Rest of W12, going very sack-heavy this sunday:

Yeah, this was another great idea. Lamar better win the MVP to cover my losses betting against BAL for 3 straight weeks... W 12 4/10 right for 3 units loss. Not going to bet W13 at all.

Back to betting action this week:



LAR-SEA Wilson can put points on the board and and last time these two met, they scored 59 pts.

TB-IND Indy wants to run the ball, but Bucs have pretty good rush D. Hilton is likely out again, so have to just hope Winston has one his non-3-interception games.

NO-SF Saints are particularly good in 1-2 personnel and 49ers have been struggling against that.

CLE-CIN Dalton is an improvement over Ryan Finley and Browns might be flat after Steelers pretty much destroyed their playoff hopes.

ATL-CAR Pass heavy offenses, Julio Jones might be back and Falcons´s pass D have been one of the worst.

--------------------------------------------------------------

One PLO hand:



Dry top set on very wet board. Could x-raise, but with so high stack to pot ratio wanted to see turn first. Also, some players might just go nuts and pot way too much after they see check-call on draw heavy board. Turn is an easy check-shove.

Final bets for W14:



All should have fairly good matchups this week, let´s see what happens.

Guice ran over 40 yards despite getting injured on second quarter, and Bengals managed to get that final field goal to get over 16,5 pts. Week ended 4/8 right with one tie for +1 unit profit.

Somehow my Steelers over 9 wins is alive and well, along with Eagles winning their division. NFC East has been so weak this year that even 7 wins can be enough for the division title.

Ravens might be limiting Lamar´s rushes in this game, so I bet Jackson under 63,5 rush yards 1,86 @Unibet for 1 unit.

---------------------------------------------------------

Took my third PLO200 shot today and felt confident but ran under EV and lost 3-4 buy-ins on untracked sites. Going to play PLO100 for rest of the month. I have noticed that it is highly positive to not look at your results constantly, so rest of December I am going "blind".

Have to imagine Lamar is a massive favorite for MVP at this point

Yes, should be a lock at this point. Only way I could imagine him losing that title would be by committing crimes off-field.

Let´s fire couple of teaser bets this week:

Most likely don´t to get to play much for rest of the year, so might as well do a little review now.

Current situation with season bets:



This year too is going to be winning with Lamar getting the MVP 99% of time. I have been lucky with these season bets as it is pretty obvious I don´t have edge in in-season betting.

Later I´ll make a longer recap of these two seasons of me betting the NFL. Just some perspective from a recreational who spends way too much time looking at stats, news and lines .

---------------------------------------------------------
I also started a project to become a winning PLO100 player by the end of December. Here are PLO50 (10k), PLO100 (78k) and PLO200 (2k) hands from the sites where trackers work:



HEM2 doesn´t track hands where a Pokerstars cashout feature has been used, so I think that bb/100 should be lower and EV should be higher. This is just a guess, but many times I see myself as a favorite before villain uses cashout but ends up winning the pot anyway. Hand doesn´t get tracked --> don´t get positive EV and winnings show too much.

So now it is end of December, am I winning in PLO100? After toying around with variance calculators the answer is maybe

Even -1.0 bb/100 losing player is winning after 100k hands 42% of the time:



Nevertheless my switching from MTT to PLO cash has been encouraging and I will continue playing these games. Tournaments are so brutal form that having the freedom to play whenever you like and and not being handcuffed to desk for x hours is a great feeling.

Fourth PLO200 shot yesterday went better than the earlier ones. My hands held and got some gifts from my opponents.



One of those holds.

---------------------------------------------------------------



It helps if you get to play vs people who never fold their bare overpairs...

---------------------------------------------------------



SB instapots the flop and I wanted to fold my set, but couldn´t do it. On the turn I contemplated coming over the top to make SB to fold his better set and trying to outdraw vs BB´s straight. I would need 25% which I don´t have, especially when SB is holding some of my boat outs.

