[Closed] From beginner to adequate! (Currently playing: 12-16tabling NL2 FR Hold'em)

Well, I think I would reraise you here with a big overpair or a set. So I'd assume his range was 88, and either JJ+, or QQ+. Going with the more conservative estimate, we'll say QQ+. (I wouldn't call an UTG raise with 22 or 44)

That gives you a 39.83% equity to win the hand, according to the Equilator. Assuming you each had a stack of 1500, you already invested 500 into the hand. Raising to 200, plus a c-bet of 300. He reraised to 700, and you shoved. So you had 1,000 chips left to shove with. Let's assume that he's never folding here. Would I go all-in with QQ here? At the microstakes, probably. So you have 0% fold equity.

Risking 1,000 chips to gain 3,000 is 33.3%. That means that it's still a plus cEV play, even if you lose your stack most of the time. So now the question is, how much is a stack of 3,000 worth, compared to a stack of 1,500? Now here's the kicker.

According to this thread on 2+2, until you get near the final table, cEV and $EV are practically identical.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/23/small-stakes-mtt/mtt-icm-chipev-vs-ev-186976/

Now as for my own hand, I couldn't calculate it precisely. So I decided to give it a dry board, because I remember it was try, and give both my opponents sets, just to really hammer the point home. I also gave one of my opponents a spade.

So, here's the scenario I set up:

Hero: A :spade:5
Villain 1: 9 :diamond:9
Villain 2: 4 :spade:4
Flop: 9 :spade:4 :heart:2

My equity in this hand was 35.99%. As we've established, risking 1270 chips to win 4100 is a 31% chance. So, even assuming I have a couple of percentage points of margin for error, you made the right play, and so did I.

Of course, this is discounting any skill advantages we may have had, but that's so subjective I chose to ignore that.

Now, naturally, if my ranges are inaccurate, so are my calculations. But I think they're correct: If only a big overpair or set pushes in, you still win out in cEV. Add that to the fact that if you play the micros as well, people might push with hands like A8, I think we have a healthy margin for error in the calculations.

What do you think? (Naturally I wish I could have frozen time and calculated all this when I made the play, but don't we all?)

OK that does it I am going to attend the coaching tonight on how to use the equilator ,then maybe I can do some fancy calculations as well ,cos one way or another I need to know this sort of thing.
cheers Gordy

Sweet, make sure to summarise the cool bits for me :). It's on at some ridiculous time for me. Thanks for the help: hopefully we can help each other be less donkish in the future I'm heading off for the night now: Grindin' time tomorrow, I hope.

Well, it's the beginning of April, so it's time to make some goals for the month. I'd like to step up during April, and dedicate some serious time to Poker, so instead of arbitarily making up numbers, I decided to make up the numbers step by step.

First I asked myself how much time I wanted to devote to Poker. I decided 2 hours a day would be good, so that would be 60 hours in the month. If I want to get good, I need to study quite a bit, so I decided to devote 15-20 of those hours to study. That would leave me with 40 or 45 hours of play.

A 45-man takes about 90 minutes to end. I don't know what my average time is for a 45-man, but I'd guess about 45 minutes would be a good starting point. 45 minutes means 1.33 45-mans per hour, but I 4-table, making it 5.33 per hour. Since I won't be 4-tabling in the first few minutes of a session, or the last ones of a session, I think 5 per hour is managable, meaning I need to do 200 or 225 45-mans in the month.

So now the question is, do I want a 3:1 practice to theory ratio, or a 2:1 ratio? Given that it's the micros and my hourly rate isn't exactly gonna be fantastic anyway, I'm playing to improve, not to make money. However, I'm also someone who learns by doing, and playing Poker is more fun in the end. So it'll be 3:1.

Therefore my goals for April are:

Play 225 45-mans.
Study Poker for 15 hours.

Study includes reading the EDUCATIONAL parts of forums. Reading blogs, not so much. Reading 2+2's best MTT threads, or learning from hand evaluation forums? Yeah, that counts.

Well, I guess I have some grinding to get to.

Had a long session today, played 13 45-mans in succession. I cashed twice, a third and a fifth, and ended up losing 4.40.

Poker is a very hard game to learn and master, and requires huge mental strength. I could play a hundred hours of it and still have no idea if I'm even a winning player! People say it's easy to beat the micros, but when you consider some of the toughest parts of Poker isn't the other players, it's the mental game...it's not as easy as one might think.

I also have about 18 bucks on PokerStars, so I might try some cash games. 4-tabling NL2 BSS. Bad BRM, yes, but I don't care if I lose my Stars bankroll. I'd like to try cash a bit: I thought it was boring, but I enjoy Rush Poker cash, and there are a few things I didn't like the first time around that I then came to love, such as SNG's. Plus, cash games will help me in deepstack MTT's.

