Can't believe I haven't auto-subbed for this already. Good luck Mr. Penguin, good luck.

This was posted in Ace high for you Arty.

Never swallow!

I don't have much to report, as I'm away from home and taking a break from poker. A couple of weeks ago I had a ridiculous downswing on the Zoom tables and didn't do very well in satties either. My rungood in social media competitions continued, however.

The Chip Race podcast had a slogan contest to mark the impending season 4, and I couldn't resist spamming Dave and Dara with a bunch of entries, since I enjoy fiddling with Photoshop more than I like playing poker. These were my favourite examples:




I got a 100 euro 'Supernova' ticket for winning that competition. Naturally, I busted the tourney in my usual manner (QQ<ATo), to maintain my minus 100% ROI in games with a BI of >$100. My tournament experience was as miserable as usual, but it was fun to rail SleazyP84 (aka MoreTBC) going deep, as we'd swapped a small piece of action.

All my recent graphs are too stupid to post and I'm probably not gonna play (or even study) for more than 2 hours this week. I'm about to listen to this though, as I always thought Phil Laak was a very interesting human.


I hope all my fellow penguins and pandas are doing well. I'll get back on the grind in about 10 days.

Update after Week 47

Taking a break seems to have cleared my head a bit and I bounced back on the cashgame tables this week with a 1900 hand mini-heater at 40bb/100 at 2NLz. I needed that after the ridiculous 17 buy-in downswing at the start of the month. I can't remember ever running so far below EV in a sample size like this before (12 buy-ins below EV in 20k hands), so I was hating life for a bit. The graph shows what a rollercoaster I've been on.

#SklanskyBucksWon'tFeedMyPenguins

Timbeys on Unibet continue to be as stupid as a very stupid thing being exceptionally stupid.

Away from the tables, I've been watching an odd mix of documentaries on i-Player ('The Vietnam War', 'Blue Planet II' and 'Junior Doctors') and chess videos on YouTube. I've also become strangely addicted to Radio 4's 'Desert Island Discs' podcasts, which are the ideal length for when I walk a lap of the local park while mumbling to myself about how I bad I run. I am now officially old and middle class. Speaking of podcasts, the Chip Race had a superb interview with Tom 'Jabracada' Hall on episode 2 of season 4 that is a must-listen imo.

The plan for this week is to play a couple of stupid satties (I've somehow still got about 750 euros of tickets), and keep grinding zoom for coffin coins when I'm in the mood. I'll move up to 5NL if the heater continues.

I hope everyone else is doing OK.

Brutal run there at the beginning of the month - good luck for rest of the November and December.

Your snowie rants on twitter (the most recent 2.2x overbet on 228 board) are always fun reads on my commute home.

Twitter handle?

https://twitter.com/artysmokesps

ty

Good to see you have cleared your head. Will you be making a return to the group soon?

Hey man good read do Unibet do rake back at all?

I just rejoined. #AceHighFTW
They have a quarterly reward scheme that is particularly generous for low volume/low stakes players. It's not a direct percentage cash back, and it isn't flat/linear (it varies from 10-30% for most micro players depending on volume, and it's higher than that for the 400NL+ bosses), but just by playing normally it's easy to collect cash/tourney tickets and bonus points that can be exchanged for tickets or clearable cash bonuses. I know several breakeven or slightly losing players that started of with <40 euros that have never needed to make another deposit, because they kept earning tickets/bonuses that kept them afloat.

assuming U cant use HUD

No HUDs or any related software allowed.

Ah counts me out then of Unibet for my challenge as need to be able to track it and not have to keep tabs on it myself

Week 48 went very well on the cash tables. I ran well with flopped sets, but mostly benefited from short-stacks spewing in an apparently random manner.
In addition to the 2NLz, I played a very small bit of 5NL and 10NLz in order to clear daily chest/boost points and the vaguely +EV Christmas promos that Stars is doing. All in all, I had a bit of a heater, so the database was full of green numbers.



Unfortunately I lost 2.5 buy-ins straight after midnight last night, so it might be hard to turn a profit this week, as I'm not intending on putting in much volume.

The weirdest pot of the week was this bizarre 5NL hand, where I flopped the nuts with AA and 6-bet the flop against a whale's second pair: Easy Game.

I also completed another 1000 hands in my Snowie Challenge, and although my error rate got worse due to a few questionable "blunders" (catch 22 situations, where I knew that calling lost money against Snowie's range, but folding would be marked as an error), I continued to beat the bots, so I'm on 7bb/100 over 5k.



Unibet tourneys were as stupid as always. I lost a tenner in those, which means it was my best week for months!
This week should be more of the same. If I can win a couple of stacks at 2NLz to stabilize the graph, I'll do more 5NL.

