The OId Order Comes Crashing Down

ZeeJustin is BUSTED.

In other news, Gigabet is BUSTO.

The Curse of the Final Table

Pokerstars Game (?) Tournament #19966384, Hold'em No Limit - Level XIII
(1500/3000) - 2006/02/24 - 07:51:53 (ET)
Table '19966384 2' Seat #7 is the button
Seat 1: naipe24 (135187 in chips)
Seat 2: veemoney (77005 in chips)
Seat 3: DDingo DK (80522 in chips)
Seat 5: Hero (61766 in chips)
Seat 6: JTOConnell (45224 in chips)
Seat 7: pfnm (37398 in chips)
Seat 8: Semi-Bluff (73007 in chips)
Seat 9: NL-nostra (147391 in chips)
naipe24: posts the ante 150
veemoney: posts the ante 150
DDingo DK: posts the ante 150
Hero : posts the ante 150
JTOConnell: posts the ante 150
pfnm: posts the ante 150
Semi-Bluff: posts the ante 150
NL-nostra: posts the ante 150
Semi-Bluff: posts small blind 1500
NL-nostra: posts big blind 3000

Holecards:
Dealt to Hero [ ]
RAISE naipe24, 6000 to 9000
FOLD veemoney
FOLD DDingo DK
RAISE Hero , 52616 to 61616 and is all-in
FOLD JTOConnell
FOLD pfnm
FOLD Semi-Bluff
FOLD NL-nostra
CALL naipe24, 52616

Flop:
[ ]

Turn:
[ ] [ ]

River:
[ ] [ ]

Showdown:
naipe24: shows [ ] (two pair Nines and Threes)
Hero : shows [ ] (a pair of Threes)
naipe24 collected 128932 from pot

Grinding Through The TIlt

Dropped down limits to grind out rent and it's been good. Just playing two thousands a day of ABC and I'm right on track. When I get my rakeback payment next month I'll move back up to 2/4 NL probably.

Also, I have finally taken the first step and admitted I can't seem to avoid playing MTTs all together. The prospect of turning a toothpick into a lumber yard is just too seductive for me. Plus, I played a couple 109s and a 215 on Party this last week and its amazing how much DEAD MONEY there is in these things. People are absolutely terrible! Anyone who has half a clue is massively +EV in these things just might be a while before that translates into dead presidents. I guess I should probably read HOH V.2 but I'll probably just play a bunch of them and trying to figure out how to stop getting busted with 88-TT on the bubble.

In An Act of Solidarity...

I went on monkey tilt playing 20/40 Omaha8 on party and spewed 2k. Basically, all the money I made patiently grinding over the last two days. The Rempel may still be a shot-taker; but, I am done. I will be drastically over-rolled for every level I play now. I'm sick of it. It's 200nl and 5/10 limit games.

I'm just not balanced enough to handle shit like this. It pisses me off super-bad and then costs me lots of money in the form of opportunity costs. I will not be able to play poker for at least 3 days now.

Seven Stages of Monkey Tilt

This post is from The Rempel. He is stuck at work and asked me to post it for him. It is a very good read.

---------------------------------------------------

I have what a textbook type a personality. While I am not always driven in all aspects of my life, when it comes to any sort of competition, I have a need to win that outweighs everything else.

When I was very young my parents refused to play any sort of board games with me because I would not quit until there was a clear winner. Any game of Monopoly could not be decided until one player had bankrupted everyone else. Every videogame I ever played required hours in front of the television until the final credits scrolled.

This attitude has carried on to my poker ‘career’ and has caused minor problems to say the least. I play Pot Limit Omaha with a very high variance style and often somewhat under bankrolled, a recipe for disaster. Generally I don’t tilt at all. PLO is full of situations where a strong hand is only a 5% favorite (or dog) on the flop against a reasonable draw and a player that got angry when his set got cracked or his giant draw didn’t hit wouldn’t last long before his head exploded. If I run bad for an extended period of time it can lead to a form of retarded aggression I call SUPER MONKEY TILT.

