Rough day but still in the green

Great hole cards, few good flops, lots of bad rivers. Gave my fold button plenty of exercise and fought my way back to even--three times...

Cheers!

M

It's April Fools Day but the joke's on them

I finally have a nemesis. He plays LHE 6-max rush, .25/.50 and 1/2 and he put a bunch of beats on me tonight. AQs vs A6o, board runs out ATxx6. JJ vs A4, flop AKT, I call his donk bet on flop & turn and fold river, finally convinced. QQ vs A2, flop looks good but he spikes the A on the turn and I let it go. Saved 2 bets on a cooler. KK vs AA. I raise from BTN and the BB 3bets and I flat. Flop 227. I raise his flop bet and he calls. Turn A and I check behind. River comes another 2 and I call his value bet which I expect him to make with plenty of worse hands, but this time he has the nuts. Oh, well. Starting off April at 7BB/100. Wouldn't it be nice if I end the month with this average? Oh, baby...



Cheers!

M

Ended March on a high note

Net for the month was a paltry $60 for 100 hours of play. I'm ballin, yo. When I go out to a club tomorrow night, all I have to do is say, "Hey, girl, I play poker for 60 cents an hour. Wanna jump my bones?"

Just for fun, here's the graph.


Here's to our hands holding up in April. Cheers!
M

The Poker life is a good life

Still looking for answers from my last blog entry...please take a minute to comment if you have ideas.

After taking off the 25th and 26th to analyze my databse, I got back to playing the game. Finally have some results showing up in green. I moved down in stakes and have won 8 BI's total since the switch. At this rate, I'll move back up in a week.

March 27:

M

Moving down in stakes, playing 'wildman'

Have I mentioned March has been wreaking havoc on my bankroll? Well, it is. At the beginning of the month I started to play 25c/50c LHE RUSH 6max more or less exclusively, with a bankroll of 45 BIs. Four weeks later my BR has dipped to 35 BIs. I've looked at my stats and I'm playing pretty much the same way I did in February, during which I posted my highest 1-month profit. So, yeah, March sucks big green donkey dicks.

I took a couple days off to review hand histories and see if I can identify any glaring mistakes, and honestly, what I see has changed is that my opponents are calling down with bottom pair, unimproved small/mid-pairs and other assorted trash an insane amount of the time. (Which would be great if the deck breaks even and I could hit a hand now and then.) Add to that they are catching their 4- and 5-outers vs. my overpairs at a higher rate than expectation, and basically I have a disaster on my hands. 10 BIs may not be much to a NLHE player, but for LHE, believe me, it's huge. I either have to move down for a while or flounder where I'm at, so I'm moving down. Even if the run-bad continues I'll have slowed the bleeding. Looks like success at the 25c/50c limit requires a bit more gamble than I'm used to, but if that's the case, I'll also need a bigger BR to handle the swings.

I have 87 BIs for 10c/20c, and my first session went well, winning better than 3 BIs in 2 hours. Think I'll give it at least a week before I take a shot at moving back up.

***

I thought I might share a game I play when I'm running bad and tilt is setting in. I play what I call "Wildman". I have about 4 million play chips on my PS account. I sit down to a play money LHE table, play every hand, cap preflop, cap flop, cap turn, cap river--every hand. It is absolutely hilarious and always cathartic. Just mash the BET/RAISE button every time it's your turn to act. Fifteen, twenty minutes is all it takes before it's 8-ways to the river every hand. If you're looking for a way to kick tilt to the curb, and have some play chips to work with, I highly recommend it. Twenty minutes of Wildman is all I've ever needed to get over tilting.

M

My first royal flush of 2011

Soooooo pretty...

M

Saturday poker sucks; Sunday, not so much

Gamblers a-plenty, but the deck runs even on Sunday.

25c/50c LHE 6-MAX RUSH on FT



Here are the adjustments I made:
1) No naked bluffs.
2) Play passively with draws. No 3-betting big draws, raise big draws only in position heads-up.
3) 3-bet preflop only with QQ+, AKs.
4) Rather than jam monsters from the get-go, trap. No capping preflop. Raise the turn with overpairs+.
5) Fold 3rd pair or worse to donk turn/river bets.
6) Fold overcards on the turn if all I have is pair outs.
7) It's okay to limp small/medium pairs and suited connectors 56-QJ from EP, raise them from MP & LP, but see #1 for postflop play.

