Reflection on donkey challenge weekend

Now that I have finished immersing myself in online poker this weekend I realise I have achieved nearly all of things I wanted to and beaten some fears along the way. The old bankroll has dropped by ten buy ins which is no worse than a bad run of playing it safe anyway, so I am glad that I have taken some shots and had a punt. I have spent the weekend largely tilt-free which is good progress in mental terms, by reflecting on bad luck situations as the product of quite a lot of bad play on my part. I have a great tendency to 'blow up' and make impatient, usually over betting or over calling decisions when I get excited towards the end of tournaments so this needs work. I still bet two barrels into tight calling stations on boards where 'they can't be repping much' when in fact they have the stone cold nuts, but I am starting to learn how to control this instinct. I find it helps to keep my hand away from the mouse for at least 5 secs before doing anything and to announce to myself 'why should I bet here?' and see what the reasons are and if it makes sense. If I can remain aware of other players' ranges and tendencies whilst doing this I can improve all the time. I sometimes forget that donkeys literally bet the strength of their hand and if you encounter serious resistance than chances are you are beaten unless you find an over bettor/donator on your table. I can also count on one hand the number of big pot hero calls I have made that went in my favour and would do well to remember this. I have also discovered that I do not like pot limit omaha since it is a game of big swings only suitable for adrenaline junkies with bigger bankrolls than I have! If I want to get my gamble on I can just wait to grind up my roll a bit again and have another punt on the odd NLHE MTT if I get time. I am going back to playing sit and gos recreationally again so I can get on with normal life stuff which is way more rewarding than playing a game all day. Time for a spot of guitar practise I think...

Challenge donkey-lost in maths

For this part of my challenge I wanted to get to grips with the medium pairs problem when you have around 17bb and usually one limper to contend with. I looked at various scenarios where you limp and then give yourself the option of hitting a set, shoving low flops, shoving over cbets, or check folding to overcards etc. This is essentially the problem I faced in the MTT I busted out of this morning holding 99. My conclusion is that the limp play is a small losing play each time you make it and should therefore not be entertained, but it took me a long time to work this out using lots of expectation calculations. In low stakes tournaments you see a lot of medium pairs played as a 'stop and go' in these sorts of situations and I just cannot justify this move numerically. I have run out of momentum in my maths session and may have to concede that this problem remains open ended for the time being. The crux of the problem is that you have around 54% equity if you shove and get heads up against a typical range, so you know as soon as you get these hands that you are going to have to flip for your tournament life and give two high cards the chance to call and see all 5 board cards. Given the pot to stack ratio you rarely leave any player any other option but to call if you shove as you will typically offer them around 40% break-even percentage anyway. This is before you consider that if you do it from middle position then you may well be called from behind as well, dropping your equity share to around 32% and leaving the initial limper 30% break even percentage and a very inviting call. If you fold your puny middle pair you dodge a bullet for sure but one more pass through the blinds takes you down to 15.5 bb and if this happens again the pot odds you offer become even more juicy to villains with their finger poised on the all in button. It is perhaps looking more and more like you can justify the all move unless you are in a sit and go with no antes and you have more of an edge in the shove/fold war that will play out as the bubble fast approaches. In an MTT it is probably better to shove and let the chips fall where they may. This topic needs further research and I have yet to consider cases where you face a raise, but in working this out so far I have learned how to make expectation calculations properly. I have also discovered how to predict the number and range of hands villains may hold, how to calculate certain basic probabilities and I have used up most of the rough paper I had in the living room for taking telephone messages. Good times:)

Challenge donkey-memorising shove/fold charts

WRT to shove fold charts I have been using some downloadable resources from prokerstrategy.com and for the most part these are a nice level of security when you have -13bb and want to ship it with decent equity, even when you are called. You still need to look for opportunities where you have more than the usual amount of fold equity when the spread of stack sizes may cause extra tightening up.  The charts also do not take into account your 'M zone' or relationship to the pot size including antes in MTTs, but for sit and gos they are the business. I have almost completely memorised the 'open shove' and 'rebound from the button' charts, I just wrote them out with only a few minor errors which I need to correct. In fairness I had started to memorise these charts before this weekend so this was more like revision, but in keeping with the steeper learning curve I set myself this weekend I wanted to revisit the material and learn it properly. I was inspired to learn some shove/fold charts when I watched a Poker After Dark episode where James Akenhead is put all in by David Williams and you can see the cogs turning as after a few seconds James announces matter of factly 'That is a call.' Contrast this on the recent NBC heads up championship where Dennis Phillips makes an emotional, almost agonised call vs Eric Lingren, with the chip lead and a decent equity hand vs Eric's likely shove range. I would rather have the numbers at my disposal to make emotionally detached informed +EV all-in decisions than be a 'feel' player who is subject to silly tanking moments or donkey calls. Heads up all in decisions are obviously more simple that full ring considerations so the pokerstrategy.com charts cover different eventualitites of position and number of big blinds and there are 4 charts in total.

