What happens when I am losing

This is one of those stream of conscious semi-tilted posts I sometimes write to rationalise losing money and recover from it. Losing is painful for me no matter how small the event or stake. If it is a game of pool, darts, cards, monopoly etc. the feeling is still the same. In other words the monetary loss is not really the source of the pain. I have had problems in the past being a very 'bad loser' and I am not sure of the origins of this behaviour as it dates back as long as I can remember. I spent a long time away from pool tables because of this attitude problem, but have since managed to partly exorcise these demons. For me, losing prompts an adreneline rush and this is the trigger for foggy thinking and bad decision making. Sometimes I will complain, blame others, beat myself up etc but on the poker table bad decision making quickly leads to loose play and loss of money.

I just left a ridculous, cheap and donkey filled poker table after 40 mins because I was losing. If I had stayed longer I was a big favourite to win back my losses and more but I still left the table for several reasons. Firstly I analysed the optimum session length of my most consistent winnning sessions and found that 15-40 mins is optimal and any more or less is linked to more losses. Secondly I have decided to put some balance back into my life and play a little less poker in my leisure time. Thirdly, when you sit and lose for 40mins at a poker table even the biggest drooler on the planet will gain confidence in your losses, notice that you usually bet but this time checked a street and use that as a cue to experiment with bluffing. The donkey in question has probably played 100% fit/fold up to that point and many donks accidentally bluff with the best hand, so it is not worth looking them up with a marginal hand when you can return another day to flop the nuts and stack off with a different donkey who has stubbornly held on with 2nd pair Ace kicker to your set.

Finally another statistic hit me today: I was running a hud and my preflop play stats matched exactly another player on the table sat to my left, and he too was having a losing session of similar proportions. The super tight style was clearly not working at this moment in time on this table, with this group of players for what ever reason. The one thing I have learned not to do in this situation though, is start playing crappy hands. If 3 donks limp and I look at QJo and think 'If I raise the btn I'll have pos'n, the blinds will fold and .....' I know it is time to leave the table and let the adreneline leave my system. Even though isolating in position or going multiway in position can be profitable you are working marginal edges and must accept bigger swings. There is also more multistreet guesswork against groups of players with super wide hand ranges as you rarely get heads up when you raise from any position.  The only way to beat the donkeys is to raise massively preflop with good hands (for your position), flop well and then get it in fast on a wet board or build a pot over 3 streets on a dry board. This is how I built my cash game profit, and this is how I intend to keep it.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

I don't know what it is about Sundays and online poker but I should routinely take a day of rest instead of playing. My best and most consistent tournament finishes have been on a Sunday because there are so many monkeys playing the big fields, but my worst overall cash/sit and go losing days have been on a Sunday. I think I develop some kind of false invincibility shield by wading through 500 players in a tournament, and then wear my new shield to the cash tables where I am of course totally vincible, as it were. I performed a classic donkey move yesterday, taking all my lovely tournament profit and losing it in a slightly higher stake cash game. At first I told myself that it would be a learning experience, to improve my game. At first I told myself I would drop out when half stacked and accept the loss for experience's sake. Unfortunately I made the classic mistake of dumping loads and then trying to get even before quitting. DONG!

I descended into some kind of gambler's distorted mind set, I got tilted in a subtle way and began to play HORRIBLY. I flatted weak aces aout of position, I stopped hand reading and played on whims and at one stage I stubbornly called down with an underpair to the board. In short I turned into a total weak-tight calling station idiot. In the cold light of day I am through the self loathing period of this disastrous session and in truth my roll is still plenty intact. I am not like the sad blackjack players on Louie Theroux's special programme on gambling, but I experienced a little of what they must go through. Mike Caro calls it the 'threshold of misery,' when you have lost an amount by which any further losses are inconsequential to you compared to what you have lost already in emotional terms. Next Sunday however, if I play and if I cash in anything I am going to do what all the weak tight nitty Sunday cash game players do: I am going to hit..... and run.
;)

To value bet or to bluff? That is the question

I have made two large post it notes, one says 'value bet' and one says 'bluff.' All bets in poker are one or the other and I have had some problems automatically betting without a good reason either way. My polarised post it notes are helping me to keep a check on my reasoning. I should also be able to isolate problem situations where it is not clear cut either way. For those who are not clear on the definitions a value bet is a bet which stands to be called by a range of worse hands eg you bet AK on a KJ8 board into a passive player who will chase draws and peel with middle or bottom pair eg JQ, J10, J9, A8 etc. Some of these hands will be superior hands, such as 88 but it is still a value bet when you make it, since there are fewer monster hands that are potentially ahead of you. A bluff is a bet that will fold out a range of better hands such as a donk lead on a A72 board with 64. Your hand is worthless and you do not want to go to the river only to be beaten by 9 high, so you bluff and your opponent will likely fold KQ,KJ,QJ,J10 etc to a bet thinking that you hold an ace in your hand. To make these bets you need to know your opponent's playing style and mood, since a tight aggressive player will pay off obvious value bets less often than a calling station and a tight-passive player will often fold to bluffs.  The psychology of betting in poker fascinates me and I think the reason why calling stations call with such a wide range of hands is that they fear being bullied and they are also eternally hopeful about the hands they might make if they get lucky 'this time'. This is why you should rarely bluff at nanostakes poker, because you are playing against people gambling for fun with very little money. They are happy to splash about their chips and so you should value bet the living daylights out of them every chance you get.

