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2016 Poker Goals

January 6, 2016

My goals for 2016 aren’t fully realized just yet, but I have a pretty good idea of what I want to accomplish so I’ll go ahead and share some of them.

Play 1250 hours

Even though this number is less than the amount of volume I put in last year, I think it’s a reasonable target. It would allow for me to play three 8 hour sessions a week, which is probably my happy zone, considering I work 30 hours a week at my day job. I will probably end up crushing this goal, but I just like to have a Mendoza Line for how much poker I need to play in order to keep myself satisfied.

Play 150 hours of Omaha 8 or better and maintain a 1 BB/HR win rate

As noted in my 2015 wrap up, I am pretty disappointed in my results in Omaha games. Granted, I haven’t put in a ton of volume – probably not even enough to have meaningful results – but I know I can do better. I can feel myself doing fishy things – limping with hands I should probably be folding, calling on the flop with non-premium draws, etc. – so there’s tangible room for improvement. Part of my problem is that my limit hold em game has evolved to the point where my playing style is almost entirely exploitive and I’m hyper-aware of what’s going on. I do not have the same game feel in Omaha, and yet, I feel myself wanting to remain unpredictable when my experience level probably calls for me to simply nit it up. Even so, I can see some improvement happening. My big cash last year was in an O8 tournament, so I actually won considerable money in the variant last year (no thanks to my cash game performance), and a hand from that final table stands out: in this hand, I flopped a ten high flush and value bet it to the river; by this point, the board was paired and I had rivered a wheel, but my opponent was now raising me after calling the two previous streets. To me, it was perfectly clear that I was being raised by a wheel, so I three bet with my ten high flush confident that I was quartering my opponent. He called and tabled the wheel just as I suspected and I took 75% of a critical pot. But when I tabled my hand, there was some commentary that implied my three bet on the river may have been reckless. Perhaps that sentiment is right, in general, but in this specific spot, the flow of the hand made it rather apparent, to me, that I was quartering my opponent. This is the kind of laser awareness that I frequently have while playing hold em, but I rarely feel it when I’m playing Omaha. I’m hoping to change that in 2016. My current plan is to play two sessions a month at Clearwater Casino in their $10/$20 O8 game and I tend to gravitate to the O8 cash games whenever I have time to play in Vegas.

Play 100 hours of no limit cash games

At some point, my game simply has to evolve to the point where I am a small to medium stakes no limit cash game expert. I feel like my win rate in an $8-$16 limit game has a ceiling of somewhere around $25/hour, whereas $40+/hour should be attainable in a $3-$5 no limit game. Last year I only played 40 hours of NL cash and the biggest reasons for my reluctance to play a ton of volume are: a) $3-$5 is a pretty high starting point – I’m super conservative with my bankroll and I still feel like playing in that game is kind of like taking a shot; b) I feel like a novice at a NL cash game table; and c) in my limited experience of playing live NL cash games, I’ve experienced a tremendous amount of short term bad luck – I’ve had AA < KK twice, KK < AA twice, and the one time I had KK > AA my opponent had a short stack. In what probably amounts to less than 200 hours of live no limit play for my career, it’s absurd how many times I’ve ran Kings into Aces, or vice versa, all with bad to terrible results. I’ve had a number of other bad connections where I can remember getting felted. To sum up, I’ve experienced the feeling of being the stackee far more times than feeling of being the stacker and it has left a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to NL cash games. Still, I can’t imagine having a future as a full time poker player if I’m not a NL cash game expert, so I want to start developing that muscle this year. My current plan is to play the Muckleshoot $3-$5 game at least once a month on Fridays when it’s at its juiciest and I may try to play once a month on Wednesdays as well, although the games are probably far less attractive in the middle of the week.

Do the Advanced Poker Training weekly challenge every week and spend at least an hour a week playing hands on APT

The last thing I want to do is help my opponents improve, but anyone that reads Card Player magazine probably knows this online poker training site exists, so if you’re willing to spend the money to join up, go ahead.  My wife got me a lifetime membership to this site for Christmas and I have to say I’m super impressed with the operation. A ton of notable pros (Jonathan Little, Scott Clements, Lauren Kling, Ed Miller) are active participants and the site allows me to practice specific tournament situations with specific hands and simulate live NL cash games without having to risk any money. One of the coolest things I’ve been able to do on the site is set up a tournament that mimics the structure of an event I’m about to play and simulates the level of talent I expect to face, without having to wait in between decision points. It’s a pretty sick site and I expect it to do wonders for my tournament and NL cash games as long as I put in the work.

Play 3-5 WSOP events

I’m ready to step up my WSOP volume, starting this year. I’ve played in two WSOP events in each of the past two years and so far I’ve gone 0 for 4. This year I’m planning to play the Casino Industry event and probably the Colossus again, but I also want to expand into some $1500 events. I know for sure I want to play a $1500 H.O.R.S.E. and $1500 Razz event and I think I’d also like to play the $1500 Monster Stack NL event. The WSOP hasn’t released a full schedule yet, so while I know I’ll be in Vegas the first week of June, I don’t know how the rest of the schedule is going to pan out. Also, I’m hoping the first quarter of 2016 is extremely lucrative for me, otherwise playing in $5500+ worth of tournaments in a month isn’t very practical – unless I have substantial backing, which is certainly possible.

Cash a WSOP event

With four WSOP events under my belt and as many as five planned for 2016, I would be running below average not to find a cash in my first nine WSOP events. Certainly cashing an event would help my cause to play more events this year… and it would also help achieve my goal of netting another career high tournament score. I feel like I’m on the brink of a life-changing cash and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if that happens in 2016.

Read through Jared Tendler’s The Mental Game Of Poker vols. 1 & 2 and do ALL the work

I’ve read most of Vol. 1 multiple times and it has done wonders for my mental game… but I still haven’t fully absorbed the material and there is still a ton of room for improvement. I’m pretty confident that one of my biggest edges in my normal game is how tough I am mentally (bankroll is another big one). The standard swings of the game have little affect on my mental state and basically no affect on my actual play while the majority of my opponents’ games fall of a cliff after a difficult hour and sometimes after losing a single, critical pot. That doesn’t mean I’m immune to mental game issues – far from it. I saw plenty of kinks in my armor as I struggled in the final quarter of 2015. It’s one thing to read the material, but it’s an entirely different thing to actually complete all the work Tendler asks of his students and I think doing so can help me reach the next level of mental game superiority.

Maintain a 1.25 BB/HR win rate at the $8-$16 level

I finished last year with a 1.12 BB/HR win rate, which surpassed my goal of 1 BB/HR, but I spent the vast majority of 2015 hovering around 2 BB/HR, so I feel like a loftier win rate is pretty attainable. I was running at 2.1 BB/HR for 2015 as late as October before the last quarter disaster shaved an entire BB/HR off my win rate. While I think 2 BB/HR is probably unrealistic in this day and age – I experienced very few stretches of negative variance during the first three quarters of 2015 – I do think a 1.5 BB/HR rate is possible, so I’m going to shoot for somewhere in between that and my 2015 end result.

Reach a $30,000 bankroll

Considering how much money I’ve made playing poker since the start of 2011, it’s kind of absurd that I haven’t already achieved this, but when I consider that poker has been my primary source of income for a substantial portion of that time period and that my expenses have hovered around $3000/month, it makes a lot of sense. As I’ve noted in previous blogs, I’ve had difficulty building my bankroll despite the success I’ve enjoyed, but I started to see growth last year and now that my day job covers all our monthly expenses I think I could see substantial growth in 2016. In reality, this should be an easy goal to reach, but I settled on $30k because I’ve felt like that’s the magic number I’d need if I ever decided to move to Vegas and play full time. Honestly, I expect to smash this goal in 2016.

I’ll probably come up with more things I want to accomplish, but those are the goals I’ve written down so far for 2016. 2015 was quite easily the best year of my life. I spent 2011-2014 repairing the damage I had caused to my life over the previous six years while basically running in place in my poker career, grinding $4/$8 games almost exclusively, and struggling to take any serious steps forward. 2015 was an enormous step forward and I feel like it has set me up to achieve even bigger things in 2016, which I feel is destined to be, by far, my best poker year ever.

