The Poker Chronicles

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May 29, 2004

New Haters!

I seem to have a new hater! He left some poorly reasoned (and poorly written) comments on my blog and I am bored so I will respond. Here we go:

I'm glad I decided to check this website out it is really good for a laugh. My assessment of the guy running this site is that he has a very shallow ego.

Good assessment there Sigmund. Much like the rest of your comments it is baseless and unqualified.

After reading many of his posts a couple days ago its obvious that he can't take and criticism he must have been someone who took alot of criticism in his high school days. He can't take it from his family even when they don't know what they're talking about because they don't play poker. You would think that would be enough for him to blow it off. He didn't reason with them or take measures to ease their mind such as investing his money. Instead he just calls them idiots like he does everyone else and talks about leaving his girlfriend to go to vegas.

First of all I never said my family was unsupportive. It was my girlfriend’s family, and I didn't call them idiots. In fact I even said I understood their point of view. Since they are people close to me I choose not to blow them off as you say. However I don’t reason with other people about my choice of careers, and how much money I invest is my own business, not theirs. I do invest my money (though that isn’t helping at all this year) but that is not the topic of the blog.
The topic of the blog is playing poker for a living. I would be untrue to my readers if I simply ignored this aspect of the job. So I wrote an article about it, because that is what I do. Also I was only thinking of temporarily moving away from my girlfriend, not leaving her. She would ideally come out a year after when she gets her national board certification. I certainly do not want to live in LV all my life, as it is no place to raise a family. Not that any of this is relevant anyway.

Then he starts pondering throwing away 10,000 on an entry fee instead of building up.

It is hardly throwing it away, especially considering I would be better than at least 90% of the field. Though instead I chose to conserve my bankroll, which is probably wise in the long run. It is still hard to not play in the WSOP when you want to be a top player.

He'll stay at the 5/10 level his whole life that much is clear. He's taken very few chances at higher levels and gotten worked each time. Now he is already going back down to the 5/10 level because its safer. Its because he can't beat the 15/30 games with regularity. If you can't do that and you're unwilling to stretch yourself how in god's name how are you going to get into really big games??

This is perhaps the most baseless point of your entire comment. When I play in casinos I play $30/$60 or above and have done well at it, which I mention in my articles. Until just recently I haven’t played anything lower than $10/$20 6 max in about 6 months, and if you read my recent articles you would know why I now play $5/$10. I am trying to see if I can profitably play 2 tables at a time, and so far it seems that I can. I never moved up and “got worked”, I moved up and made quite a bit more than I did at lower levels for a few months, which you would know if you had even the reading comprehension of a fifth grader. After that I began focusing mainly on tournaments and have had a few protracted even streaks, but nothing out of the ordinary. You apparently read every one of my posts and somehow didn't understand any of them.

How is this jump going to occur?? My guess is he'll end up like the guy who beat him in the World Series event Mike Laing. If he gets really lucky he'll do what Mike did in his career. He'll probably just end up as the end result.

“He'll probably just end up as the end result” doesn’t even make sense Captain Redundancy. Your writing skills are as poor as your reading comprehension. I’m not sure what you are trying to say here, but if it is that I will be a broke alcoholic my entire life all I have to say is good diagnosis again there Freud. I have more money to my name after one year of playing poker than Mike Laing has after many I am sure. I have played professionally for one year, made over $100k at it, and have never had to ask for backers. I think career wise I am far ahead of Mike.

Is this the part where I'm suppose to challenge you to a game??? I'm on party and ultimatebet. Name is magicman on ultimatebet and
EmpireMaker on party. If you want to sit down at the table I'm at fine. It would be fun to see a pro.

Gee, I can sit in your game. Great challenge there, idiot. If you want to play me heads up on Party feel free to add me to your buddy list, otherwise don’t waste my time. You will get to enjoy seeing a real pro for about a half hour, until you are broke.

If you want to play people for $15/30 heads up so much why do you challenge people from the $5/10 tables. Why don't you just go to the $15/30 tables and sit down at the open ones or the ones with 1 or 2 people. They will play heads up. Does it have to be someone that doesn't usually play for that much. Or do you think you'll lose if you play someone better??

Well I don’t go to $5/$10 tables looking to play heads up, but should I get someone to do it so much the better. I don’t simply go to 1 handed tables because they fill up within minutes. I mostly prefer to play poker one on one, or at least short handed and there is nothing worse than getting in heads up mode and having the table fill up on you. Switching gears that quickly is hard to do, so I simply avoid it whenever possible.
The only reason I even fund my Paradise account is their heads up action, but it is hard to get a game above $3/$6 there. You can often play $10/$20 against one of two or three people, but they are so good that it isn’t worth the time. I don't play to prove something, I play to win money. So it is a much better idea to just draw people I know to be suckers into playing me $15/$30 on Party.
I have found people to play heads up in tournaments and at $10/$20 and $15/$30 games, but never actually at $5/$10 yet. I don’t suspect I ever will find anyone at $5/$10 who will play $15/$30 heads up, and that is perfectly fine by me. And as for playing someone better, feel free to email me and arrange a time.
Also I have gotten a serious question from a reader:

Seriously though, not trying to knock anybody, it seems from your posts that you're playing pretty decent limits and making good bank - do you plan to step up to $30-$60, or $80-$160? I didn't even know they offered limits that high online, I don't have anywhere near the bank or skill so I just scroll right past that part of the lobby.

They offer $30/$60 on Party, but only 2 tables at a time which are perpetually full. Believe me I will throw a party and invite everyone I know the day they remove the limit from the number of tables, since I will finally be able to play short handed $30/$60.
Also both PokerStars and UB have $30/$60, and now that Party has no more interest payment there is no reason for me not to move a good chunk into my Stars account and start running them. My plan is to spend the rest of this month and June working on my $5/$10 experiment. If I find playing 2 tables to be reasonably more profitable than one was (and this will require some guessing since the trail is too short to be very accurate) I will move up to playing 2 $10/$20s for a few months. If I find that I don’t like playing 2 tables I will move to playing 1 $15/$30 6 max instead. The only annoying thing about that is the fact that Party only has 3 $15/$30 6 max tables so I will have to spend time on wait lists.
Also yes, there are $80/$160 games on UB, and $100/$200 games on Stars. I hope to be playing them by the start of next year, mainly on Stars. The games appear to range from very good to very bad, but I only know from what little time I have spent observing,

Posted by themaroon at 7:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I Busted A Chump again

In a previous article I mentioned a sucker named PISTOLGREEK who I had found in a $215 tournament on Party and trash talked into playing me heads up. I took his $700 in about 10 minutes and thought for sure that would be the end of it. Well since then he has been following me around from tournament to tournament trash talking and asking for a rematch. I won’t play anyone heads up while I am playing another game, and since he only ever asked me to play while I was already in a large tournament I never had gotten around to playing him again, though I was anxiously awaiting doing so.
Well today I finally got around to it. I have been watching my buddy list trying to find him for the last couple weeks and today I managed to track him down in a $100 nl game. He agreed to play me so we headed to the $15/$30 private table at about midnight.
At first he bought in for $638, which must have been all he had left in his account. I told him that he would be broke by 12:30 but it didn't even take that long. He got a $500 lead on me real fast but lost it and the rest in a few minutes. Of course I was still trashing him the whole time, making him hate me even more. So I waited while he visited the cashier and to my delight he came back with $2,000. This time I told him he would be broke by 2 a.m., but for the first time in history he made a liar out of me because when he actually went broke the clock read 2:01.
In the end the rake took about $300 leaving me a profit of $2336 in about 2 hours. Not bad at all. It is really funny how I made this guy hate me so much. I don’t know why he would continue playing me either. He has already given me over $3k (plus lost about $500 in rake) and I think he was actually going to buy more if I wanted to play, but 2 hours of heads up had given me a slight headache and I was ready for a break.
You would think if you hated someone you wouldn’t just give them thousands of dollars. Does doing that hurt me in anyway? I guess Jesus did say something to the effect of “it is harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” So maybe this guy just figures if he loses this much to me a few hundred times I will be damned to hell. That’s about the only form of revenge this guy has a shot at too, because he is never going to beat me heads up.

