Mookie

Bah. I nitted it up tonight, and I probably folded too much. Poor form. I think it's because I ran into the brick wall known as Hoyazo... I got intimidated by his aggression, and then I just gifted all my chips away with a poor table image as people kept shoving on me and I kept laying hands down. I finally went out with QJo from the CO vs. A9o. Flop came down ATJ, but no Q, J, or K and I was out. I could've done better. Ah well.

Amateur Poker Night

Good God.

I played some cards last Friday, as you know if you've read my post below. I call it cards, because it by no stretch of the imagination can be called "poker." The night was donktastic, and the cards just didn't fall my way like you need when playing against a table of loose, poor, and often overaggressive drunktards.

We were playing 8-handed. To give you a picture of how much these guys knew what they were doing, I had to deal more than a few stupid ideas and house rules.

Stupid Idea #1: Let's play a cashout game... but we'll raise the blinds every revolution.

WTF?!? What type of idiots want to raise the blinds every 8 hands? And while playing essentially a cash game? At this point, I looked around for the exits, only to realize that I'd hitched a ride from my friend. Mistake numero uno. With that call, I had literally no outs.

Stupid Idea #2: Declaring small, inconsequential dealer mistakes worthy of taking all the cards back, reshuffling, and redealing, despite how much longer this takes. Inevitably, the dealer f*#$s up when a bunch of drunktards get together and play "Pass the deal." For example, someone just got knocked out by shoving 2nd pair in a 6-way pot on the flush card (no, that's not even the worst part). The next hand, the dealer accidentally deals out 7 players instead of the 6 remaining. You'd think we'd just take his cards, which nobody's seen yet, and put them under the deck, right? No such luck, despite how I tried to reason with them (I don't know why I even tried logic), and I have to muck my KK, glaring daggers at the rest of the idiots.

Stupid Idea #3: You can't keep raising back and forth in NL Hold Em'. This "ruling" came about because two people got into a minraising war. Someone heard about the Limit hold em cap and decided that it applies to the NL hold em game, too.

So even though I ended up losing $10 to the donkage going on, I felt lucky that that was all that happened, because I was mega-tilting, through the roof inside, due to the combination of the stupid ideas (there were more, trust me), getting sucked out on the river by the guy calling my turn all-in with a gutshot vs. my set, and running into a set vs. my two pair against an aggrotard, and then some poor play that resulted from the tilt. Knowing how badly I can play, especially when alcohol is involved, I really didn't do too bad. No shoving vs. the stations, although I definitely played too loose against a table where you saw 6 to the flop in any raised pot. $10 was letting me off easy.

Still, some good came of the situation. I've got a few new, bad candidates for my own poker game, with actual poker rules and tournament structure. I'll definitely make up for what happened.

Unless their idiocy is contagious. Because if it is, then I'm doomed.

Friend Break Ups? Poker can handle that.

Friend break ups are weird. I'm not talking drifting away from friends you haven't seen in a while. I'm talking abrupt break-up, where you deliberately end a friendship because it isn't working out. Friend breakups are even weirder than romantic ones, since you at least know in the back of your mind that unless you've gotten really lucky, your relationship with your boyfriend/girlfriend is probably not going to work out for you anyhow in the long run, and a break up is likely to happen. You don't have that expectation when you make a new friend, and since you don't have to see them all the time, you generally forgive them for their faults and just let the good times roll. But sometimes, things just don't work out.

My only friend breakup happened in college. I was really good friends with this one guy. We founded a club together, lived together for a semester, ran in the same circle of friends, and dated two girls who were pretty much best friends themselves. Of course, I got to see the ugly side of him, being so close for four years. His big personality flaw is his enormous ego. Basically, if he doesn't think that you are on par or above him in terms of intelligence, people skills, women skills, and physical capability to beat someone up, then he looks down on you. A tall order, considering he's pretty darn good at all of them. That's probably why I was his closest friend; I was the only one who met all of his criteria for being someone "worthy" of his respect. He was fun, and I got a little sense of satisfaction for being in that category. It's everything you could ask for in a friendship during your college years, when you enjoy doing the wild and reckless things college men do just for the hell of it.

Once we got out of college, though, he had a nasty break up with his girlfriend. If you get a mental image of a burning bridge, blazing away to nothing, that's pretty close to what happened. And I was caught in the middle, being close friends with both, needing to decide which way to jump before falling into the abyss below.

With all of his cockiness, I realized that my college friend really didn't care too much about other people. Also, my girlfriend (now fiancé) went to high school with his ex, and so she was clearly on her side.

So my choices were:

Choice A): College buddy. Fun to hang out with. Very self-centred and narcissistic. Moody. Physically aggressive, vulgar, and treats most people like crap. Chubby, kinda bipolar and reckless, Mr. Full-of-himself-to-the-point-of-alienating-everyone?

