Wow, NFL W17 couldn´t have been much better, won already some season bets (Elliott most rush, IND+BAL to playoffs, BAL to win division). Got also all of my SB/conference bets still alive for playoffs:

BAL to win SB @51, to win conference @23

IND to win SB @75

CHI to win SB @101

NO to win SB @19, to win conference @12

HOU to win SB @27

PHI to win SB/and or conference @26 EW bet

Not sure yet if I want to hedge my bets. Right now betting for KC and LA should secure lots of profit.

I don´t usually make any new years´ promises but this time I make a promise to go to WSOP next summer and play few events, at least June 2nd Big50 for rake-free 500$ and June 7th 1500$ Millionaire Maker and some events in the middle of those two. This have been on my to-do list for 10 years and next year will be the best opportunity to do this.

Back to poker today:



On the turn I thought betting really small to keep his draws in or checking is the action I should be doing. If V has an ace, he is not folding it ever and I can still get the money in by raising the river.

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To bet or to not bet the turn? Majority of his flop floats are Ax with BDFD which are not guaranteed to make a stab on the turn, so I believe straight forward bet-bet-bet would be better.


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Made one bet for NFL playoffs next weekend: LAR-DAL Dak Prescott to make a TD 3,25 @Unibet. Still have Philly, Colts and Saints alive to win Conf/SB. Also have Saquon Barkley to win offensive rookie of the year @3,5. I fear Baker Mayfield is going to win the trophy though because of all the hype Cleveland is now having.

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New book I have been reading:



Physicists are maybe the ultimate truthseekers of our time. I love how reading about universe and origins of intelligence makes me feel tiny and insignificant. Maybe the biggest reason why I don´t tilt almost never nowadays is because of reading and thinking about this stuff. So crazy to think that over time some condensed stardust has developed awareness to a point where it has started playing internet poker against itself

One more bet for NFL playoffs:

NE-LAC LAC +4 1,97 @Pinnacle

NE had one of the easiest schedules in the regular season and LAC has the better team here. LA is used to playing away fields and with +4 I trust this to be a winning bet.

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Final table, I was wondering if I can shove every pair here, and it turns out that I can. With ICM, I should be doing very selective induces since there are two players with less chips than I have.



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Some reg made a disgusting raise-call when 3 left. He had ridiculously high Raise After SB Limp-stat being near 90%, so easy limp-shove for me.

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Very important to make note if someone knows to x-back these kind of flops with overpair. Against population betting turn+river makes a lot of money in general.

Nice thread! I love poker and betting the NFL so you've got a follower

Thanks! Am. football has so many moving parts what makes it very nice sport to make bets.

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I am starting a study period on 3bet pots. I don´t think playing those spots exactly like solvers say is the optimal way, so I will be using a lot of node locking in my studies.



I am mixing BB vs utg 3bets with these small connectors. Obviously having very narrow 3b range here, consisting of big pairs, AKs and some 45s, maybe pocket 33´s etc.

Equity seems to be quite surprisingly pretty even on this board. In first sim I should be betting 45 of clubs. However, IP should be slowplaying like 50% of the time their Ax here. If I nodelock him betting 25% pot on the flop with majority of his trips, I should be checking my whole range on the flop.

After check-check, betting pretty big, 50%-75% seems to be good.

To be honest, I wasn´t thinking like this when I played. I thought that since population is likely to slowplay their monsters on this flop, my check is likely to look like more strong in villains eyes than it really is.

This was way off, NE was very convincing. Gonna be fun to watch KC-NE in conference game!

Got 1/3 bets right on the divisional round.

I am going hedge my Saints bet, Pinnacle is giving 2,56 for straight LA win. If Saints go to SB just going to ride with them

I am going to halt my MTT´s for a while because got 40% rakeback from Pokerstars:



So I have 21 days to rake 1000$ and after that I will receive 400$. I am going to do this by playing NL 50/100 on regular and zoom tables.

Current progress:





Few hands from the session (haven´t studied these yet):



Turn bet felt like burning money, since people are generally so strong when squeezing oop. Maybe even fold pre could be an option.

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Could be betting bigger on the flop and set up better stack sizes for turn shove. My bluffs here are AQ, AJ with As, AT with As if I want to 3bet that hand.

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Don´t think villain´s call with that hand is good, blocks so many bluffs.

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Interesting river, hard to find any bluffs in my range so I could be betting really small here maybe...

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Good board for my range. I think 3 barreling this hand would be the play here.

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Folded this pretty quickly. Multitabling reg check-raising turn with bluff with this sizing? Seems very unlikely after I bet so large

Cash game project update:







Mixing some limping SB with big pocket pairs. After that hand plays itself.

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Good board to triple this hand. Villain might not call all his JTs with backdoors against 50% flop cbet which makes this barrel better.

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BB had very nitty stats, maybe he folded trips here...

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Can´t see any other way to play JJ here SB vs BTN, although people are so nitty with their 4bets...

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Vs. 4-tabling reg, interesting lead on the flop. I think he is not supposed to do that, but might want to check this hand later.