Posted by themaroon at 6:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 28, 2004

Random Bag

I had a rather funny occurrence today on Party Poker. I was playing the $5/$10 6 max games, 2 at a time, when I started making fun of some calling station named bindernutnut. Now you can tell by his screen name that he is a moron, and he played as badly as you would expect a blatant 19 year old McDonald’s employee to. So I am making fun of him while he is losing and he proceeds to buy in for his whole stack, which was about 900.
Of course I keep laughing at him and his pathetic macho display of 900 when he challenges me to play $15/$30 heads up with the usual name calling (words like fag, homo, etc.) and various “yo momma” jokes. He said he wanted to each put up $2,000 which I doubt he even had in his account) and play until it was all gone. People always say this, as if simply saying you will play out your $2,000 locks you into doing it. It is such a retarded idea since nobody on the internet could possible trust someone else to not just leave if they felt like it, but I gave him my standard response which is “I have $11,000 in this account and I won’t leave until you do or I am broke”. This is true as well, because I would not leave until one of us was broke, and I already knew which one of us it would be.
So sure enough I get to the table (which he gave me the wrong password for but I figured out anyway) and he won’t play me. He really just wanted to look like a man in front of everyone at the table (who laughed when I told them what was happening) making the same pathetic gay and mother jokes (see my article about keeping score of trash talk) and not playing. So finally he sits in, shoves a hand at me, wins $45 off of me, and then promptly leaves. I wish I had had anything to call him down with because I knew what he was doing, but I didn't. I am positive if I could have won that hand he would never have left a loser (until I busted him of course) because his fragile ego was far too bruised to allow that.
So if you ever run across bindernutnut on Party be sure to give him my warmest regards. As Amarillo Slim would say, this cowboy was all hat and no cattle. I sure hope someday he actually decides to back up his talk, because I would like to build a new computer (Athlon 64) and $2,000 should more than cover it. Actually since all I need is the processor, motherboard, and ram the $900 in his account would do.

Posted by themaroon at 2:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2004

Meltdown

Well today I had a small meltdown in my experiment. I was playing 2 $5/$10 6 max games when someone started criticizing my trash talking and I immediately (out of reflex) tried to set him up for the heads up match. Of course this doesn’t ever really seem to work at the $5/$10 tables because most people there aren’t willing to risk enough to play $15/$30 heads up and the rake on Party is too high to be playing some lower limits heads up. Maybe I could challenge them to $10/$20 but I doubt many of them would be willing to do that.
So as I am setting all this up I get wrecked on another table, getting pocket aces cracked twice, and a few other bad beats. This amount of bad beats is certainly nothing too amazing when playing with people so stupid, though all of them were violently aggressive with their hands long before they got out on me. It was annoying but certainly nothing out of the ordinary. But all of a sudden my brain shut down. My mind was reeling and everything seemed to be happening far too fast for me to keep up with. I made a number of stupid small mistakes which I would never have made playing one table until I realized what was going on and quit.
I don’t so much mind booking a small loss as I do playing badly. I mean I had some very simple decisions to make and managed to make the wrong ones. I think I just overextended myself trying to trash talk this guy into playing me heads up (I am almost positive this guy is one of the 2+2 crowd) and he wouldn’t take the bait. So I ended up costing myself a few dollars. Oh well, lesson learned.
I think I am going to have to just turn my chat on silent in the future when playing 2 tables. I really hate playing multiples anyway because I am sure I am missing things when I do. At these low limits I am sure it is fine, I can spot these people 20 points and still win the ball game. But whereas before I was making 7 bb/hr at one table (which is about the same as 7 bb/100 hands for any 2+2 devotees in the crowd) I think I will only be making 4 or 5 here. This of course means I will still be more profitable (and results so far are inline with this, even though the low amount of hours makes the experiment far from conclusive) than I was playing 1 game. Perhaps over time I will be able to bring it to where I am making 7 bb/hr per table when playing 2, at which point I will definitely try a third game.
I am still rather doubting that I can maintain a good rate at 2 tables should I try it at $10/$20. People aren’t good there but they are much better than they are at $5/$10 and definitely require more attention. You need to play the players more there, which requires more attention. At the lower limit they can almost all be grouped into one of a few stereotypes and played accordingly, they will rarely deviate from it.

Posted by themaroon at 3:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 24, 2004

Keep Score Of Your Trash Talking

Here is a post from half a year back on another blog that I have. Thought it would fit well in here.
I do a lot of playing poker on the internet and when I play I like to trash talk my opponents. It often makes them play worse than they already do (and they are generally pretty bad to begin with) and adds to my bottom line. Often times my opponents will attempt to trash talk back so I have developed a point system to keep track of who is winning the trash talk wars. Here are the categories and their points values, and remember in all cases in which the point score is unclear the players at the table who do not hate either of the participants (because they were trash talked by a participant in the past) act as a panel of judges.
1. Any well stated insult comparing your opponent’s intelligence to that of a cleverly chosen animal, vegetable, or inanimate object is worth 2 points.
2. Should either trash talker make a lame comeback 2 points are automatically deducted.
3. A well timed “your mother” joke is worth 3 points. A poorly timed your mother joke is worth minus 3 points, as it is just too obvious. Here is an example of a well timed “your mother” bomb I dropped on some unsuspecting chump the other day.
Player x: What does first place get in this tournament?
Me: Your mother.
Remember that the other players at the table act as a panel of judges, and in this case 4 of them (out of 8) typed “lol” so it was a unanimous decision that the joke was well timed. Here is an example of a poorly timed one.
Me: You have the IQ of a jelly doughnut. (Which scores 2 points according to rule 1)
Player: Your mother has the IQ of a jelly doughnut.
No one typed lol, as it was just too blatantly obvious, so minus 2 for Player X. Generally 2 lols from the judges are necessary for it to be a good one.
4. Any player who says “you’re gay” or something to that effect gets an automatic loss. All of their points are taken away and their new total is minus 10, just for purposes of calculating the point difference. However once an opponent has violated this rule cleverly worded and well timed insults to that player’s sexual preference score 2 points, since they are obviously idiotic homophobes and such insults seem to upset them. However badly worded and obvious gay jokes in return are worth minus 5 so be careful when using the gay approach, in the long run it just isn’t worth it.
5. Any insults (cleverly worded of course, that is always the key) which indirectly state that your opponent works for a specific fast food restaurant, gas station, or convenience/department store are worth 3 points. Here is an example:
Me: Man you just lost $100 in that hand. That’s what, about two weeks salary for you at Taco Bell?
6. Poorly worded insults which directly state that your opponent works for a specific fast food restaurant, gas station, or convenience/department store are worth 1 point if your opponent has not already used rule number five, as even poorly timed Burger King jokes are still pretty funny. Here is an example:
Player X: You work at Mc Donald’s.
If however this insult is in response to an insult that falls under categories 5 or 6 it is minus 2 points as it is entirely unoriginal and has lost all of its humor.
7. Any insults that have not been mentioned in these categories will be left to the discretion of the panel of judges. They are worth 2 points for every "lol" they elicit from the judges. Remember that no points are given for lols from railbirds. Should they elicit no lols you will have to find an impartial judge.
8. For every 5 total lols elicited from the judges a player gets an extra 2 points, as long as the judges are impartial to both contestants. Lols from partial judges are to be disregarded.
I hope these rules help anyone else who talks trash on the internet. Play by them and you will win more than your share, and enjoy knowing that your opponent was outwitted.

