How to be luckier (part 1): Perspective

This is the first part of a new series for my blog in which I will take some thoughts from my head and attempt to explain them in words. Hopefully I will make some sense along the way.

How lucky are you?

Luck is an ever present force in poker. Every big pot you lose after starting with the best hand is a cruel reminder of the terrible injustice present in this universe. 

But luck is a difficult concept to pin down. Are some people luckier than others? If I experience good luck today should I consider myself lucky and expect more good luck tomorrow? Or does it all balance out - so good luck today means bad luck tomorrow?

Wikipedia defines luck as "good fortune which occurs beyond one's control, without regard to one's will, intention or desired result."

So luck is a name we give to outcomes beyond our control. However, I think we often jump to conclusions about luck before we consider all of the outcomes.

For example, imagine you're traveling home on a cold, dark night and you're running as fast as you can to catch the last bus of the day. Just as you arrive the bus pulls away from the station and you're stranded, forced to spend the night in a cheap B&B with no wi-fi and a lumpy mattress. Pretty unlucky, right?

At breakfast the following morning you read the papers and find out that the bus crashed. Luckily, (there's that word again) no one was killed, but everyone sustained minor injuries. I bet you feel pretty lucky that you missed that bus now.

Weeks later you find out that the passengers sued the bus company and all received thousands of pounds in compensation - all for a few scratches and bruises! Missing that bus has cost you thousands of pounds! How unlucky!

NOW suppose that the excess money leads all of those passengers to develop dangerous drug addictions... (OK, I think we can stop there).

The point is that the perception of luck is a matter of perspective. In this example our perspective changed because of unforeseen future outcomes. Often we jump to conclusions prematurely.

Let's apply this logic to poker. Imagine I'm on the bubble of a $100 6-max SNG and all three players have equal chip stacks. I end up getting all my money in pre-flop with AA vs an opponent with KK.

Pretty lucky right? There's no way my opponent could have folded KK, and if the hands had been reversed they would've been played the same way. So I was really lucky to get my money in as a huge favourite, rather than a huge underdog.

But wait... before I've even finished my fist pump the board brings an unlikely third king and I bust out of the tournament. Talk about unlucky! Why do I even bother? I can't even win when I'm a huge favourite! The idea that I could have just as easily had the kings is long gone and I now feel cursed by the universe.

OK, the tournament is over and I lost, so there can be no more future outcomes to change our perspective, right?

But wait... because I busted I finished that game early. So maybe I start the next game earlier, and that sets me off on a chain of different games, decisions and outcomes that I wouldn't have been on had I won the first SNG. What if I go on to win the next 10 SNGs in a row? I wouldn't have even played those games if I'd won the first game, so now I feel pretty lucky (or at least I probably should).

Poker is one long session. Until you stop playing for good future outcomes are never fully decided. The influence of that first game would continue into my next session and set me on a different life path. Is it a better or worse path? There's no way of knowing. So why worry about it?

One final example, what if after I lose that first game I go on to lose every other game for the rest of the day and feel tilted and depressed. I guess that has to be somewhat unlucky?

Well again, there's no way to truly know. Naturally I would have preferred that not to happen, but it's not the end of my lifelong poker session yet. Besides, poker isn't the be all and end all. I can take a step back and remind myself that I was born in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. That I have a family who loves me. That I was lucky enough to get married this year to my best friend in the world. That I get to play poker for a living. That I have cats. That I ate a delicious slice of chocolate cake 10 minutes ago. The list goes on!

My point is that luck is not only a matter of perspective, but that we also have a choice in where we base our perspective. Eventually, whether I consider myself to be lucky or unlucky isn't down to external events, it's down to me!

TL;DR Luck is a matter of perspective, and it's often difficult to know which perspective is correct due to unknowable potential future outcomes. Because of that, perception of luck is often a choice.

 

Hopefully that made sense. Next Friday I'll cover the next installment in the series: How to be luckier (part 2): Hard work.

 

Until next time, good luck.

David

Why So Serious?

After a solid start to the year Poker has really taken a back seat for me over the summer. Between running around like a madman planning my wedding, getting married, going on honeymoon, family holidays and catching up with friends I didn't put in many long sessions at the tables.

But now the summer is over, the nights are drawing in, and it's time to get serious about poker again. For the remainder of the year I plan to treat poker like a business and do some serious grinding! In particular I plan to focus on:

- Building and maintaining a more consistent routine

- Learning a new game (HU Hyper Turbos)

- Working on my mental game

- Working on my poker game away from the tables

Combined, all of these activities will help me to maximise my hourly rate in the months ahead.

