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!

To HUD or not to HUD?

A major upgrade of Holdem Manager came out last week and it contained a truckload of new stats for the HUD: squeeze, 4-bet, 4-bet range, fold to 4-bet, triple barrel, fold to triple barrel, etc. These were previously relegated to the popup or didn’t exist at all, so naturally, in a fit of excitement, I threw every single one of them into my HUD.

It took me nearly two hours to move the new stats into position but I thought it was definitely worth it. After all, I now had a wealth of new information with which to crush my opponents! Here’s a picture of what my HUD looked like at this point.

Later that night, I went onto the Two Plus Two forums and found a very interesting thread in the High Stakes NLHE forum. Basically, a struggling small stakes player was wanting to improve his game and was wondering what high stakes players did that separated them from everyone else. Surprisingly (at least, for Two Plus Two threads), several well thought out responses were offered and, amongst them, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern; they often advised against using a HUD at all! At the very least, they suggested to keep the stats in your HUD to a minimum. This, it was said, would help you to develop better reads and to get a better feel of game flow and player dynamics.

Ugh! I’d often heard this sort of advice before but never really listened to it. Now, having just spent the best part of two hours perfecting my SuperHUD, I really didn’t want to listen to it! Unfortunately, deep down, I knew they were right and, as my own game had been stagnating in recent times, I decided that I’d be doing myself an injustice if I didn’t give it a try. So, begrudgingly, I went back to the drawing board and revamped my HUD, trying to keep it to the bare minimum.

Here’s what I eventually settled on (with revamped table and card mods from http://www.tiltbuster.com/).

Beneath each player I have the standard VPIP/PFR/AF stats. On the left (descending) I have Hands/Fold BB to Steal/Attempt to Steal and on the right I have 3-Bet/Fold to 3-Bet. If I wanted to be extra-minimalist I could probably discard the right column altogether but I decided against this as 3-bet stats are very useful in button/small blind/big blind dynamics and in heads-up matches.

I’ve yet to get a chance to really sit down and play so I’m not sure if this revamped HUD will actually help my game. If it does however, it will be rather ironic since it will mean that what I've been looking for was actually always right in front of me; in front of me, when it shouldn’t have been!

2008 WSOP Main Event Final Table Betting

I randomly decided to bet $100 on the Socceroos v Ghana friendly match last week. I’m not much of a sports better but PartyBets.com was offering 2.60 to 1 odds and, despite my limited knowledge of the Ghana team (other than that they weren’t European and were missing their best player, Chelsea star Michael Essien), I decided that this was too good an opportunity to pass up. I ended up winning the bet but, by the sounds of it, Australia was very lucky to escape with the 1-0 win (I didn’t get to watch the match as I was watching Indiana Jones; quick review: plot sucks, action is ok, good for a bit of fun, not as good as the originals, 7 out of 10). Still, a win is a win, and I locked up my $160 profit.

The next night, invigorated with my success, I scoured the PartyBets site for more profitable bets. I soon saw another match, this time between Japan and the Ivory Coast, that struck me as very similar to the Australia v Ghana game. As was the case for the Socceroos, Japan’s odds of 2.6 to 1 seemed quite high. Not only were they playing at home but the Ivory Coast, like Ghana, was missing many of its stars (Chelsea’s Drogba, in particular) due to injury or the Champions League final. Accordingly, I decided to bet another $100 on Japan and soon found myself another $160 richer when Japan notched up a slim 1-0 victory.

At this point, I considered myself quite the sports betting fiend and decided to keep looking for more profitable bets. Soon, I came across PartyBets.com’s WSOP Main Event final table betting. This intrigued me for obvious reasons but the odds offered seemed gravely lacking. To check this, I decided to do some rough calculations which I now present here. I was hoping that I could find someone to bet on since it would make following the main event that much more exciting. At the same time, I didn’t want to be making some massively –EV bet which I would come to regret.

The Maths

The first number that I had to estimate was the number of entrants into this year’s main event. Last year, there were 6,358 entrants, in 2006 there were 8,773 and in 2005 there were 5,619. With the exception of last year (due to the passage of UIEGA), the number of WSOP entrants has grown each year, so I expect that this year’s figure will be higher than last year’s. How much so is however a difficult question. On the one hand, sites and players have learnt to better understand and deal with the effects of UIGEA and so some of the players lost to UIGEA last year should make a return this year. On the other hand, the poker boom has come to an end and poker television has declined in popularity. As a result, your average Joe is a lot less likely to fork out ten grand and try his hand at stardom. Overall, I thought that there would be a modest increase in the number of players to about 7000.

This means that, disregarding skill, each player has a 1 in 777 (7000 divided by 9) chance of making the final table. What we then have to ask is how the presence of skill changes those odds. Does a pro, due to his skill, have twice the chance of making the final table? Three times the chance? Four?

The answer to this is, of course, impossible to calculate precisely, but there are ways of getting an approximation. One way is to observe the pro to amateur ratio at the start of the main event and to compare it to the pro to amateur ratio at the final table. If, for example, we find that the ratio of pros to amateurs at the final table is twice that at the start of the event, we can infer that pros are roughly twice as likely to make the final table as amateurs. Doing this for the last three or four years (when the fields were of comparable sizes), we should be able to get a pretty decent rough estimate.

