Rolled on the River

An insight into the live professional player

admin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:30:03 +0000

Throughout 2005, my sole income was from playing live poker. Thanks to this, I feel I truly understand the aspect of grinding, and now that I play online can clearly depict the difference between the two. Essentially, every evening I would arrive at the casino, join the waiting list for the highest running Limit Hold’em games, and then jump on the first available table. It’s also worth noting that I never stuck to the one table if I knew there was a better one going. As soon as I found a seat, I ensured that I stayed on the waiting list for other tables – if a better one became available then I would move to it. The most important thing about playing live poker is being able to sit in the best game available; you’re only playing one table and you need to ensure that you’re making it the best possible table.

Live poker, although easier to beat overall (no live player should ever kid themselves, the average live player is most definitely less skilled then the average online player), does have very different upsides and downsides to online poker. The advantages of online play should be quite apparent – you can play more tables, you can track your income and opponents quite easily with various software packages, you can get rakeback, and you can also find a good game with a good structure and soft opponents at virtually any time. If I had to make a recommendation to an aspiring professional poker player, I would most certainly recommend that they play online poker over live poker.

So what are the advantages of live poker? Well for one, you’re meeting people. Online poker players lose a lot of interaction, and essentially have a desk job that doesn’t bring them around people. If you’re a people person, you’re going to prefer live poker. This isn’t to say that online players aren’t sociable people, as I personally have found quite the opposite and would argue quite vigorously that they are. I’m also of the impression that your average big blinds per hour is higher at a live table than it is at the equivalent stake online table (and I still believe this after taking rake and game structures into consideration). Why? In my experience live tables are generally much better in that value bets get called thinner, and the saturation of information at a live table allows you to squeeze more money out of your opponents than you typically could with the absence of physical reads / tells. One thing to keep in mind is that although physical tells are quite prevalent in live play, the average opponent puts too much emphasis on them. The play of a hand and your opponents’ tendencies should be your first and foremost source of information when making your decisions – ie. use tells as a method of enforcing or questioning your decisions, not making them.

Another interesting point about live poker is table talk. A lot can be learnt about a hand just played even if you weren’t the one in it. Let’s assume that you see a hand where you suspect that Villain A beat Villain B with two pair. A simple statement such as “I knew you had a set there!” although untrue, if presented in a berating manner, will often cause Villain A to either defend himself (which will give you more information), or Villain B to provide you with more information about what he was thinking in the hand. As an example of the latter, I observe a hand where Villain A bets the flop and in turn and is called by Villain B on both streets; however, when he bets small on the river, Villain B folds. I can’t see many feasible hands that Villain A could have been representing, and I’m curious as to why Villain B folded. By simply saying something along the lines of “I knew you had a set the whole way, nice hand” to Villain A, you will sometimes get Villain B jumping in saying something like “No, he had a straight,” or “No, he had Aces.” – giving you information about how Villain B thinks.

Why do most live professionals not last very long? Well, in the most part I’ve found that, on average, they don’t put in enough hours. Live poker is a modest income at best; without playing fairly high stakes and without logging the hours you will often not last very long. During the time that I played live for a living, I saw many aspiring live professionals come and go – some of which had games I truly respected. On the most part these players would start off logging eight to ten hour days, but over time this would drop to one or two days a week. The pattern here? A lot of players would run good at some time or another and make the assumption that this is maintainable, causing them to play less. Making $200 / hour at $5/$10 Limit Hold’em is a very good heater, but it isn’t maintainable. Just because you have managed to do this for two or three sessions in a row, certainly doesn’t mean this is going to continue being the case.

4 betting light vs. 4 bet shoving in No Limit Hold’em

admin — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:50:51 +0000

Recently StoxPoker coach Stosh McConnell and I started discussing the concept of four betting light versus four bet shoving. What do we mean by this? Well, basically Hold’em betting patterns are commonly referred to using numbers. (Although a common misconception, this use of numbers doesn’t have any correlation to the bet size.) For example, the first bet into a pot is usually referred to as “opening”. If this bet is then raised, the person who raised them is said to have “three bet”, while the next person to raise would be “four betting”. What Stosh and I were discussing is whether it would be profitable to four bet shove our Ax (An ace with any second card) hands, as opposed to four betting these hands lightly (by lightly we mean raising the three better by a small amount - the strength of the play often having enough merit that the raise itself doesn’t need to be large). We were mostly focusing on the $0.50/$1.00 stake online, and thought the play may have some merit due to how lightly people currently three bet at these limits.

Example NL100:

SB: $.5
BB: $1

Hero opens for: $4
Villain three bets to: $13
Hero four bet shoves for: $96

There is now $114.50 in the pot, and Villain needs to call $87. To make this call profitably, Villain needs to have at least a 43% equity (87/(87+114.5)=0.43176).

