The Sunday Rant

At the end of the day I would be hard pressed to find to many positives out of this week. But it showed real promise on all fronts early on.

With regards to the job (now job hunting) I got a call from the guys who have been stringing me along a little early Monday morning asking if I could start on Tuesday. Great! Sounds good! They just busy confirming everything will call me in an hour. I hear nothing and eventually call back late in the afternoon. Get voicemail. Few minutes later get a text saying they will let me know. Hear nothing since. I mean this is a sizeable consulting firm. 200 odd people. Imo they acting really unprofessionally and I think I am fast losing interest. They keen to have me on board but they want me sold at a client first basically. So they keep making promises to keep me interested.

Anyway, started looking elsewhere. Had another interview Monday and that went pretty well. Also got asked by an ex work colleague to forward my CV on to him so who knows, maybe something comes of it soon. Really hope so! Kind of strecthed at the moment financially.

WRT poker the week also started well. Actually the whole week went pretty well. Until about 10pm Saturday evening when with my roll on 640 odd I decided to take my first stab at the 6.50s. Fired up a mixed set of 3.25s and 6.50s and what do you know. Totally bricked it. First time this year I think Ive totally bricked a set of 25 sngs and it had to be with the step up. That started a 3 set, 4 hour stretch that set me back a ridiculous $200. Was clawing it back reasonably today but also just finished poorly and only made $40 today. So bankroll sitting on 470 odd. Meagre showing for a lot of effort this week. Take away those two hours last night and Id be 700+ which would have made me very happy!

Dont think I mentiond in post 1 - I also have a 20kg weight loss bet with my brother. He theoretically has a decent edge. We similar heights and he started at 138.2kg vs my 114.0 kg. But I know he wont last so was pretty comfortable taking the bet straight up. Tomorrow is our second weigh in but I snuck a peek at the scale yesterday evening and was down to 109.0 I've been doing a little swimming but havent really hit the exercise routine hard yet so Im pretty sure with some effort I can keep up the pace for a couple more weeks before I slow down.

Want a 4 figure roll when I post next week. Whats that? Avg  $80 a day. Doable if I dont run like I have since this time last night. Wish me luck!

I know I know. 2012 has kicked in and along with gyms, sports shops and dieticians I am sure that traffic on poker forums and blogs around the world are spiking as everyone starts off the year motivated to kick some ass. Well, let me join the rush.

This will be a once weekly update mostly of my poker grind (and related thoughts) but I might just throw in a few personal tidbits now and then as well.

Poker Update

I was supposed to start work this week (3rd January) but the contract client is kind of holding out and uhmming and ahhing. Its a bit of a disaster for me as I planned around it as a given and financially Im in a bit of a hole at the moment. But on the other hand it means I have time on my hands. So after reading Velo's post regarding chasing SN this year playing tourneys only I decided to jump on the bandwagon. Given the lack of employment I have to start really small and deposited $60 into Stars on Monday morning. I decided to tackle the 45 mans and be really aggressive on the bankroll front. Plan was to start with the $1's and the minute I was showing any profit I would start using that profit to play $3's. I realise this could have been a total disaster but it worked out kinda well for me.

On Monday I had some personal chores to attend to and played only 60 SNGs and profited $17. As per plan that meant that my first set on day 2 was split between $1's and $3's and I had about 60 of my meagre roll at the tables but I ran good and made $103 on day 2 ending up on $185. In my opinion that was plenty to settle into a grind for the rest of the week and I basically playes sets of 25 mixed 1.1 and 3.25 45 mans closing up yesterday on $349 which included one stellar award of $10.

The plan for this week is to move it up another notch. I will be playing mostly $3 45 mans and $2 180 mans to start this week. If things go well hopefully I can be mixing in $6.50s before the end of the week. I cant really make any long term plans until I have some work and know my hours but ideally the promised contract will kick off soon. It will mean less grinding time but it will also mean no withdrawls required. My wifes job covers most of our expenses but if I am not working I need to provide my own entertainment money and if thats the case my roll wont be going anywhere fast. I would far rather be working and be able to follow a lighter grinding schedule BUT not have to withdraw for the whole year. I could be a little aggressive with regards to moving up and could just see how high I could get in one year playing 300-400 tourneys a week. Thats the ideal scenario and hopefully it will pan out.

