The Evolution of a Poker Player’s Blog

In reading other people’s blogs I’ve found it pretty amazing (and amusing) how similar a path everyone seems to follow, myself included. So I give you my take on the evolution of a poker player…’s blog.

Admittedly it’s basically my entire blog in a nutshell (with a few fun alterations) but I wonder how close it is to yours?

***

Stage 1: The excitable beginner

Hey guys! My name’s John and this is my first blog post. I’m a 20 year old college student studying Finance at the University of Detroit and have been playing poker for three years. I played mostly for fun in high school at first but now I want to take it more seriously and really get better. Hopefully my subscription here at CrackingCards.com will take me to the next level! Wish me luck!

Stage 2: The goal setter

I deposited $100 and currently have $107.37 in my bankroll. I’m going to try to win 10 buy-ins at 10NL at 4PTBB/100 before taking a shot at 25NL. If I lose 2 buy-ins there I will move back down to 10NL and try again. I hope to finish the year as a 25NL regular with a $500 bankroll. Anything above would just be gravy!

In addition, I’m aiming to:

a) Work out more
b) Maintain a 3.0 GPA
c) Watch 3 videos a week and take good notes

Stage 3: The hand history machine

I played a nice 438 hand session in 52 minutes today and booked a solid $31 win. I think I ran pretty well but also played really well. Here are the more interesting hands from the session.

[insert HH 1]
[insert HH 2]
[insert HH 3]
[insert HH 4]
[insert HH 5]
[insert HH 6]
[insert HH 7]
[insert HH 8]
[insert HH 9]
[insert HH 10]
[insert HH 11]
[insert HH 12]
[insert HH 13]
[insert HH 14]
[insert HH 15]

Thanks for reading through them, I would love any feedback!

Stage 4: The obsessive statistician

My VPIP/PFR is currently 23/15 but it’s meant to be 23/19 so I’m going to try to raise more preflop. I am showing a profit with most of my big hands but AK is still a majorly losing hand for me…must fix that somehow! I also seem to be losing too many 20-40bb pots and my W$SD and WWSF are a bit low.

Poker is going very well overall though…I’m currently winning at 3.27PTBB/100 (3.93 EV-adjusted, I run so bad). I’ve only played 3132 hands though, and apparently you need to play 10,000 before you can be sure you’re definitely a long-term winner. Hopefully my form will carry through!

Stage 5: The heads-up convert

I’ve started playing some 50NL heads-up and I have to say I absolutely love it! I think it really suits my game and my personality. I really love how it’s just one man versus another, a raw battle of wits and psychology; there’s mind games, there’s leveling, there’s the triumph of victory when you stack your opponent and send him scurrying away. HU is just the purest form of poker, and I’ll definitely be playing it more from now on.

Here’s a sick hand where I got into a leveling war with my opponent on a dry 442r flop. We both knew that it was hard for either of us to have a hand on this board and we both knew that we both knew this, so we get into a bit of a raising battle on the flop since it’s a spot where either of could easily be bluffing and re-bluffing. In the end though he had JJ while I had QQ so I guess it was a bit of a cooler.

[insert HH ]

*** Fast forward a few years***

Stage 6: The red-line obsession

My red line has always been in constant decline and it’s really starting to bug me. All the sick high stakes players have really positive red lines so if I want to ever get to high stakes myself I need to try to make mine go up as well. I’ve thought about it a bit and decided that the following changes to my game will help my red line.

1. Every hand I’m going to roll a dice. If it lands on 1, I’m going to triple barrel bluff no matter what.
2. If I have the nuts on the river, I’m going to tell my opponent before I shove. That way he will fold and I will win a non-showdown pot instead of a showdown pot.

Stage 7: The HUD-less Horseman

After watching Sam’s video, I decided to experiment playing without a HUD. Man, has it been an eye-opening experience! I feel like I’m suddenly so much more in tune with the game. I’m making much better reads, understanding my opponents much better and really just have a great handle on the flow of the tables that I’m on. I can’t imagine ever playing with a HUD again!

Stage 8: The expert live player

I decided to mix it up and play some live poker this week. LOL were they bad! I started with some 2/5 cash on Tuesday. Limpers everywhere, passive play all around…what a goldmine! There was this one hand where an old Asian lady called a 3-bet cold with J5s, flopped a pair of 5s on AK5 and then called three streets versus KK! So funny! Unfortunately I ran pretty bad and ended up losing $800 or so. It was so frustrating because no one would fold preflop or on the flop and needless to say my AK never hit!

Stage 9: The MTT non-convert

I played the Sunday Million today and OMG what a joke! I had 25K by the first break because MTT players are just clueless postflop but then the blinds got bigger and I got in AA v 88 for a 60K pot and what do you think hits on the river? F#$king unbelievable. I’m 80% to have a 60K stack and would have been one of the chipleaders but nooooooooooooo, I’m left with 2K chips and got knocked out the hand after. Not playing an MTT ever again!

