Posts Tagged ‘Commerce’

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LAPC Schedule @ Commerce and some PLO hands

January 16, 2019

I haven’t posted in a week, so I guess I should do some updating. My last live blog was on Friday and I returned to Palace on Saturday for some more $15/$30 and did something that doesn’t happen too often to me: I turned +$1000 into a losing day, finishing at -$114 for the day after just under seven hours of play. I got off to a pretty good start, even hitting a High Hand, but I lost every pot I played for the last 2-3 hours of the day.

With the Santa Claus Game officially dead at Palace on Mondays, I decided to make my first trip to Fortune in 2019 and I was pretty distraught to arrive there and see only one $20/$40 game in action. When I left my house their app listed two $20/$40 games so that was an unpleasant surprise. I endured over an hour of $4/$8 before they started a second $20 game. I’m happy to report I didn’t have to wait until September to book my first win at Fortune this year! I finished at +$1053 after 6.5 hours (and -$9 in 1.5 hours of $4/$8).

The game was mostly bad, so I was pretty happy to book a two rack win. I happened to run pretty good in the brief window when the game was kind of juiced, but Free Throw and Sandman showed up and sat on my left and the game went right back in the shitter.

That brings me to Wednesday’s PLO game. When I showed up there were 14 names on the list, but we started with 8 players and it did not look promising at all. The lineup was Part-Time, Charlie Hustle, The Crypt Keeper, Hit&Run, an aggressive regular, myself, a random and one of the floors at Palace. So the game wasn’t full and half the players were either hit and run artists or very non-regular and not likely to fire multiple bullets.

My first notable pot came up when Hit&Run made it $15, I 3-bet to $40 on the button with AA44 single suited, it folded back to him, and he capped the preflop betting at $125.

Flop comes down Q93 with two clubs and he pots for $250 and only has $154 behind, so we go ahead and get the rest of his stack in and run it twice. Turns out he has AA also and the first board runs out a chop, but he makes Broadway on the second one and gets 75% of the pot.

We did get a full game around 6:30 but it wasn’t destined to stay that way for long.

My second notable pot there were multiple limpers and I had a pretty ugly QJ54 single suited in the big blind and it cost me $2 more and my hand is so weak multi-way that I didn’t even want to flick it in there… but I did.

The flop is AJ9 with two hearts and the player on my left (a very green PLO player) bets $20, the random guy calls, and I decide to take one off here with a queen high flush draw because I don’t think either of these guys understand hand values very well in this game.

The turn brings in my flush and I check and overcall $40 this time. I actually love my hand here as a $40 bet is pretty weak and a call is even weaker. I think it’s all transparent enough that I can maybe even make an exploitative raise, but my standard play is to be cautious in these spots, so that’s the route I ended up taking.

The river is a clean king of spades and this time I’m facing another super weak bet and call of $50. Again, I make the safe play with what is obviously the best hand and just call and sure enough the bettor turns over a small flush and the caller can’t even beat that so I win the pot.

Here’s a weird one: I limp along with a junky KJT6 single suited and decide to bet $20 on the flop when the board comes down AT9 with one diamond (my suit) and three players call me, including one on the button. Whoops. This flop bet is a rare bluff with air from me in a multi-way pot, but I thought I just had to get through one player on the button and, well, that was a bad read.

Turn is the jack of diamonds, giving me a king high flush draw and two pair, and Hit&Run leads out for the full pot of $115. This may be precarious as I’m not drawing to the nuts in any direction, but I feel like I have too much equity here to fold, so I make the call. Button also calls but the fourth player folds.

River is a queen and I’m pretty shocked when Hit&Run checks because he’s supposed to have Broadway when he pots the turn. Well, I have the nuts now, so I don’t see any reason not to bet even though it seems likely I’m splitting with one of these yahoos. I bet $130 and they both fold! That’s when the Palace floor says he flopped a set of nines (and folded the turn) and the button says he had a set of tens. Wow.