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Cold calling 3bet with these positions in place is usually TT-QQ, AK when flatter is a reg. I think I will get more calls by just shoving it in and repping something like JJ QQ and AK here.

One bet for tonights´ KC-NE: NE moneyline 2,5 @Betfair

It seems it doesn´t matter who they have in their roster, Brady+Belichick going to just deliver it.

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Cash game project already almost in midway:







Can it get any easier than this?

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That flop sizing is super scary, maybe 25% cbet would give enough info to be able fold to a flop raise....

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Against ultranit.

Referees robbed Saint´s SB spot and a decent chunk from my potential season winnings








Should be folding turn, card that hits my range and Villain just keeps betting usually means they have it.

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Btn was 3betting CO and even MP openings with wide range (14-17% of hands). I could call, but I want to punish his wide range.

Strategy in these 4bet pots can change significantly after just small modifications to player´s actions. Here I should be checking almost whole range looking for a check shove. However, I don´t think V is going to be stabbing enough (he should use 20-25% majority of time) and same time I suspect he will be over folding to my small cbets. Winning the pot right away with J high is of course very big victory here. My strong 4bet range will protect me against flop raises that might blow me off from my equity. Does my reasoning make any sense here or am I just making up stuff to justify my actions?

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I guess flop + turn pretty standard, on the river I thought I am entitled to be very polarized with my bet sizes, which turned out to be the right assumption:

Last 10k hands have been difficult, but nearing finishing this miniature project:





Going to play some tournaments today and will finish cash game project next week.

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Wasn´t so afraid of T7 or 57 since villain is coldcalling from sb.

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Breakeven call at best, if btn is shoving JJ+ AKo, AKs.

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That turn card...

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Watched very interesting video of Google´s Deepmind AI playing against professional Starcraft 2 human players:



It played some games with very weird style which pros haven´t ever seen. Program ran on ordinary home computer and it was taught to play by watching human player´s replays, imitating those plays and then playing against itself, vs multiple different iterations. It is said in the video, that in a week it had played amount of games which count 200 years of playing in real life.

The best iterations rose to the top and those were the ones that played against pros. In some way it same evolutionary process happens in poker too. First all players play pretty similar strategies, but every now and then emerges "mutation", player that plays very different strategy. If it is successful, other players start copying that style and the process continues.

What a start for this year, got my first 5 fig score and my Stars bankroll got fat really fast:



Tomorrow 10 hour work shift, but sleeping is not going to be easy...

Finished my cash game project:



Final stats:



Really enjoyed playing cash games and I think I could be winning player in regular NL100 tables already. Not by huge margin, but maybe around 3-4 bb/100. Continuing playing those games without rakeback is obviously not appealing.

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Reviewed some key hands from that bankroll doubling MTT score:



I have never understood why people minraise from SB... These are always nice stack boosts.

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Huge 66-34 situation.

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I thought first flatter had many call-fold hands in his range. Have to call SB´s shove.

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Another hold with 68% hand.

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21bb shove with A5o?

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Final two tables, I don´t know if I want to 3b-call this hand if he is not 4betting smaller pairs like 66-TT... ICM pressure is on him, so I think I can shove every pair here.

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Final 3, good hand to limp, especially being the smallest stack right?

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Super Bowl: I would like to bet 1st half under 28, but almost every bookie is offering only U27,5, which I dont´t want to take because 4*7=28.

Haven´t still made any Super Bowl bets, but I left a bet pending on 1st half U 28,5 in Betfair Exchange, maybe somebody wants to take it.

January was very good month in poker, ended up 12,2k, lifting my bankroll to 22,8k. Not going to change much, obviously one big MTT score doesn´t prove anything. Going to play some good 50´s MTT´s and occasional shots to best 100´s, like the new Sunday Million. Want also to collect good sample on NL/PLO100 to see whether I am winning player in those stakes.

Super Bowl bet: Tom Brady MVP 2,25 @Betfair

Basically Brady or Goff winning this and I am on Patriot´s side on this one.

Before SB my NFL season betting stats are looking like this:

155 bets

ROI: 14,6%

Winnings: 41,5 units

Most (~50%) of the winnings came with the success of Baltimore and New Orleans. Gotta be satisfied with the results, this could have gone way way worse.

No call in the saints game must have been soul crushing. Sick to see you're still crushing regardless.

Hope you're right with the Pats tonight. Brady getting no.6 would be unreal.

Cheers man

Made reservation to Rio between June 1st and 12th. My preliminary WSOP schedule looks like this:

June 2nd: NLH Big 50 500$
June 5th: NHL 6-max 1500$
June 7th/8th: NLH Millionaire Maker 1500$

Optional:

June 3rd: NLH Deepstack 600$ (If busted early from Big50)
June 9th: 8-game 1500$ (If busted from Milly Maker)
June 10th: PLO Deepstack 600$ (If busted from Milly/8-game)



It is pretty rare to see mistakes like that from referees in NFL like in that Saints game. The way Brees and co fell short was truly sad...

