Grinding it out, one day at a time

You’re probably wondering WTF that title is all about so I shall explain! As you’ve probbaly read in previous posts my laptop is about 4 years old and wasn’t the greatest thing in the world when it was new! Because of the resolution etc I can only run 1 table without having horrendous overlap which is definitely -EV! At my current site, Full Tilt, I get 27% of my rakeback but can only realistically play 1 table comfortably and keep my eye on the action but at somewhere like Poker Stars I can play 4 on one screen and keep up with things due to there resizeable tables. I believe that by playing at Stars I can build my bankroll quicker than staying at a site where I get rakeback. Here’s some maths for you!

I believe I can hit 10PTBB/100 at 6-max NL10 on Full Tilt. This equates to $0.02 per hand. Say 80 hands an hour, this means I should be earning around $1.60 per hour played. 27% rakeback adds around 1PTBB/hour to your win rate (saw this posted on 2+2 somewhere) so this should take my potential earn rate to $1.80/hour.

Now say I play at Stars where I can play 4 tables and therefore hit around 300 hands an hour. My earn rate may drop to say 6PTBB/100 which is $0.012 per hand but because of the increase of hands my win rate should be around $3.60 per hour, twice what it would be at Full Tilt! Add to this that Stars currently has a 25% reload bonus which at 6-max NL10 clears at around $0.40/hour, this adds $1.60 per hour so potentially I could be hitting $5.20/hour compared to the $1.80 at Full Tilt!

With this in mind I have withdrawn from Full Tilt and put my bankroll into Poker Stars. My total online roll is now $497.14 but I may have to dip into this in the New Year as my spending has gone a little crazy once more! I plan to play 4 tables of 6-max NL10 until I hit $625 where I will make the jump to NL25. Once I earn enough cash to treat myself to a new setup I’ll probably return to Full Tilt or a similar site and multitable and get rakeback!

Good luck at those tables!

I played 135 hands of 6-max NL25 last night on Full Tilt and walked away with $3.75 which works out at 5.56PTBB/100. I’m not going to be able to retire anytime soon but it’s better than a kick in the teeth! I would have turned an extra $12 if it hadn’t have been for the following hand.

Villain in this hand was running at 13/3/2 over 60 hands and hadn’t really stepped out of line at any point, just seemed a bit of a nit. Anyway I raise to $1.50 to loose the guy who had just posted and Villain flat calls. Flop isn’t too bad but I have to bet out here and he flat calls which gets me thinking. The turn brings another 5 which doesn’t really bother me as it’shighly unlikely to have helped him unless he’s called my raise PF with 33 or KK both so unlikely I dismissed them. I am very worried about AK here though as he’s that tight he’s only re-popping preflop with KK+. When he flat calls my turn bet I know I am beaten and I think this is confirmed when he pushes on the river. I don’t think he’s capable of floating me here and I think it’s a good fold, how about you guys?

Well that is the last of the poker I’ll be playing this year. I have work behind the bar tonight which will be pretty busy and then tomorrow is New Year’s Eve which is madness for the pub trade as you can imagine and I plan on being a lot pissed so that is me done! I do have the first week in January off where I plan to get my challange off to a flying start and hopefully log around 10k hands.

Thanks to the readers and visitors of this blog and I sincerely wish you all the best for the coming year. I hope it is everything you want it to be and more besides.

Happy New Year all

I’ve not really played much poker since my last update mainly due to eating and drinking my own body weight in alcohol and fatty foods! Well it is Christmas afterall! In between the festivities I’ve managed to fit in around 500 hands and turned a nice little $55 profit, including a cash in a 90 man deep stack SnG.

I entered the SnG on a whim on Saturday night when I’d finished my bar shift mainly because I had never entered a deep stack game before. It was only a $5.50 buy in so I went for it and within 10-15 minutes 89 others joined me. I tried to see a few cheap flops but never really hit anything but the players seemed tighter than usual so I started to loosen up. I rode my luck a little during the 3rd level when I raised to 4xBB in EP with my 88 and only the Rock on the button called. My 88 was an overpair on a rainbow board of 537 and I bet the pot and was minraised by the Rock, something told me to push here (think it was the numerous beers and brandy’s I’d consumed earlier) so push I did and was insta-called by the Rock who flipped QQ Turn brought another 7 and the river a beautiful 8 to fill my boat and I was one of the chip leaders. I stole a lot of pots preflop by 3-betting and was sat in the top 6 in chips for most of the game.

