It's time.

After my previous laptop's bout with what I can only assume is CPU cancer, I lost all of the information from the databases that housed my poker life. We all learn from our mistakes. This time, instead of leaving my hand histories in a folder, I'll share a few of them here. Etched in internet stone in all their glory.

I'm back, my new laptop is here, and it's time to get to business. Now, as I embark upon this familiar journey through the stakes, I will document my progress here. This thread will help me hold myself accountable. I will use it to do some of the work that it will take to gain an even larger edge on my opponents. And I hope it will help your game as well, loyal reader.

Some quick background:

-I started playing poker in 2011. I've played roughly 300k hands of NL, 30k hands of PLO, and I'm starting to dabble in small tournaments and HUSNGs. I've had good success in the micro cash arena (+7 BB/100) but haven't had much experience playing higher than 100NL.
-My school background was math heavy and I majored in economics at college. I picked up lot of the major poker concepts pretty quickly from the beginning.
-I'll be playing online at SealsWithClubs. Cash games are the most heavily populated there, so that will probably make up a majority of my playing time. I'll post my results in mBTC. If you're not familiar with bitcoin, 1000 mBTC = 1 BTC. As of now, 1 BTC is worth $480.

I'm starting with a roll of .8 BTC, or 800 mBTC.

In case you didn't recognize the reference in the title, it's from this youtube series.

Thanks for reading!

Gl sir!

First session of this thread went pretty well. I just wish I had run something close to decent.



Played 400 hands of .25/.5. Just getting used to playing with a HUD (hadn't played with one for a long time). I like it. After just a few hundred hands, I can already tell that I've been wrong in my assessment of some of the regulars' styles. Looking forward to getting more info.

Thank you!

I'll post a session review every day for about a week or so- until I get used to multi-tabling with a HUD on. It's definitely helpful, I don't think I'm getting the most out of it so far however. There's no doubt I played tighter with it on. And 3bet MUCH less. I'll get to that in another post. Need to see more hands.

The focus of the night was mostly on one player, who sat directly to my left two of my four tables. He played ~70% of hands, something I had not noticed nearly to that degree without a HUD on last week. PFR around 40%, calls >50% of PFR. Is VERY sticky post. Can bluff some, but mostly flop and turn c-bets when he has initiative. Is inelastic with most of his calling range, meaning that if he's calling a 1/2p bet, he'll call a 4/5p bet.

Obviously, we're doing very little bluffing OOP against this guy and going to valuetown often and more thinly. 2nd pair good kicker is enough to valuebet against this guy. I'll post a few hands to illustrate the point, though I did flop a couple of monsters, so I didn't have to bet thinly that often.

Cash game $.25/.5

Hand 1: Pure Value

Seat 2: Hero ($84.58 in chips)
Seat 3: V ($105.89 in chips)

Folds to SB
Hero: raises to 2.5 from SB with KQ
V: calls 2 from BB
*** FLOP *** (Pot = 5) [2 A Q]
Hero bets 3
V: calls 3
*** TURN *** (Pot = 13) [2 A Q] [7]
Hero bets 7
V calls 7
*** RIVER *** (Pot = 27) [2 A Q 7] [Q]
Hero bets 16
V folds

_________________________________________
Hand 2: Bet/Folding


Seat 2: Hero ($94.44 in chips)
Seat 3: V ($79.57 in chips)
Hero: raises to 2 UTG with 77
V: calls 2 UTG+1
V2: calls 1.5 from BB
*** FLOP *** (Pot = 4.75) [9 J 7]
V2: checks
Hero: bets 6
V: calls 6
V2: folds
*** TURN *** (Pot = 16.75) [9 J 7] [T]
Hero: bets 13.0
V: raises to 71.56
Hero: folds

__________________________________________
Hand 3: Overbetting for value


Seat 2: Hero ($77.47 in chips)
Seat 3: V ($95.15 in chips)

Hero: raises to 2.0 from CO with 33
V: calls m 2.0 from BTN
Blinds fold.
*** FLOP *** (Pot = 4.75) [Q 9 3]
Hero: bets 5.0
V: calls 5.0
*** TURN *** (Pot = 14.75) [Q 9 3] [Q]
Hero: bets 12.0
V: calls 12.0
*** RIVER *** (Pot = 38.75) [Qh 9s 3c Qc] [Jc]
Hero: bets 45.0
V: folds

Gl, what makes you play in bitcoins tho instead of eg pokerstars?

