quarta-feira, 20 de janeiro de 2010

World Blogger Championship of Online Poker

Back to Poker

I've been away for some time.
December I hardly played poker due to being on holidays. On January I moved to my new house where I'm still seting things up and because of that my online poker has been reduced to nothing.
Offline I played another night with my fis...I mean my friendas (joking) and it went very well.

Now I think I have everything ready to start again and rise on the poker world :P

quinta-feira, 26 de novembro de 2009

My First time ever on TILT

Eyes turning red, evil laugh coming out of me inability to see the fold button basically this was I went through a few minutes last night.

I have heard a lot about tilting but in my short time in poker (6 months around 50k hands) I had never felt what it was really like until yesterday.

It all started on a simple hand where I had 77 cold called a raise to a 3 way pot. I flopped my set on a 729R Board and after a raise from EP call from MP I re-raised and that took to EP shove + MP shove. I thought for a while but it seemed to me that the EP would have something like QQ-AA and MP could had 2 pair up to a set of 2 or 9s. Well I took it very well when I saw EP with QQ and MP with 99 but the 7 on the turn made me jump until I saw a 9 on the river.
Bad beat I thought knowing that I was already behind so it would be pure luck to win.
After that my flush made on the flop hit a FH on the river I had AA beat by a 4 card straight on the board against AJ, KK beat by AA and finally when I got KK again and shoved Pre flop, thing I never do since I raise strong but allowing people to come in I get called by KK and loose to a flush!

This triggered it and I started to shove flush draws never hitting raising trash pre-flop and a lot of more idiotic stuff that made me look like the greatest fish ever.

The only thing positive was that I managed to force my self to stop not even waiting for the orbit to finish leaving the loss on 15$ (NL2).

What do you guys do in this situations? just stop on the 3rd bad beat? continue like nothing happened? Break the screen? Call for Mommy?


DAM it felt bad!

quinta-feira, 5 de novembro de 2009

November

New month, new challenge.

I started November pretty much as I ended October, loosing buy in after buy in so I finally decided to tighten my game and see how it goes.

Last night I had a really good performance at NL2 making around 8$ over 300+ hands which is more or less au pair with some of my best days.

After I closed the tables, I decided to give a shot at NL2 6 Max and 2 tables of NL5.

It's the second time I try 6 max and again with awful results. The tables are way more aggressive then FR and 100 BBs there makes you in disadvantage against deep stacks that bully the tables and since I don't feel comfortable deep stacking 6 max, I think for now I will stay away. After 90 hands I ended up 3.80$ down specially because 2 times my KK broke against two pair. I don't fold KK on NL2 so almost 2 BI there.

NL5 ended up being exactly as NL2 FR, the same lack of Pre Flop Aggression from villains, the same calling stations not allowing too many bluffs and the same kind of donks calling 2 outers on the river and sometime hitting. On 1 table I ended up 8$ up and on the second, after struggling almost 4$ down I ended up loosing only 0.20c which made this shot return almost 2 BI over 200 hands which is very good I think. The only thing one needs to adapt here is getting used to the raise value, I mean, 4 BBs are 4 BBs but coming from NL2 where 0,20c is a very strong bet pre flop, it's not always easy to make the raise.

Feeling that I was playing good, and for the first time seeing that my stats where near the perfect zone (26/21/4.5), I decided to give a shot at NL10.
Well, I'm clearly not ready bankroll wise. Although I played good and ended up 1,5$, I realized that with 70$ bankroll I can't be on spots where I should go all in with 1/7 of my bankroll. Yesterday I had a spot like that where I had the 2nd possible nut and on the river I couldn't force my self to go all in so I betted only 2$ and won a 6$ pot where I could had one a 20$ one.

Well over and out for today!

October

Just making this post in order to upload my graph for the month.





segunda-feira, 2 de novembro de 2009

Day 10 and beyond

Whenever I started to follow other people's blogs, I always ended up thinking the same, this people only post when they are good! On my blog I wont be like that, I will keep posting because it's on the bad times one gets the most out of talking/writing things.

