I flopped the nuts!

Ugh.  Having a bad, bad stretch in tournaments.  Started seeing a bunch of last-place finishes, so I read up on Harrington again (toned down my aggressiveness), and started seeing consistent bubble finishes.  Annoying.

The worst bit about this recent stretch is that I’ve mostly seen bad beats.  Bad beats, I remind myself, are the sign of a good player: stuff your money in with the best hand and the only way you can lose is if bad cards hit.  But the bad cards have been hitting.  Like:

1. I started following Phil Gordon’s advice and playing any pocket pair, as long as there haven’t been two raises.  He’s right: the implied odds are insanely good, and there isn’t an easier hand to play in no-limit.  Either you hit the flop and you’re pushing, or you missed it and you’re cutting fairly cheap.  But when your 66 sees a K64 flop, and you bet about 2/3rds of the pot, and holy crap 53o calls, because there’s a straight draw… what can you do?  Watch the 7 hit, bet, get brought all-in… mistakes.
2. Same idea: miss the flop with 88, but the turn is an 8, and the third diamond.  Again, I am forced to call an all-in bet before I have the chance to make one, but I actually saw that draw, and called with the intent of hitting one of my ten full-house outs.  Oh well.
3. 88 vs KK on a K82 flop: always a favorite
4. QT vs AA on a QT6 flop: of course the final 6 comes on the river
5. BB calls a raise with 65o… enough said
6. These are getting fairly petty, so I’ll stop

It’s just the inventiveness and creativity behind these beats.  (I’m leaving out heads-up beats, too, because anything can basically happen there.)  But aggression is great: they can fold, or they can call with a worse hand, and that’s why we do it.  On the other hand, sometimes they call with a better hand (it happens) and sometimes they call with a worse one, and win anyway.

I distinctly remember having lost $200 already into online poker, and reaching for another $100, thinking… "man, if this doesn’t go right, I’m going to have to stop completely."

It was around that time that I started realizing that post-flop bets are made in fractions of the pot, not table minimums or multiples of that.  Betting more when I had the best of it (and realizing that I should get out when I likely didn’t) made my play suddenly, unquestionably profitable.  I went on a tear with tournaments, experimented with cash tables, and built that $100 up to $250.

I was just barely profitable, but when you consider the rake, that’s not bad.  I didn’t look back when there was a chance to redeposit for a bonus, but when I did that, I started an Excel sheet with my deposits, balances, and winnings.  When you play even-money poker, bonuses aren’t sucker bait.  (That is, unless you play differenly when you’re burning off a bonus, which always seemed to happen to me.)  They’re a valuable way to build your bankroll.

I took some money out of Poker Stars and moved it to Party, and played the cash tables there.  With a decent bankroll, the play there is pretty attractive.  (As I’ve mentioned earlier, a $25-max NL table is a dangerous place to learn cash games, but if you can absorb that loss occasionally, the water’s fine.)  With money in two accounts, it became imperative that I track my wins and losses, and soon I could see that, combining real-life with online play, I was profitable.  (Largely thanks to a real-life tourney I won, making up for the $75 or so I was behind in online-only play.)

But in two days, I’d covered that gap, and proceeded to cash out all but $100 of my original investment.  (Better to have $110 in there than $10… you know, risk of ruin.)

I turned that into $120, and went to a friend’s house for a couple of tournaments.  The first was okay, but the second offered rebuys.  I didn’t want to stay out that late.  People argued about the dumbest things imaginable.  Everyone was more drunk than I was.  And I lost money overall, while missing out on an evening with my family and a good night’s sleep. 

It kind of summed up the past six months.  I didn’t want to do it much anymore.  While I’ve felt this way every once in a while during my six-month poker career, I’d just made a nice deposit into my bank account, bought a new iPod, and started working on a new PC in the basement.  I was ahead, but for how long?  I was a consistent winner at the small tables, but I didn’t know how, and I wanted to read some more books.  Anytime I read a book, I start thinking about how much better I am for having read it, and I start testing my knowledge on the tables, applying fresh lessons in inappropriate situations, getting myself in trouble.  I didn’t want that inevitable dip (which always comes back, but still) eating into my tiny lifetime profit.

