End of the Month

I'll be honest, this month has been absolutely insane. That 2 week heater propelled me from having a bankroll barely able to cover enough buyins for PL10, to now where I am safely rolled for PL50 and borderline PL100. Obviously I will not break poker player rule number one, never tell anyone what you're worth, but safe to say, it's a lot more than I've ever had! The only shame is that I'm going to have to cash out a fair portion of said gigantic bankroll in order to pay for Christmas, but you know what, this actually makes me happier.

Let me explain. When every grinder begins his long arduous crawl up the rungs of the cash game ladder, he aims to acheive 3 main goals.

1. To make his way up to the highest stakes game and eventually crush Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey for millions of dollars (not alot will acheive this)

2. To make enough money to quit their boring dead end job and play poker full time (many do achieve this, but few will become millionaires)

3. To grow their account to a size where they can make regular withdrawls to support and enhance their lifestyle.

Now, if I'm honest myself, I can't see myself crushing Ivey in the near future, and going pro, while pretty awesome, probably will not happen either. However, if I can cashout even $100 a week, that's around £60. That will pretty much pay for my living expenses, assuming I don't get too drunk at Walkabout and break out the plastic excessively. That would seriously change my life, honestly. As a student you look to cut corners in nearly every possible area. Food, drink, clothes, travel etc, it can get pretty depressing. To be able to go out and buy that brand name loaf of bread, to buy that increasingly necessary new jumper, to drink a pint of Kronenburg rather than London Pride, apologies LP faithful, would dramatically alter my lifestyle. And if we think about it, $100 isn't that difficult is it? I mean that's 2 BIs. If I keep up this months winrate, which is approximately 6BBs/100, and keep up with the volume I really should do as a PLO8 grinder, then withdrawing $100 AND continuing to build a BR should be attainable. Once I hit the promised land of PL100, and settle in nicely to what I assume is a tougher game, then we could possibly move onto withdrawing more, but I think this is more of a long term goal than a hope for the new month. Right now I need to concentrate on playing solid poker, not getting worked up after losing a few pots, an issue which is sort of troubling me right now, and most importantly, getting in that volume. Although I'm hitting the 20k hand mark for the month tonight, I would really like to be much further than that this time next month.

I've got a few things I'm going to share with you but it's getting on, and Man Utd just lost 4-0 to West Ham, yeah I know! So I'm off to drown my sorrows in a haze of watery tea and mediocre porn. We'll get around to the other stuff later. Toodles.

Summary of the month

Heater of a lifetime

Once again, I can only apologize for the distinct lack of blog entries. The "problem" is that I've been too busy winning money! I know, crazy isn't it. I've literally been on the heater of a lifetime.

If I'm honest with you, this doesn't really need alot of writing, thus I invite you, and probably myself for the next few minutes, to glare in awe at my epic month so far.

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The majority of this comes from PL25 deep stacked tables and the last 2k hands orso have been PL50. Yes I realise I'm ridiculously underolled for PL50, but give it a few days and I should be there :)

Besides this amazing run at the O8 tables, I've also been doing well at NLHE. To start with, I'd played around 50 Sngs this week as I felt rather bad about letting my staker down. Afterall, I'm about 3 months into the stake and I'm still in make-up. So after quite a bit of research down in the SSMTT forum over on twoplustwo, as well going through a ton of not only my own hand histories, but those of the other players in the stable, I thought I should put in a bit of volume. And to an extent, it's paid off. Granted it's a small sample size, but my ROI this week has been around 180% without actually shipping one yet. I feel like my NLHE game has gotten a lot better in terms of pushing and calling ranges, but I'm still making the odd mistake when I'm deep stacked. It's pretty ironic if you think about it, my shortstack NLHE game is far superior to my deep stacked game, and vice versa for O8.