Turbo booster

Quick blind levels in microstakes heads up turbos creates an interesting set of challenges for the thinking/improving poker player. You are forced to observe frequencies of player actions within a few hands and make decisions based on these observations with the ticking time bomb of 3 minute blind levels. When you factor in the aggressiveness of many heads up players this makes some matches like a game of chicken. Your initial impressions of a player can be mistaken though, and if you do not keep reevaluating their playing style then you miss it when the swingometer moves in the other direction. This is not to say that players are varying their style to confuse and disorientate, they are simply not that sophisticated at my level of play.  What players are doing though is hitting or missing hands and any change in consistency is likely to reveal a hit rather than a miss since they will rarely have a strong hand.  My strategy is based around exploiting the following general player characteristics:

1. They call and slow play too much
2. They bet more with better hands and less with bluffs (unless they are an aggro donk)
3. They are impatient
4. They do not read the board to assess your hand strength, only their own
5. They are happy to get all the chips in early to feel the rush of the board running out yeah! Bizarrely though, they often tighten up when they have less than 7-8bb.

So to counter these general characteristics I try to:

1. Bet more for value and bluff less
2. Avoid overthinking their overbets, but stamp on min bets
3. If they think for a long time, they are likely in a marginal spot, not super strong or super weak (unless preflop with high blinds when you sometimes see a tank min raise or tank min 3bet with AA/KK which is surprisingly common amongst calling stations or weak tight players)
4. Look at the board and announce how well it fits their likely hands and compare their strength to mine
5. Try to avoid giving them the perfect reshove at around 15bb, but shove wide myself at -10bb

I am on a mission to remove fancy play from my game. It is a long road ahead but these simple rules should help to keep me in check. I have stopped playing full ring SNGs because everyone has tightened up way too much so the value vs the time it takes has vanished from them. I am too busy for cash games so heads up is the way to go with a busy lifestyle. A HU Turbo only takes 20mins max to complete. Current roi 6% and counting....

Tilt mode

Earlier on today I lost a big pot to trip queens holding KQ on a Qxx (2s) board, the player in question slow played the hand and hit and ran straight after. I dusted myself off mentally, switched tables and promptly made several questionable decisions, quickly losing another stack to a fish. To cap off this fantastic session I lost another buy in to the same fish who stacked me preflop with KJs vs my pocket queens. Once the King spiked on the flop I knew it was time to switch off the computer and do something else, as I was tilting and therefore incapable of making proper strategic decisions any more. It did not take long before I calmed down and reflected upon the KQ spot as bad luck, since I would play it the same way every time.  Apart from one all in 50/50 vs a fish’s range the rest of my plays were not big long term losing plays and heck, these things just happen.  At least it got me action!

 To appease my bruised ego and claw back some cash I decided to play one heads up match since the fields are often pretty weak for these games and If I lost I could not use a donk’s play or bad luck as the scapegoat. It is difficult to win a heads up match by luck alone, so I said my ‘small hand small pot, big hand big pot’ mantra and signed up for a match. I ground down a slightly tricky opponent in tight match where I got all my decent hands towards the end, so luck in a sense granted me a win on this occasion. A passive early-aggressive later strategy paid off as this particular player backed off after I gained the chip lead and folded too many hands later on in the match. I declined a rematch which is a little unsportsmanlike but I like to take a break between HU matches as they require a fair amount of concentration.

I decided to write this brief article on tilt since there is a right and wrong way to deal with the anger we all feel to some degree at some time in poker. I dealt with my tilt in almost the right way by quitting the game, but then undid all my good work by returning to the computer too quickly. Heads up is also the wrong format to play when tilted as a thinking player can tear apart my game, and as it was a weekday there are a greater proportion of winning/thinking players on the site that I use than at the weekend. The worst way you can deal with tilt is to let rip and berate your opponent, which you see a lot of in the chat boxes. Whilst scouting for heads up opponents I opened up a table and watched two donks spill forth the following diatribe. They manage to cover racism, homophobia, ageism and arguably (ac. to Singer) speciesism in a few short misspelled phrases. Idiots like this consistently feed money into the poker economy, so keep up the good work boys, just watch your fucking mouths.

