Tribal Chieftan-"...Conan! What is best in life!"
Conan-"To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, to hear the lamentation of their women!"
- Conan in "Conan the Barbarian"
Back in June I ended up half through luck and half through my own machinations (IE hunting the sumbitch down in an effort to take mobnies on camera) in two of BigBadBabar's "Peanut Collector" coaching videos on Deucescracked. Prior to that I had been experimenting with NL games, playing some PLO, and learning 2-7 Triple Draw for about a year. I really didn't have a home game and I was spreading my mental energy pretty thin. I was still playing 6max LHE and applying my lessons learned in aggression and blindstealing--not to mention my handreading abilities--to the occasional FR game on Pokerstars and Fulltilt. In that 2 hour session Babar and I tangled a few times and I began to realize that I'm just as good as a coach on a major poker coaching site. It wasn't an ego thing so much as it was finally understanding that, yes, I'm good at poker, specifically limit holdem. In a conversation on AIM afterward Babar prodded me to really buckle down in LHE and take that one game seriously. I gave it some thought, hemmed and hawed, and finally embarked on a vision quest in early July. I would play FR LHE on Pokerstars against some of the toughest, grindiest competition for 50,000 hands and see where I stood at the end of it. I would put in limited sessions every day, play at my absolute peak abilities, ignore variance both good and bad, and whatever happened at the end happened at the end.
Here is what happened at the end:
Holy crap! I just made $2000 in about a month's worth of play! Well, it worked at 1/2, how will it work at 2/4?
As of today, October 4th, 2009, here is my progress:
First graph is about 2.4BB/100 over 50k hands. Second is approximately 1.7BB/100 over 45k hands. There are many factors that contribute to how I pulled this off. Many of them are advanced topics, marginal spots that many of you aren't taking advantage of to squeeze that extra 0.5-1BB into your winrate. I hope to post a few threads and get into them but to begin with, I want to bring up some meta-issues that formed the foundation of my accomplishment.
I'm not a fan of massive multitabling. As a fellow 2p2er pointed out to me, MMTers are like furniture, you find ways to move around them. I do multitable, however. I believe in a concept I like to call "The Friction Point". It's the spot where you can balance the ability to pay attention to the action, take good notes, and multitable enough so you don't get bored. My friction point is 6 tables. I can follow along with what's going on while taking notes on my opponents. What do I take notes on? Easy. Who open limps, where do they open limp and what do they open limp with? How about coldcalling? Again, where and what with? Postflop how does your opponent play? Is he fit or fold on the flop? How does he play the turn and river? I take especially detailed notes on how my opponents play on the bigbet streets as they are some of the most telltale signs of their ability as a player. An added bonus of note taking is that you'll be so busy writing down what your opponent played and how they played it that you won't have time to get tilted at bad beats nor will you be bored from lack of action. Information gathering: it's the anti-tilt. One quick note to add, though, The first 10k hands are the worst. You're going to be building an information base as you figure out who the weirdos are at your game. Fair warning.
This leads me into proper mindset. 300BB for whatever stakes you play, right? Wrong. With the increased toughness at 1/2+ I like to keep a minimum of 500BB in my bankroll for whatever stakes I'm playing. To some I am overbankrolled for the stakes I play, but for grinding purposes I know that several bad days in a row won't leave me feeling like I need to move down in stakes. As you can see in the 2/4 graph, I took a 315BB downswing over 10k hands. That's over $1200 dollars and I was still able to fight through it. If you're going to grind, you need to be able to take some beating. It's the natural progression of the game.
Another aspect of proper mindset is always being properly rested. My job has me on graveyard shift, so I'm getting home at 8am pacific time. Do I sit down and grind? Hell no. I get some sleep so that my mind is sharp and ready to operate optimally. Furthermore I restrict my sessions to 1-2 hours each. I'll sit down, get seated, play for my alotted time, then go do something else. I've found that I can get at least 2 2-hour sessions in per day on good days. Restricting the time played not only keeps my mind on the game, but allows for natural variance to occur. It keeps me at good tables when I'm running well and gives me an excuse to quit when I'm stuck. This prevents the two biggest leaks in a poker player's psychological game, that is quitting too often when we're ahead (booking a win)and chasing losses too often when we're behind (playing stuck).
Lastly, and this is going to be the basis for future posts on what I've learned in the last 100k hands, the essence of good postflop play boils down to the essence of valuebetting: "what worse hand calls this bet and is that hand in my opponent's range based on how this hand has progressed?" Understand and execute that concept and you will profit greatly. I hope to expand on this in future posts on blindstealing and thin valuebetting.
In the meantime...
Good hunting and good luck
Two Plus Two
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