Itz a poker blog

Ok, so a half year review is a month late but here goes anyways.

I really started playing poker about this time last year and spent the second half of 2007 learning as much as I could and putting in a ton of hands, even grinding out supernova at NL100. Unfortunately the result was a severe drop in my stamina and disipline to put in a lot of hands per month.

This year I have averaged less than 20k hands (and less than 30 hours) of poker per month - which is a fraction of what I used to play. Which really is a shame because I'm playing better and at higher stakes and making a lot more money.

Here is my graph for the year, the downswing in the middle was my first shot at NL400.



A pretty consistent $100/hr without considering bonuses etc, so I'm pretty happy with poker as a hobby right now. I have considered quiting my job and playing poker full time but for now I'm content with keeping it a hobby and a source of extra income. My biggest concern financially is that some law will be passed or some other trend will cause the games to dry up so I believe sticking with my career (which I really enjoy and am good at) is the safest approach. Outside of that I think it's also healthier mentally. The financial freedom poker brings comes at the cost of the daily grind, which I'm pretty sure would drive me insane.

Of course that said, 20k hands a month is still pretty pathetic for the amount of tables I play and I definately think I should be picking up the slack in the second half of the year and pulling in some more profits.

Oh, and I'm going to vegas later this week. I've only been once for a weekend (stayed at the luxor) so if anyone has any "must-do" ideas please drop me a line here!

Good luck,
-Itz

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Hey all, Been a while since I've updated.

December and January went well so i splurged on a new computer and 27" dell monitor and am thoroughly enjoying my new setup.

After setting up the new computer I didnt want to reinstall PT2 with all the new poker tracker type programs coming out, so I just installed the PT3 beta and imported all of my hands. The program is nice, but right now the only hud is that AHK script/hud thingie that one of the pt3 guys put out.

It took forever for me to get it to show up at all, and then when i did it seemed random on whether it would display any stats at all.

I'd been thinking about making my own HUD for a while now because I have a lot of ideas on automating the note taking and profiling of players (for example noticing patterns and bet sizing tells automatically and having this information available on the HUD).

I have a working prototype on a simple HUD right now. Here are some screenshots:



The stats shown are:

Label1: First 5 characters of name | # hands
Label2: VPIP / PFR / 3bet%
Label3: FlopAF/TurnAF/RiverAF

Oh, I know that having the players name on the top label is kind of pointless, but I did that so I could see the update rates when new players joined etc.

Right clicking on a label will bring up a little window with more stats, kind of like acehud.

If anyone wants to help me test it, or doesnt like the AHK hud or whatever, you can download it here:

http://conquest.teamgbu.com/shaun/PT3Hud.zip

You will need the .net Framework 3.5 located here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/de...4E35-B531-508D977D32A6&displaylang=en

It should be very easy to use - Just unzip to a folder and run.

Other Notes:

Currently it only supports pokerstars.

If you are feeling adventurous you can modify the hud layout by editing the hudconfig.xml file after running the program once.

How to do that:

Look at the of hud configuration first, you will see PokerStars6Max, PokerStar9Max, PokerStars2Max sections.

Each of these have multiple . You can add or remove labels if you want, as well as modify the x,y coordinates, width, and . The way the formula works is that it just replaces the special tags with values from the database. For example the second label has a formula of:


$vpip | $pfr | $3bet and will output like: 20 | 18 | 4

You can put any characters in here you want, it just does a straight replace on the data tags.

Note: Eventually I plan on making a layout manager to do this graphically.

Here are the data tags available:

$name - Players full name
$sname - First five letters of the players name (I added this cause some players had long name and i wanted to limit the real estate showing the name would take up)
$faf - flop AF
$taf - turn AF
$raf - river AF
$pfr - pre flop raise %
$vpip - vpip
$hands - number of hands on villain
$win - total amount of money won by vpppp
illain
$3bet - percent of time they 3bet
$f3bet - percent of time they fold to 3bet (i dont think this is accurate?)


Most of these should be accurate, but PT3 has a database that is a little more complicated than PT2, so some may be off a little or a lot. I do plan on adding more stats obviously, these were just the bare minimum that I wanted for testing. Adding new stats / data tags will be easy. I will probably need help from some smart people figuring out how to query for certain stats.

Overall you should find that the program operates very efficiently, it doesn't tax my cpu or memory at all - though if you have hundreds of thousands of hands it will probably chug (postgres will technically) retrieving your own stats, so if you have 100k+ hands, you probably want to use the "do not query my own stats" feature on the front.

Another note on update rates: It will update stats from the database for a player every 1 minute plus 1 minute for every 1000 hands you have on that player. So if you have 60k hands on a player(wow?) it will only update their stats once per hour. My reasoning for this is that they simply shouldn't change dramatically enough to warrant updating any faster.

I'll probably work on improving / maintaining this program as long as PT3 doesnt have a HUD release date announced, and then after that it will depend on how motivated I am to design and implement the automatic note taking functionality / indicators idea I mentioned

-Itz

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Woohoo! Just hit supernova at 1AM on Dec 31st. Stupid procastinating caused me to have to run a 20+ hour 10 tabling poker marathon. Sooo tired now.

Anyone else supernova cramming?

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