If that wasn't enough, I ran good outside of Pokerstars. Whilst updating my Twitter, Grimiscool for those who use it, Sky Poker had a little give away, where the first 5 people to return an answer to a trivia question received free entry into one of their £5 rebuys in the evening. Seeing as I ran like god this week, obviously I was the 5th person to return the correct answer and thus sealed the ticket. I'd never played a proper tournament on the site so thought I might as well give it a good shot. The tournament was a fairly deep stacked affair, with a 2500 chip starting stack and 12 minute levels. The play was very passive and I spent the majority of the tournament stealing and restealing whenever it was folded to me. After 4 hours of arduous play, I made it to the final table as the shortstack but after winning 2 important flips, as well as constantly stealing the now fairly large blinds, I became an overwhelming chip leader and shipped that bad boy for £144. Even though I didn't get my money in bad ever, that fact that I ran well in those important flips meant I had a more than healthy chip stack for the majority of the tournament. I must thank Sky Poker for the ticket into the tournament, and now that I have some funds on their site, I'll be crushing the O8 on there :)

I don't know how long this run good is going to last, but I might as well put in as many hours as humanly possible so that I have enough money next month to be able to cash out some money to pay for Christmas. On that note, I better return to the tables so until next time, take it easy e-world :)

Little rant about short tables!

I can't really call my move from half stacking to full stacking a "transition", just common sense. Nevertheless, I have experience at both forms of the game and thus I think I can compare the 2 games impartially. Shortstacking is just not real poker! (Still being impartial obv ;))

I've had so many discussions on the 2+2 forum about this subject and although people have brought up some valid points about why I should embrace the new 50BB table trend, I don't think I ever will. Most of the reason I enjoy poker so much is that it makes you think, you're pitting the strength of your decisions up against the decisions of others, so why would I take away this part of the game and replace it with just pure gamble. It's not enjoyable for me, and according to my Omaha Manager, it's definately not profitable either.

Unfortunately for me, others don't share my disdain for it. Right now as I write this post, there are 10 tables running at PL25, not one of them a full stack table, or even a deep table. Even when I sit on my own at these tables, they'll take an hour to fill and if I'm honest, sitting HU or 3 handed with decent regs isn't the most profitable idea in the world. I assume that most players who have decided to have a go at PLO8 are new-ish to the game and would like to learn how to play it properly, so why sit at a table where you're going to be pushing around small stacks without even having a clue what equity you're going to have. Come play some full stacked poker and you'll learn so much more about the game and become adept far faster than you will at the short tables.

Sorry this isn't a meaningful blog post, just a bit of ranting and raving about silly short tables. I write something actually half decent later. So bye for now :)

Back for a bit of cash grind

Sorry for getting a bit lazy about updating this blog. It’s been a really busy few weeks, and finding a few spare moments to just write down my thoughts have been few and far between. So, seeming as it’s been a while, I feel I should give you a bit of an update.

The NLHE SnG grinding had been going along nicely, but unfortunately I hit a bit of a rough patch and busted my stake. Now, literally, there is no worse feeling than having to face up to your backer and admit that you just lost all his money. Even though I had been running on fumes for about a week prior, I was still optimistic that I could turn it all around. After all, only 2 weeks previously I had almost doubled my money, so it was definitely within my capability to do it. Luckily for me, this feeling was mirrored by my backer and he very generously reloaded me, which again I thank him for. Rather than jump straight back into haemorrhaging money, I thought it better to take a step back, review my game and more importantly, just take a break from push/fold poker. I would get into my thoughts on the subject, but let’s leave that for another post, don’t want this one to be a bit tl;dr.

Being the degenerate gambler that I am, I couldn’t just withdraw from poker altogether, after all that would give me far too much time than I care to have, so I thought why not go back to my passion, PLO8 cash games. Once again, I thought better of just jumping into games which I was quite clearly losing money at, it would be a fools move. So I started doing some research on my HEM database as to what I was making money at, and the results were quite baffling. Overall I had been a small loser at PL25, which was quite shocking in itself considering that I was above $400 in profit at the game at one point, and a big winner at PL10. Obviously the change in skill level would account for a chunk of that difference in performance, but surely it could not be responsible for t he whole problem. And then it dawned on me, when I was playing the PL10 cash games, it was back in the days of regular 100BB buyins, rather than the crazy 50BB games that were running these days. So I filtered my database for games in which I only played with 100BB stacks or greater, and the results were unbelievable.

