FML

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK I got super doomswitched today, dropping over $15K, my worst day ever After last week I had visions of having like a 40-50K month but I’m going to be lucky to have a positive month now Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I’m running so hot I feel guilty, up $18,000 in the last 36 hours! I like to think that I’m playing pretty well too, but there’s no denying the fact that when you crack AK with AK, turn sets over sets, river flushes over flushes, and flop straight flushes versus turned ace high flushes, you’re definitely running well above average.

I have however made a few adjustments of my own which I think might have helped me eke out a little more value than I might have a few months ago. Firstly I’ve been playing almost HUD-less (I have no stats on the table but I still use a popup) and I think it’s really helped me to get a better feel for the table and where my opponents are at (not in terms of their hand range, but in terms of how they’ll react to my plays). Of course, it may be a complete coincidence but my big bluffs have been getting folds and my big value bets have been getting calls with a frequency that has surprised even me. Secondly, I’ve been playing multiple short sessions with breaks in between rather than playing one massive one. I know a lot of people probably do this anyway so this is probably not news to them, but I’ve definitely noticed my focus and alertness improving and my susceptibility to defaulting into ‘robot-mode’ decreasing. Thirdly, with uni now taking up the majority of my time, I’m actually really eager to play poker once again. Towards the end of the summer I was getting pretty burnt out from poker and every session seemed a chore. Now that I can only play weekends and can’t play for days at a time I’m really enjoying it again and making the most of every chance I get to play. I know it sounds cliché but like anything else in life, if you’re enjoying your poker, you’ll probably play better and have better results to show for it (admittedly the causation runs both ways).

The final thing that I’ve been doing, and the thing that I want to talk about in more detail here, is making a lot of overbets. I used to do this a lot but for some reason it slowly filtered out of my game. Anyway, quite often I’ll be faced with a situation where my opponent’s hand is face-up on the turn as say Jx or 99 on a J726 board and I won’t bother trying to move them off it since I’ll probably have to fire three barrels to do so. What I’ve been doing again recently however is overbetting the turn and preparing myself for a slightly above pot-size river shove. This has turned out to be far more effective way of moving people off one pair since they now know on the turn that a) they’re facing a huge bet and b) they’ll probably be facing a river shove for their whole stack. This is much scarier from their perspective than a normal triple barrel line and elicits a lot more folds on the turn. This in turn means that although you’re overbetting you’re actually committing a lot less of your chips to win the pot since oftentimes you won’t even have to fire the third barrel.

The problem with this style is that you need to balance it with your monsters, meaning that you’ll now need to overbet, say, a set on the turn when it’s clear that your opponent has a marginal one pair hand that can’t stand a lot of heat. This is obviously an undesirable result if your opponent would’ve called you down had you bet normally and means you won’t be getting as much value as you would like from your big hands. What I’ve been thinking about doing therefore is something that raptor said in a video ages ago. That is, balancing your overbet bluffs with marginal hands that you know are good and saving the monsters for normal bet-bet-bet lines. I remember thinking he was crazy when I heard it but it makes a lot more sense to me now. Basically, the idea is that when you make a river overbet your opponent will put you on a range of nuts or air. From his perspective, his medium strength hand is a bluff catcher that will either win if you’re bluffing with pure air or lose if you flip over the nuts. The important thing is that because of this, he doesn’t distinguish between the strength of his bluff catchers – bottom pair is a good as any other pair to him – meaning that if you start overbetting top pair he’ll still call you and, more significantly, still lose, just as if had you flipped over the nuts. This means that you don’t need to ‘waste’ your nut hands for balancing anymore and can use them to value-town your opponent in more conventional spots instead. The big issue with this style is that you need to really understand your opponent and you need to be a really good hand reader. You don’t want to start overbetting weak hands that you think are ahead and end up getting constantly check-called by better (your overbet range would become entirely bluffs in this scenario).

Anyway I’ve only been experimenting with this style for a week and a bit so I obviously don’t have much experience to go on but I think (in theory at least) it looks very promising and if I’m able to master the fine balancing act that it involves I think I’ll become very difficult to play against. To give you guys an idea of how it works in practice, here’s one example of a hand where I was able to pull it off in a big way.