Not that I would promote any site above DC (and any other training sites would be supplementary for me) but I think SNG players should note 2 interesting options kicking off in the new year. PokerVT have spacegravy starting a $100 challenge where he will make 3 or 4 videos a month showing how he would go about trying to turn $100 into $1 Million dollars playing only tournaments. There is no time frame mentioned and it may be the million dollar figure is just arbitrary because I dont know how realistic it is to achieve in one year  (maybe it is??) but it should still be really interesting to follow.  On top of that Bluefire have launched a SNG team as well. (Ive seen coaches mention other sites in videos so I assume DC dont mind this kind of discussion because I think its relevant but if any mods have a problem with the last paragraph just remove it).  

Study Time

For now I am in grind mode but once I get my roll to a level where I can play $6.50s I plan on picking a topic a week to study and get better at. For now, this is just a place holder.... :)

I just havent been in the mood for SNG’s whis week. So Im not going to post much but simply ask a question of anyone who reads this. When you are really not in the mood to sit and grind, are there any tricks and tips to help change that mood?

Probably not.. just throwing it out there! :P

I think Im gna play the f40 tourneys tonight, really sick promo by stars! Gl to everyone who plays. Sure it will be many thousands!

Just a quick check in. Its been a slow week. Fifa released the results of phase 3 of the 2010 world cup football draw and I admit to being overly excited about that and me and my mates spent a lot of time swapping tickets and planning road trips. Getting accomodation around South Africa in June this year is like being dealt Aces at the same time at 4 tables. Anyway, poker took a back seat.

When I did play I was mixing 3.40s and 6.50s and while its a tiny sample I definitely think there is way less of a spaz out factor in the 6.50s. I regularly play the bubble at levels like 75/150 in the 3.40s but that does not seem to happen at all in the 6.50s. So yeah, they seem tougher. I won a little in the 3.40s, lost a little in the 6.50s…

So yeah, nothing week for me. Will be getting back into a grinding routine as of tomorrow!

I ran hot in the beginning. Obv. I thought I would be done with my $3.40 challenge in a few days but it was not to be. I hit the inevitable downswing that has to happen if you are not actually making realy good decisions all the time and found myself back at breakeven for the challenge after about 480 games.

At this point I decided I needed some coaching and got in contact with Vandweller. I was very happy to pay up for a review of 5 hand histories and was all excited about doing so until I started trying to select 5 tournaments. Now dont get me wrong – I wasnt trying to hand pick 5 tourneies for vandweller to tell me how well I played. But I wanted to potentially learn new stuff so I didnt want to send him tournaments with obvious mistakes in that I could pick up in a personal review. Problem was, I just couldnt find 5 tournies that didnt have at least 2 or 3 horrendous mistakes.

So, knowing that I wasnt playing according to my ability and knowledge I decided the review would be a bit of a waste of money and I needed to fix the major stuff first. I will be going back to Vandweller in a few weeks I hope all going well.

So what have I done. I was thinking about how in most sports people have prematch and sometimes even in game routines to keep the mind and body in tune with what they should be doing. Take golf for example. You arrive at the club. Before the game even starts you hit a few balls. Make a few putts. Then you get on the tee and for the next 80 to 90 shots (if you like me) you have a routine you go through prior to every single one. My best rounds have always been when these routines are in order.

So, I instituted a routine for my SNGS. Before every single session I do a 5 min SNGWiz quiz to get the mind in tune (and also to assess that my mind is in tune.) I time it, and I am logging scores. I hope that overtime this exercis trains my mind to think through everything more deliberately yet faster if that makes sense. And to enable that I just put together a in game process using an appropriate acronym: SHARP

S – Stack (Ninja HUD is my cue for the process and it shows bb’s so that came first)
H – Hand strength
A – Action so far
R – Risk (Equity risk vs Reward)
P – Position – Had to find a P but it has relevance with regards to fold equity. R and P work together obv.

Theres nothing new here that any of you are not thinking about. But while trying to make a decision every 4 or 5 seconds I definitely wasnt adequately analysing every spot and was doing a lot of things that I could easily see later were incorrect.

So – since implementing that, things have gone better again and I am now just a few $’s short of completing the $3.40 mini challenge I set myself to kick off this blog. Actualy as you can see in the graph I hit a peak of $209 mid set but Im not going to count that.