Posted by themaroon at 6:31 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 23, 2004

Feeling A Little Down Today

Well the WSOP main event kicked off in Vegas today with a record shattering field of roughly 2600 people, half of which play today and half of which will play tomorrow. Some of my top picks are already out and I hear that the big stack is a very drunk Mike Laing (the guy who bad beat me for most of my chips in the $2000 NL WSOP event) with about 140k. Useful information seems to be pretty hard to find right now since it is probably taking forever to count up the chips.
From what I can gather a few of my top picks were already eliminated, most notably Paul Phillips and Daniel Negreanu. Some of my information comes from RGP which is about as reliable as a used KIA so forgive me if anything I say is inaccurate. I read there that Daniel went out due to bluffing at too many unbluffable amateurs (his polite way of saying idiots), but since it was RGP I won’t be surprised if he turns out to still be in with a $100,000 stack. Even if he is out he had a great year, winning 1 event and making money in 4 or 5 others for a total of over $300k.
Paul’s exit is chronicled on his blog, which is one of my favorite poker reads. Apparently he got some shove artist all in and was knocked out when said shove artist hit his straight draw. He had three decent cashes for what appears to be somewhere between $200k and $250k. He got robbed by fate a few times along the way it seems, but I'm sure he is not unhappy with his season.
All in all I am a little saddened that I did not play in the event this year. I am pretty sure that opting to not buy in was the intelligent situation given my bankroll, but it still sucks to be sitting in Ohio wondering what is going on like some sort of internet railbird. I suppose it just gives me all the more reason to log the hours and save the money this upcoming year. I have only been playing for a living for one year (and practically started with nothing) so not yet having the bankroll to simply play every $10,000 tournament (or any for that matter) that comes a long should not be too deflating to my confidence. Actually another year like the one I had this past year and I will be able to hit some of the main events next year. But for now I will have to console myself by playing every $215 tournament on Party. John and I seem to be getting very deep in them one or two times a week lately, so soon we will manage to take one down.

Posted by themaroon at 8:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 22, 2004

The Latest.

Tonight I got 29th or so in the $215 limit tournament on Party, and John (who I split with) made bottom money for a total of about $1150 between us. I hate that John and I both keep getting so close and then our luck flies south, but I suppose you'll have that. Nothing worse than getting down to 3 tables with a decent stack (10-15 big blinds) and losing it in a hand or two but such is the game.
Actually I was amazed that I got as far as I did. I had almost no luck at all. After the first break my stack was 165, and John’s was 260. I had had 3 or 4 big pairs and lost on them all. Luckily it seemed for both of us that every time we were down to 3 or 4 big blinds the idiots would double or triple us up for no good reason so we just kept getting deeper and deeper in the tournament. Neither of us really ever had a big stack. I was average or slightly above a number of times, but average in the late rounds of one of those is 10 big blinds, so it is still a fairly large stack.
After the tournament we went to Steak and Shake. I really wish there was some sort of 4 star restaurant open 24-7 around here where I could go get some really good food late at night because I tire quickly of greasy food. After that I came home and jumped in a couple $5/$10 6 max games to continue my little experiment. After about 15 minutes I realized my brain had been battered, dipped, and fried throughout the tournament so I just took my small $200 win and ran. I went to play chess and blew a good amount of my rating after that losing to bad players who could never beat me if I were awake.
Lately I have found myself tired all the time. I think it is because I spend every waking hour reading, playing chess, or playing poker. Those things just drain you mentally, especially since what I read is often books on chess or poker. I think I really should cut my chess playing, since it is never going to generate me any money and uses up brain power. I do enjoy the game greatly but I would probably be much better off if I only did it on days when I am not going to play poker. My rating would definitely be much higher but you don’t get anything for that so I never really cared very much about it.
The only good thing about playing chess during a poker day is it seems to be a fairly good barometer for how well my brain is functioning. If I play well in chess I will almost always play well in poker, and the same when I play poorly. It is definitely easier to phone it in when playing poker than it is when you are playing chess, since the competition is so weak. In chess the rating system is somewhat handicapped so that you can’t attain a very good rating just by beating a bunch of people who suck. So if I am rated 1550 and play against someone rated 1300 and lose my rating gets slammed, whereas if I beat them I will only win a few points. If this happens it can take a few days just to get my rating back to where it was, so playing badly for a day can be disastrous. In poker there is no handicap, so even if I am playing below my normal level as long as I am not playing worse than my opponents (which would require me to be drunk, high, tired, and talking on the phone against the people on Party Poker) I am still a winning player or at worst a small loser. In chess if you are rated 1600 and are playing like a 1300 player you will end up losing in the long run, no matter who you play against, even if they are only rated 1100.
Well I normally try to give my posts some sort of ending sentence so it doesn’t seem like I just stopped writing in the middle and posted, but I am too tired and don’t feel like thinking one up today. So I am going to go take a long hot bath and read Amarillo Slim’s book over again. Have fun.

Posted by themaroon at 6:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 21, 2004

RGP

Well the experiment is continuing. I do not have any set amount of hours of play time before I determine whether or not it was a success, but I will probably run at least 200 hours of it. Seeing as I get about 200 hands per hour that is almost as good as playing 1000 hours in a casino. This should be long enough to get my hourly rate within a decent range and allow me to compare it to my normal $10/$20 6 max rate. If the experiment turns out to be a roaring success as it seems to be so far I will give it a shot at the $10/$20 tables too. The people at these $5/$10 tables are insanely passive and incredibly stupid though so I do not know if it will work at $10/$20 6 max. As bad as everyone there may be they are still far better than these people at $5/$10.
The only thing I miss about $10/$20 was the ability to trash talk people into playing me heads up $15/$30. It doesn’t seem that anyone at a $5/$10 table is willing to play that high, and given the exorbitant rake at Party when playing heads up I am not going to play it below $10/$20. One guy today said he would do it then backed out at the last minute, and that is as close as I have gotten. I also do a little less trash talking now as it is somewhat hard to focus well on both games and engage in too much conversation, but I still manage to do a bit. I was starting to think I should maybe just quit altogether but then a hand came up that reminded me of its other benefits.
In the hand I had pocket 10s and raised under the gun only to be reraised by some dunce I had been bad mouthing for a while. A perpetual calling station called as did the big blind so I just called and the flop came J 10 5 rainbow. Two more worthless cards came, with me and the reraiser capping every street and the calling station pushing his favorite button each time. Sure enough the reraiser had A J off. He capped flop, turn, and river with one pair. So I ended up taking down a $250 + pot, which is huge for a $5/$10 game.
Now any sane individual may have capped the flop and even raised me on the turn, but when I came back over just about anybody with any sense would have slowed down. Not this guy, he came right back over, then raised me on the river and capped it when I reraised. Why? Because I had gotten his ego involved. My insulting his play made him want to beat me so much that it was all he could think about. It was for the same reason that he rebought later when he went broke.
People always say things to me about how I shouldn’t trash talk. They say it will make players play better or just leave the table. Both of these are so untrue, as it has the exact opposite effect. I was reading Amarillo Slim’s book again today (not often I read a book twice) and he explained it best when he said “The more you can get someone to want to beat you, the more likely you are to make him emotional, so that his ego gets in the way of his brain.” This is much better advice than the “don’t tap on the glass” crap you will read in a Sklansky book (and that every idiot on Party seems to have memorized) when it comes to online poker.
Also this week I have had a blast flaming away at the idiots on RGP. These people are so clueless. RGP, for those who don’t know, is a newsgroup (rec.gambling.poker) about poker and is pretty much the world’s number one source for poker misinformation. If you ever want to see a bunch of people who couldn’t beat a $1/$2 game trade advice on how they should have played textbook hands in $11 sit ‘n go tournaments, this is the place to find it. In addition to being bad at poker most of them probably couldn’t write a C paper for a sixth grade English class either. When you are writing something that potentially thousands of people are going to read you should at least be coherent. Many of them write in all caps, use zero punctuation, and have one run-on sentence after another. There was one particularly insidious article this past week by some guy who tried to play poker for a living, could only make $42k a year at it, and went to some finance job where he is getting paid over $80k. How anyone can get paid $80k a year and not know the difference between “then” and “than” is beyond me. So I obviously couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask how he managed to get his MBA without being able to write better than a 4th grader and somewhere in my post I ended a sentence in a preposition.
Now here is the funny part, where you get to see what sheep these people are. Some dumb bitch made fun of my ending a sentence in a preposition and at least 10 people chimed in about how witty she was and how it put me in my place. The only problem was that I actually know the English language and happen to know that a sentence in a preposition is perfectly acceptable English. I recommended that they Google for “end sentence in a preposition” and if they did they would have seen that the first 3 links are all sites that explain the origin of this “rule” and how it is not in fact a rule at all. I got some more good material out of it all for some more flames though. What a way to pass the time.