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2015 Poker Year In Review

January 4, 2016

All in all, I’d have to consider 2015 the best year of my life. As far as gambling goes, it was my third best year ever, but I’ll get to that later. In my personal life, I had a lot of big things happen this past year: I married my beautiful, amazingly supportive wife, Dina, in May and then we moved out of Kitsap County across the Narrows Bridge to University Place in Tacoma in August. Shortly afterwards, I was hired to work at the Palace in Lakewood, where a slow day is when we only have four games going. This wasn’t just a great move for me concerning my day job, it was an absolutely essential move for me as a poker player. Sorry to say it, but there just isn’t a poker scene in Kitsap County anymore. Silverdale and Bremerton went from 3-4 rooms completely thriving during the poker boom of 2004-2007, to having three rooms within 5 miles of each other spreading multiple games at the same time as recently as 2010-2011, to having ONE poker room with ONE $4-$8 game – and maybe a second game for a few hours on peak nights, but more often than having a second game there was NO game after 11 PM in Kitsap County in 2015. You have to drive at least 30 minutes to find another option. Eventually, with a major assist from my wife wanting to be closer to her work and family, I found that option so attractive that I decided to cut out the commute altogether and just relocated. It was a decision that already has and will continue to let us realize a ton of growth. If you’re as sick of the Kitsap poker scene as I was, I have good news for you: people are still gambling in Pierce County and King County.

In addition to the overdue change of scenery, I also bid adieu to my last link to my 2010 DUI: the breathalyzer that had been installed in my car for the past 5+ years. Less than a week later, I got rid of my POS 2001 Pontiac Grand Am that I was driving into the ground and upgraded to a brand new 2016 Subaru Legacy. In fact, the only negative that remains from my past mistakes these days is a hospital bill for my emergency appendectomy I had in late 2008. With a balance of over $23,000 I simply have no intentions of ever paying it off. I still haven’t decided exactly how I’m going to tackle that issue, but since it is not on my credit report and doesn’t really affect my livelihood, it’s not really that imposing of a storm cloud.

Now back to poker. Technically speaking, 2015 was only my third best year of my poker career – in 2005, I had an absurd three month stretch that convinced me to play professionally and make all sorts of terrible decisions in my life that would lead to a downward spiral I wouldn’t really start to recover from until 2011; and I had a breakout year in 2012 where everything finally started to click – but it was quite easily my best year in terms of giving myself the cushion that will be needed to play for a living some day and continue laddering up the stakes. My new day job has finally allowed me to handle our monthly expenses without having to use any money I win gambling, so all my profits from playing poker are now entirely invested in our future.

As far as my actual 2015 goals are concerned, these are the goals I set for myself and how well I succeeded at achieving them:

I had a bunch of mental game goals for 2015, including: studying away from the table, profiling players at the table, improving my c-game, focus on how well I’m playing and my emotional control instead of focusing on results, taking notes throughout my sessions, studing opponents in tournaments to find mistakes and exploit them, and taking my time in critical pots. If I’m being honest with myself, I feel like I started out really strong in staying on point with these goals, but as I smashed the $8-$16 game all throughout the spring and deep into the fall, I got lazy and, possibly, – *gasp* – overconfident. I certainly stopped profiling players and I stopped taking notes of all the hands I played, and I can think of a few big pots in tournaments where I really didn’t think things through enough and made big, tournament-costing mistakes. Definitely not a great success here, but I’m way better at handling variance than I used to be. Perhaps the best stat that shows just how much growth I’ve made in this department is this one: in 2015, my main game was the $8-$16 at the Palace and, overall, I played 93 sessions totaling 701 hours for an average session length of 7.53 hours. What that number means is that I’m basically never quitting a session because I’m running bad. There may have been a time or two I should have, but most of the time, I powered through and, quite frequently, I’d limit the damage or even book a win in a session where I would’ve left a big loser in the past. It’s all about the long run and that’s a concept I seem to fully understand now.

I also had goals to spend less than 20% of my live hours in $4-$8 games, play 750 total live hours, and play at least 100 hours of no limit cash games. I smashed my 750 hour goal by playing 1487 total hours, including tournament play. I only spent 18.8% of my total cash game hours in $4-$8 games and over half of those hours were as the floorman propping the game at my old job. At this point, I think it’s safe to say that the $4-$8 limit is a thing of my past. I did not play 100 hours of no limit cash. I only played 40 hours… over 12 sessions. So not only am I not putting in the sessions, but the ones I do play are super short. I played three reasonably long Super Sundays at Muckleshoot before I started working on Sundays, but other than that, I was in and out of any no limit game I played this past year.

I did play 2-3 events at the 2015 WSOP – two WSOP events and two daily tournaments – and went 0 for 4, to bring my career total at the Rio during the WSOP to 0 for 9. I did not play a tournament series in a city I’ve never been to before but I did set a new career high tournament score with my third place finish in the 08 event at the Wildhorse Fall Round Up in Pendleton, Oregon.

I spent most of my poker playing time in the $8-$16 game, where I exceeded my goal of 1 BB/HR by maintaining a 1.12 BB/HR win rate over a significant sample size, despite a monstrous downswing from early October to late December.

My five biggest $8-$16 wins were: +$2230, +$1835, +$1697, +$1360, +$1246.
My five biggest losses: -$1847, -$1238, -$1166, -$1081, -$896.

I had a 0.48 BB/HR win rate at $4/$8 with my top 5 wins being: +$616, +$499, +$456, +$441, +$425.

I played 151 hours of Omaha 8 for a whopping $478 profit despite a -0.29 BB/HR win rate (I hit and ran the $20-$40 at the WSOP pretty good).

I played 93.5 hours above the $8/$16 level and maintained a 0.46 BB/HR win rate. Most of those hours were in the $10/$20 O8 game at Clearwater where I basically broke even (-$34) and almost all of that win rate resulted from smashing the $20/$40 O8 at the Rio for an hour and having a good $15/$30 Razz session a few days later. Basically none of these stats are meaningful – due to lack of sample size – although I do feel like my O8 game could needs work. I see no reason for me not to be a 1 BB/HR player in most O8 game in the United States – it just seems so attainable.

My best location was the Palace by a mile. My worst location for 2015 was Diamond Lils and I only played one $8/$16 session there and it didn’t even crack my top five worst that I listed above. I posted a profit for the year on every single day of the week, with my best day being Saturdays by a long shot and my worst day being Fridays, which is a bit bewildering to me (note: after digging deeper, I discovered that my average session length on Fridays was less than 5.5 hours, which leaves me vulnerable to quite a bit of short term variance – it’s no mystery why my shortest sessions are far less profitable than my longest ones). I only had two losing months for the year and the worst month was in April and I only lost $289, so all in all, 2015 was a consistently very good year.

I played in 48 tournaments, cashed in 8 of them (16%), for a 25% ROI. My average buy in $183, which is a significant increase over years past. I’ve never had a losing year of tournament poker – even when I deep into the misery of alcoholism – but a week into November I was down multiple thousands in tournament buy ins before clutching up for that third place O8 finish at the Fall Round Up that put me squarely in the black for the year. I also won the weekly H.O.R.S.E. tournament at The Orleans in Vegas in June and cashed two of the major Muckleshoot events this year, but if I said I was satisfied with my tournament performance over the past couple years, I’d be lying. I know I can do better and I know I will. That’s the thing about tournaments – when you make a mistake, it can cost you your tournament life or cripple you and you have to wait til the next event to plug that leak. Hopefully I’ve ironed out enough leaks that I’m in store for a monster 2016!

I was going to post my 2016 poker goals in this blog, but I will do that in the next couple days. Good night!

