100K Rush Hands

So here is my first 100k hands at rush full ring:



It would have been looked better if I hadn't been in a particulary generous mood this morning. Pretty spewy session so you're welcome 100nl rush regs, have a merry xmas on me!

Overall I am quite pleased with the way I have started with rush. It's a totally different game from mid stakes 6max, and there have been tons of mistakes made along the way, but if I continue working hard and improving then good things could happen for Mr Fickle in 2011.

I am off to find some festive beers, have a great xmas everyone :)

Full Cup Coffee

by King Fish on 2+2:

On Tuesday, I purchased a cup of coffee for $2.00. I am a valuable customer Full Cup Coffee, so the manager gave me 25% off, like he always does. It's a win/win, as I drink a lot of coffee and he still makes a nice margin. $1.50/cup.

On Wednesday, the Manager said that to show his appreciation, from now on I will get 50% off all my cups of coffee. I was stoked. $1 cup FTW!

On Thursday, the manager let me know that because of his generosity, he needs to re-evaluate the price of coffee. I will still get 50%, and every other day 75%, but the price of coffee has gone up to $4. I have no idea how much the coffee costs any more. My accountant is on it.

Yesterday, the manager let me know that the price of coffee has gone up to $10 a cup because of all the frequent customer discounts he was giving. I will now get 80% off on every cup because I am such a good customer, however the 27% coffee tax recently implemented by Harry Reid will go against the $10 wholesale price of the coffee and not the $2/cup I would have spent.

He has assured me that this is what I want, as a valuable customer he is looking out for me. He then kicked me in the shins and walked off. He does that sometimes.

There is a really great coffee house next door to this guy, (PokerStarbucks) and of the 100 varieties of coffee, theirs are better than Full Tilt Coffee. Their staff is also a lot friendlier and much more knowledgeable about the beans, roasting methods, etc. They are also really, really funny. The coffee is also cheaper, at 90 cents per cup for all (frequent visitors I have heard get theirs for as little as 40 cents per cup!). My problem is that my current guy has one type of coffee I really like (Rush Coffee). It has 5 times the caffeine as standard coffee and gives me my caffeine boost much quicker.

So, I will continue to go to Full Tilt Coffee for now, because it is a bit closer and easier for me. Once Pokerstarbucks gets a coffee that is just 1/2 good as my current brand, I will switch.

I spend probably close to $50k/year on coffee, so I assume they will appreciate my business.

There may be a very loosely related allegory here somewhere, but it is purely coincidental.

Silence is deafening

Stars have announced their 2011 VIP club changes, which are very minor changes and not worth going into, but they remain deadly silent on what they are (or aren't) going to do about the 20-50bb tables for next year. Seriously wtf stars? If you aren't going to do anything just say so, and if you are going to do something at least tell people some changes are in the pipeline!

I'm not that bothered now tbh as I have made my plans for 2011. More than anything I am just sad that things weren't dealt with better/quicker so I could have at least considered stars when making my plans.

Having said that I am really happy with how things are going elsewhere and will post a rush update when I hit 100k hands, which will be soon :)

Deep Valuetown

Read: Station
Action: Value bet to death

Full Tilt Poker $0.50/$1 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

BTN: $100.70
SB: $294.50
Hero (BB): $263.05
UTG: $112.60
UTG+1: $98.00
UTG+2: $108.50
MP1: $42.25
MP2: $87.60
CO: $239.35

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is BB with Q Q
5 folds, CO raises to $3.50, 2 folds, Hero raises to $12, CO calls $8.50

Flop: ($24.50) 5 Q J (2 players)
Hero bets $18, CO calls $18

Turn: ($60.50) 9 (2 players)
Hero bets $60, CO calls $60

River: ($180.50) 2 (2 players)
Hero bets $173.05 all in, CO calls $149.35 all in

Final Pot: $479.20

Hero shows Q Q (three of a kind, Queens)
CO mucks T J

Hero wins $476.20
(Rake: $3.00)

Ruuuuuussssssshhhhhh

Have been playing some rush poker whilst I consider my options for 2011. It's been fun so far ;)

So long stars, enjoy the ratholers

It is with mixed feelings that I will no longer be playing on pokerstars.

