Poker book review
Gigabeef, Dec 06 2010
Hey guys, short and sweet blog. If any of you have already read Carthac's latest blog post this is going to look somewhat similar, but I will also be writing a review shortly of "Dynamic Fullring Poker". I think Carthac wrote a good summary of the expectations of the book, and I will be posting a review here too shortly from an nl10'ers perspective.
Have a good December everyone!
nl10 progress+month so far
Gigabeef, Dec 05 2010
Have ran well and feel like I'm actually understanding these limits and playing well too.
Currently 4tabling and table selecting extremely hard, things have gone damn well tbh. I moved up to nl10 at the start of November and got hit around a bit after initially running really well, which affected my confidence a bit, so moved back to nl5 even though I was super rolled for it to make myself feel comfortable again.
Well I am glad that I did, because once I was feeling confident again and had built some of the money back that I had won and then lost at nl10, I tried again with much better results. I read through some really epic threads about the microstakes again, the responses to my last blog post helped greatly and something seems to have just clicked into place for the time being and I feel like I'm really being extremely concious of what everyone is doing around me at the tables, not tilting or calling bets where I am obviously behind, playing in position FAR more than oop etc. One thing that I have been putting active work into is double barrelling on good turn cards which has been going great so far.
I don't have a massive sample but I do feel quite strong in a lot of situations now at nl10 and have faith in my BR management to be able to keep learning and improving and hopefully take some shots at nl25 in the near future!
November at nl10 (shots at nl10 and trying again after moving down for a bit):
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December so far:
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All of nl10:
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Adventures into nl10
Gigabeef, Nov 18 2010
So I tried moving up to nl 10 and actually ran really hot, which was lovely and also boosted me significantly into nl 10 territory. However something went horribly wrong as I proceeded to lose 6BI pretty quick and then break even after that. Small sample, but 6BI down is pretty bad, I'm sure I can improve what I'm doing 10000x to minimise these losses. Still it could be worse.
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It seems a little strange to me, there seem to be waaaay more aggressive fish at nl 10. I've been trying to tailor my play to the individual players and am also trying to practice and improve my valuebetting, however sometimes I think that I'm overthinking things and making it harder for myself.
I know that I'm terrible at dealing with 60/40 type aggronuts who 3bet about 20% preflop and raise a plenty postflop, but only if they are the ones betting. It feels like if I just try to wait for a good hand against them I end up spewing mountains of chips folding and when I do get a good hand, they shut down because I cbet or bet the turn and not them. Not sure what to do generally here.
Also I'm not sure how to deal with 10-15% 3bets from some guy in the small blind when I open otb and I'm more likely to just leave the table than to do anything about it in the game itself.
Lastly, I feel really uncomfortable 3betting for value with any of the unpaired hands. Even if I know they will call with worse preflop, if I miss the flop I have no idea whether I am ahead or not and don't really want to cbet bluff into a 3bet pot with A high knowing that they will call with all sorts of random pairs, but don't like the idea of check folding every time I miss either. You just don't hit top (or middle depending on villain) pair that often to make nice value money it seems.
My most hated thing of all is when I raise to isolate a limper preflop, get a call, limper checks so I cbet the flop and get called. We both check the turn and then he bets ~3/4 pot otr. I feel totally helpless to this and it happens a lot.
I think I need to sort out my thought process tbh, trying to remove these kinds of inconsistencies atm. I feel as if it should be simple to see what to do against each villain of a certain type in the micros but I feel confused instead unable to come to the right idea on how to play against them.
Right now I'm playing a mixture of 5nl and 10nl, but hope to feel 100% confident to move to playing 10nl all of the time soon!
Cheers
HEM and leaks
Gigabeef, Oct 28 2010
Ok so I've been thinking for a while about tuning my play to the 2/5c games and about cbetting and all that, so rather than just thinking about it I just cranked out some HEM to look at a few things.
I am just wondering if these stats are reasonable to draw conclusions from because I know that some can be extremely misleading by not understanding the filters properly.
So I wanted to know about cbetting primarily to start with, and filtered for cbet made = true which looks fine and up. I changed it to vpip = true (so it doesn't get raped by the blinds) and searched for flop cbet = false, which also looked fine. At this stage I don't particularly care what is going on in the graph as long as the slope is in the up direction.
Next I wondered how cbetting without a hand was, and so I again set cbet made = true, along with the 'hand values' tab set to any high card, and then any high card and low pairs. Both of these graphs sucks massive ass, with a lot of money lost, so I set cbet made = false and this one also has loads of money lost, but a little more than cbetting.