Posted by themaroon at 6:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 20, 2004

Another Day

Well tonight I managed to make it pretty deep into the $162 limit tournament with a stack when 2 people with dominated hands hit 2 pair against my top pair with AK. So I ended up finishing just shy of the money which I seem to do often lately, except for the times when I finish nowhere close to the money.
It is truly amazing sometimes how you can play at the same table for 2 hours, not play on single hand voluntarily, raise under the gun, and get called by such hands as QJ and 33. On Party in the early rounds I pretty much just play extremely tight and open it up a bit when it gets close to show time. I am really convinced that simply playing tight can get you in the money enough to show a profit on this site, as long as you know what tight actually means. In fact even the idiots who think limping with KJ under the gun is consistent with tight play might be able to show a profit as long as that is the worst thing they do.
In the same tournament my friend John took the worst beat I have ever seen. He had pocket aces, flopped a set, bet, and got called by some dunce with 99. Sure enough both remaining nines in the deck came on the board giving John aces full and his opponent four of a kind. John was about an 832 to 1 favorite to win this pot according to my calculations. I will not be surprised if I live the rest of my life and never see a beat this bad again.
Also I think I may have met Peter Costa. He is a well known British player who has won a few major events. At first the fellow was saying he won this tournament which I looked up online and found Peter Costa was the winner of. Obviously nobody believed him at first and John came in the chat and was making fun of him. So the guy emailed my friend, gave his phone number, and talked to him for quite some time. It turns out that this fellow is either Peter Costa or someone who knows every single detail about Peter, has the accent, has a girl willing to pretend she is his wife Leah (which is Peter’s wife’s name and is part of his Party name), and is a decent player. So in the end we think it is really Peter. I find it rather strange that he would give out his phone number but I guess he just likes talking to new people or something.

Posted by themaroon at 6:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 18, 2004

Brian Mulholland Is A Dunce

I http://www.cardplayer.com/poker_magazine/archives/showarticle.php?a_id=14016 in Card Player magazine today by Brian Mulholland which is 100% inaccurate. The article was about players passing chips to each other when they win a pot. This is a common occurrence in home games but is banned in most cardrooms. It is banned for many reasons but not the one Brian Mulholland suggests.
His article begins by explaining the rule against splashing the pot. Suppose you bet 6 chips and your opponent splashes his call in which, unbeknownst to you is only 5 chips. Your opponent here has a tremendous edge over you and sure enough if every opponent splashed every bet you would go home a big loser. In fact it wouldn’t take that many splashes short on chips to destroy your edge. This is why casinos ban splashing the pot, and rightly so.
The author continues by saying that passing chips back and forth has the same effect on the game because an opponent who calls the river has a substantial chance of getting a rebate if their partner is in the river too. His example sites a $9/$18 game where seats 1 and 3 have a deal where when one wins a pot he passes $18 to the other. Suppose you are involved in a showdown with these two players. The author claims that calling would really cost one player $12 given that the other one was going to call too. I am curious what sort of dartboard he used to come up with this figure, but it is completely inaccurate. It will cost your opponent $18 in the long run, just as it does you.
Let’s suppose this situation occurs 3 times and in each time the winner takes down a $100 pot. So seat 1 wins $100 once, gives seat 3 $18. Seat 3 wins $100 once giving seat 1 $18. You win $100 once and keep it. All 3 players net $100 income, just as if no passing went on. If Mr Mulholland’s theory that it only cost them $12 where did this mythical six dollar edge come from? Not from you, you still netted $100. Both of your opponents still netted $100, so it didn’t come from them. I don’t think the house just threw $6 to each opponent when they lost. He just does not take into consideration that the $6 edge is coming from their partner, who has to pass $18 whenever he wins. So their partner is losing $6. And neither of them are winning $6 from or losing $6 to you.
I think the funniest quote of the article has to be “Many players, of course, are unaware of such considerations, while others are aware and simply choose not to think of it "that way."” In reality the truth is that many players have more understanding of mathematics than the average sixth grader and know that such concepts don’t exist. Not the one who wrote this article though. I have never been a fan of the Mulhollands’ writing but this article is exceptionally bad, even for one of them. Next time you guys want to write an article about anything mathematical run it by Sklansky first so you don’t make an ass of yourself.
When chips are not put in the pot due to splashing the missing chips are effectively coming out of your stack. Suppose they short the pot $10 every time and win half the time. That means you are losing $5 every time. The money is coming directly from you to them because of their cheating. In the above case the money is not coming from you as the author suggests, it is coming from their partner. This makes the two scenarios apples and oranges and therefore the article in no way answers the question that prompted it, namely “Why should passing chips be banned?”
I am not endorsing chip passing, as I think it should not be allowed in a casino. Not for fabricated mathematically unsound reasons such as this garbage (you would think Card Player would have some sort of fact checker to catch this sort of thing) but for a few other reasons. Even though it is not mathematically costing you any money (like splashing fewer chips than are required does) it does make it easier for the second opponent to call which forces you to adjust your strategy. Also let’s suppose only one of your opponents is in on the river. Now a river call costs them $18 whether they win or lose, thus negatively affecting their pot odds. Thus you are more likely to be able to bluff (your opponent will be less likely to call in very borderline situations when he will lose $18 even if he is correct) but you are less likely to succeed when value betting. All of these things change the mechanics of the game, which is not good. Serious players should not have to deal with needless changes in strategy. So while it is not directly money out of your pocket as claimed in the magazine (as splashing is) it can be money out of your pocket in indirect ways.
Also suppose that seat 1 wins 5 pots and passes $90 to seat 3. Now seat 3 leaves (never having passed any back) and seat 1 gets low and goes all in. He should now have $90 more than he does and be able to be all in. Again this could be money out of your pocket indirectly. So there are a number of actual reasons why this practice should not be allowed. Just none sited in the article entitled “Splashing and Pushing — Two Sides of the Same Chip”, which should be titled “Splashing and Pushing — Two things that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.” Or it could be titled “Why Card Player should replace about 50% of their writers with people who have a clue.”

