RLMSNGer: Veloblank

I'm moving my blog here http://veloblank.sngrinder.com/ 

Thanks to Clickys for hosting.

I'm going to start completly new.  Purge most of my DC blog posts and just blog from my new site.  Going through a phase right now of deactivating Facebook, etc. and just streamlining my life--online and IRL, mainly for privacy reasons and to some degree security.

Thanks to everyone for checking this out since last year. 

velo

EDIT:  Woke up this morning to camera flash in BR window and people running from my porch and into a car.  On porch this morning "Bikes are Gay" on the steps, along with some other crude stuff on the cement. Just a little wake up call to how we throw our security/privacy around.  We are being lulled in by media that is creating a melting pot of individuals, granting accessibility to our thoughts, likes and dislikes, photos, day-to-day living, at the expense of our safety.  Bring back individuality please.

FYP

Listening to: Tears of Time by Crematory. Beware: Of Metal Music
Watching: The Big Lebowski

I’ve been watching The Big Lebowski a couple of times this week, even when I’m playing poker. I find music gets old after awhile. I either need more talking or some slower action like a soccer match, baseball game, or some sport that I enjoy, but don’t really watch enough of, or won’t take my whole attention away from the games.

I have not watched this movie enough, I’ve found, and it actually describes a great relaxed mindset. Granted, the Dude is 100% into this laid-back lifestyle. It’s not like he puts in a day’s work curing cancer and then fucks off the rest of the day like a 9-to-5er (although maybe he combines the best of both by doing some ganja hits).

The polar opposite is of course some other personality like Lance Armstrong who has his hands in so many political and social causes, while holding down a professional cycling career, and finds 35 times a day to fire off on his Twitter account. This suits his personality, much like the Dude found things that fit his. If I could somehow find a way to hybridize the two, I’d be the most productive poker player on the face of the earth.

What I take away from the movie, though, is a roll with the punches attitude to life. I’ve often been accused of this, so maybe I share more with the Dude than I thought. And maybe I should be less ashamed of it than I’ve been. He finds joy in small things: White Russians, bowling, comfortable clothes, good friends, smoking. Even when a huge curveball comes his way, he and Walter find a way to deal with it, with ensuing hijinx.

My favorite quote is at the end of the movie:

The Dude Abides

Listening to: King of Kings by Motorhead (King Leonidas Edition)
Watching: At Home with the Poker Superstars

I’m one to give credit where credit is due. Hollywood’s 1996 modern-day version of Romeo and Juliet has the line, “Romeo, thou art a villain,” in which John Leguizamo’s character Tybalt then spits on the ground. Seeing as I have been doing that since 2008 everytime I bubble in an SNG, I guess I’ll give credit where credit is due.

My last few games have been going pretty well. I no longer am throwing away the occasional buyin chasing down hands in the early/middle game of an SNG where I can just as easily fold and make my way to the push/fold game, where I increasingly am seeing an advantage for myself.

I played a few $5.50 regular speeds, got my money in good, but hated the fact that it took so long to get to push/fold. The little hole I dug playing those kept me busy at the $3.40 turboes for the rest of my poker playing today.

Finishing the $3.40s on a very positive note makes me feel very confident going into this week where I will be playing the $6.50 turboes again. My push/fold is constantly improving. I find more and more spots while I’m playing to push where I usually would have folded and missed a chance to pick up easy chips.

On a related note, I’m excited to be getting staked. I was able to find this post by Bones in which he describes moving up in stakes as 50% fear and 50% technical. I think getting staked will take care of almost all of this for me and get me confident in my game:

Bones:
I understand that they appear tougher. The point of my post is the play is still weak. Yeah, you might get called a bit wider and shoved into a bit more. We certainly want to help you guys grow and improve as players, but the adjustment to that is simply to put in more time with wiz and more focus on the changes in ranges. People are still making huge mistakes left and right. Look back at the 6 max vid I posted in the hitchhiker’s series. I believe it’s a 36 and people were chucking off ev left and right.

Moving up is probably 50% psychological and 50% technical. To those of you playing the 12s, think about the first time you lost 15 buyins at the 6s. Didn’t it make you sick? Didn’t it make you question whether you could beat these stakes? Didn’t the amount seem huge and the players soooo much better? After some grinding, after a few downswings, things didn’t seem so tough. It’s not like variance stopped hitting you or that players became terrible. You just got used to it and started noticing the mistakes of others.

I bet there are a bunch of you out there who feel like they’ve been beaten down by a particular level. I’m here to tell you that you can get through it. There is no level (below the 100s probably) that you can’t beat by just working hard with wiz and watching the vids we have up now. We can’t teach you to ignore the doubts that creep in on your first downswing at a level, or to approach your new buyin with the same critical eye as your previous one. Maybe Tommy Angelo can. It’s something that comes with experience and talking to people who are going through the same thing as you are.

All of that said, we will have more midstakes content in the near future. If you guys have questions on this stuff or on the psychology of moving up, I think we’re gonna do an “ask us” type thing for the final hitchhikers guide ep.