This is a direct result of their decision to split the games between 20-50bb and 40-100bb. They claim this is to give people choice, but they took away my choice which is to play with a mixture of full and short stackers.

I do have another choice though which is to play elsewhere and that is what I am going to do. I have given them way way more time than I should have to rectify the situation but now feel enough is enough.

The shallow tables now outweigh the normal tables significantly at mid stakes and the waitlists are ridiculously long. People don't want to start 40-100bb tables for whatever reason. The final straw was sitting down with a reg who was apparantly trying to start tables, he sat out after 1 hand (in which he won $40) and then just sat there for the next 20mins. Unsuprisingly nobody wants to sit down at a table with me plus a reg who is sitting out, and plenty of shallow tables filled up in the meantime because the one thing rats are good at is starting tables.

It is very similar to what happend with PT3 and HEM. I really didn't want to give up on PT3 but eventually it got to a point where I couldn't wait anymore and had to go with a product that was clearly better and was giving my opponents an edge on me. Once I eventually made the switch I didn't look back.

Really is a shame because stars still has a lot going for it (ie traffic, VIP program, customer support) but the simple fact is the games I like to play simply don't exist anymore.

I am not going to let misguided loyalty stop me from maximising my winrate anymore.

Game Selection

Battling the Demons (not mine)

The following was posted by one of my students in our google group. I thought it was awesome and worth sharing.........

"I've been on a downswing and tilting lately, I actually took about 2 weeks off from seriously playing. I needed to step back and reevaluate some things. I did a lot of thinking and I believe I'm ready to come back.

Tilt is when I stop playing against my opponents and I start trying to play against either myself, or against variance. I realized that when I'm tilting all of the reads, the focus, and sound play go out the window. Sometimes I honestly forget the other players are even there. It isn't really about trying to beat my opponents anymore, I'm fighting a battle against variance or myself.

This is a waste of time. Variance is undefeated. I can't beat it. No matter what I do there's going to be suckouts, runs of bad cards, downswings etc. More importantly it's my friend. Without variance there wouldn't be poker.

Even worse is trying to play against myself. For me mainly it's beating myself up over mistakes and losing confidence in myself because of it. I looked at my mistakes as a total loss, instead of realizing there's a lot to gain from them. Also instead of being so critical of my own game, I need to turn that focus outwards and look at other people's. Find and exploit the mistakes they're making.

From now on whenever I feel like I'm no longer playing against my opponents I'm just going to close Full Tilt. Because that's the reason I log onto FT in the first place."

Backdoor Brilliance

Villain was never ever folding river and there is no better feeling than shoving all the money in when you know that you are getting paid 100% of the time :)

Poker Stars $1/$2 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players

DeucesCracked Poker VideosHand History Converter

BTN: $258.40
SB: $220.30
BB: $179.95
UTG: $214.00
MP: $358.40
Hero (CO): $200.00

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is CO with A T
1 fold, MP raises to $6, Hero calls $6, 2 folds, BB calls $4

Flop: ($19.00) A 8 2 (3 players)
BB checks, MP checks, Hero checks

Turn: ($19.00) J (3 players)
BB bets $8, MP calls $8, Hero calls $8

River: ($43.00) K (3 players)
BB bets $16, MP raises to $56, Hero raises to $186 all in, BB folds, MP calls $130

Final Pot: $431.00
MP mucks 6 9
Hero shows A T (a flush, Ace high)
Hero wins $429.00
(Rake: $2.00)


I enjoyed this one almost as much though.

Poker Stars $2/$4 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players

DeucesCracked Poker VideosHand History Converter

MP: $80.00
CO: $80.00
Hero (BTN): $217.10
SB: $381.00
BB: $80.00
UTG: $102.60

Pre Flop: ($6.00) Hero is BTN with 7 2
2 folds, CO raises to $8.40, Hero raises to $20, 3 folds

Final Pot: $22.80
Hero mucks 7 2

Hero wins $22.80
(Rake: $-0.00)

Offline & Golf

My internet has been down since saturday morning and is still not fixed. I have spent the majority of my weekend on the phone to the ISP and am now waiting for an engineer to come to my house and sort it out. They can't tell me when, or even what day, this will be so am having some unexpected time off.

Apologies to all students who have coaching booked, I will catch up as soon as I can.