Stage 10: The down-swinging Emo

Man I can’t catch a break! I lost a little over 7 buy-ins today at 2/4 NL, all in all about $5000. The session started off well but then I lost 3 races in a row and got sucked out on with a set versus a flush draw. I seriously run worse than anyone in the world! Here’s the graph.

[insert graph with brutal EV line]

I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I’m now down 20K for the month and 15K below-EV. I think I’ll take a break and drop down in stakes to regain some confidence. I really thought I was going well and going to hit my goal and move up to 3/6 by the end of the month, but the poker gods have f#%ked me again and it looks like I’ll be slumming it down here for a while longer.

Stage 11: The inspired philosopher

Winston Churchill once said that “failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”.

Ne’er have wiser words been spoken.

And thus, though I may have been brought to my knees…though my confidence may be shattered and my bankroll decimated, I shall persevere.

I shall continue.

I shall be courageous.

And I shall succeed.

Stage 12: Reborn and rejuvenated

I watched a couple of videos from Ben’s new series and have been implementing some of his plays into my game. It’s been working out great and I really feel like a new man! I’m really glad I took a break, I’m actually excited about poker again and feel like I’m playing better than ever! I don’t want to jinx myself but here are my results for this week. Pretty sick!

[insert graph]

*** Fast forward several years***

Stage 13: You’ve made it!

Hey guys, sorry I haven’t updated in a while. I’ve been busy travelling across Europe and Asia. Just got back from Thailand yesterday actually, it was simply awesome. Great location, great views and a great time. Here are some pics.

[insert pic 1]
[insert pic 2]
[insert pic 3]
[insert pic 4]
[insert pic 5]

I haven’t played much recently but I did log a short 30 minute hand session yesterday and made about 500K. Mostly standard spots, although there was this one fun hand:

[insert link to HH instead of the HH itself :(]

I’m going to a friend’s house for New Years Eve tonight, should be fun to see everyone again. Take care, happy new year and have a great 2010!

-18K Day, Might’ve Played Isildur Accidentally

No prizes for guessing what happened today lol.

I dropped about 18K at 10/20 and 25/50 and am now below my goal again! Oh well.
It was pretty cool though because for the first time I played a fully-fledged 25/50 session, at one stage 5-tabling it across various sites. I’ve taken shots at 25/50 for a long time now but usually I’ll only have one or two tables up and running. To have my entire screen filled today with 25/50 and not a single lower stake game running felt so sick!

So I’m only up 14.6K for the month now and need to get back to 21K to hit my ‘tier 1’ goal. My ‘tier 2’ goal is to get to 58K so that I can say I’ve made 100K in the one and a half months since uni finishing. That’s obviously a long way off now, as is my ‘tier 3’ goal, which as I said last time is to get to 71K for the month.

My other concurrent goal is to get my 10/20 6-max winnings out of the red for the year. I was down 90K at one stage at 10/20 6-max but managed to get it to +5K or so a couple of days ago. It’s now back down to -12K though so I’d like to finish the year with that in the positive.

The other thing that I’ve been meaning to mention but keep forgetting (but re-remembered today because of the FTP Regs Thread) is that I might’ve accidentally played Isildur1 at 200/400 HU. If you remember I did a gimmick of a shot at this player who I thought was a huge fish and who was down over 1M on iPoker: http://thepokermind.blogspot.com/2009/10/very-brief-200400-nl-shot.html. I later found out though that my opponent is likely to be Blom90, who of course is also rumoured to be Isildur1.

If true, this would make my shot rather dumb. The thing that makes me think it’s not Isildur1 though is that a) he plays 6-max and b) he’s a complete galah at 6-max (I’ve been shown some pretty lol hand histories). Either way though I think it’s a pretty funny development and it definitely makes you think twice before shot-taking just because you saw someone’s PTR!

21K Day at…HU!?!?

Wow how things can change! I’ve been running so poorly this month at 6-max that yesterday I thought “screw it, let’s give HU a whirl”. For those of you who don’t know this is generally a really bad idea for me. I’ve never really studied HU videos or gotten coaching for HU or read HU hands in forums. My HU career has basically been me clicking buttons versus I Win Flips and slowly learning how much I suck (though he loves constantly reminding me as well).

Anyway yesterday I played two different opponents for about an hour each and won 10K in the first match and 11K in the second. I felt I actually had an edge in the first game (which surprised me as much as anyone else) and in the second I just ran quite possibly the best I ever have in a 20 minute period in my life. There were simultaneous stacks going in everywhere and I just kept flipping over the nuts. I’m surprised he kept his game together as much as he did. I probably would have been open shoving every hand in his spot!

My plan now is to never play HU again in my life and run away with my run-good! Hehe.

