Ah screw the 1r!!

If you're a fan of well written meaningful blogs, then this is not the post for you. This is just a tilt writing!

So this stupid tournament is a $1 + R, 3x Turbo (3x meaning the rebuy period is 3x longer). If you want to be anywhere near a decent position, you need to have around 100k by the first break, so as you can understand, it's a bit of a crapshoot. Luckily for me, I had some donkey to my left constantly calling my shoves, and my shoves alone, with atc. Spite calls are awesome.

So made it to the break with 100k and continued to chip up until I got up to 750k before losing AK vs AJ to a short-ish stack, which by itself was tilting enough, but that's not the tiltworthy tale that I promised you! So I build the stack up again through multiple steals and a flip so before you know it I'm up to 1.8 mirrion orso (Yes, I said MIRRION!). Then, tilt city.

UTG makes just over a minraise, I'm UTG+1 with AKo and shove, folds back to UTG and he snaps with KQs. Flops a blank but turn is a motherfucking bitch of a card, Qc. Another reason to hate women ain't it! River's a brick and I'm out in around 50th for $45. If I ship that pot I'm top 5 stacks and on the way to a 1k+ score (1st pays 4.5k which is just ridiculous for a $1r). Ah well, FML.

Well there's a little tilt post, pointless I know, but meh it's my blog, I can write whatever I want lol. Scroll down and you might find some more insightful articles, even if I use the word "insightful" loosely. Later y'all.

Few thoughts on Multi-tabling

From as far back in my poker career as I can remember, I’ve always played more than one table at once. I vaguely recollect bringing up the lobby on the tiny euro site that I began my addiction on and noticing that there were two tables of 5c/10c running and quickly decided that I should split up the 10 euros I’d deposited and play on 2 tables instead of one, after all, double the tables, double the profit right? Needless to say, I learnt a lot that day about how quickly one could lose 10 Euros.

When I first started grinding PLO8 I’d taken a step down from my usual stakes of NL25 to PL10. I’d read enough by this stage to know that to attain a similar hourly rate as before I’d have to play more tables of the lower stakes games, so made the decision to 8-10 table my new game. Like before, it was a steep learning curve, almost as steep as my losses column. It took weeks of practice before I even felt remotely comfortable playing that many games and even then I was still struggling to make correct profitable decisions in that short period between the table popping up and Pokerstars delivery that horrible siren that even to this day gets me a little tilted.

Now this was at the “beginning” of my poker career, around a year ago.  6 months ago I started grinding the NLHE Sngs and began 4-6 tabling them. Even with a decent ROI in these games, the hourly rate is going to be miniscule if you don’t mass table them. I took some tips from a few players in the stable and worked my way up quickly to playing around 20-30 simultaneously. This may sound like a lot but if you think about it, it’s not that hard. While you’re loading up all the games, you’ll only be playing the early stages where the blinds are very small and you’re playing extremely tight, or at least that’s how I play them, and by the time you get down to the deep end, you’ve busted more than half your games and you’re essentially playing 10 orso full ring push/fold games, requiring little to no real thought, once you’re comfortable in the games of course. So in essence, it was easier than multi-tabling my 6 max PLO8 games.

So there you have a small history lesson, if anyone ever decides to take a class on how I’d risen through the micro ranks to become the most profitable poker player on the planet (lol), but it’s not really a discussion piece. I admire those who 24 table the games comfortably, by that I mean not nitting it up and slowly bleeding away money and essentially becoming a rakeback pro, but never thought it was going to be something I’d do myself. But the other day I watched a video by frosty012 that he’d posted on his blog a while back.

Blog

If you watch the video you notice that he’s not frantically clicking buttons, timing out on tables or haemorrhaging money, he just makes it seem easy. Now, granted he is playing FR NLHE which doesn’t exactly require a huge amount of involvement, or at least compared to 6 max PLO8, but it still gets me thinking about my TableNinja configuration and even my general layout. It’s well and good going over HHs and working on my game, but maybe profit isn’t all dependant on how well you play poker. Like in the same way a good player with bad bankroll management will not succeed in the long run, I think a player with a bad grinding setup will not succeed either. I’m eager to see what others think about this so please drop me a comment or IM me about the subject, or anything else for that matter.  I’m playing around with my setup at the moment but for now I’m going to try frosty’s  idea of stacking my tables and using TN to bring selected tables out of the stack when I’m involved in a pot, even though he mentions that he doesn’t usually do that while he plays. I’m also going to try the Stack and Tile program and see if that suits my style better. Obviously it would be helpful to get another monitor involved so I’ll hopefully be getting one of those sorted soon.

So, there’s another quite pointless blog post to relieve the boredom for some of you, even if I’ve just put you a little deeper into your coma. Later y’all.

So what's new...

So I’m a few days into my first 12s shot at the moment, and like a true professional, it’s time to evaluate. I’m almost half way through my 50 buy-in shot and things haven’t been going so well, if the numbers are anything to go by.