Level of play is more his speed...

Thanks! I live in the U.S. and my state doesn't offer an online poker option in dollars.

Third day of play was up and down. Went 2-0 in HUSNGs and was up about 2 buyins over 1200 hands. Graph of total play so far:



Overall, +130 mBTC through 3 days. Will post some mistake hands when I get a chance.

Rise I've read a lot of your posts and you seem to be a decent, thinking player. That said, your style of play is ridiculously bad for Seals. You are trying way too hard and you get too much money involved way early on mediocre holdings. Great in some situations but horrible in others.

Just playing ABC poker on the stakes you frequent should net you hundreds of chips per day on one or two tables. You are playing more than that I think, could probably win 1k + per day if you'd settle down.

See where your AIEV is running? No reason you should be up LESS than that, especially on Seals.

PS, when I talk **** on the tables just ignore me if you haven't already. It keeps me from tilting off 20k chips in an hour.

I don't think you understand how AIEV works

gl OP

I understand exactly how it works but nevermind that.

I've played with Rise, he is a spew fountain and will go broke if he keeps it up. Maybe it works live but it won't work where he's at.

Edit: Did look at the chart wrong.

Ran hot tonight. Played okay but not great. I think I play better 5 or 6 tabling than I do with 2 or 3.

The HUD is doing wonders for identifying player types for new/seldom seen usernames. It's helped me table (and seat) select as well.

I'll write a more complete recap of my first few days during the NFL games tomorrow.

Through 3916 hands: $343.66 profit in .25/50 6max NL games.

+429 overall.

Time to do a mini checkup on my play through ~4k hands. Since I haven't used a HUD extensively before, I'll follow Pokey's structure from THIS thread.

1. Do you have sufficient preflop aggression?

Pokey's general guideline is to be raising at least half the hands you play from each position on the table. Here's my positional breakdown:

(Ratios are PFR/VPIP)

BTN: .79
CO: .87
UTG+1: .93
UTG: 1

So from every position I get away from the BTN, the larger my raise/call ratio is. This makes sense, as position allows us to rely less on the absolute strength of our hand because it's easier to get value, bluff, and control the size of the pot.

2. Are you positionally aware?

Pokey states that VPIP should gradually decline the further we move from the BTN, with a rough guide being BTN VPIP > (UTG VPIP)*2.

BB: 19.4%
SB: 25%
BTN: 29.6%
CO: 19.9%
UTG+1: 11.2%
UTG: 14.6%

I was surprised to see the % played from the blinds so high. UTG is also larger than UTG+1, but I only have about 300 hands from UTG so far. Might be a sample size issue, but I'll keep an eye on it. Interestingly, I'm right at Pokey's suggested BTN/UTG relative frequencies.

3. How's my stealing? I'll quote his entire section here because it's a worthwhile reference:


Okay, this is a lot to think about. First, my BTN steal is 30.7%. This varies wildly from table to table, as the opponents on your left heavily affect the frequency and range of hands that I should be considering opening with on the BTN. Overall, though, I think 30% is a good starting point.

I don't think I can filter out BTN steals by themselves on my database software (FBDB). I really wish I could use that feature, because I have a lot of questions about that part of my game despite the amount of thought that has gone into my overall strategy in that situation. I don't believe that I have anywhere near enough observed hands to know what my true winrates are by position, so I'll have to give that time.

4. Defending the blinds.

I don't think Pokey's suggested checks on blind play are sufficient. Checking up on blind play will be a 3-part process for me, I think:

A) Defending against steals

This will involve how I defend against infrequent BTN stealers (5-15%), frequent BTN stealers (15-30%) and extreme blind stealers (30-60%).

B) Limped pots

This will cover when I choose to complete/fold/raise out of the blinds when it has been limped to me. When I go through HHs, I should be able to explain why I decided what I did.

C) Blind v Blind

This will cover SB and BB battles.


5. Heads-up play.

Eyebrow raising, for sure. I'm just about breaking even in HU pots from every position save for UTG, where I'm only playing premium holdings. It's hard to tell whether I'm having more trouble as the preflop aggressor or as the preflop caller. I'll have to check the HHs to follow up.