I logged on this morning to check my e-mail and without any intention of playing but someone informed me that a massive fish was playing 25/50 so I had no choice but to sit. I won 8K there in about an hour of 1-tabling before I had to go off to the travel agent to pick some stuff up.

So all in all I’m suddenly up 27K for the month and out of the blue have hit my main goal for the year! There’s two weeks left in the year though and I can’t see myself just stopping now. I’m going to try and hit my secondary goal which is basically just to win another 50K (44K from here on in). I know I’ll be life-tilted if I go on a downswing and finish below my original goal but, I mean, what can you do…

In regards to HEM the problem seems to be that HEM won’t import hands if I import them AFTER the session (as opposed to during). I don’t import during HU because I don’t use a HUD for HU so this is probably why only my HU sessions have been affected. I think this must be a recent problem caused by the spyware that infected my computer. It must’ve damaged my hard drive or something. Anyway since I know how much I should be up or down after each session (sometimes you just can’t beat trusty Excel) I’ve just been deleting hands to get to the right dollar amount. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do until I get my new computer next week.

On Tilt from F*#king HEM

My HEM has turned into a useless piece of shit. I’ve literally spent more time trying to fix HEM these past few days than I have actually playing.

It’s so frustrating because I really have no idea how much I’m up or down this month now. I don’t know how close or far away I am from my goal. Heck I don’t even know if my HEM has been stuffed up this entire year and my results this year are completely off. I only started double checking my HEM results with my poker account balances after every session recently.

I spent yesterday and the day before trying to get these 3 tables of HU on Stars to import but they simply wouldn’t. Eventually I changed the SN, hand history numbers and table names in them, re-imported them and added the new SN to my Alias. Then I realised a table of FTP was also missing as my account and HEM were $700 off. I did the same thing for that and breathed a sigh of relief when it all worked out.

But then today OMFGdsfnakafdsadfad I played another 4 table HU match. Of the 4, one table imported correctly, one did not appear at all, and the other two only half imported.

Even weirder is that if I filter for the last 2 days, say, and I group it by ‘Sessions’ it’ll show a different amount for winnings than if I group it by ‘Sessions (by Table)’. This is obviously retarded. It somehow wipes out 2K in winnings when I move it from one to the other!!!


I had an inkling something was wrong with my HEM a while ago. If you remember I posted an entry where I showed myself a zillion dollars above-EV. When I analysed it afterwards though I realised my HEM said I was 35 buy-ins above EV in a heads-up match versus I Win Flips. I thought to myself “that can’t be right, I ran hot but not THAT hot”. When I asked him he agreed it was impossible and said his HEM showed I was only up 8 buy-ins in EV. I assumed the problem was restricted to EV calculations though so didn’t think much of it. But now that it’s the actual dollar amounts which are wrong I’m mighty pissed off.

I’m getting a new computer next week and will start a fresh HEM database. Hopefully that’ll fix the problem somehow. It’s annoying though because I planned to finish his year with a review of how I went and to know that the figures might be completely wrong is so bloody tilting. It’s kind of weird I know but it’s kind of like a piece of my identity has been taken away…

Stars is Rigged, X Factor: Go Joe!

To finish this year I set myself a relatively modest goal for December of $21K. In my end of year review you can find out why I decided 21K but suffice to say the poker gods have been conspiring against me.

I guess on the bright side I’m actually only down 2 buy-ins for the month and I still only need 26K (or 13 buy-ins) to hit my goal - very do-able for sure!

Most of the run bad has been on Stars and I’ve literally busted my Stars account for about the 4th time this year. Even without the run bad, for the life of me I cannot beat that site. I feel like I can walk on water on FTP and Party but on Stars I just have no clue.

I’m pretty sure it’s because Stars doesn’t use a continuously shuffled deck. On FTP and Party I can time my turn call so that I get just the right river card, or my preflop all-in call so that I get just the right board to run out. But on Stars the deck is fixed once the cards are dealt and I’m simply helpless!

In other news, after seeing Susan Boyle’s now famous Britain’s Got Talent clip earlier this year I followed the rest of the series on YouTube and then transitioned to Simon Cowell’s other show, X Factor. In one of the early episodes there was a really good audition by a boy named Joe and I thought “wow, he’s like the only one who can actually sing, he’s sure to win!” Once it was confirmed he was one of the 12 finalists I decided to bet $750 on him at 4/1 odds. Well 10 weeks later and he’s in the final 2 tomorrow! Not only that but he’s the heavy favourite! I don’t really understand UK odds but apparently I get $3750 back (or $3000 profit) tomorrow if he wins. He’s currently at 1/4 while villain is at 11/4, so I’m pretty sure I made a sick bet whatever happens.

Anyway, go Joe!