Challenge Donkement!

For this part of my weekend I got up early to play an MTT. I do not know why the weekend tournements are so weak in the morning but that is just what I have found. MTTs are technically not much of a challenge and do not really deserve to be on a poker to-do list, so I upped the ante and played a large field higher buy in to 'make it more interesting.' Play started incredibly loose with lots of min bets, donk bets and generally ugly play. There was an very fast pace to the game, as if loads of ADD kids had been let loose with a poker account. Donks and fish were calling raises from all positions and hitting lots of weirdness post flop. It was not long before the game settled into what I call the 'frantic limping' stage. This is when the blinds are so high that any decent raise leaves you pot-committed, so many players look down at A4s or K10 and limp in from any position on the table. The sharks were doing well at this stage pushing hard post flop, and there were also a few phantom chip leaders from early all-in head butts. I made an good fold of 66 in EP, noticing a desperate medium stack in the blinds and as predicted the BB shoved. As the board played out I managed a wry smile, as I would have been up against top 2, and made quad sixes lolz:) In the end I came out of the last intermission to a quick exit in 38th place of 295 because I could not manage a nit-fold with 99 preflop to a few limps. When the board came down low and the big stack potted the flop I slid in my 16BB to look down the barrell of 1010. I know this was horrible 'yellow zone' play but even if I had shoved preflop then the monster stack was calling in a heartbeat, so we can probably file this one under 'cooler.' I really need to tackle the maths side of my weekend challenges now and start working out the +EV way to deal with these sodding medium-low pairs at 15-88BB...I think my good buddy KingTubby would agree with me that these hands are a terrible curse!

Challenge donkey-multitabling sit and gos plus higher stakes adventure!

Like an idiot I cured my boredom this afternoon by playing two tables at once and to kill two weekend challenges with one stone I decided to play a higher stake sit and go at one of the tables! I was frantically tapping buttons and realised too late that to start both sit and gos at almost the same time is total madness. All the quick higher blind decisions happen simultaneously and you miss opportunities to exploit people who are trying to fold their way to the money. If I repeat this experiment I will load up one table a few levels behind the other, since my nerves just cannot take the pressure of quick decisions on auto pilot! I ended up slightly down in profit on the experiment because I won the cheap sit and go and crashed out in 5th in the more expensive one. The higher buy in game was less wacky than my usual stakes and the players seemed more evenly matched: an early raising war resulted in two players getting it all in, both with AK. I only played one hand in the game, raising with pocket tens to receive one caller on the button. The villain on the button floated my cbet on a scary middly texture flop,  but folded to a second barrel. Thinking about this hand again I am still fairly happy with my second bet as it was strictly for protection against AQ, KQ, QJ type hands, although I could have thought about pot controlling and check-calling turn and/or river to that range since I was crushed by small pairs that were slow playing trips and strong draws anyway.  From the slightly higher buy-in game I also noticed that fewer hands are shown down, more people vary preflop bet size creatively and that wider shoves could be the way to crush these seemingly very tight games. The giant stack at the table, playing a very tight aggressive-ish style, spent most of his time bank before calling my 4bb shove, holding 109 which given the pot odds, his chip position and the J5 I had recently shown down should have been more or less insta-call. The fact that I was holding 108 makes this move even more profitable, so I typed a toungue-in-cheek 'nh' to the fellow as I left the table lolz:) As a footnote I pulled a glorious reverse float on a weak tight player in the cheap game when 3-handed. I called BB with a low ace and then checked the flop almost nit-instinctively without thinking. I decided to call his inevitable cbet planning to raise any low cards on the turn since the middly dryish flop missed his high-aces, pairs-and decent broadways range by miles, plus the precisely 50% bet size looked hella bluffy. The turn paired the board and one smallish value bet later I picked up enough chips to effectively prepel me to the victory. Granted I should have donked the flop in the first place, but after the fishy cbet I realised the door was open and stepped in.