As I stated in a previous post, I was running very very well in the $400 6 Max games on party. So well that I’d almost quit playing the $100 games altogether. My bankroll at the end of January was about $6000 and would have been $10,000 if I hadn’t withdrawn along the way to make some purchases and pay some debts from my university years. It was insane. There were at least twenty players at those tables out of the roughly five-hundred I’d played with that would play eighty percent of their hands preflop and raise with half of those. Obviously fifteen buy ins is no where near enough in that kind of game, especially when people are backing their stacks with middle pair and the fourth nut flush draw, but like I said, I was running good. The $400 6-max games are gone now, but I think I’d probably need at least $25,000 minimum to sit down there on a regular basis.

On February 3rd I cashed $2500 out of Party and deposited $600 on Full Tilt and the remaining $1700 on Poker Stars (Neteller really screws Canadian customers, taxing our money for 3% each time we deposit or withdraw from a site). I’d decided to take the weekend off and then go back to grinding on the $100 tables on Party and Stars while learning a few new games on Full Tilt as I cleared the 100% deposit bonus.

Things went pretty well. I played a few hands of LHE and Razz on FT on Saturday, February 4^th, winning a little. I use MTH on Party which auto sorts the tables for me and lets me use the keyboard (the primary reason I haven’t been playing on Stars much) instead of having to use the mouse. It makes things substantially easier and lets me play more tables without giving the huge diminishing returns you might normally see playing 4 tables vs 7-10. Going back to point and click on Stars and FT was an exercise in frustration for sure, but that night I actually fell asleep at about 10:00 pm, very odd for me, since I generally don’t go to sleep before 1:00 am even on a week night.

I woke to 6:00 am and found my buddy Chris messaging me through MSN. I’d transferred him some money on party the night before and he was confirming he’d gotten it. His wife works very early and doesn’t drive so always finds himself up very early on Sunday mornings to drive her to work. We went out, had a nice breakfast and talked about some of the struggles he is having in finding the right spots to gamble while playing PLO. Chris is an ultra-conservative player for the most part. When we first started playing hold’em, he was one of the type that could never understand why you’d fold any two cards preflop, since there is always a chance you can hit a big flop for your hand. Over the last few years he’s switched almost entirely the other way and has become very easy to bluff, especially on the river. He’d frequently fold hands like JJ on a T9643 board on 5^th to a 1/4^th pot sized bet or fear quads and the nut boat when he held TT on a T886J board and the loosest jackass at the table made a big bet on the river. I’ve gone the other way, I started off very tight preflop and very tight-aggressive post flop and have morphed into a complete loose aggressive gambooler in PLO.

At 8:00 am we went back to my apartment. I’d just bought a new HDTV the night before to go with my new XBOX 360 that I’d purchased from Chris’s store. He wanted to play on party so he went into my office while I tooled around with some games on the new TV. I was sticking to my plan not to play outside of Full Tilt. After he’d played on party for a few hours, we ended up having a marathon gaming session, playing some Dead or Alive and Tiger Woods 2006 until about 8:00 that night, at which point Chris left.

Here’s where the monkey tilt started. I was trying to clear the freaking stupid achievement points in Dead or Alive (a fighting game). Achievement points are kind of like badges you get for doing various random shit in Xbox Live games. One of these entailed beating the final boss of the game. I tried with every character but couldn’t do it for the life of me. Fighting games (excluding Soul Caliber) are usually not my thing, but I was getting pissed. By 10:00 I’d had enough and decided to go play on FT. I actually took a sleeping pill (they usually take about forty-five minutes to an hour to work) as I didn’t intend to play long.

I played one table of $200 PLO, one of $0.50/$1 Razz and one of $1/$2 LHE. For the first hour I won hand after hand in HE, broke even in PLO, and lost playing Razz. Then I started losing all at once and as my blood was boiling, I would not allow myself to concede defeat and simply get up from the computer. At 11:30 I went broke on FT. Not a huge thing, 10% of my bankroll and money I hadn’t really included in my main roll anyway.

