[Closed] In for the long haul

Yesterday, a PS member I was railing at the Daily Dollar mentioned the 90-man SNGs on Full Tilt, so I gave them a try this morning. I played two, sewering out early in one (KK vs a J9 two-pair) and made it all the way to 15 in the other. Here's the losing hand in the latter tournament:

Grabbed by Holdem Manager
NL Holdem $600(BB) Replayer
SB ($10,513)
BB ($17,389)
UTG ($91,299)
UTG+1 ($6,120)
UTG+2 ($6,766)
CO ($8,560)
Hero ($14,580)

Dealt to Hero K♥ 9♣

UTG calls $600, fold, fold, fold, Hero calls $600, fold, BB checks

FLOP ($2,625) 6♦ 9♠ K♦

BB checks, UTG bets $2,625, Hero raises to $10,500, BB folds, UTG raises to $18,375, Hero calls $3,405 (AI)

TURN ($30,435) 6♦ 9♠ K♦ T♦

RIVER ($30,435) 6♦ 9♠ K♦ T♦ 5♣

Hero shows K♥ 9♣
(Pre 62%, Flop 67.8%, Turn 9.1%)

UTG shows 7♦ 8♣
(Pre 38%, Flop 32.2%, Turn 90.9%)

UTG wins $30,435

I know K9 is not a hand to call a raise with under standard strategy, but I'd been getting a read on the porn stack as being a bully and raising with any two cards. It turns out that I put him on a very wide range correctly. His AI was super loose and based purely on stack size, and he sucked out. The only thing that really bothers me is that I was positioned to go deep and again won only about 70 cents after playing for nearly two and a half hours.

I have failed to meet one of my goals: to avoid reloading before June 16th. Thanks to my massive losses in the Daily Dollar rebuy, I have to go make another deposit a mere eight days after making the last one. My net losses are now about $57 in eight days or $7.125 per day or $213.75 per month. That is clearly unsustainable, so I'm going to have to turn it around fairly soon.

Thanks for reading.

I guess the lesson is clear then. Don't play the Rebuy! If you want to play a big-ass MTT, play the freezeout. It's a lot cheaper!

go buy a $1 lottery ticket better luck with that

I've discovered that I can do pretty well in the $2.25 STTs. Today I've played 10 and finished ITM in five. Over 20 STTs, my ROI is exactly 0%, but with some bonus whoring I'm actually about $3 in the plus.

The other thing I've discovered is that I can comfortably two-table the STTs. I play two, and when one finishes, FT makes it very easy to register for a third one immediately, so that I always have two open. I'm doing these rolling sets of four to six tournaments at a time, and it's working out well.

There's a silver SNG live coach today at 12:30 pm my time, and I plan to attend it, even if I'm not exactly a silver-level player yet.

Thanks for reading.

Good to hear you're doing well. Now we just need to build your game a little more and you'll be winning em. Naturally, this will allow you to become a regular at those stakes, thus giving me intimate knowledge into the game of a regular whom I can then crush. ♠_cool: You didn't think I did this out of the goodness of my heart, did you?

I've now done 30 $2.25 STTs on Full Tilt and have a net profit of $4.55.

Today's session was bad because I played a rolling set of 5 and finished ITM only once (2nd) for a net loss. But last night, after my live session, I played a set of 2 and finished 1st in one and 3rd in the other.

Doing these rolling sets, I am now projecting that I can comfortably do 40 STTs per week. That means I should reach the 100 STT mark around June 14th. At that time I'll post some more detailed stats.

Today I'm playing live again but might do a set of two if I get home early.

I've now done 69 of the $2.25 STTs. I went through a horrible 11-game losing streak where I finished 4th no fewer than five times. During discussion with Salivanth I was able to identify about seven leaks that had sprung in my game. In the eight tourneys since then, I've finished ITM four times.

