@TopGun: If you're on web, the little plus sign icon in the lower-right. Click that for as many posts as you want to quote, then click the "Post Reply" button.
Not sure on mobile.

I don't know, uberkuber, but we'll find out soon enough.

Thank you, Black Aces 518 and TopGun in VA! Leaving on time is going to be fine, if the balance of the various factors lean towards it. Leaving early, however, has always been a slippery slope for me, as you'll see in the next post.

I got my head bashed in yesterday from the moment I sat down. After two hours of it, my attitude went south and I picked up.

Leaving early is not a good thing, for reasons that I have explored, somewhat exhaustively, over the last several hundred posts. In this case, I lost less than 2 buyins, which is a routine amount of money to lose in this game, even over the course of only 2 hours. I will need to show more mental toughness going forward.

Day off today; tomorrow is June 1st, and that marks the start of an excellent June promo that will hopefully help me to put in more hours.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 2 hours
(-$759.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$111.00

Running Poker Total: 331.5 hours, +$8887.00

Running Slot Total: 108.5 hours, +$3331.60

Grand Total: 440 hours, +$12218.60

A+. Good quit.

I know that you feel this way, but never understood why. Is it a work ethic thing? Do you feel that you still have an edge even though you are losing?

Approaching 350 hours in this MGM Springfield session, I may presume that my current hourly win rate is somewhat indicative of my expected EV per hour.

It's a pretty good hourly for $1/$2, and potentially a living wage for a single guy who lives a simple life, but it's by no means an extravagant wage. Time moves ever forward, and the bills arrive on a regular and predictable basis. I will need to put in at least 32 hours/week at poker, along with 8 hours/week at the slots, in order to pay the bills and live.

Can I move up in stakes and try to make a higher hourly? For sure, but I don't have enough of a bankroll at present to survive an extended downswing at $2/$5, so that will have to wait until I do.

So in the present state of play, hours are at a premium.

Yesterday I talked to some of the dealers about MGM's Pays to Play rakeback promotion, and I found out that the room ran this same monthly hours promo a few years ago.

The first place, $5000 winner of the previous time put in more than 360 hours in just 30 days. Second place tallied 320 hours, and so forth. The consensus from the dealers is that it's unlikely that I'll be able to squeeze into the 20th place bonus mincash with a measly 130-something hours.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$708.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$43.46

Running Poker Total: 339.5 hours, +$9595.00

Running Slot Total: 110.5 hours, +$3375.06

Grand Total: 450 hours, +$12970.06

On Friday, I had another day of wild swings, starting by winning an all-in preflop (for Villain's $250 effective stack) holding KK vs AA after my KK made the straight with Villain's third ace on the turn. Unfortunately the day ended on my (planned) last orbit when I ran AK into AA in a four bet pot and flopped Kxx with $280 already in the pot, subsequently losing my ($500 effective) stack.

Today, I should cross 350 hours in this Springfield hold 'em session. I may post some stats and graphs tomorrow.

On the non-poker front, it appears that YouTube is beginning to shut down adbl*ck*rs for their videos in Chrome. Mine still works, but for how long? I would switch to Firefox or Opera, but my poor cheap laptop can barely handle Chrome and Edge, and setting up a new laptop would be a huge pain.

So, while my blocking lasts, I think I'm going to start in on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Albums of All Time, and see how far I get, posting some of my thoughts here on the various albums.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
(-$431.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
(-$9.75)

Running Poker Total: 347.5 hours, +$9164.00

Running Slot Total: 112.5 hours, +$3365.25

Grand Total: 460 hours, +$12529.25

Since your office radio trauma is prolly still fresh, I think you won't get past #491.

I see that, Sheep, and you're right. It will be difficult to listen to some of them, but I'm going to try to give a fresh, unbiased hearing to the more recent albums that happen to have heavily overplayed top 10 hits on them. I can't guarantee anything, though, other than I will use my words afterwards.

Yesterday, everything came up Millhouse.



I got a $200 river bluff through vs a reg who I believe had only seen me show down for value in the past. I did not show the bluff in the hopes that I could pull that trick on him again in the future, but unfortunately he did see me get caught trying a smaller bluff on someone later on, and I saw what appeared to be his gears grinding away on our hand because of that.