668 games
ROI: 8%
$$$: 182.80

Not happy with that ROI but considering I was all square after 480 games when I started really focusing on ensuring I was making good decisions rather than just auto piltoing, I have to be very happy with the last 200 games.

Hoping for a hot set this morning so I can start stabbing at the 6.50s. I will have about $680 in my account when I reach the $200 mark and I think I will start playing 6.50s and not think about moving down unless I drop below $480.

All going well I will come up with another mini challenge next week.

Well, Im about halfway through making the $200 which was my initial goal at the $3.40s.

No. of Games: 160
ROI: 18%
ITM: 41%
$$$: $98

I just had a terrible session (play wise) though where I misclicked my way out of 3/12 tournies. Only lost $4.80 though. I am not sure why as this first 12 table session of my day is usually the most focussed and the one I tend to play best in. Just wasnt in it though.

During todays HEM review though I dived a little deeper into my SB shove spots and I am surprised and a little shocked at how many I am missing. With my filter set to the following:

Blinds: 4-8 (I know I can shove wide with more bbs but I will look into 9-12 another time)

Position: SB

Action: Folded to me

I get 77 hands back in the period since I started this $3.40 mini challenge. I have shoved 37 of them and been called only 6 times. The problem is the 40 I have folded. In a quick run through wiz it seemed at least 75% of them are pretty comfortable shoves. I know in my head I am always sitting there thinking..“Hmmm.. I have 85 off and only 5bbs. He is going to call me so wide. I have a full rotation to find a better spot. I fold.”

But, if I look at the 37 times I did shove, I was only called 6 times. So I am wrong. Horribly wrong. And I am missing a ton of SB shoves in game that I know I shouldnt be.

Guess I will be looking harder for these. My next few review sessions I am going to focus entirely on SB/But/CO jam opportunities. If I have a leak in the SB it likely extends to Button and C/O as well.

Lets not beat around the bush. I have been trying to get this SNG game right now for quite some time and have failed miserably. My Sharkscope graph which I will post below clearly shows that over a reasonable sample I am no better than breakaven. The first little stretch was when I first started playing poker and did not take pokerstars particularly seriously at all and obviously was a loser. I recouped that when I made my first serious effort at playing SNGs after watching a series on CR. But that was maybe when the games were a little softer and I no doubt ran good as well.

Since then I have played SNGs in spurts. The concept of mega tabling and being able to play tight fits with my “poker personality” and I feel like its a skill I should be able to master more easily than for instance learning to beat low and mid stakes cash games. However I can no longer deny there must be some major leaks in my game, most of which I feel are in the early and mid game and probably result directly or indirectly from playing overly tight. It would also be silly of me to totally deny that I may make more than my share of mistakes when it comes to the shove fold game but I think very often those are due to tilt issues rather than a lack of knowledge / understanding. I tend to crush the quizzes on SNGWiz for most shove fold situations and score over 85/90% even on expert level almost always. That said – it is not an area of the game I plan on neglecting.

So – plan of action for the next few weeks. My daily SNG routine will be as follows:

1. Play 12 $3.40 10 man SNG’s
2. Review them with filters set up for the following:

• Missed opens (I have a filter looking at specific opening ranges from cutoff and button specifically)
• Missed opportunities to raise or shove over limpers
• C-bet spots (Looking for both missed and incorrect cbets)
• All in Calls
• All in shoves
• HU Game

3. During the review I will mark and post a selection of hands and also be taking note of any particular issues
4. I will then play 64 more SNG’s, 16 tabling 2 sets of 32.

I am going to look at each step of this process as a mini challenge and my initial goal at the $3.40s will be to make $200 in profit. At this point (if it is achieved) I will assess my results, ROI, improvement or lack thereof and plan my next steps accordingly. That may involve continuing at the $3.40s or moving on to the $6.50s for which I already have 100 buyins in any event.

I plan on using this blog to track updates to a degree, but also, and more importantly, to post my thinking as I analyse certain situations. I am sure it will help me, and maybe also spark some interest in one or two others. I am definitely keen to make some contacts and potentially share histories and videos with other players in a similar position.

If anyone sees me at the tables and notices mistakes – fire away. Im looking to improve and am not one to take criticism to badly.

Chat Soon
Bull.