Running Hot

Well I haven't updated this blog in a while. I was almost at risk of not graduating this semester, but it seems as if it has worked out alright. But lately, I think that the games on the internet have been extremely soft. I've just been making a ton online recently.

Below are my stats in the recent weeks since I almost went busto in 2/4nl. I'm especially excited about this because of the 1/2 nl heads up results. I've been a lifetime loser, at 1/2 heads up, but I've recently started playing a lot better.

I was on TV!

Well, not really. I was playing on a couple tables on 2/4nl, when I noticed Yawning Boy and a couple of my tables. I was even playing HU against him on one when everybody left. I soon realized that I've seen the name on CardRunners.com, and it was Andrew Wiggins one of the lead instructors on the site. I know he doesn't really play limits this low, so I thought that it was going to be a video.

At the end of his session he told the table that it was going to be a cardrunners.com video! I'm just glad that he had already finished recording and sat out when I tried to run a bluff on somebody. I wouldn't want to be called an idiot infront of the online poker community. I don't know if my ego can take that.....

So it went up on Wednesday and I watched it right away. The video was pretty good overall. On a more important note, though, the quality of the video was kinda shitty. So it's kinda hard to make out the names. Dammit. I also pretty much stay even the whole time I'm playing with him on two tables. I think I ende)d up about 20-30 dollars in the whole session that was recorded on cardrunners.com. So, he barely mentions me at all in the video. I think I only entered two-three pots against him, and I folded to his cbet, or he folded to mine. I guess I'll have to wait for another day to become an online poker celebrity.

Almost made a huge huge mistake....

So the other day I finally had access to my entire bankroll online. My Epassporte account was finally approved, so I can know move my bankroll between the different sites I played. With that in mind, I decided to take another shot at 2/4nl on Full Tilt. The first day I played pretty good. I ended up about 3 buyins. I was feeling good about myself. I was only 3/4 tabling, and I was definitely improving. Just paying attention to the different plays that people do and the plays being run on me really improved my game. So, I was feeling good with myself and the next day decided to continue playing 2/4nl.

Well, disaster stuck. I went on a 13 buyin downswing. It was sickening. Here are some hands:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1039736
I guess this guy really wanted to gamble. He's dominated by so many hands it's unreal that he does this with 45s. Oh well, set is no good.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1039748
I almost puked after this hand. When I saw the turn, I got this feeling that another spade was going to hit, and it did. This happened near the end of my downswing , so I was pretty pissed after this.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1039752
AA, no good. I guess the flush really likes to hit when playing against me.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1039757
Really frustrating when I lose those hands before, and I can't win this.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1039762
This is a cooler, I think. I'm not really sure if I can get away from this hand. I don't know. From just the way that he bet I put him on 77 on the flop. Part of me was thinking QQ and AA, but I heavily discounted those just because I held the A and the Q. So I also somewhat discounted the flush draw because I don't think the flush draw would be 3 betting me as often here. This is because I thought they guy to be pretty tight and not stupid. I just don't see him playing the flush like this, he'd probably peeling the flop. I don't know though. I also don't think with the flush draw out there that I can fold. On the other hand can I even fold this flop EVER if the board was rainbow?

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1039775
I don't think I can get away from this hand. Toughts welcome.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1039782
Well, I knew I had the best hand on the flop and turn. However, I asn't sure about this river call. Is his range on the river big enough that my call of his push is +EV long term? I guess this is player dependent, and I shouldn't have called.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1039786
I don't think I can ever fold this. It's just sick.

Well, there are also few pots that I tilted and general spew. Well, after this horrible session, I took a break, and somehow reasoned that I was playing really well, and decided not to move down. I was very very close to going broke. However things started to turn around and I started to gain some of the money I lost.

Since I was playing well, I decided to contine to play 2/4nl. Well I started playing a lot better, and my hands finally heald up. I made some money back, and then I took a break for that day. Over the next 2 days, I decided to 8 table 1/2nl. Well, 8 tabling 1/2nl was so much easier after my 2/4nl stint. I completely destroyed 1/2nl 8 tabling. I also destroyed heads up 1/2nl. In two days, I basically erased my huge huge downswing. I'm really pissed that I can't quit after say a 4 buy in downswing in one session. And the fact that I continued to play 2/4nl after a 12-13 buyin down swing really disturbs me. If I had continue to tilt or run bad, I would have completely destroyed my online bankroll. I need to learn to protect my bankroll. I'm completely gratefull that I completely destroyed 1/2nl and got my bankroll to it's previous position. I'll show the graph below.



My pokertracker stats of the run that helped me out of the holeI dug myself.

Over 100k hands for the year

So I just looked at all my PokerTracker hands and I'm over 100k hands in nlhe for the year. 113k hands to be exact. One statistic, though, really jumped out at me today - the amount of rake that I've spent.

I've given poker sites over 13k in business. That's mind boggling to me. What sucks even more is realizing that I played the majority of my hands (over three quarters) on sites that I don't have rakeback. That is unacceptable. What's crazy is the fact that I paid this much in rake, without even realizing it. Rake is like that scheme that they described about in Office Space, where they had the program which took cents off thousands of transactions. Nobody notices it, but over time it adds up.

