phrenik's blog

Today was my first shot at NL5 and it went pretty well. Up just over 3 BI's in 1079 hands. If I keep up this pace I'll be done NL5 in about a week. I did make some terrible calls and I paid off big pocket pairs with small/medium pocket pairs way too many times. Also got check/minraised on 4 of my 7 biggest losing hands. I guess I need to give any aggression more credit, even if it's a minraise. It doesn't really feel much different than NL2 at all, although there seem to be a few more players with stats that I can 3bet light against.

Ran into some crazy hands. In this one the action makes no sense at all. I raised a minbet on a 3way flop (admittedly probably too small) with second pair and got min-reraised, the original bettor called the reraise and I called behind, quite confused. The turn brought three to a flush and the original bettor donked small. With only 2nd pair I decided I'd had enough and folded, and the two left in the hand proceeded to minraise each other until they got all-in. Then they turned over 3rd and 4th pair. I sat there in shock, the only relief was the fact I would have gotten sucked out on.
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This hand a player folded to a $0.10 bet into a $4.67 pot on the river when he had $0.07 left behind. Once again, shock.
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Finally after a long Christmas lull (which featured plenty of family gambling) I decided to play and finish grinding my 20BI for NL5. 2 months and 28k hands to grind from $7 of freeroll winnings to $100. I'm going to be rich. I'm hoping to be done NL5 within the month and be on to NL10. If I start putting in a decent amount of hands it shouldn't be a problem. Race ya MadJukes?

The hand that got me there was the essence of NL2: Taking people to Valuetown (although in this hand the idea I might be taking myself to Valuetown started creeping in around the turn.)
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NL2 (minus rakeback and a $5 session lost to import errors)

13.37bb/100, it can't be coincidence.

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Besides today, I've run really good this week. The way I this week went I would basically go breakeven for a while and then I would get a rush of hands where I'd take a few stacks and then I'd just quit. It obviously feels nice to end a session up, but I think that if I want to get to real stakes any time soon I'm going to need to stop quitting when I get up a bit and just put in some more hours. I feel that I'm ready to move up to NL5 but I'm just going to stay disciplined and wait until I've hit a $100 BR. 77.7% there, that must be lucky right?

Things I need to work on:
- Identifying better players and learning how to play against them
- Putting more thought into what flops not to cbet (I basically cbet any flop that's not 4way or more)
- Putting in more time (Any advice on what a decent amount of hands per day is at 8 FR tables?)

This is an unusual hand I played today. Normally against this kind of action I would fold but him leading into me after checking to me on two streets didn't really make much sense to me. Would it have been better to check back on the turn to pot control? The villain was a complete unknown who just sat down a few hands ago.
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Cheers for a 24BB/100 winrate


p.s. Damn you Flash, ZvT is depressing to watch sometimes.

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It's been about one month since I decided I wanted to give playing poker seriously a shot. The idea of building a bankroll from nothing really appealed to me so that's what I attempted to do. I started off inspired by a post on LP about selling play chips for real money and decided I'd try to grind up some play chips while playing a few freerolls each day on Full Tilt. I figured that the rakeback from Full Tilt would end up making it a better choice than Stars, but after recently looking up the rake structures because of an edzwoo post, Stars does seem slightly better (but it's too late now!). In the first few days I got up to about 150k in play chips by basically open shoving AK and JJ+ and getting about three callers every time. My first poker lesson was that surprisingly, people actually fold to pre-flop shoves at real money tables. By the end of the first week I ended up cashing in two Canada Freerolls, the first for $2, and the second for $5 and that was the start of my bankroll.

Before starting to play on cash tables I downloaded the free trial version of HEM which I'm still using (I just haven't closed HEM for the last 20 or so days lol). I started off playing one table of full ring $0.01/$0.02 NLHE buying in for $0.50 (feeble attempt at BR management) but quickly moved to two and then four tables. Between bad play, tilt, and bad beats I was down to $3 pretty quickly. Lesson number two: tilt is evil. When playing one table tilting wasn't so bad, but tilting at four tables quickly ate up a large chunk of my undersized roll. After learning how to unclick Autopost Blinds when starting to tilt, my roll started moving in the right direction again. By the end of November I was up to about $30.

One memorable night I had was playing against a giant fish that ended up playing 78% of his 154 hands. Easy money right? Apparently not as he coolered me for multiple buyins. I had 2 flopped sets cracked by straights, and AKs owned by A5o for 300BB in total. This tilted me pretty hard and after spewing for a bit, I started closing down tables, but I still wanted my money back from the salmon. I ended up closing all my tables except the table the fish was sitting at. I was determined to felt the tard. Besides the fish, the rest of the table was pretty nitty, so I decided my strategy for getting my money back would be to raise to 5x every time the fish limped (my standard raise is about 3x) which he would invariably call and I would take by cbetting. I had missed out on this goldmine earlier because in my first hand against the fish, he hit something and called my cbet, putting his fold to cbet stat at 0%. I didn't notice the sample size and ended up not cbetting him at all until I realized my mistake down 300BB later. After chipping away for a while, I eventually won back around 100BB when the rest of the table decided they were tired of my overaggression and left, leaving me heads up with the fish. This was my dream scenario, even though I didn't have much HU experience, I was sure I could turn this fish into sashimi. Three hands later I had his stack and he quit. Now I realize this could have gone pretty badly considering how tilted I was, but luckily it worked out and I got the immeasurable satisfaction of felting a total and utter megafish that had the audacity to get lucky and steal my money.

Making Sashimi
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For some reason in December I decided that I should try limping in with any two cards that remotely connected and try to stack a fish if I got lucky and hit something big. This was a terrible idea. I got lucky with the strategy early on but that luck would run out pretty quickly. Soon I hit session after demoralizing session of pure losing poker. Who would have thought that loose passive is a losing strategy? I dropped from $30 down to a low of $18. Only when I started playing more TAGish poker did I start winning again. The last few days have been pretty big winners and I'm up to $47 (woo finally fully rolled). I'm up to playing seven tables on two monitors and I'm debating adding more. I could easily play eight tables without any overlap, but to add more I would either have to overlap tables or make the tables on my main monitor smaller than I really want. For anyone else doing the micro grind on Full Tilt, you might want to check out the Academy. I'm doing the Jennifer Harman "Sizing Up Opponents" challenge over and over since you can do each challenge up to 10x. The challenge basically completes itself through normal play unlike some of the others where you have to bet a specific size or something. The hardest part of the challenge is winning a hand preflop by reraising without a pair or an Ace. It's surprisingly hard to move people off their hands with a 3bet (people have called with some rediculous hands). I've almost got enough Academy points to buy a $26 tournament token, although I'm not really sure that will be of much use to me with my current skill level. But I figure I might as well get every bonus I can. Hopefully this wasn't too long and boring. I know $0.01/$0.02 is super exciting.

My month of poker (not including rakeback)

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