One upside was I got to play a rare round of golf on Sunday morning which was great. Weather was perfect, course was very nice and I shot 115 which is probably about par for me. Golf is not my strongest sport lol.

Edit: Am back online and catching up as quickly as possible.

Pretty Picture

My September so far...........

Frying Fish

It is becomming more and more apparent to me that most people stuck at microstakes think they have a good understading of 'ABC' poker but when they are sitting at the tables they struggle to beat bad players.

This is usually due to one of two reasons:

1. They go on tilt easily and don't fry fish as they know they should.
2. They don't have the solid 'ABC' game that they think they do.

My advice to everyone is to make sure you understand how to fry fish.

They taste better when cooked to perfection and don't make you ill.

Time does not equal effort

A lot of people seem to think putting a lot of time into their poker automatically means they are putting in sufficient effort. I have news for all those people. It doesn't!!

The time you put into your poker needs to be focused on improving and this is what pretty much everyone struggles with to some degree. People listen to the 'playing to learn' philosopy but do not truly understand what is required to be successful.

I hope that this post sticks in the mind of everyone reading, especially those to which it is aimed at, you know who you are :)

It is all well and good putting the time in. You play plenty of hands and learn from experience.

You do a session review and realise you played badly yesterday. Sometimes you review some hands and realise you didn't play as badly as you thought you did. The whole point of reviewing hands is to improve your thought process in order to make better decisions next time that spot comes around again. If that spot comes around again are you going to remember what you have learned from your session reviews? Maybe you will if that spot comes up again tomorrow but what if it doesn't come up for another 2k, 4k or even 10k hands? Are you going to remember anything from the session review you did 3 weeks ago? Have you studied this 'not sure what to do' spot sufficiently enough to ensure that you will know what to do next time, and have therefore eliminated the possibility that you will make the same mistake again?

Do you suffer from tilt at all? If so have you ever thought it may be a good idea to try and identify what makes you tilt and try to elimate tilt from your game? Tilting is unacceptable and should be taken seriously, not just shrugged off as something you do from time to time. If you need to study tilt then that's what you should be doing.

Do you find yourself reviewing hands but are just going through the motions (ie not putting the effort into your reviews)?

If you think you review your hands well answer some more questions. How many times have you written down your opponents range and analysed exactly how it connects with the board? How many combinations of each hand in their range do they have? How do you expect them to play each of those combinations if you bet?

How many times have you written down every option available to you for a particular street and calculated the EV of each decision? Uhm never? Thought so............

I don't doubt that lot's of people spend lots of time playing and thinking about poker when they are not playing. Putiing that time in does not mean you are going to win, nor does it mean you deserve to.

Time does not equal effort.

Focused Grinding

Been working very hard at my game and coaching loads lately.

Is nice when the hard work gets recognised :)

Don't bluff fish imo.

Poker Stars $1/$2 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 896277

The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

UTG: $40.00

MP: $868.55

Hero (CO): $123.25

BTN: $219.00

SB: $101.00

BB: $100.00

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is CO with Q J

1 fold, MP raises to $4, Hero raises to $14, 3 folds, MP calls $10

Flop: ($31.00) 3 2 6 (2 players)

MP checks, Hero bets $10, MP raises to $40, Hero raises to $109.25 all in, MP folds

Final Pot: $111.00

Hero mucks Q J

Hero wins $108.00

(Rake: $3.00)

Back Grinding :)

Holiday season is over, wife and baby are away all weekend and I finally find some time to get some hands in!

Played 11 hours in total today and feeling good despite a small loss;

Was looking like a bad day for a while :)

Rusty but refreshed

Not too much happening and haven't played hardly at all this month due to vists from family and friends.

Am also having some computer problems and really hope the new bits I have ordered turn up soon and are a good short term fix. I don't think it will be long before I need a new setup though which sucks.

PC permitting I will be back grinding tomorrow and am excited to start implementing some of the stuff I discussed with Corwin last week. Will start off with some 100nl to blow the cobwebs away and take it from there.

Corwin Cole & Clicking the Right Button

Inspired by my group coaching / profit share experiment, and coupled with the fact that I feel my own game has gone a bit stale lately, I decided to contact Corwin Cole - [vital]Myth on CR - to register my interest in his profit share program.