So yeah. Having played 19 45-mans, I'm a whopping 55c up in profit ♠_biggrin:. I'm one rich bastard now In any case, I'm enjoying it, and learning, and that's what counts.

That's it for today: I had a lot of thoughts while playing, mostly about the nature of Poker and how truly tough it is to just play competitively, let alone win...but while it's not whining, it would sound a lot like it if I wrote it here. Suffice it to say Poker is hard, and I have more respect than ever for people who do this for a living.

Of course, I'm sure I still have no idea just how hard it truly is. I haven't suffered a big downswing yet.

See you next time!

I'm thinking about trying to learn cash games.

There are a few reasons why, and really one reason against it. I started out thinking cash games were boring, because they basically always stayed the same, but now I realise that you can pick up on how opponents play and such, plus, that was when I was 2-tabling. I realise now that I should play more tables than I would playing SNG's or MTT's. (So I guess I need to practice playing when I cannot see all the tables.)

Essentially, my reasons are:

1) Convenience. Obviously cash games are convenient for short or long sessions. Whenever I want to play, it's game on. I can't count the number of times I've thought "I feel like playing Poker...but I have dinner/a TV show I want to watch in half an hour" and then not played. If I get interrupted or don't feel like playing anymore, I can just quit whenever I want.

2) Connection. I have a connection which cuts out every now and then. When playing SNG's or MTT's, this really sucks, as every hand I'm not playing makes me less likely to win the tournament. In cash games, you can sit out for a hand or two every now and then and your win rate barely suffers (The only thing that changes is a microscopic change to your hourly)

3) Learning. I want to learn to play with deeper stacks, and cash games will certainly help with that.

4) The fourth is far more subtle. I suppose, reading the blogs, seeing the graphs, checking out the hands, and all that has made me soak up the atmosphere of cash games. I like the IDEA of them. Every win or loss being immediately reflected in your success. If you win a flip for 2 bucks, then lose one for 2 bucks, you break even. If you win a flip for 1500 chips, then lose a flip for 1500 chips, who knows where you're at? Only players with decent ICM skills.

I like the idea of measuring one's experience and sample size by hands played, not tournaments. I like the lesser variance in them. I like the idea of having a win-rate per amount of hands played, so if I have a 4bb/100 rate, I know that if I 4-table for an hour, I should come up with exactly this much at the end of it if I did it a thousand times. Sure, that applies to SNG's and MTT's too, but considering the time variance and the regular variance that could take tens of thousands of tournaments to even out.

I guess it's something I just want to have a go at.

My reason for it is fairly obvious: My goal. I have a goal to play 225 MTT's this month, and I'm not sure what I should do about it. Abandon it? Make a new one? Change it to X hours of Poker? Should I go for my original intent, or should I switch to what I'd prefer to play?

In the end, I know what I should do. I just like sharing my thought processes with the six people who shall read this post before my next one goes up

So I guess I'm gonna try cash games. I have a BR of 151.73 at the moment, so I shall play NL2. The reason for this is that I intend to try and find out how many tables I can comfortably play at, and I don't want to have, say, 30 bucks on the table at one time. I guess I should study the cash game articles again, as well, but first, a session.

Who knows, perhaps I'll try it and simply still not like it no matter what I do. I'm gonna go with a 30 BI BRM, moving down whenever I fall to 25 BI. So, for example, once I get used to cash games, I shall play NL5 at 150 bucks, and move down if I fall to 125. If I reach 300, I'll move to NL10, and fall back to NL5 at 250.

I got this from the Stairway to High Stakes image:

Will I actually cash out when it says? Probably not, unless I move up quick enough that I don't feel comfortable moving up because I might just be getting lucky. We shall see what happens: Getting a bit ahead of myself, as I would have to actually get to 250 bucks first.

Well, thanks for reading my long-ass post. One last thing is that Full Tilt Poker is currently running a Take 2 promotion. From April 8 - April 17, each day, it tracks if I earn at least 5 FTP from cash games. I have to be playing at least 2 tables, or a Rush Poker table. If I succeed in 5 of those 10 days, I get 5 bucks. If I succeed in 9 of them, I get an additional 20 bucks, for a total of 25. Can't pass up money that's so easy! Very handy that this promotion starts in a few days, after I consider getting into cash games, considering that I'd hop on a Rush Poker table for this promo even if I didn't normally play cash. 25 bucks is decent money at the uber-micros.

Thanks for reading!