Challenge donkey-PLO game

I just finished a half hour session of pot limit omaha at nano limit and I am bored out of my skull. The game followed the usual cash game pattern of absurd action followed by super tight nut-pedalling with a rotating cast of short stack donkeys coming and going. I discovered that 1. I have no concept of what a good hand is in PLO preflop and 2.My natural poker state is perma-fold when I am out of my depth, and that is no kind of money making scheme. Since the point of this weeked is to leave my comfort zone and try new poker experiences I have to ask the question "Did I learn anything that helps my game generally or is transferable to NLHE?' and the answer is probably no since it played very much like a cheap no limit cash game where the hand that gets the last raise in is the nuts even if the nuts is an inconceivable quads or daft KKK66 full house. The only positive benefit I can see to playing PLO is that it makes you think through the streets very carefully to see how the action fits the possible hand ranges, rather than jumping to a conclusion pre-flop such as 'he must have a big pair or AK' and then failing to admit to other possibilities when the turn and river cards alter the action.

Challenge Donkey!

This weekend I have the house to myself and I am going to put in some serious poker time based around a few personal challenges to keep things interesting. I will then write up my experiences and chart the inevitable downswings that come with experimentation:)

JD’s bank holiday poker weekend May 28-30^th 2011

-Play a sit and go at a higher level

-Play an MTT

-Play some other form of poker for cash and see what happens eg PLO, 7 card stud-whatever cheap game I can find. RULE=NO QUICK HIT AND RUNNING IN A CASH GAME!

- Play two sit and go’s simultaneously or play a heads up SNG (one of these two big fears needs conquering)

-Create some mathematical solutions  for ‘hands too good to waste but too crap to shove, maybe i can stop and go them?’ marginal range problem (77,88,99, AJ, A10) for low buy in SNGs with 15-18bbs to a list of choices:

-when facing a raise, you are in BB

-when first to enter in middle position

-when first to enter in late position

 -Memorise two shove fold charts for use in SnGs-be able to write out the charts completely from scratch


yes I am a geek

Sorry

Another successful home game went down last night, a hardore of four of us played a winner takes-all nailbiter. KingTubby brought his ‘A’ game, got the chip lead and then harangued us to keep putting up the blinds on time! Pokerhontasz played tighter than Phil Hellmuth in an airlock and TheConge refined his overbetting strategy to a deadly effective small–ball game. KingTubby was unlucky to go out first, limp calling my shove with 99 and losing when I spiked an Ace holding A10o. Pokerhontasz blinded down quickly to go out in 3^rd and I took the money in about 3 hands of heads up thanks to a spiked 7 on the river having shoved over with K7s vs TheConge’s pre flop raise holding A8o.

It is great to regularly spend some quality time with my fellow poker geeks although in the words of Paul Newman in The Colour Of Money I had “A little too much booze” and I was “A little too cocky.” In many respects this blog post is an open apology to TheConge for needling him all night but I was probably out of order with the rest of the table at some point too, so I am sorry everyone. 

At one point I shoved over a cbet from TheConge on a low connecting flop holding two whiffed overcards. As he faced a tough decision for his stack I was unable to remain quiet and barracked him for a failed ‘steal’ attempt. He probably realised I had nothing but did not want to risk a suck out when he could preserve chips for less volatile battles. I was also out of order when I told TheConge how he should have played the final hand of the night after I had just sucked out to victory after getting it in bad. Sorry dude.

Horror calls!!! Sunday matinee!

The curse of the brain eaters continues!! Zombies ate my premium pairs!! You won't believe your eyes!!
I have been having loads of fun in the micro slums lately, but unfortunately tonnes of bad luck near or around the bubble with many horror calls holding up against me. The latest one was A10o calling my AA shove and rivering a straight for example.  The reason it is so funny is that I would have played these hands the same way every time and in the long run I believe I am still making decisions that are profitable in the long term. I just have to wait it out until the variance fly comes and bites these donkeys on the ass! In the meantime I leave you with my favourite recent donk attack from outer space: AJ raises from HJ 7 handed. Small blind shoves him all-in which HJ is only too happy to call and go heads up with, given the absurd hands SB has recently pushed hard and showed down. SB shows 82o and naturally flops two-pair which hold up. I'm off to buy some popcorn and a large soft drink 'cos this B-movie is so bad, it's good.