Half Year Review 2012
Apologies for the long delay between posts. The last couple of months have been rather busy as I got married and went on honeymoon. I'll cover all that in another post, but for now let's have a long overdue look at my adventures in the first half of 2012.
Party time!
This year I have been playing the vast majority of my games on the Party Poker network. Overall, after playing on stars and a couple of smaller sites I have to say I've been pretty impressed with Party. From what I've seen they tend to get a bad rap on the forums, and perhaps it's true that given their early market dominance they should be in a better position than they are, but really there's not a huge amount to for me complain about. Yes, the software is a little flawed compared to Pokerstars, but it's a lot better than most. Yes, the rake is too high but it's counterbalanced by a decent reward system and some good promotions. And in my experience the oft-bemoaned customer service has been excellent (although admittedly I've only experienced it as a Palladium / Palladium Elite).
Rake and Roll
So far this year the majority of my income has come from rakeback, making me a lowly "rakeback pro". The combination of a high rake, a poor structure and a lot of regs in the party turbos mean that the edges are very small. I think a long term ROI above 0% in these games is fairly respectable, and in fact the majority of turbo regs on Party are losing players pre-rakeback.
So I'm pretty pleased to be up about $6k for the year in the $33 and $55 turbos pre-rakeback (having raked over $28k in them). Unfortunately in the high stakes games I'm down $4k for the year pre-rakeback. After starting strong I've run really bad in them, and it's especially disappointing as the structure in those is slightly better and I table select them more carefully.
The graph below is January to June, and makes it pretty clear that the majority of my income this year is rakeback (the top line). I'm pretty much breaking even at the tables, which I think is fine as I'm mainly playing super turbos. I'm also excited to report that so far this year I've run above EV! I think in the super-turbos card distribution is also very important, so I don't know how lucky / unlucky I've been overall, but it certainly looks like I've been winning more showdowns than I deserve to.
HU 4 Rollz
I've really enjoyed playing on the Party Network but unfortunately the 6-max games seem to have been declining steadily over the last few months. Lately I'm finding it difficult to get in enough volume, especially if I don't want to sit with 4 or 5 other regs in every $55 turbo. I'm also starting to feel as though I've stopped growing as a poker player recently: I'm very familiar with the 6-max format so I find myself increasingly slipping into auto-pilot and making sub-optimal or lazy plays.
Therefore it seems like a good time to diversify, and with that in mind I'm going to be trying to learn to play the Heads Up Hyper Turbos on Stars profitably. It promises to be an exciting new challenge and I expect it to require quite a different approach / skillset to maximise profits. More on that in the coming weeks!
Life good, Poker bad
After an amazing wedding and a great honeymoon "my wife" (still a novelty) and I have really been walking on air and feeling happier / more content than ever. Sadly, this seems to have coincided with probably my worst run of the year at the tables. So far, since arriving home from honeymoon I've played 13 sessions and 12 of them have been losing. The net loss isn't too bad at around $3k (and certainly standard for the games I'm playing), but I'm finding it difficult to motivate myself to play long sessions as a result. Mental game leaks!
So I'm pretty pleased to be up about $6k for the year in the $33 and $55 turbos pre-rakeback (having raked over $28k in them). Unfortunately in the high stakes games I'm down $4k for the year pre-rakeback. After starting strong I've run really bad in them, and it's especially disappointing as the structure in those is slightly better and I table select them more carefully.
The graph below is January to June, and makes it pretty clear that the majority of my income this year is rakeback (the top line). I'm pretty much breaking even at the tables, which I think is fine as I'm mainly playing super turbos. I'm also excited to report that so far this year I've run above EV! I think in the super-turbos card distribution is also very important, so I don't know how lucky / unlucky I've been overall, but it certainly looks like I've been winning more showdowns than I deserve to.
HU 4 Rollz
I've really enjoyed playing on the Party Network but unfortunately the 6-max games seem to have been declining steadily over the last few months. Lately I'm finding it difficult to get in enough volume, especially if I don't want to sit with 4 or 5 other regs in every $55 turbo. I'm also starting to feel as though I've stopped growing as a poker player recently: I'm very familiar with the 6-max format so I find myself increasingly slipping into auto-pilot and making sub-optimal or lazy plays.
Therefore it seems like a good time to diversify, and with that in mind I'm going to be trying to learn to play the Heads Up Hyper Turbos on Stars profitably. It promises to be an exciting new challenge and I expect it to require quite a different approach / skillset to maximise profits. More on that in the coming weeks!
Life good, Poker bad
After an amazing wedding and a great honeymoon "my wife" (still a novelty) and I have really been walking on air and feeling happier / more content than ever. Sadly, this seems to have coincided with probably my worst run of the year at the tables. So far, since arriving home from honeymoon I've played 13 sessions and 12 of them have been losing. The net loss isn't too bad at around $3k (and certainly standard for the games I'm playing), but I'm finding it difficult to motivate myself to play long sessions as a result. Mental game leaks!
I had a lot more planned to write about, but I'll wrap it up for now. In the next few weeks I'll make a concerted effort to catch up on a few posts.
Until next time, best of luck.
PS. Yes, my strategy blog post was a joke. I had fun writing it and it's lead me to consider writing one
or two more serious strategy posts. If anybody reading this has a good
idea for a topic (serious or comical) then please let me know.
