Tournaments Suck
k2o4, Jul 18 2009
So my girl, zaragyemo, and I went to a home game tournament tonight. $20 buyin, 1 rebuy after u got knocked out or you could add-on at the first break.
First hand I'm in the BB and get AJs, blinds are 25/50 with 3k stacks. 2 limpers and the button raises to $150 (fish). I repop to like $500 (this was questionable but I figured I could outplay him even OOP) and limpers fold, button calls. Flop comes 337 and I cbet about $800 and he calls, but I can see that it's slightly reluctant and he's not acting. Turn hits a 10. I look at him and it's clear that he doesn't want me to bet. I put him on AQ or AK at this point and there's no flush draw out there and I have about a pot sized bet left, so I jam figuring he'll fold. He thinks for a bit and does a "fuck it" type of call and turns over AQ. River bricks and I'm rebuying right away.
I don't mind my play cause he was totally new to me and my read was dead on, I just had no idea he'd go all in with A high on the first hand like that. I wouldn't risk it if there was no rebuy but oh well.
Ran bad for a while after that, raised some limpers with AQ twice and missed the flop and had to fold. Get down to about 5 M and get AK, jam over a raise and take it down pre. About this time zaragyemo busts out after she'd been slowly losing chips all night. She rebuys. 1-2 hands later I get QQ and I jam over about 5 limps with 8 M and it folds and I take it. Then the next hand I get JJ and even though I have about 10 M now, with my image and the fact that any raise other than AI will put me in a spot to Jam the flop, I just Jam again. The guy to my left who had been talking about calling me with 22 since I am so aggro calls, and zaragyemo also calls. When she called I said "FUCK" cause I knew I was crushed. I turn over JJ, the guy to my left turns over KK, and zara turns over AA! Flop and turn brick, river brings a K, and we're both out.
What a night. Off to go party it up.
Rebuy strategy
k2o4, Jul 18 2009
Curious, what should I do differently in a rebuy tournament? It's only 1 Rebuy. Should I play pretty loose before the rebuy period is up and hope to spike and win some sorta huge pot? Then if I get stacked rebuy and play normal?
I'm playing a live tournament at a friend of a friends house tonight for the first time and I've never played a tournament with rebuys before, so no clue how this affects the strategy. halp
FTP or PS for Micros?
k2o4, Jul 16 2009
I was under the impression that with the rakeback it made more sense to start grinding on FTP now that they had .01/.02 tables instead of stars, but that once you got up to NL100 where supernova was achievable Stars evened out the rakeback battle thanks to the concierge option. I wanna know cause as you can see in my blog post below, I'm starting my GF out on poker and I was planning to have her start on FTP as they've fixed their software up a lot so that it's close to being as good as stars and they have rakeback. Now I wonder if I'm making the wrong choice because of this PM I got from Edzwoo:
| | Just a quick heads up, even after a standard 27% rakeback deal is setup on FTP, the rake is actually still worse on FTP + rakeback than on Stars.
Basically the rake rates are as followed for NL2-NL10
Stars rakes you at 4.92ptbb/100
FTP no rakeback rakes you at 7.89ptbb/100
FTP + rakeback rakes you at 5.76ptbb/100
FTP recently changed their rake numbers, but it's misleading because they rake a smaller % but more often, so it really didn't change at all. I have friends that play NL2, and those numbers are from 50k hand samples of each, so they should be accurate.
Also not including that bronze star on PS is worth like 10% rakeback in it of itself. |
Anyone else heard the same stuff?
What have I done?
k2o4, Jul 15 2009
My GF has started a poker blog!
hehehehehe
Actually I'm really happy about it =) I just hope we don't both go on uber mega tilt at the same time - if that happens then I'll feel very bad for the neighbors.
Underground Poker
k2o4, Jul 14 2009
I just talked with a friend of mine from HS and he's got the info on a handful of underground poker games. I don't think any of them are literally underground... unless they're hosted in someones basement (har har... ok no more bad jokes). But I was just expecting some home games that were consistent but it sounds like a full out Boiler Room type of operation. They've got dealers, waiters, food, drink, rake, etc. I wonder if there will be a steel door like at Teddy KGB's place.
I definitely wanna play more live poker but I wonder if this is a good idea. Concerns:
1) I have no idea how illegal this is, but I assume it is illegal. I figure if it's just some random home game it's really unlikely that cops would come, and if they did it would be easy to get out of. But since this is a type of casino set up I have a feeling I might actually be taking a slight risk. Probably not a huge one, but hell what do I know.
2) Rake. I have no idea what is fair rake or how to follow that shit. In Vegas it was a total mystery to me. I don't want to be getting myself into a situation where I will get rake raped. What should I be looking for?
3) I don't think this is a huge concern, but I feel like my risk of being robbed will hit its peak if I go to one of these places. I've never really worried about it before cause I mostly play online and the live games have either been at real casino's or home games with friends. But this will basically be me by myself with a bunch of people I don't know at a location that is probably pretty poorly protected. Luckily it's in Boulder CO so that reduces the risk cause people around here just aren't criminals very often, but I think this is probably the type of crowd/situation that would attract the few that we do have. I am probably worrying too much about this though as it's really unlikely. I guess I will actually have to watch the dealer for once to make sure he's legit.