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2015 Poker Goals – March Wrap Up

April 3, 2015

Every month I’m going to reflect on the previous month of poker and see how well I’m doing at accomplishing my 2015 goals:

Log 1200 live hours

As I noted in my February Wrap Up, I have upped my goal from 750 hours to 1200 hours. Since I’m frequently playing when I’m working, I am still able to play nearly full-time hours despite having a day job. In March, I played an absurd 174 hours, my largest output since the first half of 2012 probably. That kind of pace is unlikely to continue, but I think I can average about 120 hours most months.

focus on how well I played, how well I controlled tilt, and how well I paid attention to game flow instead of how well I ran.
continuing taking notes throughout all my sessions and combing through them later.

One of these days, I will really start paying attention to the game when I’m playing. It is quite easily one of my biggest weaknesses. I kept accurate notes for most of my $8/$16 sessions, but I continue to struggle to pay attention when I’m not in hands.

I’m also learning how to go through my notes in a more efficient manner – skimming past hands that seem totally standard and focusing on the ones that gave me trouble. It should be noted that the statistics I’m about to post are for $8/$16 sessions only and don’t include notes from one of my more important sessions of the month – where I started off stuck $700 and stayed in the feeder game playing short-handed for several hours (and thus unable to take notes between hands). I ended up crushing the short-handed game and then went on an absurd run after the game broke and I finally made my way to the main game. At that point, with so many hands unrecorded – and it being the first of the month – I decided to continue not keeping notes for the session. So for a period where I went from stuck $700 to cashing out over $1300 sugar, I have no hands logged for an absurd amount of positive variance. I also played 65 hours of $4/$8 where I did not keep notes.

Here are the hands I have decided to track to keep variance in perspective:

AA – 4/8 (50%)
KK – 4/12 (33%)
QQ – 7/14 (50%)
JJ – 7/12 (58.3%)
TT – 4/8 (50%)
77-99 – 14/43 (32.5%)
22-66 – 8/28 (28.6%)
All Pairs – 52/125 (41.6%)
Sets – 16/18 (88.9%)
AK-AQ – 25/65 (38.5%)
AKs-ATs – 12/30 (40%)
KQs-KTs – 5/13 (38.5%)
QJs-JTs – 4/17 (23.5%)
Flush Draws – 19/40 (47.5%)

Thoughts: Running at over 40% for all my pairs seems like a pretty favorable result. Running at less than 50% for AA-QQ is definitely below average, however. It’s also worth noting that I made a set 18 of the 125 times I played a pair, or 14% of the time – which is almost exactly average. More importantly, I almost never lost with my sets and I nearly always got an abundance of action when I had one. I’m curious to see how the smaller suited Broadway hands do going forward. I completed nearly half of my flush draws which is a highly favorable result – although I lost some of those hands. Between the sets and flush draws – and running above average with my pairs overall – I would have to say variance was mostly on my side in March.

spend less than 20% of my total hours in 4/8 games

I played 66 of 150 cash game hours at the $4/$8 level – or 44%. However, subtracting 34 hours as a floor man, that total becomes 32 of 116 hours – or 27.6% – a reasonable result. For the year, I’ve played 191 of 403 total hours (47.4%) and 95 of 308 (31%) of my non-working hours at the $4/$8 level. Including my tournaments hours, it probably comes pretty close to my 20% target.

log 100 hours of spread limit

I played some small stakes NLHE when I was in Vegas this past month and my conclusion is that I’m still not very good at that format of poker. Obviously, at 11 hours of play logged for the entire year, this is an incredibly small sample size, but the results are consistent with an ongoing pattern of performing poorly in no limit cash games. In Vegas, I lost every session I played and it should have been worse – I jammed 100+ bigs preflop with 99 vs AA and rivered a straight. Over my past 163.5 hours of no limit/spread limit, I’ve won slightly less than 50% of my sessions and I’m running at almost -10 big blinds per hour. I have been unlucky in some hands, for sure, but the biggest problem I’ve identified is that I play overly aggressive and try to win every hand I play rather than being selectively aggressive and picking my spots more wisely overall. Starting this month, I want to log at least one 8-10 hour session of no limit and focus on correcting these mistakes.

continuing reading about mental game, develop mental game profiles, and improve my c-game

focus my learning — don’t study multiple variants at the same time or games I’m not playing frequently

I finally finished the series of questions in Jared Tendler’s The Mental Game Of Poker designed to pinpoint potential problems and give an outline of my current mental game. This can be referred to and adjusted as I improve or discover new concerns over time. Working on this had halted my reading for the most part, but I should be able dedicate time for that soon. With the Pendleton Spring Round Up and World Series Of Poker coming up, I’ll probably adjust my focus to studying Omaha 8 or better and tournament play over the next few months.

treat poker like a job with set hours and not like a hobby

With 445 hours in roughly 12 weeks, I have been playing full time hours despite the fact that I work 20-30 hours a week on top of that, so my poker playing is like a second job these days. My work off the tables has suffered a bit, but for the most part, I’m taking my poker time very seriously and putting in the hours unless I feel like I’m not playing near my A-game.

watch opponents closely in tournaments and develop exploitative styles for each of them instead of playing laggy for laggy’s sake

take my time in critical pots and really think things through before acting

set a new career high tournament score

I played 5 tournaments last month, but one of them was a freeroll and two others were very small, local tournament, so I’ll focus my attention on the bigger events I played.

I played the $150 daily tournament at the Venetian and I dominated my table for most of the day, feeling like I was really playing well. I got lucky in some spots to dodge a couple coolers, but I consistently increased my stack throughout the event without much resistance until I got in a blind vs blind situation late where I flopped trip aces and my opponent turned a gutshot straight. I ended up betting the turn, re-raising my opponent when he raised me, and ultimately calling off against his 5-bet jam. I had completed with A8 from the small blind so I figured my opponent was never giving me credit for an Ace – and I surely wasn’t giving him credit for one – and I had a decent amount of outs against any hand that was beating me. In retrospect, calling his initial raise makes a lot of sense because I’m not getting action on a 3-bet unless he’s committed to a bluffing line or I’m crushed. Instead, I lost a decent portion of my stack on the hand and my momentum disappeared soon after. I managed to make the final table, but ultimately busted out in 9th in a tournament that paid 8. I busted when I shoved my short stack from the button with the big blind away from the table. I don’t even remember my hand, but the small blind woke up with AJ and that was good enough to bust me. It was my second final table in a medium-sized tournament that didn’t even pay. Even though the end result was poor and I may have misplayed a big pot, I felt very good about my overall play and thought the style I chose for this event would be profitable in the long run.

I followed that deep run up by playing in the Muckleshoot Spring Classic $750 Main Event and finished 14th of 226 runners, ending a nearly year long drought of not cashing in a $150 or higher tournament. Once again, I played well and ran pretty good before getting cold late and losing a couple crucial pots. Midway through the tournament I was moved to an extremely tough and loaded table: multiple WSOP bracelet winner Rep Porter, Adam Coats – who got TV time on ESPN during the main event and made multiple deep cashes in the 2014 WSOP – and a couple of other local players I’m pretty sure play for a living. Not only did I outlast all four of these tough players but I held my own in a couple of difficult pots against Rep, including one where he put me in an extremely tough spot and I found the correct call. And then I busted him. It’s not that I beat a top pro in a couple of pots, it’s that I was able to make the correct decisions because I knew what he was thinking and how he perceived me and that is something to be happy about. Obviously, I was a bit disappointed to fall just short of some serious money ($45,000 for 1st!) and I had a very real chance of crossing off my goal of a new career high tournament score, but I feel like my tournament play is improving and things are trending in the right direction. I feel something big is about to happen. I believe.

double my current bankroll size

maintain a 1 BB/HR win rate at 8/16

start playing 20/40 regularly by end of year

I finally had a month where my bankroll saw serious growth. It’s probably been a year or longer since I’ve seen a 10% increase in a single month, but I did much better than that in March. Doubling the bankroll I started 2015 with should be a very attainable goal and honestly, I hope to do much, much better.