Posted by themaroon at 1:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 16, 2004

Brand New Bag

I was talking to John the other day about the merits of playing one table or multiple tables. He is an ardent supporter of playing multiple, while I have been almost militantly opposed to playing any more than one for the last 6 months or so. I suppose it is due to the fact that I have had so much success at the ring games doing so. However when talking to John I started to realize that any more when I play just one game I do often find myself bored, reading articles on the web or chatting on AIM with someone when I could probably just focus the same amount of attention on a second game. So I decided to run a little scientific experiment to see whether or not running multiple tables is a good idea.
So for the next month or two I am going to run 2 $5/$10 6 max tables non stop. While doing so I am going to refrain from chatting (which I do continuously while playing one game) since I very much doubt I am going to sucker anyone at a $5/$10 table into playing heads up $15/$30 with me anyway. I am going to just concentrate on the games and see if I can read my players well enough to eek out a better win rate than I did when I played one $5/$10 table at a time.
So far I like playing two tables. You get to see twice as many flops this way so you are in action quite often. With the games being as fast paced as they are this sometimes makes it tough and I have to work on just slowing down and taking my time. I always try to play very fast but sometimes this leads to small mistakes. Also you do take twice as many bad beats but I have an iron constitution for them any more and even if I didn’t I would have no time to dwell on them.
I feel like I am still able to read my opponents very well. People on Party usually can be stereotyped very accurately, especially at this low level. You have your typical calling stations, your typical maniacs, and a few of what I call “random betters” whose betting patterns are very strange (and very bad) but easy to read because you understand the flaws in their logic. They don’t understand at all that the idea is to get the money in when you have the best hand and put as little as possible in when you don’t. They will do things like limp with a black pair of aces, just call a raise preflop, wait for the board to come 6 7 8 10 with 3 diamonds, and then start getting aggressive. They are the kind of people who turn mediocre flushes and just call then raise the river, even if a fourth card of their flush suit comes. They are the kind of people who will go nuts at you with middle pair one hand when you obviously have a straight and then just call you down with top two the next hand. All of their actions are controlled by fear, either fear of losing the hand or fear of losing bets. So you just look at their action, figure out what they fear, and you know what they have.
All of the players try to sandbag far too much and often let you off cheaply when you have a second best monster. When the flop comes 997 and someone check-calls you then check-raises you on the turn you know right where they are. Also if they get aggressive with you on the flop they definitely do not have the nine and often not even the seven. They all feel that this is a great bluff opportunity, but really it is a very bad one because you know that they wouldn’t make any aggressive action with a 9. At the same time if you get aggressive with your trips they put you on a bluff and will go nuts with poor holdings. Also if the board comes with a flush and they get aggressive they probably just have the ace of that suit or a pair or something. A flush they would always slow play, no matter how small. There are a few people who violate the above rules, but once you note them you just be careful with them when monsters flop.
So far I have only played about 10 hours of my experiment and am up about $1000, so my hourly rate is $100 which is slightly better than I used to make at one $5/$10 table. However 10 hours means nothing so we will see where the future takes us. I do think though that I should be able to maintain at least $100 per hour, if not more. After a few hundred hours (200 hours of this is like 800 hours in a casino because you see so many more hands) if I am finding my win rate to my liking I will try doing the same for $10/$20. Given that people are so much more aggressive there I may not be able to pull it off, but I will at least give it a shot.

Posted by themaroon at 8:28 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 13, 2004

I Busted A Chump

Often lately my trash talking seems to be drawing suckers into playing heads up $10/20 or $15/$30 hold’em with me. I have won every time with the exception of a couple very small hit and runs. Some people when they sit down at $15/$30 heads up are just trying to win $100 or $200, which is pretty easy to do. They will probably do that too, maybe as much as 1/2 of the time, but the one time they lose they will lose $1k or more so it is a winning proposition for me.
Yesterday my friend and I were playing in this tournament when we came across some douche bag named GoCavs. He was bragging about how good he was because he won $25k in a tournament. The funniest part about that is that about 10-20 people every week win that much on Party Poker, and 90% of them are clueless jackasses. Bigger Party tournaments have anywhere from 800 to 2000 people in them, maybe 5-10 of which are good, 20 or 30 are mediocre, and the rest are complete idiots.
Winning $25k in ring games on Party is an accomplishment, winning it in a tournament is not.
So we watched him and he was making one atrocious play after another. Of course we started railing on him (as we always do) and this guy just would not quit fighting back. John and I aren’t the 2 people you want to get in a battle of wits with either, especially when you have the IQ of a cheese grater like this guy did. Sure enough we put him on tilt and he was out of the tournament in short order. The whole time I was of course telling him that he sucks (which he did, badly) and how I would bust him if he would ever play me heads up.
So today I am talking to John and he tells me that GoCavs is at his table. So I go there just to rail on him, and after I have him really worked up I challenge him to the old $15/$30 heads up. Of course I have bruised his ego far too much by now to back down and he agreed to play me, but only at $10/$20. At first he said he was only going to play a half hour, which often would be more than enough for me to clean out his account but he had phenomenal luck, hitting one straight after another on the flop with me hitting top pair with an ace or better every time. So he actually managed to last 1.5 hrs before I cleaned out his $600, at which point he quit.
The funniest part about the whole thing is that it never occurred to him that I am far better at poker than he is. The reason for it is because I was trash talking him. Just about every well respected poker book says that pros treat their opponents well and don’t make fun of them because it makes them play better or just leave the table. First of all this is completely wrong on the internet for a list of reasons. First of all people don’t know how to play better. When you insult them they aren’t just going to magically turn into Doyle Brunson. Second bruising their ego makes them want to beat you more and therefore overplay hands even worse than they should. Third they very rarely leave because they want to prove to you that they are good. Fourth in the rare instances that they do leave (which is not even an option in tournaments) another idiot takes their place.
In the case of GoCavs my trash talking had the following effects.
1. It made him want to play me heads up to take my money.
2. It made him not even consider that I was actually a good player rather than just an egomaniac.
3. It Jedi Mind-Tricked him into playing 1 hour longer than he had wanted to so I could get all of his money.
4. Every time I made fun of how badly he played a hand he mentally noted that he played it perfectly. This made him continue to make the same atrocious plays. It is a perfect example of reverse psychology, you tell them that they are an idiot and you are much better than them and they believe the opposite.
I also had a very similar experience last week with some idiot named PISTOLGREEK. He was one of those idiots who types in all caps, says “u” instead of you, “ur” instead of you’re. Any time you see somebody who types those shortcuts or in all caps you know they have the IQ of a cardboard box and should not hesitate to play them heads up.
All of the time I get people who tell me that I shouldn’t trash talk because they read it in a book somewhere. I have made a few thousand alone this month just off of heads up with people who wanted to bust me because of trash talking. I think Doyle said in his book that people who trash talk are all talk, and while this is 99% true that other 1% can be fatal to your bankroll.
I think that even though I haven’t exactly been having much luck in tournaments and ring games in the last month I have been having more fun than ever. It seems a few times I week I get to smack down suckers who think they are better than they are. If somebody who was actually very good at heads up wanted to wreck me for a k or 2 all they would have to do is come sit at my table, speak with the English mastery of the average 8 year old, play badly for a little bit, act like they got offended at my trash talk, then play me heads up.
So the moral of today’s story is judge people’s poker skill by their play, not their talk. Just because they say they brag doesn’t mean they suck. It is highly likely that they do, but don’t go playing them heads up unless you are sure. But if their name is PISTOLGREEK or GoCavs then go ahead and whip them.