Couple of player props for divisional round:

HOU-BUF Cole Beasley O 4,5 receptions 1,9 @Unibet for 1,5 units

There is a good chance Watson and Houston force Bills throw the football pretty early. Beasley has had 4,5 receptions/game this season on average.

NE-TEN James White O 35,5 reception yards 1,9 @Unibet for 1,5 units

Pinnacle has this one over 37,5 for only 1,62. Julian Edelman is banged up and Pats should be using full back fairly often to create screen plays. White´s avg. rec yards this season is 43/game.

Poker volume has been low this month, but I have managed to get to somewhere around 13k€ with my roll, so playing PLO200 more regularly.

Some hands:

1.



Should I be valuebetting this hand on the river? After check I guess I just have to call when so many draws missed and not really blocking any bluffing range...

--------------------------------------
2.



It felt this hand could be good candidate for a bluff raise on the flop and after turning more equity on the turn decided to double. Not sure of my sizing though, could be betting a little less maybe?

------------------------------------------------------------------
3.



Turn can boost my equity a lot so went for check-call OTF. Planning to donk shove additional flush draws and maybe some K,Q,9 and J´s.

On the river it seemed villain was giving up so tried super cheap bluff(?) which worked. If Villain is folding over 1,5% of the time, that minbet is a winning play

------------------------------------------------------
4.



These dryish aces make good traps if there are raise-happy players behind. Extra bonus if there are players who cold call 3bets in the middle.

Player prop for KC-TEN:

Travis Kelce over 78,5 receiving yards 1,85 @William Hill

There should be a big mismatch in KC´s two TE offense vs Titans´ two TE defense, which is the worst in the league.

Player prop for Super Bowl:

Kyle Juszczyk O 12,5 receiving yards 2,14 @Unibet for 2 units

Every trick is in use now. Juszczyk has 19,9 avg yards/game this season and career long avg is also over 15 yards. 49ers should be throwing more in this game when compared to their earlier playoff games.

I also have 49ers to win SB for @36 as a season bet, which I am not going to hedge this time.

NFL betting season 2019 recap:

Total bets made: 127
ROI: 17,7%
Profit: 40 units

Majority (~75%) of the profit came from Lamar Jackson MVP season bet. Didn´t hedge my 49ers SB bet, but I am fine with that. In-season bets were profiting measly 1 unit and got little burnt out in the middle of the season. There are only so many hours in week you can do things and don´t want to cut out my sleep so didn´t study spots as intensively as I would have wanted.

When it comes to studying NFL if I had to pick one guy to follow it would definitely be Warren Sharp. His views and arguments are so well thought that you are progressing along almost automatically.

NFL fantasy went well, although I was in just two leagues, where I was 4th in one and second one I managed to win despite having my round 2 pick Andrew Luck retire before even any games played!

I tried NFL DFS also and one week I got 2nd and 3rd in 22€ tournament and got some profit from it too.

This was my second season betting NFL semi-seriously and obviously am super pleased to get another winning season which was even better than last one. However I have a strong feeling that this has been just over-EV running with those high variance season bets going my way all the time. Right now I think I wont be betting next season besides Fantasy leagues.

If I were to continue betting to make decent income, I would choose some leagues/sports with less media coverage where I think betting markets wouldn´t be as effective as they are in NFL and other major sports.

-------------------------------------------------------

Poker as a side job

It is apparent with all these tools and training sites that playing poker online is getting harder every year. I have never been professional myself, but since 2015 I haven´t logged losing year and 2019 was my best year ever. So there is definitely opportunity to play 2-3 nights a week and get decent side income of 10k-30k a year playing 0,25-0,5 to 1-2 cash games or something like ABI 10-30 MTT´s in my opinion. From those stakes upwards I see it getting a lot harder for non-professionals.

It is again about how many hours you have in a week to work, socialize, study, play, sleep and so forth. It is sort of balancing game.

I am pretty sure where my ceiling as a poker player lies and I am playing very near it. It is sort of frustrating to know you can´t go upwards anymore without investing a lot more time which I don´t want to do. But I still find playing poker fun and interesting. There are few hobbies that actually pay YOU money for doing something you like. Isn´t that sort of privilege itself?

