Been a while

It's been a long time since I blogged, over a year, and I haven't made a dollar since. My roll is $168, been up to $4k though, and it's been up and down since then. This is a low point. And I don't think I tilted today...well one or two hands lol but I just got owned by a huge fucking donkey and ran terribly.

Today I'll start over from .02c/.05c or .5c/.10c and see how that works for me. I'll be posting interesting hands and such and reflect on my play.

I play on FTP and get rakeback now so that's a big plus.

Sick Heater

It's been a little over a week since my last post. Why you may you ask? Reread the title. Despite playing generally poorly after moving up to 2c/5c NL, I have been hitting my cards again and again and again. Granted, I did have some coolers but the overall result has been running 10 buy-ins above EV. It is a welcome experience after more than my fair share of downswings in the past 50k hands. When looking at this graph, please keep in mind that 10k hands are missing close to the end because I had to reformat last weekend due to a really annoying computer problem that has only lessened in severity.

I'm at about $125 at time of writing, playing a bit of PLO 6-max, which I must say I feel I'm getting really good at. The fast-paced and aggressive nature of the game suits my personality quite well. However, I am afraid that tilt will be an inevitable factor when the swings come. It's also strange that, while I am a winning player at full ring Hold Em, I suck nutsacks at PLO full ring. I just retreat into an uber-tight shell and become totally lost on what to do with anything but the total nuts. Tne blinds end up eating me up after a long session. In 6-max, however, I can make calls with stuff like top-and-bottom two pair and bottom set. PLO is a great game in my opinion and I hope to get really good at it later on. There is hand in which I am particularly happy about how I played it.

Poker Stars $0.01/$0.02 Pot Limit Omaha Hi - 5 players
The Official [url=http://www.twoplustwo.com/]2+2[/url] Hand Converter [url=http://www.deucescracked.com/?referrer=converter_2p2]Powered By DeucesCracked.com[/url]

[b]CO: $6.10[/b]
BTN: $1.57
Hero (SB): $3.69
[b]BB: $2.75[/b]
UTG: $1.06

[b]Pre Flop:[/b] ($0.03) Hero is SB with 7:club: T:diamond: K:spade: Q:club:
UTG calls $0.02, CO calls $0.02, BTN calls $0.02, Hero calls $0.01, BB checks

[b]Flop:[/b] ($0.10) T:club: 2:diamond: T:spade: [color=blue](5 players)[/color]
Hero checks, [color=red]BB bets $0.02[/color], UTG folds, [color=red]CO raises to $0.12[/color], BTN folds, [color=red]Hero raises to $0.40[/color], [color=red]BB raises to $1.42[/color], [color=red]CO raises to $2.44[/color], Hero folds, [color=red]BB raises to $2.73 all in[/color], CO calls $0.29


I don't really know why I raised after the first raise as the raiser was a loose-passive donk and almost certainly wasn't firing air there. I think I was hoping that he had an overpair, but after the action following my 3bet, I knew there was only 1 ten left out there and both these don.ks were playing like they had it. That meant they either had TX and 22 or T2 and 22 and I made the tough decision to fold this baby. As it turns out, it was T2 and 22 but I would've hit my king on the turn.

As for my weekly strategy discussion, I want to discuss betting for protection.

Betting for Protection

As all good NLHE players know, there are only two reasons to bet according to both mathematics and game theory. They are:

1) You bet for value from a worse hand.

2) You bet as a bluff to get better hands to fold.

Different hands have different reasons for betting. For example, 85o on the AT9 rainbow flop is a complete airball, thus if you bet you are betting as a bluff as nothing worse is calling you. However, AA on the same board would qualify as a valuebet as you want calls and reraises. Some hands have value as both, but whichever one is the overarching reason should dictate your play.