Later, I checked the stone nuts on the river vs an aggrodonk, got the bet that I needed from him, then raised him to $300, and got the call. Things were working.

In a few hours, I will post some of the stats and graphs from this 10 month long MGM Springfield poker run via my Poker Bankroll Tracker app.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$671.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$74.70

Running Poker Total: 355.5 hours, +$9835.00

Running Slot Total: 114.5 hours, +$3439.95

Grand Total: 470 hours, +$13274.95

I’m really interested when you give us a stats breakdown on your hours. Really curious how it looks over the short sample size at full time, vs. part time.

Full time sample isn't big yet though.

Suitedjustice's About Tree Fiddy Poker Hours Statstravaganza

Intro:

Back in August of last year, I was in an existential rut, having returned home around $3500 poorer from a failed attempt to satellite into the 2022 WSOP Main Event, and still nursing my wounds from a nearly 3 year stint in Las Vegas that had concluded in failure, marred by the pandemic shutdown and my own deep-rooted laziness, and hating my return to my old office job all the more for having enjoyed, then lost, the freedom that came with playing cards for a living.

I was down.

And I was slowly drinking myself to death with whiskey in the morning before work, whiskey at lunchtime, and whiskey after work until bedtime, then whiskey all the weekend long...wash, rinse, repeat.

I've been fortunate to have never become—thus far—physically addicted to alcohol, so that I've been able to cut off the flow without suffering any bodily withdrawal repercussions, but the psychological lure of it remains strong whenever I find myself bored or depressed; which, in the spring and summer of last year, was all the time.

Then I got the idea to start playing the cash game again in my spare time, and why not? I had spent all of those years learning and playing the game, why let that hard-earned skill turn to ash, along with the rest of my hopes and dreams?

After some initial rungood, a few of the kind readers here brought up the win rate, and I pooh-poohed the idea, opting to wait until I'd logged at least 350 hours before even beginning to discuss such things.

Well, here we are. What I have here is somewhat less than 9000 hands. If these were online hands, that sample size would be a pittance, a tiny drop in the bucket. For online, you want maybe 250,000 hands before you can begin to make observations.

At 32 hours/week, 52 weeks a year, 250k hands would encompass 6 years worth of full-time live play.

The deal with live play is that your hourly EV/100 hands should be a lot higher than online; that is, if you're a good player and you're playing, say, $1/$2. The higher (or lower) your EV is, the fewer hands it takes you to play yourself into statistical relevance.

4 BB/100 hands is a very good online win rate. In the live cash game, I'm currently winning around 54 BB/100. That allows for a much shorter statistical long run vs online.

I'm not saying that this current win rate won't vary—perhaps wildly—back and forth within the next 350 hours, I'm just saying that I've played a chunk, in terms of live cash, and that we can start to look at some things.

In any case, here are some stats. I use the Poker Bankroll Tracker app for Android, and I recommend it. It's free (with a few ads), but it also comes with a paid professional option. I should and eventually will buy the latter, but I'm still riding with the freebie for now.

Right now, I'm just going to dump some screenshots, and I'll be happy to discuss them later. I might also post longest winning and losing streaks and biggest wins and losses in a session, if there's any interest in that.

Great Mr. suited, always good to see friends doing well. From all my observations, and as much as I'm even able to judge playing much less hours of live pokies than you on average, at least at this point in my life, you're definitely a hugely winning live 1/2, 1/3 player. You're probably correct, the main thing that held you back in Vegas was laziness and IMO also playing too much in crappy promo-heavy games.
And don't get me wrong, I can certainly more than relate to some of your struggles, esp when it comes to laziness and addiction issues, but I don't want to hijack this fred so I'll just shut up.
As you pointed out just remember that poker is a high variance game, and you'll certainly suffer some extended bad run at many points again in the future, but I think you know that.
The WSOP ME satellites that we played together, more or less, were certainly essentially coinflips, not much skill edge to be had there, obv we were on the wrong side of things there...

nice

I'm going to go out on a limb and declare you, winner winner chicken dinner.