Part-Time opens to $15, Slimer calls, I call with AQJ3 single suited and some others tag along also. It checks to me on the AT9 two diamond flop, so I fire $60 into $100 since I have top pair, the nut flush draw, and an open-ended straight draw. The Crypt Keeper check-pots it for $320 and it folds to me, so I put him all-in and we run it twice. When he asks if I have a set and I say no, he suddenly looks like he hates his hand because he must be on a draw that I have crushed. I make two pair on the first board and the nut flush on the second one to scoop a $1200 pot.

As expected, the game fizzled quickly. Hit&Run booked it with over $2k and multiple players quit early, including Part-Time with basically all the chips (over $4k!)

That left 6 of us at 9 PM and by 9:18 the game was 100% dead. Geez. I’m a little concerned about the Palace PLO game. The Thursday game is basically dead already and I don’t care about that too much, but I would be pretty devastated if the Wednesday game also dried up. It is typically pretty decent, but this is a really bad look considering I’m a key player and I’m going to miss the next three Wednesday sessions as I’ll be in Los Angeles playing in the LAPC. Plus The Man is claiming he’s not playing any poker in 2019.

Fortunately, the big pot against The Crypt Keeper gave me a solid +$980 for the night and made the super short session much easier to swallow.

Speaking of the LAPC… here’s what my schedule looks like:

Monday, 1/21: $350 Omaha 8
Tuesday, 1/22: $350 Triple Stud
Wednesday, 1/23: $20/$40 on Live at the Bike
Thursday, 1/24: $350 Stud 8

Wednesday, 1/30: $350 Limit Hold’em
Thursday, 1/31: $350 H.O.R.S.E.
Friday, 2/1: $350 T.O.E.
Saturday, 2/2: cash games
Sunday, 2/3: cash games
Monday, 2/4: $570 Omaha 8
Tuesday, 2/5: $570 Stud
Wednesday, 2/6: cash games
Thursday, 2/7: $570 H.O.R.S.E.
Friday, 2/8: $570 2 to 7 Triple Draw

I have some tournaments I’m interested in playing later in February also, but this is already a lot of time away from home for a non-WSOP event so I’ll have to really be crushing it to justify flying back a third time. Commerce does have extra prizes for not only overall Player of the Series, but Mix Game Player of the Series as well and they pay out a lot of spots. So if I’m in the running there, maybe I will be back for the $1k events.

I intended to play poker today (Thursday) but my wife and I went hiking this morning and when we got home we were both so wiped we basically lounged around all day, alternating between falling asleep and watching six episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, an excellent show on Amazon Prime about a housewife in the 1950s that stumbles into stand up comedy when her marriage falls apart. Rachel Brosnahan plays Mrs. Maisel and unsurprisingly she has won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Series – Music or Comedy for two years running. She is spectacular! The show is a strong recommendation from me as I near the finish line of season one.

I will be playing $15/$30 at 4 PM so expect another blog at that time.

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2017 Poker Results

February 6, 2018

Volume Goals:

-Play 1800 live hours
-Play 600 hours of 20/40 or higher
-Play 100 hours of Omaha 8 or Better

Comments: My final live hours tally was 1729.5 hours, so I came up just short of that goal. However, I did add another 1100+ hours in online play, which sounds massive, but can actually be reduced somewhat because each table I play at is accumulating time in my app tracker. So one hour while 4-tabling is actually four total hours. Still, if you include the online volume, I easily played 160+ hours a month in 2017. In addition, 85% of my live hours were in cash games and 15% were in tournaments. Online, my volume is closer to 50/50 between cash and tournaments.

I only played 239 hours of $20/$40 LHE, but I did add 74 hours of $15/$30, 98 hours of 1/3/5 PLO, 11 hours of $30/$60, and 15 hours in bigger mix games. Add all that up and that’s 437 hours in bigger games, which is still short of my goal – and this would have been much worse if Palace didn’t start spreading bigger games in the last couple of months of 2017. When it came down to it, I just preferred to commute 5 minutes to play poker rather than 30+, even if it sort of hurt our bottom line.