I had an amazing month of $8/$16, running at 3.48 BB/HR for the month overall, and an absurd 5.27 BB/HR in the $8/$16 at the Palace in Tacoma. It was a month where I set a new personal record for an $8/$16 win on the 1st of the month – and then I absolutely annihilated that new record just a couple weeks later when I had this session:

For the year, I am now running at:
1.68 BB/HR in $8/$16 LHE
1.04 BB/HR in $4/$8 LHE
1.3 BB/HR in all limit games

In April, I will be making a 4 or 5 day trip to Pendleton, Oregon for the Spring Round Up – a tournament series I haven’t attended since Fall 2012 and never with a sizable bankroll – and I am currently planning on playing the $225 O8 and $225 H.O.R.S.E. tournaments. I may play a few other events, but I’ll likely focus on cash games the rest of my stay. Also, anyone interested in buying up some of my WSOP action, I’m ready to start selling. You can e-mail me at maccent17@gmail.com or PM me on Facebook. I’m currently planning on playing the Casino Employee Event and the Colossal, but I will be there for at least a week and if things go really well, I would be interested in increasing my stay.

Here’s to more run good!

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2015 Poker Goals – February Wrap-Up

March 2, 2015

Every month I’m going to reflect on the previous month of poker and see how well I’m doing at accomplishing my 2015 goals:

-log 750 live hours

For the second straight month I played 100+ hours of live poker with 112.5 hours logged in live games. That brings my total to 249.5 for the year and I’m on pace for nearly 1500 hours in 2015. As someone noted on my Facebook last month, 750 hours is a soft goal for a professional poker player – that’s true. But it should be noted I am NOT a professional poker player – I work to pay my bills. Still, it’s obvious that my 750 goal is going to get demolished and it’s sad that I was playing so little poker that I felt like that was a number I had to strive for. I think I can safely update my goal to 1200 hours as 100 hours seems like a good number for me since I’m working part-time.

-focus on how well I played, how well I controlled tilt, and how well I paid attention to game flow instead of how well I ran.
-continuing taking notes throughout all my sessions and combing through them later.

I fell off a bit here in February. Once again, I pretty much only kept notes for $8/$16 sessions, but I ran into some roadblocks this past month. For one, I have at least three sessions worth of notes I haven’t gone through looking for mistakes or for variance so I can’t post the stats like I did last month. I may update this page in a few days with those numbers, but part of me feels like I should just move forward and focus on current events.

Another issue I had was that I played a lot of short-handed poker and when then game gets down to 5 or less players, I find it not only difficult to jot notes between hands, but my game changes so much that some crazy things are going to happen – variance is going to increase drastically and I’m going to be in a lot more marginal situations. It’s better to just focus on the action and let the results speak for themselves.

My ability to keep my emotions in check remained strong, but everything else listed in the above goals could use some work going forward.

-spend less than 20% of my total hours in 4/8 games

February was extremely fluky. I should be able to log at least two $8/$16 sessions a week, but this past month it seemed like something random came up on all my normal playing days: big poker tournament, went to a hockey game, I got sick, I attended a going away dinner, I played $4/$8 on a friend’s shift because he’d been playing on mine, and I had to cover a shift for someone on vacation. As a result, I only played 39 hours of $8/$16 compared to 70 hours of $4/$8, although nearly half of those $4/$8 hours were as the floorman. For the year, 67% of my free time hours have been in bigger games, so I guess I’m okay with that.

-log 100 hours of spread limit

I actually played one really short session in the $3/$5 Muckleshoot game which brings my total hours for the year to a whopping 2. I feel like this is a goal I’m more likely to achieve over the last few months of the year. While I’m all for challenging myself as a player, at the end of the day, I’d rather spend my time in a game I’m an expert at and I just haven’t spent much time developing my NLHE game and I don’t feel like my bankroll is large enough to learn on the job.

I doubled up early in the session and won a sizable pot with KK, but I blew back all my profit in an extremely marginal situation where I whiffed a nut open-ended straight draw in a raised pot and then leveled myself into calling off $200 on the river with 4th pair after concluding that I should fold. It’s that kind of flimsy decision-making that makes me feel like I’m not ready for that game yet – the confidence is simply not there.

I did cash out +$20 though. GOT EM!

-play a tournament series in a city I’ve never been to before

I thought I was going to Shakopee, Minnesota this past month, but that trip was cancelled for various reasons. I will probably revisit that idea in late summer or early fall. Some friends recently moved to Connecticut and I may visit them later in the year, which would certainly include a trip to Foxwoods. Also, I am going to Vegas a week from today, but that’s nothing new and also not necessarily a poker trip.

-continuing reading about mental game, develop mental game profiles, and improve my c-game
-focus my learning — don’t study multiple variants at the same time or games I’m not playing frequently

To be honest, I didn’t spend a ton of time on my game away from the table this past month. Between all the distractions and being sick, I didn’t have a bunch of free time, but this should change going forward.

-treat poker like a job with set hours and not like a hobby

Fortunately, I work for a living and I’m in a situation where straying from this plan isn’t detrimental to my short-term quality of life. Even though I reached my hours goal, I definitely treated poker like a hobby this past month.

-watch opponents closely in tournaments and develop exploitative styles for each of them instead of playing laggy for laggy’s sake
-take my time in critical pots and really think things through before acting
-set a new career high tournament score

I played five tournaments in February, but three of them were at my job and two of them were while I was working. I took second while I was working for my only cash of the month.

I made a pretty early exit in the $115 Monday night tournament at Muckleshoot. I lost with QQ to quads for a decent portion of my stack and then I jammed over an open with 18-19 bigs holding JJ and my opponent showed up with QQ.

I also played the 4th Sunday $250 deep stack at Muckleshoot and never really got things going. I had a chance to chip up early, but got decidedly unlucky. With blinds at 100-200 and effective stacks well above 20K, a weak, predictable player limped in and I raised it to 700 on the button with AKdd. A younger Asian guy three-bet me from the big blind to 2200 and the limper folded. My first instinct was that this guy was capable of re-raising me light and capable of realizing that I would raise the button light trying to isolate the weak player in position. In this instance, I was near the top of my range and I felt like if the big blind was capable of 3-betting light, he was probably capable of 5-betting or jamming light. Since I’m never folding AK here, I decided to avoid the leveling war and not get 100+ bigs in preflop with Ace high during level 2 and just called. The flop brought KQ3 with two clubs and I called his bet of 2500. The turn bricked out and he bet 5000. I could jam here, but I really felt like his range was mostly air and that if he had nothing, he would almost certainly have to bet the river and raising the turn would let him off the hook – so I just called. The river was a pretty gross Tc, but since I felt like I backed him into a corner where he had to be his entire range, I snap-called his 10K bet and he showed me the 85 of clubs for a flush. Sigh. From that point, I made a few unsuccessful opens trying to pick up some much needed blinds before eventually cramming it in with AT and 6 bigs only to run into AQ.

I am now about a month away from going a year without cashing in a tournament with a buy-in of $100+ and it’s been such a steady drain on my overall results that I’m starting to think maybe I should focus solely on cash games. At the moment though, I am still planning on playing the $500 NLHE event at Muckleshoot this month and the first two events at The World Series Of Poker in late May, plus the daily $150 at Venetian this month.

-double my current bankroll size
-maintain a 1 BB/HR win rate at 8/16
-start playing 20/40 regularly by end of year

I crushed it in February for the first three weeks before having a rough last week.

My final numbers were 1.35 BB/HR overall, 1.52 BB/HR @ $4/$8, and 1.02 BB/HR @ $8/$16, which brings my YTD totals to: 1.15 BB/HR overall, 1.87 BB/HR @ $4/$8, and 0.48 BB/HR @ $8/$16.

See you next month.