Party Poker, $5/$10 NL Hold'em Cash Game, 6 Players

CO: $1,253 (125.3 bb)
BTN: $1,000 (100 bb)
Hero (SB): $1,005 (100.5 bb)
BB: $1,000 (100 bb)
UTG: $1,773 (177.3 bb)
MP: $467.15 (46.7 bb)

Pre-Flop: Hero is SB with 7 T
4 folds, Hero raises to $35, BB calls $25

Flop: ($70) 7 2 4 (2 players)
Hero bets $55, BB calls $55

Turn: ($180) 9 (2 players)
Hero bets $144, BB calls $144

River: ($468) K (2 players)
Hero bets $525, BB calls $525

Results: $1,518 pot ($3 rake)
Hero showed 7 T (a pair of Sevens) and won $1,515 ($756 net)
BB mucked 7 8 (a pair of Sevens) and lost (-$759 net)

The turn value bet in this hand is pretty standard but on the river I’d usually check-call or ‘range-merge’ by betting for value (but bet a normal 3/4 pot amount). Since I was pretty sure my hand was good here though, I decided to use this river as a spot to balance my overbet bluffs and at the same time was able to induce a call where a normal 3/4 pot bet might not have (since my range in his eyes becomes infinitely more polarised when I overbet).

Switching topics now, it looks like I’m definitely going to Vegas for the WSOP Main Event! I’ve got some friends who are eager to come so there should be about six of us down there in July. We’re staying for two weeks and are currently looking at hotels to stay in. I’ve never been to Vegas before so I’ve really got no idea which hotels are good but at this stage it looks like we’ll be staying at the MGM Grand for one week and either Caesar’s or the Mirage for the other. If I can get a good deal at the Venetian or the Bellagio though I’ll definitely be looking to stay there. Wherever we stay, it should be an awesome two weeks regardless. Watch out for six 21 year old Aussies wreaking havoc at a hotel near you!

Finally, I’ve decided to set myself a few poker goals for the year. I realised that ambitious as I am there really is no way that I’ll just stop at 5/10 and 10/20. Although reaching those stakes has always been my long term goal, now...

It was our first week back at uni this week and I have to say it was pretty hard for me to get back into the swing of things. After nearly three months of playing poker basically full time, the thought of once again settling down to do hours upon hours of law reading was not a particularly tantalizing one.

I’ve played about 18 hours so far this month and currently I’m up a little over $3000. Unfortunately I’m about five buy-ins above-EV at 10/20 so really I should be well down for the month. It’s a bit disconcerting for sure but I guess I’ll take the good runs while they last.

In other news, I joined the uni poker society this week. They run a weekly $1 (about $0.65USD) tournament every Tuesday with first place being a few free drinks so I don’t think the standard will be very high but I’ll try to go down at least once this semester to see what it’s all about.

I’ve also started thinking about where I could go on exchange next year. I really want to go to the US so at the moment my options are something like NYU, Cornell, Duke, Harvard and the University of California campuses. I seriously doubt I will get into any of the Ivy League universities (there’s only one spot available for each to a Sydney Uni student) so basically I’m hoping for NYU and if not I guess I’ll see how close Californian life really is to the OC/American Pie/etc. (and whether people really use red plastic cups!).

Anyway, that’s enough for this update I think. Time to hit the books…

I started playing poker 3 years ago with the view to one day being able to cash out regularly and give myself a weekly wage of sorts. Back then my goal was to be a 5/10 regular with a 60K bankroll before I started cashing out. Last December I hit that goal but nevertheless decided to persevere on and try to be a 5/10-10/20 regular with a 120K bankroll before cashing out.

Now, just two months later, I’ve made it.

Granted, I cheated a little bit with a huge tournament score to help me along the way but still, it feels awesome. It happened a few days ago after I had booked a nice winning session and decided to tally up my various accounts to see where my roll was at. I had expected to be around the 115K mark, but after counting, I stared at the beautiful figure of $121,346.85! I immediately cashed out $1,346.85 straight into my bank account and revelled in the fact that I had finally done what I had wanted to do for so long – a cash out made not out of necessity, but merely because I had more money than I needed online! Now I can play knowing that every dollar I make will be one more dollar in my bank account, not merely another dollar towards building my bankroll. I know that might sound like a petty difference, but for me it’s really exciting.