After some inital discussions by PM, Corwin kindly offered to give me a free lesson to see where I am at, with no obligation to sign up to any of his coaching services. I am extremely grateful for this and was blown away by his coaching style, professionalism and amazing ability to listen to problems and offer innovative solutions instantaneously.

In just over an hour we managed to identify a number of issues in my thought process, discuss the reasons behind these failings, look at ways to make better decisions during game time and set up a daily study/development routine focused on learning (as opposed to putting the time and effort in which has never been a problem for me).

I am not going reveal all his tricks and tips publicy, nor my leaks, but I will give you an example:

Corwin advocates a 4 step thought process:

1. Make a read
2. Consider All Options
3. Calculate EV
4. Click the Right Button

Everyone can improve in all four areas, me included, but I have seen this 4 step process in his videos and am always thinking logically when at the tables.

A problem for me, however, is when my logical thought process is telling me one thing and my insticts (or gut feelings) are telling me another. This presents me with an inner conflict and the logical side usually wins as I can provide reasoning for my decisions rather than 'just knowing' which always sounds vauge and stupid. Or so I thought!

Having explained this to Corwin I was blown away by the discussion that followed. This is getting a bit tl;dr already so I will leave out the nitty gritty details but in short I have been making a big mistake trying to shut out my insticts, which have been developed through almost 1 million hands and hundreds of hours coaching and analysing hands, and I now fully understand how my brain is functioning and why this conflict occurs.

So I have a leak that lies somewhere between steps 3 and 4 and need to start recognising the value of my insticts. I don't think that gives away too much :)

Unfortunatley we didn't have time to iron out the details of future coaching and/or profit share but I sincerely hope we can work something out. I have an opportunity here to take my game to a whole new level and really have to take it!

Exciting Times

I have spent a lot of the last month coaching and discussing a potential group coaching scheme with my current students.

My ideas have been well received so far and I am excited that 2 trial groups will be starting early next month.

I have high hopes for these guys and really beleive that with frequent, consistent and risk free* coaching I can get them crushing and moving forward.

Exciting times next month for Spurs too. I am going to be gutted if we fail to reach the group stages of the champions league after a great effort last season. Come on you spurs, one time!

Have a great August everyone :)

(* risk free for them)

Just ban the damn cheats

Pokerstars are having a terrible time of it lately and now there has been confirmed long term botting in the 20-50bb NLHE games.

Apparantly the pokerstars.fr site has only one buyin option 35-100bb's and hopefully pokerstars will now remove there heads from the sand and fix this nonsense by mirroring on the .com site too.

The only people dissapointed by a 35-100bb game accross the board will be angle shooting ratholers and bots.

Stat Free Thoughts

Ended up playing stat free for 19 hours.

Overall I think that playing stat free over multiple sessions is a great way to fix a broken poker mindset, however I do have some reservations about stat free weeks/months as it stops me from reviewing my play between sessions.

HEM doesn't allow me to totally remove results so if I want to review hands etc, which I most definitely do, then it is inevitable that I will see my results anyway.

Am going to give this some thought but I think my stat free targets will have to be session based.

Now I am off to review my last 19 hours!

Record Breaking

Have logged 14 hours of play since I last looked at my stats which will be approx 7,000 hands I guess.

Am 1 hour away from equalling my personal best of 15 statless hours which was set not that long ago.

This time around I have gone into it with a better mindset and am really trying hard to focus on reads and good decision making, rather than making money. It feels great and I can feel my play improving and confidence coming back by the hour.

The most telling thing is that I am pretty sure that I am down a bunch of buyins during this experiment and feel like I have run very badly. Despite this I feel great and full of confidence which would probably not be the case if I was tracking my results and feeling sorry for myself.

Sometimes it's just better not knowing and all I can do is play for the long term.

Challenging Times

Someone said it's a hard way to make an easy living and I am battling the confidence demons to the max at the moment. I am becoming increasingly focused on short term results and am driving myself a little bit crazy!

Obviously short term results are irrelevant and I fully beleive in this but at times I have difficulty accepting it. If you don't know the difference read the poker mindset and then you will.