Posted by themaroon at 8:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 12, 2004

Handicapping the WSOP

I was looking today at an online cardroom that has odds posted for players to bet on the winner of this years WSOP. Whoever made these odds either has absolutely zero clue about poker, or just assumes that nobody else has any clue. Here is why. If I had to pick my top 3 contenders for the WSOP title I would pick (in this order) Daniel Negreanu, Barry Greenstein, or Gus Hansen. Daniel is my first choice because he is a stellar player, seems to be running pretty well, definitely wants it as much as anyone, and from his writings seems to be pretty much on top of the world in his personal life. Barry Greenstein has been a man on a mission this year, winning a couple major events and hitting top table in others. And Gus, well he is Gus. The guy is just a tank.
So what are the odds for these players? Barry has one of the lowest payouts with 220:1 odds. Gus Hansen is paying 270:1, and Daniel Negreanu pays 358:1. Look at that again. 358:1.
These seems moderately absurd that a guy who keeps hitting top table in WPT events, has already cashed in 4 WSOP events this year (with one win) could be that much higher. It is even more absurd when you consider the following odds:
1. Gabe Kaplan (the actor): 250:1. I'm sure he has a better shot of winning than Gus Hansen.
2. David Sklansky: 300:1. Has this guy ever even won a tournament before? I wouldn’t take 900:1 on him. Don’t get me wrong, when you want to know how to beat a $10/$20 game he is the man to ask. But a major event, no way.
3. Louis Asmo: 350:1. He has a bracelet from years ago and plays in many major events, and is probably a winning player. But just going on record alone I'm going to have to pick Daniel over this guy with similar odds.
4. Paul Magriel: 300:1. You remember that goofy looking guy on the WSOP the first year they called “22” who always said quack quack? Apparently just that one money finish makes him better than Daniel Negreanu.
5. Johnny Chan: 75:1. If Jesus Christ came back to earth and decided to play in the 2000 man WSOP I would take him at 75:1. Other than that nobody, and I mean nobody, could possibly be worth such poor odds. At one time he was 225:1, which means people must have bet the hell out of him to get down to 75.
So if I were forced to buy anybody I would buy Daniel. He is definitely the best odds you will get on that site. To be honest though I am not sure that even he is a good bet, since he would have to have 6 times the chance of winning (if the tournament has 2000 people as I think it will) as the average player, and I am not sure that anybody has that. The odds on everybody else are really just absurd. They would be great given a smaller field but with 2000 people nobody really has that great a chance of coming in 1st.

Posted by themaroon at 5:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 11, 2004

Hand Du Jour

OK loyal readers, I have never done this before but I found a hand today pretty amusing so I am going to post it for you. Ready?
I am on the big blind with A(d)7(d) in $10/$20 6 max on Party Poker. There are 3 limpers and the SB raises so I call, all call behind me. The flop comes 2(d)3(d)4(d) giving me an ace high flush and the SB leads into me. Now generally I don’t slow play flushes on the flop, even ace high ones, but this time I felt it was a good idea since I had 3 people behind me, none of whom were probably drawing to anything that could beat me other than maybe a runner runner full house. If one of them had a set or something they would probably raise the flop, at which point I would just go nuts with the hand. So I figured that it would be best to just let them draw at their hands and hopefully hit a straight or 2 pair.
Anyway 2 people called behind me and the turn was something like the 8(s) that made no real difference. The SB led out again and since I felt both of the players behind me were likely drawing dead to me (and if they weren’t they would certainly raise allowing me to re-raise) I just smooth called again. Slow playing the turn is even rarer than slow playing the flop for me but again I felt it was the play to make.
The river was what I thought was the worst card I could see, the Q(d). The SB checked and I bet out, thinking that it was unfortunate that I didn’t just pop the turn before this action killer came off the deck. That is one reason why I almost never slow play flushes, because if you have the nut flush another one of the suit will often kill your action, and if your flush is not the nuts it will often kill your hand. I was rather surprised when the fish to my left raised the flop, the button folded, and the SB thought for a while and cold called $40. I of course re-raised and the fish capped it. The button folded and I now knew what I was up against. This guy was not aggressive enough to be capping a K(d) here. Even though I was very sure I was up against the straight flush, on Party Poker you have to account for what I called the “random idiot surprise factor” or RISF for short. What this means is that since most people on that site are atrocious at poker they often have no clue how strong there hand is, and even when they do they often don’t play it accordingly. They aren’t doing it to trick you either, they really just have no idea what to do.
Let’s put it this way. Suppose you were playing poker against someone who didn’t know what cards they held. You could never get a reliable read on them. They might play a hand as if they had AA, but since they don’t know what they have your read of AA would be wrong. On Party people know what 2 cards they have, but they often don’t know the strength of their hand. When you read people what you are really doing is figuring out how strong their hand is. Sometimes when you deduce that you can determine exactly what they have (sometimes even the specific 2 cards) because only one hand could be of that particular strength. These times are rare, but normally against weak opponents you can determine a range of hands, use your intuitive knowledge of math to determine the chance that your hand is better than theirs if it falls within the range of hands that they could be holding, compare that to the odds the pot is laying you, and play accordingly.
Now suppose someone greatly overvalues their hand and plays it as if it were much better than it really is. You would then read them for a much better hand and possibly be wrong. This doesn’t mean that you should call necessarily, just that you should factor the chances of your being wrong into your decision.
Since the pot was laying me over 20-1 (and the RISF means that even your best reads will often be off as much as 25% of the time against people as bad as the ones at this table) I had to call even though I was virtually certain I was beat. Where as losing $20 here is not good, giving away the 400 and some dollars in the pot is a catastrophe. So I called and was unsurprised to see the straight flush take the pot from me.
To be honest I was almost lucky in a way. Had the guy with the straight flush raised on the flop (as he should have) I would have capped every street and been very surprised when he beat me. So it would have cost me $90 more. I am also certain that the SB would never have folded (I think he may have had QQ or JJ with the J(d)) on the flop or turn so it would have cost him quite a bit more and possibly been the biggest pot I have ever seen at one of those games.
I really don’t like his slow play, especially on the turn. In his situation nobody could have beaten him no matter what came. The odds of somebody hitting something on the river that they would go nuts with are slim. The only way that happens is if somebody has the A(d), and they weren’t going to fold that for $40 anyway. Also there is the chance that the SB or I flopped a flush and are slow playing it. That is a slim chance, but definitely something to account for. I really just can’t think of any situation where slow playing would net him more than playing it fast, and is it turned out it cost him somewhere between $90 and $150 dollars to do so. With a bettor and a caller (and 2 people behind you) you should open up there. If he were in my position with just a bettor and 3 people left to act behind him I don’t think it would have been fine to slow play the flop.
So there you have the hand of the day. It is the most interesting one I have seen in a while, so enjoy.

Posted by themaroon at 12:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

My Bad Streak Rages On...

Well I think I can now officially say that I am on the worst streak yet of my poker career. Over a one month period I am actually down a few thousand. I am also even now for almost 100 hours of 10/20 6 max. None of this might sound so bad to B&M players but in online poker (which much of it has been) a month is equivalent to three months of casino poker. Having a three month bad streak in real life (or a one month one online) is not the most uncommon occurrence and I know full well that if I am going to be a professional poker player I am going to have to deal with much worse.
Bad streaks are so tough to deal with when you play for a living because they test your objectivity. So in reviewing my play over the last few months I have come to a few conclusions.
1. I didn’t play as well as I could have in a number of tournaments. I think my trip to the WSOP and playing with my friend have both helped me to rectify this quite a bit, and I feel that for the most part I am back at my A game. At the WSOP I played VERY well in the single table satellites. I had a little bit of a tough time adapting to competent players in the main event but once I did I felt that I played very well. I look forward to my next major event.
2. As far as $10/$20 6 max goes I do not think that there is a major flaw in my game. I do think that there have been a few times where excessive amounts of bad beats have set me off my A game (and one time even on tilt) but this has not happened very much. Playing this game has been nothing short of amazing lately. I seem to hit one monster after another, have some maniac cap it at me with 3 outs or so, and lose when he hits the river after putting in $100.
3. My heads up play has been insanely good. I have won quite a bit playing heads up lately. I was looking through my StatKing and I win something around 7 out of 8 times when I play heads up. I don’t count hit and runs (one guy hit and ran me for $150 playing $15/$30 heads up) and I think this may account for some of it. I define a hit and run as any session lasting less than 15 minutes except when one player goes broke and doesn’t buy back in. I of course never (and I do mean never) go all in when playing live limit games so I will never go broke to an opponent in under 15 minutes, but they sure do go broke to me that fast sometimes. The last guy bought in for $750 playing $15/$30 with me and lost it in less than 10 minutes.
So now I am at a rather tough spot because my confidence has been shaken a little (though it is definitely still there) and I have to play through it. One of the first turning points in my poker career was back when I was in Atlantic City around the time of the Borgata Open. I was getting cremated in the $10/$20 games (which I was playing because I had taken a shot at $20/$40 and gotten blasted) and was feeling pretty down when Big Al gave me a piece of advice. “The best way out of a shooting slump is to keep shooting”. How right he was. I immediately went right back to the game and won $1800 ( a fortune in a $10/$20 game with no kill in 8 hours) and got myself even for the past few days. Since that time I have employed this marvelous cliché and it has proven itself true. So that is what I am going to do right now, just keep shooting until I am out of this slump. And then all hell is gonna break loose.