As part of my new routine I'm going to update my blog every Friday. I've had a few suggestions and I've got some good ideas for blog posts, so look out for them in the weeks ahead!

I'm going to start by taking a look at an interesting hand I played this week:

PokerStars Hand $58.74+$1.26 USD Hold'em No Limit - Match Round I, Level III (20/40) -
Table '611403004 1' 2-max Seat #1 is the button
Seat 1: Villain (525 in chips)
Seat 2: Albumfiller (475 in chips)
Villain: posts small blind 20
Albumfiller: posts big blind 40
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Albumfiller [5c Kd]
Villain: calls 20
Albumfiller: checks
*** FLOP *** [7h 3c 4s]
Albumfiller: checks
Villain: bets 50
Albumfiller: calls 50
*** TURN *** [7h 3c 4s] [4d]
Albumfiller: checks
Villain: bets 160
Albumfiller: calls 160
*** RIVER *** [7h 3c 4s 4d] [Ac]
Albumfiller: checks
Villain: bets 275 and is all-in
Albumfiller: calls 225 and is all-in
Uncalled bet (50) returned to Villain
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Villain: shows [9c Qd] (a pair of Fours)
Albumfiller: shows [5c Kd] (a pair of Fours - Ace+King kicker)
Albumfiller collected 950 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 950 | Rake 0
Board [7h 3c 4s 4d Ac]
Seat 1: Villain (button) (small blind) showed [9c Qd] and lost with a pair of Fours
Seat 2: Albumfiller (big blind) showed [5c Kd] and won (950) with a pair of Fours

To provide some context there had been a fair amount of back and forth so far in the match and the villain is a fish who had been playing particularly aggressively post-flop.

Pre-flop on the button Villain was raising around 55% of his hands and limping around 25%. K5o will be well ahead of his limping range and a strong case could be made for taking a more aggressive line and shoving pre-flop (as my hand has good showdown value but isn't easy to play post flop). On this occasion I opted to check and see a flop.

The flop is actually a pretty good one for my hand. With our villain folding the bottom 20% of his range he won't have connected with this board too often. Since I expect the villain to raise all aces, kings and pairs pre-flop I can expect my king high to be good here a lot of the time. On top of that I also have a gutshot straight draw for a little extra equity in the rare cases where I'm behind, so it's an easy flop call vs an aggressive villain.

The turn pairs the board. Good news - if I was ahead on the flop I'm still ahead now. The villain now fires 160 into a pot of 180. This large bet really polarises his range to include mainly very strong hands or complete air. Against some opponents this bet size would set alarm bells ringing, but against a villain with an aggression factor of 8.0 it's less cause for concern. 

What value hands is he representing? An overpair that was limped pre-flop, a flopped straight, a flopped set (now a full house), or trip fours. I think it's unlikely he would make such a big bet with a pair of sevens (especially as we can discount A7 from his range). Furthermore I expect with all of those value hands the villain would be likely to bet less in order to entice me to call. Add to that the fact that I expect him to continue with almost all of his bluffs and this looks like a pretty straightforward call.

Finally on the river the ultimate scare card comes - the dreaded ace. This is actually a good card for me. In the unlikely event the villain was betting a seven or a limped overpair I would now expect him to check (the ace being a scare card for our villain and also A high should be a large part of my perceived range). When villain bets here it's even more likely to be a bluff than it was on the turn, and I was actually able to snap call.

I earned some abuse in the chat box from our charming villain for the call down, but when I break the hand down and look at all of the variables I'm happy with the way I played.

Feel free to call me a fish in the comments if you disagree!

Good luck

David

Half Year Review 2012

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!

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.

Advanced SNG Tactics - Calling Wide on the Bubble

Today I'd like to take some time to "give something back" to the poker community by explaining an exciting new strategy I have developed to exploit aggressive regs on the bubble of 6-max SNGs. Let me just preface it by saying that this is an advanced strategy and not for the faint of heart!

Let's look at an example from a SNG I played recently.