What I'm trying to get at is that today, I finally realized the importance of playing your "A" game all the time. If I played the best that I could in every single pot that I was in, saved a bet here, put in an extra value bet there, I would be much much richer. Lets say over 100k hands, I averaged 5 cents more per hand. That's either 5 cents I save or 5 cents more per hand, that's $5k more that's in my pocket. So, lets play good in every single hand.

A high... ship it

I was playing against this really aggro donk. He had position on me, and for the first half an hour with him on my right, I didn't connect with a single flop, and I couldn't take a single pot from him. On the flop I knew that he didn't hit anything when he didn't bet. Since nothing changed on the turn, I already told myself that I was going to call ANY bet on the river. I was going to call any overbets as well.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1012355


Pretty proud of this call. Who says you can't get reads 8 tabling?

Bleh, gotta control tilt

Well, I started off playing pretty well today. I can multi-table really easily know. I'm using FullTiltShortcuts which basically automate my betting for me. So I can 8 table pretty easily now, and right now I'm just trying to grind so that I can move up stakes. So I was playing pretty well up to the last 200-300 hands in the session.

I misclicked in one huge pot and called instead of folding. Maybe it's because I haven't gotten much sleep, but I wasn't thinking right after that. Instead of just folding the later streets on the big hand, I got stubborn, and tried to bluff out my opponents in a three way pot! Then, I sorta went on auto-pilot on the 8 tables and tried to really run everybody over. Well, that didn't work out so well. So within half an hour, I erase basically all of my profit for the day. Oh well, at least I caught myself quit all of my tables before I ended up in the red.


Other than this I think I'm playing a lot better poker. I've changed up my game and I'm a lot happier with the way I'm playing right now. I've also started playing Omaha Hi. I've been dabbling in the .5/1 OmahaPL for the past month or so and over the weekend I moved up to 1/2nl. It seems as if there are a lot of awful players in Omaha that don't know what they're doing. You don't even need to outplay people, you just sit back and wait until somebody overvalues there hand, and you make tons of money. That, or you win money through a lot of coinflips.

College Night

Brag:

So, at Rice, all our dorms are separated into colleges, and you pretty much stay at the same dorm for all 4 years. Each semester, we have a college night, where the college buys booze and food, and you start drinking from the afternoon until you pass out. Well this year our theme was global warming and below was the email my friends sent out to the college:

***************************

GLOBAL WARMING has caused large areas of the Arctic ice shelf to break off and
melt, diluting the North Atlantic Ocean with large amounts of fresh water.. This
has disrupted the ocean's thermohaline circulation and slowed the Gulf Stream,
causing a rapid heating of the northern hemisphere. This has triggered a series
of anomalies, which have led to a coming GLOBAL SUPERSTORM hovering over
Hanszen College. The impact of the storm on Hanszen is uncertain, but
scientists are predicting that THE END IS NEAR.

There is only one solution.

Hanszen must PARTY LIKE THERE IS NO TOMORROW. This could easily be our last
College Night ever. Let's celebrate the power that is Global Warming. A
little rain is no excuse!

***************************

Well, this was the most fun I've had at a college night at my time at Rice. We got this inflatable slide with a tiny pull on the end, and we basically got really drunk and started doing all types of crazy shit down the slide. I think my highlight was a backwards slide, with a flip (inadvertently) half way down the slide.


Beat:

I was careful for the entire day not to put my shoulders at risk. I have dislocated my left one 8/9 times in my lifetime, and the right one once. Well, I was watching out for it the whole day. I didn't attempt going on the slip and slide head first because I didn't want to expose my shoulder. Near the end of they day, I decided to join in a game of slide HORSE. You had to replicate the slide of choice by the leader. Part way through the game, I attempted to go into a Superman pose, bounce off the slide, and then kick out my legs to end up going feet first down. On the bounce, I felt my right shoulder pop out. I was pretty pissed off at myself.



On a different note, later that night I went out to a bar with some of my friends. I usually don't get that many sugary drinks, but I guess tonight was one of those exceptions. The first somewhat notable drink I tried was a Yummy Bear or a Pink Beer. It's a shot of framboise, which is a raspberry lambic stout (one of the bar tenders explained this to us), and PaulanerHefeweizen. I really like Hefeweizen, so I thought this drink could be amazing. It was a little too fruity for my taste. The raspberry really overpowers the entire drink. Later on, I had a Colorado Bulldog. It's basically a White Russian with coke. I really liked this drink. Not only did it taste like a milkshake, but it brought me back to my high school days. If you haven't seen the movie "The Big Lebowski", I urge you to go watch it. I think it's one of the funniest and best movies I have ever seen. In high school, I watched this movie a lot. And there would be times, when we would do a Lebowski and White Russian night. We'd also smoke some weed to complete the Lebowski trifecta. Those were fun times. If you haven't had a White Russian, that's a damn good drink as well. Tastes like chocolate milk. I remember when I was younger I used to drink a lot of chocolate milk, I haven't touched that stuff in over a decade. Well the Colorado Bulldog was tasty, but it also elicits a lot of great and happy memories for me, perhaps from simpler times in my life.