Posted by themaroon at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 9, 2004

The Plan

I am back from my brief poker sabbatical. I had to take a couple of days off since I had played almost every day for a month. To be honest I would like to take a week or two off and maybe travel around Europe or something but I don’t have any friends who don’t have job obligations and do have the money to be able to go. Most of my friends also don’t have the same interests I do and would not be much fun anyway. I may just go when the WPT goes to Paris in July, just to hang out in my favorite city and win some Euros. I would at least know some Americans there.
During my break I have done a lot of thinking about poker career, mainly where I would like to go and how to get there. I hope in the next 5 years or so to be a world class player and be able to play in (and beat) the white chip games that go on at the Bellagio and most major events. I am certainly under no illusion that I am anywhere near good enough to beat them now but I feel I truly have the potential to do so. To get there will require two things, much practice and a very large bankroll. In thinking of ways to get there I have come up with a few solid plans.
1. Stick mainly to internet poker. I suppose this would do somewhat. I could move up to playing $30/$60 short games on PokerStars and from there try to win enough to play the $100/$200 games that are short handed. Short handed is so much better than full games because you learn so much more about the game. Being forced to make so many decisions in marginal situations is very good practice and will help you very much in no-limit games as well. From there I could possibly move up to the bigger NL ring games on UB. The disadvantage to this strategy is the lack of any games other than hold’em, since most of the bigger games in real life are mixed games. You can’t just jump from $25/$50 NL hold’em games online to the white chip rotation games and expect to win right away, but since you could earn a high six figure salary (or even low seven) at those online games you could just do that for a couple years then simply take the hit in the white chip games until you learn. I don’t think I have the constitution for that though.
2. Continue on the road I am on. I currently play many internet tournaments and a decent amount of ring games to provide an income. I also try to play in internet satellites to major events like the Party Poker Million, the WSOP, and a few others. I am going to throw a lot of money at these this year and try to play in all 3 of the online cardroom-sponsored events. Eventually I hope to win a fairly large prize in one of these main events which will allow me to play higher limits while traveling and work my way up to the big games.
3. Spend all of my money chasing that big payday. This is probably the least sensible and definitely the most tempting route to take. I have enough money to play the last few events of the WSOP and maybe another large event or two. The only reason I likely will not take this route is that I have played 1 WPT event and 1 WSOP event and made a whopping zero dollars and zero cents total. This really doesn’t mean anything other than it is definitely possible that I could play in events until my bankroll is gone without ever making a penny.
So I think I will continue down path number 2 as I have for a year. Even if I don’t win in any of the big events I play next year and make the same amount I did this year I will be more than comfortable. And as soon as I hit that big win Chip, Doyle, and Barry better be prepared because I'm coming for them.

Posted by themaroon at 9:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 8, 2004

Responses

Got a few questions in my comments section, and since I don’t have a proper forum thought I would answer them here.

I read those articles also and thought it sounded a little weak and passive, and altogether too simplified. I have thought about playing in the low buy in multi-tables at Party and was wondering how the competition is? I assume it's pretty soft, and any decent player coud make the money with decent cards and a good solid aggressive strategy.

The competition in Party tournaments ranges from very soft ($162 buy in and above) to holy shit I can’t believe anybody could play this badly ($22-$109 tournaments). Anybody with a basic understanding of tournaments could be a long term winner in them with great ease simply by playing tight and not risking their stack foolishly.

Did PokerSavvy send you a threatening email telling you to take back what you said? :)

Actually the publisher did send me an email saying my criticism was “sensible and well-considered” out. He did not threaten me (“I’ll find you at the WSOP and beat you up”) or ask for a retraction. He did however say he wasn’t going to change his domain name as I suggested and I can hardly blame him. He also said that he doesn’t always agree with what his writers write but respects them and their opinions, which sounds like a good publisher to me.
Because of his professional attitude I took another look at his website. I found most of the advice on there to be reasonable and based on sound theory, even when I don’t necessarily agree with it. In poker there are many different viewpoints each of which can have their own merits. There are however some that are just plain wrong and contrary to everything that is known about poker theory, and that is where the article about internet tournaments stands. The theory that you should play to hit top 3 (rather than just trying to make money) is much like the theory of evolution. It is not really something that can be proved, but it is so blatantly obvious to anyone informed that to not accept it is to not accept reality.
Also many of the writers on their site are professional writers, so the site is well written through and through. Much of it is humorous and the majority of it doesn’t even seem to deal in advice. There are many reviews of books, TV shows, and cardrooms. All in all I recommend taking a look at it. Or I will find you at the World Series and beat you up.

Posted by themaroon at 5:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 6, 2004

Pokersavvy

I actually took a look at the site I wrote about in my previous article (PokerSavvy) and it turns out to be a very good site other than the articles about internet tournament strategy. Some of the articles actually have very insightful points in them, particularly the one on big bet ring games, and most of the articles are very well written. It appears that their staff is made up of experienced writers, most of whom are experienced poker players as well and offer sound advice so I retract my statement about changing their domain name. I actually will probably add the site to my links when I get around to it. Just be sure to ignore the article on tournament strategy, or at least only read it to get an idea of how your weak opponents will play.

Posted by themaroon at 5:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 4, 2004

Worst Article Ever

I think I have finally found the worst internet article on poker tournament strategy of all time. It is at pokersavvy.com, which in my opinion should be called pokeradvicewrittenbypeoplewhohavenofuckingclue.com. Here is the first quote, which heads off page 2 of the article and was my first indication that I was reading some seriously useless garbage.

First, you should put aside any notion that you're playing to win the tournament. By focusing on winning -- finishing first -- you aim at an unnecessarily small target. If, however, your goal is to make it into the money, your target is much larger and considerably easier to hit.

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr WRONG! There are exactly 3 pieces of useful information in T.J. Cloutier’s book on tournaments, and one of them is that your goal in a tournament is to finish in top 3 because that is where the money is. Actually since T.J. wrote that book tournament payout structure has been greatly flattened, so now it may be more advisable to say top 4 or 5, but that is beside the point. Let’s take the Sunday $215 on Party Poker as an example. Last week 130 spots (out of about 1500 players) paid, with first being $63.2k. Bottom money was just over $300, meaning you would profit about $100 each time you hit that. How many times do you have to hit bottom money to equal one first place? 630. Lets say that you average finishing middle money, 60th place or so. That pays $1100, for a $900 profit. Now to equal $63k you would have to hit the money 70 times. That means you would have to do it every single weekend for a year and a half (impossible) if you averaged making middle money.
The “I just want to make the money” philosophy is one of the worst attributes plaguing the idiots on Party Poker. It is so funny how it takes forever for the 10 or 20 people just before the money to get knocked out, but once you are in the money 50 people will drop out in 15 minutes. I don’t think I have ever hit the money in a Party Poker tournament and not gotten at least half way to the final table because people just get knocked out so quickly.
In part 2 the clueless author goes on to say that you should avoid tough decisions in the early levels of a tournament. You should in reality just learn to make the correct decisions in tough situations. He lumps all pairs between 22-JJ in the same category, saying they are easy to play when you flop a set and easy to get away from when you don’t. Anybody who thinks that the top few pairs in that group or QQ are easy to play thinks so because they have no idea how to play them. JJ and QQ are often the toughest hands to play in a tournament, because you have such a good hand, but not a great one. Especially given the propensity to shove with anything AJ or better that people on Party possess, hands like JJ can get very tricky. He then continues with:

If you find yourself below 500 in the first 4 levels, your only goal is to double up. That means that you are only going to make plays where you double up or bust. Of the three options available to you pre-flop, calling is the least desirable. Why? Because you are not in the "let's see a flop" mode. If you waste valuable chips on calls where you hope to see the flop, you are wasting equity. Doubling up from 300 is significantly less meaningful than doubling from 500. Unless you hold A-A or K-K and your intention is to trap an opponent, calling isn't an option.

