I flopped the nuts!

Welcome to May, everyone.  I lost $192.98 on April 30, so that’s casting a cloud over the whole month.  There’s really no reason for it, though.

That loss doesn’t even wipe out the gains from the previous six days.  It’s a smaller loss than the gain on my best poker day of all time, which came on the 18th this month.  About the only thing it did was turn my +$1000 into a +$800 month.

Those are insane figures for someone who got into this a year ago, with $100.  I’ve never been down more than $250 into the online game, and I was playing at a level completely cool with my bankroll.

So, the stats, then.

• $1/$2 Limit: 6600 hands, 2.6 BB/100
• $50NL (mostly 6-handed, but some full table): 3000 hands, 2.18 BB/100
• $25NL (full table): 1000 hands, 9 BB/100
• $2/$4 Limit: 923 hands, -1.48 BB/100 (down about $50)

I played in about 10 tournaments, for a loss of about $50.  The rest has to be bonuses, I’m thinking.  (I joined UB for rakeback, but they’ve offered a reload bonus every two weeks, and always right after I withdraw to play somewhere else, so I keep reloading.)

Yeah, almost all limit.  I initially did that to maximize the rakeback / bonus calculations, but it’s much easier to multi-table, and it’s a little easier for me to analyze where the mistakes are.  (One of my tendencies is to freeze up and call down in pots I might be winning: limit makes it cheap to check-call without attracting attention, and with looser players, I find I’m frequently ahead anyway.)

$1600 is the line where I start playing $2/$4, and it hasn’t gone well so far.  I have more to learn at the $1/$2 level, really.

February: wasn’t bad. Turned $400 into almost $800, with 23 good days and 5 bad days. I started a new account at UltimateBet for rakeback (my first rakeback account). Their bonuses have been good.
March: Took it almost to $1000, but that’s only a gain of $200, which is kind of slow growth. UltimateBet’s bonuses are insane: they’ve been offering crazy reloads non-stop.

I realized at the beginning of March that I had two weeks to burn off my FTP initial deposit bonus. They pay off you bonus in 10% chunks, but at a very slow rate, and I think most players give up before their four months is up. I burned it off playing .05/.10 NL, mostly because I have a better winrate there than .10/.25 NL, and because they rake double at the .05/.10 level. (Nasty.) I actually lost $80 to recoup my last $20. That happens.

Leaving FTP for UB, I was still thinking about maxmizing the rake to get the bonuses burned off. At the same time, I was getting a little burned out on .05/.10 NL after four-tabling it for a week straight. So I took up limit. UB has kill games, which seem to me to be one more way to play poker bingo, but I don’t know enough about that game to really say. Maybe it’s a nuanced and subtle way to play poker bingo.

I reread Small Stakes Hold’em, and seriously used the starting hand chart in the middle. My first couple of hours were unreal: with three tables open, it seems like there’s very little variance, and my win rate seems pretty generous. I’ll have more to say at the end of April, but at the end of March, it was my new favorite.

Getting better at limit meant I could play more solidly at Canterbury, and I did, picking up $60 in about 90 minutes out there on a Friday afternoon. That’s another story, but I think live $2/$4 might be enough to live on professionally if I ever had to do it.

I am getting real bad about updating here, so I have a new system (yay!) and I’ll try to keep in touch better. Thanks for reading, whoever you are.

It was April 6th, 2005 when I first stuffed money into Neteller and hoped for the best. Once that $50 cleared, I deposited it to Planet Poker (I didn’t know any better at the time) and played a little bit of everything. Of course, people were playing limit and no-limit hold ‘em, and I really didn’t know that much about the game. (I would eventually print off a sheet that reminded me: flushes beat straights.)

Exactly a year later, with about $300 invested in poker books, online “school” and software tools, I’m ahead almost a thousand dollars. (I frequently think about what I should do with this money, but I know, of course, that I want to keep playing.)

One could check the date of the first entry on this site to see when exactly I realized that there was an awesome poker blogging community (I should have known: there’s a good-sized Jonathan Taylor Thomas blogging community), and I’ve only sat at a table with them once, but they’ve been consistently encouraging and enlightening. Good friends, I suppose, if I had ever had any meaningful human interaction with them.

Getting turned on to PokerStars and Party Poker two weeks after I switch from Planet (ick) to Empire (eh) was a big favor, one I haven’t thanked anyone for. Winning a tournament at a friends house in my third month playing was huge. Busting through “profitable” in month 6 was great. I’m proud of starting over then, and pulling out my initial stake in month 9. This past month has been about learning new things and pushing the edges: I love this hobby, and I get to do it basically for free, as long as I want.

After reading The Grind last week, I decided that an appropriate poker birthday present would be a subscription to CardRunners. I’m loving it so far. (If you want to sign up under me, my name is dnordquist.) If they’re serious about putting new content on almost every day, it could be exactly what I’ve been looking for: a very current guide to the way that internet players play on the internet, in cash games and tournaments. (They don’t cover limit there very much, but they don’t cover Omaha or backgammon, either.)