By the time I hit the 3rd break I was stuggling to keep awake but I could smell the final table and was uber-confident of finishing in one of the top 3 places where the actual money was. The bubble burst soon after the break and we were down to 16 players when my final hand occured. It was folded to the SB, who had been on one of my previous tables for over an hour and he’d commented on how he knew I was stealing and raising light and he seemed pretty solid and capable of making moves, and he limped. I made it 4xBB from the BB with AJs and he raised to 10xBB. I knew this was going to be a critical hand as if we end up all-in once is going to be the chip leader. From our previous play and comments he could have anything at all here and decide he’s doing this with 22+, A9+, 76s+, KTs+ and I’m here to win the whole thing so I push into him. He calls right away and shows AKo. FFS! Neither of us improved and I go out in 16th. I think I made the right move to win. I could have folded here and limped a few spots higher (I was 7th in chips at the time) but I read him for making a play based on my image and made a move based on these factors. Meh. $8.10 won which equates to $2.60 for 3.5 hours work,

I’ve played around 280 hands of 6-max NL10 and shipped around $1.20 which isn’t the best result in the world but by no way disasterous, nothing really of note to be honest. I’m around $50 up from 6-max NL25 which is nice! I’ve only played around 200 hands and have been paid off with my big hands which helps things. Here’s an example. I’d only played 20 hands here but was at something stupid like 75/60/8 due to picking up KQs, AQ, KK, 88, JT, 98s and obviously AA! I guess he thought he could bluff me off the pot! LMAO!

I probably won’t get to play now until the New Year mainly because tonight I am going to kick Mrs Pudding’s arse at 10-pin bowling, Friday I have Pudding Jr and Saturday and Sunday are going to be crazy in the pub with it being New Year’s weekend so I’ll probably be in no fit state! I do have the following week off though and plan to log a whole bunch of hands during my time off. I originally booked it off as I thought Mrs Pudding was having that time off too but she’s had to take this week instead so why not utilise my spare time by logging a few hands and making some cash?! Even if I don’t play I’ll still be checking out your blogs so please upate them!

Best of luck at the tables and if I don’t update before the New Year, I wish you and your family all the best for 2007! :) 

I mentioned auto rules I use in my last post and have since been asked where I got them. Here are the links for:

Full Ring

6-max

Thanks for reading, now get back to those tables

I’ve really slacked on logging any hours this week and have only managed a couple of hundred hands although I have managed to turn over a $50 profit. I had my bar shift last night and by the time I finished I couldn’t be bothered and was ready for bed. However, I couldn’t get to sleep due to a combination of eating late and having to do a load of rearranging in the beer cellar when we’d finished. With my second wind I decided to fire up Full Tilt and have an hours worth of play.

Hello boys and girls. Here is post number two on NLHE starting hands for full ring cash games. Each of the scenarios is split between Early Position (EP), Middle Position (MP) and Late position (LP) and they’re will be a small section on playing from the Blinds. As mentioned before this guide is intended for Full ring games of 9 or 10 players and assumes the following:

One of the first questions people ask when they start playing Texas Hold’em is usually what starting hands to play before the flop. Fixed Limit (FL) Hold’em is relatively easy to plot a table for due to the betting structure etc and if anybody wants an Excel spreadsheet with the recommended starting hands for Early position, Middle Position, Late position and from the Blinds (taken from a best selling Poker Strategy book) post a comment (I’ll respond via email to you and delete your comment).

Anyway, back to No Limit (NL)! NLHE is a totally different beast from FLHE for reasons that are so obvious they don’t need explaining here and if you need them explaining then I think you need to find yourself a new game Hands that are basically unplayable in certain positions in FLHE become profitable in NLHE as you have the potential to win your opponents entire stack, which could be 100xBB or more, where as in FLHE the most you can expect to win from your opponent is 16xBB (assuming a cap of 4 bets on each street). So hands like T9s can become very profitable in the right situations, as can small pocket pairs. In FLHE in Middle Position (MP) I’d want at least 2 maybe 3 limpers in front of me before I called preflop with say 55 but in NLHE I’d be quite happy to limp with these even first to act, Under The Gun (UTG) if the table wasn’t being overly aggressive as if I flop a set I have the potential to win a huge pot. I’d much rather have QJs than A8o even though A8o could win the pot without having to improve along the way. To get things under way I’ll list hands into 4 (A to D) categories and then in a separate post I’ll list which hands are profitable in certain situations and in each of the positions of the table. These are entirely meant for NLHE cash games and not tournament play as such.

A-listed hands

These are hands that you should be happy to see dealt to you preflop and as a general rule play well in any position when playing deep stack (100xBB) NLHE. They include:

• Any Pocket Pair
• Any Suited Ace
• Suited connectors from KQs down to 54s

B-listed hands

These hands are weaker than the hands listed but they are still very often playable in deep stack NLHE games. These category includes:

Play Online Poker 

I received an email yesterday from Cadmunkey telling me he was going to hit some cash games and that he’d also listened to an article by Daniel Negreanu with regards to beating the micro stakes NL cash games. I have utmost respect for Negreanu as I think he’s a tremendous player who seems to have an insane ability to read hands. One hand that stands out is in Harrington On Hold’em Volume 3 where he lays down a flopped straight after reading Sammy Farha, correctly, for a flush after Farha called a raise and reraise preflop with 9s2s! Anyway, Negreanu stated that if he were to play micro stakes poker he’d avoid 6-max and play Full Ring (9 or 10 man) as it’s the only way to beat the rake and make a consistent profit at these stakes! So as I am not on any sort of challenge at the minute and am just donking around I think I’ll give the full ring games a go on Full Tilt Poker and I think Mr Munkey is going to do the same also.