Of the tourneys, I've played 65 in the last eight days for an average of about eight per day. That doesn't meet my original volume goal of 10 per day, but should easily meet my new goal of 40 per week now that I've scaled back my live play and can play online more days.

Also in discussion with Salivanth, I've decided to make EV ROI my metric rather than actual ROI, at least until I have a decent-sized sample to evaluate my results. My EV ROI now stands at -2.08%, which is fantastic considering that I finished OOTM in 11 straight tourneys. Overall I'm pleased and looking forward to further progress.

I did a test cashout from my fun account on Players Only poker. I made the request Saturday and it was processed early Monday. Because of the postal strike in Canada I didn't expect to receive the check for several weeks. Instead, I got it today by FedEx at no extra charge (PO usually charges a fee for courier delivery) and the check was even in Canadian funds drawn on a Canadian bank. PO seems to be a very classy site--great live customer service and zero cashout hassles. If they had better tourney volume I would consider making them my primary site because that's where my money seems to be most secure and most easily accessible. Full Tilt, as we all know, makes it a nightmare to cash out, but because of the superior volume on Full Tilt I'm kind of stuck playing there.

I started a concept thread in General Poker forum that obliquely discusses how it is that suckouts are so prominent in everyone's mind. The conventional wisdom is that we all suck out just as often as we get sucked out on and just happen to have a better memory for the suckouts that go against us. But that is not the case! The fact is that suckouts depend on playing inferior starting cards and poor postflop play, which boils down to taking silly chances. Solid players do far less of that than fish do, so solid players suck out far less often than they get sucked out on. The good memory players tend to have for suckouts is not a trick of the mind but a reality: the better a player you are, the greater the disparity between the many times when luck goes against you and the rare times you need luck in your favor. Conversely, fish chase far more often than they should, so they experience a far greater proportion of suckouts to their benefit. The saving grace is that solid players still show a profit after a reasonable-sized hand sample while fish still show a loss. Or, as tokyoaces put it in a quotation from _The Poker Mindset_, bad players win a lot of pots while good players make a lot of money.

These are all considerations worth thinking about when you ponder how fundamentally unjust poker seems. It's as if everything that is wrong with the world gets encapsulated in a poker player's career. In fact, a solid player might lose 75% of his pots while showing a ROI of +10%. It is the sheer number of lost pots that gives rise to this appearance of injustice, but if looked at intelligently the appearance is not entirely reflective of reality.

With this entry I'm hoping to make this a more substantive and intelligent blog that people will want to read, follow, and post comments on. At the appropriate time I'll post stats and results, but in general I'd like to concentrate on discussing poker concepts.

Thanks for reading, and all comments welcome.

Originally posted by belayd
I'd been getting a read on the porn stack as being a bully.

That's too bad to hear. My porn stack is very friendly towards me. ♦

Okay, I'm up to 80 tourneys now. My last set of five was just about an hour ago and ran fantastic, with two 1st places, two 3rd places and one 6th for an unholy short-term ITM rate of 80%. My overall ITM rate is exactly 40% with 10% 1sts, 10% 2nds and 20% 3rds. It's really the 16.8% 4ths that bug my ass. I should NOT be bubbling 1/7th of the time, gawdamit. But my ROI has climbed back up to -4.0% and my EV ROI is now -1.9%. I can't thank Salivanth enough for offering me free coaching. During sweats I always ask him not to guide me but to observe my play, listen to the decisions I make, and then make comments after the fact. That way, I'm not cheating the other players in the STT and am learning in a better way than if I let him make decisions for me.

I piled up enough FTT to get another Daily Dollar ticket but didn't use it on the freezeout today. I had just finished a set when the freezeout was about to start and thought I would be too tired to play at my best. I also went out today to meet in person with a man from eastern Canada whom I'd been phoning and emailing with for five years but had never met in person. The meeting required me to take the subway for half an hour to the train station and then a commuter train for an hour to an eastern suburb, and then the same on the way back. By the time I got home again my energy was a bit depleted and I even contemplated not playing any more poker today. Luckily, I judged that I was fresh enough to play a set of STTs. I certainly would not have been fresh enough to spend four to eight hours at the Daily Dollar. The tournament ticket will still be good tomorrow.