Assuming Villain calls, and we only have one overcard (our ace), then we are still 30% likely to win. Villain is less likely to call with an ace, since there are fewer aces available due to card removal effects. The merit of this play, however, doesn’t come from Villain making a call here, but rather from the fold equity that the strength of our play has (generally we will also fold out most hands that completely dominate us, except for AK and AA combination’s).

I then spoke to Felipe Mesquita (another StoxPoker coach) to take this further. We made the following assumptions:

Typical Villain three bets us with QQ+, AK+ (although this is a tight range for your typical NL100 opponent, this is the range we chose for our first calculations).

Typical Villain then calls our four bet shove with: AA-KK, AKs

Assuming these are the ranges for our Villain, then, taking fold equity in consideration, we lose 17bb’s each time we make this place. Fold equity is a much lower consideration in this example, since Villain is three betting us with QQ+,AK and calling with any AA-KK, AKs combination, essentially he’s only folding a small portion of his hands (QQ, AKo).

We adjusted the second example’s ranges to take into account a more typical NL100-NL200 opponent. In this example, Villain three bets with 22+,AJ+,KQ (10% of hands), however, his calling range stayed the same. In this instance the play actually became profitable for us, making 7bb’s. If we then adjusted his calling range to include AKo and QQ, it becomes 2bb’s.

Basically, the end result of our experiment is that it can be profitable to four bet shove against the right opponent (one who three bets 10% of his hands).

Random PokerStars praise

admin — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:25:42 +0000

If I had to recommend an online poker room, it would be PokerStars. Why? Not because of the software, or because of the player volume, but because of the excellent support. Every time I have had an issue with PokerStars I have received prompt, eloquent and informative responses.

Nothing more to say - just a random PokerStars praise entry. Keep up the good work, guys!

Pessimistic or Optimistic?

admin — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:20:47 +0000

A poker player can be one of two types – a pessimistic player, or an optimistic player – and this will effect his reaction to the games he plays.

The pessimist loses a hand. He may have played the hand poorly, but his ego doesn’t let him reflect on the hand and realize this. His first thought after the cards are mucked and the dealer is shuffling, is something like “Again! AGAIN he caught his flush on the river!” The pessimist may have allowed the villain to draw correctly, he may have polarized his hand, or he may have checked a street when he shouldn’t have. Either way, the pessimist lost the hand. Whether it was his fault or not is something he doesn’t consider – in his mind he simply got unlucky.

The optimist reflects on his hand. It may not be during the session or immediately after, but he is critical of his own play and can take his ego out of the equation. The optimist deals in theoretical money – it doesn’t matter if he finishes a session up or down, provided he has made the best possible decisions throughout his session, he can be pleased with his play.

Cutom PokerTracker 3 HUD

admin — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:49:46 +0000

After my Colouring PokerTracker 3 entry, I spent a lot of time discussing HUD layouts with various people. This resulted in my helping a number of people configure their Heads Up Displays. By doing this, I have found that people are commonly unhappy with the lack of information that is available in the default HUD. To help overcome this I have created the following HUD, which people can modify to suit their needs:

This HUD also has the following display when clicked:

Before you install the HUD, be sure to backup your current one. To do this, copy the file Layouts.pt3 from the C:\Program Files\PokerTracker 3\Data directory to another location. If you do not like my HUD, simply copy this file back into its original folder and everything will revert to how it was.

To install this HUD, first download this file: Layouts.zip

Once you have downloaded it, extract the contents to C:\Program Files\PokerTracker 3\Data, and click “yes” when prompted to overwrite the Layouts.PT3 file.

Enjoy!

The StoxPoker Blog

admin — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:34:03 +0000

In lue of my ‘Life as a poker professional‘ post I’d like to point everybody to the StoxPoker Blog. A number of Internet pokers best players as well as StoxPoker’s psychology coach post here and provide a rather unique insight into the life of a poker professional.

Disclaimer: Although I am biased by working with StoxPoker I do genuinely feel that the blog is one of the better poker blogs on the internet and strongly recommend spending a few minutes flicking through an entry or two.

Life as a poker professional

admin — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:33:52 +0000

Although many people assume it will, playing poker for a living doesn’t mean you aren’t still working full time. To do it, and do it well, you’ll need to be putting in similar hours – you’ll just get to choose when you do them. It’s a typical grandiose notion that professional poker will release you from the shackles of the rat race, but you still put in the hours, you still have to be wise with your money and accounts, and you still have to pay taxes. Essentially, you put on a new set of shackles – provided you see normal life as being chained down.

Before you consider playing poker for a living, make sure you really love the game. You may think your job is repetitive now, but multi-tabling poker all day can be just the same. You should also take into consideration what future opportunities you have in your current position – is it really worth giving up a potentially good long-term career for what could possibly be short-term money and freedom?