I played 35 hours of live Omaha 8 or Better, far below my goal – and only an additional 21 hours online. I did play 90 hours of O8 tournaments though, so I guess this goal is somewhat of a wash. On the bright side, I didn’t plan to become a Pot Limit Omaha player in 2017, so that was a fun development. I played 96 hours of live PLO and 234 hours of online PLO, plus another 111 hours in PLO tournaments. So all in all, I played 587 hours in four card games, which seems like a check mark for this goal. I imagine I will be playing even more PLO in 2018, but Global Poker currently doesn’t offer O8 games and the only live casinos with O8 are either too far away or spread it too small for me to want to play consistently. I did hear Muckleshoot brought back a $20/$40 O8 game on Saturdays, but I’m yet to play it.

Win Rate Goals:

-1.5 BB/HR @ $8/$16
-0.75 BB/HR @ $20/$40 or higher
-1 BB/HR @ Omaha 8 or Better
-50% ROI in live tournaments

Comments: I came up just short on my $8/$16 goal. After posting a win rate of 1.12 BB/HR in 2015 and 1.8 BB/HR in 2016, I thought somewhere in the middle for 2017 would be reasonable, and I was right. I didn’t quite hit 1.5 BB/HR, but I did finish at 1.41 BB/HR for 2017.

My goal for bigger games went much better. After finishing 2016 with a disappointing 0.5 BB/HR in $20/$40 LHE games, I wasn’t sure if I was really capable of putting up the numbers I’ve become accustomed to in smaller games, but I’m happy to report that I finished 2017 with a 1.19 BB/HR win rate in $20/$40 (and 1.47 BB/HR in the Fortune $20/$40) and 1.23 BB/HR in LHE games of $15/$30 or bigger.

As I mentioned earlier, my Omaha 8 or Better volume was really small for 2017, so individual sessions had a really big impact on my final results. I won $29/hour playing O8 in 2017 while posting a win rate of -0.05 BB/HR! How did this happen? I played a seven hour $30/$60 O8 session and won $1300 and that accounted for more than 100% of my profit for the year.

I didn’t set a Pot Limit Omaha goal for 2017, but since I played so much of it, I figure I should share my results. As I’ve mentioned many times on my blog, I don’t think I’m a particularly good PLO player, but the game that’s spread on Wednesdays at Palace is so incredibly soft that I’ve managed to put up some monster results. I won over $100/hour in a 1/3/5 structured game. I don’t really know how to express that as a win rate since big bet games are usually expressed as big blinds per hour and this game has a $3 big blind but it’s $5 to call. Shrug. $100/hour is pretty much all you need to know – and it’s totally unsustainable. I actually lost money in PLO cash games online, to the tune of -$12/hour in over twice as many hours as my live volume and this is why I’m pretty sure I’m not that great. In fact, I lost $14/hour in $0.25/$0.50 6-max PLO, which is 28 big blinds/hour. That’s BAD. I seem to do better in full ring games than I do in short-handed PLO. I know I have run bad in online PLO, but I also know I’m not that good. On the other hand, I did really well in online PLO tournaments. I cashed in 23 of 65 events (35%) for an ROI of 119% with six wins and three seconds in fields that typically had 50-120 players, which means I finished in the top two of nearly 14% of the PLO tournaments I played. That’s either dominant or super lucky… or both.

I once again crushed my ROI goal for live tournaments, thanks to another WSOP final table and a new career high score for my 5th place finish in the $1500 H.O.R.S.E. event.

I ended up playing 37 events with a buy in of $100+ and an average buy in of $476 and finished with an ROI of 256% which smashed my goal of 50% I set for the year. As I noted in my 2017 Goals, I guessed I would play about 3 live tournaments a month and that was a spot on estimate. All my success basically came in the WSOP where I cashed 4 of 5 tournaments and found myself in the WSOP Player of the Year running before deciding not to play any more events.

It’s worth noting that I whiffed completely in the Muckleshoot Classic series, posting an overall 0-9 effort. I still have zero final tables in that series to date and it remains a location that I am yet to have a breakout in.

I only had two notable cashes outside of the WSOP – I took 4th of 188 in my first tournament of the year back in January at the LAPC at Commerce in the $350 Omaha 8 or Better for $5600 and then I took 1st of 75 in the $125 All In Or Fold tournament at Run It Up Reno in October for $3900.