Wrong again. In the first level suppose you are down to 500 chips (big blind 15 chips) and you have 66 on the button with many limpers. What do you do? Also there is nothing wrong with stealing small pots when you are low, in fact it is more meaningful than when you have a big stack. 500 in the early stages of a tournament online is not that small of a stack, in fact it is somewhere between 10 and 30 big blinds on Party. If you found yourself in a tournament with 2 tables left and a stack equal to 30 big blinds you should be ecstatic. Why are you so anxious to double or go bust in the early rounds with the same stack? Ready for more misinformation? Here we go.

Going all-in will be your first choice on most playable hands. You are going to shove your stack into the pot with just about any pair. But use common sense. There are situations where you might exercise caution. An example would be if you held 7-7 and the action before you is a raise and a re-raise all-in. Faced with this action, you might want to think about looking for another spot.
What about raising? Here is where you are going to find a lot of controversy. You can go ahead and raise with medium pairs, or even A-K if the blinds are still at 10/15 and your stack is close to 500. But in most situations where you make any raise in the first level, you are going to get called. If your raise gets called, the majority of the time, the player is calling to see the flop. Why give opponents what they want? What if they are calling to see the flop, and you are raising to double up? If you only raise, you are giving them what they want. If you move all-in, you are dictating the terms. You will be surprised at how often bad players will bend to your strategy -- especially in the first four levels.

Yes this is a great idea, just shove in the early rounds with hands like 7 7, that way if nobody has you beat you steal the $25 in blinds, but if somebody has you beat you go all in as a 4.5-1 underdog. The best you can really hope for in this situation is a coin flip, and routinely taking 50% shots at getting knocked out is a great way to lose in tournaments. Sometimes you do have to go all in as an underdog or even money, but when a situation where you have a 500 stack with blinds of 10 and 20 is not one of them.
This is perhaps the greatest mistake I see on Party on a regular basis, people just shoving in situations where their opponents cannot make a mistake. They do silly things like shove under the gun with JJ or AQ for 30 times the big blind, where they will either win a small amount, coin flip for their stack, or be a huge favorite to lose it all. Hold’em is a flop game. Seek to outplay your opponents there, not shove it all in and hope nobody has a better hand.
There are numerous more things I could say about this article, but to do so would mean giving away more good advice than I already have. I don’t get paid to give away useful poker concepts. I get paid for being able to employ them more frequently than others. I had serious hesitations about posting this at all because there are a few key concepts which I think very few people on Party (including the author of this article) just don’t comprehend, but I just cannot tolerate these idiots writing articles on topics about which they have no clue.
I am giving serious consideration to writing a book on internet poker, which would cover many things that the few books already available on the topic either don’t cover or are inaccurate on. The problem is I do not think that I could make enough money off of it to be worth my time given that I have no name recognition. Sure I could write on the cover that I made 6 figures in my first year of online poker (and truthfully too) while working an average of 25 hours a week (what a lazy bum I am), but anyone could just say that so to the average person that may not be a great selling point. I could maybe write the book and send it to Two Plus Two or something, but I have heard that authors like me would make $5 of each copy sold. Even if I were lucky enough to sell a couple thousand copies that wouldn’t amount to enough to compensate me for the time spent on it.
I also fear that it might make the games tougher, though I suppose the only way it would do that is if a very large amount of people read the book, in which case I would make enough off of the book not to care. I also don’t know how much more I will even be playing online. I can’t imagine more than another year, except for maybe the higher limits where people don’t need my book anyway.

Posted by themaroon at 11:59 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 2, 2004

Weekend Update

Well my bad streak seems to be continuing on in full force. I suppose things didn’t go too badly this weekend, I may have even shown a little profit. I was splitting with John and Jason on the Saturday $215 where he made somewhere around 30th. He went all in with pocket aces against K 3 off suit and lost on the final hand. He didn’t have a very big stack but he would have been in good shaped if his aces came through for him, but nobody I know is ever anywhere near lucky enough to win with aces when it counts. I went out myself when I went in with JJ against 10 10 and KQ, and the 10 10 hit a straight. I normally don’t like going all in with JJ against 2 people anyway, but given the situation it was called for and I turned out to be a 46% favorite to triple up.
Nonetheless I think that we both played exceptionally well, and look forward to playing more of these things. I am going to try to make more of the $215s on Party Poker now that John is unemployed and will be playing with me. I really have a lot of confidence in his tournament game, since I think he has figured out a lot of stuff in the last few weeks we have been running these together. He has been beating the hell out of live no limit games on the net for some time and I think just had to figure out how to adapt to tournaments. Also I think running so many tournaments on Party in the last few month has given me tremendous insight into the thoughts of these complete idiots and he is picking it up as well now. I really think that we will win one or two of these this year.
Hopefully that win will come in the $640 tournament at the end of this month. I do not know if Party is going to cap it off at 2000 people again (I sure hope not) but even if they do it will make first somewhere around $250k. I think that both of us will receive the full extra 1000 chips this time too, which is tremendous. Party Poker tournaments already have a structure that is much better than anywhere else on the net, doubling the starting stack just makes it plain amazing.
As far as live action goes my plateau in $10/$20 6 max is growing, now to somewhere around 80 hours. This is nothing extraordinary, and I don’t play it much anymore anyway. I am currently running an experiment on Party because I think that I may be able to make somewhere around $100 per hour playing the $1/$2 no limit 6 max games. I only have a few hours under my belt (where I am making much somewhere around $250 per hour) but I will keep running these indefinitely. I would very much like to improve my live no limit game, and what better way than to play short handed. The competition is rather soft, so I don’t think busting one person per hour is really a tough feat. I have mainly just been playing very aggressively preflop and on the flop. People on Party see you raise junk a few times and they think that means you will be willing to put in your whole bankroll on middle pair. They are just entirely unable to distinguish between aggressiveness and stupidity. They also have no clue how to bet their hands and almost always either greatly underbet or greatly overbet the pot. For instance a hand came up today where 5 people limped (making the pot $10), the flop came 10 6 2 rainbow, and the guy who had limped under the gun bet all in for $170. Later another fellow simply called my raise preflop with AA. The flop was rags so I bet the pot, about $10, and he called again. The turn was a K, so I checked and he checked behind me. The river was another rag, which made some goofy gut shot straight so I led out for almost the size of the pot and he shoved. I happily called with my set of kings. I am not sure if this guy could have done anything reasonable to prevent me from winning this pot anyway, since the number of people on Party who are eager and willing to get their whole stack in with hands like QQ-88, AQs, AJs, and AK makes it pretty much impossible to fold KK preflop. I suppose he could have just called preflop and put me to the test on the flop, which would have been very hard for me, but instead he elected to wait until I saw the entire board, then bet his whole stack, which was many times what was in the pot, as if I could call with anything worse than aces. I either had a set (which I could never fold on such a board) and would bust him, or had nothing and would fold which means his bet gains nothing. These are just 2 examples from the last hour or so of play and pretty much some up how every jackass plays. So I will be sure to keep you posted with the results.

Posted by themaroon at 11:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack