Stars

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This PokerStars tournament is a No Limit Texas Hold’em event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 027988

Shot and put

While we were visiting Vegas a few weeks back, I played for the first time in a live $4/$8 Omaha/8 ring game at The Venetian. That game was like some kind crossroads moment to me, since after playing live I just play with a different attitude and outlook.

Last night during the Mookie I was playing in some Stud/8 cash games and since I have been doing well enough lately, I yielded to the temptation and sat in a $10/$20 table that had seven other players. I usually play a couple of $.50/$1 or $1/$2 and occasionally $2/$4 tables simultaneously, so that was the biggest ring game table that I have ever played in. Yes, I could easily afford it with my real-life money, but it took about a fourth of my poker bankroll to sit in. Scary, but exciting. Buy in for the minimum of $200, since in a limit table your stack doesn't matter as long as it is sufficient for one hand. ($200 is not enough in a hand that caps every street, but I wouldn't be playing in that hand unless I was certain to at least split.)

The play didn't start very well. I correctly folded my trash and took a couple of hands to the fifth street against completion and betting action, but they didn't improve and folding them was clearly the right play. I was getting a bit annoyed and then got suckered into a hand where the usual Full Tilt style, starting with four babies against high hands gives you high cards or pairs in the fifth and sixth. Before the last street, I was down to my last $30 dollars, hoping that the card would be an unpaired baby.

It wasn't. I had a pair of twos, no low. However, the other guy had a pair showing, and he had checked the sixth street. So the one last chance to win is to bluff him to fold his one pair, which hopefully didn't improve. I bet. He calls. Poker sucks. Playing at this level is clearly above my head...

And I can't believe my eyes and have to look again and check the last hand screen when all the money in the pot is shipped to me. I won it legitimately with a flush that I didn't even realize I had rivered, against his two pair. And if I hadn't tried to bluff, the other guy probably would have bet and I would have instantly folded.

Playing in the $10/$20 game had the beneficial mental effect that the $2/$4 didn't look that big any more. As a result I started playing better there, making the correct raises and reraises the way Ray Zee instructs in "High-Low Split Poker". I was sucked out a few times, but I won plenty of hands and the evening ended up with me $100 bucks above where I started, raking in a $100 pot (of which I had contributed half) in "just this one more last hand".

I have only recently began to fully see the importance of bluffing on the last street in both Stud and Stud/8, when your big pair doesn't improve or you end up It is so damn essential to push the other guy off his two pair that currently has you beat, and recognize the situations where this bluff has a +EV chance of succeeding. I don't remember if Ashley Adams has written about this, so I'd better check that out next.

In the mystery box... it could even be a boat!

Since I haven't been posting anything for a long time, here is one lucky Stud/8 hand in which I win my first ever online cash game pot bigger than $100. I start with rolled up threes which eventually become quads, and the other guy gets a boat. Since I disguised my hand as if I was going for low, I have to wonder what the guy was thinking capping it out in every street from the fifth one. I mean, I wouldn't raise him back with at least a made low, right?

General thoughts on The Mookie

I have finished twice in the money in the Mookie: a win is still somewhere in the far future. I play tighter in the Mookie than usual, which I can tell from the fact that I usually have two or three $3 90-handed knockout tournaments going on, and according to the stats window, the percentage of flops and turns that I have paid to see is in those tourneys about twice as high as in Mookie.

Perhaps I do play too tight, but here's the thing as I see it: everyone else also plays much tighter in Mookie than usual, especially during the first hour. I swear that over half of the hands go on like this: everyone folds to the cutoff or the button, who then raises the pot, and the blinds usually fold. This slowly siphons away my chips at the big and small blinds, especially since there is something seriously wrong with the Full Tilt RNG that I always end up with crap like T3 and 84 at this spot, and never seem to wake up with a legitimate reraising hand. As for calling, there just is no value in defending your blind with those hands, playing the rest of the hand out of position. There is no better example of a situation where you either win a little or lose a lot, so defending your blind there is a total loser proposition. So I just cut the loss and try to get those chips back in a more suitable position later.

The first hour of the Mookie also plays in other aspects very differently from any other tourneys that I play in. For example, it's quite rare to see three or more players seeing the flop. And I can't even remember the last time that I saw two players going all-in preflop (I usually don't get placed to the same table as Waffles, who I have understood has some notoriety here). The second hour, the blinds and antes get big enough to force players to do something, and the game starts to look more like a normal tournament.

My first time folding AA preflop

Last night I parlayed 50 Full Tilt points into $216 tourney entry, which I unregistered into tournament dollars. Top 108 got paid, and I finished 108:th. I posted a question about one difficult decision to the Full Tilt forum, repeated here:

At the point where there are 114 players left and a break coming soon, the player at 108th has about 5000 chips. I have about 15,000 and sitting around the 90th place. A player with about 10,000 chips left goes all-in on the second seat. All fold to me, and I have AA. If I call and win as I am I likely to do, I am certainly safe to finish with the money. If I call and lose, I am in a really bad place.

After thinking a long time, I fold.

Small blind calls with a much bigger stack, and loses to the QQ of the early raiser. My aces would have won that hand, for all that it matters.

Verdict on the decision to fold AA preflop here? Had our stacks been something like her 20,000 versus my 25,000, I am sure that the fold would have been obviously correct. But with the stack sizes as above? What do the better players say?

How it turned out in the end, it sure took a lot longer for the last six to be eliminated than I expected! When the blinds and antes were so high that pretty much everyone in the last dozen places had M=1, to my horror I noticed that despite my 97th position, I am going to be blinded and anted out in five hands! I kept fiercely opening the other table windows to see if any other short stacks were about to blinded out sooner, and there were none. Crap. I had once before come this far in a satellite, and there in the bubble when two players in other tables were all-in with just the antes, I thought that I was a shoo-in, but by some weird poker god intervention, both of them won their hands, and I was blinded out two hands later, ending up the bubble boy there.

Fortunately, two other players soon go out. With 109 players left, we are in the bubble, tables playing hand to hand. The big blind comes to me, UTG raises, everyone folds, I fold my total junk, leaving me less than the small blind and ante. The short stack in another table is in the same spot, and thank Glub he has a slightly smaller stack than me. My KT misses the flop completely. There are bets and calls around the table, so I know I'm dead. Fortunately, there are also bets and calls at the other table, big enough to give me hope. I lose. He loses. The player list shows both of us at zero chips but his name is higher up than mine, making me fear that I have missed something. But when the hand is over, the order changes and I end up 108:th, he becomes the bubble boy and I win the entry.

Double ookie

It's pretty late so I'll keep this short, but today was the first time in months when I was able to play in Mookie. And good thing that I did, since I finished in money in both Mookie and Dookie! Mookie paid off six and I finished sixth, surviving the bubble with the skin of my teeth. I had won quite a few coin flips along the way, though. Dookie paid three and I finished second, somehow managing to lose my massive chip lead in the end.

This ain't gin

While I am sipping rum and cokes and playing sit-and-gos, we can take a look at what other people aroung the poker blogosphere are saying about things.

• I certainly never expected the ending of the $100 million dollar poker movie "Lucky You" that made even the usual poker movie "quads vs. straight flush" endings seem rational by comparison. The posts "Poker movies see too many flops" at Up For Poker and "Why Poker Movies Have Failed (Thus Far)" at Pot Committed explain why after "Rounders" there have been no good movies about poker.
• Reading the blog "The Vegas Year" makes me dream that, one day perhaps, also we will... oh well. All these posts are good, but just to pick one, the post "If You're Gonna Complain You Gotta Show" tells us the tale of one donkey at the table.
• For all of us aspiring short stack samurai in cash games, Lair of Lucypher gives us the Confessions of a Short-Stacker, parts one, two and three. The Noted Poker Authority has also often recommended buying in short to simplify your decision making with favourable stack to pot ratios.
  
• I only recently discovered Never Win Poker radio and discussion forums. The May 15 show about limit hold'em was quite educational and instructive. At least it taught me never to limp in as first player in the hand. I only play limit hold'em as part of HORSE, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to learn to play it well!
• Doyle Brunson himself has become a poker blogger, showing us whippersnappers how it's done.
• Pokerati is another new-to-me poker news site. The post "Daniel Negreanu on Serious Tilt?" links to a SikTilt interview that was so funny that my wife wanted to see it when she heard me laughing in the den.
• I haven't been able to play in the Mookie for a while since I'm teaching Wednesday nights. In five weeks I'll be off for the rest of the summer, though, and will be able to play every week. Changing the format permanently to 3000 starting chips would be nice.
• Full Tilt recently updated their software to allow heads-up tourneys. I haven't tried them yet, but if they really work as moronically as described in the post "Attention Full Tilt" of Biggestron, I probably won't.
• I don't play for money that I wouldn't afford to lose, but losing still annoys me. However, reading 88% Concentration is like a window to whole different world.
• While playing poker, I usually like to listen to Sinatra and Dire Straits, but perhaps the video "All In" would be more appropriate. The chorus is catchy and it even gets the lingo right, and everything. On the other hand, I don't understand how somebody with JJ can have only a set when his opponent has a full house.
  

