First cash game 1/2 NL experienceby ynot, January 04
This an update to "My re-entry into poker".
Yesterday I decided to compete in my local casino's 1/2 NL game. As I have previously stated, my goals going into this game were simple. Play safe, don't bluff, study the table, never be the first to limp in, always play in position. These tactics are very generic and although as simple as they appear to be should create a solid 1/2 player due to the level of skill presented by 1/2.
So there I am, walking into the casino seeing a lot of familiar faces from when i was a regular sitting down grinding 8-12 hours a day. Some players recognized me, even most of the dealers. It was nice to be in the atmosphere again. I ended up sitting down as some generic 9-handed table. Everyone's stack was actually quite small. The largest being 300-400$. Since the average stack was around 100 I wasn't able to buy in for the full 200 for some reason. I didn't question my buy in and just accepted it. There was a another table with much money at it with the average stack being around 300$. But I would have to wait for someone to be eliminated before joining.
On the the game!!
The first thing i tried to do was get the feeling of the table. My range of hand were quite high since i told myself to always be in position and value bet your strong hands. The rule everyone has told me was to never be the first to limp in. I'm not quite sure why that is. Why is it ok to limp in behind someone but not be the first. Anyways, the table seemed to be quite tight initially. The average pre flop raise was between 6 and 10$ which I thought was a bit odd and there were always a handful of limpers before each pre flop raise. I tried to eye up who if anyone would see this and decide to be the aggressive raiser trying to pluck these individuals of their limps slowly. There were two people at the table who were more aggressive than the others but when their hands were revealed they always seemed to have the nuts. I picked out 2 people who if i could, I would try to stay away from and steal any pots i could if they were not in the hand.
I always seemed to get mediocre hands just after the blinds. Hands like A,Q off suite, K,Q off, A,T off. Nothing incredibly strong but good hands if i was in position. When I had these hands I was always first or second to act pre flop so i wasn't sure to raise since i couldn't be the first to limp or just fold since i was out of position in this semi-tight calling station of a table. If I were to raise 10-15$ pre flop I was almost sure I would have gotten a few callers and put myself into a bad position being the first to act post flop. I would need to hit since a continuation bet would have just been called in my assumption. I wasn't aiming to steal the pot since my goal wasn't to bluff out the pots. But should I have just bet anyways? I decided to limp in (the first to limp in), already breaking one of my rules i said not to do. 4 Other people limped into the pot as well. I would have called a small raise but I feel I have already made a large mistake by limping. The flop however was incredibly good to me. Coming A,Q,3. I lead out with a bet of 10$ Since the pot was still quite small and the bet would attract any schmuck who plays Ace - anything. There were no flush draws. I got two callers. Turn was a Q. I hit the nuts. Unless someone had A,A I won this hand. Assuming no one's hand strength had changed too much since there weren't any real straight or flush draws i fired a 25$ bet. I got 2 folds and a re-raise to 50. After another fold it was heads up and I made the obvious choice and shoved. River was nothing and I took down the hand. He had trip queens with a low kicker. I doubled up quite fast even making a few mistakes in my play.
As the night continued I wouldn't see any other strong hands and continued to play tight and from position. I would limp in with my low pocket pairs and never trip up. On the button I would play suited connectors and any suited Ace. I never hit on the board and folded more often than not. The day was quite slow from here on out. I never hit any strong hands and if every time i was in position and thought about stealing the pot or tried to raise from my position there was already a raise on the table and my hand was quite weak. I tried not to get frustrated since I came into this game expecting this would happen.
Eventually I moved tables and sat down with players whose average of chips were around 300$ with the big stack having close to 1k. At this point the blind have taken me down to 150% from my double up early on.
This table was a bit more aggressive. The main chip leader was involved in almost every hand which was no surprise but what was a surprise was every time he showed down he had a strong hand. When he limped, he had what you guessed he would have. He was hitting and it was important to avoid him if I could. After an hour of sitting down I found myself in the same situation. Nothing but crap hands and nothing even close to a strong hand when I was in position. I was studying the table quite hard trying to pick up on betting styles and how the big stack played. I found a few players who I would consider calling stations and identified a few players who were playing as tight as I was. The big stack as well as 2 other players were quite loose. Limping in most hands and always raising from the button or a few spots before it. I never got involved with any hands but one or two due to my cards. I thought to myself If I should be trying to raise the limpers from position regardless of my cards since I have sustained a quite strong "tight" image. I however, continued to be safe.