Unfortunately, accurately observing the pro to amateur ratio at the start of the main event would require scanning through thousands of names and categorising each player as a pro or an amateur. Not only would this be ridiculously time-consuming, it would also probably be fruitless since in many cases I wouldn’t be able to discern pro from amateur anyway. Thus, I decided that it would be better, although less accurate, to simply compare the fields of the WPT Championship and the WSOP Main Event. In theory, since most pros will attend both the WPT and the WSOP, while amateurs will only attend the WSOP, the ratio of WPT entrants to WSOP entrants should give a rough indication of the pro to amateur ratio.

Here’s some data for the last few years.

Thus, pros, on average, make up about 9.6% of the starting field at the main event.

The next question then is what percentage of the final table they comprise. First, here’s a table outlining the names and number of pros at each of the final tables from 2004 to 2007.

Thus, we can see that, on average, 2.75 pros make the final table. This means that pros make up (2.75/9)*100 = 31% of the final table. This number is significantly greater than the 9.6% starting composition of pros and suggests that your average pro is 31/9.6 = 3.2 times more likely than an amateur to reach the final table. Thus, rather than having a 1 in 700 shot, each pro has a 1 in 700/3.2 = 1 in 220 shot of making the final table due to their superior skill.

Turning now to the odds offered by PartyBets.com, we can see that no pro offers odds of 220 to 1 or better (indeed, only two people offer odds better than 220 to 1 – Ben Affleck and Boris Becker – and they are both clearly amateurs). This suggests that no one on PartyBets.com is worth betting on. It should however be remembered that 220 to 1 are the odds you should be getting on your average pro. Some pros will obviously be better than others and thus should offer lower odds. If, for example, I felt that Phil Ivey was twice as good as your average pro, I should be willing to accept 110 to 1 odds on him. However, twice as good in this sense does not mean twice as skilful but rather twice as likely to final table. In a field of this size, even with far superior skill edges, it is doubtful whether any elite pro can truly be said to be twice as likely as an average pro to make the final table since there is so much luck involved. Thus, I don’t think it’d be wise to accept odds of less than 200 to 1 on any given pro.

Time to Bet! Or Not?

I was pretty happy to come to this conclusion, but unhappy that I wasn’t able to apply it anywhere. Or rather, my applying it was simply abstaining from betting! This was not what I had hoped for. So I looked around to see if any other sites offered betting on the final table. Fortunately, not only did I come across one, but the odds it was offering were in a different galaxy to PartyBets.com. Maybe a profitable bet was to be found after all! The site I had found was PaddyPower.com. Here are the bets it offered.

Looking at these, we can see several pros with odds of 200 to 1 or better. If my calculations are correct, betting on any pro with odds of 250 to 1 should be profitable in itself while betting on an above average pro with odds of 200 to 1 should be fine too. Of course, my calculations are not correct; they are only rough estimates. Thus, I had no intention of following them blindly and some intuition would still be required. However, at least I knew now not to bet on anyone with odds worse than 200 to 1.

Anyway, here’s the list of players I eventually settled on (I put $10 on each). Tell me what you guys think!

Edit: I've since added David Singer to the list (200 to 1).

Futsal Update

It’s been a while since my last futsal entry so I thought I’d give you an update since the regular season has actually come to an end. My Tuesday team didn’t manage to win another game so we finished the season with an unflattering record of one win and six losses. Better luck next season I guess! My Thursday team on the other hand went on a tear and we won three more games in a row to give us a record of four wins, one draw and one loss heading into last week’s final round of matches. We were in third place but only the top two teams from each pool went through. This meant our final game, against the team coming second, was a virtual playoff for the finals. Winning would ensure our passage through to the finals while a draw would see us through (on goal difference) only if the team coming first lost their game. As it happened, the team coming first did suffer a shock loss and we only needed a draw in the final game.

Before getting to the game itself, here’s a random pre-game joke by our resident comedian, Antony.



Right, on to the game itself!

The first half was a fairly even affair and it seemed that we’d be heading into the break nil-all. However, with literally a second left on the clock, we were caught napping waiting for the buzzer and the other team managed to score a very soft goal...



While this was certainly disheartening, we were counting our lucky stars that we only needed a draw and went back out in the second half looking for the equalising goal. Unfortunately, we soon conceded another ourselves. 0-2...



At this point, I thought it was over. The momentum was against us, the clock was against us, and, most importantly, the score-line was against us. However, with four minutes left, having thrown everything at them for what seemed like an eternity, we finally got a goal back!



This turned the momentum in our favour and we began to get most of the possession. We started to constantly pepper their goal but unfortunately had no real golden opportunities. But then, with less than one and a half minutes left, I was set in the clear by Julian and found myself one-on-one with the goalie.

This was it.

A goal, and we’d go through. A miss, and we’d almost certainly be out. What a moment, what a chance...

I put the ball on my right foot, looked up, sized up the goal, and struck the ball...



ARGHHHHHHHHH!

That’s right. The whole season, done and dusted, just like that. Great work Joey! I couldn’t believe this was how the season was going to end...

Fortunately, there was still a minute to make amends, and with thirteen seconds left on the clock, we managed to get one last corner...



2-2!!! FINALS, HERE WE COME!!!