A >>                f uck you

A >>                m0ng

B >>                A… the fag                                          

A >>                say what ********? (A uses racist slang here that I refuse to retype)

B >>                yer

A >>                what a maggot you are hahahaha

B >>                im winning

A >>                to a fish move lmao pathetic

B >>                lol

A >>                ahhh the good old ace raise ahahahaha

B >>                fishy

A >>                donk

A >>                lmao coming from you! ahahahaha fold til you have an ace little boy

B >>                yer

B >>                how old r u?

A >>                20

B >>                ur shiit

A >>                your a f ucking mug

B >>                ty

B >>                lol

B >>                probz playing ur whole bankroll

A >>                lmao says you whos in _ ahahahaha

A >>                stick to cod you little noob

B >>                 dont play cod

A >>                ha what are you ten?

B >>                18

A >>                ooo guess who has an ace ahahahaha

B >>                7 2

A >>                go to bed you mug hahahaha

B >>                no thanks

A >>                haha

A >>                knob jockey!

B >>                YES

B >>                HAHAHAHHA KNOB JOCKEY

And in classic style they get it in preflop with the better hand, player A’s pocket Jacks, losing out to player B’s Q10o. Lol donkamentsJ

Why I am awful at poker

I have won money at poker. The money I have won has not been life changing money, it has barely been weekend changing money.  Occasionally a decent cash in a tournament will resonate throughout the week if I buy a bus pass with a win.  This fact has kept me afloat in the game and blinded me to the reality of my flawed play, which if I do not improve means I can only ever break even at best. I am awful at poker, because I am not making enough money off my good hands, and not losing the minimum on my dominated hands. I say ‘dominated hands’ rather than ‘bad hands’ because I do not play bad hands. If I am in a hand past the flop you can guarantee I am well in the running with, at the very least top pair. When I discovered how to select good  starting hands for my position at a table I felt like I had arrived as a poker player, but when it comes to fundamentals my game stopped improving right there and then.  Every now and again I am felted by a superior hand that I could have got away from, but this is not my biggest leak in terms of profit. The fundamental mistake I am making is one of ‘missed value,’ or not making the maximum profit from my good hands. I shamefully present to you one of the worst two hands I have played in recent cash games:

      Exhibit A: weak 3c/6c, 6 max play from the blinds and missed value on the river:

Preflop: UTG (fish) limps, SB (tight-passive) completes, BB (abc/bad tag) checks KQs

Pot: 18c

Flop: TcKc8s

SB checks, BB bets 15:18, UTG calls, SB folds.

Pot: 48c

Turn: 9d

BB bets 25:48, UTG calls.

Pot: 98c

River: 4s.

BB checks, UTG checks.

BB shows KQs for top pair

UTG shows Q6 for queen high

Mistake 1. Not raising preflop.

This would have built a bigger pot and made more from the hand. In case you are wondering would UTG call Q6 to a raise? The answer is of course he would, he wants to see a flop so bad it aches a little bit and if he folds then that is a good result for my hand because I do not have to play a hand out of position.

Mistake 2.  Flop bet could have been pot size.

Facing a fish on such a coordinated board a pot or overbet is getting called all day long. I could have made more here. I have seen shoves called with weak draws on board like this at 1c/2c.

Opponent could have Axc, JQ , J9, Kx, small pocket pair, 79,and many more suited combinations  besides.

Mistake 3.  Turn bet could have been bigger, much bigger.

This is basic stuff to gain value from weak made hands and the myriad draws out there. Anyone with half a brain could have raised my turn bet and folded a tonne of my range here, luckily UTG is not so blessed and merely called my super weak bet. The nine only slightly strengthens my opponent’s range, giving some draws a pair and does nothing for mine unless I stumble across two pair at this point. If he did spike two pair I would have known about it on the turn.

Mistake 4.

By this point in the hand I was baffled. This was a mistake. I have played enough fish to know that they will chase all kinds of draws all day long and pay off with weak pairs just in case you are bluffing this time. I meekly decide to check the 4s (effectively blank) river for no reason at all.

This is such a big mistake and I miss value from draws that hit the 9. I miss value from pocket pairs. I miss value from A4c that spiked the 4. I miss value from so much of this player’s range that I should have chucked in a small-moderately sized value bet. Yes a tonne of draws miss on the river and he will not call if he missed those but so what?

It is for these reasons I am awful at poker and now you know. I may post another of these travesties, but for now I need to go and beat myself about the head with a blunt object and repeat the nano stakes mantra: value bet/value bet/value shove.