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2014 Poker Year In Review & 2015 Goals

January 1, 2015

I never finished my post for my 2014 goals, but I did save a draft of it and these were the goals I had at the time:

Increase bankroll to 5 figures
Play @ least 250 hours of 8/16 or higher
Play a WSOP event
Increase 4/8 win rate to .75 BB/HR

Sadly, I managed to accomplish only one of those goals — to play in a WSOP event. After having more than 24 consecutive winnings months in a row in 2011-2012, for the second year in a row I struggled from spring to winter. Although I didn’t suffer through the brutal downswing I did last year, I pretty much broke even for an 8 month stretch after getting off to a very hot start through April. Also, because of this static stretch and what felt like a really slow year at my day job, I once again struggled to pad my bankroll. In fact, I won more money gambling this year than currently sits in my playable bankroll. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished the past four years as a lucrative gambler, but I’d be lying if I said I was satisfied with the end result. I thought committing to a day job would ensure that all my gambling profit went to building a bankroll, but that has mostly proven to be untrue — my current bankroll sits at less than 20% of my total profit since 2011 started. Most months, I find myself using bankroll to pay bills or some other unexpected expenditure. It’s been very hard for me to hang on to the money I’ve won gambling and it hasn’t been because I’ve lost it playing poker.

Despite another winning year, one that included my biggest lifetime cash — a fourth place finish in the Main Event of a series at Little Creek this past April — 2014 was mostly a disappointment as far as my poker career is concerned. It felt like a lot of running in place and, even though my upswings were frequently erased by a bad session or two in bigger games, I mostly have myself to blame. For one, I played a lot less than I did the previous two years. In the first half of 2012, I was averaging over 225 hours a month of poker. Last year, I was probably averaging well over 100 hours a month. The past five months I’ve averaged a mere 52.6 hours a month. That’s a pitiful output; one that I can’t fully blame on the increased responsibilities in my life. There were other contributing factors: laziness, lack of motivation, diabetes, even fear. Another reason I’ve made such little progress is that I played the vast majority of my hours at the $4/$8 level, a game I likely grew out of two years ago. I set a goal of 250 hours of $8/$16 or higher and I probably logged less than half of that total. I enjoy supporting my day job game and hooking up my co-workers, but sometimes I need to remind myself that I play poker for money and dedicating myself to such a small game when I have so little free time to play poker these days is downright silly and detrimental to my future, especially since I’ve been bankrolled to play nearly five times as big for some time now.

While I did manage to achieve the goal of playing in a WSOP event this year, my experience at the 2014 World Series Of Poker was incredibly disheartening. For starters, I went 0-5 in my efforts, which included the $500 casino employees event, the $1500 Millionairemaker, and three entries into the $230 daily deep stack. I busted out 10 or 11 spots shy of cashing in the first event, despite having an above average stack at the time. It was quite the shock. I could have easily folded my way to a cash in my first ever WSOP event, but instead I got involved in a 3-bet pot with AK vs A8 and then check-raised all in on the A83 flop. I felt sick to my stomach after losing that hand, but it was only going to get worse from there.

This was my experience in the $1500 Millionairemaker tournament — easily the biggest buy in I’d ever played in: I barely get to my table as the first hand is being dealt. My big blind is already out there and I’m not even comfortable in my chair when the action is on me and I look down at KK. I look up and survey what’s happened so far: an early position player has made it 75 to go and one player has called, with blinds of 25/25 and starting stacks of 4500. I take a closer look at the opening raiser and it dawns on me that it is David Williams, a well known pro that finished runner-up to Greg Raymer in the 2004 WSOP Main Event. I’ve read his section in Daniel Negreanu’s Power Poker so I’m familiar with how absurdly loose and aggressive he can play. Honestly, I don’t want to play a big pot out of position against an elite LAG when I haven’t even had time to pull my card protector out of my pocket yet, so… I make it 475 to go, an absurdly big raise, in an effort to end the hand immediately. Instead, they both call. I manage to get one of the few flops I’m comfortable playing in this spot: the AK9 with two spades. I lead out for a pot-sized bet of 1500 and only David Williams calls me. The turn is a Q that is not a spade. There is 4500 in the pot already so the only bet that makes sense is all-in. I shove and David basically snap-calls me and I feel pretty confident that he’s about to show me the JT of spades. I can barely digest my good fortune when he shows the K5 of spades before the dealer burns and turns the 3 of spades on the river, giving David a spade flush and eliminating me. On the first hand. Of the biggest tournament of my life. I was in shock. I was fully backed for this event and I spent the long walk out of the convention center contemplating if I could even go tell my backer that I was out of an event he put up $1500 for within the first five minutes. I felt nauseous; even though I played the hand perfectly, I was concerned I was about to get sent back on the next flight to Seattle. Instead, I told him the bad news, which he handled well, and then I proceeded to lay in the fetal position for roughly the next 24 hours. My first two WSOP events had been about as agonizing as possible. I got coolered in the live NL games a couple times, broke roughly even in some $20/$40 Omaha, had a few more brutal bust outs in the daily deep stack event, and I left Las Vegas with the Rio as my worst casino lifetime by a long shot. Needless to say, I have something to prove at the WSOP. Still, despite the fact that my results were terrible, it was a pretty awesome experience and I can’t wait to go back in 2015.

The World Series was just the start of my tournament misfortune, however. I have not cashed in a tournament of $150 or more since that score all the way back in April and I’ve played around 20 events, including a $1000 one, a $775 one, and a few over $500. It’s been a brutal stretch and honestly, I haven’t even really made it interesting. I’ve been experimenting with incorporating a more loose-aggressive style into my tournament game and it either doesn’t suit me (unlikely) or I’m misusing it (very likely). Of course, I’ve also experienced a tremendous amount of bad luck. When you never have the best hand when a crucial pot develops, it’s difficult to produce good results in tournaments.

For 2015, I’ve decided to focus on goals that are within my control instead of the things that aren’t (win rate). I felt like I’ve made huge strides improving my mental game the past couple years, but every once in a while I get so frustrated it’s embarrassing. I’m not the type to say anything or cause a scene, but I am the type where you can occasionally see the steam coming out of my ears. It’s ridiculous. Winning or losing should really have no affect on me at this point. I have years of data that prove I beat the game in the long run and whether I do awesome or poorly in a given session, week, or month should really have no bearing on my emotional state.

2015 Goals:

-continuing reading about mental game, develop mental game profiles, and improve my c-game
-focus on how well I played, how well I controlled tilt, and how well I paid attention to game flow instead of how well I ran
-continuing taking notes throughout all my sessions and combing through them later
-watch opponents closely in tournaments and develop exploitative styles for each of them instead of playing laggy for laggy’s sake
-take my time in critical pots and really think things through before acting
-focus my learning — don’t study multiple variants at the same time or games I’m not playing frequently
-spend less than 20% of my total hours in 4/8 games
-log 750 live hours
-log 100 hours of spread limit
-play 2-3 events at 2015 WSOP
-play a tournament series in a city I’ve never been to before
-treat poker like a job with set hours and not like a hobby

And some less controllable goals:

-set a new career high tournament score
-double my current bankroll size
-maintain a 1 BB/HR win rate at 8/16
-start playing 20/40 regularly by end of year

And some blog goals:

-1 new post a week, for starters
-ultimately aiming for 1 new post a day
-write about poker and current progress
-write about movies and at least keep grades for everything I see
-write about baseball
-share my embarrassing rap career

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I Suck At Tournament Poker

March 8, 2013

God, it sure feels like I do. I mean, my history in online tournaments pre-Black Friday and even playing live up through all of 2011 suggests otherwise, but my success (or lack thereof) since the start of 2012–particularly in big ($150+) events–has been…unsettling. I managed to post a profit in tournaments last year and went deep in multiple major events, but the overall result is lackluster and disappointing. So far in 2013, I’ve fizzled out of a couple events and have been cold decked out of a few others. All these experiences have lead me to the following conclusions:

a) I handle the short term luck factor in tournaments very poorly. This is a concept that creeps into my limit hold em cash games very seldom. Generally, when it comes to variance in cash games, I realize that over time, all the money I lose when I get unlucky eventually comes back, with interest, and often within the same session. I also grasp the fact that these frequent beats are a result of poor play and that errors from opponents is how I make money playing poker. Therefore, I never berate players and rarely tilt, spending as much time playing my A-game as possible. I have a much harder time applying these same concepts to tournament play. Perhaps it’s the absolute nature of tournament poker: once your chips are gone, you’re out. If you get unlucky or coolered in a massive pot, you are usually out or crippled, and the amount of chips you have directly correlates with how you can play. And when you bust out, you might have to wait a month to play in another good event. All of this tends to make me highly upset during a tournament and almost always afterwards. I mean, I don’t want to be bothered by anyone and my day of poker is usually mentally over with. For the third time in less than two months, I immediately left the casino instead of waiting for the dinner break to use my free meal voucher and socialize with the other players. I lose, I’m gone. No goodbyes. Rarely a “nice hand.” It’s not a good look.