And choice B): I avoid pissing off my girlfriend. I get me some sweet, sweet loving at night, look forward to a peaceful future with my soulmate, and get to keep a good, loyal, and very attractive friend (his ex) that would eventually help me pick out my fiancé's wedding ring.

Hrm. Seems tough, doesn't it. And so my college buddy and I parted ways.

So how does poker figure into this? How does that exhilarating game of chance and skill overcome the mighty friend break up?

Well, ever since I got engaged in October, he's been contacting me again. Sending me texts to hang out, a facebook congratulations message, email, you name it. I'd get one every 2-3 weeks.

"You wanna go to happy hour? Soccer? Party? My place?"

Hmmmm, that's some suspicious timing there, buddy. Seems like someone just wants an invite to my huge, awesome wedding. It's out of character for him to beg so much to hang out with someone, even someone as awesome as I am. Hell, he even swallowed his pride and sent his ex an email asking if she could pass a message on to me.

But then I get this invite:

"You wanna play poker on Friday night?"

You $^%#$#%^, haven't I told you off eno... wait, poker?

I love poker. I get to take money from people who are ignorant of how much skill goes into the game and arrogant enough to wager money on it. Ignorance and arrogance. Self-centredness... that's being ignorant of other people's needs, right?And arrogance, being a narcissistic, overbearing prick kinda qualifies. And he wants to play poker with me?

Hell yeah. I'm so there. Of course, I still don't trust him. I'm skeptical that he's anything but a smooth-talking sack of shit, but I've got a test for that. You see, he's not getting an invite to my wedding, no matter what. My fiancé gave that the big ol' hell no. She isn't happy about me going to hang out with him, but it's too late for her to pull back from me now. I liked it, and I put a ring on it (hah, I actually got to say that). But when it comes to the wedding, bridezilla gets what she wants. 5 feet nothing and under 100 lbs. can be scary, sometimes. We'll see how he takes that news, but I'm going to wait until after the poker game tonight.

You see? I believe in giving people second chances. It isn't a lie. So long as you invite me to a poker game.

The Mookie

Played the Mookie for the first time. Waffles' post about it being an avenue to the WSOP ME piqued my interest. ;-) I had some really nice situations early on, letting me stack up a bit, and I eventually finished 15th, in the money but not by much.

I definitely made a few mistakes though. The biggest one being on the final hand. Villain with a small stack (M=2.5, aka he would be blinded out in 2.5 revolutions) shoves UTG. I've got ATo in MP... and I shove for 2x his stack on the 8-handed table. Big mistake. I put the UTG raiser on Ax or small pairs since the blinds were coming, maybe even hands like KQ. I read him right, he had 77 for a race, which wasn't bad, because I definitely needed to chip up for shot at the bigger money.

But I shouldn't have made the shove with ATo 8-handed. I should've just folded. Because an even bigger stack woke up with AK and made the call. Silly me.

The Mookie was nice. There were definitely a few fish there, but a lot of the bloggers were really solid players. It was a good time. The tournament's likely very -EV for me, but I just might come back for more next week, dreaming the dream of the WSOP.

Til next time,

Thorn

Edit: For those interested, the Mookie runs on Wednesday nights at 10:00 PM EST. $10+1 buy in. Password: vegas1

Running bad

The good news is that I'm playing well, and by expected value, I should be up by a little less than two buy-ins. The bad news is that, in reality, I'm down a little more than half a buyin again. Crazy variance.

I do love PokerTracker telling me that it isn't just me whining, though. I can now look and see the mathematical support for evidence that I really am playing well, but I'm getting unlucky. It probably doesn't help that I'm likely only a marginal winner at the Rush Poker tables, running below 3 PT/BB, so my variance is going to be pretty big.

If I get up another 4 buy-ins, I might move back to normal 5 NL tables instead of Rush for a bit, and see if I do any better with the ability to actually read and adjust a little bit.

On the other hand, I've also joined a local home tournament game. It's a cheap, $20 buy in game at a place on the DC Metro system without rake, and the players I do know are pretty bad. I've got a feeling that I'll be the best one there at all times, really. First game's in about 3 weeks with a fairly decent, medium length structure. We'll see how it goes.

Still going strong over 3300 hands...

I'm up a buy-in and change at 5NL Rush after 3.3k hands. It's a miracle! I'm actually about a half a buy-in below EV, too. Graph of a marginal winner to come.

Running Good

On the poker front, my housemate and I are looking to set up a home poker tournament. Which would be awesome, because I'm pretty much far and away the best player out of everyone I've invited so far. 99% sure I'm the only one who's actually won money at online tournaments. And yes, I do win money at tourneys, I'm at around 11% ROI over 600 tournaments at the micros. Shocking from such a marginal, probably losing player at cash, I know. Then again, I'm a firm believer that tournaments are easier.

