That was the question of the night, when I adjusted my preflop raise strategy to always consist of 3.5BB+1/limper. I recently asked for some advice on how to deal with preflop overbetting in loose live games. Anyone who has played live surely knows what I'm talking about, as it is a very common occurrence. Basically fish have evolved to open 8-10BB's on average to try and limit how many players actually call them. They're trying to "weed out the rift raft" as they often put it, as they only want good hands to call them. That way when they lose they dont feel bad about being sucked out on, cuz "hey, at least you had a good hand". I started doing it too, albeit only because I expected to get massive value out of inferior hands. But it just never worked out right. So I said fuck it and played like I would online.
I ended up running $200 up to $1100 in 6 hours. It was like nothing. Sure I got a few extra callers at times, but really nothing that made life difficult for me. And now I'm not investing 40BB's every fucking hand I play. I even got a few jabs when people were like "lol, why are you raising so small, this isnt like last night". The greatest was raising $8 utg and being told "wow I didnt put you on aces with such a small raise" after I stacked one guy. And then 5 hands later stacking someone again with 24s when I raised $7 in the CO (guy tried to slowplay me in the BB with AA). While it might seem silly to balance your range vs fish, they do sorta notice what you're doing a little bit. They dont really adjust their ranges vs you, they just adjust their calling frequency.
What I found really advantageous about using online betsizing is that it allowed mt to raise speculative hands preflop like suited connectors and all my PP's. I could never raise $20 utg with 44 previously, but $7? Sure. And it works out great that 6 people call because thats exactly what I want with 44 anyway. And if I have AK and flop top pair, chances are it's the best hand anyhow and most of the table will fold to a cbet, and the 1-2 people who call are dominated as usual. So getting the pot HU doesnt really seem to serve any great purpose, since their ranges are all garbage in the first place. Online isolation is much more relevant since you actually expect callers and limpers to have playable hands. You really arent happy with AK when you raise $8 vs a bunch of regs and get 3 callers. But live it's fuckin ez peezy, because there's really no threat other than blatant suckouts which are far and few between.
Ultimately, I just felt so much more comfortable, like I was playing online more or less. The SPR was always fitting, I wasnt overcommitted to hands, everything just clicked since I felt like I was in control of every hand I played. Going to keep up this strat for awhile and make sure I wasnt just running hot.
Sigh. So I finished January +34,040. I know this would normally be a celebratory post but to know that I won 56k in one day and lost 22k spread out over all the other days, it's hard to feel like a winner. Feels sorta like I'm gambling and randomly got lucky one day. Never really felt like this before.
Lost like 19k on the last day of the month, realized I got back to taking too many norcos again and that it again was affecting my play. Obviously have been trying to detox myself from those since that day and have been taking a few days off. Good thing I've had other stuff to take my mind off of it lately. Hopefully that continues.
I've probably been playing more than a few guys HU who have an edge over me lately. Easy to tell since I lost a grip to a few specific people while playing HU and had a general overall win from the rest of my games. I'm just not as good as some people and the higher I try to play HU vs guys who will play anybody, the more money I feel I'm likely to lose. Am I improving? Yes, but I don't think I'm improving enough to justify shot taking @ 10/20 and 15/30 vs players better than me. I need to keep those shots vs those guys at 5/10 from now on. That's the adjustment I'm making for next month and the rest of the year. Just barely on pace for my goal of earning 400k for the year so that's a good thing. Guess we'll see what happens next month and those to follow.
So I started grinding again after being pretty freaking inactive for the past 2 years (now a proud daddy of a little girl and a little boy) I was never really motivated to grind, always wasting a lot of time playing SC2 or whatever else....