Actually, there is something people can advise me on if they know Full Tilt. I've been told that Daily Dollar tickets are not the optimal value to acquire with FTTs because they cost 225 points each and satellite tickets prorate to only about 209 points each. I have a hate-on for satellites that only feed into other satellites because the resulting prize structure is horrible, but if there are affordable satellites where the prize ticket can be cashed out for tournament dollars that can be used on STTs, then perhaps playing them would be a good investment. If anyone reading this knows more about this issue, please speak up.

That's it for this exciting evening. I'm off to railbird anyone who is playing the DD freezeout. Thanks for reading.

I should warn you though, you cannot unregister and take the T$ in an FTP satellite. It MUST be a REAL MONEY satellite for you to do this. Considering the new information I've found out, spending FPP on the Daily Dollar isn't such a bad thing for you, since buying an mFTOPS ticket, much better value (The 209 FTP to the dollar item at $11 for 2300) means you have to play in it, and your ROI probably is terrible in it, making the ticket worth less than 11 dollars to you. (The same applies to me, I'm not saying you suck.)

When I reached the milestone of 100 STTs I made a post in General Poker entitled "forever the loser." It was just a gripe about the fact that I had a 40% ITM rate but, thanks to too many 3rd place finishes, had a negative ROI.

Well, I'm now up to 115 STTs and things are going rapidly downhill. I played a set of five and had one 3rd place finish and nothing better than 6th place in the other four. Then I played another set of five and had nothing better than a 5th place finish in the first four and then a 1st place in the last one. This morning I played another set of five and suffered horrific suckouts in the first three, which put me on tilt in the fourth (which I was already playing and couldn't put off). I finished no better than 6th in those four. In the fifth I finished 3rd. So I'm bleeding money like a skewered hog and again have the urge to quit poker forever for the next 24 hours.

Because of the substantial deposit I made seven days ago, I still have the BR for the 2.25s but am down about 10 buyins with an EV of about -6 buyins. It's profoundly depressing that I seem to be a losing player at no matter what game type I choose. Right now I'm afraid to do another set because I'm feeling a combination of rage and depression that would guarantee another losing session.

The good thing is that it's beautiful summery weather outside and I can spend a couple of hours in the park with a book, petting dogs. That's probably what I'll be doing when the next Daily Dollar rebuy rolls round.

Deep breaths, nice music, good food and ofc petting dogs helps too

You say losing player at whatever game type you choose i think you should just for a minute forget all about which games you have won/lost the most at then decide which one you get the most enjoyment from playing this should be the game you play for now, also im sure you know this but 115 games really isnt enough of a sample to tell anything i know sometimes its hard but you gotta learn to take defeats on the chin, i learned to laugh everytime i got sucked out on, now its easy.

If you have a good enough BR for the 2.25s and you are enjoying stt's then go play the 2.25s i read too many interviews and forum posts were successful players say their biggest regret is not taking shots or being too tight with BRM afterall its easier to build back up a $500 roll than a 5k roll or more.

Try not to worry too much about results and concentrate on playing the right hands the right way, have you read <3s blog yet i really believe this is the first step to making you a winner in STTs

Anyway chin up and hope you turn this around soon

Thank you for your support, EUO.

Just a non-poker note. At the park there was a dog walker with six dogs. It's an off-leash park so the dogs were running loose. At one bench a fellow sat with his burka'd wife (whom I felt sorry for because of the heat). When the dogs came by that bench to say hi the fellow started screaming at the dogs and trying to kick them, and the dog walker and he almost came to blows. Welcome to multicultural Toronto.

