How do you get stats like this?

Guess this would be the epitome of "running good":

Weekend Degeneracy

Friday night: after dinner, I hop on the bus and head to Goldies for some limit poker. I played limit for the first time in MONTHS last week, and it was an interesting change of pace. Still not my cup of tea (I ended just below even for the two sessions), but I think it's a good thing to come back to every now and again. Limit is the place for good, solid, standard, ABC poker: nothing fancy about it.

Session time: 5 hours

Saturday I took a skate around Greenlake park, had some lunch, and around 2:30 headed up to the Tulalip. As I was sitting down to play (waited less than 5 minutes), a line of about 20 people came streaming through the doors to get on the poker lists. Within minutes the $1/$2 list was about 10 deep.

I played that session through the night / morning, and ended up leaving the casino around 6am.

Saturday to Sunday session time: 15 hours

Well, Sunday;s action didn't disappoint! Though I got their later than usual (7:00pm), I was sat within 5 minutes. Awesome action. Awesome. The $1/$2 game dwindled from 3 tables to 2 down to 1, and let me tell you: the 4am-7am table was juiiiiccceeyy!! That game never broke, and at 1pm on Memorial Day, there was a list about 10 deep for $1/$2.

Session time: 18.5 hours

And I have no clue how I am keeping my eyes open right now. Matter of fact I've been drifting in and out on occasion, and when I do it's interesting because whatever dreamlet starts going through my head starts to come out in what I'm typing (yes, I can type with my eyes closed and apparently half-conscious).

Poker goal / hand analysis:

Aggressive deep stack 6-handed home game. $0.50/$0.50 blinds, $100-200 buy in.

UTG: big stack ($300), very aggressive player. Apart from big hands, he has not had to show down many. Smart player.

SB: $130. Tight, careful player. Less aggressive than the other 5, but the only big re-raise he's put in were holding the nuts.

Hero on button: $150; tricky, slightly unorthodox image; winners I've recently shown down vary from 94o to flopped boats, turned flushes; successful bluffs I've shown down range from 2 overs to nothing near the board. I have a good feel for the risk-tolerance of the rest of the table; my steal-raises and re-raises have been spot-on all night, as have my value bets. I was way on top of my game: not to toot my own horn too much, but it was some of the best poker I've played in a while.

UTG raises to $2 (standard raise); Hero re-raises to $6 with AJ0. SB looks and thinks I open-raised to $6, comments "that's a big opening raise OK I call" (comma intentionally left out as he didn't speak it). He then sees that I reraised and says "Oh, that makes sense then."; UTG also calls.

FLOP: 9c Th Qh

SB bets $12; UTG instacalls. HERO announces raise; calls the $12, considers the pot, and raises $50. SB stares down HERO for a good 2 minutes. SB announces All In. UTG shows his cards to his neighbor and says "can you believe I have to throw this away?"

I ask for a count, it's $100 even to call.

I can't put him on KJ or J8: he's WAAAYYY too tight to call what he perceived to be a preflop overraise with these. It's possible he has AK/AQ/TT/99/QQ/KK/AA. Outside of these hands, all of which are ahead of me, I can't figure anything else out.

possibilities

I need an 8 or a K for the probable nuts. That's 8 outs, twice. ~32% to the winner. Slight chance an A will give me a winner, though I'm not convinced so I won't count that, and I have no backdoor flush.

And unfortunately, my emotions ran too hot for me to properly do simple math. See, I'm fairly bad at the math-end of poker (perhaps why I suck at limit). If I had done the math, I would have seen that I was being asked to call $100 to win $242. I was getting 2.42 to 1, which really meant that all I needed was a better than 29% chance to win to make the call. I actually had the perfect odds to call. Even if I was down to 7 outs, I would have been right at the borderline to call.

I mucked. And then unfortunately I paid $1 to see his cards. Guess what he had?

AJ.

Because I failed the math, I let myself get outplayed.

NEW POKER GOAL: become proficient at quickie pot-odds calculations, even under intense scrutiny and emotional duress.

FU FTP

I just got creamed by the FTP RNG.

First up: I got check/raised all-in on the flop:



Next up:
flop: Bet pot / call. Turn: bet pot / call. River: 1/2 pot, ALL IN....reluctant call:

I can almost understand the turn call: at least then he had a gutshot, but the flop?


LAST: preflop, UTG raises I RR, UTG calls. UTG check/raises all in on the flop.


