I have a quick HH here. This is the game that killed what little faith I had in SAGE. This game went on to the 100/200 level, and that is where I really used SAGE at it's most base. I don't have the entire HH because I ripped the power cord out of my computer when this game ended.

This debacle starts at 30/60

At 350:
ATo
QJo

At 305, playing rock tight, I tossed Q9o to a shove in the BB.

Shove

J6o at 365
8To at 275
tossied 69o at 18


hero (2,815)
villain (185)
hero posts the small blind of 30
villain posts the big blind of 60
[K 3]
hero raises to 2,815, and is all in
villain calls 125, and is all in

villain shows [2 K]


*** RIVER *** [A J 5 8] [Q]

villain ties for the pot (185) with Ace King high
hero ties for the pot (185) with Ace King high

hero (2,755)
villain (245)

[3 3]
hero raises to 2,755, and is all in
villain calls 185, and is all in
[5 Q T Q] [8]
Villain [Ts Kc] and won (490) with two pair, Queens and Tens

40/80a

Shove 9Ts @ 550

Tossed 68s to a shove @ 470

Shove 77 @ 670

Shove KQs @ 550

Toss 58o in BB @ 470


hero (2,450)
villain (550)
[3 K]
hero raises to 2,450, and is all in
villain calls 470, and is all in
hero shows [3d Kh]
villain shows [Kc Th]
]
[6 A 8 K] [9]
villain showed [Kc Th] and won (1,100) with a pair of Kings

50/100

I shove AKo @1200



[J 9]
hero raises to 2,040, and is all in
villain calls 860, and is all in
hero shows [J 9]
villain shows [8 8]
\[8h 4d Qd Ah] [6h]
villain showed [8s 8d] and won (1,920) with three of a kind, Eights

I shove with KK @ 1330

I shove AA @ 1430

60/120

I shove AQo @ 1310

hero (1,810)
villain (1,190)
[4c 4s]
villain raises to 240
hero raises to 1,810, and is all in
villain calls 950, and is all in
hero shows [4c 4s]
villain shows [Q K]
[J 3 A 5] [Q]
villain wins the pot (2,380) with a pair of Queens

shove KQo @ 620

shove Q3s @ 620

shove ATs @ 740

I don't remember the last hand, but it was probably something like my T9 vs his A3 or something.

Looking over this just burns me. I KNOW I could do better than this. This is just rediculous. However, I would like to know if you guys agree with my errors, and I am open to suggestions, as long as they aren't "Stop being results oriented," or "You played it right by playing shove or fold."

Thank you.

Dude, stop being results oriented, you played it right. Really.
SAGE is optimal if your opponent plays optimal, too.
If he calls too tight, like most people do, shove a little wider (raise your power index by one or stuff). If he is very tight, you might be better off minraising in the 12-7BB area. If he calls very loose, shove a little tighter.
Almost all villains are shoving way too tight. This means you are doing much better by calling very tight. Personally, I'm calling significantly tigher than SAGE suggests as long as I'm not up against a very solid player, a total maniac or someone else who seems to shove a lot of hands. Either you saw him shoving crap, then you know for sure, or he shoved his last 6 buttons and you had to fold, then I start to assume he is doing it light.
But these push or fold situations are of course very luck dependant. Of course does it feel bad when you shove your A4 with 6BB's and get called by A8, but it still was the right play

I agree that the folds were correct. I am more concerned about the shoves. I present no less than 15 here. Sorry, I posted the results.

They're all fine. You just ran into better hands a few times and lost a few coinflips. You know the word variance, right? That's it!

Orly?

What about my shoves with AK, KK, AA, AQ?

A little deep for that, right?

And that is the problem, using crap like SAGE automatically puts you in a position of taking the worse of it. It is a self-weighting strategy.

I lost a few times? Before this, I had already lost 3 races. Then this guy comes back from 120 points to win?!!???

He was horrible. There is nothing he did correctly whole match but wait for a better than average hand.

I understand "luck," but a "few coin-flips" is how many? Ten, fifteen (about how many races this bastard won), twenty?

At what point do you stop blaming your sore luck and look at yourself?

I am not going to accept "don't be results oriented." I f*d this up, and I want to know exactly where.

Why did you shove AA and KK with 13+bb? You might have missed a shove with the 85o. You really need to stop being emotional about this stuff daveT its how HU SNGs work.

dave, I agree that you shouldn'd have shoved AA and KK, but this deep sage doesn't apply anyway. AQ an AK are standard shoves, you are only putting you in crappy spots postflop when you raise to 3BB or minraise.
However, shoving AA and KK is far away from "horrible" and you haven't "f'd up" anyting there.

The 85o was vs a shove.

I am sure tilt had something to do the KK, AA shoves. This was really starting to kill me.

Emotional? What the hell? Because I know for a fact that I play better than this. Being harsh on myself is, and always has been, my nature. Because my games dumps to complete s* after the 25/50 level, and then I try something different, and the results are actually worse. I am p*d because I should know better than try stupid systems when my intuition is better than this.