I feel refreshed by some naturally acquired Vitamin D and ready for my second set of the day. I've been reading lessthanthree's blog and it seems clear to me my high variance is partly caused by not enough volume. I need to experiment with four-tabling, which is the most I can manage on my cruddy display. Either that or I need to invest in a better display. But right now I'm bleeding so much money two-tabling that I'm scared to double the number of tables in case my losses are caused by my own poor play rather than just low volume. I reach my one-month anniversary at the 2.25s on June 19th and shall re-evaluate then. By that time I hope to have played another 120 or so STTs and shall have a better sample size to review.

No worries mate, if you want you can add me on skype and you can vent your tilt my way if it helps, externaluseonly89 if you want it.

How could anyone get angry at a dog? And how anybody be angry with a dog for bothering them in a park specifically for walking dogs of the lead?

Originally posted by belayd
Thank you for your support, EUO.

Just a non-poker note. At the park there was a dog walker with six dogs. It's an off-leash park so the dogs were running loose. At one bench a fellow sat with his burka'd wife (whom I felt sorry for because of the heat). When the dogs came by that bench to say hi the fellow started screaming at the dogs and trying to kick them, and the dog walker and he almost came to blows. Welcome to multicultural Toronto.

I feel refreshed by some naturally acquired Vitamin D and ready for my second set of the day. I've been reading lessthanthree's blog and it seems clear to me my high variance is partly caused by not enough volume. I need to experiment with four-tabling, which is the most I can manage on my cruddy display. Either that or I need to invest in a better display. But right now I'm bleeding so much money two-tabling that I'm scared to double the number of tables in case my losses are caused by my own poor play rather than just low volume. I reach my one-month anniversary at the 2.25s on June 19th and shall re-evaluate then. By that time I hope to have played another 120 or so STTs and shall have a better sample size to review.

they almsot starting scrapping? LOL Gotta love toronto

played my first tourney in a while on FT first hand I raise 4x bb with QQ one guy goes all in with KJ another with A5 another with A10 and yet another with JJ, I almsot wanted to puke, Should have folded but I knew I was ahead of all of them, but of course the J hits

Players are so horrible at Full Tilt on lower limits it's almsot hard to beleive, no wonder suckouts are a major issue when ppl are going all in with ATC god knows what they could have, after my first deposit freeroll i will get rid of full tilt nothing but bad memories here

sorry for ranting in ur thread haha I thought it was proper since u were having problems 2, ur not the only one!!

I had a decent set of five, finishing 1st once and 2nd once. I also had two 4th place finishes and a 5th, so I'm comfortably making it out of the early stages after a bad patch of about 20 tourneys where I kept sewering out early. The 4th and 5th places today are directly attributable to _multiple_ suckouts I can do nothing about. Mind you, I sucked out a couple of times myself, just not more than about one-tenth as often as I get sucked out on. That statistic is what's really encouraging if you accept my bromide that a player's sucked-out-to-sucked-out-on ratio is a good indicator of how good a player he is. I'm finally starting to feel that I am better than my ROI and that I just need volume in order to start approaching the results that I should be getting.

My shorthanded game also continues to improve despite lack of results most of the time, and I often look forward to the stage of an STT when there are five or fewer players left. That's when I can really hit my stride. My last STT, in which I finished 4th, was actually one of my best ever in terms of abusing small stacks with my big stack and putting a passive table under pressure. I didn't get the results I should have gotten, but, unless the experts have been cynically lying to me or I labour under a Gypsy curse, the results should eventually come.

I do need to work on generating more volume. Right now my display and comfort level don't permit me to play more than two tables at a time. That means a maximum of 15 STTs per day if I really knock myself out, and that's not nearly enough. Lessthanthree's blog makes it clear to me that I must at least 12-table at some point in the future in order to have any serious shot at becoming a winner and moving up limits. Once my windfall comes in mid-July, I'm going to think of investing some of it in a better display, or maybe even multiple displays.

That's it for now. At the 200-STT milestone I'll post a graph and some detailed stats so that people can see for themselves how I've been doing. Thanks to everyone for reading, and all comments welcome.