APPT Sydney Main Event Day 2

No luck unfortunately. I had my 40k stack whittled down to 20K, then I won two small pots with AK and JJ in the space of 3 hands to get back to 36K; then I got whittled down to 20K again before doubling up with AJs v A5o on A62dd to get back to 40K; then I got whittled down to 23K again before I stuck the rest of my stack in with QJo in the big blind versus a hijack 4K open. He thought for quite a bit but eventually made the call, showing A3s, and the Ace door-card sent me packing.

I’ve decided to play the last event of the series tomorrow, the $3200 heads-up event. I didn’t play this event last year as the structure was retarded: it had a best of three structure but the blinds in games 2 and 3 left off from where the blinds in the previous game finished. This year I’ve been told that problem has been fixed so I’m really looking forward to my first live heads-up tournament. Should be fun!

APPT Sydney Main Event Day 1A

I played the $1650 Bounty and $2700 6-Handed events earlier in the week but had no luck so when I rocked up for Day 1A of the Main Event yesterday I was hoping that I had saved my run good for when it mattered. I had initially planned to play Day 1B but had an Anti-VirusPro09 attack the night before which basically rendered my computer unusable and technicians had to take my computer away to fix it. Unable to grind online I thus did the only logical thing a poker player can do – grind live!

Day 1A was always going to be the smallest field but even I was surprised at the number - only 81 people showed up. The day was pretty tepid – my first table was the first to break and by the end of my two orbits there I had already lost 5K of my 30K starting stack, mostly due to a failed river bluff. On the whole it seemed like it was going to be a pretty tough table though so I was pretty pleased when I got moved to my new one and saw fish galore.

I had three middle-aged fish to my right, an annoying, slow-acting, and constantly-talking-to-his-imaginary-friend loose nit to my left (loose because he played a lot of hands, but nit because he wouldn’t put a cent in the pot if it put him at risk), a middle-aged Asian TAG two to my left, and then three notables around the Australian poker circuit filling seats 3 through 5. Seat 3 was Jamie Pickering who played in the Aussie Millions cash game with Durrrr and co. earlier this year. Seat 4 was Jason Gray who is an Australian pro and who I believe has come 2nd in this event before but who in reality seems very bad. He called a 3-bet for 25% of his stack with 35s and managed to smash a Q55 flop to crack aces. So that’s how you do it!

And then seat 5 was none other than Tony Dunst, AKA ‘Bond18’. A year ago when I was learning MTTs I actually watched quite a few of Tony’s videos and consider myself a fan. MTT videos are dry as hell since nothing at all happens so you need someone interesting and talkative to keep you attentive. I decided not to introduce myself as a 2+2er as I’m sure it would have affected the way he played against me and would instantly have given him a zillion reads.

I got off to a good start on this table and worked my stack back up to 28K within an orbit. The rest of the day however proved incredibly fruitless. I watched hopelessly as all my opponents received AA at least twice each (being live fish they always showed them) while I sat there mucking hand after hand. The only big pairs I received were KK and TT. The KK I squeezed preflop and took it down. The TT I had to fold because there was a UTG raise and MP 3-bet before it was even on me.

My other big hand of the day proved to be my double up. I had been whittled down to 19K and picked up AK UTG+2. UTG+1 raised to 1500 and I 3-bet to 4200. He called, the flop came K95hh and he led for 6K. I shoved in the extra 9K and he called. I had him covered by about 500 chips and he showed ATh. A much bigger sweat that I would’ve liked! Fortunately the red queen on the river was only a diamond and I doubled up to 40K.

I finished the day on 42600, and although it’s below the average I’m pretty happy all things considered. Tony meanwhile managed to win two huge flips to propel himself to the chip lead with over 100K. He was down to 17K at one stage so it really shows just how quickly fortunes can change in MTTs. You really have to just hang in there, wait till you run like God, and then crush (pretty much what I did at the WSOP ME, which by the way I still have to finish my trip report on I know!).

The highlight of the day turned out not to be the poker but the fistfight that broke out in the poker room. Security took what seemed like an eternity (was a solid two or three minutes) to get there and, by the time they separated the men, one was bloody and mangled. For a good read/recount I recommend reading Terence Chan’s blog entry here: http://terrencechan.livejournal.com/324249.html.

My personal highlight of the day however was a quote from the guy to my left. It definitely gave me a good chuckle. A guy raised in EP and the guy to my left re-raised. He only had about 15bb’s total so he probably should’ve just shoved but whatever. It then comes back to EP who puts him all-in with AQs. The guy to my left calls with AA. After his hand holds he happily proclaims to the table: “I was trying to represent Kings” (to get action from Ax). LOL.

I have two days off now before returning on Friday for Day 2. The blinds will be 500/1000 so I’ll have 42 big blinds which will be more than enough to work with. Hopefully I can pick up some cards though and put up a better showing than yesterday.