12/31, 1/1, and 1/2 were all all-time highs for my bankroll.  I went to bed on the 2nd fifty-six cents away from $800.  Five of the next seven days would be losing ones, three more than $100, and so I gave up a couple months’ progress.  Not a huge deal: variance had been very good to me for a while, and payback is inevitable.

Here’s the good news: dropping below $500 meant leaving $50NL for $25NL, and I’m a better player than I was when I left $25NL the first time, so sessions have been more positive more often.  I’m still up in the air on my tournament play: I redeposited at Party just to play their $10+1s, but 800 chips and killer blinds in the fourth round just put in me bad situations more often than I would like.  I did have one memorable tournament (out in fourth) where I’d been pushing my 5BB stack with every A, K, or pair that came my way.  I survived for a long time doing this, but when I finally got caught (with T9s vs. 77 - a matchup I’ll take any day shortstacked), the table just lit up: they were so glad I was gone… it’s such an effective strategy.  When they’re glad you’re leaving, you’re doing something right.

I read the NL chapter of Super System, and it didn’t really move me that much.  I guess it brought some of the value of draws into perspective, but I don’t play that many drawing hands to begin with.  (Of course, if you’re going to start, you learn a lot about position, and a lot about post-flop play, but I think there’s also a reason people don’t use his system as the foundation of their game.)  He likes to get all-in with crazy draws and have people fold.  I suppose that works for some people, but at the low levels, you’re putting your crazy draws up against other crazy draws, and people don’t fold.

I cashed out of everything to collect a Party bonus I’d heard about, but BonusWhores.com decided not to tell me when Party withdrew the bonus, so it was all for naught.  I did just deposit my bankroll at Paradise to do their Super Bowl weekend bonus, and if the Seahawks win, I go to the freeroll tournament.  Go SEAHAWKS+4!

Went home thinking I should try $1/$2 limit yesterday.  I don’t play limit that much, but I was eager for a new challenge.  Couldn’t get started there, so I switched over to my standard $50NL.  I had a few opponents call continuation bets with beaten hands, only to hit on the turn or river, and stick me for a bet on the end. 

Well, your hero fights donk play with donk play.  I loosened up considerably, didn’t back down when I was beaten, pushed all in when I knew any hand but an overpair would fold (overpairs… funny, they call), ignored reasonable bets from reasonable players… ahh, anyone else would describe it as tilt.  I had never gone through anything like it in my short playing career.  Actually, I had a lot of these runs right before I got "good": just trying to make something happen, pushing edges that didn’t exist.

Home audience, I donked off almost a quarter of my bankroll: maybe $150 all told.  I told myself that everything I have online right now is house money (which is true), that I’m only back about a week’s progress (also true), and that with my tremendous upswing lately, I was way overdue for a dose of variance.  It didn’t feel much better.

Then I moved from Party to Full Tilt, and picked up three or four nice pots, almost doubling up.  For some reason, that bought back all my self-confidence.  With your own swings, it’s important to have a short memory.

I spent some of Christmas Eve morning on Full Tilt, playing raked tables.  I actually took minor hits in my first two sessions, but the last one before I got up to go church / Grandma’s house was a big one, and my online bankroll cracked $500, up from $100 at the start of October.

That breaks down like this:

• I’m up about $100 in those 5-handed $10+1s at Pacific that pay 3 spots.
• I’m down about $200 in other sit n’ gos.
• I’m break-even in heads-up tournaments.
• I’m up about $400 in cash games, even though I don’t play those that often.

The rest is probably bonuses, I’m guessing.  Anyway, cracking $500 was great.  I think I can start playing .25/.50 NL, unless that goes really poorly, and then I’ll have to reconsider.

The kicker is this: I won $200 in Full Tilt’s daily contest on Dec. 24.  So, as of today, my bankroll’s at about $750.  Unreal!

I deposited $100 with Paradise, and took advantage of their "referral bonus" to put $50 in my bonus account, and $50 in my uncle’s.

Paradise gives you one point for paying a dollar towards a tournament fee, or one point for every raked hand (raked meaning raked more than .25, so a pot of more than $5 in NL, which happens fairly frequently at the $25 table with .10/.25 blinds).  After you get 100 points, you get $10 of your bonus.  Repeat.

Obviously, someone could pick up 20-40 points an hour playing cash games, and 1-2/hr in tournaments.  Cash games it was, then.

I cleared the bonus today, so it’s time to look at stats.  I won $50 over 1,373 hands.  My $25 NL rate was 2.26BB/100, but my $10NL rate was 33.  That’s obviously not a big enough sample size to guarantee anything, but the flop percentages were attractive: you can almost always find a table over 30% at these limits, and frequently over 40.  (At Empire now I can’t get anything above 20%.  They must be folding pocket kings.)

Possibly important side note: I lost a buy-in yesterday at $25 NL, when I held AA vs. QQ, and we got all-in preflop.  The flop was KJ9, all clubs, and I held the Ace of clubs.  This is a hair’s breadth from drawing dead: one of the two remaining queens was a club that would give me the nut flush.  The turn was another Ace: a queen on the river would only give my opponent second-best set.  The river, though, was one of the three non-club Tens in the deck, completing a soul-crushing, faith-robbing straight against all odds.  Of course, once two people are all-in on Paradise, they just push all the cards out and hand the money to the winner, so it was a lot less dramatic.  But the point: if I hadn’t angered the poker gods somehow, I’d have won that $25 instead of losing it, and I’d be up $100 instead of $50. 

Which is not to say I didn’t try tournaments.  I have a philisophical problem playing $5+1s (20% rakes are for live poker in casinos), and with my bankroll, I could only play $10+1s when I was feeling extra flush with cash, but that ends up not being a huge problem: I hit second place once, and out of the money six times.  Heads-up, I went 14-12, just barely enough to eek past the rake.

I cash out, then, up twenty-five cents, if you don’t count my bonus.  The plan for now is to take the original hundred out of Paradise, return it to Stars, and go back to small SnGs.  The money that’s left at Paradise should just live on the small NL tables: they’ve been extremely loose and generous, and I hope to milk them for a long time.

I despise this game.  I am fed up with it.  I don’t even have my bonuses from this month any more.  I had to lay down a hand yesterday on a pot I’d invested $10 into.  Two hands later I picked up my $10 bonus.  Great.

Online poker is obviously rigged.

Okay, just kidding about that part.  But I did lose a heads-up tournament earlier today by having QQ cracked by AJ, AT fall to A5, and the final hand: TT lost to J9.  Which is interesting, because I hadn’t seen anything like these hands yesterday.  The cards have been awful.

I still have about $150 in the system, so I should probably quit those $5 heads up tournaments cold turkey (even though I’m still up on them).  $10 SnGs need to wait until the bankroll hits $250 again.  At least.  And while $5 SnGs are probably fine, I should probably play just as many $1 / $1.50 PS SnGs.  (Those 2-table Turbos they have are really fun, and I’ve had luck there.)

But first, I have to cash out the rest of that Paradise bonus… 100 more raked hands to go.  I just have no confidence that I’ll be able to do it without dropping $100 in the process… okay, I guess I’m pretty confident that won’t happen.

I’m playing in a $50 buy-in NL tournament on Saturday - offline.  It’s modeled after the PS deep stacks tourneys, so it should be a welcome change of pace from the high-speed games we usually play.  It would be an excellent idea to set up Poker Academy for these parameters and play a couple dozen sample runs against robot opponents.  I hope I get a chance over the next few days.

I’ve been at this for about six months now. 

• I’ve played 159 $5 SnGs, and I’m 38.4% ITM, with an ROI of… -7%?  Yikes.
• I’ve played 59 $10 SnGs, and I’m 40.7% ITM, with an ROI of .6%.  (Barely profitable.)

Now, about 80 SnGs in, I was very profitable.  June and July, in particular, were insane.  But looking at these actual stats (particularly, how small the Ns are), can I draw any conclusions at all?  I’m feeling like I’m hitting a disproportional number of 4ths and 5th, but how much of that is due to eliminating my 9th, 7th, and 6th finishes?

Here’s some more raw data:

• In cash games, I’ve played 194 hours (10,000 hands), and made $89.  At .10/.25 NL (the highest stakes I can really play, no matter what my bankroll), I make about 1BB/hr. 
• In heads up tournaments, I’m 63-56.  That’s enough to beat the rake, actually.

So I’m not the worst.  (I don’t have a lot of short-handed data, but I think I’m probably less practiced there.)  I can see that there are some gaps in my game, but nothing glaring (nothing like a 100% VP$IP with KQo, or a lot of cold calling… nothing unfixable, anyway). 

On some days, the only number that matters is the bottom line of my Excel sheet.  And right now, it’s showing a $75 profit over the past two months.  All of it bonuses.  Maybe I do suck.

After withdrawing every dollar from Party, Stars, and Empire, I played against the robots of Poker Academy.  Interesting, but it’s no substitute.

So I freed $100 from the confines of my bank account and stuffed it into Stars.  Then Empire offered a bonus.  Then Party did.  Then Stars did.  That $100 had no idea where it was when it landed, but it did bring along about eighty new friends.  Good deal.

That was all about two weeks ago.  I finished off my last Stars bonus and got all itchy: it was time to try a new site.  Since I hadn’t done Paradise, and that’s where my whole family plays, I decided to give it a shot.  I’ve earned $10 of my bonus, but I’m also up about $30 on an initial deposit of $100.  It’s easier to earn a bonus on a cash table than a ton of tournaments, so I’ve been focusing on that.  Full table is a big strength for me, mostly because it’s so easy to be patient at loose tables and just wait for the right cards and a strong flop.

Then this Stars-hates-me tournament drought started.  I can’t wait until that’s over, because I really like not finishing in fourth.  I think my short-handed game kind of sucks, but I’m also referring back to the starting hands matrix (it’s way more complicated than a chart) in Harrington’s Volume 1. 

I still haven’t been to a live game since the Tournament That Shook My Faith in Poker.  (But my work friends keep holding them over thirty miles away: I love this game, but I’m not going to drive that far to get beat by some jackass on a low-end straight draw with… never mind.)

I bought two new books: I’ll post them on the sidebar as soon as I’m done.