Listening to: Silver Future by Monster Magnet
Watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKAW173cSjY

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a
king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.” -Hamlet

When I first played SNGs I played them one table at a time, and played that table very badly. I had no concept of strategy to survive the games, no real goal in mind other than to mix it up with the other players, splash around in a few pots and end it up allin at some point. I loved the low blinds so I could duck and dodge my way into situations and hopefully end up with some chips at the end of the hand.

As the blinds got higher and higher I began to shut down. I realized the power of someone’s raise and I wasn’t going to get into a pot with suited crap that stood no chance against someone’s huge hand. Simply, I played SNGs backwards. Instead of clamping down in the early game where the chips have very little value, I was throwing them around because I knew I could get them back in a few hands or run good and catch a bigger hand later or suckout on someone. This strategy led to frequent and ugly bustouts from around 5th place on up. I no longer have my old hand history data but I can guess it looked brutal on paper.

Today I play a different game. I’m only in a hand early when I have a big value hand in early to mid position and only in a hand with big value hands and hands with great implied odds in late position. In either case, if unopened, I’m raising to get in.

I’ve learned to look at board textures and the number of opponents in the hand to gauge my cbet size or if I should even cbet. I’ve learned how to identify and deal with different player types and to construct hand ranges post-flop to guide my play.

All of this has moved my early bustouts to about 25% above 5th place. There are of course some ugly hands I’ve clung to versus obvious monsters, but by in large I’ve eliminated this from my game. By folding hands with kicker problems and overall showdown value. I’ve saved my SNG play.

NEXT STEP

The next step then is to take 5th to as close to 1st as I can get. This has been problematic in a number of ways. For the longest time I only donked around SNG Wiz, looking for the red “X’s” in the hands where I made a mistake. Taking the quiz for a few hands and then returning to play.

This has helped my game no doubt. There are some sessions where I feel like an SNG killer. Taking down games left and right for an unreal ROI/hourly and feeling like I can take on anyone. And then there are the games with players clearly better than I am; players that frustrate me with bet sizing and steals that take me off of my game. Just when I feel I can claw back I’ll play a mediocre hand and get wrecked by clearly superior ICM.

I’ve also been trying to steal more, and mix in some resteals, which it has become brutally apparent I cannot do very well. Some of my games in my last sessions have ended very violently, where I am exploited by a bet size. I nick top pair on the flop and go over the top OOP into villain with clearly a monster.

The stealing inefficacy boils down to doing it to the wrong stack sizes and with the wrong hands. I cling to my K10 and call a resteal from a player who clearly has a tighter hand range preflop and have to pray I hit.

This concept of stealing more often has thrown my game for a loop, -EV-ly. Instead of putting people on a range and playing hands into them, I assign them a hand that they can only call with plow my hand right into them, telling myself they can only call if they have this hand or this small %.

This thinking is part of ICM, but only a small part. Not only do we need to put people on a hand they can only call with based on their equity, but we need to put them on a range and assess if our hand plays well against their hand and if it is worth risking our equity. We shouldn’t be blowing K10o into someone who makes a huge call for all of his chips with AQ and takes all of our chips just because “he can never call here.”

The truth is, they can and do call here. They can and do call with worse here. We need to look at what we are risking by doing this, the reward we are gaining, the chance villain is folding or calling, our fold equity (how much power our stack size has in influencing villain to fold) AND our hand equity. In so many of my past allins I’ve only assessed part of the villain calling % a part of my hand equity and overvalued my fold equity; again citing that the villain cannot possibly call.

This is disastrous thinking. It is thinking, no doubt, but will yield some very mixed results and some very poor ICM decisions. Instead of beating stakes, you will be barely breaking even. Grinding and grinding just to catch that upswing that type of suckout driven shove game rides on, instead of proactively making much better decisions and crushing the stakes for a good clip.

Before you go allin next time:
1. Opponent will Fold or Call based on calling range
2. Hand has equity? Yes or No
3. Hero has Fold Equity? Yes or No
4. You will gain from shove/or risk little? Yes or No

If you get around 2.5 out of 4 points (the bold) and you take a look around the rest of the table to check stack sizes and tournament position, squeeze that allin trigger. You will be shocked by your results.

*These points are all the work of Vandweller and is profiled in his series Real-Life Micro SNG Grinder.

I just need to be reminded sometimes about the push/fold game. Mass-tabling has kicked this out of me yet again and replaced it with “Fuck it. I’m mass-tabling. I’ll do it next time.” Really? Will you?

This week I will be focusing on:
1. dropping more tables again and getting my push fold game back.
2. Nitting it back up again on steal situations when they are so transparent.
3. Bet sizing

Links that have helped my game:
http://www.pocketfives.com/jennifear/recommended-reading-and-tools-3839035
http://www.sngwiz.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=43&topic=3.0
http://www.chillin411.com/node/7
http://www.sitandgoplanet.com/index.html

And biggest of all:
http://www.sickread.com/blog/article/how-to-learn-good-them-sngs/