If you gonna be a square, you ain't gonna go nowhere

Just that I write one poker blog post this month, here are a couple of random poker thoughts that I have entertained recently. The past month I have been sitting still, but at least that horrible run of bad beats has ended. It feels almost surreal now that I again feel good and positive going all-in when I am ahead and the other guy is drawing to two outs, knowing that I'll win 96% of the time. But since it's Full Tilt, I expect these suckouts to happen. As I also expect that whenever there betting left and there is exactly one turn or river card that is scary, it will always come, especially if I slowplay. The vast majority of cards are safe, yet the scare card comes. It's like the Full Tilt RNG is conditional on the betting activity, or the Poker Gods are trying to tell me to bet more. But I don't think it's wrong to not consider possibilities that have a 2% or 4% chance of happening.

I have loosened up my play with AK considerably. In the book "Bigger Deal", Howard Lederer was quoted advising a student in his "poker fantasy camp" that you should always call preflop with AK. I have done so, and also been more aggressive with it in the first place, with usually good results. Another, much larger change that I have noticed in my game in all streets is that I understand the concept of fold equity much better and utilize it in my calculations and betting decisions. This equity is usually bigger than one would think and makes the case for betting or raising, or calling if I set up a bluff in the next street with a suitable bluff out scare card.

I had an interesting situation in Pot-Limit Omaha, whether I should try a bare ace bluff against two opponents. I posted a question about it in Full Tilt forum, but got only one answer. This is a special case of a more general question I have been pondering, of where the stack size inflection points lie in various situations between where it is correct to fold, call or raise: in three situations that are otherwise exactly the same except for the stack sizes, the correct move can be different in all three. Somebody should examine interesting situations such as this one, and analyze game-theoretically the exact locations of these inflection points.

I thought of a related question when I watched the WSOP video where Oliver Hudson goes out against Sam Farha with an underfull vs. overfull cooler in the very first hand of the tournament. Of course, with the stacks that size or smaller, there is nothing that any pro could have done. But how big should the stacks have been so that Hudson (or you or me) could have escaped with some chips left? A million would certainly suffice, but how much less would have been adequate? Perhaps we could come up with a measure of how good a player somebody is, as the stack size needed for that player to escape being felted, as measured over a set of well-chosen situations such as this one, the smaller number here indicating a better player.

One sick beat that I saw happen in a tourney was when a guy with KK called an all-in against A5 and flopped a boat with the flop K88. That's pretty much in the bag, right, especially since I know I folded an ace? But wouldn't you know it, both of the case eights come up in turn and river, giving the other guy the shared quads but with a better kicker. (The probability of that is what, about one in two thousand?) But why I think this is an especially bad beat is by imagining what would have happened if the same hand had happened in a casino cash game. It wouldn't qualify for the bad beat jackpot because only one of his hole kings is playing. Which would make it a level two bad beat, worse than a regular bad beat. But there sure is no bad beat jackpot for that!

Meanwhile in Stud High, I have been questioning the wisdom of not betting on the river when the other guy has checked and only a better hand would call (or even worse, raise), which would be a typical silly beginner mistake in hold'em. For example, say I make my flush in the 6th street and take the lead betting whereas I have been just calling so far, and the other guy calls with a probable two pair and knows that I made something. He checks the river, so should I now bet? I think one of the articles of Ashley Adams says that he bets here, and I usually do. Sometimes he raises and I know I am beat, but the odds are so good that I have to call. But most of the time it works and scores me an extra bet.

Quadrophenia

To post something in the poker blog, here is one Stud hand where I got extremely lucky. I start with two pair against two players showing an ace and a third one betting with 78 suited showing. The sixth street gives me a boat. The river gives me quads, which turned out to be necessary for win since another player rivered himself a bigger boat.

A quick downdate

I noticed that the whole March passed by without me making any posts. I just haven't had anything interesting to write, since I have read pretty much everything (although I am of course eagerly waiting for the new Harrington and Professional No-Limit Hold'em Part 2) and the few books that I read didn't really have anything worth mentioning here. (I did like the quip in "Bigger Deal" of how a poker fantasy camp is actually a reality camp, heh.)

Playwise, the last two months have been a slow downswing, and it's really been frustrating and annoying to play when half of the tournaments and sit-and-gos that I enter end with me going all in on the turn with the better hand, and some donkey calls and gets his two- or three-outer at the river. As for the preflop all-ins, I am pretty much accustomed to going in with aces or kings and somebody calls with KJ and gets his straight or flush, and I just shrug my shoulders of how that was just expected. It just isn't fun any more to lose 50-60% of the confrontations where the chips should have been rightfully mine over 90% of the time. For this reason, I have recently played mostly Go to satisfy my need for intellectual action because in that game there is no luck whatsoever, so the only reason why you lose is because you simply made more (and more serious) mistakes than your opponent. And it's not like my small stakes play is financially relevant anyway, since it's just practice for when I retire and can start playing with real money.