The Real World Called

Hey guys, it's been a while. As I'm guessing most regular readers, or anyone who follows me on Twitter, would have guessed, the blog had to take a back seat for a while because I finally managed to get a real job! Pretty soon after I made my last post I got a call from a large online gaming firm in the city offering me the position of a marketing analyst. The company focuses mainly on online Slots and Casino sites with a little bit of Poker and Bingo thrown in, so I'm still in the general industry not far away from the eventual dream. We're even looking to get into real money Poker in the U.S., which is pretty exciting, so you never know, I could still make it in.

Needless to say, grinding has had to take a bit of a back seat for the past two months. I started the job fully with the intention of continuing to play at evenings and weekends but it soon because apparent that it wasn't going to happen. On a regular day I'm working 9am-7pm, occasionally longer, so by the time I get back to my place at around 8pm, I've missed basically the whole evening MTT schedule, not to mention the fact that I'm constantly shattered.

I have managed to play every now and again though, but not seriously. Recently I've been enjoying jumping into 8-game cash games, purely for enjoyment sake. Now that I don't have to rely on poker to make a living, I've felt that sticking to one game can get a bit monotonous really quick. My first thought when getting back to the games was, naturally, to just into PLO8 cash games as O8 is still my best game by far and I've pretty been successful at micro stakes. I managed to beat NL10 O8 Zoom for a pretty substantial win rate but after a week or so I found the games tedious and uninteresting. It also felt a bit strange playing for such small stakes again after playing low/mid stakes MTTs for so long. With 8-game cash, I've yet to become bored because the games are constantly switching and every time I sit down, it feels fresh. I think I'm also liking it at the moment because I know I'm not very good at most of the games, and the thought of getting better at the likes of Razz and 2-7TD excites me. I've been reading a lot on the games and watching a few videos online on how to improve and so everything feels new again.

In terms of blogging, obviously I haven't had anything much to write about recently so I felt like it would be a waste of everyone's time to read articles that had no substance and we're literally just my random musings, even more so than before. Now that I'm learning games and thinking about Poker a bit differently, I thought it would be a good time to get back into the swing of things and give writing another go. I've had some good conversations with players recently exploring hands and talking strategy about mixed games so maybe you guys would like to hear some things too. Don't worry though, O8 is still part of the mix, so I won't be abandoning the old girl just yet!

For now though, it's Sunday evening, so methinks I should be hitting the tables. I hope all you grinders out there are doing well and maybe I'll catch you at the tables sometime! Good luck for now and I'll speak to you all soon! Take care.

Note Taking

So as my break even February turns into a down swinging March, I took a little step back yesterday to go over some of my play and have a look at some areas of the game at which I need to work upon. While I poured over my HEM database and went over a through hand history reviews, a fellow grinder made it to a decent Final Table so I jumped on the rail for support and, as there is with most low-stakes Mixed Game MTT tables, he was sat next to a reg. I knew the reg well from both PLO and PLO8 and had around a 2k hand sample on him. I had him tagged up as a reg, and a winning reg at that but I didn't have a single note on him. How can that be right, how can I have played over two thousand hands with one player and not picked up a single read on him other than the fact he was a decent player. So thus I've decided that my note taking skills need to be worked on.

Now this isn't the first time I've though about how to improve my note taking. During Andre Coimbra's $100k bankroll challenge last year I watched a ton of his videos on his Youtube channel and I noticed that even in low-stakes MTTs that he wasn't likely to play regularly ever again, his note taking was very detailed. Whenever he was down to a few tables, say two to three, he could pretty much manage to make a note on every player left at his tables.

Now while I didn't agree with some aspects of his note taking, such as merely reporting hands that said player was involved in rather than gleaming reads regarding his range over a sample of similar hands, I did really the way he was noting every hand of interest, regardless of whether he was in it or not, as well as he noting of bet sizing and position. I started incorporating some of these note taking skills into my game but I feel I've become somewhat lazy recently and started to rely more on my HUD for reads than actually watching hands. The HUD is great for generally tagging up what kind of player I'm up against but the specific reads you learn through actually paying attention are where the money is made.

I'm going to be working on this a lot in the near future and I'll let you guys know what kind of effect it has on my play and on my results. Feel free to leave a comment below on how you take notes and maybe what steps you're taking to work on your notes. For now, good luck at the tables and I'll speak to you all soon!

Top 5 things I KNOW I'm doing wrong!

I read a blog post on PartyPoker's site recently where numerous UK Online Pros gave their thoughts on the best tips they could give on how to be a successful online player. These weren't strategy tips i.e. 3-bet more in position etc, but more on the poker lifestyle and mindset and how to prepare yourself to win at the game. It got me thinking not only about which of their tips I was already doing but about those I was not as well as many others. So without further ado, here are the top 5 things I KNOW I'm doing wrong.

1. Playing Tired

Over the past couple of months I have worked really hard on getting a routine in place and organising an actual schedule of when I play poker.  It's helped me to treat poker more like a job and to take it more seriously, however, it does have it downsides. Much like a real job, if you feel tired or ill, you feel compelled to still play, especially as you feel that you miss value by not playing. Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Again, much like real life, you performance is greatly hampered by feeling tired and the usual win rate just doesn't exist. As a poker player, I am blessed that if I am tired, I am not forced to play and I think I should take that one day off to recover and feel fresh, rather than continuing on and maybe playing 3-4 days straight tired.