So yeah I went to WPT Montreal in late November for the 3.3k main event and luckily I finished 11th for $32k and had action of 2 of my friends who finished 1st and 2nd that added an extra ~$30k to my winnings... this kinda motivated me to get back into it, I don't remember exactly how much I've made in december, I've played a lot of live games in december and almost no online and I think I won something like 6 or 7k
January I decided I would give a shot at HU again since it's where I've made most of my money and I enjoy it a LOT more than 6max/FR, despite having very very little action at 2/4 and up (almost exclusively regulars) I still had quite a bunch of people play me at 1/2 and 0.5/1 so here are the HU results http://www.freeimagehosting.net/t/sblb7.jpg
I lost like $3k at 3/6 6max prior to that on like january 2nd I believe and won $1.2k on my laptop.. I also went to Niagara Falls for the fallsview poker classic, won like $3k playing cash games, busted from the $2.5k event and final tabled the $5k event and despite being chip leader the tournament was fairly shallow and I ran like garbage on the FT against shortacks... busted 5th for $44k (swapped like 35% of my action with several people). Played some live games in quebec, one of them was 1/2 PLO where I went godmode and won a little bit less than $3k lol
Overall I think It's a little bit more than $40k in profits, I'm pretty happy about my results, I was aiming for a +$150k year so I'm well on pace
oh and for those who'd be interested here are pictures of my children
At the end of the year I had to withdraw a fair amount of my BR for real life shit, so that left me with enough to grind 100nlzoom for Jan. 100zoom is incredibly soft and I started mixing in 200zoom a bit but kept running bad over short samples with a small roll so I kept having to stick to 100. Volume wise I did alright, mostly 4 tabling so 80k hands is ok but Feb is going to be a lot worse for volume
Going to Florida for a golf trip on Monday for a week and then Cuba on the 20th with a bunch of friends to an all inclusive resort so Im pretty pumped about all of that. Essentially it means I will only be playing poker for 12-14 days of the month though so hopefully 30k/40k hands would be nice but we'll see.
These stats are from my desktop and laptop so thats why there is a split
As I'm aiming for SNE this year, I thought I'd start blogging a bit more about poker and hopefully find some extra motivation that way. In the past I've talked about what's going on in my life as well as poker in my blog, but this year I'm just gonna post about poker.
I've been playing 8 tables of Zoom200 and 500 in the hope of making enough VPPs for SNE by the end of the year and, somewhat luckily, January was my best winning cash game month since early 2011, which was the last time I was going for SNE (Was on pace until halfway through Feb then made ~100k VPPs for the rest of the rest) and doing well at PLO. However January has been the worst month I ever remember having at tournaments, though this isn't the end of the world since I've never put in much volume in tournaments so it's not much of a loss monetarily. Clearly, I'm largely doing so well due to my running way way above expectation at Zoom500, but I think that situationally I've ran pretty atrocious there. I do think there's a sizable skill gap between Zoom200 and Zoom500, but not so much that I should have near enough 7bb/100 EV winrate at Zoom200, and a negative one at Zoom500. TCOOP was the reason for the poor tournament results, nothing good happened there and I was only close to a deep run in one tournament, the $320 knockout NLHE tournament where I had above average chips with ~180 players left, only to bust not long after due to 2 lost flips. A shame, because the prizes were increasing rapidly from then on out, but not really a surprise given that average chips at that point was about 10bbs.
So for the month:
VPPs: 63,358.97 (20k behind SNE pace)
Cash: +$20,496.21
MTTs: -$3,829.33
Overall: +$16,666.88 (Not including fpps and bonuses)
Next month I'm mainly just hoping to have a positive EV winrate at Zoom500, aim for ~4bb/100 EV winrate at Zoom200, and get in as close to 100k VPPs as possible and start to make some headway on SNE.
just 8 tabled 100/200 zoom all month. So i didn't play that well. But i think i ran pretty bad as well, prob the worst i've ever run if i include last month which was equally as bad.
at least finished in the black, but for almost half the month was running in the red. came very close to busto at one point. Had to move down a few limits for about 5 days as I didn't have enough buy-ins to play my usual number of tables.
Looking forward to Feb.; gonna be in Vegas from 8th-12th, and in the meantime will try to keep online results in the black.
Ran really really bad, but thats ok, I learned a lot and from talking to people there are a lot of them running even worse, pretty sick this game we play tbh. Had 1 MTT session and made 4 FTs and though they were all micros they helped the comeback. Failed the 50k VPP goal by ~2k but thats not so bad.
I think the telegraph might lean a little towards sensationalism in their reporting but still a bit concerning.
From a geo-political standpoint the situation in the Korean peninsula is very tense. China in particular is in a very precarious position with regards to somewhat needing the status quo situation in Korea and at the same time being irritated at the position North Korea threatens to put them into if they were to actually act out toward South Korea or US Military bases.
Oddly enough, this is all also tied into the situation in Syria.
I know North Korea has more or less been a pretty sick bluffer for the past few decades but there are a lot more indicators than usual that things are getting pretty dicey.
I, for one, am perpetually nervous about the situation in the Korean Peninsula.
Im thinking on buying a tablet in the range of $100-400, could be higher but not much, my principal reason is to read books/magazines, but that doesn't mean im not interested on using other applications, web, etc.
Only thing that must be, is 10inch.