But there is a third reason to bet. Mathematically incorrect. betting for protection is still a powerful part of any good player's arsenal. The reason is that you don't want to be faced with a tough decision which can either be slightly +EV or largely -EV. A good example of this is having JJ on a board of 894 when a solid opponent on the button called your raise in Middle Position after you raised UTG. Mathematics tells us clearly that betting here is a mistake as worse hands will not call you most of the time but better hands (ie, a set) will raise. However, unless you have an extremely strong read or usually physical tell on your opponent that tells you whether or not he hit his card or not (and it has to be foolproof or damned close to it), you have to bet here because if you check, your opponent will check his most likely holding (ace-X, where X is a high card) behind but an overcard (QKA) will fall on the turn or river 40% of the time, assuming he has two overcards. If you have TT here and/or he doesn't have overcards, overcards will come well over half the time.

If you check and your opponent check, say the turn comes a 2. You are almost always ahead here. But if a K comes on the turn, you are in a really tough spot. If you're out of position, you will probably bet, but a solid player will often checkraise with a bluff. Do you call? Now you can get outdrawn on the river. Or do you raise and ship your stack in on a suspicious hunch that he is bluffing? Your chances of winning if he has a K are extremely slim, even slimmer if he has a flush draw and one of your jacks is of his draw's suit. If you're in position, let's assume he checks. You bet, he calls/raises. Now what? Or what if bets? Now you're in the same spot as being out of position.

Position can make a big difference in deciding whether or not to bet for protection, which with vulnerable hands like low overpairs you should be doing pretty often. In position, you can see your opponent's moves and gestures (if in a live game). This allows you a lot more freedom in disguising the strength of your hand. Protection betting is even more important in no limit than in in limit, where betting is predictable.

Hope you enjoyed it, cheers!

First Blog Post

Well it's been a week since I started this blog and shamefully no updates yet. Today is going to be the first, however, and boy have I had a stressful week. Tried my hand at $3 6max turbo sngs, lost a quarter of my bankroll before realizing I was way too underrolled for them and decided to get back to cash games and one HORSE tournament/day. I finished 4 off the final table yesterday in 08 while shortstacked. I flopped a weak flush draw and an OESD and decided to chase. Turn gave me my straight, I shoved my slightly-below-average stack and ran into someone with a set who filled up on the river and busted me in 13th place. That put me on major tilt. The big stack who busted me was a major donkey who was barely hanging in there a few minutes ago and hit a few miracle cards to stay in there. Hey, don't get me wrong, I hit a ton of miracles too after being a big-stack-gone-short halfway throughout the tournament. Why HORSE some of you ask? Because NLHE have a huge variance level but the fact that we start with 1800 chips and play limit drastically cuts down on this. The first HORSE MTT I ever played I cashed in 3rd and that was when I fell asleep next to my computer before the final table got formed. I had such a massive stack it took 2 hours to blind me out in 3rd place. I also have a huge edge over 99% of the field as I bave studied every single game and, though not an expert in any, I can say that I am good enough to make a sizable profit each level. My favorite games vary depending on my stack size as certain games favor big stacks (Limit Hold Em) and others favor smaller stacks (Stud 8-or-better). There is also a lack of HORSE literature as opposed to all of the training tools for NLHE so I may be one of the only people in the tournament who understand the fundamentals of each game.

Other than this tournament, I have had a rollercoaster of a week. Starting off playing cash games, I decided to analyze my winnings graph and realized my redline (non-showdown winnings) was insanely low and needed to work on this. I've since started bluffing more and am not used to doing this against the uber-weak fields at .01/.02 NL. I'm slowly finding good spots and such, but I can't say it is totally +EV at the moment. I was running $30 below EV this week for NLHE c games and I speewed out another $4. Finally today the ice thawed and I ran my roll back up to ~$85 after a pretty hot run and some good reads. I'm playing some Pot-Limit Omaha 8-or-better and razz while typing this and looking for some interesting hands to post.

This week, I want to discuss slowplaying. I had a few discussions/arguments about this on the 2+2 forum with most people bashing slowplaying but I think it can be an immensely profitable play. The majority of poker players, however, do not know what kind of boards are good for slowplaying and which are not. So, off to our first poker analysis!

Slowplaying

Definition: Checking or not betting a strong hand strongly to disguise the hand's strength in the hopes of extracting more value from an opponent who misreads the actual strength of the hand.