b) I have no idea what style suits me best. Without a doubt, I’ve experienced my most success using a tight-aggressive (TAG) and frequently nitty style. The problem is, while this style gets me to the money most often, it also leaves me short stacked in the late stages of tournaments and relies far too heavily on what cards I’m being dealt (luck) and has much less to do with playing position correctly, exploiting my opponents’ tendencies, staying unpredictable, and playing poker after the flop (skill). However, my ventures into playing a loose-aggressive (LAG) style have led me to continual destruction (often self-inflicted). I have little doubt that a controlled LAG style is the best way to play tournaments, as it makes you highly unpredictable and sets you up to make the final table with a bundle of chips and the ability to make moves your short stacked opponents can’t afford to. Note that I said “controlled,” which seems to be where I go wrong. My use of the LAG style is frequently misguided and random, as I’ll show when I start talking about the $180 tournament I played at Little Creek on Friday night. Ultimately, the biggest problem here is that the TAG style is my comfort zone. It’s not how I want to play, but it’s the style I feel most comfortable using and my history of experimenting with the LAG style has been… questionable.

So last night, I’m playing in the $180 event of the Spring Classic at Little Creek Casino and within the first two levels I run JJ and TT into overpairs on favorable boards and lose a bunch of chips, but stay alive. Then I flop a full house with QQ in a raised pot and make 0 chips after the flop and then I flop another boat with 22 in a 3-way raised pot and manage a measly +700 in chips. I raise with 99 over one limper and both blinds also call. We see a flop of TT6 and only the big blind calls my bet of 500. At this point in the hand, I feel like I should tell another story.

Flashback to the Fall Classic $230 Main Event at Little Creek last year. I get into a massive leveling war with the big blind in the hand I’m talking about in the last paragraph. A few people limp into the pot for 200 or 300, something in that range, and I make it at least 1000 on the button (OTB) with a deep stack holding the monstrous T8o. The big blind repops me to, say, 2700 and everyone in between folds. My first instinct is to fold, well, because I just got caught with my pants down and T8o isn’t exactly AK… but then I start thinking… I already have this guy sized up as someone that pays attention and is capable of making plays and realize that he probably realizes that I’m raising light. So if I know that he knows this, how can I possibly let him get away with it. For the first time that I can remember, I pull off the preflop 4-bet bluff and make it 6500 to go. For some reason on this day, I have chosen to sit with my chair backwards so that my arms can rest on top of the chair and my face is basically buried in my arms. I am nervous, oh boy, am I nervous, but this is the same posture I’ve taken the entire tournament. Regardless, after sizing me up for quite some time, this guy pulls the trigger and ships it all in. I spend very little time posing for the cameras before tossing my hand into the muck and he turbo fastrolls 96o. Good play, sir. And the lesson learned here is that if I trust my read, I can’t let him have the last move (the 5-bet shove) because even if he “knows” I’m bluffing, he can’t call me, much like I couldn’t call him even though I was sure he was full of it.

Flashfoward to the 99 on the TT6 flop. After he calls my flop bet, I’ve already determined that a) I’m showing down and b) I’m going to keep the pot small. So I check back on the turn and call an 1100 bet on the river and he shows me JT. Nice.

I definitely have a fishy image at this point because I’ve had lots of big hands and I’ve shown NONE of them so far, so when it folds to me in the small blind and I raise to 450 with AQ the big blind makes it 1475 quickly and with a tone in his voice that says: “find someone else to pick on.” So… I shove it on his ass and he folds.

Then, I proceed to play AK so poorly that I’m not going to write about it out of fear that no one will ever back me again. I mean, seriously… Worst. Line. Ever.

So now I’ve been involved in a number of pots, have lost almost 67% of my stack, and I’ve tabled zero hands. My terrible image is still intact. Blinds are 50/100, one player limps, the button makes it 500, the worst player at the table in the small blind flats, and I look down at QQ. I’m sitting on 6200, which creates for a rather awkward situation. My inclination is to just shove it here, but that’s a huge re-raise and I want at least some action on my hand. I opt to 3-bet it to 2000, an amount that virtually commits me to the pot, and my plan is that, if called, I’m going to shove it all-in on any flop unless something dictates that I shouldn’t. This is a gambling line, but I want chips. I’ll take the risk. Everyone folds except for the kid in the small blind which is the perfect result. He checks to me on the KJx flop and I shove my remaining 42 big blinds into the pot and he calls pretty quickly with AT for… a gut shot. I’m holding two blockers and he somehow misses his 5-outer and I have a playable stack again.

Naturally, my playable stack lasts one orbit before this happens: Blinds are 100/200, the kid from last hand limps, I limp in with 99, one other player and the button limp in, the small blind completes, and the big blind raises to… 400! Yes, a min-raise. I’d love to hear the thought process on that one. The kid calls, and I briefly consider 3-betting because given the action so far, I almost certainly have the best hand and should be able to take it down right here. Alas, my confidence is shot and I decide to just call, as does everyone else. 6-way action for 2400 to see a flop of T98 with two diamonds. Not the best flop for a set, but the pot is big enough that I’m never folding here with my stack size. The big blind leads out for 700, lighting those chips on fire and kissing them goodbye because, well, because he just announced that he has absolutely nothing with such a weak beat on a super dangerous board. The bad player to my right makes it 1400. Perfect. I practically min-raise it to 3000, prepared to get it all in if anyone comes over the top of me, but everyone folds around to the kid, who only has 3100 total, which he proceeds to shove into the pot as he fastrolls TT for top set. FML. I actually have a chance to fold here for 100 more, but I’m getting 85 to 1 and it’s probably correct to draw to my 1-outer. I miss it and am back to short stacking it.

Final hand. Folds around to the button who has yet to not raise in this situation. He makes it 700 to go, the loose kid to my right calls, and I look down at A8. A few things to consider here that I didn’t take the time to think over at the table. The button has open-raised in this situation four times now. Once, I 3-bet with QQ and he got out of the way pretty quickly. Another time, I flat called with A2o and he checked the flop and turn when medium cards hit the board and folded when I bluffed the river after a 4-card straight showed up. Giving this information, calling preflop makes a lot more sense as this opponent took a pretty passive line with a hand he missed with and folded without resistance when I bluffed the river and he folded when I 3-bet the queens… so when I decide to raise it up to 2700, I’m only going to get action when he can… go all-in. Which he does. I deliberate for quite a while and study him. I’m not getting much information there, so I start looking at my pot odds and realize, with horror, that I’ve priced myself in with A8o for my tournament life. Awful planning on my part. Just terrible. I shake my head and put my chips in and he shows me QQ and the dealer wastes little time killing me off as he brings out the Queen high flop. GG.

Honestly, I’m so discouraged with my tournament play that I went to the cashier and had to go through the arduous and embarrassing process of refunding my tournament buy-in for the main event because well, I don’t want to waste my time and money (or my backers’ money) when I’m not feeling good about my game. I’ve had some terrible luck in the Oregon tournaments, but my play in the local ones has been pretty awful. I just need a break to collect my thoughts and think about what I need to fix.

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Wildhorse Casino: Poker Training

April 30, 2012

“It’s humbling, isn’t it?”

That’s what one of the regulars at my local casino said to me upon my return from the Spring Round Up at the Wildhorse Casino in Pendleton, Oregon. I’d be lying if I said she wasn’t right. This was my third trip to Pendleton and my third time coming home a loser. It doesn’t feel good and it proves I still have a long way to go as a poker player. I often get asked when I’m going to Vegas or if I’ll play the Main Event and my answer is: Let me conquer Pendleton first.