I was recently contemplating the passing of Doyle Brunson.
Thinking that there will never be another one like him. There can't be. Born in Texas almost a century ago. Playing in the infancy of Poker. Dominating the game for over 50 years.
And, at a time in the early 2000's, when all these self proclaimed internet wiz kids were coming, claiming how the old timers were no good and that they played more hands on the Internet in an hour than the old timers did in a life time, Doyle Brunson just continued to crush them. With the exception of a few true talents, like Galfond and Dwan, they're all just about gone.
Someone correct me of I'm wrong, but I don't think Brunson had a losing season on high stakes Poker.
But you sir, are living today's version of the Brunson legacy.
You've got big shoes to fill.

Thanks, Fire! And good luck with your struggles. We understand each other with that. You have my number whenever you want to text or call.

Regarding the WSOP: one of the Springfield regs was bragging about how easy it was for him to pick up veritable pockets full of lammers* from working the satellite tables at the WSOP every year, and I had to bite my tongue: maybe he's on a sun run at these turbo shovefests, or maybe his 25% limp/call preflop range is perfect for that particular configuration? Anyways, I listened and nodded politely and listened some more, as I typically do.

Thanks fidstar!

Thanks Nepeeme2008! That's very kind of you, but Doyle will always be in a class by himself.

We think of him as an old man, but he was 10 years younger than me when he won his first two WSOP Main Event bracelets, back-to-back, while I'm still trying to scrape together enough of a bankroll to play $2/$5 safely.

*Lammers are plastic chips worth $500 WSOP tournament dollars each. You win them in WSOP satellites, and they can only be redeemed in other WSOP satellites and tournaments. Other players will buy them from you for face value, but I really don't know why, other than out of common courtesy, as they are a pain in the ass.

So far I only have a month of full time play. It might be something to look at around hour 700 or so.

I took some artistic liberty in that post of mine of course, and it could have been easily taken the wrong way. But you're one of the few people here who seem to get me. Thanks!
So in all earnestness, I'm convinced you're a winning player. Ok, maybe the sample size is still too small. Maybe you'll hit a downswing that you won't be able to easily recover from. Who knows.
But that would be a defeatist mindset in my opinion.
So anyway, I won't be crashing your party anymore.
Unless I have a great new life hack to share of course.

Post whenever you want, Nepeeme2008. Whenever I open this forum and see that someone has posted in this thread, I'm hit with a little shot of joy.

I guess it would depend which satellites he is talking about. The ME sats we played are prolly hardly grindable as you said, but I would not outrule others being doable. I've little experience but I remember e.g. that 250$ stt or whatever it was, something in that range, that we played together at the wsop 2019. The players on that one were so bad on average, and it didn't take that long, so if that was the usual table composition they would prolly be grindable for some decent hourly and maybe others/related ones too, but yeah the guy could of been just sunrunning or talking complete bs, lots a bs is being spoken at the poker table...

Sooo, I think Villain saw my cards here. I had the AK and he had the 55. I was sitting in the 5 seat, directly across from the dealer, and he was in the 4 seat, to my right. I try to protect my cards from being seen but, as Gambelina pointed out to me, this is one of the easier seating configurations from which to peek at someone's hand.

Two EP limps, V limps along from the CO with his 55, I make it $20 to go from the BTN with my AK. I was going to make it $15, but the chips sometimes stick together. Folds around to V. He calls. We are heads-up.

Flop ($47) he checks, I bet $25, he calls.

Turn ($97) he checks, I bet $50, he calls.

River ($197) he checks, I bet $100, he calls, and after he shows down, and a number of people make surprised noises upon seeing his hand, and he says "sorry".

I played with Villain for around 4 hours, and he did not make any other stationey calls before or after this hand. In any case, I will try to protect my hand more closely going forward.

This hand, and another hand where a donkey chased a bad pair and a backdoor flush draw to the river, got there, and got my stack after I'd flopped a set, combined to make yesterday a bad day at the tables.

It was, however, still better than a good day at the office. I'll be back at it today.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 6 hours
(+$662.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
(-$32.83)

Running Poker Total: 361.5 hours, +$9173.00

Running Slot Total: 116.5 hours, +$3407.12

Grand Total: 478 hours, +$12580.12

Rolling Stone's 500th Greatest Album of All Time: Funeral by Arcade Fire



I followed the new music scene up until around the mid-2000's, then like a lot of other folks in their 30's and 40's, I just stopped paying attention.

