Month: April 2008
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Played just a little bit this morning
I’m waiting for a plumber and a landscaper to show up, so I had some free time this morning. It appears that the reload bonus has attracted some new faces. Hooray for that! Here was the best hand of the session by far:
PokerStars 15/30 Hold’em (9 handed) Poker Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: HTML)
Preflop: Hero is Button with :Kh, :Qh.
5 folds, CO raises, Hero 3-bets, SB calls, 1 fold, CO calls.
At this point, the hand is fairly straightforward. Both CO and SB are new faces. CO has seemed solid, SB a bit spewy. CO should be opening with a wide range, so KQs could be the best hand and if not, a lot of flops could be scary to him. SB calling suggests that he has a decent hand, although I suspect I’d mostly cap or fold in his spot.
Flop: (10 SB) :Jh, :9h, :Ac (3 players)
SB checks, CO bets, Hero raises, SB calls, CO 3-bets, Hero caps, SB calls, CO calls.
The initial raise is fairly standard. I assume CO has an Ace to lead into me, but probably not a monster or he would check-raise. I’ve got 12 outs and would love to get a free round on the turn, so its a pretty standard raise. When he three bets, I know I’m beat but I’m pretty sure SB isn’t calling two and then folding, so I figure I can still raise for value with all my outs. I guess I might even get a free card.
Turn: (11 BB) :Ts (3 players)
SB checks, CO bets, Hero raises, SB calls, CO 3-bets, Hero caps, SB calls, CO calls.
The offsuit Ten is the best possible card for me. A flush card might kill my action, but I figure they are going to have a very hard time putting me on KQ here. When CO leads after I capped, I’m sure he has a set of Jacks or Aces. I have the nuts, so I’m not going anywhere. SB is weirding me out a bit. I guess he has AJ and isn’t confident top two is good? He is a mystery of sorts.
River: (23 BB) :Ks (3 players)
SB checks, CO checks, Hero bets, SB raises, CO calls, Hero 3-bets, SB calls, CO calls.
The offsuit King is a bit of an action killer because now any single Queen is the nuts. SB comes to life now, so that answers the question of what he holds. He must have had AQ and was a bit stubborn on the turn. I’m miffed that I have to split the pot with him, but at least he has squeezed an extra bet out of the CO. Hopefully we can cap and get two more. When he just calls, I figure he’s trying to squeeze the overcall out of the CO.
Final Pot: 32 BB
Results in white below:
SB has Jc Jd (three of a kind, Jacks)
CO has Ah Kc (two pair, Aces and Kings)
Hero has Kh Qh (straight, ace high).
Outcome: Hero wins 32 BB.
Well, that was special. Talk about your first-level thinking from the SB. He doesn’t cap preflop when we both should be a bit light. He plays super-passive on the flop, doesn’t realize he is probably drawing to a Queen on the turn and then gets all happy when the crappy King hits the river. What we need is monthly reload bonuses.
I feel bad for the CO because he played OK. I’d be banging a set of Jacks there too. He slowed down on the river, which was wise, but he couldn’t fold, which was also right. The chat afterwards was amusing too:
CO said, “SB…what u have that hand?
SB said, “ak
CO said, “i flopped set of jacks”
CO said, “w3orst hand win again”
SB said, “stupid raise on my part at tyhe end”
SB said, “could have saved us 60 each”
CO said, “i couldnt believe i lost that pot”
CO said, “i knew i was beat on the end but was on tilt at that point”
CO said, “those kinda hands make me sick”
CO leaves the table
Apparently he doesn’t know about the hand history feature. This is why poker is a great game. They both are sure that I am the fish and that they will eventually take my money (or that poker is rigged and donkeys like me always get lucky).