It’s not like I’m completely out of my league; there are plenty of pros that go for the series, but there are also plenty of fish and tons of money to be made in the live games. Plus, even pros are prone to making mistakes and everybody has leaks…you just have to find them and figure out how to exploit them.

My biggest problem is the kinds and sizes of the games they spread. When it comes to limit hold em–my area of expertise–the only limit they spread regularly is $4-$8, which is the exact same game I play every day back home. Whoopty doo, Basil! The most popular game at Wildhorse is the $2-$5 no limit hold em game. While I fancy myself a solid no limit player, my experience in live cash games is limited and $2-$5 plays way above my current bankroll. I’ve felt like I’ve held my own in this game, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m often the least experienced player at the table and have felt out of my comfort zone at times. I’m confident I can beat the game, but I can’t play it to my full ability because I’m absolutely not willing to lose a chunky portion of my bankroll playing in it. I take pride in the fact that I protect my bankroll and don’t take risky gambles with it. I am now gambling for a living–comfortably–while more accomplished players are broke, working day jobs, and advising me to take shots. “Why aren’t you playing the no limit game?” “Why are you selling your action?” Because I don’t ever want to work again in my life… that’s why.

All that said I did play 21 hours in the $2-$5 game and only lost $115 overall… But I did have the displeasure of running KK into AA for a $1200+ pot and I did turn a couple solid wins into losing sessions, which I feel reflects my inexperience as a no limit player more than a run of bad luck. The biggest thing I noticed was that I had a much tougher time the better the other players in the game were. When I was at a table of weak tight or inexperienced players, I could run over the table with little worry of anyone challenging my alpha male status or putting serious pressure on me… But I think the tougher players could sense my inexperience and continually put me in spots where I had to make difficult decisions. I wish they had a smaller no limit game that I could play in, but I suppose I just have to hope I have a bigger bankroll to work with on my next visit or maybe I will have someone back me in the cash games.

The biggest reason I had a losing trip was my first session of $4-$8 limit hold em I played. I was playing in the game with my buddy Vince and somehow we convinced the table to agree to an automatic straddle, which means that whoever was first to act after the blinds had to raise to $8 without looking at their hand… Or in the case of a kill pot, raise to $16 blind. Needless to say, it was a highly volatile game with lots of action and we were playing short-handed most of the night, which can dramatically increase short term variance. Well, I went three and a half hours in this game without winning a single pot. Unlike the no limit games where I can admit I may have been outmatched, these players sucked and were just getting continually lucky all night long while I was running incredibly bad. I saw a dude put in 4 bets on an all broadway flop with nothing but a back door flush draw and take the pot down with running sevens. It was sick. Everyone was playing so bad and I couldn’t get ANY of it! What it amounted to was the worst $4-$8 session of my life…or at least since I’ve been sober. Maybe I should have called it a night after four or five racks, but when you see everyone at the table playing so poorly, it’s tough to let them keep it. Luck has to even out in the long run, right? Well, it didn’t that night and I lost over nine racks. The good news is I made six and a half of those racks back in the $4-$8 games the rest of he trip… But damn, that loss stung and it put me in a pretty poor state of mind to start my trip.

The good news is that I cashed in two of the six tournaments I played and had a winning series for my backers. Unfortunately, I bubbled the final table in one of the events and neither of my cashes were too meaningful. I felt like I was playing good, deep stack tournament poker in four of the six tournaments I played. I played the limit hold em event on my own tab and on absolutely zero sleep. It was a bad idea. I suppose the lesson there is: just because you can’t sleep doesn’t mean you should go gamble. I’ve come to find out that one of the bigger leaks in my poker game is restlessness and playing when I’m tired or grumpy can be detrimental to my win rate. While I’m able to overcome these mental handicaps at times (when I’m running good), there are times when I’m clearly off my A game and losing more money than I need to be (when I’m bad).

I’m looking forward to the Fall Round Up and having my first winning trip to Pendleton. Hopefully my bankroll will be in even better shape and I’ll have much more no limit cash game experience by then. Also, I’m going to open up my action to more people and sell it at premium, so there’s less pressure on myself and my few backers to perform well. At times, especially deep in tournaments, I’m hesitant to make what I feel is the right play, because doing so and being wrong might cost me my tournament. But I have a pretty good feel for this game and going with my gut is usually correct and people invest in me because they trust my abilities. Next trip, it’s time to stop trying to cash and bring home a big prize. I got you guys.

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August 2011 Gambling Results

August 31, 2011

Ugh. What a gross month. I topped it off with another miserable live session. In the interest of keeping my 9 month winning streak alive, I’m deciding to take tonight off, barely in the black.

I’m feeling a little depressed lately and middling gambling results aren’t helping out my mood much. Not only did I barely show a profit this month, but I had a pretty disastrous month financially as well. I moved into a new place and, long story short, my bankroll is about $1600 short right now. I took over a lease for someone and trusted them to pay the rent and deposit for me and for whatever reason, he couldn’t pay it (even though I handed him cash) and now owes me around $1500 (and another person owes me $120 for Kanye West & Jay-Z tickets). Oh, and Full Tilt still owes me $1600. Also, I blew my August budget by about $400 (the cost of moving and having no furniture). A frustrating situation under any circumstance, but exponentially more so since my month of September is built around jumping up in stakes. I requested five days off (that I normally work) this upcoming month to play juicy $8-$16 games and I’m playing a $300 No Limit tournament at Muckleshoot on September 9th. Fortunately, I have a backer… which is nice if I lose money, but kind of sucks if I win. Either way, the backing situation makes it a lot safer to play higher limits when half my bankroll is not in my possession.

I don’t know how I feel about my play this past month. I beat up the $8-$16 game both times I played it and I finally held my own at the $3-$6 level, but I couldn’t beat $4-$8 to save my life… a game I’ve been CRUSHING for two months straight. Perhaps it’s just variance, but I think my biggest leak nowadays is dealing with Run Bad, and on multiple occasions I turned somewhat bad sessions into disastrous ones. Or maybe I’m just burned out. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I do NOT have fun playing poker when I’m losing. That’s not a good trait for someone that’s hoping to play this game for a living someday. It’s not always peaches and cream… and I know that… but still.

Perhaps I need to approach my every day game like I’m playing $8-$16 because when I was playing that higher limit, my starting requirements were much tighter and I really felt like I played mostly mistake free poker. God only knows I’m not above a $4-$8 game so there’s no reason to start playing like I am. I kind of feel like I’m falling into the same trap I’ve been stuck in before: I can play weaker hands because I’m better than these people. While the second part of that statement may be true, the first part isn’t. I think it’s time to hit the books again and get my mind right because there’s no reason I should be consistently losing at $4-$8, even for just a month.

To add to my depression, my day job has me at my wit’s end. It pays my bills, but I can’t say it’s even remotely what I want to be doing with my time. I have no interest in the food service industry, but my hourly income would be pretty hard to match elsewhere. I enjoy writing, but there’s not much money in that, especially when you barely have a foot in the door. Other than that, I have no idea what else I want to do. Except play poker… which is why this past month has been so discouraging. After two months where I brought in $4400 gambling, my bankroll was rising rapidly and I was more than a third of the way to the point where I feel I could quit my job. Now… I’m looking at this $3000 I have and realize my date with destiny is so much further away than I want it to be.