I couldn’t let it go. I hated going bust, even in this type of artificial situation. I sat down on Stars and played 4 $200 PLO tables. There was no action whatsoever. I don’t know if I managed to take the seat of the action player on all four tables or what, but the average pot was about $15 on each table. I soon got frustrated and sat down at a highly action oriented $2000 PLO table with $900.

First hand I get AcAh Kd Jd in the BB. Random player I’ve got no notes or stats on makes it $70 to go UTG, Chufty and I both call. Some people would argue for a reraise here OOP, but given how loose aggressive Chufty is and that I can only put about 30% of my stack in preflop, I think calling is the best play given all the outside factors.

The flop came 5h 9d Td. Pot is about $230. I check, Random checks, Chufty pots and I push for most of my stack. Very high variance play because I’m about 45% against a set and coin flipping with a decent draw. I think I should be about 60% vs something like top two pair, no draw, which is a fairly common chufty hand. The only way I’m truly fucked here if he has top two pair and the nut flush draw, a set and the nut flush draw, etc, etc. I expect Chufty to call with a lot of strange hands here, but I don’t think I’m often in much trouble. His hand range is so huge that I have no idea what kind of card is going to help him on the turn, so I went with the easier (and higher variance) decision to check-raise for 90% of my remaining stack. If I pot here, I only have 3 nut outs, the four queens, Virtually any card on the turn could make a loose player like Chufty a better hand. If I check call, I’m in the same situation.

The turn is the 8h, I go all in for my last $100, Chufty, calls. The river is a brick and he shows Ad 6d 78 and of course, IGHN. This was a fairly trivial beat but combined with the DOA and FT bullshit, my blood was boiling. I quickly left the table (smart) and sat down at a $1000 NLHE table short with $400, half of my remaining Stars money. As often happens with short stack desperation moves, I busted with an outside straight flush draw versus top and bottom pair.

Since I was now on Super Monkey Tilt, I could hardly call it a night there. I found four very active $400 PLO 6-max tables on party and sat down at all of ‘em. Each table had two or three players that were raising at least 30% of their hands, which meant that virtually every pot was getting raised and lots of big bets were going in on the flop. My middle set + nut flush draw couldn’t outrun a flopped bottom straight, none of my big draws were getting there, and I soon found myself broke on Party too. At one point I was so angry with myself I moved in on the turn on a K78K board after raising preflop with AAJJ double suited when a LAP player had called preflop (as on every other hand) and called my continuation bet on the flop (as he’d do with absolutely nothing, but probably a king here). He bet $100 into the $180 pot on the turn and I chose to move all in, not because I thought I had the best hand but because I WAS PISSED OFF. Definitely a +EV move in the long run.

By 2:00 am I was totally broke, basically. I still had $200 left on stars and $300 left on party, but after weeks of playing $400 PLO with occasional shots at $2000, that seemed like nothing. I attempted to make a minor comeback the next day, deposited more to bolster what I had, and ran bad at the one $400 table I was playing and all of the $100 tables. Between 8:00 pm on February 5^th and the same time the following night, I had blown $6500.

Will I continue to take shots? Yeah, that will never stop. People that know me know I have no fear of gambling it up as long as the potential benefits outweigh the losses. Obviously I need to control the frequency and extent of the shots I take to a far greater degree. My biggest problem is getting away from the table when I’m playing bad due to lack of sleep or bad mental state. Bad play and great play can be hard to distinguish in PLO.

Currently I’m not playing at all. If I can get some seed money, I’ll probably grind some of the new $10 and $20 SNG’s on party, since the average party player is not at all used to a higher structure. I’ve always had decent results in low limit SNG’s but pretty much stopped playing them altogether when I started playing PLO almost exclusively.

Regarding the $50,000 challenge I made with Beset, it’s over. I conceded and he graciously forgave the bet. He’s good people.