….I’m sick of this mother fucking spam on this mother fucking blog! Seems to have gone crazy in the past week!

Well in my last post I announced that I was going to have a small break from all things pokery as I had a pending withdrawal and fancied trying out some new games like Omaha and Stud on the play chip tables but that changed and I ended playing on Sunday afternoon like the big degenerate that I am! Basically, as expected, the play on the play money tables was ridiculous to say the least and I feel that in order for me to learn the ins and outs of these games it is going to be better to play even the penny tables somewhere and risk losing some cash rather than donking around with pretend cash and losing my sanity. Maybe I’ll have to save learning new games until my roll can support them and my regular game. As it happens I did enjoy the Stud games and also the Omaha but just couldn’t grasp the Omaha H/L (just seems like a big gamble-fest) and didn’t get my head around the Razz games either.I checked my Neteller on Sunday morning and found that my withdrawal from Bowmans / Bet365 had hit my account less than one day after my request which was surprising as Cadmunkey waiting an age for his to hit and is one of the reasons I was going to take a small break. With this in mind and the play money tables mushing my brain I redeposited on Full Tilt and found myself a nice little game of NL10 6-max. I don’t know what it is but the lobby always says the 6 max tables are churning out around 80 hands per hour but I’m only ever getting around 60 at best? Anyway, I logged the huge sum of 54 hands and turned a nice profit of $25.25 and an extra $1.20 in rakeback, LMAO! I swear my first table was just a donkey-fest, I’m sure the whole table was either pissed or seriously hungover and I had a guy 2 to my left min raising every single hand and another guy who as long as he had paint he was going to showdown! Here are a three hands of note, two of which I’d be interested in your line.

Suckout then re-suck out! - Glazierboy (GB) was running at 80/50/0.5 over 40 hands (small sample yes) and had shown down Ace-rag type hands. Lavawalker (LW) was the guy who called any raise with anything remotely resembling a hand, a true calling station. When GB pushed all-in preflop after min raising all his other hands I was very weary of AA but if this was one of the 200+/1 times he was holding Rockets at the same time as me holding Cowboys then so be it. LW’s call didn’t worry me in the slightest/ I was kind of hoping for AQ’s to be show as that’s take care of some of the Aces available but that wasn’t the case. GB preflop pushed with 77 (LOL) and LW called with JJ (questionable). Flop gives LW an set and I’m a bit pissed off about the potential suckout but I do have 10 clean outs (4 Aces, 2 Kings, 4 nines) for the win. The Queen fills up LW and I now have to hit one of the last 2 Cowboys in the deck…..KERCHING, justice is served!

SB vs BB - Is there any way I could have gotten away from this? No reads at all on villain apart from he sat down with $4 a few hands ago. His 3xBB raise could mean anything and holding TT I feel I have to raise here which I do. Flop isn’t the best but he’s more likely to have raised with Ace-x rather than K or J-x and I lead out for 1/2 pot figuring he’ll lay down Ace-rag after my aggression and 2 face cards on the flop. Instead he pushes all-in for his remaining $2.55, giving me odds of around 3.5/1 and those odds for me are too good to turn down when he could be sat their with say A7o. Do you play any different here?

Crying call or easy fold? - Not too sure what to make of this hand, especially as the pot is very small, I feel now I should have let it go but that is easy to say once you’ve seen the result I guess! The Villain (DYlonCSL) was running at 50/20/1.2 over around 35 hands and didn’t seem the best playing I’d ever come across. Flop isn’t great but gives me an OESD but I don’t want to get involved too heavily in this pot with 4 other villains. I feel if I try to steal here on the button I’m either going to get 2-3 callers and bloat the pot or I am going to be raised enough to force me off a potential hand. Turn gives me bottom pair but makes the board even more draw heavy and again it is checked around. River is no help and now Villain bets 1/2 pot offering 2/1 odds. I should fold as I feel like I am beat but I go ahead and call, partly because of the very faint chance I’ good and partly through wanting to know his hand!

Not overly sure what the plans are for the week but they should involved plenty of NL10 action! I might play tonight but I am already shattered after a late night 0230am and an early wake up 0710 so it depends what frame of mind I’m in when I get home after the crazy commute home! Think I’ll have a shower and a bite to eat and take it from there. When I played yesterday I only opened one table and felt everything was much clearer in my decision making so I’ll probably do that again for a few sessions to see how it goes, hopefully they’ll deal me more than 60 hands an hour or I may start to surf / watch TV / MSN etc.

Oh, it looks like I’ve pissed off Blackscribe too for showing a bluff and not “being friendly”. I’ll reply to his post on his blog at some point today to explain my actions etc. Got to love this blogging malarky

Thanks as always for reading and best of luck at those fish filled tables!