Poker home game report: season two episode three

Players in attendance: Hitmanhead, TheConge, Pokerhontasz, KingTubby, Top_Jimmy

We changed the format of this week’s game to a cash game for a change of pace, which was originally KingTubby’s idea and I pushed it because the sit and go format can be boring if you play them all the time.  Everyone seemed to think a cash game was a good idea for a one off so we set the blinds at a wallet friendly 5p/10p and all sat down with £10 = 100bb. My girlfriend does not play cash poker online and initially baulked at the idea of me sitting down with a ‘massive stack,’ since in a way it forces everyone to buy in for the maximum. As a fan of Doyle Brunson she will eventually come to understand the logic of sitting down with the table maximum in any cash game. Your stack is your leverage to make decent sized bets and raises, and a shorter stack restricts your game to simply waiting for a made hand and then quickly getting it all in.  As a micro and nano stakes donkey I am not strictly bankrolled to play stakes as high as 5p/10p cash.  If I were to lose 3 or 4 buy ins in a row that would sting badly at these stakes and this can happen faster than you can say ‘Damn my aces just got cracked, again.’ That said I sat down with my stop-loss limit at 3 buy ins and got started on the cooking lager. In respect of the increased money on the table this week, I could have chosen not to drink alcohol, but I would rather loosen things up a bit than sit quietly and soberly playing one pot every 5 mins. I also chose to not take notes on key pots and avoid my traditional write up, since I think everyone is getting fed up of me commentating and judging their plays. Since I started this blog to help think about and improve my own game, instead I will judge a couple of my own plays…

I played a small ball game for the most part and got quite lucky, being dealt a few aces and broadway hands on the button which were mostly raise and take it down preflop hands.  Five handed play requires you to adjust your opening ranges so I was a little bit more liberal with my openers, without going into permanent raise mode. I played a tight, uncreative but successful game and I don’t think I even three bet once during the whole game. I faced one tough spot fairly early on with a flush draw/straight draw/overcard to the board combination that I played aggressively, but got reraised on the flop after donking out. I will often play these monster-combination draws aggressively as you have a lot of equity on the flop (I figured I had 15 outs twice if it played down to the end), but I have run into trouble playing this way online since nobody can ever fold a hand. If you are going to semibluff a draw by betting hard, then part of your hand’s strength is your fold equity. Gus Hansen talks about these types of hands for tournament play in ‘Every Hand Revealed’ and tries to plan a series of bets that still has a chance of folding out one or two better hands in an opponent’s range, whilst getting the most chips in when you have lots of equity. He achieves this by check raising an aggressive player or betting with the intention of four bet shoving a player who will likely get married to his one pair type hands. You have to know that your opponent is definitely going to bet with a large portion of his/her missed hands in order for a check raise to work. In this case I should have realised that was my best way to maximize fold equity, but since I accidentally donk bet and got raised I had to reevaluate the situation. As Gus might say ‘Fold-nope; Call-has some merit, allows me to keep the pot small and see if I can hit one of my many outs; Four bet-maximum rock and roll and definitely the most stylish move'.  I reasoned that there were more weak draws and weak made hands than missed overcards hand in my opponent’s range so if I four bet, I allow him to play perfectly by folding draws and weak pairs, and five betting strong hands. Another way of saying this is that in the event he was sitting on two pair or a set, keeping the pot small was probably a good idea.  I was getting 2:1 pot odds to call the flop with a 50% chance (by the river) of making my hand so I decided to call and try and take it away on any blank turn card, or put the pedal to the metal  if I hit one of my outs. The next card was a handy brick and I bet out again to take the hand down. The next time I flop the world I will be check raising a la Gus’ tournament strategy,  and hopefully I can avoid such a sticky spot against a good aggressive opponent!

The game had some interesting swings in dynamic and I found myself sitting on a modest profit for a while and nitting up during a spell of super loose play. Another interesting hand came up three way when I reraised two pair to a flop donk lead, hoping to take it down on a low connected board out the big blind. I was called behind by one player in position and the initial donker folded the sb. The turn card was an ace which reasonably improved some of my opponent’s range and clearly did not affect mine, so I blocker bet folded the turn which was probably a silly move. My donk rationale was that my opponent will call a bet with dominated one pair and other made hands better or worse, but will always bet out a larger bet size with 100% of his range so even though it was a small chance, I thought I could get a cheaper river card by betting than check calling. Cue QI style Klaxon noise!!! This is the effect of cooking lager ladies and gentlemen, the breakdown of sound rationale and a journey into the quagmire of foggy logic. In retrospect I should have folded what was the worst made hand possible on the worst flop since King Kong felt pressured on his wedding night. I was mildly tilted with myself after this hand but quickly recovered as I was still showing a healthy profit and the night was drawing to a close.  Within a few hands the second of our five players was felted and the game broke up.  I feel compelled to express the results in some form so with no rebuys the finishing positions were…

Pokerhontasz-doubled through+

Top_Jimmy-roughly a stack and a half

Hitmanhead-roughly a stack and a third-half

TheConge-felted

KingTubby-felted