Rolled On The River

Well, it’s my birthday today, and it’s been a pretty sweet day. Played a decent session at 50NL FR last night after work and finished up, plus I’ve been working a few kinks of my game out.

It’s always best to be your own harshest critic in this industry, and I know that I’m mine. But I think I’m playing a winning game, I can more often than not put myself at the advantage and find profitable situations. I’m still not as aggressive as I’d like to be, but I’m beginning to widen my opening ranges as I get tougher to play against postflop. Skelm has offered to up my stake, and begin coaching me at 100nl, but I still think there’s a lot to learn here that’s going to be the same, but for half the price.

The biggest leak most players that I’ve come up against at 50nl full-ring seem to have is reading flop textures, the person you’re up against and the flop texture should take precedence over the cards you hold. Fortunately for me, the opponents at this stake don’t often bet the flop. There’s just so much money to be made from continuation betting it’s crazy, whether the opponents are playing fit/fold, or they just get scared when they see a 2/3 pot bet, they are bleeding money. Of course though, you want to factor in position, player type and board texture before you just start burning cash, but generally the best way is to throw a bet out there and charge them for the turn. If you’re playing position well your cbet will often be behind a check, whether they call, fold or raise will tell you so much about their hand, and though you had to pay, you have a lot more information than if you checked behind, regardless of your hole cards.

It’s really just basic aggression with a little bit of depth to help you narrow their range, when their range is narrow, you know where you stand, and you have solid reasoning behind making each play.

I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to throw my hat into the coaching arena – not only to broaden my own poker knowledge but also to bring some more variety to my day. I coached a few SSNL and MSNL students for free to see if it suited me, build up my skills and get critical feedback and ultimately decided that I would continue with the idea. Today I went ahead and added a coaching page to the blog. I’ve included a variety of methods you can use to contact me along with a bit about my poker background and the graph from my current database (albeit only a few weeks old but more then a decent enough sample size). Any feedback and/or questions would more then be appreciated and hopefully my own game continues to develop so I can coach 200nl and higher sometime in the future.

• "So we're not going to play drunk poker?", "f yeah we're going to play drunk poker!" #poker #

Nothing helps you snap back to the reality of full-ring quicker than having your opponents turn trips against your overpairs, river straights against your sets, and flop quads over your flopped boat. Just poker’s way of saying ‘welcome back to 9-handed play, retard’. It was good to put in some volume and be reminded that I still know what I’m doing, Skelm helped get the thought processes back in line for the games.

We’ve been having some problems with out net connection late during the nights, which is good, because the games get horribad around the time the net dies, so I spent some time running a couple of people through the intricacies of TableScan Turbo. Was a pretty fun experience to see the alternative ways you can look at a program based on the games the player is sitting at. I have everything for myself customized down to a tee, table scanning takes into account the custom scoring system I’ve set up, which ranks tables by assigning + or – values to the number of: People in the waitlist, TAGs, regs, fish, multitablers and such. But the other guys I was helping set the program up play at 1/2, which has far less tables, and far tougher regs, so it was a challenge to help them set something up that was customized for their stake, since they perceive ’good tables’ not as the ones with the most fish, but more the ones with less soul-crushing regs.

I’ll also probably be making the official tutorial video for the program which I’m looking forward to, since we’re trying to make names for ourselves as the guys who are on the forefront of the poker software development, it would help our cause if I had some accessible media with a blog/rakeback plug on it.

I’ve been neglecting my poker play recently to accommodate work and the book, which has been pretty slack on my part, but there’s just not that many hours in the day. I’m slowly moving back into full ring play and getting back on track, while balancing my writing and work. Since Skelm has been taken under Dusty’s wing, I thought it would be a waste not asking about, discussing, and applying as many strategies as possible. So I’ve set myself a couple of hours minimum each day to play, and another couple for study, hopefully I’ll be making a regular profit and doing a stake-jump soon enough.

• Currently sitting on 90bb's in the mini ftops me but all I can think about is wanting to sleep… Shouldn't have reg'd after an all nighter #
• Jumped up to 200nl and luckboxed a 1.4k day. So good to be back at a reasonable stake and hoping to prove my worth / remain at it #poker #
• Now old enough to know better yet young enough not to care… Happy 24th bday to me. #
• http://twitpic.com/1bde9j – Variance! (Img From Setzy in SSNL) #poker #

While we’re still plugging away at book content, it’s getting closer to the date we’ve set for everything to be turned over to the publisher. We’ve been reviewing the guest articles, and it’s no surprise that we’ve learned a few things along the way. The content is top notch, we couldn’t ask for more, and really reflects the reason we contacted these specific writers for their input in the first place. We’ll be relinquishing control of everything in a few weeks, freeing up time for a second project we’re coordinating with James *Splitsuit* Sweeney, and I’m already salivating with anticipation.

Sweeney’s one of those cool guys who just seems to have a really relaxed and laid back approach to life. He knows his shit, has solid fundamentals and a grasp on where everything’s at, but he also has a good history, integrity, and character. He taught Skelm and I beer pong when we were in the states last year, and we met a few of his friends who were also pretty awesome, looking forward to catching up with him this year when we head over. Check out his site http://www.splitsuit.com/

• Happy St Patricks day! #

Another guest chapter for the book was submitted this week by Collin Moshman. For those unfamiliar with Collin he is a renowned SnG Professional, Lead Coach at Stoxpoker.com and also runs a successful staking/coaching business. I approached Collin in late January to author a chapter on the subject of staking which he submitted this week. In true Collin style the chapter is extremely exhaustive containing a full introduction to running a staking operation, FAQ, and a series of case reports from difficult scenarios that Collin has experienced and how he tackled them or would tackle them in hindsight. Just like with the Rich Muny chapter a teaser from this chapter is included below:

Case Study 3: ODog79

ODog79 (William) applied for a stake to play to play $16 18-man turbo SNGs on Pokerstars. He had one reference, a respected member of 2+2 with over 6,000 posts. With an 18% ROI in these games, I gladly accepted his application. Over the next two months, he did exceptionally well in his games, maintaining a 14% ROI with an average of 250 games/week.

Within two months, he was playing the highest-buyin 18-mans that actually fill up — the $60 level. Like many horses and coaching students, we also became friends, talking about poker and other topics over Skype.
I was therefore disappointed when he told me he wanted to end the stake and start playing low-stakes MTTs. I was confident in his poker ability however, so I offered to switch to an MTT stake, so long as he continued playing a smaller volume of 18-mans.

William agreed. He then hit a long breakeven stretch at the 18-mans, while doing very poorly at MTTs. I asked to see HHs, and it was clear he wasn’t adjusting well between the formats. He was starting to play the early game of the 18-mans too loose to reflect his MTT style, and he was making clear errors in the deep-stack portion of his MTTs.

I never require a horse to change game type or buyin when in makeup, as we believe that’s unfair. Nonetheless we made the request that he voluntarily take a break from the MTTs. He agreed, but couldn’t seem to regain his former dominance of 18-mans. It took him six weeks of up-and-down swings to get out of makeup, and he became so frustrated with the swings that he eventually quit playing.

While I will still sometimes let a player transition to a related game type, it’s important not to assume that players will be profitable at the same buyin as their established game. Agree on a maximum percentage of volume that comes from the new game type until the player has a clearly winning track record.

Please note that all player names in the above quotation have been altered for the sake of privacy.

• Travel plans set for June/July: Sydney to Hawaii to New York to Vegas for WSOP, back to Hawaii again for a day then back to Sydney #poker #
• @spartan_poker Thanks a ton! Let's hope! in reply to spartan_poker #