10/20 NL 6max? LETS TAKE A SHOT

#Game No : 3548919804
***** Hand History for Game (?) *****
$2000 NL Texas Hold'em - Monday, February 13, 18:08:10 ET 2006
Table Table 85395 (6 max) (No DP) (Real Money)
Seat 1 is the button
Total number of players : 6
Seat 1: Kvelerslange ( $3411.50 )
Seat 2: Shavlick ( $3165 )
Seat 3: LitleBastrd ( $2000 )
Seat 4: toolittle111 ( $3343 )
Seat 5: flakslodd ( $2214 )
Seat 6: Hero ( $940 )
Shavlick posts small blind [ $10 ].
LitleBastrd posts big blind [ $20 ].

Holecards:
Dealt to Hero [ ]
FOLD toolittle111
CALL flakslodd, $20
RAISE Hero , $100
FOLD Kvelerslange
FOLD Shavlick
CALL LitleBastrd, $80
CALL flakslodd, $80

Flop:
[ ]
CHECK LitleBastrd
CHECK flakslodd
BET Hero , $300
FOLD LitleBastrd
ALL-IN flakslodd [ $2114 ]
ALL-IN Hero [ $540 ]

Turn:
[ ]

River:
[ ]
Hero shows [ ] a full house Kings full of tens .
flakslodd shows [ ] a flush ace high .
flakslodd wins $1274 from side pot #1 with a flush ace high .
Hero wins $1987 from the main pot with a full house Kings full of tens .

Also, 2-7 TD pwnage

Hand number: 1533875-3408
Level: $5/$10
Players:
SB($493) seat 0
Hero($324) seat 2
UTG($195) seat 3
CO($561) seat 4
Button($197) seat 5

Button at seat 5

Hero posts. UTG posts.

Hand: 55672

Round 1(0.75BB)

CO raises. Button calls. Hero re-raises. UTG folds. CO calls. Button re-raises. Hero calls. CO calls. Hero takes 1. CO takes 2. Button takes 2.

Hand: 5672J

Round 2(5.75BB)

Hero bets. CO calls. Button
raises. Hero calls. CO calls. Hero takes 1. CO takes 2. Button takes 1.

Hand: 56724

Round 3(8.75BB)

Hero bets. CO calls. Button
raises. Hero re-raises. CO calls. Button re-raises. Hero calls. CO calls. Hero stands pat. CO takes 1. Button takes 1.

Hand: 56724

Round 4(19.75BB)

Hero bets. CO folds. Button
calls.

Showdown:
Hero shows 76542
Button mucks 97543

)#()HIODSAHSDAIOQ()#$39032

David Sklansky Vs. The High Stakes Forum

David has engaged in a war of poker theory versus many of 2+2's most respected high stakes NL posters. The threads are great fun.

The Battle Started Here

Continued Here

...And Took A Lighter Turn Here.

Enjoy!

Exercise In Humility

I'm going to post a hand I played badly every few days just to keep myself humble (read between the lines: I'm running hot again). Villain in this is a total rock. I should have never open-limped, I should have folded preflop to the raise and when he call the flop raise I am FUBAR. I should have check and called a turn bet. He's a big puss so he probably would have given me odds. But I decide to get stacked I guess.

Party Poker ($2 no limit). Hand converted by Check Raised hand converter

HERO ($209.70) (UTG)
MP ($200.00) (MP)
CO ($263.80) (CO)
BTN ($226.80) (BTN)
SB ($273.88) (SB)
BB ($40.00) (BB)

Hole Cards:



Preflop (6 players):
SB posts small blind ($1.00).
BB posts big blind ($2.00).
HERO calls ($2.00) [1.50:1].
MP folds [2.50:1].
CO folds [2.50:1].

BTN raises $9.00.

SB folds [1.75:1].
BB folds [2.00:1].
HERO calls ($7.00) [2.00:1].

Flop (10.50 bets ($21.00) in pot, 6 players):



HERO checks.
BTN bets $15.00.
HERO raises $55.00.
BTN calls ($40.00) [2.27:1].

