So ... I haven't updated this blog since October 2009, which means I have quite a bit of updating to do.

A bit of background: for around a year from the second half of 08' through the first half of 09' I couldn't win a goddamn hand of poker. There were a few reasons for this, but that's another story.. I sheepishly remember times where I would be chatting on the phone with a friend, fcking around on google maps and playing 500/1k nlhe at the same time. During this run I ended up dropping a ton of money playing big games and running very poorly in them and being underrolled. Staking also went absurdly badly... So I dropped down a bit to play 25/50, but things still didn't seem to be going right and I wasn't sure I was even a good player in the first place and my whole winnings might have been due to extremely good luck. And if that was the case, I'd really feel like a schmuck pissing my illgotten winnings away slowly in games I couldn't beat. Hell, during that year I couldn't find a game on the internet I could beat. Also, I was starting school in the fall. I really wanted to immerse myself in school so I considered cashing out my roll to force myself to focus. One of the odd things about high stakes poker is it's extremely hard to be bored- if I have nothing to do, I just gamble. And making friends and doing school work involves a lot of shooting the shit time. Time which is fun but often a byproduct of being bored and finding random bullshit to collaborate on. Retreating to my poker-cave would not be option if I had no poker to play. So I cashed out every cent.

Unfortunately I didn't find academics as inspiring as I had hoped, and despite my best intentions I didn't see philosophy possibly being as interesting as poker, now or ever. Which- as a sidenote- is sort of depressing- that possibly finding answers to fundamental questions in life bores me but seeing money bounce back and fourth between degens does not. So in late September I found a friend owed me 1k online and I decided to get back at it. Well, truth be told, I never really left, I just love playing poker. In the first few months of the school year I ran up my 1k in play money on ftp to well over 1m. Which is somewhere between really cool and embarrassing, I'm not sure which. After having played play money and *gasp* enjoying it, I decided it might not be a bad thing to take this 1k in real money and do the same thing, starting from the bottom. Sorta like a down and out boxer who has to see if hes still got it. Maybe some sort of penance for my excessive degeneracy during those dark days of 08 and 09. There was a nice symmetry about the whole idea I couldn't get away from.

I'm not going to painstakingly go through every wrinkle, trial and tribulation at the tables since that time, but I did a few interesting things. I started at .25/.50 cent nlhe (20 bi) and moved up around when I had 30-40 bi or so. So I didn't completely luckbox a quick start out of it. I played a bunch of hu sngs as well, which I have definitely gotten better at, but am still not an expert at, as well as a ton of omaha which it appears from my database I suck a lot at. Though I feel like it can't be that hard. Then, in Feb 2010 I decided to try and 16 table 5/10 nlhe so I wouldn't have to wait for hu action. I did a lot of fun stuff with my database in order to design a strong strategy, mostly by trying to solve ranges for whole populations of players (this makes a certain amount of sense at 5/10 because there are so many regulars who appear on all your tables). The idea was that I would play a ton of hands, racking up 100k+ samples at a given limit and then look at my data and see how best to play situations on average against the whole population of the limit. For example, I would go in HEM, search for a given situation: for example, it is folded to me on the button. Then I would filter out all the hands I knew it was almost certainly possible to open OTB for a raise and look at how I fared with the bottom of my range- for example hands like 98o or worse, Q5dd, things like that. If I was making money with the bottom of a given range I would widen it slightly, if I was losing I would narrow it, and so in this way I hoped to find ranges which were optimal against the whole population of the limit in order to make my decisions easier over many, many tables. In turns out this doesn't work well at all and I broke even for 50k hands or so, despite putting in a ton of time with HEM and doing an incredible amount of number crunching. Moral of the story really is that if you are massively multitabling you either have to be an unbelievable quick thinker and be able to process all your information perfectly in split seconds or you have to play against idiots and be a huge nit. Or I suppose you could try to play GTO, which I did try to incorporate some ideas from in my play as well, but the whole exercise was a huge headache.

After that, around the beginning of March, I began to play hu NLHE again since my results have been pretty consistently great in that since forever and it's fun as hell. I kept getting frustrated though because I wanted to filet the bumhunters who were cluttering the lobby trollishly grabbing Abigail V or whatever and playing drunken russians once every 3 weeks. In a characteristically bold move I combed through my aim buddy list and got a stake from a fellow HSNLer who took half my action so I could move up and find someone with the stones to play poker. The only condition was that I couldn't play Ike or Isildur which seemed a fine compromise to me. So I moved up to 25/50 and played everyone for as long as I could, mostly UrNotindanger2, Jungleman, Tcorbin, Raptor, Inorej, BrightGreenPoop, Molswi, Hal0zination, ZeeJustin, Zugwat, Chewy, AEjones and won a bunch, which was really cool. I decided to end the stake after amassing around 50 bi for 25/50 with the plan to reevaluate if I dropped down to 100k. It only took me I think a week and a half to do exactly that, mostly courtesy of Leggo Poker's very own LuckyChewy who clipped my fledgling wings in this exciting pot:

Seat 1: luckychewy ( $32764.50 USD )
Seat 2: Sauce1234 ( $29070.25 USD )
Sauce1234 posts small blind [$25.00 USD].
luckychewy posts big blind [$50.00 USD].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Sauce1234 [ Jd Qd ]
Sauce1234 raises [$125.00 USD]
luckychewy raises [$400.00 USD]
Sauce1234 raises [$1085.00 USD]
luckychewy raises [$2661.00 USD]
Sauce1234 calls [$1876.00 USD]
** Dealing Flop ** [ Qc, 2c, 3c ]
luckychewy bets [$3625.00 USD]
Sauce1234 calls [$3625.00 USD]
** Dealing Turn ** [ 6d ]
luckychewy bets [$6750.00 USD]
Sauce1234 calls [$6750.00 USD]
** Dealing River ** [ Th ]
luckychewy bets [$19278.50 USD]
Sauce1234 calls [$15584.25 USD]
luckychewy wins $3694.25 USD
luckychewy shows [Kd, Kc ]
luckychewy wins $58140.00 USD from main pot
Sauce1234 doesn't show [Jd, Qd ]

Now, to the untrained observer, this might look like a lot of money to get in with one pair. There is certainly something to that, top pair, afterall, will get flopped around a fifth of the time depending on what cards we play preflop and 1200 BBs is a lot of BBs to be shoveling in there. I had an intricate chain of reasoning which led me to not fold on any street and the real decision point is on the turn anyways from there on out there was fuck-all I could do. Hah! I would like to explain why I played this pot the way I did, but it would be giving away sort of a lot about how I think about poker. And you probably don't want to know, cause then you will be tempted to play these kinds of pots all over the place, and most likely be institutionalized.

Dejected, I have moved down to 10/20 and am trying to grind my way back up though if I get too bored I will end up taking the stake again, same terms as before. I managed to pull the whole thing off such that I'm completely breakeven despite having won a bunch of money due to my impeccable timing, a recurring problem for me in poker. I have the rest of April unencumbered by classes to win as much as possible so that I can move up and play big stakes hu with players who are probably better than me again. Time is of the essence though, as in May I am leaving on a cross-country roadtrip with my GF and won't be plugged in again until at least June, at which point I will probably split my time between couch-surfing across Vegas and trying to win every cent dividing my section of the lobby from Phil Ivey's.

Gl All,

Ben