In effect that report told me that I was losing over 20 buyins at the 50BB games! If I had picked up on this sooner I could have saved myself a lot of heartache, let alone a boat load of cash. It was clearly obvious that I should exclude myself from these games straight away, but that brought up a different problem, I was nowhere near rolled for deep stacked PL25 games, but, I was nicely rolled for PL10 deep, so why not give that a try. Now I cannot say in any certain terms what a goldmine these games are!! I’m still playing for $25 stacks, just with a lot more play, so in effect I’m risking the same amount of money but with more of a chance to use my skill advantage to outplay what were, in almost all cases, significantly worse players. WHY HADN’T I WORKED THIS OUT SOONER!!!!

So I think, I’ll be playing these games for a bit, then graduating to PL25 when the roll gets deep enough, but still with one eye on reviewing my NLHE SnG game so I can get back to crushing those. Actually, let’s go do that now J Til next time, adios!!

Thoughts on PLO8 and NLHE

I spent of lot of time thinking to myself yesterday about the subjects of PLO8 and NLHE. The nuances between the games, the players themselves and generally my feelings towards the two disciplines.

PLO8 will always be my main game. Even if I put most of my volume in NLHE, like I am at the moment, I will always come back to it. It was the first game that I truly took seriously and made me want to learn and get better. NLHE was fun, but it never gave me the drive to spend hours trolling forums and read books, it was just a passing fancy. In fact, I probably wouldn't be where I am today, which granted isn't very much, but it's better than reloading Pokerstars with $10 every time a student loan payment came in. But when you grind it day in and day out for months at the time, the motivation just goes, and you find yourself yearning for something different, something just to spice up the routine. NLHE SnGs gave me just that and really just reignited that spark that poker just gives me in general.

But then the downswing came, and I found myself once again wondering if this was now the game I wanted to focus my attention on. I was discussing earlier with a fellow grinder the demoralization I felt when I discovered that in 2 months of grinding hard at these SnGs, I was still a loser, not by a huge amount but the fact that I was not even a break even player after such a period of top coaching was devastating. Sure I can chalk it up to variance, and many will say that even a 1k game sample is not enough to determine how good of a player someone is, but am I just not good enough for these. Other players in the stable have, in the same time period, blasted through the 2/180s and are cutting their teeth on the 12/180s, and making good money might I add. So I think to myself, how can these guys do it so easily and I'm struggling to even show profit? I thought about quitting on more than one occasion but wouldn't that be the easy way out, the cowardly option. I'll keep working, I'll keep trolling the forums, I'll keep going over the hand histories and hopefully, in the near future, all the effort and graft will pay off. We will see.

Well that's enough of me ranting for one day. With a bit of luck maybe I'll post you a sick sharkscope graph of me winning almost 1k this week =]

Till next time x

Trip to the Fox Poker Club

Affordable Omaha tournaments don't come along very often. Affordable O8 tournaments, almost never come along. So you can see how excited I was when PKR published their "London Calling" tournament schedule at the Fox Poker Club. A £40+5 Omaha Hi Lo with 1 Rebuy or Addon. This, for me, was just sick. Finally I could play O8 live, and not just heads up for pennies with my buddy. Sure it's a little bit out of my bankroll, but for this tournament an exception just had to be made!

OK, so here's a little trip report. The tournament started at 4pm, and I got there a little bit early, just to make sure I got a seat, wasn't sure how big the club was. Turned out it was pretty huge. Just a guess but I think there were around 20 tables in there, and enough dealers to fill them all. The club was brand new, and very well presented. The place was brilliantly organised and I could not fault the staff. I met up with a few 2+2ers beforehand which in itself was pretty cool, but we weren't there for a chit chat, I was there to beat them ;)

We started with 5k chips at 25/50. 20 minute blind levels. My first level was fairly boring. I got top set in against bottom set fairly early on, but he backdoored a crappy low to split the pot. Would have been nice for that to hold up, but it was early doors and I wasn't too fussed about winning the tournament in the first level. I got a lot of chips when I turned the nut flush and nut low against a fairly loose player and he called me on 3 streets with a lower flush, no low, which made me very happy :) My table was a mix of tight competent players, and, well, the opposite. I managed to pick out the players I knew I was going to attack but with the blinds getting pretty steep already, I would need to make that advantage pay off soon.