2. Chasing Losses

I think every poker player out there has felt this at some point. You have maybe two or three losing days in a row and then suddenly you're not thinking fully about winning the tournament you're playing, what you're actually thinking is where in the tournament you need to finish in order to get back to even. It's a truly terrible mindset to be in. The focus of every tournament I play should be to win, end of. I spend a lot of time working on my mindset and this is just the next hurdle to overcome.

3. Holding onto small stacks

This is a lesson that I've taken off some of the well known NLHE grinders. There comes a stage when the tables start to build up and it's hard to focus equally on each one. It's at this point that I start to build up 10BB and less stacks on some of the smaller tournaments approaching the late stages. It's in situations like this where I should be getting aggressive and attempting to shove and reshove my chips in order to build a decent stack, after all, I'm aiming for first, not a min cash. I know that keeping my eye out for spots like this will get me to more final tables and increase my ROI, even if I bubble tournaments a little more often.

4. Not paying full attention

Again, a problem I'm sure other grinders out there experience. I have a pretty short attention span at the best of times, so grinding for hours on end gets somewhat monotonous after a while and I tend to resort to watching TV as well or sometimes even playing other games. Needless to say this is diverting my attention away from the tables and directly affecting my bottom line. To combat this I've recently bought a pair of high quality, noise cancelling headphones and put together a super long grinding playlist that should keep my focus on the tables. I'm always for looking for new tunes to add by the way so feel free to suggest your favourites!
5. Autopiloting

This is somewhat different to not paying attention. Even when I am focused on the tables, I tend to get into a stretch where I genuinely am just clicking buttons. It's a mindset that's easier to get into with Omaha games which is a lot more dependent on showdowns and making the nuts. I definitely can tell when I've been doing it for a while, at which point I snap out of it and start thinking about each hand again but I'm still not entirely certain how to eliminate it all together. Hopefully some of you other grinders have experienced similar and can give me some advice!

As you can still see, I'm working on trying to eradicate these issues from my game but it's a long old slog. At least the first stage of identifying the issues is out the way, so I can work on techniques to focus more and improve my bottom line. Hopefully this helps some of you who feel that you're doing the same thing. That's it for now, so good luck at the tables and I'll speak to you all soon!

The Volume Question

It's an age old paradox among the grinders, "What is the right amount of volume?". Every player out there who's ever taken poker seriously or even considered playing the game for a living has at one point believed that the best way to increase the amount of money their making is to play more poker. After all, surely if a player is beating the games they're playing, then playing more should directly lead to more profits. But we all know that's not the case.

I've always spent a lot of time thinking about how much I should really be playing poker. It's not always been purely from the stand point of trying to increase my winnings, I've also considered about how I should play less to accommodate a more balanced life, i.e. spending a bit more time with the girlfriend or maybe taking the odd weekend off to chill out with friends. Especially after finishing university for good, I then had so much free time in which to play poker than I felt the need to organise when I was going to play as it now became feasible that I could play every day of the week. Luckily for me I'd been in similar positions before where I'd had nothing to do bar play poker and I'd learnt that playing all day, every day for a sustained period of time definitely didn't lead to a fat wallet.

Let's take a look at my "schedule" right now. I normally know well in advance whether I'm going to play on any given day. I'll usually know what days I  have to go to work, or if I've organised with friends to go out etc, so if I know I'm playing poker on a day, I'm immediately in that mindset. Some of the worst days I have are when I've suddenly had a bit of time free and I jump straight into the games. I'm not prepared and not focused so surely enough the results reflect that. If I do play, I register from 3-4pm up until 9pm, the last being the $22 NLO, then play out. That should encompass around 20 scheduled MTTs plus however many 180s I load up depending on how many tables I have up. Even this isn't an exact science yet, I'm still undecided on how many 180s I should have going at any one time because my play style in them requires a bit more work than simply clicking buttons.

I'm comfortable with this schedule and rarely feel overwhelmed by the amount of tables I have going, if I ever do, it's a good sign that I'm not busting tournaments and I'm having a good day so far. Sometimes I get to the end of a days grinding and I think, especially when it's gone well, that I should continue playing and keep going so that I can put up a huge winning day. But it doesn't work like that. Without a doubt, if you were to pull up a record of all the tournaments I'd played after a session should have finished, I would be down tons. When you I set up my schedule and stick it, I am completely focused on the task at hand. I know what tournaments I'm playing, what I' m registered in and vaguely when I'm going to finish. After the window closes, all train of decent thought goes out the window and I'm doomed to lose. It took me a while to learn this important lesson but it's definitely been worth it, I no longer throw away money unnecessarily. It's always best after a session to draw a line under what you've accomplished for the day, good or bad, and start again tomorrow.

Always interested on what you guys have to say on the topic so feel free to leave a comment on the post. I've tinkered around with the page layout to make it easier for you guys to follow the blog. You can follow using your Google account which most of you should have if you made a Gmail or Google+ account, I think Youtube accounts are linked too. You can also sign up for Email updates which prompts you when I upload a new post. But until next time, take it easy everyone and good luck at the tables!

$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!