Had fewer sticky river situations as a result. I'm not advocating the above for these games all the time. Generally a more aggressive game is ideal for tighter fields. One cannot describe the weekend RUSH player pool as tight. Far from it. So with multiway pots as the norm, you have to adjust.

M

Weekend poker sucks

Yeah, I said it. I can't seem to make a hand or buy a pot on Saturday or Sunday. I'm matched up against a table full of fish and just can't hit or hold up or both. It's not worth iso-raising AK because 4 callers is routine. Open-raise, yes. Iso-raise, no. And forget bluffing. You can't bluff players who'll call the river with a pair of twos, or, for that matter, eight-high.

Yep, you read that right. Playing FT 6-max RUSH LHE 25c/50c, in a blind vs blind hand tonight the SB open limped and I raised with 5 6 and the SB called. I had this player flagged as a weak player, with seven different notes on him. He chases to the river with any draws (including gutshots) regardless of pot odds, and folds if he misses, except for a couple times when he had ace-high . He tends to raise the flop or turn with made hands as weak as second pair. The flop came down 2 3 A. The SB checked, I bet my gutshot straight-flush draw, and he called. The turn was the Q. The SB checked, I again bet my draw, and the SB called again. The river was the K. The SB checks again. At this point, I have to bet. No question. There's no hand I can beat at showdown and he is known to fold rivers where he's missed. I bet. He tanks for a full ten seconds and calls. He has 78 and wins the pot. I could not believe my eyes.

I quit once I hit my stop loss of 50BB. It always hurts when I play well and the deck just bends me over. And it's really, really hard to quit when I know I'm playing well but just not hitting my fair share of the time. But the truth is if you can't bluff, and you can't hit, you simply can't win.

The bad news:


Hope the deck is being kinder to the rest of you.
M

Back to Winning

Okay, I know I said I was going to take the day off. But at the end of the day I put in a couple hours anyway. I don't normally play late at night (10pm to midnight), but anyways...

And then I did something I should be doing more often. I spent four hours going through the hand replayer and making notes on every hand, identifying weak players and the mistakes they're making. For some reason, maybe because it was a "holiday", there were tons of players at my tables I'd either never seen before or had no notes on them for whatever other reason. I usually review my session the next day, in the cold light of objectivity. But I also have the bad habit of reviewing only those hands where I lost big pots. It's helpful, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Last night I reviewed EVERY hand. There were quite a few where I didn't get full value out of my hand. Others where I called down even though it was painfully obvious I was beat and should have saved two bets.

Until I get a system that can run a HUD (and even after, regardless), I think it's extremely important that I review every hand in my sessions, as much as time allows anyway (it takes twice to three as long to review a session as it does to play it), and identify weak players and what mistakes they make so I can exploit them in the future.

All that being said, I crushed the tables for 7.5BB/100 last night.

Full Tilt RUSH LHE 25c/50c


Hope your next session goes this good!
M

Happy St. Patty's Day!

Still playing my style (stats for the month unchanged), but running a little better. I'm still comfortable with my play, knowing the swings will be a bit bigger than straightforward ABC but in the long run I'll make a larger profit. Yesterday was another up and down day but ended on a high note.

March 16:


Taking the day off today for other business.

Happy green beer drinking!
M

Sanity check

My results for March are dismal compared to February. So I wanted to take a look at my playing stats for each month and see if there's any glaring reason for it. You're going to get to see this the same time I am. I captured the screens but haven't looked yet.

If I had to make a blind guess, it's going to mostly come down to two things. 1) I'm calling down too light in too many spots. 2) I'm playing too passively. Well, those and some run-bad.

Here's my results graph for February:


Here's my results graph for March:


Here are my stats for February:


Here are my stats for March:


Now let's take a look at what's different.