After 1 hour I took the addon which built my stack up to around 13k, which was around the top 3 stacks at the table. One solid player had chipped up well throughout the level and one of the poorer players had binked a few hands after busting and taking a rebuy. We took a break, I discussed a few hands with the 2+2ers and heard some stories of the whales at the other tables. Tales of players not realising what their hand was, and others of some really horrendous bets and calls. That table was going to break first so I was hoping that some of them would filter down to my table. The second level was much more exciting. Soon I got Kings with a flush draw in against Aces against a stack which I thought was much shorter than it actually was. I was never going to fold but maybe it was a mistake to commit myself so quickly. I'll put the hand into a converter and post it later. That mishap put me down to around 2.5k so I had to make a move soon. It limped around to me in the big blind and I saw a flop with 44K8, the obvious nuts. I flopped bottom set, which was more than enough to put my measly stack in the middle. The nut low draw called me, yeah a draw, to a chop. Thankfully the board ran out 2 high cards and I scooped a pot which almost tripled me up. A few hands later it's folded to me and the big blind is short, almost pot committed. I pick up AK59s which is well ahead of his calling range so I isolate him, and sure enough he comes along for the ride with a less than brilliant hand. I held that one which put me back to around where I started the level. A few other small pots put me around 16k at the break which was around 15BBs but still average for the tournament.

One more round of discussing hands and we were back to the action. Our table split and I moved up to table 2. This is where the tale get's interesting. I got blinded down a fair bit after running card dead, then it folded to me in the small blind and I completed with rags. I was hoping to bluff any non-connected flop as I didn't believe he was folded to a raise, with any four cards. The flop wasn't really what I was hoping for but I check/called a min bet hoping to bluff on a later street. The turn went check/check and the river brought a 3rd flush card. I insta-bet half the pot, trying to represent. Villian tanked for ages before finally cutting out a call and throwing it into the middle. I turn over my complete bluff and he scooped the pot with a made low and a pair of eights for high. That brought me down to around 11k and then my biggest hand happened. A tight player in middle position raised the pot and I look down in the small blind to see AA78ds. I pushed and he insta called without waiting for the count and flipped over AA34s. The low came and I didn't suck out for the high so I got three-quartered and was down to 5k, around 3BBs. The table broke and the very next hand, I look down at A259. The blinds were about to go up so any 4 cards were being shoved here, luckily for me I had a good hand. The player to my right had already limped so he called with 2344, rags. The flop brought 1 low card and a flush draw for him, definately not what I hoped for. The turn brought another low card but another club, which had me drawing dead for the high but I could still hit a low. But the river bricked and I was sent home in 19th out of 46, respectable I feel.

The trip was amazing. It felt great to finally play some Omaha Hi Lo live, and although I didn't cash in the tourney, I was very happy with how I played and how deep I went. I even managed to outlast the 2+2ers I met so let's call that a win :) The trip also wet my appetite for playing some O8 cash so as soon as I made it back, I jumped into some cash tables. I'm hoping to play a few thousand hands before the end of the month, just to get back into the swing of things. I'm running pretty terribly in the NLHE SnGs so maybe some time off will be beneficial to my game.

Anyways, that's a long enough blog post. I'll update you on what happens fairly soon. Ciao x

Ok, let's update!

First of all, not gonna lie, I forgot about this blog. Went to start a new one up earlier and blogspot kindly let me know that I already have a blog that I set up in February to track my adventures in PLO8. So, instead of starting a completely new blog, I'll just update you on where I'm at now, and how my poker life has changed quite a bit.

Let's start with PLO8 then, after all, the title of this blog is "Tales of a Micro PLO8 Grinder". I have been grinding alot since February. In my last post I spoke about moving to Full Tilt to grind the Rush PLO game over there. That fad lasted a few weeks. Variety is the spice of life, and to take a break from grinding the Stars PLO8 game was needed. I felt more energized, excited and generally my interest level in the game was much higher than it had been in a while. I sustained a fairly high winrate, as well as clearing the Full Tilt bonus, which was afterall the main reason for changing over in the first place. So how did I do you may ask, well the less said about the best really. I made the horrible mistake of paying more attention to the bonus clearing process than my actual game. Eventually I was 4 tabling Rush PL10, which is the equivalent of 16 tabling regular poker, and folding in a lot more spots than usual, just to get more hands in. It was just poor poker, and not play I would advise to anyone. I lost a lot of the profit I had made in the first 2 weeks and was relying on the bonus money to keep my bankroll afloat, and if you consider that I was only clearing about $10 every 3-4 days, then you can see that it wasn't very healthy. I eventually cleared the bonus after about three and a half weeks but my profit was minimal if not breakeven. The way I saw it, I had wasted 3 weeks of grinding time, in which I could have made a decent amount of profit playing my regular games. However, there were many positives to the time off. I had come out of my PLO haze refreshed and more excited about PLO8 than ever. I looked forward to grinding my favourite game hard, and more specifically, getting back to my regular stakes of PL25 and playing for what I considered a decent amount of money.

So now I was back to the PL25 6max games on Stars, and loving every moment of it. To make a long story incredibly short, between March and now I made around $400 dollars, lost pretty much all of it back, then made some of it back, told you it was short didn't I. I'm still semi-committed to grinding PLO8, but at the moment it hasn't got most of my attention. About 2 months ago, my staking agreement ended and although I was still motivated to play PLO8, I wanted to improve my NLHE game. There were many reasons for this, firstly NLHE is so widely played, that if I'm ever going to make serious money in poker, I have to be very adept in it. It's well and good having a very high level PLO8 game, but how often are you going to find a live PLO8 tournament, or even a big online tournament? Once, twice a year? Not nearly enough to make some real money. Secondly, and I think most importantly, I had never actually seriously grinded NLHE. I'd play a fair few SnGs back in the day, but never taken my game to the next level. So with this in mind, I hopped over to the staking forum on 2+2 to see if anyone was looking for some SnG grinders, and low and behold, the first application I made was sucessful. I am now part of a stable of players grinding the 180 man turbos on Stars. Not only do I benefit financially, but the stake also comes with some really useful coaching. I've probably learnt more in the past 4 weeks playing with this stable, than I knew in the whole of my NLHE playing days. For now I'm going to be focusing a lot of my attention on these games, but don't worry my faithful followers, my heart still belongs to PLO8, and come the new month, I'll be putting in enough volume to not only satisfy myself, but to get enough stories to fill the blog.

Wow, long post eh. Promise you guys the next one will be a little less tl;dr. Good luck on the tables boys and girls!

Small change of tact

I logged onto Full Tilt yesterday to play a mate HU and I found that FT were offering me a $100 bonus. All I needed to do was earn enough FTPs, approximately 1600. I have 30 days from today to clear all $100 dollars, so I thought, heh, why not. Free money!

Now, usually I mass multi-table PLO8 6max cash games. Up to about 10-12 tables, minimum of 8. FT just doesn't have the volume that Stars does. I logged on this morning only to find 2 games going, and a small handful of FR games. So, I'm making a small change. Just until I clear the bonus, I'm going to play 4 tables of Rush Poker PLO10. With the increased rate of hands, I can play almost 1k hands per hour, already more than I was playing on Stars with 10 tables going. PLO is not my main game but I have had some good success in PLO tournaments and I feel I can beat 10PL fairly easily.

So this morning I had a small grind, just after I woke up, to see how much I'll need to play. Obviously I don't want to take too long clearing the bonus because I won't have any time to play my main game, PLO8. What came next was staggering! The play at PL10 is horrendous. Either that or I'm a top PLO player, which I very much doubt. Players are so tight post-flop and call 3/4 bets out of position with marginal hands. It's a goldmine.

So far I've grinded for about 2 hours. Enough for 1500 hands and $55 profit. Cleared $10 of the bonus, so $90 to go. Here's the graph of todays results:

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/2070/graphjl.jpg

I'm going to do a few bits of housework now, and a little bit of studying but I'll put in a session tonight. See you at the tables!

Welcome to the blog!

Sup guys!

Not sure if anyone's gonna read this but there you go. I'm a micro stake PLO8 grinder, hoping to make the move to midstakes in the next few months. The main aim of the blog is so that I can analyse my own game and rectify my mistakes. It also acts as a way of monitoring my progress as I player. For example, in 6 months time I can look back at the blog and make comments like "I'm not making mistake A anymore" or "I am still making this mistake, it is obviously a big leak in my game".

Hopefully others will read my posts and can comment on my game as well. The main focus is personal development so the advice of others is always welcome.

I'll make a more meaningful post later tonight but at the moment I think it's time to grind!

Laters y'all :)