***** Hand History for Game 11705492463 *****
NL Texas Hold'em $109 USD Buy-in Trny: 69050498 Level: 5  Blinds(150/300)
Table Speed #2094209 (Real Money)
Seat 2 is the button
Total number of players : 3/6
Seat 5: Hero ( 5,400 )
Seat 3: Villain ( 6,000 )
Seat 2: Player 3 ( 600 )
Trny: 69050498 Level: 5
Blinds(150/300)
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero[  Jc 8s ]
Player 3 folds
Villain is all-In  [5,850]
Hero calls [5,100]
** Dealing Flop ** [ Jh, 2c, Th ]
** Dealing Turn ** [ 3h ]
** Dealing River ** [ 8c ]
Villain shows [ Kc, Kd ]a pair of Kings.
Hero shows [ Jc, 8s ]two pairs, Jacks and Eights.
Villain wins 600 chips from the side pot 1 with a pair of Kings.
Hero wins 10,800 chips from the main pot with two pairs, Jacks and Eights.

Here we're on the bubble of a $109 6-max SNG. So far so good! After the cripple stack folds Villain is going to exploit his big stack by shoving into us super wide. Let's suppose for this example that he's shoving a range of 100% here. Now, conventional strategy would tell us to fold and wait for aces. The problem is that Villain is going to keep shoving and we're going to blind away, looking really stupid in the process.

But hold your hoses, what if we fight fire with fire? What would happen if we exploit Villain by calling 100% of the time? "That's it! David's finally lost it!" I hear you cry, metaphorically. But wait, before you lock me away and throw up the key let's just look at the maths.

Villain is shoving 100%. That means if I call with a range of 100% we will both have exactly the same range.

If we both have the same range then clearly we will both have 50% equity in the pot. 

If we win, we'll double up and be almost guaranteed to cash every single time.

Any good reg will tell you, an "in the money" percentage above 40% in 6-max turbos is excellent, and here we can expect an "in the money" percentage close to 50%! Obviously if we lose then we just chalk it up to a bad beat and move on - there's no point worrying when you lose a coinflip in poker.

When Villain shoved in the example above I put him on a range of something like J7s. That made J8 an even easier call because I have his range dominated (unless he makes a flush). I was actually very unlucky that Villain turned up with KK here, given his wide range. Fortunately the luck evened out on the board and I took it down.

An added bonus with this strategy is that it makes you extremely difficult to read. How can your opponents ever put you on a hand when you could be calling with literally any 2 cards?

Let me know any success stories you have in the comments, and happy hunting!

David

Beats, Brags, Variance and Goals

Well so far the storm I had planned for April / May has been more of a shower. My goal of unlocking all 60 cards in the VIP500 promotion earlier this month was doomed from the start. I started well, grinding close to the required 1500 points for the first couple of days. However, traffic on the party network has been declining this year and it soon became apparent that I wasn't able to get in enough volume during daytime hours, resulting in me changing my schedule to play mainly at peak times (between 4pm and midnight UK time). This was also doomed to failure as there are far too many distractions in the evening to lure me away from poker, resulting in me trying to make up the hours between 12 and 4am when the games are also dead. All round a pretty bad idea!

 

Beat

Unfortunately poker has also been taking a back seat to real life. In the last few weeks I had a friend's stag do, his wedding, a wedding shower (for my fiance), a couple of family birthdays, a meeting with our wedding planner, buying our wedding rings, the list goes on! Of course I could have made my apologies and skipped some of these events, but one of the best things about being a poker player is having the flexibility to make time for friends and family. Of course the flexibility of being a poker player is both a gift and a curse. It's easy to blame external events but really it's my responsibility to build a proper routine and find time to put the hours in.

Brag
On the plus side I finally hit 100,000 points which means I can unlock the $20k bonus from the WPT store. Until now most of the rakeback I have earned this year has been tied up in these points so it will be nice to finally see some of the cash monies. I was also lucky enough to win a free iPad 2 in the VIP500 promotion which should be delivered this week. I'm incredibly excited about this as I've always wanted a tablet but never really been able to justify the cost. Now that it's on it's way I've already made a list of about 30 that I want apps for it. Oops, another distraction from poker!

Variance
When I have been playing I've been enjoying some swings. In the last 4 weeks at the tables I quickly lost $1.5k, then had a nice $5.5k upswing followed swiftly by a $3.5k downswing. All pretty much par for the course when I'm playing so many (super) turbos with a high rake and plenty of regs for company. After rakeback and bonuses I'm still up about $4 or $5k so no complaints.