So far it’s only been the solitary min-cash but actually I can feel my game improving already and I know this is down to several factors. For one, I’ve drastically cut down on the number of tables I’m playing. As a rule of thumb, I load up around 25-30 $2/180s and within 30-45 minutes I’ve busted enough tournaments to leave me with a core group of around 10 tables where I’m fairly deep and am running up a stack. Because I’m only taking a 50 Buy-in shot this time around, I cannot really afford to spread my attention so thin in order to go for the big scores, I must maximise the value I can extract from each tournament. This is not saying that what I was doing before was wrong, I still believe that is the best way to make money in the long run, but as I’m not yet comfortable playing the 12s and dropping a significant portion of my bankroll in one sitting, it makes cutting down on volume a sound “economic” decision. Most importantly, I’m cutting down on the number of tables so that I can take detailed notes on every $12/180 grinder. At this level, the majority of the real winning players are professional grinders, playing not only my games but levels much higher. When grinding these tournaments for a living, you can be sure that they have thousands upon thousands of hands with the same players and have better reads than I can ever attain through my sporadic play as an amateur. The only way to catch up to them is to closely observe their play and hope to uncover leaks and weaknesses in their game to possibly exploit. A great measure of whether a grind is solid or not is to scope their winnings at this level, and some of the graphs I uncovered and just ungodly. I won’t go into names in case they aren’t comfortable with it, but some of the top winners at this level and maintaining a 25-30% ROI over tens of thousands of games. It’s just mind-blowing to me and can only be a seriously long term goal to achieve this myself.

Anyway, enough of the NLHE talk, this is an O8 blog! I’ve stepped back from the cash grind for a while because I was running quite far below EV and it was causing me to lose focus and tilt a little, so I made the correct decision last week to just take some time off. I am however playing some MTTs on the side, purely for enjoyment rather than monetary gain, but as we all know, the two run hand in hand. I took second in a small turbo the other day for around $200 as well as a few small cashes dotted throughout the week, nothing to report back on. I am however keeping a keen eye on the games and should I find a table too hard to pass hard, no matter what the stakes, I’d happily jump in. Luckily for my bankroll, if any games were to exist, it would without doubt occur at PL50 or lower.

Away from poker, well not entirely, it’s still a degen story, I read Haseeb Qureshi’s account of the Ashton Griffin 70 miles in 24 hours prop bet. Obviously the story in itself is enough to be drawn into, but the way Haseeb writes the account is just brilliant. The man obviously has a talent for telling a tale and although I knew he was a CardRunners instructor, I wasn’t aware that he was a keen blogger. For all of you here’s the link. I think the level of writing throughout the 2 part saga is something to aspire to and I hope he continues to blog in the same manner in time to come.

Haseeb's Blog

Well there you have it, and rather long blog post, with even something not entirely poker related. Who knows I may even write a bit more about things regular people give a shit about in blogs to come. For now, good luck at the table everybody.

Woohoo it's 12s time!

As you can see, I've been on a bit of a heater recently.

99% of the games on that graphs are NLHE $2/180s and the rest comprise of PLO8 $6.50 STTs and 10 orso $7/180s. The final push as you can see right on the end is a $7/180 I binked the other night.

What this means is that I am now rolled for the $12/180s! It's taken a while due to the lack of volume I put in early on, but the more I played, the better my game got and even though I ran pretty hot, I could see that I was making more correct decisions, and more importantly, getting my aggression right. The easiest part of the game to get wrong is shoving in the wrong spots or not shoving in the correct spots. Granted, I always have a push chart to resort to should I need, but when you're mass multitabling it's near on impossible to to read the chart for every decision, so you have to learn to eyeball the correct shoves.

So for now, I'm going to 1-4 table 12s and take shit loads of notes, because I know that the 12s is just so reg heavy, I need to seriously get reads on everyone if I'm ever going to beat this level and hopefully make some real money! $1k swings are so easy in this game so if I can start winning a small amount until my roll gets to a safe amount then start to mass multitable them, we could be onto a winner ;)

Hopefully everyone else is having some run good as well :) Take it easy y'all.

Taking a step back

Just gonna write a short post this time, feeling a bit hazy. I've been a bit lazy again with post updating but to be fair that's likely to continue haha.

Cash play has just been crushing me recently, close to $500 under EV since the beginning of the year, so I think I'll take a small step back for now, and actually carry through with it this time! Although I'm losing an absolute bucket load this year through cash play, I'm winning close to 3 times that through MTT and Sng play, so why not make the smart play.

On top of my $1.2k score in the $16.50 PLO8 Turbo, I've made a number of $100+ scores and also won a $7/180 for $358. The Sng bankroll is actually at the level now where I can move up to the $12/180s and hopefully make some real money. I'm getting tired of stable-mates talking about their standard $1k days, both up and down. It's time for me to get ballin!!!

If anyone from 2p2 is reading, please give your support for Borys313 to play Isildur HU PLO8. I know it's a longshot but some support may get Pokerstars thinking. You can find the thread here.

Finally, I'm looking to improve my NLHE game, other than the turbo 180s. So if anyone out there is a cash game player or a deep stack ninja, drop me a comment and maybe we can get a bit of discussion going.

That's all for now, later y'all.