Anyway the end of February was good to me and I actually stopped playing a couple of days ago once I hit the 20K mark. Uni restarts next Monday so I thought it’d be wise to take these last five or so days off and just relax a bit (relax from online poker that is, there’s a live $500 six-max tournament that I want to play this Sunday if I feel up to it). Here’s my graph and results for February, by far one of my most swingy months ever.



I’m now up about $75K for the year, $22K from cash games and $53K from tournaments. This puts me well on the way to making my goal of $200K for the year, but with uni around the corner and freak tournament finishes unlikely to repeat themselves, I’ll probably find myself just at par in the pretty near future.

I’ve been thinking more about my game recently trying to work out ways to better compete in the tough 5/10 and 10/20 games. The first thing I’ve decided to do is to try playing without a HUD, something that many top pros recommend as it really forces you to concentrate on your opponents and their tendencies. My game certainly made drastic improvements last year when I cut down my HUD from 10+ stats to just 3 and I started watching my opponents more. In recent times though I’ve noticed that I’ve become lax again and started multi-tabling loads and playing almost on auto-pilot. I think the reason for this is that I realised that I simply didn’t need to pay full attention to beat the 3/6 games anymore, something which wasn’t true six months ago. Hopefully by playing without a HUD and by dropping 3/6 from my roster altogether I’ll be forced to continue improving and I won’t develop bad habits or stagnate as a player. It would be all too easy for me to just keep playing 3/6 forever and win there without ever stepping outside my comfort zone (and I know a lot of people do this and to be honest it’s perfectly fine; once you reach 3/6 the money is after all very good), but I really want to one day beat 10/20 with the same ease as I beat 3/6, so I really think that this is the best course of action, even if it does mean challenging myself a bit more than I’d like in the short term.

The second thing that I’ve been thinking about doing is getting some coaching. I looked into it a little bit last year and it was mind-boggling to see just how many people are involved in coaching in some way, either as a student or as a coach. I was particularly surprised to see that a lot of the second-tier DC instructors were coached at one stage or another by the top-tier DC instructors. For some reason I had always assumed that every instructor was just a genius poker player in their own right but it seems that even the top players got coaching! At the moment I’m not sure whether to choose a poker ‘superstar’, someone like whitelime or aejones, or someone who is more familiar with the games that I play, someone like iRock in particular. I’ll definitely think about it more in the coming days.

And last, but not least, I’ve decided to renew my subscriptions to DC and Leggo and to sign up to BFP. I got really lazy with watching videos towards the end of last year and decided not to renew DC when it expired in December since I had this huge backlog of videos to watch and I was away for virtually all of January anyway. Now that everything’s back to normal again though I’m going to make a concerted effort to keep up to date with videos and stay ahead of the game so to speak.

Anyway, that’s another good month in the books! Let’s hope the rest of the year brings more of the same.

You’ll never believe what happened today! Remember my super tilted post about my disconnection? Well, I requested the hand histories today since HEM wasn’t able to record them and after importing them I discovered that in the hand against the giant fish he in fact just check/called the river and did not check/shove as I had previously thought. So then, how did I lose my money you ask? Well, somehow, I was actually beat! I had QQ on a QA9T7 board blind versus blind and he actually had J8, check/calling the flop with the gutter and only check/calling again on the turn and river when he hit! Sick! Anyway this meant that the disconnection only cost me $350-$600 (depending on whether my opponent paid me off in the other hand) and suddenly I felt like a new man; a huge burden had been lifted off my back.

All of a sudden, despite not having recorded a decent winning session in about a month, I felt really excited about playing again and jumped into an 8-tabling session. And what a session it was! My biggest ever in fact; a cool $11,285 in a little over 4 hours. I definitely ran ridiculously well, but even EV-adjusted I was making over $1000 an hour. Given that I hadn’t even made $1000 this entire month, I’m definitely extremely pleased with how today turned out. Let’s just hope that this wasn’t a one-off event and that the good run continues!

