$11 180 man PKOs - The Goldmine

As promised, I'm just going to give you guys some of my thoughts about these new SnGs now spread on PokerStars. I won't go too deep into strategy because I'm still not too sure myself about what works the best, I'm still testing out push/folding ranges.

First off all, for those of you who haven't played a PKO yet, this is how it goes. The buy-in is split into the regular prize pool and a bounty, much like in regular bounty tournaments. In the case of the $11s, $5 goes toward the prize pool and $5 towards the bounty, and of course, $1 as rake. Now here comes the tricky part. When you knock a player out, you receive half their bounty value while the other half is added to your bounty. For example, if you were to knock a player out on the first hand, you would receive $2.50 straight into your account, and your own bounty will increase to $7.50. SkyPoker have actually used this system for a while for their own bounty tournaments.

The main reason why these tournaments are so profitable at the moment is because the regs seem to be avoiding them, but I can't understand why. As soon as you introduce the word "bounty" into a tournament, the fish just flock to it. And it's because of these fish that are so narrow minded and solely focused on taking bounties that their calling ranges are so well defined. Basically, if the fish has you covered, you can shove pretty much any marginally strong hand and expect to be called by near enough any 2 cards. In the past week I've seen over 50BB shoves snap called by hands such as Q2o, 65s and much much worse. You can tell who this kind of fish are within around 10 hands at the table, and better yet if you have HEM, you don't even have to pay attention, it'll flag them up for you.

Then all of a sudden the situation is completely reversed when the fish get short, they become absurdly passive. Especially around the bubble, the fish decide to call 80/90% of hands pre-flop only to play fit or fold poker on the flop, it makes for very each chip accumulation.

It's a combination of these two factors that have got me thinking that a loose aggressive small ball strategy, if that makes sense, is best. Even with a short stack, I believe that min-raises pre with a very wide range followed by 1/3rd pot flop c-bets are the best way to go around these tournaments. A decent push/fold game can still work but it needs to be altered to take into account the serious drop in fold equity, e.g. 98s and similar hands become less valuable when shoving but are worth opening, even with less than 15BB stacks.

Well there's a few of my thoughts on the games, it maybe wasn't the most structured post in the world but hopefully it gave you guys a little insight into what I'm thinking at the moment, which is kind of the point of a blog! But that's enough writing for now, it's time to jump in and crush the games. Good luck to all you grinders and I'll speak to you all soon!

November Goals Review

Hey everybody, I'm back with my review of how my November goals went. If you want to read the original post where I outlined my goals and gave a reasoning for all of them, then you can find it here! So without further ado, let's get on with the show. s

1. Profit of $5000

So the first goal didn't go quite to plan. I started off the month pretty well, finishing up a few hundred over the first week but then things stalled. I'd run pretty well during October and so maybe I got a little over confident and upped the volume too much but I definitely felt like I wasn't playing my A-game. I didn't play enough games over the period to call it a downswing but I lost a little bit towards the middle of the month. Because of my birthday and other things towards the end of the month so the volume dropped for a week orso and I didn't get time to make the goal. Overall I ended up in the black for the month but it was definitely a lot less than I was hoping or than I anticipated.

2. Ship a Red Label

I'm sure after reading my post about my Red Label Heartache you can guess that I didn't ship one in November. There were many deep runs and too many near misses but I just couldn't keep the run good going. Good news though, I have managed to accomplish this in December! I managed to ship the $8.80 NLO8 Omania a few days ago for just under $1k. I'm really happy about it and glad that after all those close calls, I finally managed to put it to bed. There's a few funny stories from that tournament so I'll stick all the details in another post. Happy Days

3. Show a profit at 180 man SnGs

This goal I did manage to accomplish, thanks to Pokerstars' introduction of the $11 PKO 180s being introduced. Since they started at the end of November I've shown a pretty large profit on these games including 1 full ship and numerous final tables. Like I said in my previous post, the dynamics in this game are so interesting and there's so much to talk about that it really deserves it's own post. [Wow I'm making a lot of promises here aren't I?]

4. Win my MicroMillions prop bet

Another win in this column however it was technically by default. My friend who I made the prop with was another MTT grinder specializing in O8 but just as the series started, he decided to stop grinding MTTs and moved into cash games, thus he didn't intend to play the series anymore. As far I as knew, the bet was still on and I accumulated a large amount of TLB points in the first half of the series. Eventually my friend put all his eggs in one basket and decided to ship the bet just by winning the PLO8 event but unfortunately for him he couldn't navigate the 10k field, in fact I actually ended up running deeper than him. Sure it was a default win, but a win is a win and even though it wasn't for a lot of money, it was still a fun prop and served it's purpose of getting me to grind the series properly.

5. Only get drunk twice

And there's the hattrick! 1. Pokerstars VIP 2. Birthday. That's the win. Sure, the occasional beer was had but the "I won't get drunk so I can grind later" excuse seemed to work pretty well. The fact that I'm staying home to grind more is actually working out well for my liver and my wallet so I'll have to keep it up a bit longer. With the obvious exception of Christmas parties of course.

So there's a solid little recap. 3/5 isn't too bad and seeming as I managed to ship the Omania this month instead, I'll call it 3 and a half. I think I've left it a little late to start writing December goals, especially as I won't be grinding over the Christmas period. To be honest, I need to achieve the goal of writing all these posts that I've promised and that could take long enough! Oh well, until next time, good luck at the tables and speak to you all soon.

They say it's all over........Hell no it's not!

Indeed, I am not dead, just busy. I have a few posts that I need to write in the next few days so here's what should be coming up.

Following on from the last post, I did go to the PokerStars VIP Party here in London and it was amazing! I have tons of pictures, including pics with various Pokerstars Pros, but be warned I am pretty damn drunk in most of them, it was an open bar after all.

The week after the VIP Party was my birthday so I had a fair few events during the week including a night out with my mates and visits from my family and on top of that, my girlfriend's family also visited for a weekend so I even had to take a Sunday off! The horror. That did mean unfortunately that I didn't post a November summary and a conclusion to how the month's goals went so I'll be writing that pretty soon. This also means that I need a fresh set of goals for December, however they may not be as lofty as you'd expect, because.....

I got a job! OK, not a real job, just some catering and events staffing gigs. With Christmas just around the corner, a little guaranteed cash will come in quite handy as well as giving me a solid reference to put on my CV. Unfortunately, most employers don't consider "Professional Poker Player" a valid job so it's good to show that I'm not sitting around all day playing a game and writing blog posts!

I also want to write a more detailed blog post about the new 180 man $11 PKO SnGs on Stars because I think they're fantastic. Definitely the best new game Stars has released in a while and they create some pretty interesting dynamics where the fish will seriously call you with any 2 cards given the chance they can win your bounty. It makes for some pretty fun short stacking.

So anyway, I'll get started on writing these posts and I hope you guys stay tuned and read them. Quick shout out to MrScRuFFF and Pokerchef for shipping the NLO8 and PLO8 FTOPS events (Scruffy actually chopped the PLO8 with Chef too!). Enjoy the jerseys and, of course, all them $s! To all you grinders, have a big Sunday and good luck in the big Sunday Million!