My last hand was a bit silly. First to act pre flop I look at A,9 of diamonds, amazed to see something other than 3,7off suite let alone an ACE. The big stack was in position so raising right now i know would get called by him but in my gut know that i should not be limping in especially since i am chasing the flush and not a pair of aces with crap kicker. I limp in and cringe in my mind as I know this is a mistake. Mostly folds around the table until the big stack raises to 10 as expected and the small blind who was a tight player like me makes the call.
Flop comes Qd-Jd-9s. Quite a good flop for me considering I haven't seen any flop for quite some time. I check, hoping to see a cheap turn and get out of chasing for a relatively cheap price. I think to myself if raising was the right call. I could decide the going price as well as give an impression that im not chasing. But I am a newby and check. Big stack bets 20$ with a call from the tight player. I decide to call since I could hit a A,9, or any diamond and have a shot at having the nuts between the three of us. Turn comes 10s. Now I have open-ended straight and a flush draw. roughly 35% change of winning assuming my opponent haven't hit the straight right now. I check, big stack bets out a large 75$ bet. tight player calls. I take a few minutes to think it over. there is over 300$ in the pot, i have, in my mind about 17 outs. 11 diamonds, 3 kings, 3 eights. Maybe even an ace could hit. Wasn't sure. I decided to shove all-in with another 50 on top of that 75. I watch as both players call. [b]River is a J[b/], nothing for me. Big stack had a King and hit when the 10 landed on the turn and tight player had a pair of queens low kicker which was quite odd of him. I had a 65% chance to win before the turn but when the 10 hit, my odds to win vs the straight were 25%. I didn't think he had the king so in my mind i thought i was around 40%.
Tough games!
I lost 100$ which was fine for me. My first time back i spent a lot of time trying to learn the table and had a hard time knowing what to do when I had semi strong hands in first position like A,Q off suite. I didn't know to raise or limp and semi-aggressive table. When I was in position i never had anything too strong, no pair of faces, suited connectors or anything. I will be going back once design a little more structure in my games and being getting the kinks out of it.
Please help me out and post some good responses that I will definitely go over and do my best to adapt into my play style.
Any help would be great and I hope you enjoyed this article. I will continue to update each time i go back to the casino.
Puts me at -200 for the month online. Had a good start @ +600 and just didn't win any more hands after that.
Live results: -3.1k, 7.5 hours Got to the casino at 5pm and had to wait 45 minutes to get into a game so an hour of waiting between the 20min drive and the wait. Played from 1745-0115
lost 900 doubling someone up with AQ on A587K just bet/bet/shoving into their set of 5's when I thought they had a weak A, also doubled up a shorty with KT on TJQ, prob was a fold but he only had 500 so I ran it vs the worst hand to see, KQ.
then played the hand of the night versus a guy I've played with a fair amount. He is really goofy. Prob like 70 years old and prone to spazz out when he doesn't play a hand in a while. That condition had been met as he hadn't played a hand in an hour. Here's the HH:
My read here is that he either has a hand like a limped overpair and is scared (25%) or a weak two-pair/top pair type hand (30%) or some complete garbage hand like a gutshot or something (40%) or has me beat (5%).
Turn (330)
4s Td 8c 3s
Villain bets 550
Hero calls
I think I took long enough on the flop to convince him that I had a ten or a draw or something weak, so I think he's gonna keep barreling here if he has nothing. I think he'll also bet if he has a stronger hand but I think raising would be a mistake since it looks really strong and my best bet is to just take a long time and hope he ships it on the river.
River (1430)
4s Td 8c 3s 9d
Villain bets 1200
Hero calls
Pretty lame card and he definitely looked happy to see it but obv I'm pretty under repped and beat all two pairs and spazz outs so I'm not folding.
Villain shows Qd Jc
Hero shows sadface
And that was my day. He proceeded to talk about how 9's always come up in baccarat and how he always bets big when he needs a 9. 103,300 to go!
2011 was a pretty good year for our company and we're really excited about what will happen in 2012. Despite eBay fee increases and new restrictive selling policies, we still came pretty close to our sales goal. This was our first year as an official S-Corp and we got a pretty strong start. We branched out onto Amazon in October which gave us a nice 100k in sales for the holiday season. Overall, for 2011, we did $948k in sales which is just under our $1 million goal.