When: Slowplaying is most effective with a hand that cannot be easily outdrawn or not at all. In Pot Limit Omaha, slowplaying is almost always a disaster as so many cards can come that would totally crush you. In NLHE, it's somewhat of a different story. Say you have quads on a flushed board by the turn and you think your opponent has an ace-high flush draw. If you know he likes to call with bad odds, you would bet a substantial amount into the pot. But let's assume he's a competent player. Now you need to check and represent a weak hand. If the river comes of the same suit as his ace, you will most likely be counting his chips in no time.

In English, you slowplay to get value from an opponent when betting would extract less. The risk can be great and if you often slowplay, you will undoubtedly encounter some of the toughest situations in poker when your straight sees a flushed board on the river or your flush a paired one. The key to SP'ing is to calculate how much you will make if you SP and your opponent's cards will come. For example, if you have a flush by the turn and your opponent a set, you are roughly a 75% favorite here, so 75% of the time, you will lose the money in the pot and then some. But 25% of the time, you may win just the pot or extract even more money. Now, this is the type of slowplaying where if your opponent hits his card, it cripples you or pretty much counterfeits your hand. There is a second type of slowplay, a generally more effective one:

The Impervious Slowplay: Although there isn't really an accepted name for it, this is what I call it. It's when you give a free card to an opponent when you doubt any or most cards can damge you. A good example is having the ace-high flush by fourth and your opponent has the K of hearts. You want to extract value here so you could either charge him or slowplay. For slowplaying to earn more money than betting, you have to extract 5x more money from him when he hits than when he doesn't. Easier said than done for sure.

Good Board to Slowplay:

You hold Ks Jd. You're on the button after UTG +1 (a donk) limps and button (TAG) limps as well.

The board reads:

Kd Jh 6h

You check, donkey checks, a TAG fires 1/4 pot, donkey calls, you call.

Kh

This is a great time to slowplay! There is a flush out there, you have the nut house, the only thing the TAG could have is 66, JJ, or a K the way he's played. You're ahead of all. How many cards scare you out of the deck? Four out of 44! (4 Jacks + 4 sixes - 2 since he most likely has one of these because u hold a K) So 1/11 times you will be faced with a tough choice and 10/11 times you will be grabbing his chip stack.

Bad board to Slowplay:

PokerStars Game #25649563300: Hold'em No Limit ($0.01/$0.02) - 2009/03/05 21:51:15 ET
Table 'Tavastia III' 9-max Seat #2 is the button
Seat 1: Rob Roll ($4.63 in chips)
Seat 2: nanostar ($1.10 in chips)
Seat 3: ku12 ($2.83 in chips)
Seat 4: laura_abley ($0.92 in chips)
Seat 5: Bu1L ($1.11 in chips)
Seat 6: urbansprawle ($4.14 in chips)
Seat 7: BlueGuy52 ($2.89 in chips)
Seat 9: rafin19 ($5.45 in chips)
ku12: posts small blind $0.01
laura_abley: posts big blind $0.02
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to urbansprawle [Ks Qc]
Bu1L: calls $0.02
urbansprawle: raises $0.10 to $0.12
BlueGuy52: folds
rafin19: folds
Rob Roll: calls $0.12
nanostar: folds
ku12: folds
laura_abley: folds
Bu1L: calls $0.10
*** FLOP *** [4d Qs Kc]

I had both villains as very TAGgy and thought they would only continue if they hit an ace or two pair. Now, if an ace comes, I will be scared of the AQ or JT that checks here. I made the mistake of not protecting my hand here and ended up losing a big pot when a ten hit the river and my opponent pushed me all-in and flashed AJ. This is one of those boards where you will rarely win a big pot because of your opponents' tendencies, but slowplaying is still a mistake.

Well, that's it for today (or at least for now) until I get some more interesting stuff to post here. Hope you enjoyed it!