Well now I can say...I understand them!
On Downsizings, it's very hard to write anything.

Well day 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 came. I made my 10k hands and ended up 62$ up. When I say it like this, it sounds like a huge achievement. 31bb/100 is not bad at all on the contrary it's super good, means I have beaten the level and the only thing that keeps me from going up is my bankroll since I barely have 70$ and is way to short to go up. But on the other side I can't avoid the fact that I had 8 sessions on a row winning and 7 sessions on a row loosing and to be honest I can't find a way to put me up again.

Whenever I do some analysis on the hands I played I always find the same problems:
1. Too much spewing - I pay way to many $ on hands that I shouldn't even be playing.
2. Hero Calls - I had this problem almost removed but suddenly here it comes again. I call way too many times with the worst hand.
3. Draws - I pay way too many draws. Probably the main problem here is not knowing the pot odds / implied odds and calling on some spots I should fold but to be honest, I feel rather unlucky since I almost fail all my draws.
4. Not getting enough value from made hands - Whenever I have a hand I can't seem to extract the value I should. I have 7 out of the last 8 pocket Aces folded all around and the largest bet I made was 0.10c which is a bet I sometimes make on the button with Kx trying to steal the blinds and I end up getting called.
5. Bad Luck - Yes it exists but on a normal day you end up reducing the luck factor almost to 0 by playing well the rest but on a bad day your KK hitting AA or your QQ flopping Axx or Kxx just puts even more down.

Knowing my problems should be a great spot to start inverting things but even if I can revert the 2 first problems and tune up the third, the fact is that 4, 5 and even 3 were big money makers for me and those I can't control.

One thing I must do is post more hands both here and on 2p2 and let people explain me what I should do better. Another thing that helps is posting because at least you can think about things and that's always +EV.

For now I think I will re-read all the things I've read before about Micro stakes and stop playing cash for at least 1 week.

segunda-feira, 19 de outubro de 2009

Day 9

Well, what can I say...this day had to come!
-$9.53 over 1,421 hands!

Last night I blew up every expectation I had of reaching the 125$ over 10k hands and I did it in style.
I could take shelter in variance but I don't think that would be the right thing to do. I also could omit the results and feign that the session never happened but that wouldn't count towards my goal either and would only make things a fraud so I better just assume it and try to understand what happened.
It's true that I had my AA beaten by Q8 making a straight, it's also true twice my KK encountered AA and my QQ found a KK but it's also true that I made huge mistakes.
I made mistakes evaluating the hands of others, I made mistakes making hero calls a problem I thought I had fixed, I did mistakes going on to much games with marginal hands and had my TPLK beaten by TPTK but above all, my greatest mistake was not knowing when to stop.
As you can see in the spreadsheet, I played 1400+ hands over 3 hours, an amazing 430+ hands per hour, having up to 14 tables at the same time. I feel that I can handle it and that was not the major leak yesterday, although it feels strange because with 14 tables you go all in on one table and you hardly can see the output...you wont probably remember where you did it lol.
The night started very nice rising up to 4$ on 9 tables, after a while I was on 9$ with only 400 hands played but after that the mistakes started to come and I went bellow 0 very fast and I stood there on -2, -3 a lot of time waiting for the big hands. Some came but when I hit no one was willing to pay me and then some of those hands made a big part of my loss like I explained. At around 1300 hands I reached 0 and I really should had stopped there if not before but I wanted to go on and I close almost all the tables staying only on the winning ones and the Armageddon came a some stupid calls along with bad beats took me to where I ended.

I will try to take 2 lessons out of last night.
1st I must stop when I see my game affected by losses. At the very least I must make a break.
2nd I have to take things lighter, meaning the spreadsheet is a nice goal but it demands me to beat the level by 62.5 BB/100 which I have made sometimes but it's an extremely high value. I'm on 51.9 BB/100 which is a very high value that before I started this I wouldn't dream possible so even if I fail the goal which I will probably fail, it has been a great month!

Off to work now, tonight I probably wont play because I need to "loose" at least one hour looking at last night mistakes.