May/June Review and July Goals

The holidays are finally here and I can’t say how much I’ve been looking forward to these ones. I’m going to put some serious hours into poker these next four weeks and hopefully I can emerge from them properly rolled for 5/10 NL. Now, you’re probably wondering, where on earth did this talk of 5/10 come from!? I mean, wasn’t I sent packing back down to 1/2 NL just a month ago?

Well, let me give an update on how I’ve been going poker-wise. If you’ll remember back to the end of my last poker post, I set myself a goal of winning $10,000 at 1/2 NL in 25,000 hands (10PTBB/100). Well, 25,000 hands have come and gone now and alas to say I didn’t quite make it. In the end, I fell about $1500 short, though EV-adjusted I’m only $1000 short. Here’s the graph and stats of my $10K challenge.

As you can see, I actually got off to a flyer and was up to about $9,000 in about 16,500 hands. I was definitely running hot (about 9 buy-ins above expectation) but also playing really well (my EV-adjusted win rate was still over 10PTBB/100). I then managed to have the 9 buy-ins above expectation wiped out in the space of about 2000 hands. You can see this in the graph where the two green lines rapidly converge at about 18,500 hands. Now, I’m all for regressing back to the mean, but come on, not so damn fast! It certainly sent me a little tilted and I started to play too many tables in an effort to win it back quickly. I also started to open up 2/4 and 3/6 tables and, as you can imagine, this exasperated rather than helped the problem. I ran pretty badly there as well and, in short, managed to wipe out just about everything I had won during my 1/2 challenge.

Here’s the EV-graph of the downswing as well as the overall graph.

Fortunately (for my poker bankroll at least), exams were fast approaching by this point so I didn’t have too many more opportunities to spew my bankroll away. I did however decide to sign up to DeucesCracked.com as I really felt I needed a new perspective on the game and was particularly keen to see how FoxwoodsFiend, whitelime and Krantz approached the game. This turned out to be a fantastic decision and Ariel’s (FoxwoodsFiend) videos in particular turned out to be amazing. There was one thing that he said that really stuck with me:

“While exploiting passive fish is something that was very important at 1/2, at 2/4 it’s not going to be anywhere as near as big a determinant of your profitability as your ability to figure out what regs bluff too much, what regs you can check-raise bluff, who you can get to lay down hands, who calls down too much. Playing the regs is going to be a lot more important than beating up on the fish.”

While this might seem very straightforward, it was actually a big eye-opener for me. You see, I had always treated 2/4 as just a bigger version of 1/2 and done my best to play 2/4 pretty much the same as I would 1/2. The problem with this was two-fold. First, fish at 2/4 are a completely different animal to fish at 1/2 or indeed any level below 1/2. Sure, you get the odd whale with 50/2/1 type stats just like you do at 1/2, but more often than not, fish at 2/4 are 31/13/2 type players. These players are a lot harder to extract value from and blindly isolating and c-betting against them can get you in a lot of trouble if you’re not careful. Secondly, and more importantly, big fish at 2/4 are a relatively rare species. If I fire up SpadeEye at 1/2, I can probably find 15+ tables with 40+ VPIP fish. If I do it at 2/4, I’d be lucky to find more than 5. This means that whenever you do find yourself at a table with a fish, you invariably have to battle with other regs to get to him first. This means that understanding and playing against regs takes on a whole new importance. If your aim is only to profit off fish and break even versus regs, then your win rate will probably be quite meagre indeed. What FoxwoodFiend’s quote let me to understand is that all regs have leaks too; they are just a bit tougher to pry open. But if you really want to beat MSNL, then pry away.

Up till this point, I had never really tried to analyse regulars’ tendencies. If I saw someone with TAGish 18/14 stats or LAGish 22/18 stats I assumed they were fairly competent and pretty much stayed out of their way. There were better spots elsewhere.

The past week, I’ve gone back to playing 2/4 and have really been trying to get reads on the other regulars. I’ve cut down on the number of tables I’ve been playing, tried to take quality notes on my opponents, reviewed hand histories for all the big pots as they happened, and even analysed some data-mined hands away from the table on the hand history replayer. In short, I’ve put a lot more effort into thinking about the game behind the game.

Has it worked? Well, monetarily, it definitely has. I’ve been winning, albeit over a very small sample. But more importantly, something FEELS different. I remember earlier this year when I won $10,000 at MSNL, I never felt like I was actually a winner (which I guess was proven when I eventually lost it all back). Back then, I always felt that if a few races went the other way, I’d be break-even at best. It never felt like money was destined to come. This isn’t the feeling I had at 1/2 NL. If I was stuck several buy-ins at 1/2, I was always pretty confident of getting it back within a few days. At 2/4, I wondered if I’d ever be able to get it back.

Now though, it feels like something has clicked. I know that I can’t justify it on my sample size, but I really feel that I can beat 2/4 now. If I had to specify my ‘Eureka’ moment, I think it’d have to be a rather innocuous session a week ago. I was at numerous tables with a 23/19/3.6 regular, someone I normally would avoid unless necessary. But watching him carefully, I couldn’t help but notice how much he was spewing. This itself wasn’t the thing that perked my interest, but rather the fact that he was spewing because he was clearly playing super standard, no doubt a product of how many tables he was playing. In the space of half an hour, he 6-bet shove AKo preflop (into my AA), he called a 5-bet all-in with AQo (versus QQ), he instant-stacked off AJ on AJ99 when the other player patently had a 9, he 5-bet shove AQo into a 16/14’s 4-bet (AKo). Now, none of these are of themselves beyond terrible, but combined they evidence some pretty massive leaks in his game.

In this one player, I not only saw shades of how I used to play at 2/4 - that is, mindlessly auto-piloting and taking standard lines – but also the type of regulars’ tendencies that I should learn to exploit and profit from in the future.

Anyway, here’s a graph of how I’ve been going at MSNL.

Now, I know that this win rate is unsustainable but if I could maintain even a fraction of it (or even just stay a winning player) I should be able to put in enough hours these holidays to be well rolled for 5/10 by the end of them. I don’t know why, but playing 5/10 NL has always been my goal in poker. I’ve never felt the urge to play higher, but hated that I was playing lower. I think it’s just the thought of buying in for a cool grand and using only $5 chips for your blinds that excites me. Anyway, here’s hoping I can reach this goal by the time uni restarts!