Categories
March Wrap-up
March was a month that went more or less to my averages, so I guess I have learned a few things about my goals that I originally set. I expected to be able to get in more hands at my preferred limits, so I expected to play fewer hands than I have. It also twisted my money winning target because I need to run hotter to win the same money at lower limits. For instance, I ran right about 2 bb/100 this month which is pretty much what my target is, Despite playing 7,000 hands (my goal was 5,500) and running at the expected win rate, I actually only won what I expected to win in fewer hands. This was primarily a factor of playing at lower limits that I hoped. The vast majority of my hands were at $15/$30 and I actually had more $10/$20 than $30/$60. The $30/$60 doesn’t run a lot of the time I play and sometimes when it runs, I think my expectation is better at the $15/$30 game. Here is my month in pictures. The massive downswing in the middle was an especially brutal $50/$100 session.
If you would like to see this in a larger and more legible format, click here. To review in detail, we can compare to my original goals and look at my YTD progress:
[table=3]
I was basically right on track for all my goals and remain ahead of schedule in terms of my YTD goals. This is really good, because as I write this post, I have not yet played a single hand of poker in April and we are already one third of the way through the month. If I end up playing no poker at all in April, I should still be on track for SuperNova, although I will fall behind in money. I was a net loser at NL, although I played very few hands. Many of those were experimenting with some NL short-stack strategies. I actually won money with the short stacking and lost money playing “real poker.” I had no more than 1,000 NL hands in total, so the sample sizes are quite small.
Broken down by limit, my month looks like this:
[table=4]
Broken down by short-handed and full ring, it goes like so:
[table=5]
I just bundled heads-up into short-handed. I was a net winner heads-up, but it was against a particularly fishy player who stayed behind at a busted short-handed table. I didn’t play more than 100 or so HU hands this month. As I reported last month, I’m quite happy with my play and confident that I’m a winner in the games I choose. If I had not been unlucky in my one $50/$100 session, I could have had a really great month. I dropped over $2k in just about an hour and a half. It was a good table and I just had a couple of tough breaks. If I break even, I have a $5k month. If I win, even better.
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I am completely buried.
Me being me, I can’t really just sit back and watch someone else do the new kitchen. I have very specific ideas about proper carpentry and I find than not many people share my particular brand of fussiness. Therefore, I feel the need to stay directly involved so that I can steer the project in the direction I want. This has forced many of my other outside activities to the background, which includes blogging, playing poker and damn near everything else.
A before picture of the ITH crowd in my old kitchen:
A view of my new kitchen about three days ago:
I’ve got some current pictures, but they aren’t handy at the moment. At this point, all of the upper cabinets and base cabinets for the main part of the kitchen are in place as well as most of the appliances. The wall where the fridge is sitting in the bottom picture will get upper and lower cabinets added, but they aren’t installed yet. I’m exhausted.
The remodel is now in full swing. Everything I own is coated in a fine layer of drywall mud dust. My continued failure to have opinions about every question is driving my wife and designer nuts. I feel bad for them both. I really wish that I could generate some sort of strong feelings about the relative merits of painting the sunroom in “Natural Wicker” or “Brandy Cream” but I simply cannot. Truthfully, I don’t think I could tell them apart on a bet. Unfortunately, we’ve reached the stage where I need to box up everything in one room or another virtually every night. This is going to cut into my poker playing. I think sometime in the next few days we will be tearing the old cabinets off the wall and then it all goes to hell.
On a positive note, I am now a certified Security+ expert, whatever the hell that means. I made a good faith effort to study, but I tended to glaze over and wound up playing a little poker when I got bored with the study stuff. I had four employees who needed to pass the exam and they formed a study group and spent hours and hours in review and preparation. I took one day to prepare and didn’t go to any review classes or take any CBT or any of that jive. I passed the test in 20 minutes (I was scheduled for two hours). I was in some danger of seeming like the pointy haired boss, so I think I have reaffirmed to them that I’m not a complete bozo when it comes to tech issues. I was actually sweating it because I had pretty much resigned myself to my certain failure on the stupid thing.
I’ll try to get my act together and post a summary of my March results and get the next installment of the big blind ramble up in the next few days. But I might choke to death on constructive debris before that happens.