I played many, many more tournaments online. This is basically what I did on my “days off.” I played in 500 total tournaments with an average buy in of $21.50 and I cashed in 106 (21%). Despite a decent cashing percentage, I actually finished with a -8% ROI and lost $1.25/hour overall. LOL. To be fair, I did punt the majority of my bankroll on Ignition when the future of that site went into question. In July, I switched over to Global Poker and cashed in 82 of 303 tournaments (27%) with I think about ten wins, an overall ROI of 11%, and a sexy hourly of $1.56!

Training/Study Goals:

-read through MG1&2 and do all the work
-do APT weekly challenge every week
-memorize all the typical LHE drawing odds
-watch at least one WSOP FT a month
-play at least four hours of PLO and four hours of NLHE every month
-play at least ten tournaments a month

Comments: Most of my studying is in the form of playing micro stakes cash games and tournaments online. Basically my goal is to stay sharp or gain experience in no limit hold’em tournaments and pot limit Omaha cash games. With that said, I crushed the bottom two goals listed above. The rest of my study goals didn’t go nearly as well. I never finished Jared Tendler‘s books and as you can tell from some of my recent blog posts and my mind state at the end of my last LAPC trip this is an area that I could still use considerable work on. I subscribed to PokerGo and there’s tons of content on there – and I’m even watching the $25K Mixed Games Championship in the U.S. Poker Open as I type this (Go DeathDonkey!) – but most of my poker watching has been on the streams and vlogs of Lex Veldhuis, Andrew Neeme, Brad Owen, Tonkaaa, and JNandez. There is so much good poker content out there right now that it’s overwhelming at times. I also read Tommy Angelo‘s Painless Poker and while I prefer his older work, it did spark some lifestyle changes.

Top 5 $8/$16 Sessions:
1. +$1867 @ Palace
2. +$1808 @ Palace
3. +$1550 @ Palace
4. +$1530 @ Palace
5. +$1465 @ Palace

Worst 5 $8/$16 Sessions:
1. -$905 @ Palace
2. -$887 @ Palace
3. -$873 @ Palace
4. -$857 @ Palace
5. -$758 (x2) @ Palace

Top 5 non-$8/$16 Sessions:
1. +$4010 in $1/$3/$5 PLO @ Palace
2. +$3535 in $1/$3/$5 PLO @ Palace
3. +$2907 in $20/$40 LHE @ Fortune
4. +$2725 in $15/$30 LHE @ Palace
5. +$2540 in $15/$30 LHE @ Palace *$2352 Royal Flush
6. +$2348 in $30/$60 LHE @ Palace

Worst 5 non-$8/$16 Sessions:
1. -$2265 in $15/$30 LHE @ Palace
2. -$2100 in $1/$3/$5 PLO @ Palace
3. -$1442 in $20/$40 LHE @ Commerce
4. -$1242 in $20/$40 LHE @ Fortune
5. -$1191 in $20/$40 LHE @ Fortune

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2017 Poker Goals

January 8, 2017

Volume Goals:

-Play 1800 live hours
-Play 600 hours of 20/40 or higher
-Play 100 hours of Omaha 8 or Better

Comments: 1800 hours comes out to 150 hours a month which is actually less than full time volume, so I will likely beat this goal by a few hundred, but I undershot it because things happen and I don’t know how much I will be playing online. 600 hours of 20/40 could be tougher. That comes out to 50 hours a month, which means I’d have to play at least 5-6 sessions a month – far more volume than I’m currently doing. It’s all a matter of forcing myself to make the long drive to play in a game that is typically worse than the one that’s five minutes from my house. But it’s hard to get better if you don’t challenge yourself, so that I must do. Omaha is also at least 45 minutes away, but between random $15/$30 sessions at Fortune, some trips to Clearwater when I have dental/medical appointments in Kitsap, and cash games while I’m in Vegas, 100 hours seems doable.