However, if you have strong self-discipline, and the ability to critique yourself (this is a particularly handy skill for post-flop match reviews), then poker may just be for you.

So you’ve played a few hundred hours of poker online, have an established win-rate over a large number of hands (250,000+), and want to take a shot at becoming an online poker professional? Where do you go from here?

First of all, think about how much money you would be comfortable with having in reserve. Now double it. Having far more money at your disposal than you need not only decreases your risk of ruin, but will help you cope with those inevitable ‘down days’ that much better. You’re not going to profit every day – and if you don’t know this before you start, you should reconsider your decision – and having a large amount of cash in reserve is nothing but a good idea.

Secondly, what are your expectations? How much money do you want to make, and how many hands do you plan to play each month? When you first go from having a 9-5 job to what may start out feeling like an endless weekend, it’s very easy to start slacking off and not playing as often as you should. Have some goals to help keep you focused.

Third of all, what are your pre-session and post-session routines? When you were working you presumably had a routine. Whether it was the drive to work, or a morning coffee, you would have had something which mentally prepared you to work. As a poker professional, having a pre-session routine will help you to mentally prepare to play your absolute A game. A good example of a pre-session routine would be to wake up, have a shower and breakfast, grab yourself a bottle or glass of water and then start locating good tables. Post-session routines aren’t that different – this could be opening a video site, such as StoxPoker or Deucescracked, and watching some videos, or posting hands from the day on TwoPlusTwo. Either way, your post-session routine should help you to close off your day until you start again tomorrow.

Software tilt - PokerTracker database dead

admin — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:36:31 +0000

ACK! I’m really, really trying to support PokerTracker 3 amidst everybody looking into alternative options but so far I’ve been having problem after problem. To be fair support usually resolves the issue but HoldemManager has the best support in the business combined with what is very rapidly looking like a more reliable product.

I don’t want to jump the gun on this but I’m incredibly frustrated right now… I’ve put hours into making custom statistics and queries for PokerTracker 3 and not being able to get back at those is definitely a deal breaker for me…

No Limit 25 days in

admin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:02:26 +0000

I’m now 25 days into becoming a No Limit Hold’em player after playing Limit Hold’em professionally and semi-professionally for almost three years. When I started out, all I had was No Limit Hold’em Tournament experience, and hours upon hours of StoxPoker videos in my head.

Although I don’t have time to log several thousand hands per month, I’ve done quite well for myself. At the end of the day, if there is nothing outstanding for StoxPoker and I don’t have any other commitments for a few hours, I’m generally opening up Telescope, finding 8-10 good tables between NL100-NL200, and grinding it out. Results shown below:

Emotional Rollercoaster hand part 2

admin — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:34:42 +0000

This hand is made more hilarious by the fact that I flopped Quad Jack’s against this player four hands prior to this one.

See the HandHistory in all its glory: http://www.pokerhand.org/?3074005

Seat 1: He11bound (t6120 in chips)
Seat 2: JackDeuce71 (t2495 in chips)
Seat 3: Zakkant (t2920 in chips)
Seat 4: juudas (t3290 in chips)
Seat 5: rema2504 (t2710 in chips)
Seat 6: skelm (t3620 in chips)
Seat 7: jgfg13 (t2660 in chips)
Seat 8: Break D Doub (t7365 in chips)
Seat 9: jewbag_2 (t8330 in chips)
Zakkant: posts small blind 15
juudas: posts big blind 30

Holecards:
Dealt to skelm
FOLD rema2504
RAISE skelm , t60 to t90
CALL jgfg13, t90
FOLD Break D Doub
FOLD jewbag_2
FOLD He11bound
FOLD JackDeuce71
FOLD Zakkant
RAISE juudas, t120 to t210
RAISE skelm , t300 to t510
FOLD jgfg13
RAISE juudas, t480 to t990
RAISE skelm , t1000 to t1990
RAISE juudas, t1300 to t3290 and is all-in
CALL skelm , t1300

Flop:

Turn:

River:

Showdown:
juudas: shows (a full house Aces full of Kings)
skelm : shows (four of a kind Kings)
skelm collected t6685 from pot

SUMMARY:
Total pot t6685 | Rake 0

Board:

Seat 1: He11bound folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 2: JackDeuce71 (button) folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 3: Zakkant (small blind) folded before Flop
Seat 4: juudas (big blind) showed and lost with a full house Aces full of Kings
Seat 5: rema2504 folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 6: skelm showed and won (t6685) with four of a kind Kings
Seat 7: jgfg13 folded before Flop
Seat 8: Break D Doub folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 9: jewbag_2 folded before Flop (didn’t bet)