Played a cash game session a couple hours ago. Really enjoyed it, won a few bucks. Ended up playing 1,501 hands. I started out 4-tabling in 2 stacks of two, found I could easily handle it and ended up moving all the way to 12 tables. I was kept pretty busy on 12, but I might put it up to 16 after a couple of weeks. It wasn't hard playing NL2: Bet the good hands, mostly. Of course I'm sure there's a lot of nice +EV situations I was missing, so as I get used to the pace I'll have to incorporate more moves into my repertoire. I enjoyed making decisions at high speeds, and will have to play some more sessions in future.

That's it for the day, I reckon. Short post, yay!

Hi guys. Haven't been playing much Poker lately, only played like, 1200 hands in the last few days. I just finished doing some maths with the aid of this page.

http://www.pokertableratings.com/poker-rake-analysis/no-limit-hold 'em

With it, I've determined that it would actually be more profitable for me to play on Stars than Full Tilt in NL2, NL5, and NL10. This is assuming that even in NL10 I remain BronzeStar, that I don't play long enough to get the 50 dollar bonus at 3,750 VPP's (I'm thinking short term right now) and not using the Academy. Even so, PokerStars comes out a clear winner, though Full Tilt is far better for tournaments. Since I'm A) Nearly at 1,000 FTP which is needed to withdraw my original 50 and B) In the middle of the Take 2 promotion, I'm going to finish the Take 2 promotion on Full Tilt, then withdraw and move over to Stars. I earn a few more cents per hundred hands on Stars (Or, to be more accurate, lose a few less cents), but 25 bucks is probably equal to like, 50,000 hands worth of savings.

Before I do this though, once I get 9 days of Take 2 done I shall have a test session or two on Stars. I only have 17.44 over there, so I'll 8-table NL2 and see how the software is and what it's like to play a fair few tables there. If I like it, I'll head over to Stars.

In the meantime, I have a session to get to. Gonna 12-table for a couple hours tonight (I tried 16 tables, but I made too many mistakes and so I dropped back down to 12) and get the points needed for Take 2.

So I guess I have some new goals for this month:

Get 25 bucks in the Take 2 promotion
Decide whether or not to switch to Stars.
Get an okay sample size for NL2 to see if I'm winning. (20k hands)

20k hands should take 25-30 hours 12-tabling. Shall adjust the main page now. That's it for today.

Thanks for reading!

Dear god.

Full Tilt Academy, I curse thee forever. I decided to do a long session today, aiming for 2,000 hands. I started 12-tabling, had time to think stuff over with that pace, opened 4 more tables, and was able to handle it, and started blasting through the hands. I then decided at about 1900 hands that I would try and achieve one of the Full Tilt Academy challenge tasks. Get a stack 3x the max buy-in, then leave. So I decided I wasn't tired, I may as well.

At 2:30 am, with 3,500 hands of poker under my belt that session, I finally succeeded in a deservedly grandiose fashion of winning what may be the largest pot I've ever been in, against a 185-ish bb stack (Too bad he folded with 65bb left on the river when I pushed him all-in!) with AA. With 7.13, I left the table and ended the session for the night.

I'm a few bucks down, but I had some pretty bad luck early in the session. While one AA was cracked and I got a cooler or two, I think the real killer was the draws: I don't think a single flush or straight draw got there in 2,500 hands. And I play my draws fairly aggressively, relying on implied odds, so yeah. (That might be a leak in my game actually. If it is, I've been hemorrhaging money from every orifice.)

I also came to the conclusion that stealing the blinds with any ace was probably not a good idea. Fortunately, this idea occurred BEFORE it bit me in the ass.

I also found out that NL2 is not as tight as I assumed it was. I have JJ, and the flop comes up something like T72. My opponent bets, I re-raise, he shoves. I type "Well, I think I'm behind, but I don't think I can fold here". I then call, and my opponent reveals...KQs. With a backdoor flush draw. He did not get there. I just cannot get into the head of that play. Middle pair, sure. But overcards and a backdoor flush draw against a flop re-raise...not so much.

More evidence supports this below:

Pictured above: Matching wits with the elite shortstackers of NL2.

Well, I'm now at 4.750 hands for this month already, thanks to that monstrous session I am unlikely to repeat in the near future. (Mind you, six months from now I'll probably be doing 6,000-hand, 4-hour sessions consistently and laugh at my endurance now :P)

(Yeah I wish)

Once I get to the end of the month I shall download a copy of Elephant. Don't want to be tempted to look at my win rate until then. Well, I am heading to bed, for obvious reasons.

Thanks for reading!