The Excel sheet started to bug me.  Since I was up $20 online, I was playing with a $20 bankroll, not $120 or $520.  I couldn’t take risks that would expose that "seed" money, and when you stop taking risks, you’re not playing poker at all.  I cashed out the $100, thinking that the $20 that was left would either be wasted, or the seed money for another run to the top.

It turns out that a naked $20 burns pretty fast, especially when I’m reading a new book.  Ha ha.

So I’m positive, lifetime, online and offline, and I’ve got pocket change (literally: Party doesn’t cash cents, only whole dollars) in a couple accounts, but this will be the first weekend I don’t play online (barring a frantic relapse and paying Neteller’s 8.9% on instant deposits) in about forever.

Basically, that $65 smash hit on Party ended up saving my bacon for August.  In tournaments I ended up $13 to the good, and in cash games, I posted the tiniest of profits.  (I lost a buy-in yesterday, when someone was making bets that were too small to chase away my nut flush draw, and a third guy was in there for unknown reasons.  River was my spade, so I pushed all-in, the initial aggressor folded, and the third guy called.  The turn, as it happens, was his fourth five, and I wasn’t afraid of the pair on the board, because who plays with fives?  Someone with two of them, is the answer.)

I’ve dabbled in heads up tournaments (5-5 so far, which means I’d be even if I wasn’t paying a fee), and started to play a little limit.  Limit’s sort of fun, just because you can play more hands, but it’s much more frustrating, because every set or nut straight gets outdrawn by some braying jackass with J5s.  Thing is, he’s getting odds for his calls, too.

I also want to note that the 45-player $1.00+.20 SnG (paying 7) is about 40% ITM for me, with a ROI of over 100%.  If I had all day to scrape by and collect pennies, that’s what I’d be doing.

I focused my game in July, playing nothing but $5 SnGs for a long time.  It worked.  I hit the money in an obscene percentage in the first half of the month, and cooled off a little bit, but still showed a $100 profit after 50+ tournaments.  A few MTTs for large prizes didn’t pay off, but that’s no big deal.

I also started playing .05/.10 NL on PokerStars… that wasn’t quite as sensational, but the profit was still there.  I am always reloading when take a hit, so it’s hour after hour of super-tight play… gets a little boring after a while, but you can’t do much else.  I don’t know enough to get away from ace-junk when I end up playing it, so I am better off waiting for premium hands.

Having proven that I could crush the $5 SnGs, I was really eager to try the $10, but a friend advised me to wait until I’d built up at least $300 in my bankroll.  That was wise: you’ll read in my August recap what happened as soon as I "graduated". 

That’s more or less what I want to see happen in August: hit the $10 tournaments, see about the same success rate (or a little less), and keep building.  Maybe cash a bonus or two.

June’s been better. I got PokerTracker at the beginning of the month, so I can’t really say what my historic totals are, but I definitely turned some corners and learned some lessons. A huge home tournament saved my month - about $100 in one night, plus the respect and fear of my coworkers. I had two or three terrible cash hands, and only one or two awful tournaments, but I feel pretty good about both. The interesting thing is that I’m doing very well in MTT play: single table sit-n-gos are a money loser for me, but two, three, and five table have all been pretty good.

I’m officially done with Empire. I moved $50 in there last week and it’s 97 cents now. Their sit-n-gos are so aggressive: 800 chips, and blinds moving from 10/15 to 15/30 to 25/50 to 75/150 with every ten hands… if you don’t see something you love in the first three rounds, you’re pretty much playing short stack against the six guys that are left playing Party-style. I may try to open a Party account, since I have heard the play is atrocious (and it is, I just can’t catch a break in their tournament format), but I’ve been smacked down trying to install it (since Empire is the same thing).

So that leaves PokerStars. I’ve had great luck with their .05/.10 NL game ($10 max), but every time I try to move to the .10/.25 ($25), I get crushed. So I’m playing two-at-a-time $10 tables, and that’s working out. I’m also going to leave the $10+$1 sit-n-gos alone for a while and see if I can’t make $5+$.50 profitable. And, with the revelation that MTT is a good game for me, I may try to carve out a couple two-hours blocks of time and play in larger tournaments. That’s where the real money is, anyway.