STAT FEB MAR DIFFERENCE
VPIP: 27.52  27.88  +0.36
PFR: 19.08  19/25  +0.17
WTSD: 46.96  47.17  +0.21
AF: 1.72  1.69  -0.03
3B: 13.18  12.91  -0.27
FT3B: 33.91  30.14  -3.77
ATS: 31.59  32.33  +0.74
FBBTS: 40.99  33.33  -7.66
FSBTS: 72.06  72.96  +0.90
PF AF: 1.69  1.66  -0.03
FL AF: 1.82  1.87  +0.05
TN AF: 1.77  1.74  -0.03
RV AF: 1.44  1.31  -0.13

Well, the major changes I can see are that I'm defending my blind 20% more often than last month and calling (or raising) vs 3bets 20% more often than last month. I can't say these alone are responsible for my nosediving green line, but I'll at least keep these two things in mind for my next few sessions and see what happens.

Good luck to you!
M

Intro

I've wanted to start a blog for a long time, but wasn't sure anyone would be interested. I'm a small/micro stakes player who has mostly broken even the last couple years. I'm posting a profit this year but still have plenty to learn. That being said, maybe there are many of you out there just like me and perhaps we can compare notes and learn something together.

A little about me. I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. I'm ancient in terms of the majority of online poker players at 42 years old. I've been playing poker since 2006. I started out playing online, playing NLHE strictly as a hobbyist and with no bankroll management whatsoever, and went busto a dozen times for $100-$300 each time. Switched to live play, playing both LHE and NLHE still as a hobby and while I never kept any records, I believe I either broke even or was a small loser over the next couple years. I've also played NLHE tournaments, where I have shown a profit, but I much prefer cash games.

In 2007, I was a moderator for PokerStars. For those of you who are curious, DonkDown.com recently did a rundown of what Moderators get for working at PS, and they got it right except that Moderators are also given automatic GoldStar status, so they can play the weekend VIP freerolls. During most of 2007-2008 I played strictly play money games, and while it's not real poker, I did run my 2,000 chips into a total of 12,000,000.

Okay, so at the end of 2008, I decided to study the game and try to improve and return to cash games. To date, my library contains over 20 poker books. Some were helpful. Some totally screwed up my game. But overall the information was helpful, if not always applied correctly. Changing one's approach to the game is tough, but for me it was necessary.

After studying up it was time to start playing again, and in Jan 2009, I deposited $100 on PS and $100 on FT and away we go. To date, I've run it up to just over $1000. No cashouts yet. I've moved up in stakes as my bankroll has grown and am now playing 25c/50c LHE on FT. My BR on PS is somewhat smaller, so I'm still mostly playing 10c/20c over there. What games to I play, you ask? I'll spare you the long story and just say that I've sworn off NLHE for now, and staying away from SNGs and tourneys because of the high variance. My bankroll isn't big enough to withstand any dry spells, which is a high risk when playing tourneys with $1 and $2 entry fees.

I have therefore chosen to play LHE exclusively for now and really focus on improving my game. The LHE literature is kinda sparse. SuperSystem covers it but it's so general in nature that it's not very helpful. I may get criticized for that but it's my opinion. A much better source is Barry Tanenbaum's Advanced Limit Hold 'Em Strategy. It's an excellent breakdown of all aspects of LHE. I highly recommend it.

I joined CR in 2010 and wow. Just wow. It has made all the difference in the world. Scheids and the rest of the gang have totally transformed my game.

I am not using a HUD yet. My computer is an older model that needs to be replaced, and any time I try to turn on the PT HUD, it can't handle the load and my system crashes. So I'm taking lots of notes on players and relying on them for reads. Fortunately, the player pool for limit games is smaller than NL, and I often have notes on half the players at the tables. I hope to buy a new system soon and would appreciate any recommendations/information regarding what I should get.

Since I've had some success lately in growing my bankroll, I've decided it's time to set some goals. It's something I've never done before and wonder just what kind of goals to set. Hours of play? Number of hands to play? I'm not sure. Leave me your comments and tell me what your goals are.

Anyways, for now my goal is to play 3 hours per day and put in 800 to 1000 hands. I usually play 2 tables of shorthanded RUSH, but occassionally play FR and occassionally try 4 tables. But 2 tables of 6-max RUSH is the norm.

Here are my stats from today's sessions:


And the results graph (not that it matters to you, but it does to me):


If you've made it this far, it's more than I expected. Will try to have more interesting stuff in the future. I plan on posting hands, asking questions, and maybe even having an almost-competent answer or two. If you're a small/microstakes player like me trying to move up, let me know...wouldn't mind making your aquaintance.

In the meantime, thanks for stopping by!
M