There were a lot of roadblocks on the way. Mainly rising eBay fees and new policies that really restrict the way we operate. PayPal decided to hold $20k of our money hostage for no real reason. Amazon is increasing their fees in the first quarter of 2012 as well. Along with a hundred other issues that came up over the last year that whittled down our profits. Early in the year we predicted that we were easily going to do over $2 million in sales at a ~50% higher profit margin than our current profit margin. But by May, with all of the changes on eBay, we knew that wasn't going to happen.
However, $948k is still pretty good by our books and our current profit margin, although a lot less than it was at the beginning of the year, is still more than enough to keep us motivated. We got a trade show in Vegas coming up in March and by the end of August, we'll have moved into a permanent location either in the Midwest or in California. Once we get things going, we're going to start importing directly from China. There are a lot of things we're excited for in 2012 and although there's definitely going to be a lot of unpredictable setbacks, we're hoping for at least $2 million in sales by the end of 2012.
Looking back at 2011 I realize that although there is still a ton I don't know about the business world and e-commerce, it's unbelievable how much I learned over the last year. edzwoo keeps saying we should write down what we know so it would be easier to train new employees in the future and who knows, maybe in 30 years write a book about our experience
I remember buying our first storage shelf about a year and a half ago to help organize our products. We were getting to the point where we just had too many boxes lying around and needed a better way to store our products. This was when we had less than $3000 in merchandise so one shelf was enough at the time. After assembling the shelf and putting some stuff on it, I took a few steps back to get a better perspective of what I just did and man, I felt SO legit. That was when I started to feel like what we were doing wasn't just a part time thing (I was still in college at the time) but rather something I could do as a career.
A few months later we had a CPA on our payroll and a lawyer setting up the S-Corp for us. I thought having to buy storage shelves for business purposes was pretty sweet but getting incorporated was really amazing. We were now a legal entity and we even had shares of stock. It was pretty awesome.
A few months after that edzwoo and I flew out to a trade show in New York. Felt pretty legit handing out business cards and wearing a badge with our company name on it. After a day or two though, we realized that we were one of the bigger companies there. We were actually bigger than a good number of distributors there too. I don't think anyone there took us seriously though because of our age. Most of the buyers there would inquire about products in quantities of 10 or 20. Because the way we operate requires that we move products really fast, we usually purchase items in the hundreds and thousands. And usually when you purchase in those quantities, wholesalers will give you a price break or a discount of some sort. But very few of the sales reps at the show knew if they could give us any price breaks so we couldn't tell if certain items were worth purchasing. Either way, it was in New York and we had a blast.
I know how everyone on LP love charts and graphs, so here you go
eBay - the red bar isn't accurate and for 2010, we didn't really focus on the business so it's not a very good comparison
Woke up real tired yesterday had little sleep managed to grind out what I needed to do, was a real swingy day managed to win around $400 so not like the 1st day bit I will take it . Think I played like 6k hands making the vpp count at the end of the day like 8k, which puts me a little ahead.
Played today and played pretty good played 4k hands which was pretty good as I had a driving lesson and a footy match so was kinda busy, finished $800 up and putting the vpp count at just under 11k.
Super motivated at the moment with everything not just poker, football, golf basically anything I do. Sucks my football team aren't the same and don't put 100% in, I need to find a better team anyway. I'm pretty sure that I play at a much better level then most of the players on my team.
If your lacking inspiration/motivation watch this saw it from someone else on 2+2 you have probs seen it before but this is my first time watching it enjoy....http://youtu.be/7X38PCf7kao
I guess I have to quit hyper turbos. But its just so fucking annoying, I swear I should be winning but I just get butt-fucked over and over on every single showdown.
What god damm sucks is that I had a 100% easy lock on SNE on those games, but I can't keep playing if I'm just losing like this. However I checked some of my reg friends and -80, -100 bi downswings are fucking common, so idk.
If I play only turbos I will have to play an absurd, inhuman amount of games. But I can also enjoy this fucking beautiful winrate instead of losing JTo x A3o and A8s x K5s every game.
Just man up an grind I guess. It was too easy like this anyways, 13.4k VPPs after day 2.
I even bought PT3 and studied the game and was feeling good about my game but I just can't keep crushing one game and feeding the other one like an gambling addiction.
Kind of made a general "what I need to do" plan to get myself back on track in 2012 and blogging about it should help keep me updating at least once a week I hope.
I've been playing online a little just trying to keep my game sharp, but still enough to try and make some money off of it (100NL) for when the DOJ unleashes the online poker beast later this year (i hope). I was thinking about moving to Canada for PS/SNE but right now it just doesn't seem cost-effective with everything else I have going on in Vegas + the chance that I spend a bunch of money to move and DOJ says OK USA go ahead.