I think I am activating this blog again since it is nice to actually write about games and to be able to see what I have been thinking in the past. After last blog post global pandemic started and the whole 2020 was absolutely shitty not only because of that, but also bc personal reasons.

Didn´t end up playing poker almost at all that rest of the year. Did some moderate NFL betting which ended not so good and fantasy leagues showed some nasty variance. I was in top3 teams who got scored most points against in literally every league I was in.

I have only 2 bets in this season: Trey Lance to win Offensive Rookie of the Year for 9 and Washington Fitzmagic to win NFC East for 3,6. Maybe going to play some DFS too, but season long leagues are not on the list this year. Mostly just watching games and hoping that Jets won´t blow up a new quarterback again.

Also started to play MTT´s again this spring. It has been fun to play and especially motivated to run sims and study spots in general.



Because of my bigger c-bet on flop, Villain has more 6´s in their range and actually they should lead turn small almost 100% of time. On the river I timebanked all my time thinking that this is drawy enough board V to have lot of bluffs. I think it is important that villain shoves the river because with smaller value bet they are losing value by not leading turn.

July wasn´t the most active month in poker front and finished negative profit around -800€.



August though started better with two wins and one second place. This was the biggest win of the session:



Run a sim on this 3b pot:



Whether to call or fold the river, it really depends on villains´ leading range on the turn. 5 is one of the worst cards for me, so they should lead a ton here. Versus solver this is a call, but in real life I suspect UTG checks way more. With nodelocked 65% villain check on turn, solver is mixing fold and call with AT.

-------------------------------------------------------------

That second place finish ended kinda weirdly



Could have played this one more passively, but I kinda felt villain was weak here and rolled high on RNG. Well, villain was weak but he/she just didn´t care I guess

Not the best end game runs recently:



This was pretty interesting hand:



Definitely one of those boards where we get to take the initiative of the hand. On the river 5d is one of those action killer/suckout cards for BB so I thought I get to donk jam a lot.

IP´s equity really takes a dip on that card:



Also bought PIO 2 and have been toying with the GTO trainer. Seems like a good investment. By changing pre ranges and nodelocking postflop I get to practice vs "reg ranges" and "fish ranges" and compare how I should deviate between those two.

Month ended with +1264 eur profit and +204 eur profit from one live session.
Pretty bad running in end games, but it sure is encouraging to see that I am able to make profit despite of it.



Studying game has been fun, and I am pretty sure my game has gotten better during august. Have been looking up more carefully for under 50bb pre bluffing 3betting hands and adding more offsuite combos with high card in them, like here:



also overbets vs capped ranges are easier to recognize nowadays:




Just gotta run better in future and I am sure the results will get better too!

Well, the run luck changed... but for the worse. Now I can´t win pots even in early game:



I was over -1000€ already for month, so yesterday I made changes to games I play. Basically shifted to small field tournies only and immediately bagged +400€ session.

For NFL I made couple new bets:

Jared Goff to throw most interceptions @13 Betstars

Detroit has one of the worst receiving talent and now Goff doesn´t have McVay to help him.

Doubling down Washington to win their division @3,5 Betstars

Pinnacle has this same bet for 2,5. NFC East is again so weak that solid defense plus veteran quarterback with other offensive talent sounds pretty good bet.

Dug myself from the hole to breakeven for the month. It has been easy to play, thanks to opponents, who make calls like this all day every day:



Made also small loss for DFS last NFL week. Looks like Dallas is going to be absolute fantasy monster this year too, full of talent in offense and can´t stop anyone on defense.

Wrapping up the month:



Practically BE month that ended up 120€ profit.

Had decent opportunities but just didn´t get there. Most important thing is that games are very good. On the other hand it is sometimes difficult to play one 5€ rebuy with table full of 50/5 players while also playing higher buy-in table with 23/18 players. Have to play differently on these two, basically not bluffing in the first one and trying to find good bluffing spots in the second one where people actually have a fold button on their software.