6. Multiway pots.

This is hugely positive. Of pots that I'm involved in 3+ ways to the flop, I'm +$219 in 532 hands. By position, the BTN and CO are the big winners, while the BB was a huge negative (-200 BB/100) and the SB was a large positive (+140BB/100). I'll have to go through HHs to see if I'm leaking from the BB multiway.

7. Pocket pairs.

213 hands, +$434 overall. 77-22 by themselves are about +$100 over ~120 hands.

8. Suited connectors.
9. Unsuited connectors.

I don't have a lot of hands played here, so I'm not going to spend time on them now.

10. Postflop aggression.

My overall aggression factor is 3.52, which doesn't mean much to me off the top of my head. Pokey suggests at least 2 here. I think some of the games I play in are generally more aggressive than the ones he was describing in 2005, so I'm not sure exactly what that new 'bar' should be.

11. Check-raising.

These are probably better dealt with reviewing individual hands in low stakes games, where opponent type affects these actions so much.

_________________

Overall, I think I need to tighten up a little out of the BB and 3bet a tighter value range, since even the more aggressive blind stealers are calling too much for me to be 3betting hands like AT or KQ. I need to have a follow up on my BTN play, both in stealing situations and in PF calling situations. Also check HU play and blind play after 10k hands.

Graph through 4k hands:

Hey dude, write in chat on table 11.

Look, you're welcome to post here, but when you do, please keep it relevant. This is not a chat thread.

New volume goals + an outline for updates:

2 hours of play per day. 2 hours x 4 tables x 40 hands/hr (rough estimate) = 320 hands per day. I play 6 tables when I can, but Seals isn't large enough to have 6 tables of .25/50 going all of the time.

I'll have an update every 10k hands. Each update will have a theme with some HHs to support what I'm trying to work through. If you play micros or low stakes and have a suggestion, please feel free to make it!

Currently at around 6.5k hands. Will post my next update at 10k.

40 hands/hr sounds really slow, should be like double no?

It's probably more. My database doesn't do a good job of making that information easy to find, so I have to do it by hand/memory.

Going off of my session viewer, it looks like I've gotten in between 250 and 300 hands/hr. Sometimes I'm able to play more tables (up to 6), sometimes not. So it's hard to get an actual hands/hr metric. I mean, I could get it, but I don't feel like doing a weighted average of hands/hr over 20 or so sessions when I don't have a clue about how many tables I had open.

If you take 275 (very rough estimate) and divide it by 4.5 (also very rough), you get ~60 hands/hr. 1 hand/min makes intuitive sense to me. That's what I'll use going forward. Plus, you know, round numbers.

I apologize. You were spewing chips to a bot for an hour and I figured I'd let you know why it was constantly jamming you with the worst hand and making you fold. I'll never post here again, as you wish.

I said it before, you're quite welcome to post here. If you are following because you're curious and want to improve your game, that's fine. You might get a lot from reading and interacting here and throughout the rest of the forum. I don't have a problem with that.

But if you're here to see if That Reg From Your Site is winning or losing, and trolling based on results, yeah that's not going to be tolerated.

It's really up to you.

I don't care if you're winning or losing at all. Figured I'd tell you about a bot that was kicking your ass with progressively larger bets when you could min raise and make it bet .50 on the turn and river instead of 5 and 10. Nothing lost, no worries.

Is this site reg infested yet? You mentioned not enough to keep 6 tables going, so I picture ACR. Also, why are you 5x'ing bvb and 4x'ing utg???

There was a response in the SWC thread that answers that really well.

__________________________________________________ ____________

Those are not my normal PFR sizes from either position. In each case I was trying to get as much preflop value as I could from players that call too much.

10k HANDS UPDATE

Here's an overall look at my cash game results over the last 10 days:



And this is the breakdown:

NL50: 11,145 hands +216.04
NL100: 356 hands +245.79
PLO20: 69 hands -15.12
PLO50: 766 hands +351.94

Overall, including small tournaments, HUSNGs, and rakeback, my bankroll has grown from 800 mBTC to 1.62 mBTC. Not bad for 10 days!

Will post some PLO hands later today. Still thinking about how to approach reviewing my last 10k hands at NL50.