Goals
I find that I work best under pressure, when I have clear goals with tangible outcomes and rewards. In order to clear the $20k bonus I need to grind another 25,000 WPT points. So my aim is to do that by the 16th of June, grinding approx. 6000 points per week. This will be tough but definitely achievable. The only problem is that (you guessed it) I have a lot on in the next few weeks with my own stag do, my fiance's 21st birthday and, oh yeah, a wedding 6 weeks away! Still, as an incentive if I do manage it I'll be rewarding myself with a TV for the bedroom, which would be pretty sweet.

Here's hoping you run good (unless you're at my table).

David

The Eye of the Storm

So far April seems to have been the calm after the storm. I think I burned myself out more than I realised after putting so much volume in during March. The $4000 pot of gold at the end of the Gladiator rainbow was such a good incentive that I tricked myself into believing I had overcome the motivational issues that have plagued me this year. As it turns out... I haven't, and with the promotion over they are back with a vengeance. The good news is that another promotion is starting next Monday and I plan to get back to some major grinding. So maybe April is really the eye of the storm?

Interestingly, the new promotion is VIP only (Palladium+), and to get max value from it a truly epic grind will be required. Pushing myself hard last month worked really well, so I'm going to give it my best. I'll need to rake $15,000 in 21 days (about 1500 party points per day). I was raking 1200 points per day in March so it should be easy, right? The problem is that I have a friend's wedding and other commitments that will mean I can't play at all on probably 4 of the 21 days, meaning I'll have to rake closer to 1800 points per day, which will be really tough. As I'm typing this I read an interesting quote on the Party Poker thread on 2p2:

I was thinking about grinding those 60 cards but then i realized i don't hate myself that much.

 -OMGKaraScott

A fair point. I'm going to hit it hard for the first week and see how things go. On the plus side if I succeed I think all the bonuses will tally up to over $10,000 (depending how lucky I am with the random prizes). Not bad for 3 week's work!

Although I haven't been playing a lot of poker this month I've been using my time fairly productively getting on with wedding plans, home improvement and spending time with friends and family. I've also upgraded my setup with a new PC tower. I went for a fairly basic model and with the help of a friend installed a better graphics card and an SSD to run my OS and all my poker software. So far I'm loving the SSD: Windows 7 Ultimate loads completely in under 10 seconds and it should handle mass multi-tabling a lot better than my poor laptop. I'll post a few pictures of my setup in a future post.

So wish me luck for grinding my ass off for the next 3 weeks! Today I just feel like doing this...

Palladium Elite, Gladiator and Pussies

Well so much for more regular updates in 2012! Must try harder...

Poker Updates

At the start of the year my plan was to multi-site Pokerstars and Party Poker, with the aim of retaining my Supernova status on Stars whilst attaining Palladium Elite status on Party. I found it harder than I expected to juggle 2 sites, so I've focussed most of my attention on Party. As a result I sadly lost my Supernova status at the end of March. However, I was successful in attaining Palladium Elite on Party.

Turbo SNGs on Party have very short levels which leads to smaller edges and lower attainable ROIs. Therefore my income this year will be much more dependent on rakeback. Fortunately, in my experience so far, Party have been really good at providing regular bonuses and promotions.

In March Party Poker ran a huge promotion called Gladiator. This promotion was heavily dependent on volume of play, leading to a lot of grinder regs making the games extremely tough. A lot of the turbo games running were -EV to play pre-rakeback. However, with all the bonuses I accrued translating to a rakeback percentage of over 80% there was still a lot of money to be made.

Raking $15,000 in a month to reach my Gladiator goal meant some serious grinding, so in March I put in a lot more volume than I ever have in a single month. Pushing myself in that way has been a real eye-opener for me to realise what I'm capable of, and I plan to push myself to keep volume high throughout the year. So far including all rakeback and bonuses I'm up around $22k this year. I'm actually above EV (!) although I'm down a bit at the $109s and $210s. Fingers crossed for some run good in those in the months ahead. My EV line in Party turbos is worryingly low, although perhaps partly due to the toughness of the games in March. I think card distribution is also a massive factor in those games so it's hard to know how much to read into it.

Life Updates

In other news, my fiance and I bought 2 kittens at the end of 2011 which we've named Leia and Starbucks. I've never been a big animal lover, but these two have really won me over. They're playful, full of personality and good company. It's hard to be too annoyed by a downswing with a kitten purring on my lap.

I'm also very excited for the return of Game of Thrones this month. I started reading the books last summer and pretty much lived and breathed them for a few months. For anyone who hasn't checked out the books or the show I highly recommend both!

Good luck at the tables

David