Win Rate Goals:

-1.5 BB/HR @ $8/$16
-0.75 BB/HR @ $20/$40 or higher
-1 BB/HR @ Omaha 8 or Better
-50% ROI in live tournaments

Comments: After posting 1.12 BB/HR in 2015 and 1.8 BB/HR in 2016, I’ll shoot for somewhere in the middle in 2017. I was hoping I could do better than 1 BB/HR in the bigger games, but popular opinion seems to be that 0.5 to 0.8 BB/HR is more reasonable. I have consistently bested the higher end of what experts say you can win in low stakes limit hold em, so maybe I can continue to do that at the higher stakes, but I’m not going to count on it – I’m still feeling the games out right now and paying for my education. My Omaha 8/B cash game results have been pretty disappointing to me the last few years, but I just find it hard to swallow that I can’t win a big bet an hour in them. I think most of the games I play in are pretty soft and you should be able to win long term simply playing an ABC style. I obviously can’t expect to run at 400%+ ROI every year, but I do think cashing for twice as much as I buy in for is a decent goal. I played $15k worth of tournaments last year, so that number should increase by at least 25% which means I’d have to cash for at least $40k in 2017 to meet this goal and that is actually pretty lofty.

Training/Study Goals:

-read through MG1&2 and do all the work
-do APT weekly challenge every week
-memorize all the typical LHE drawing odds
-watch at least one WSOP FT a month
-play at least four hours of PLO and four hours of NLHE every month
-play at least ten tournaments a month

Comments: I failed to read through the two books like I planned. I have already read the first three chapters of vol. 1 in 2017 so I’m off to a strong start. Just have to stick with it. I hope to be more consistent with the APT challenges this year and hopefully they add some other interesting content. As someone so proficient in LHE, it’s embarrassing to admit that I don’t know exactly what odds you need to call with 3-outs, 5-outs, and 8-outs. I’m confident I frequently make the right decisions, but there’s really no excuse for not having all this stuff memorized. I find watching the WSOP FTs to be a good source of learning – you get to watch some of the best players in the world playing all the different variants. The last two parts of this section of goal references how much volume I want to put in on Ignition on a monthly basis sharpening underdeveloped skills. It would be highly unlikely for me to play even 3 live tournaments a month.

Possible Tournament Trips:

–LAPC @ Commerce (January)

    $350 Omaha 8 or Better
    $350 Triple Stud (Razz/Stud/Stud 8)
    $350 Stud 8 or Better
    $350 Omaha 8/Stud 8

–WSOPc @ The Rio (February)

    $365 HORSE
    $365 Monster Stack
    $365 NLHE

–WSOPc @ The Bike (March)

–Run It Up Reno @ Peppermill (April)

–Spring Round Up @ Wildhorse (April)

–WSOP @ The Rio (June/July)

    $565 Colossus
    $1500 Millionaire Maker
    $1500 Monster Stack
    $1500 Summer Solstice
    $1500 Razz
    $1500 HORSE
    $1500 Omaha 8
    $1500 Limit Hold Em
    $3000 Limit Hold Em (6-max)
    $3000 HORSE

Comments: Those LAPC events are set in stone, though I may miss some of them if I make deep runs as they are all two days events that intersect with each other. I’m fully intending to play those three events at the Rio WSOPc, but I have yet to book any flights for it, so there’s some flake potential there. I would say I’m over 90% to be going though. The WSOPc @ The Bike is on my radar, but in all likelihood I probably won’t be going. I will attend at least one of the Run It Up Reno or Spring Round Up, but I’m undecided at the moment. I would love to get back in that $20/$40 game at the Peppermill, but the tournament series in Reno was a little underwhelming. As for the 2017 WSOP, the schedule has not been released yet, but I’m guessing these are the events I’d be interested in playing. It’s highly unlikely my wife will let me stay in Vegas for three weeks straight again – unless I absolutely murder it – so I’ll likely have to trim that list down to 5 or 6 events. In that case, I’m more focused on playing limit events over the NLHE ones, as I feel my edge is bigger in fixed structures and mixed games. I likely won’t be selling action for anything except the WSOP, but I’ll definitely be selling for that, so contact me at maccent17@gmail.com with any interest.

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