I would just like to share an ICM Calculator for 4-handed play made in Microsoft Excel.
You only need to type the tournament payout structure and the stack sizes and the spreadsheet will calculate the chances for finishing 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th and the most important your equity.
Please let me know if you see something that isn’t correct.
Microsoft Office 2007 or better is required.
Delliks asked me to add rakeback to the SNG Simulator and so I did.
I haven’t remembered about rakeback back then when I originally made it because as I play at PokerStars my form of rakeback is a bit different from the traditional form.
So, rakeback was easily added to the spreadsheet. Also, I’d like to explain a little better what the simulator actually does.
Based on tournament info and your finishing distribution, the spreedsheet runs a simulation over the specified number of games and calculates the resulted profit and ROI. For example, if your true finishing distribution is 10/12/15 there might be a stretch of 5000 games where you will finish in 1st place only 7% of the times due to natural variance and that will certainly impact your ROI, this is what the simulation does.
So, basically the simulation tells you that even if you have a 10% ROI you can always have stretches where you run a 5% ROI for example.
Haven’t posted in the last few days because I’ve been a bit bored about Poker in general. Finally today I’m feeling refreshed and with more energy to continue playing Sit’n’Gos.
Sadly, once again I’ll have to drop the $20+$2 games and focus solely on the $10+$1 level because I’ve already lost a good portion of my bankroll playing the 20s. I’ve been trying to transition from the 10s to the 20s since the beginning of last year but still can’t see light at the end of the tunnel, this is becoming really frustrating to me.
I’m starting to think that Poker is not supposed to be played by part-time players because of variance. If you look at any winning player’s graph it’s not difficult to spot runs of a couple of thousands of breaking even games or even losing ones, for the part-time player this can possibly mean several months of play or even a full year.
So, to motivate myself for this month, I’m considering thinking about quitting Poker if I finish negative at the end of this month playing the $10+$1 games.
You may have noticed that I stopped posting the Wizard Quiz results lately, that’s because I haven’t been doing any but I’m thinking about restarting them in a matter of days.
I bought a couple of books from the PokerStars VIP store for a total of 7000 FPPs or so. Both books are related to SNGs somehow, they are:
. Kill Everyone: Advanced Strategies for No-Limit Hold ’Em Poker, Tournaments, and Sit-n-Gos: Revised and Expanded Edition
. Heads-Up No-Limit Hold ’em: Expert Advice for Winning Heads-Up Poker Matches
And finally, I’d like to ask you what kind of posts do you like more, do you guys prefer to see posts on hand analysis, posts on daily results or random poker-related stuff ? Leave a comment to let me know.
This by itself may be the reason why I’m running so bad at the $20+$2 level.
All-time all-in luck graph
$10+$1 all-in luck graph
$20+$2 all-in luck graph
I think these images speak for themselves. I think I can say I’m running bad for more than 1 straight year playing part-time, poker isn’t for everyone, is it ? It’s just psychologically devastating.
Any winning player with all-in graphs like these ? Please share, I want to make sure I’m not the only one suffering from this. :D
Here is today’s result from the SNG Wizard Quiz :
Today’s result : 47/50 ( 94% )
Total : 188/200 ( 94% )
I’m starting to think it wasn’t a great idea to mix the $20+$2 with the $10+$1 games, the 10s went pretty well today but the 20s were a disaster. I honestly can’t see where is the difference between the two levels apart from the buy-in. I’ll continue mixing both buy-ins for the next 2 days and then make a decision to drop it or to continue.
I missed yesterdays session of SNG Wizard Quiz due to lack of time but today did another 50 hands session, here are the results :
Today’s result : 50/50 ( 100% )
Total : 141/150 ( 94% )
I’m starting to feel that’s too easy but I’ll continue for a couple of weeks more till deciding to improve different aspects of my game.
I’ve started to mix some $20+$2 SNGs with the $10+$1 today and hopefully I’ll set myself at the $20+$2 for good. I usually play 6 tables of $10+$1 but today I’ve started to play 4 tables of $10+$1 and 2 tables of $20+$2. Today wasn’t particularly good results-wise as I finished both $20+$2 games on the bubble but I’ll try not to be results oriented.
Now I’m off, going to review todays sessions.
After 2 months completely away from Poker, March was time to get back to the tables. I was feeling refreshed to once again try to move up another level to the $20+$2. Unfortunately, I completely failed to accomplish this goal but at least I learned a lot. Believe it or not, I’m trying to establish myself as a winning player at the $20+$2 level for approximately one year and I’m yet to achieve it. I’m only playing part-time so this isn’t really that bad.
March 2010 (350 games)
NET : -$64
ROI : -1.63%
ITM : 38.48%
For next month I’m not setting any “agressive†goal, I’ll just play as normal and hopefully it will be a better month than March. For next month my goals are the following :
April Goals:
. Play 400 $10+$1 SNGs;
. Keep reading “Secrets of Sit’n’gos†book;
. Keep playing with the SNG Wizard Quiz on a daily basis;
I’ve been reading the “Secrets of Sit’n’gos†book, the author is one of the best SNG players I’m aware of so certainly I have a lot to learn from his book. If any of you have read it before please let me know what do you think of it.
As you might have noticed, lately I’ve been playing with the SNG Wizard Quiz mode to try to improve my late game play and it’s a crucial part of the game and I think I still have plenty of leaks to plug there, so hopefully the Wizard will give me a hand here.
Cya!
Today’s result is 46/50 ( 92% ).
Total is 91/100 ( 91% )
Let’s see how it goes tomorrow !