Lol that K2 is magical. Give that guy a medal

God giveth life, god taketh it away. Week 49 was pretty brutal.



It was a weird week where I played horribly (tilted) in some sessions and won, but played well in others and got destroyed. I think I need a break from Stars. Over 30,000 hands I won 6 buy-ins, but my EV was 17BI, and I'm kind of sick of looking at the graph and being reminded how much the RNG hates me. My entitlement tilt just gets worse and worse over time. #MentalGameFish

Someone from Betsafe rang me up a couple of days ago and offered a re-deposit bonus that pays much better rakeback than the Stars coffins do, so I'll fire up that client in a couple of days and see how I get on. (I don't really like the MPN client, but a change is as good as a rest, I suppose).
I only played 2 tourneys on Unibet last week. Bubbled both, of course. #StupidGame.

It's ****ing freezing in my flat and I've been getting a lot of headaches again, so I'm pretty miserable. Everyone says that Christmas is the most profitable time to grind, but after I've played this week, I'll probably do my usual thing of visiting mum for a fortnight and I'll likely avoid poker completely until next year. At the moment, I'm more interested in watching playbacks of AlphaZero vs Stockfish. That AI is incredible.
Be good penguins!

I just watched the zugzwang game. Cool stuff. For some reason I like watching chess playbacks even though I pretty much never play.

How big of a deal is alphazero? The commentator mentioned that grandmasters have long been aping stockfish, and that AZ plays way different (favoring activity over material?), so it seems like the whole model could change.

I think it's a huge deal for chess. Top players will literally stop using openings that have been played for hundreds of years if AlphaZero has shown them to be sub-optimal. I particularly like how Alpha Zero neglects castling when it sees it can gain more space by pushing pawns and then moving its king up behind them. Chess engines will get re-programmed, just as Go engines were after the AlphaGo paper was released, and that will alter the way that many players approach the game, but the AI project is bigger for the world as a whole. Deep Mind has shown that neural networks can solve just about any problem if you give them the rules of the 'game' and a ****ton of processing units. Machine learning is already changing the world, but it's gonna be the most revolutionary technology of the next 50 years, affecting every part of human existence, to a greater degree than even the internet.

In other news, I had a quick go on the Microgaming client, and I'd forgotten just how awful it is. It's just completely ****. I cashed out most of my roll from Pokerstars yesterday, but I think I might go rushing back, as MPN is virtually unplayable. It took me an hour to work out where to enter my bonus code, and then I was greeted by the terrible lobby, low traffic, no HUD in cashgames, stupid betsize buttons etc.
Meanwhile, Unibet decided to "fix" their incredibly broken UK Tour satellites with their stupid 3 minute levels and 10% rake, by making them re-entries with add-ons. I have no idea what they are playing at, and just about everyone I know that plays them (about 6/8 of all entries in the UK25s are regs I'm on first name terms with) is going to quit. #StupidGame

^^why do you play high raked stars micro games when you could easily crush NL4-NL10 at unibet?

I'm not massively motivated by money, so I change sites whenever I get bored. I like to do some grinding on Stars every now and again just to get some stats and hand histories for analysis etc. I always found it very hard to get much volume in on Unibet because I spend so much time making (fairly useless) notes on players, whereas with Zoom I can just jump in, stay focused, and play more hands. Jumping around from table to table is a hassle I can live without.

On the subject of Unibet, I was very unhappy with them yesterday, and me and a bunch of other UK Tour regs gave some constructive criticism about the satties on the community forum. I specifically complained about the hyper-speed levels, the addons and the unbeatable rake. Amazingly, the criticisms have resulted in an immediate volte face, and the satty structures are being changed today. To whit, there will be deeper starting stacks, no rebuys/addons, the levels will be twice as long (3 minutes was ridiculous) and there's even a rake cut. Confirmed that #MoanItIn works.



It's nice to see that some site reps do listen to their players. I've now got some motivation to play satties again, as these small changes might actually make them beatable.

Wow, that's pretty neat actually. Well done

Thanks for the news on the chess engines.
You are watching on "kingscrusher" Youtube's channel aswell I assume?
Guy gives great analysis.
I remember watching a video from him where he discussed a match between Rybka and Houdini.
That game is over 6 years ago and had mind blowing moves aswell, so interesting to see how sick these new engines are

Yeah, I watch Kingscrusher from time to time. He's good. The ChessNetwork (Jerry) and Chess.com also have some good vids on AlphaZero. I think my favourite youtube chess vids are by Mato Jelic, though. I don't think he's looked at the AlphaZero/Stockfish games, but he has a really calming voice that helps me get to sleep at night!

Ferrari GTO lol


deadly thread, how the fuuk have I missed this..