Also, I rock. It's official. Really.

I just got Employee of the Month in my ~300 person company. Apparently I'm the only one from this office to ever get it haha. So our site manager came and bought everyone in my office lunch, gave me a letter from the president of the company, a fancy certificate of achievement, and slid me an envelope under the table with an American Express Gift Card inside.

That last part felt baller. And a little like I was doing something illegal. Hah.

Back to the donkaments!

So after finishing off the promotion for a free $25 on Full Tilt, I decided to go back to the donkaments and pulled up two of my old favorites: the 90-seat $2.20 sit-n-go on Pokerstars.

I have to say, I'm really glad that I did. I just broke the bubble in both of them and I'm now on the break. About to break final table bubble for one, with 3rd in chips. Woot. More updates later. Break's running out :)

Finished! 3rd and ninth. Not too shabby at all. I have to say, playing cash games has improved my post-flop game a hundredfold. These tournaments are as juicy as ever. So much easier to make money than cash games.

Doh, tilt issues.

Darn. So I'm still positive on Rush Poker, but now only by about 10 BBs. What happened? Well, I got coolered for 1/2 a buy-in, began to tilt, and then gifted away another 1/2 a buy-in.

Fail. Sad.

Hooray for Rush Poker!

Yay! I've played almost 1000 hands of Rush Poker so far for a profit of exactly a buy-in, winning at a little more than 5 pt/bb. And I'm actually running a little bit below EV, according to PT3 :).

I like this thing more and more.

Coming back to Rush Poker

So I couldn't keep away. Full Tilt's Take 2 Promotion, plus the need to kill about 15 minutes waiting for my fiancé, led me to pull up a table and play for a bit. And by a bit, I mean 200 hands at 5NL, the lowest stake, and that netted me a buy-in.

The Take 2 promotion, running now, basically gives you free moneys if you play Rush Poker or 2+ cash game tables at the same time and get 5 FTP points a day for 5-9 days of the promotion period. I'm pretty sure that's made all the donks in the world come to Rush Poker.

I will have fun taking their money :)

Multitabling!

Alright, so I have impulse control issues. I ended up playing four tables last night instead of just three. I did pretty well, actually; there are enough donkeys around that my multi-tabling "B" game was enough to end up a buy-in after a few hundred hands.

Then again, my winrate definitely suffered. People tend to call off too light postflop rather than pre. My guess is that the huge preflop donkeys, even at 2 NL, lose their stacks quite quickly. Most either learn better or stop playing poker. And you can get a read on these postflop fools who will be a station with third pair in a 4-way pot a lot quicker when you can actually watch all of the action going on. When I was stacking 4 tables on top of one another, I couldn't do that. Most of my multitabling play revolved around HUD reads, with the occasional traditional read if I happened to be watching a particularly noteworthy hand at table.

I'm going to tone it down to 3 tables tonight. Can't stop, after all; I'm clearing that fancy Full Tilt Take 2 bonus on 2 NL.

I've considered taking out the "losing poker player" tag in my headline, but sadly I realize that my sample size is STILL too small, despite my successes running at 5 PT/BB over a couple thousand hands. I've decided not to take it off until I win back everything I've lost, though. It'll probably be a few months at the rate I'm going since I plan on moving up to 5NL before my bankroll gets anywhere near that big. I might actually have to buy PokerTracker 3 before I hit my goal :P

So... about $200 to go? Blah.

The beginnings of HUD-enhanced play.

Here's my first successful cash-game graph!

As you can see, I started off my PT3 graph by losing 2 and a quarter buy-ins. It turns out I haven't quite gotten to the level of automatically being able to play well; while setting up my HUD, researching the different stats, and playing two tables at the same time, my focus and game went to high hell. I chased, I was a station, all in all just terrible play. That's taught me how unprepared I am to become a mass multi-tabler. There's just no way I can play anywhere near optimal without analyzing the hand for a bit. I might try tackling three tables in a bit after I've gotten used to using the HUD.

I really haven't consulted the statistics as much as I should have at each hand decision, relying more on my conventional reads and notes. Not really a negative thing, but I won't be able to do that if I try mass multi-tabling some day.

Once I started playing without the distraction of learning about PT3, however, I was immediately back to flooring the tables. I won it all back and then some, so my graph has me up by 1 and a quarter buy-ins. Of course, that doesn't include my earlier successes before getting PT3 at 2NL, so I'm really up about 3 buy-ins more than that at these stakes. Here's hoping that my 1000-hand sample or so is indicative of future success and not just some incredibly awesome, positive variance. Considering that I understand the plays being made and am hand-reading much better against villains, though, I don't think I have much to be afraid of.

Thorn