As part of my plan for 2nd half of 2010 I am setting myself a target of only looking at my stats on a weekly basis. Have started a trial run and instead of checking HEM results at end of session I am handwriting a short summary of my feelings. It is tough to ignore results but I need to repair my poker mindset and I think this will help.

Playing Out Of Position......

......POOP

Dissappointing Day

England put in worst performance I have ever seen in a competitive international and I follow it up by spewing off a few buyins.

Time for everyone to show some bouncebackability.

June Targets

Back from holiday and am raring to go. Am going to set some targets for June and see how it pans out:

1. Split weekly play into minimum of 8 hours off peak (Tues-Fri am) and 16 hours peak time (Fri pm-Sun).
2. Game select better and play some 100nl or full ring if and when necessary.
3. Begin default strategy and development (study) folder.
4. Keep weekly timesheets and write weekly review.
5. Select and print hands for weekly coaching session.
6. Write up notes from coaching sessions and keep printed hands in study folder.
7. Re-read Leatherass book & The poker mindset.
8. Draft budget and business plan for 2nd half of 2010.

Hope everyone is running good.

Failed

I made it to 15 Hours.

Finished month down $300 which sucks and now I am going on holiday.

Am looking forward to not thinking about poker for a while!

No Stats Attempt

I intend to play 20 hours of poker between now (I have actually just finished 1st hour) and saturday night UK time.

I will be attempting to not look at my stats once during this period.

Piece of cake!

Birthday Blues

Tuesday was my 35th birthday. These are my results since then:



Have a coaching session shortly. Much needed.

Chat Ban (self imposed)

Oh, by the way I asked for my chat option on stars to be taken away.

I am not being rude if anyone chats to me, I just can't reply!

Are the games good?

I just keep changing my mind about the state of the games on stars. For those of you that don't know stars changed their games structure to:

20-50BB buyin
40-100 BB buyin
100-250BB buyin with ante

For the rest of this post I will call them shallow, normal and deep (why stars don't do this is confusing and a different subject altogether).

So basically this is what is happening:

Pro shortstackers and most fish at shallow tables
Multitabling regs and some fish at normal tables
Multitabling regs and a couple of fish at deep tables

On the face of it the normal games are full of regs and suck. Waitlists are massive for any table that has a player who vaguely resembles a fish and not many people are starting tables. I do try to start tables and/or or sit with other regs starting tables but a lot of time table is quickly filled with regs.

The shallow tables are thriving. Ratholers are starting tables at a high volume and the fish jump in.

So like I said, on the face of it the normal games suck. Thing is my results at 200nl are telling me otherwise at the moment and therefore I can't decide whether the changes are good or bad (for me personally).

Obviously results are the most important thing in the long term, and if things continue to go well then I couldn't care less how attractive the games look, but I cannot help but think that 'normal' poker on stars is dying. If this happens then my options are:

1. Start playing some 50BB poker on stars
2. Move to a site where normal poker prevails

Neither of the above options are attractive to me.

Shipeeeet

Need better moving up BR plan

Am break even at 400nl this shot (well $140 winner to be precise) but my end of month withdrawal plus $-2k start to May means another shot comes to an abrubt end.

Had high hopes this time around but in hindsight shooting with 5 buyins is never going to work for me as withdrawals have too much of an impact.

I am going to grind out 200nl for the forseeable future and reconsider my bankroll plan for next shot.

[ ] Sustainable

Next 2/4 shot in progress and yesterday was a good day:


More of the same please poker gods :)

Mario Wars

Poker Stars $1/$2 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 657906

The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter



MP: $277.50

CO: $201.00

BTN: $220.00

SB: $200.00

BB: $486.50

Hero (UTG): $251.30

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is UTG with 7 8

Hero raises to $6, 2 folds, BTN calls $6, 2 folds

Flop: ($15.00) 6 9 A (2 players)

Hero bets $10, BTN raises to $32, Hero raises to $80, BTN raises to $214 all in, Hero calls $134

Turn: ($443.00) 8 (2 players - 1 is all in)

River: ($443.00) J (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $443.00

BTN shows 8 T (a pair of Eights - Ace+Jack+Ten kicker)

Hero shows 7 8 (a pair of Eights)

BTN wins $440.00

(Rake: $3.00)


Converter ok bish ?