Turn (65.50 bets ($131.00) in pot, 6 players):



HERO bets $99.00.
BTN raises $162.80.
HERO calls ($46.70) [6.16:1].

River (219.75 bets ($439.50) in pot, 6 players):



BTN shows [ ] and won $436.50 (109.13bb)

Also, click below for month to date stats. I'm not going to make 50k hands this month. Hoping for 35-40k.

Also +$450 in RB.

c

Roy West Is Creepy

I loved his low-limit 7-card Stud book but the opening lines to his Cardplayer articles are getting creepier and creepier.

"Hi. Come on in. It’s a cool winter evening here in the Las Vegas valley. Let us go out on the patio and soak in the hot tub while sipping hot apple juice and musing over various aspects of our beloved game."

Sitting in the hot tub with Roy West sipping hot apple juice? Ugh.

In all seriousness, I like his article this month. Roy's Rule #1 sounds retarded (Play Happy or Don't Play At All) but there is a kernel of truth there. I don't have the option of taking it literally since I try to play 100 hours+ a month. I'm just not happy that often. But, the idea that a central tenet of playing poker should be to refrain from emotional imbalance such as tilt, anger or all-encompassing distraction or to minimize playing time is an excellent one and translates directly into $$$ in my opinion.

Head Pops Out Of Arse

I was truly stumped.

I had been suffering unparrelled break-even stretches, my variance was going way up and I was just plain out having a hard time adjusting to mid-stakes NL games. I had beaten 100NL 6max over 40k hands for 8ptb/100. 100NL full ring at 7ptb/100 over close to 100k hands. But once I moved up to 1/2 and 2/4 NL, my WR dropped down to between 3-4ptb/100 and my swings/breakeven stretches went way up. Often breaking even for 10-15k stretches and one week I had an 8 buy-in 15k hand downswing. Something I’d never experienced before (I’d dropped that many buy-ins a number of times but never over such a long stretch).

Now, some of this is obviously just a function of the games being slightly tougher. That being said, they are still basically fish ponds and I was not happy at all with my results after 40k or so. So, I decided to spend most of a full work day reviewing hands from my 100nl days and comparing them to my more recent hands from 1/2 and 2/4 NL to try and see what, if anything, I was doing different etc.

I made a shocking discovery.

I had turned into a weak/tight little bitch.

I'm not sure how it happened but I'd tightened WAY up, even in position. I had stopped playing draw heavy flops hard. I wasn't getting any action on my big made hands because I wasn't giving any with draws or air. I had gone super-passive with marginal made hands just hoping to call down and win. I seriously don't know how this happened. I suspect that when I moved up (even though I had played these levels successfully last year for a few months) I subconsciously decided to tighten way up while I adjusted to the new games. Then, I tried to integrate my game again but was only partially successful and ended up with a skitzophrenic style twitching along somewhere in the nether regions between a fully functioning TAG, a confused positional LAG, and a loose/passive Automatic Teller Machine.

So, I made a list of all the things I was doing wrong, played a session of only 4-tables, started playing 10xAggression, way more hands in position, switching gears, etc etc. All the shit I used to do. Suddenly the rocks and TAGs weren't peeling light on the flop and stealing pots from me anymore. I began padding my stack with lots of little pots so I could take the occassional Brunson free-roll when caught semi-bluffing with strong draws. I started getting action on my sets again. I stopped playing marginal hands OOP and passively calling off my stack with marginal hands and big draws.

It's wierd how grinding online like I do (I play 30-40k hands a month) you can settle into auto-pilot, develop some wierd/bad habits and turn into a marginal winner/break-even player. I'm not sure exactly how it happens but it sure as hell does. I'm just glad I was able to figure out where I was leaking and stop the bleeding a bit. I'm dropping down from 6-8 tables to playing just 4-5 (6max. Full ring I can still play 8 and remain sane and integrated).

I'm looking forward to the rest of the month.

Yesterday

I had a fun session yesterday. Click below for the gory details.