[Closed] fryandspicy's blog of blood, sweat and tears [SH BSS currently NL10]

So as I'm sure most of you have heard Full Tilt has closed down and taken my staker's money with it. Presumeably the stake is ending early and I'll be shipping him his $$$ by the end of tonight probably (although not sure what I made is worth three dollar signs.) I'll post a review of the stake despite the fact it was a bit of a wet squib when I'm feeling more up to it.

In other news I finally got a job. Only 22 hours a week which means I can afford to eat and will still have time to play poker! Hopefully I can get some of my own money to play around with (unless pokerstrategy feel like offering me another second starting capital?!)

Also my exam results are out and I'm bricking it. Will have to go and get them tomorrow because I wussed out of going today...

What an eventful month!

I've had to juggle lots of real life stresses with the emotions of playing poker us fish have, but have learnt alot about self control in this month. And a substantial amount about how to play 6max too.

IRL I started this month with no idea what my future held in the long or short term - now I have a job with enough leeway to play large amounts of poker, I have planned my trip to China (and done some research into the technicalities of playing poker out there), and I have found a replacement flatmate to ease my financial worries.

Replacement flatmate works for pokerstars and knows a thing or two about SNGs, but seems to not be a cash game player at all and quite nitty despite being Swedish. Which is a shame. He has a few physical copies of classic poker books like Harrington on Holdem that I might borrow at some stage but at the moment I'm chowing down on The Poker Mindset instead.

In terms of poker profits, they were all swallowed by spew and run bad this month. Thanks to my generous first deposit bonus I think my bankroll is actually healthy but overall I've ended the month 4BI down. I'm not too worried. Mainly because the first few days of this month has been infinitely better. Pretty confident I can get my bb/100 up to a respectable number by the end of the stake despite wasting 15k hands.

June Graph:

I've often wondered just how wide I can call in the small blind in a hugely limped pot, and just how lightly I can defend in the big blind versus a min raise. Today I decided to actually try and solve these questions. Obviously this is quite tricky to do without exact villain ranges, but I can assume it's worth calling if I get the odds of flopping two pair + or a strong draw no matter what their min raising or limping range is. So this can give me a minimum calling range in certain situations. Which should be useful.

I used the probabilities on Two Rags to calculate my limping ranges. Obviously if I'm in the SB and the BB is very aggressive I should tighten these ranges up.

With two unsuited unconnected cards:
3.5% chance of getting 2 pair or better. So the pot odds need to be 25:1 or better. Pretty unlikely I guess. So I should stop defending with 72o.

Unsuited One Gappers:
~12.5% to flop OESD or 2 pair +. So I need pot odds of 7:1

Unsuited Connectors:
~13.5% to flop OESD or 2 pair +. Pot odds of 6.5:1 needed.

Any two suited:
~14% to flop flush draw or 2 pair +. Pot odds of 6:1 needed.

Suited Connectors:
~20% to flop OESD or FD or 2 pair +. Pot odds of 4:1 needed.

HOWEVER these numbers do not take into account implied odds. The other issue is with the flopped draws I will be OOP so will not be able to play them well most of the time.

I'll give this some more thought and hopefully have solid ranges for completing by the end of the day. I could also use the equilab ranges but because I have no idea how they're calculated I'm a bit skeptical.

Other thing on to do list is work out what I should be doing versus huge 3bets to be at least unexploitable. This shouldn't be too hard.

Heyyy, I'm gonna put up loads of spewy hands to shame myself into playing better. Considering my staker is a reader of this blog (perhaps the only reader of this blog) this is not the wisest of ideas. Also list might get quite long. But hopefully it will provide some interesting insight into how weak regulars play poker.

Actually this session I was card dead enough to not spew. Plus I was playing overly nitty rather than overly spewy. Here's a nice spew from yesterday though. Against a complete unknown. Against a reg the board is good to bluff at but I should at least have like the A for backdoors or SOMETHING.

Hand converted with online PokerStrategy.com hand converter:

Play hand

$0.05/$0.1 No-Limit Hold'em (6 handed)

Known players:
[tg]SB$1.83:///////;BB (Hero)$10.00:///////;MP2$13.32:///////;MP3$10.00:///////;CO$17.58:///////;BU$14.79:///////;[/tg]

Preflop: Hero is BB with Q:h, J:h.
3 folds, BU raises to $0.30, SB folds, Hero calls $0.20.

Flop: ($0.65) 5:d, 4:c, 8:c (2 players)
Hero checks, BU bets $0.48, Hero raises to $1.50, BU calls $1.02.

Turn: ($3.65) 7:c (2 players)
Hero bets $2.20, BU raises to $4.40, Hero folds, BU gets uncalled bet back.

Final Pot: $5.85.

Let me start with some context:

Hand converted with online PokerStrategy.com hand converter:

Play hand

$0.05/$0.1 No-Limit Hold'em (6 handed)

Known players:
[tg]BB (Hero)$10.15:///////;MP2$8.84:///////;MP3$16.61:///////;CO$42.97:///////;BU$11.82:///////;SB$10.00:///////;[/tg]

Preflop: Hero is BB with Q:c, Q:s.
MP2 raises to $0.30, MP3 folds, CO raises to $1.20, 2 folds, Hero raises to $10.15, MP2 folds, CO calls $8.95.

Flop: ($20.65) 2:h, 9:h, J:s (2 players)

Turn: ($20.65) 8:h (2 players)

River: ($20.65) 7:s (2 players)

Final Pot: $20.65.
Results follow:

Hero shows a pair of queens(Q:c Q:s).
CO shows a pair of kings(K:d K:h).

CO wins with a pair of kings(K:d K:h).

The 3bettor had 3bet stats of 14% which didn't change much positionally (although over just a few hundred hands) and I had him tagged as crazy post flop. I decided just to ship it rather than inducing with a small 4bet because I thought he could call with worse anyway (he was that bad), and because i worried he'd call IP and the flop would come A or K high. Obviously pretty weak reasoning but bear with me anyway. The problem with QQ is you're never getting called by worse hands in this spot, nor are you making better hands fold (against normal people). So the question is, is it still okay to cold 4bet jam QQ despite this fact? Assuming opponent calls with AK, AA, KK, QQ and folds everything else:

x = Opponents call shove once 3bet probability
Our EV = 0 = x((.4021 * $10)+(.5979 * -$10)) + (1-x)($1.50)
Here we set our EV to zero to find the limit of where it becomes profitable for me to ship QQ. If his x is any higher than the number we find here it becomes unprofitable. The rest of the equation should be easy enough to figure out i hope.

x = 0.4337

y = Opponents 3bet %
y = 2.19/0.4337
2.19 is the percentage of poker hands that make up {AA, KK, QQ (1 combo), AK)
y = 5.0%

So it's still +EV to 4bet shove QQ against an opponent who knows we have QQ if he 3bets more than 5% of the time. Phew. Shame conclusion isn't that interesting. Might be worth calculating this EV with lots of different hands though, to find out how wide I can defend and squeeze against light 3 bettors. But then I should probably include a 5bet range into the calculation and reduce my 4bet size. But that's too complicated. Meh. Sorry for boring post.

EDIT: If opponent 3bets to 3x initial raise (and initial raise is 3bb) y changes to 5.5%. Fascinating.

Tbh, didn't pay too much atention to all the maths because vs a 14% 3bettor QQ deffo has value and shoving looks strange/weaker and might get TT, AQ to call and vs fishy players even smaller PPs because they "put you on AK".

When you pass 20k hands can you either contact me on Skype or email me the overall situation please? Or you can just post here a detailed update with all stats and stuff like that...

Good luck!