No MVP for Brady this time although he is now starting to decorate his other hand´s fingers too with all those rings. It is hard to be a Jets fan, but maybe some day...

haha too true. You guys need to hire Rex again imo :P

I generally don´t like to base my poker strategy on printed books since they get old so fast. However, I ordered couple of them anyway

I heard Jandas´ book is more mathematical and therefore should last longer and Ken Lo´s book is about mixed games, where I am not very experienced and this should work as a good cornerstone for further progress.





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Have been playing mostly PLO/NL100 this month and one leak I have to plug is not to leave money on the table = valuebet thinner.



Missed squeeze on preflop I don´t think people are checking enough overpairs on this exact river, so I think I should be valuebetting my jacks here, something like 20-30% sized bet.

Something like in this hand:



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Haha, that would be an adventure surely! I may sound too optimistic, but I believe in Gase+Darnold duo! Just don´t f up hiring bad free agents with all that salary cap money and next season should be interesting to watch. Good offensive line men + young RB´s, some good WR´s and unpredictable playbook plz

Haven't been able to play online because managed to spill coffee on my laptop and it didn't start after that. Played some live first time in months. I did one 8-hour session in live nl200 table and managed to win little under 600€. It was very relaxing session, almost nobody threebets or puts you in tough position pre or post. If wsop is even half as juicy as the live games/tourneys I have played so far in my life, it is going to be a great summer

Very slow month in poker, but managed to play quick MTT session yesterday. Also got new PC with double the RAM and i7 CPU, so PIOing bigger trees is now possible for me.



Felt like I was just clicking when played this hand. Decided to go full pot cbet holding just 6-high. On the turn I was trying to keep villain´s draws in to get him to fold more hands on the river. Final 30% bet basically just to get rid of his missed draws.

On the flop he has roughly same amount of K´s and draws:





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Interestingly Villain can lead over 30% of hands on the 2d turn... I ended up using way too little bet sizes but I guess it ended well if getting money in as a 68% favourite.

Still no proper time to get full sessions, but lately have been playing some amounts of cash on RIO poker and Unibet. Games are good, but it is hard to analyse hands when you have to take a screenshot of a hand history to be able to record the hand for later studying.

It seems I can´t recover my files from my old SSD, so bye bye few hundred thousand hands database...

Anyway, tomorrow will be playing some good old MTT´s. Adding some NLO8/PLO8 tourneys, they seem juicy enough.

Month is around -900€ at the moment, somehow managed to lose pretty big without even playing much. Then again my last losing month was in July, so I sort of had this coming.




In the money, something like 60 left. I had reggy vibes about the opponent, so called pretty quickly. He can shove 50% of all hands here, but I gave him 21% shove range of 77-22,ATs-A2s,AJo-A2o,K8s+,KJo+,QTs+,QJo,JTs,T9s,98s,87s. Against this range A9o is a snap call, as are all (even 22) pairs too. Have to be careful with these spots since some people play super scared when deep in a tournament and you can see them shoving something like AK here.

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I think this is fine, betting 33% on the turn with Ac or Qc and setting up a river jam on any club should be fine too.

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BB´s call seems fine when so many draws missed, but I think it is those spots where only a small drop in IP´s bluffing frequency makes the call down not profitable.

Played a sunday session, where I ended up in lots of nasty spots. Made some tight folds which might have been bad:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...78/?highlight=

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...78/?highlight=

I stepped down to NL50 zoom for a while to gain some confidence back and think I played fairly well:

[converted_hand][hand_history]Poker Stars, $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em Cash, 6 Players
Poker Tools Powered By Holdem Manager - The Ultimate Poker Software Suite.

SB: $67.09 (134.2 bb)
Hero (BB): $115.32 (230.6 bb)
UTG: $55.70 (111.4 bb)
MP: $52.51 (105 bb)
CO: $84.22 (168.4 bb)
BTN: $55.72 (111.4 bb)

Preflop: Hero is BB with 9 T
UTG folds, MP raises to $1.50, 3 folds, Hero raises to $5, MP calls $3.50

Flop: ($10.25) Q J Q (2 players)
Hero checks, MP checks

Turn: ($10.25) J (2 players)
Hero bets $11, MP folds

One of those situations where IP should be stabbing with small bet like 70% of the time to keep their range uncapped. I am confident I win this pot by betting big over 50% of the time after Villain checks the flop.

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This was interesting hand. I decided to have no 4betting range this deep OOP. Turn is very favourable card for my range, so wanted to lead preferably with big bet. River is also very weird card. I assume Villain would have raised my turn lead with 78s if he chose to 3bet those combos, so question is how big part is JQs in his range?

I chose to valuebet with generic 50% size, but I could maybe go up to pot sized bet...

Month down for -1400€, taking a week off from games now. I am going to leave cash games for a while because want to focus on tournament play two months prior to WSOP.

I have been looking for potential early value for NFL season 2019, and 49ers might be one team to give some thought. They were very hyped before last season, but several injuries led them to 4-12 record. Offensive line was 4th best when measured by RB yards (football outsiders). They also have no. 2 draft pick this year.