4) I wonder, will the quality of play actually be good here? Home games are always filled with donks, but this sounds a bit more serious. I dunno if it will still be full of fish. Probably, but I wonder.
Despite these worries I'm definitely gonna go. There's a smaller NL100 game that I will check out first. If that goes well I'll try the NL200 game. If that goes well I'll try the NL300 game. I don't know if there's anything higher than that around here right now.
Any advice is much appreciated!
oh noes HEM
k2o4, Jul 14 2009
For some reason my HEM got all funky yesterday. It kinda self shrunk... now I can open it and it goes to the systray in the bottom right, and I click that and nothing pops up on the screen but it is in the bar on the bottom of my screen. I have to right click that and choose "maximize" and it will appear again. If I try and get it to a size where I can resize it, then it disappears. Any ideas on how to fix it?
Better be winning
k2o4, Jul 13 2009
I've been grinding a lot since coming home and I think I've been playing really well. The live sessions in Vegas actually taught me a lot about exploiting fish and gave me practice at creative thinking which has allowed me to take some new lines, make more bluffs, and value bet better. Overall I feel like I'm playing really well with lots of patience and emotional discipline.
I know I've had at least 1 losing session since I came back but I think the rest were break even or winning. I dunno cause I'm still not checking results. That's also why I haven't posted a end month results blog in ages, cause if I'm really playing for the long term a single session, week, even month is just a small part of it all. I think yearly results make a bit more sense to pay serious attention to, or monthly results if you're playing 100k+ hands a month. This also helps me to approach wins and losses with the same mindset. I don't think huge highs from wins and gigantic lows from loses is a healthy way to live, cause while the highs are awesome the lows are devastating. If I can approach the entire game as a long term investment and just focus on how I played then I can be happy all the time as long as I keep playing well. Letting my happiness get tied into how my bankroll is looking always caused me more pain and suffering than joy.
Almost back
k2o4, Jul 13 2009
Spent the weekend with my lady cause I missed her like crazy and had to catch up on lost time. Had a lot of fun. Friday we went out to dinner with my dad and then partying in Boulder with a bunch of HS friends who were in town. Saturday we chilled during the day and then went to a home poker game with friends that we made while working on the Obama campaign. After the game we went out dancing. Then yesterday we tried to go on a hike but as we were driving towards the mountains we saw huge rainclouds coming in, so we ended up doing a picnic in the park by our house instead and then spent the afternoon lounging. I've had a shitload of fun since I got home =) It's nice to be back in CO!
I'm spending today catching up on a million errands that I have put off and also trying to get back into the online grind mode. Gonna start back into coaching on Wed, already have a session set up with my full time student. If you want coaching sometime this week send me a PM with the info from the bottom of this post. Obv if I've coached you before then just send me a PM with a time you'd like to do it.
My big goal right now is to find some live cash games to play in locally. Now that I've seen how ridiculously easy it is I wanna keep building up a live roll. If I can find a NL200 game live it will be so much easier to make decent money =)
live grindin with my lady
k2o4, Jul 12 2009
Just took my girl to a live cash game with friends and we took all the monies. Such a fearsome team we are! Heading to another game now which I think will play at 1/2 or 2/4, so if we run good it should be a solid score. My girl is planning to start learning poker and blogging here on LP, keep an eye out for her. I've got her reading theory of poker right now.
Vegas Wrapup - Back Home
k2o4, Jul 10 2009
What an awesome trip. Ever since I saw Rounders when I was 14 yrs old I've always wondered what it would be like to go to Vegas and play poker. It wasn't till I was 22 that I finally learned how to play, and by "play" I mean being good at the game and knowing more than just the rules. The last 3 years have been a big long buildup to the trip that I just finished and I'm happy to say that every goal I had was achieved.
1) Meet lots of LP guys - Done
2) Play and beat 1/3 live - Done
3) Stay within a tight budget and at least cover expenses with winnings - Pwnd
4) Make new friends - Done and done
That reminds me, there are a lot of people I need to thank for their generosity. First off I have to give a big thanks to Pinball, Sakisaki, timdawg, bigbobm, and Milkman for letting me bum around their house so much. I think I spent most of my time at a casino or at their house, and it was a lot of fun. Secondly big thanks to Frinkx, Peachy, Myth, Pooruser, and Night201 for inviting me to their 4th of July party. That was a great time with good food, good booze, and fun people. It's the first 4th of July that I've enjoyed in ages cause I've been running bad on the 4th for yrs now.
And before I forget, let me repost the pictures from an earlier blog post for those of you who missed em:
Pics are in the spoiler - I was too lazy to resize so I'm sorry but they're worth checking out:
+ Show Spoiler +
Bigbob gets taped up for edward 40 hands (they didn't have 40's so 32's had to do) 
Sakisaki tapes up milkman and bets are placed on who will finish first
They're ready!
30 minutes later there's someone at the window...
and it's bob!