It was my birthday today, and as a birthday present, my unofficial, unpaid coach gave me a sweat. After the sweat we earnestly discussed whether I should quit poker. I was very upset about yet another bad 10-STT run (one 3rd place and nine OOTMs). I told him that I'm retired and play poker to relax and he wisely stated: "Poker is not a relaxing activity." So I thought about asking all of my poker sites to ban me permanently (under the false pretext that I'm a problem gambler so they wouldn't hassle me about my request). I planned to discuss the matter with my birth family at my birthday dinner and then sleep on it and make a decision on Thursday morning. My friend/coach told me that I didn't need to set any deadlines, but I know from experience that if I don't set a deadline for myself I don't get things done.

At the birthday dinner my mother made a valuable point: it's not effective to have someone else do something for me. The action has to come from within myself. For that reason alone, she thought getting permanently banned would be a bad idea.

After the birthday dinner I came home and had a nap. When I woke up, I decided that there were basically three issues: (1) by nature I am not able to put in the hard work required to be a winning player, and losing bothers me more than it should; (2) I enjoy playing poker but just hate losing when I should in the course of justice be the winner; (3) anything else I did, from darts to painting to spelunking, would also cost me money and cause some stress. So I decided that it's worthwhile to continue playing poker as long as I understand up front that it's just a hobby that costs me money, and as long as I can minimize the times I feel bad from unjust losses.

Now, I've played cash, and when playing cash there is a risk of heartbreak 30 times per hour. In my SNGs (including MTT SNGs) the average game has lasted 35 minutes. In my MTTs the average game has lasted 114 minutes. So I can play for three times as long at an MTT as at a SNG before experiencing heartbreak. Since I did rolling sets of SNGs and only play one MTT at a time, the difference is even more pronounced.

Thanks to my HEM filter, I was able to find out that my losses in SNGs are about 69 cents an hour, with EV losses of 24 cents an hour. My MTT losses are about $1.14 an hour with EV losses of $1.13 an hour. The higher MTT losses are thanks to the times I have invested heavily in a Daily Dollar rebuy and the two times I took a flyer on an MTT outside my bankroll. If I stick to the same stakes at MTTs as at SNGs, my losses are comparable. But my EV losses in MTTs are much closer to my actual losses. This is a key point because I really suffer only when a particular loss is way below the EV line. If I get eliminated because I made a mistake and played a worse hand, I'm able to shrug it off.

There is also the fact that, on reflection, I find that I enjoy MTTs more than SNGs. I started concentrating on SNGs in the hope of making a profit, because the variance in SNGs is much lower than in MTTs. But if I give up that ambition and ignore results and just treat poker as a hobby that costs money like any other hobby, then the motivation to play SNGs totally disappears.

Then there is the matter of rake. Nearly all micro SNGs have rake more than 10% while nearly all MTTs have rake of 10%, while the Daily Dollar has no rake at all. I don't know why that's important to me but it is.

Everything seems to militate toward my concentrating on MTTs from now on. According to Jennifear's famous article, the BRM for professionals playing MTTs is 200 buyins, but casual players who can afford to redeposit can use 100 buyins. Well, boyz n gorillas, I currently have about $100 in my Full Tilt account, which means that I am recreationally rolled for the $1 MTTs. A single entry in the Daily Dollar freezeout or the Ferguson (if it's still running) is within good BRM for me. The 1+10 MTTs are only slightly outside it. So, for that matter, are the 1+10 90-man SNGs, which are almost like MTTs.

I know that I seem to change like the wind, but that might just be part of who I am. The latest change is that I'm going to start being a casual MTT player. For that reason I plan to close my two blogs and start a new blog aimed at a readership of casual players or those who are interested in a casual player's experiences. Because, face it: to most players who are serious about poker, casual player = fish.

Thank you all for having read this blog and see you in my next one.