I've been really tweaking my live game lately and I think I can get out of this breakeven slump I've been in for a while now so I've set an ambitious goal for the first half of 2012.
Overall goal: Make 100k by WSOP
How I am going to achieve it:
1. Make 18,000 per month playing 5/10 live
-Will be tough but I've made some assumptions that hopefully work out
Assumption 1: Estimated live hourly-rate of $100/hr with good game selection
Assumption 2: Play at least 45 hours per week (will have to play 9 hours a day for the next 5 days to catch up to this pace by next week)
2. Make 2000 /month between online + rakeback
-could be tough to even play enough but I'm going to try
3. ship an MTT?
I guess for a normal person this wouldn't be super tough but for me to put in the hours is hard bc we don't have a babysitter. So I'm home all day and then when my wife gets home to watch Alli, we eat dinner at like 4 and then by 445-5pm I'll usually be in a game. So 5pm-1230am (or 5pm-2am for the rest of this week) is tough when I have to wake up at 8am again.
Here's my planned schedule for the next few months
Mondays off
Tue-Thurs schedule
0800-1400: Wake up, fatherly duties, daughter naps at 2pm
1400-1600: online poker while she naps
1600-1630: husbandly duties (eat dinner etc)
1645-0100: Live poker for 8 hours
Friday schedule
0800-1600 the same as above
1600-1800 stay home longer
1845-0300 play later since it's friday and don't have to wake up early
Sat-Sun schedule
0930-1100 wake up, etc
1100-1500 hang out on saturdays, online poker on sundays
1600-0000 Live poker
So that works out to about
-12 hours per week playing online so I'd need to make $41.67/hr after rakeback to get 2k a month
-48 hours of live poker per week so I'd need to make $93.75/hr if I played the full 192 hours each month.
I'll try to update this with weekly results if I can, maybe daily but most likely won't have time until Mondays.
for some reason the season 4 episodes aren't loading for me on cuevana.tv, is there another place i can view this without risking downloading something sketchy? thanks
1st day going for SNE and Introby UnitedAs1, January 02
Hey all,
Little about myself, Name is Simon I'm 22 from the UK and have been playing poker as a small stakes grinder for about 4 years seriously now. I have mostly played NLH 6 max cash and PLO 6 max cash and HU, all ranging from 50nl - 400nl and 50plo - 400plo.
My problem over the last few years has been volume so I thought this year I would take the plunge and go for SNE although recently I have been playing some really long HU sessions. To achieve this I am starting off playing 1/2 PLO averaging like 3k vpps a day 16 tabling, as I play golf and football/soccer a lot I'm trying to get ahead of pace when I can as I know these activities are going to get in the way at some point. I do plan to move up to 2/4, 3/6 and 5/10 but we will see how we go 1st.
I think that's it for now so for the 1st day I played which was yesterday.
Well it went really well tbh I thought it was going to be a lot tougher, I normally play tiled and about 10 tables, so for me to stack and play 16 tables I thought was going to be difficult. Anyway pretty good day here are the results. VPP COUNT: 3.1K
Got some job interviews scheduled before I moved here. Hopefully I run good and land a job so I can grind poker on the side comfortably. Going to try to get back online as well and improve my HU game.
Stopped smoking weed because I can't control myself when I have some (all the time) I smoke every 3 hours caused some tilt issues, but ran good so.
Changing my diet eating a lot more trying to gain 10 to 15 kg tired of looking scrawny. Brain foods: omega 3, blueberries and dark chocolate. Pretty much only drink water and smoothies but have been doing that for a while.
Got a new phone Nokia 3310 bought it at a green grocer. Don't want or need any of that fancy shit (just get mugged anyway)
http://i.imgur.com/EC9Nc.jpg
Yes thats huge $730, stakes vary between nl100 and nl1k. 16 tables at once most of the time. My average daily poker time was like 1.5-2 hours, didn't read any forums or watch any video since mid 2010s thought im good enough to kill beat the field, however now this looks more like timewaster;/
Still up about 50k because of rb and bonuses, and up like 5k live games.
Going to improve my game and cut number of tables to 12, and switch to HM2
What is le best Anti-Virus?by LikeASet, January 01
Norton Subscription about to expire, should I just renew it or are there other superior anti virus software out there? Is there a superior one that is free or cheaper than 44.49? USD
Contact Users: 442 Active, 0 Logged in - Time: 23:29
. Think I played like 6k hands making the vpp count at the end of the day like 8k, which puts me a little ahead.