This geezerish lack of enthusiasm for the new and cool stuff corresponded with my return to the office in 2006 after my first stint in Las Vegas. In that work environment, as some of you may recall, the powers that be were dialed into a single radio station that only played the top 10 hits, played those 10 songs over and over again, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Rolling Stone updated their Top 500 list in 2020, so some of those hated top 10 hits are lurking again within the albums I'll be listening to, but there will also be a huge number of songs that I've never heard, and I'm looking forward to listening, as I've missed essentially a decade and a half worth of good music, not to mention all of the good old deep album cuts from classic bands that I'll be hearing for the first time as well.

So, Arcade Fire...cool name. I heard of them, back when this album debuted in 2004. They were buzzworthy, but I've never heard their stuff.

Funeral comes across as a mixture of influences from bands like Roxy Music, the Flaming Lips, and Weezer, and the more I think about that combination, the more awesome it sounds.

Arcade Fire are not awesome; they're good. I like their wall of sound with the steel percussion and the tinkling synth sounds and the xylophones and the whatnot backed up by basic guitar and bass chords ripping away in the background.

If a Wes Anderson movie was magically converted into an album, it might sound a bit like Funeral. That in itself sounds a bit twee, and maybe it is.

Here is Wake Up, from the album.



The song has soccer-like chanting, emo lyrics that, as delivered, vary between snotty and shouty, a power guitar hook, violins, some classical synth, miscellaneous tinkling, and smart tempo changes. It seems pretty representative of what the album is about. It's pretty good.

Rolling Stone Says:

Loss, love, forced coming-of-age, and fragile generational hope: Arcade Fire’s debut touched on all these themes as it defined the independent rock of the ‘00s.

As I listen to these albums, I'll try to get my impressions down in the post before I look at Rolling Stone's blurb. Then, if there are any interesting comparisons or contrasts between their view and mine, I'll comment on those here in this spot.

On Thursday, I played poorly. I started the day up a fair amount, but I was too much of a station. I couldn't stop myself from calling down in bad spots. I lost my winnings for the day and more, and I left early.

Also, the slots were heavily monitored and I found no plays. This has been developing pretty much as I'd predicted. Up until recently, I'd at least had the Ultimate X poker machines somewhat to myself, but now those have been overrun by grinders as well. I may have to adjust my poker daily hours up to 9 or 10 in order to compensate for the loss of slot revenue, but first I'll have to endeavor to work the original 8 hour poker days consistently before I presume to add anything.

I took an attitude adjustment day off yesterday, and I'll be playing today.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5.5 hours
(-$150.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 1.5 hours
(no plays)

Running Poker Total: 367 hours, +$9023.00

Running Slot Total: 118 hours, +$3407.12

Grand Total: 485 hours, +$12430.12

On Saturday I played better than I did on the last session. I turned off the autopilot, I slowed down, and I made an effort on every street to answer the question: Why are you doing this (checking, betting, folding, raising)? And why are you not doing one of the other things?

Still, I made a couple of mistakes, and by no coincidence, I made them on the streets where I forgot to question my actions.

It's difficult to apply this sort of mental work consistently over the course of a long session, but the more that I've done it, the better I've become at it, and the easier it has become. However, I'll always have to keep an eye on where I am relative to the slippery slope between the hard work getting easier and me just going on autopilot. And that monitoring in itself is work.

I didn't run well on Saturday, and I had to leave early to avoid the impending parking garage traffic jam from the Bruno Mars concert. I left myself just enough time to make one more slot floor run, and I found a few good plays, in spite of the competition.

This week, my goals are to get my hours in, and to try to keep the line of questioning going as I play each hand. The latter is not something new that I'm trying, it's something that's been a part of my game all along, but I slack off on it occasionally, and I have to remind myself to reapply it from time to time.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 6 hours
(-$135.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 2hours
+$139.71

Running Poker Total: 373 hours, +$8888.00

Running Slot Total: 120 hours, +$3546.83

Grand Total: 493 hours, +$12434.83