Glossary

As promised, here are some common terms I will use:

2+2: Short for twoplustwo.
3bet: To rereraise or to raise a raise preflop.
Cbet: To bet out of position on the flop or in position after a check.
Dead Money: Money left in the pot by players who have folded.
Donkbet: To bet a small amount of the pot, looking like a call hoping to induce a call.
Donk(ey): A bad player.
EV: Short for Expected Value; how much value you expect your action to be earning you in the long run.
Equity: How much money a certain play will earn you in the long run.
Fish: Bad player.
(Coin) Flip: A play made with about a 50% chance of winning.
Fold Equity: How much money a bluff will make; how often one will fold and concede the pot to another.
FTP: Short for fulltiltpoker.com
Hero: The player.
ICM: Independent Chip Model. A mathematical way of comparing your hand's equity in SNG to
how much actual money, not chips, it will earn you in the long run.
LAG: The opposite of TAG. A LAG plays many hands, bluffs often, and usually loves to gamble.
MTT: Multi-table tournament. A tournament with 90+ players.
OPR: Official Poker Rankings. Used by SNG players to obtain stats on opponents; as I am not an SNG player, mine are poor.
PFR: The percentage of the time someone raises preflop.
SNG: Sit-N-Go: A small tournament with under 90 players, usually between 2 and 10.
Stars: Short for pokerstars.com
Swing: Variance at play. Deviation from expected value.
TAG: Tight-aggressive player. Someone who plays few hands, and plays only good cards for the most part.
Valuebet: A bet made hoping to extract money with a good hand.
Variance: The deviation from what a person's EV is supposed to be.
Villain: Opponent.
VP$IP: Voluntarily put $ Into Pot: the percentage of the time som calls/raises preflop.

Independent Chip Model. A mathematical way of comparing your hand's equity in SNG to how much actual money, not chips, it will earn you in the long run.

The Beginning

Poker is everywhere these days. Blogs are everywhere these days. It is inevitable that we will have poker blogs. Just about every micro grinder with aspirations of ever playing in Bobby's Room has made their own blog about poker, mainly NLHE. This blog is not of the standard bankroll challenge variety, but is intended to be a hybrid of solid strategy, inspiring stories, and well, the bankroll challenge :).

Before I write my first "real" blog spot, I think it's only right for me to introduce myself. I am Raphael John, a .01/.02 NL grinder on Pokerstars under the name urbansprawle (they couldn't fit the r at the end of the name) and urbansprawler on twoplustwo.com. My SNG/MTT record is pretty poor; although most of this can be directly attributable to the small sample size, I will admit I am far better at cash games than I at tournaments. 3 months ago, I deposited $75 on full tilt and blew it all. After reading some poker articles from kingcobrapoker, I redeposited $37 on pokerstars and, 50k hands later, have $101. That said, I know how hard it is for losing poker players when they start out. Even with all of the learning tools and books out there, it's difficult to sift through the absolute nonsense and the actual good stuff. When I was starting out, kingcobrapoker helped instill some good concepts in me that have fueled my partial success. This blog will demonstrate that the kingcobrapoker methods are effective and will also serve as an extension of the website.

On this blog, I will post interesting hands from the day as well as feedback I have received on various forums and will talk strategy sometimes. If a big tournament has just played out, or something big is going on in the poker world, I will talk about this as well and I hope you, the reader, can take away a decent amount of information from this site.

First and foremost, even before I talk about any poker, I must recommend to anyone serious about poker to purchase either Pokertracker 3 or Hold Em Manager. I personally use the latter, but unfortunately it only works for NLHE and not the other games I often play, so if you are a mixed game player, pokertracker is the better choice. However, if you will focus mainly on Hold Em, HEM is the way to go as it is a bit more powerful than PT3 and also a little cheaper. A lot of people will read this and disregard this as advertising and will think they can pull of stellar reads without the programs. I was once one of these myself and, for one or two tables, a good player will most likely be able to do this, but when you're playing 12 tables at once like me, some kind of tracking software is not an option, it's an absolute must. Some of the advantages of this are:

1) Less effort remembering people's actions, thus allowing you to use valuable time for difficult decision.

2) Better hand history recall. Odds are you won't recall most hands you've played with someone from over a week ago. A program will.

3) Allows you fine-tune your game. The program will provide you with easy-to-use and highly complex statistics to tweak the percentages of whatever you do (cbet, double-barrel, etc.) to increase your overall profitability and also provide some nice-looking graphs ^_^.

That's it for now. My next post will be a glossary of poker terms I will often use. Good luck at the tables!