My first choice is the Galaxy Tab 2, but i have read that it has its problems when playing 1080hd, probably this is nothing to worry about but in the case i end up loading 1080hd material i wouldn't like to have problems playing it, and for the specifications that i has apparently the cost is high... so im looking for alternatives (no Ipads please)
Played like 500 games today with a decent abi in 22 hours or so for almost no reason was easier then I thought made like 1k with 200$ in rakeback.
Almost broke my tourney drought at one point I was 1.2 mil vs 150k vs 150k in an 8$ 500 cap but my hands didnt hold up and I ended up getting second for 550$
Nice to have my student crushing and all my stakes winning. Heres a nice graph
My name is Daniel, coming from Czech Rep, i am close to 25 (4th february) and playing poker for living.
So i was very decent winner from 2/4 to 5/10 in years 2008-2010, but now im only breakeven player, i know games are most hardest to beat, but i believe in ME, i can beat that game...
I play mostly live games, which are still very very soft, only problem here is the boring factor...u have to wait for good spots and when u r carddead for 3 hours in a row, its so much boring, u prolly now what i mean, so i want to start play online poker again.
This blog will be some kind of commitnemt for me, i will post weekly results (graphs, stats, profits etc.), post some hands in right section (hope to get some comments)
and because i did not used statistics never ever, i'll be very glad, if someone of you guys can help me with my hud.
My adventure begins 1st februrary with 1000 euros deposit and im gonna play NL 50 with 3 Buy ins stoploss and max 4 tables, 1 hour session...
Dont have any specific target, but will be nice to be rolled ( like 40+ Buy Ins ) at NL 200 at the end of 2013...
Thank you for replies, feel free to help me with HUD pls and good luck to all of us,
The interview and some other thingsby DustySwedeDude, January 29
Wanted to answear some questions first.
On January 27 2013 20:13 the cleaner wrote:
Dusty's you are awesome! thanks for the interview.
Thanks, it made me happy to see that you managed to turn things around. Make sure to start up a little bit of savings when you can afford it.
On January 28 2013 02:15 morph1 wrote:
dusty is a good dude
and
On January 27 2013 20:57 MeProOk wrote:
very nice interview, dusty! thanks. you seem a good person
Thanks! I do consider myself a fairly good person. I live by the words of the good Heinlein; "Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense."
Are you still on prima? I think I remember you playing a bit of PLO there.
On January 28 2013 01:47 nootropics wrote:
Dude tell us more about your work for the Libertarian Party of Sweden, that sounds awesome. Great interview just being greedy obv
Well, I've done a ton of research about a bunch of stuff and helped out with some small legal issues. Other then that I've helped a little bit with the start up one local organisation and spent A LOT of time writing stuff for them. The situation is a little unclear right now, but I think there's about a 70% chance of me getting on the board after the congress later this spring. It'd be some serious fun trying to help build a very small party into something slightly less small. I have some many ideas I wanna try out and I'll probably get twice as many later when I get hold of a bunch of books and other things on the subject.
In case they decided to put me on the board I'll write a lot more about it, promise .
On January 28 2013 05:31 longple wrote:
the best dotateamcaptain a noob could ask for
I sent applications online to a bunch of stuff without knowing that you had to pick your first pick if you got it. First pick happened to be law.
lol exactly the same for me, I didnt know u had to pick the first pick either... no regrets though
LOL
On January 28 2013 15:55 VanDerMeyde wrote:
Nice interview Dusty, I hope u dont come down to 100 plo prima too often to rape me
I highly doubt I rape at PLO100, my concentration levels tend to sink a bit . I mostly play lower if I have to get hands in and nothing higher is running, but since there's no fun rake races in February I think I'll stay away .
Other then that I play two of the dumbest hands of my life tonight. Me and mepwnya agreed that I should've showed the first one just to make runitonce coach Isildrooon consider me even more of a retard. The 2nd one was just dumb in all regards, but I managed to get one small piece of information. The guy has absolutely no respect for my game. Like, for him to play something like that he has to consider me dumber then a bag of bricks.
That's probably good information that I'm spewy and should spend a month or two shaping my game up before I keep going with my 10/20 shots... Let's see if I'm disciplined enough.
something i liked about hon, is they made everyone a bit more op for a more fun early/mid game. arguably this "Destroyed" dota but hate the current trend of dota2 to nerf the hell out of everyone.
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. I mostly play lower if I have to get hands in and nothing higher is running, but since there's no fun rake races in February I think I'll stay away 
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