I swear 1/2 the yahoos out there think a preflop raise must only mean AK, so no A and no K on the flop = golden.

I have run AMAZINGLY HORRIBLE online over the last month. My roll has been severely depleted. SEVERELY. Like the lowest it's been since my first deposit.

And don't read this post wrong: I love love LOVE all these plays by my opponents. Just the magnitude of the suckouts was kinda gross.

Oh, this was over 3 tables, over about an hour. And only the highlights. :)

Live 6 max this weekend

Sunday should be interesting: one of the guys on the Microsoft poker discussion list is putting together a regular deep stack 6-max home game: $0.25/$0.50 blinds with a $100-$200 buy in.

And I honestly have no idea what to expect. I know the guy organizing it plays higher than that: he's a Tulalip $3/5 regular. And I don't know if that means he's better than $1/2 players, or that he just has the money to risk more. I mean - I never felt out matched at the $3/5 games: I don't believe there's a ton of skill difference from the average $1/2 player to the average $3/5 player.

I'm not used to short-handed play, and am not sure what types of adjustments I'll need to make. I'm honestly anticipating come out of there lighter: I'm really hoping the caliber of play is going to be higher than I usually play. I need to learn more about this game, and if I play better players I'm bound to both learn, and lose - for a time at least.

The main difference won't be the stakes, though, but the stacks: I'm not used to playing against maybe one other deep stack. I don't know how much to adjust my play because of that.

I may do some strategy reading online the next couple of days, hoping to find something that'll help me out somewhat.

Live play: Tulalip $1/$2

Over the past 1.5 months I logged 7 live sessions, with 2 wins and 5 losses for a grand total of -$257. Not great. Not horrible, but not great.

I had been playing very well, I thought. But I took last weekend off, and the week away from the tables gave me time to reflect, and found what I thought were some leaks. Well, the two major ones were: 1) playing too many hands, and 2) bluffing players who were incapable of folding top pair no kicker. Simple stuff. Basic discipline.

Tonight, I logged two wins: 1 for $676, and one for $28 (at a local casino playing $2-40 spread).

Tulalip $1/$2.

Got sat not ten minutes after arriving, which is awesome. When I got to the table, I had to ask again if it was 1/2 or 3/5: two players had over $500 in front of them. One woman had $500 in green $25 chips alone! You don't see this too often in a game with a max buy-in of $100.

Table seemed pretty gambly, which meant that the best course of action was to tighten up and pick my spots; avoid marginal hands OOP, and value bet my strong hands on every street. Standard poker.

Pot of the night:

UTG with 44, make it $6 to go and 3 of us go to the flop:

FLOP: 934 rainbow

I don't like to slow play here: I lead out $10; folds to the button who raises to $30. I'm guessing an over pair, and knowing what I know from him in the past, he'll call most anything I put out there if he's got an over pair. I raise to $80, and he re-raises to $180.

This re-raise really got me. I took my time and thought about this. I started the hand with about $320. I start to consider whether I've got the underset: whether he really has 99. I begin to wonder how deep our stacks need to be to consider folding a set here.

Once I decide to call (spread-limit, so betting is capped after the 3rd raise), I take a little time to count out the chips and figure out how to get him to call for the rest of my chips: if he's got 99 then oh well, I reload.

I say "I call, and I'm all in blind on the turn." He INSTAcalls.

TURN:
[934] 6

RIVER:
[9346] 9

Villain: shows 88 for two pair, 8's and 9's
HERO: shows 44 for a full house, 4's full of 9's.

I've played this guy like 3 times over the past couple months, and won large pots from him each time. He says that here he put me solidly on AK, and figured I was trying to push him off his hand. It's amazing that he didn't consider the fact that I could have simply had 99/TT/JJ/QQ/KK either!

Thing is: in this guy's eyes, I'm the guy that raised on the button with 64o and almost cracked his KK when I flopped 2 pair (over a month ago). In his eyes, I'm the guy who will call or raise with seemingly any two cards, and an UTG "standard" 3x's raise means AK or some odd 10-7 or 9-6 etc.

Somehow, to him, I'm the guy who tries to buy pots with big bets. He apparently hadn't noticed how locked-down I was playing this session. Of course, this was also helped by the fact that earlier in the session I re-raise-shoved on the flop with nothing but a draw, was called, and got there. Thing is, in that situation I read the hands perfectly and was a mathematical favorite to win. He saw me push with a draw; I saw me value-betting. He probably considers me reckless.

I'm happy to have this reputation! :)