August Results (YTD in parentheses):

Overall Gambling: +$191 (+$4261.36)
Poker: +$295 (+$4418.36)
Live: +$355 (+$4543.30)
House Games: -$60 (+$298.70)
Pit: -$89 (-$55)
Sports Betting: -$10 (-$122)
Other Bets: -$5 (+$20)

$3-$6: +$41 (-$505)
$4-$8: -$903 (+$1321)
$8-$16: +$643 (+$643)
NL: $0 (+$503)

Live Tournaments: +$367 (+$1536)

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Check-Raise: Mid August Report

August 17, 2011

I’m depressed today. I haven’t been having a great month gambling and I really compounded my problems this morning. I did something I never do. I play Blackjack with Match Play coupons (free money), but I never gamble in the pit. Today, I showed up 30 minutes early for the morning tournament at Chips and decided to sit down at Ultimate Texas Hold Em. I’ve played it a couple times before, with minor success, and it appeals to my poker side since a sound preflop strategy in this game seems profitable. Max bet AQ preflop and 2x bet Q9 on Q high flop and lose to KJ on the river. Ugh. Max bet AJ preflop and lose to J5. Really? Max bet A4 preflop and 2x bet top pair on the flop (playing two hands) and dealer turns over a set. I can’t count how many times the dealer flipped his first card and only one card in the hole could beat me and he had it today.

All in all, -$190 in the pit. Then I run bad in the live game and my final straw is losing with AQ to KK on a AT83K board in a 20 BB pot after check-raising the flop and leading the turn. I even had the sense to check the river because I felt like he had KK or QQ and since I have AQ, I just felt it was KK most of the time. “I knew I needed that King.” Yeah, no shit moron. Nothing like losing big pots to two-outers on the river. Good day all.

So it’s August 17th and I’m showing a $55 profit gambling this month. Considering that I’m destined to have some losing months, even at the peak of poker greatness, I shouldn’t be too stressed out… but this month is a bit different since I’ve had to pull from my gambling bankroll for the first time since I’ve had one (again) because I’ve been moving this month and have basically no furniture. To put things in perspective, I keep a monthly budget and I’m $25 away from going over with two weeks to go… and I budgeted HIGH. I won’t know exactly how much I’ve pulled from my bankroll until the end of the month, but I do know now is NOT the time to be breaking even.

People often tell me that gambling for a living isn’t as rosy as it sounds. That’s making a lot of sense to me right now. I’m not having a losing month (yet), but even breaking even seems like a colossal waste of time, especially when you’re the hours leader at Chips Casino for two months running. I’m working 5 days a week at my day job–which is more than I want to–and I’m still putting in about 30-35 hours a week at the tables. Which means I’m basically doing nothing else with my life. I haven’t made a non-poker update on this blog in over a month. I didn’t even bother to review the new Harry Potter movie. I haven’t even seen Captain America or the new Planet Of The Apes. What kind of movie buff am I? All I do is work, play softball, and gamble. I have no social life. I can’t even imagine what I’d do if there was a girl out there that wanted to date me. After taking a beating this morning, today is the first day in probably a couple months that I’ve actually taken some time out to just lounge around. Hell, I’ve been living in this new house for over two weeks now and I’ve only unpacked and sorted the bare essentials.

I’ll probably be back at the tables later tonight, but right now a break–even a small one–feels really good.

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Check-Raise: Moving Up To $8-$16

August 6, 2011

I’ve been bankrolled for $8-$16 for a while now, but due to my day job and location, I haven’t had a chance to move up in stakes… until last night.

Side note: I sat in the $4-$8 game for 20 minutes waiting for my $8-$16 seat and cracked it for +$233 (that’s a $706/hr win rate! lol)… and that includes calling a raise HU from the BB with AdKh against my friend and check-raising him on AhTh5d3h turn and getting 3-bet by 8h2h (uhhh… nh Matt, you weirdo) and paying off on river (-$44). Turned top set with QQ in huge multiway pot. Flopped top set of 9s on 94343 board–sorry, we’re not chopping. Turned nut flush vs. 2nd nut flush against my friend. Sick run. Also folded As8s first hand against a raise and would’ve flopped nut flush vs. set on unpaired, 3-spade board (also against my friend). With one cold-call in front of me, I would maybe call in that spot in my normal games, but being the first hand I got dealt at a new casino, I had no idea how the table was playing yet. Folding seems best.

Even though I’ve played as high as $20-$40 online regularly (way back), it’s always a little rattling moving up to a new limit and playing in a new casino. I definitely sat down w/ the intentions of playing much tighter than I would in my typical $4-$8 until I got a really good feel for the table. For a while, I didn’t think there was any real weak spots at the table, but 3 of the players were $20-$40 regulars and started playing like the game was beneath them, spewing chips. I was willing to give higher stakes players the benefit of the doubt, and even though there were a couple people in the game I thought played good, by the end of the night, I felt like I might be the best player in the game.

I finished +$187 and I got pretty unlucky in 3 pots.

My first pot I play, I pick up AA UTG and raise. 5-ways to J53 rainbow flop. I bet, 2 callers. Q on turn. I bet, two calls. T on river. I check-call HU and lose to JT. Not a good welcome to my new limit, but I felt like I read the situation perfectly.

I have Qd3d in BB. Several limpers, the spewiest $20-$40 player raises, I call from BB in 6-way pot. First limper (JT from previous hand) 3-bets, everyone calls, original raiser caps. I get trapped for 4 bets with my weak hand in a huge pot. Flop comes KdJcTd. Gin draw! I check-raise the field. Turn is 7d. I bet and get 3 callers. River is another diamond. I check-call and lose to the 3-bettors red Aces. Groan, but nh sir.

Same villain limps in 3rd position, folds to SB, he completes, I look down at AsJs and raise. Both call. Flop comes AAT. I bet, thinking I’m never getting action here. My nemesis raises, I 3-bet, he caps. I check-call turn and river and he shows AT. Yay! I can’t beat this dude.

Another weird pot: I raise a couple limpers with 99 and we see a J84, two heart flop 4-ways. It checks to me in last position, I bet and the SB raises me. Everyone else folds. This player hasn’t been particularly aggressive, but there’s a reasonable chance my hand is good and I have the 9h. Since my opponent isn’t all that aggressive and I plan on calling, I decide to make it 3-bets and get to the river for “free.” He just calls and checks to me when a small heart turns. I check behind. River gives me a 9-high flush and he checks again. I don’t see how my hand is ever not good here, so even though I obviously have good showdown value here, I think a value bet is in order. I’m rather shocked when he calls and shows two red Kings. Whoops.

I flopped a set of 3s in a raised pot from the BB but didn’t get a huge amount of action. I lead into the field on the flop, hoping to 3-bet the OG raiser, but I just get a couple callers and the preflop raiser pays me off through the river for a single bet on every street. Oh well.

Another decent pot, I limp in OTB with one limper holding 9d8d. 4-ways to 644, one diamond flop. I bet when it gets checked to me trying to pick up the pot… and the SB calls… I’ve already pegged him as a tricky, trappy player. Throughout the session, he flopped trips out of position at least 8 times and got away with a turn check-raise 75% of the time. Turn brings the Td, giving me the flush draw. He checks to me and I check back (betting isn’t bad against a passive, predictable player, but I’d already seen this guy’s movie several times) River is Ad. He checks to me again, I bet, he raises, I 3-bet and he calls with K4 and tables it in disgust. Odd line on the river and nice try sir.

And here’s the only reason I finished up. I’m stuck about $100 at this point and haven’t had a playable hand in forever. Two people limp in front of me and I begrudgingly limp with KJo from MP. My friend immediately punishes my first weak limp of the night by raising from the next seat, the $20-$40 spewer 3-bets w/out looking, my friend caps and we see the flop 7-ways in capped pot. Board comes QT9r and gets capped 4-ways w/out me ever betting or raising. SB leads into me on turn, I raise, my friend (the flop capper) folds and I clear the field, he 3-bets, I cap. I’m starting to think we have the same hand. I’m still the nuts on the river, he disappointingly checks to me, I bet, he raises, I 3-bet almost sure we’re chopping and he finally figures it out and calls. He doesn’t show and I’m good for about a $550ish pot. Question preflop decision-making on my part, the hand played itself postflop, and I was lucky to get 7 BBs on the turn and river before my opponent figured out I wasn’t playing. Huge pot, but not really expert play from me. Just luck.

I was happy with my play overall. I won that one big pot that saved my session and got unlucky in most of the other big pots I played. Most importantly, I didn’t feel outmatched at the table and came out of the session thinking I should be able to beat that game on a regular basis. Time to move on up!

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