And it really irritates me that my wr only exists because I can play with 75 and 50BBs effectively and that is it. I want to be better at the later levels. What good am I if my leak is this huge? If I face competition that drops my edge at the higher ratio levels, what do I have left?

This is wholly unacceptable.



Why would this bother me?

By pushing those AA and KK you threw away a lot more EV than 'running bad' at shoves, you really only have yourself to blame like you said, HU SNGs do not dump to complete [censored] theres plenty of exploitation available you are just missing the spots where its possible for example.

Q3s OTB with short stack easy push, your not exploiting villain much here.
AA 13bb deep theres tons of exploitation available to you here depending on how you know your villain.

I guarantee if you keep your emotions tied up in this game you will NOT win as much as you should if at all. Furthermore you will probably either go insane, burnout or quit. Im really trying to help you because from the tenor of your posts the last few days you are pretty emotional at least IMO.

Yep, at times, I have the emotional maturity of a twelve year old girl. I was also attacked earlier this week on these boards (if people really don't understand why I don't out my sn, it is because I am open about my leaks). I know where I need to improve, I am always searching where I should improve, and that is all.

Are you saying that the rest is fine?

I'd pass on the second K3o shove and just dump the hand. And I'd probably limp the J9 and be forced to fold to his shove. I'm not giving him the chiplead with J9 here. Just because you may be playing SAGE strategy doesn't mean that limping occasionally is pure evil. It should make them respect your next shove more anyway. And if you do happen to get dealt a monster in the next few hands you can limp and it won't look so suspiscious, they'll likely just shove any two. Other than that all I can say is that I wish I had a match where I was dealt half of the premium hands you posted. And PS I'm not an expert at HU SNGs so take it as you will. But my winrate is much better the longer the match goes. Too many early bluffs snapped off, I guess I need to stop doing that so much.

I looked over it quickly but yes.

Okay.

Feel like I am almost "there." Another 1k games it may finally hit me.

Adding comments in between these examples would have made for a more entertaining thread.

this might be a really dumb question but what does SAGE actually mean?

thx

[S]it [A]nd [G]o [E]nd game (system).

Alternatively, it means the bees in daveT's bonnet.

hey dave, came a bit late to this thread but just thought i'd add that i think everyone finds it really frustrating when you've grinded your opponent down to nothing and just have to finish the job off. So being annoyed about then losing the game or taking ages to kill the bugger is understandable, but at least you are coming here asking questions about whether or not there are any errors in your play.

yesterday i played a game where i was down to 30 chips, 1 big blind and i went on to win the game. Now i didn't play amazing poker and my opponent did pretty much nothing wrong, i felt really sorry for him as he just could not win a race or suckout on me, whereas i won every race and sucked out on him a number of times. I think every once in a while you get that rare game where to quote dennis hopper you're opponent "is like a turd that won't flush". You just have to move on and think about the multitude of games where you do finish off your opponent and dont even think about it.

Anyway, regarding the shoves, i dont see any real problems with them apart from when it gets above 10+ big blinds where i feel it is better to min-raise some hands.

One thing that i find works really well is to put a few limps in here and there and see if villain tends to view that as weakness and shove your limp. Then trap him by limping all your strong hands. I only really like doing this though with 8+ big blinds otherwise its just shove or fold.

This stuff is crazy talk, even with some of the "wider" shoves there is no range your opponent could call with profitably against you. Only big mistakes are shoving the big pairs. Once it gets down to less than 8bb I shove these, but you are losing a lot of value shoving these when you're not getting called very often. Even if your opponent suspects you might have limped with a big hand they won't get away from it if they hit a flop and a lot of guys are going to just shove over you as it's a great play against most people who limp preflop with high blinds (I shove any two against limpers with <10bb).
But why would you want to play a system anyway. There are a lot of shoves that are very opponent dependent, i.e. if guys only call with an ace/pair or the best kings, you can shove 10bbs with any two cards and show an automatic profit, whereas against a guy who will call with K7o (which is not a bad play if you are shoving very wide) then shoving trash is a huge -ev play. Same thing goes for calling. Definitely get one of the sng softwares and play with the quiz or review your hhs on them, there's really no excuse not to play this segment absolutely perfectly.

Haji, you speak my language.

Obviously, these systems (SAGE), are not going to work perfectly, since it is free information. While I can see it as a base-line thinking, I can't think of why anyone should stay permanently on them. At some point, playing the player has to fit into the short-stacked strat, even though there is not much room to play.

SAGE doesn't "not work" because it's free information.

Plenty of free information works in this forum if you can figure out which is bs and which is valuable.

And yea, SAGE isn't perfect by any means, but it's a hell of a lot better than anything you can come up with when you start playing the game, and it's good enough to give you an end game edge in every buyin level of husngs.

Yeah, you're right, I got a little over-zealous about my anti-SAGE crusade. That is a terrible reason to hate on SAGE.

Look at the bright side, though. Since my posts are free, that must mean that all of my information is trash as well.