When I decided last December to learn a thing or two about MTTs, I never envisaged the path that that decision would ultimately lead me to take. I had intended merely to put up a worthy effort defending my $10,000 buy-in at PCA, but in the end I became engulfed in the frustrations and excitement of the MTT world.

It all started of course with my $45,600 AUD score at APPT Sydney, a result which for me was significant not so much because of the money but rather because it reminded me just how exciting poker can be. The sense of excitement that I had felt when I made my first successful bluff had long given way to a monotonous and sometimes tedious grind on the online cash tables. In many ways that result and MTTs in general came just at the right time for me; they rejuvenated my desire for the game and gave me the impetus to keep improving.

When I arrived at PCA however I would be lying if I said I had prepared myself well for the event. Though I had meant to watch a lot of videos and whatnot, I couldn’t shake the desire to get my cash game graph for the year to $100,000. So in the end my preparation was shaky at best, consisting only of watching a few videos on the plane to the Bahamas (SEABEAST’s videos in particular), reading some of Bond18’s articles, and playing a few weeks of the Sunday majors beforehand and learning from my mistakes. Somehow though, despite my lack of preparation, I managed to cash at PCA which was a hugely satisfying result for me. It felt as though the validity of my preparation and even the happiness of my holiday depended on it, and though I know it sounds ridiculous I was actually more pleased with this cash than my APPT Sydney result.

When I got back to Sydney I decided to head down to Melbourne early and play a relatively full schedule at the Aussie Millions. I hadn’t intended to play the Main Event initially but flush with my newfound PCA funds I decided to have another once-in-a-lifetime crack at a million dollars. Though that never eventuated and the whole trip in fact turned out to be a disastrous decision for my bankroll, I definitely do not regret going as overall it was definitely a worthwhile experience.

When I came back, as if to make me feel better for my cold run down in Melbourne, Full Tilt decided to boomswitch me and I went on to win three tournaments in the space of a week, an overall profit of close to $20,000. Then, just one week later, I hit the Holy Grail – a $50,000 score in a PokerStars major. I remember when I used to try to satellite into the Party weekly tournament and balk at the thought of winning $60,000 for first. What would someone do with all that money!?!? It had always been my dream to win one of those ridiculous life-changing scores and all of a sudden completely out of the blue I had done it.

Unfortunately, with my summer holidays ending in two weeks so too must my foray into tournaments. I have one more Monday (i.e. Sunday in the US) of Sunday majors available to me but I decided to go out with a bang and finish up today since today marked the final day of the FTOPS series as well as the main day of the PokerStars 25 Billion Bash promotion; this meant huge fields across the board for the Sunday majors as well as two huge $2.5 million guaranteed marquee tournaments - the FTOPS Main Event and the PokerStars Sunday Million. I didn’t have too much success today, cashing only three times and going relatively deep only in one, but that’s life I guess.

Anyway, as of tomorrow, I’m back to being a full time cash player. It’s probably a good thing to be honest as my cash game has probably suffered these past few months as I’m only up about $1000 in cash games this year (though dropping several buy-ins at 10/20 has had a lot to do with that). The time also feels right as I’m actually wanting to play cash games again, something which could not have been said at the start of this year. In fact I think I was partially drawn to MTTs not so much because MTTs were good but rather because after playing cash games full time in December I had become so taxed that I really needed a break and the simplicity of MTTs offered me that.

Anyway, it’s definitely been a fun and worthwhile journey and I’m glad that I decided to take it. I never dreamed that I would have as much success as I did, and to top it off I got to travel across the world and have an awesome time while doing it.

I've had a blog for a long time now at http://thepokermind.blogspot.com/ and I've been copying over its contents to CardRunners http://blogs.cardrunners.com/jcl as well. For some reason though it never crossed my mind to syndicate it here as well. So anyway here begins the start of that and I'll be copying over all future entries to Leggo. If you are interested in reading older posts please see one of those two links. Anyway, good luck at the tables, I look forward to being more active at Leggo!