Just now I quickly had a look at (again with high card + low pp) cbetting the flop and then cbetting/not cbetting the turn. Its an incredibly small sample where I've cbetted both (57 hands or so), but I'm actually up there but as I said that could be due to the number of hands. Not surprisingly, hands where I cbetted the flop and then didnt cbet the turn also have masses of losses.
I'm not really sure what this tells me, the only thing I can see is that it is marginally better to make a cbet with air in the spots that I have been choosing as opposed to not bothering and just giving up, and possible I need to cbet the turn more even when called on the flop on good boards.
How do you guys check for really simple and obvious leak spots?
microwned
Gigabeef, Oct 25 2010
Want to try and move up to 10nl when I've got the bankroll and this really doesn't help. Think it might be affecting me a little tbh.
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First 1.5k hands of this was my return after like 6 months, clicking buttons cos I'd forgotten what to do lol
So hard to learn and advance when getting consta-raped every time I go all-in though, I have lots of things to improve on but I guess just keep playing the way I am now, cos I'm just not sure what to change. Even if I was at EV, these results are still crap. Could be running bad in non calculable ways like coolers and stuff and also small sample size so whatever.
Also I've been encountering this thing where I tried to strive for "value" all of the time like I should, but keep hanging myself on better hands but against fish of all people. It's like when they limp call hit 2pair/disguised straight on the flop and I b/b/b with TPTK they call all streets and own me... not nice (because I know they also do this with midpair or 77 on Ahigh board)...
Oh well what can you do? Fortunately take 2 was these last 10 days so happily I get a free $25 from FTP which is cool.
another 2/5c blog
Gigabeef, Oct 14 2010
Collection of thoughts:
As said in the rake thread, its pretty damn high, which I have thought before on many occasions myself as well. I seem to be getting raked at 7.5 BB/100 (like 75c/100! That's a big deal to me :D), which is pretty hideous. With rakeback, that turns into 6.2 BB/100 but it's still pretty immense.
So I'm kinda stuck at breakeven atm, with any edge that I have transferring directly into FTP's bank account, and as such can't seem to build my bankroll anywhere atm. However I am half re-learning the small amount that I knew before as a result of taking a large break from poker after getting frustrated last time, so I can dig it for now. Just trying to improve.
Also been thinking about some cbetting stuff, which I have been thinking about for a while.
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Incoming splurge of maths thoughts beware (just about ev calculations and stuff):
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Suppose we have raised a hand preflop 3x OTB and get one caller from the SB with no limpers or anything:
Pot size = 7bb
When we miss and cbet the flop for ~ 2/3 psb say (for 4.5bb)
In this situation when we ask "how much does he have to fold here for this move to be profitable by itself?" usually people say "well obviously when he calls, we lost 4.5bb and when he folds we win the pot, at 7bb. So -C*4.5 + F*7 = 0 for break even means that he needs to fold 39% of the time for this to be +ev".
Now unless I'm just plain wrong with this, that fold percentage seems to be way too low. If you only take situations in which you get to the flop, cbet and lose, this kind of calculation doesn't seem to take into consideration the fact that some of the money in the pot was yours to begin with in a global hands kind of sense.
As far as I understand, this is only 0 ev given that this is the specific situation that we are in (i.e. we are plonked into the chair with a missed hand on the flop and what is the best play from here) however in terms of overarching preflop -> flop strategy this is a losing play!
If this guy folds 39% of the time to cbets (supposedly 0 ev), then only looking at situations in which we miss the flop and continue to bet 4.5bb, this leads to a net loss of 1.45bb every time we do this, and so instead we need a fold of 48% to break even.
It is just this difference of about 10% that I am confused about, obviously the percentages change as you change different parameters (PFR size and cbet size) but this discrepancy has got me wondering.
Its kind of like the same thing as why folding is always EV 0 even though you would lose money if you only folded (or would globally lose is you fold in big pots all of the time), which I have also never particularly understood. I know that the money in the pot is not seen as yours any more, but it still seems to affect total profits?
The main reason why I actually decided to think about how I am cbetting is because I took a look at my cbets when I have no pair at all, and I am actually slightly down (although this is probably because of variance, as I only have a smallish sample from recent play) and I just thought it would be an interesting thing to take a look at.
I'm also trying to figure out where I have leaks in my game (obviously everywhere seen as I'm not crushing tbh) and working out the best way to analyse my own game to work out where I'm losing money unnecessarily.