Switching to frinkx's 4th of July bash, meet Frasier, MiPwnYa and Pooruser
Adding pinball to the mix
Night201
MiPwnYa being a G
Doomer and his GF - such lovebirds, props to them ^^
timdawg, mipwnya and sakisaki
thetank and his buddy
pinball and eric let their true emotions out
me and my friend Pani who's house I was crashing at
bigbob, sakisaki and me
Ok, back to what I was saying... the pwning of the goals. I've played some live cash before Vegas and always sucked at it. I made a lot of live fish mistakes, like always being confused on the action or the pot size. I never felt comfortable while playing live and was so distracted by small stuff that I never played my best. So heading to Vegas had me very nervous, cause I was gonna play live for $300 buyins instead of the $5 games that I got my friends to play with me. Those live fish mistakes could become pretty costly and being a nit, that made me pretty damn nervous.
My first 2 live sessions in Vegas I played pretty tight and just got used to things. It didn't help that during my first session some wanna-be white boy rasta decided to take out his anger at Milkmans nonstop talking by going after me. I find Milkman to be very fun to play live with cause he just talks and talks, and since live can be very boring at times it's good to have some sort of conversation going on. So the table is overall fun and friendly until I 3bet the rastaboy, who tells me that he will call when I'm counting my chips and then folds as soon as I bet and starts cursing me. I laugh cause I never saw someone get so made cause they had to fold to a 3bet preflop but he's oddly steaming. The very next hand I open AJ and he calls in the blinds along with 2 others. Flop comes something like AT7 2 suited and I cbet, rastaboy check raises and it folds to me. Considering that he's steaming, could have a worse ace or a draw, and I have AJ, I call. Then the turn hits another 7 and he bombs it and I tank.
This is when the weirdness ensues as he begins talking lots of shit. Before the hand started (after the 3bet) he had been calling me a trout, which I guess is his way of saying a fish, but I guess to him that's a really bad fish cause he kept saying trout tasted bad so he didn't want to eat me... I said it was good cause I didn't want him to eat me either. Well he kept calling me a trout and other weird shit and I kept asking him what hand he had while mocking his idiotic insults. This seemed to tilt him more and he started flexing his biceps (he was wearing a TANK TOP, lolz, and a rasta hat) and giving me some crazy wide eyed stare. At this point I was 99% that he'd turned a boat with A7 but I just kept talking shit back to him for a while till the dealer told the guy to calm down... I was drunk but I feel like he was talking about going outside to fight or something. I finally fold and he snap mucks which confirms to me that he wasn't bluffing, cause he'd have shown that and gloated all night long.
Since that was my first live session I wasn't sure if it was a normal occurrence for weird cuntbags to flex their muscles at you and call you a trout, but I hoped it wasn't cause that just doesn't fit under my definition of a fun time. Luckily it was a freak occurrence as the rest of my sessions were really smooth and fun. I got really good at finding the fish and befriending them and encouraging their fishiness, which usually turned into profit for me in the long run as they'd gladly spew money to me when we got into a hand together.
1/3 live cash games in Vegas are like playing .1/.2c on stars. It's fucking easy. But it's actually EASIER because you can make huge folds and huge bluffs that you'd normally never make because these horrible fish will pretty much tell you when they hold the nuts or when they want to fold. So while online sometimes you just gotta go with a hand, live there are lots of times you can lay that same hand down. It's pretty sweet and I wish I could play vs live fish all the time.
Like I predicted I am not a huge fan of Vegas overall... I just love the cash games and had a great time hanging out with other LP guys. If I was rich, single and felt like blowing money then I can see Vegas being fun. But none of those things are true so there's very little that appeals to me. I wish I could have a teleporter so I could live here in CO but instantly go to the cash games whenever I wanted. If I could grind that live cash but change nothing else about my life, then I'd be in heaven.
I'm glad I went during the WSOP though, cause not only did I finally get to meet a lot of cool people that I've always looked up to or been curious about (I got to shake Elky's hand, spend time with Myth as he acted British, have a fun conversation with Peachy about finding ways to give back, and reminisce with frinkx about our epic coaching session, and more), BUT I also made a handful of new friends that I am gonna miss a lot. Pinball, timdawg, bigbobm, and Milkman were people I barely knew before this but I now consider them as friends (hope they think so too, haha). They were all really cool, generous, funny guys and definitely people I'd want to hang with again in the future. Plus I got to hang with my coach, sakisaki, for the first time IRL. That was a lot of fun cause we've spent hours and hours talking online and became good friends, so it was fun to actually hang out in person. I hope you guys have a good last week in Vegas and hopefully I will get myself to some more events so we can chill again (gogo PCA!). Worst case scenario will be that I see you again in Vegas for the next WSOP. You're all invited out here to CO anytime so just lemme know if you need a place to crash!
I think that's a long enough rambling rant for now. I'll close by saying that I'm gonna go back to coaching (sorry to my students who I didn't get in touch with this week, I literally got online twice cause I didn't have net where I was staying) and grinding for now and I might head back to Vegas again when the summers over and it's not so damn hot out there. Oh, and I almost forgot to say that MiPwnYa is a crazy guy - in a very good way. haha
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