Rather than working on studying heaps atm, I think it's more important for me to be applying concepts to my game. Stuff like when to overbet on the river isn't gonna come up too often, and I've now come up with the solution:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/78/micro-stakes-full-ring/concept-week-schedule-table-contents-397190/

For several years now, 2+2 has had a "Concept of the Week", a guide to a specific area in micro-stakes cash games that is generally applicable to your very next session. Each session, I'll pick one of these concepts, and look for ways to apply it. After a session or two, when I feel it's become part of my game, I'll move on to the next concept. If a concept isn't all that applicable to me, I'll just do a different one.

There are currently 95 concepts, so assuming I only find about 3/4's of them to be applicable, that's still 76 sessions. That'll probably take 6-9 months to go through, by which time there'll be more concepts up, and so on. So if I stick with cash games, I should have over a hundred new additions to my game in a year. Poker is a game of small edges, and I'm going to gain HEAPS of them. I've already looked at a few of them, and here are the first few I shall do:

Using PokerStove; a video course in ranges and equity (probably not applicable to me, but I will watch the video to learn about ranges anyway. I play too many tables to use PokerStove, and I'm not ready to put in the effort to learn those ranges and equities intuitively yet)

Table Selection. (Oh HELL YES. Can you say "Ship it?")

Preflop Positional Awareness. (See above. This is why I started with the beginning. Holy crap this stuff will be useful)

Blind Stealing. (Potentially the best of the lot.)

So in a week or two, I should be able to:

Select the best tables to sit at
Abuse my position and play more hands correctly
Steal blinds a lot looser than I do now (Which will make a huge difference)

And that's just the first week or two, so I am quite optimistic for this. I've already read Table Selection, Preflop Positional Awareness and Blind Stealing, and it's good stuff. But the key is applying it to my game, the part of studying I've been missing.

No poker today, just a sweet idea for later. Hoping to get a session in tomorrow though (And I shall learn to select tables, yay!)

EDIT: Just realised I missed a day in the Take 2 promotion! DAMMIT! I can't miss another day or I'll miss out on 7.5 BI. On the plus side this gives me plenty of sessions to try out this new idea...must put a note on my comp or something.)

I was tired today so I didn't want to enter the laborious grind of 12-tabling NL2 for the FTP's for Take 2, so I opened 2 Rush Poker Tables. I moved it up to 3 fairly quickly, and had a very short session of 263 hands. Despite the fact that I was playing about 12 tables worth of hands per hour, I was able to play FAR better, as I could take my time postflop, and think things through. I was able to make several bets that I normally would not have seen, and extract good value from that. That combined with excellent luck (I got several sets, flush draws paid off, etc, and only got coolered once, with the hilarious JJ 9JQ flop running into QQ) actually doubled my stacks on average. So I earnt 15.01 in a single Rush Poker session.

I hope I'm not being results oriented here, but even with average luck I still think I would have come up a decent amount ahead. This is a reason to stay on Full Tilt: I forgot how fun Rush Poker is. My problem with Rush Poker was my inability to learn stuff like reads, but when I'm 12-tabling, I simply can't develop that anyway.

It actually seems like a very pure form of poker: Each hand is a new game, a new test with unknown opponents. You can just focus on playing your best game. So I reckon I'm gonna start 3-tabling Rush Poker. Maybe even 4-table, as the advantages you get from Rush Poker mean it's not like 16 tabling. The difference is, when I'm 4-tabling Rush, I can see all the screens, and more importantly, I can simply stop playing hands if I have a difficult postflop decision to make, something that helped me extract value I otherwise would have missed.

So lucky session + good play = very happy player. Plus, NL5 = more monehz and FTP's. I'm not sure what buy-in management I want to use yet though, but calculating it out using adjusted limits from:

http://www.evplusplus.com/poker_tools/bankroll_simulator/

and average rake from

http://www.pokertableratings.com/poker-rake-analysis/no-limit-hold 'em,

I've found out that if I move up at 20 BI, I have a 1.17% RoR over 12 months. I'm willing to take that chance, so 20 it is. Most of the concepts that apply to cash games should apply to Rush Poker as well, only concepts that rely heavily on reads should be unusable. Next session I shall work on Preflop Positional Awareness, as table selection is obviously not applicable to Rush Poker

Rush Poker goes all the way up to NL400 too, so it's a secure long-term thing. I'll just have to see how it goes when I start playing longer sessions. I don't know what I'll do with my April goals, right now they're all over the place. I guess I should change 20k hands at NL2 to 20k hands at NL5 Rush, but there's no hurry.

Well, thanks for reading (If any of you did in fact read it :P) and I shall post again soon.

Take 2 status: 3/4. (Six to go!)
BR: 158.10 (I did not go well at NL2 cash games. Too many tables probably.)