Anyway, I'm having fun and not spewing cash and that's what its all about right? :D
microstakes progress
Gigabeef, Mar 31 2010
Ok so second blog post, I've been trundling away playing .01/.02c and have built my roll to around $100. Took a few shots at .02/.05 here and there after about $85 which has mostly gone well so far, but I've only really been playing on tables that I think have totally terrible people. I am still swapping back and forth between 0.02/0.05 and 0.01/0.02 depending on how the tables are, so I'm not exclusively playing 2/5 just yet.
In my last blog post someone mentioned that you can get HEM by signing up to different poker sites with a deal, and I was just interested as to how that works tbh. From looking at the offer, you get a kind of redeemable e-voucher thing to buy stuff in the HEM store and some of the sites give you more than others.
Would stars be best to sign up with to get this voucher? As far as I'm aware (I don't play on Stars), all of the Stars bonuses and rakeback etc come from actually playing there and getting volume rather than affiliate orientated rakeback like FTP? Is this right?
Also the Stars token is only $75 credit whereas HEM itself is $90. However the small stakes version is $40 which is totally coverable by the voucher, and I'm not going to have to worry about moving past .25/.50 any time soon at all, so I'm not entirely sure what to do.
And if I get HEM this way, that does give a full copy of HEM and not some lame crap like I can only use it on Stars or something? I'm just kinda dubious because there is usually a catch to these things somewhere along the line.
I'm not really that desperate to get it anyway, yes it would probably help but I don't think I really need it yet however I'd like to be able to use it in conjunction with reasonable note taking that I do regardless and it will let me analyse my game better for the future too I think.
Cheers all!
1st blog post
Gigabeef, Feb 11 2010
Hey all, first blog. Well basically I've posted a few times here but I mainly just lurk because I don't have much to contribute to most discussions really but that's fine.
So I started totally from scratch playing 1/2c NL with a limited bankroll in the hope to learn the basics of ABC poker gameplay on the cheap which has worked for the most part. Put on $20 with FTP (the only poker site that works at university) and together with rakeback and the bonus, have increased that to over $40 so far after initial losses for a bit that I figured were to be expected (seen as how I'd played poker before maybe 3 times...).
I can't imagine that I will want to update this a lot (like anyone cares anyway  ) but I just wanted to put a few thoughts down here so maybe I can get some insight from others.
1) Hands.
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From a totally new player's perspective it seems so difficult to get enough hands in to do anything at all really. It would be nice to look at an overview and say 'oh look I'm winning x amount here I must be getting better' but in reality when you don't play many tables and have other commitments (aka studying) then its real hard to get statistically significant numbers of hands down!
2) Number of tables.
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Usually I just go for 2 but have tried 3-4 a few times more recently and although it does seem easier to focus on what is going on on every table than it used to when I attempted 4, I still don't feel like I have the total overall grasp of the players on all of the tables, and have most of my success with 2 tables.
However at 2 it really does take a long long time to get hands down (like 200/h or something). I have been playing a lot more recently that I did right at the beginning and I am more confident now that I can beat nl2 but I don't know how much by and I've only played 16k hands lifetime ANYWAY so who knows?
3) Tilt.
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I think I'm actually ok at not tilting which is probably an advantage. I mean I get a little frustrated when someone hits something ridiculous on the river but I don't usually let it bother me much. Occasionally I brainfail on the next hand and insta-do something when I shouldn't but most of the time I think I'm pretty diciplined (not that I've had a really mega rough time yet so that remains to be seen). Like today some guy flopped a really disguised straight when I made a set, but I just kinda went 'tut' and that was that.
I seem to get more annoyed at things like 2 pair on the river (8's and 3's or some bull like that ) beating tptk than things like set over set and AA/KK.
4) The eventual move up.
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Obviously the next stage is 2/5 and I want to stick to the 20BI rule really, however $100 is a long way away, especially in time. So I have been tempted to reduce that to something a little earlier but not sure if that is the right way to go about it (most of the temptation is due to the apparent similarity of 1/2 to 2/5 and maybe even 5/10 from seeing videos and reading what people say about the micros, how the players are still very bad and that its just a larger bankroll required to play to ride out the variance).
5) PT3/HEM.
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Well I don't have it because it costs like 2x my BR to buy and I'm not sure how much use it would be at micros anyway. But obviously with everyone using it all over the place to help with individual player analysis it's crossed my mind as to what point it would be worth buying it. Not really a priority though because of the cost more than anything else.
That seems to be about it, depending on what happens I might put some more nanostake thoughts up at some stage.
Bye for now 
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