BLAST from the Heroic Future [$5-15 SnG GRoDT]

888poker total stats as of 17.10

Profit: -$396
Tourneys: 950
(incl. $45.5 won in 46 freerolls)

partypoker stats as of 18.10

Profit: $713
Tourneys: 367
(raw PT4 net winnings: $65
used free tickets: $590
bonus: $58)

They say in the Russian community that making a blog is +EV

Myth confirmed

Those were $5 BLAST games Incl. two 10x's It doesn't matter if one is playing the B-game when opponents hand chips on a silver plate like this

(The hand happened in a 5x awarding 70% (3.5 BI) for the 1st and 30% (1.5 BI) for the 2nd.)

888poker BLAST Hand History
$25/$50 Blinds $5 Antes No Limit Holdem
Tournament $4.57 + $0.43 - 4 Max (Real Money)
Total number of players : 4

Seat 1: CO ( $760 )
Seat 4: Hero (BTN) ( $1,010 )
Seat 7: SB ( $2,740 )
Seat 9: BB ( $1,490 )

Dealt to Hero A♥:Q♠:

CO folds
Hero raises [$100]
SB calls [$75]
BB folds

** Dealing flop ** 6♣:Q♥:3♦: (Pot: $270)

SB bets [$50]
Hero raises [$235]
SB calls [$185]

** Dealing turn ** 4♦: (Pot: $740)

SB bets [$370]
Hero raises all-in [$670]
SB folds

[Sorry for the raw HH format - it's a known issue that tracking software can't properly show or generate forum code for HHs of this new SnG format, an analogue of Spins where one can win up to 6K BIs and where the prize pool is split in all 5x+ games, i.e. a bit less than half the time.]

As for the health, a very important step is to start going to bed earlier, not spending the night time on writing walls of text on forums, so I'll put it off until tomorrow, sorry

It’s an interesting fold of the SB.
Good luck with improving your game and your challenge

Cheers,
SDK1987

Thank you!

If I encounter an interesting spot in a multi-table donkament expensive enough, I'll surely drop the HH into the evaluation section, otherwise I'm afraid I have no job for you in your expertise area. All the MTTs I'm playing are either freerolls or $0.50 36-mans (alas the easiest way to use the tickets awarded by the July 2016 edition of the $88 welcome offer ). The only worthy freerolls are the monthly 60+ and 70+ VIP (giving a few dollars' worth of equity); unfortunately, I fell short of the 70th level last month so only played the former, didn't cash.

PSA about my partypoker activity

Upon relatively deep analysis, I've concluded that SnG Hero is a totally wrong variant of lottery SnGs for me personally. I'm not going to disclose all the reasons, but what's my own fault is that I seem too bad at HU in 20+ bb stacks and don't have the resources to improve fast in my weak areas because I need a short-term gain and am not in a position to pay for private coaching whose effects are spread over the long term.

My way of dealing with the situation is putting more volume into games that highlight my strengths given my STT past and are blind to my weaknesses, i.e. 888's BLAST.

To those who consider themselves good at HU turbos and at beating weak regs, I do recommend SnG Hero because its HU phase is deeper and longer than the one of Stars Spins, and the rake is adequately low taking promotions into account.

Therefore, my activity at Party is going to be limited to 5 Hero SnGs per day at each of the $3-20 stakes, making use of the 'play 5 - get 1 free' promotion which obviously gives a boost of 20 percent points to the ROI and thus makes it viable to play even five $20 games a day with a $300+ roll.

However, I do appreciate Party's idea of issuing its own goPlay Mastercard (that became available to Russians this August), which will be my primary way of withdrawing money home for the time being, ahead of Skrill's Mastercard.

Originally posted by tonypmm
making use of the 'play 5 - get 1 free' promotion which obviously gives a boost of 20 percent points to the ROI and thus makes it viable to play even five $20 games a day with a $300+ roll.

Today's $20 5-game promenade (games 21-25 in the graph) must be my most ridiculous (+9.5 BIs) 5-game heater ever had with no multipliers bigger than 6x.

Mind that I used a free $20 ticket today which isn't reflected in the graph, so I'm actually up $80 at Party (plus $25 at 888 so far).

This was an idiotic overcall by me in one of the two 6x's, I was somehow hoping none of them had a bigger pair, but they're actually rather big parts of 3-betting and especially coldcalling ranges. The bounty was on myself so the Nash 3-bet ranges taking it into account would be wider (that's a quick and wild guess - I actually need to study the spot in detail), but I doubt that most of the current SnG Hero regs realise it so I had to put them on standard Spin & Go ranges.

partypoker - $20+$0|10/20 NL (4 max) - Holdem - 3 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

Hero (BTN): 470
SB: 1,010
BB: 520

SB posts SB 10, BB posts BB 20

Pre Flop: (pot: 30) Hero has 5♥ 5♣

Hero raises to 40, SB raises to 1,010 and is all-in, BB calls 500 and is all-in, Hero calls 430 and is all-in

:facepalm::facepalm::facepalm: That's what happens, folks, when you're high on rhodiola rosea extract Don't take more than 10 drops at a time!

But this promo is a 'lift your eyelids with toothpicks and play situation' - the ROI boost from the free ticket is so big that even regfishes on tilt are still profiting.

It's been a demotivatingly good weekend thus far: +$197 in 71 game. There were some really nonstandard recreational opponents, though, who were hard to crack and (alas that's what exploitive poker is) focus-consuming.

The task for the next week is to record a self-hypnosis audio to recharge myself quick between mini-sessions. I'm totally lacking a good break routine, ending up doing nothing useful for hours instead of pulling myself back onto the tables.

Official GRoDT report

Week: 1
Tournaments: 209
Profit: +$270
Bankroll: $1022

Maybe Party's 4-table limit is a good thing preventing from self-destruction... 888's software is sooo slooow (or, rather, most of the hands require preflop actions only and the total decision time per hand is less) that, when playing a session there, I end up loading 5-7 tables continuously and missing the train of thought in some spots. It's definitely vital to build a HUD for 888 soon.

Originally posted by tonypmm
A technical note about casino play: as it's required to optimise the poker rakeback at both 888 and Party, I've decided to subtract exactly the casino edge ((100%-RTP%) * total_bet) from the challenge BR no matter the results of wagering, but add the fixed benefits that it gives, i.e. 888's gold tokens and Party's $100 slot bonuses purchased by points.

Saw this whilst reading your blog... what does it mean? I am currently on party poker and wasn't really sure what to do with the points I have been building up. My guess was wait for 1500 points then try get gold key to exchange for cash....

Originally posted by Catonthemat
Saw this whilst reading your blog... what does it mean? I am currently on party poker and wasn't really sure what to do with the points I have been building up. My guess was wait for 1500 points then try get gold key to exchange for cash....

My method is:

1. Buy a $100 Slot and Jackpot Slot bonus with 600 points (it's in the casino tab of the VIP store and is to be used in the casino inside the poker client found under the '777' icon on the left, not in the standalone casino client; it's required to bet a total of $1500 to clear it, but as it should be with casino bonuses, you'll either bust it much earlier or finish it with a big return - I took the bonus once, bet $5 at a time and turned it into $920 in cash in the end ).

2. Play the Joystick Generation slot (it's at the bottom of the list of slots, has a 99% return to player if the correct strategy is used in the bonus round*).

3. Profit! (Over 25% rakeback no matter the VIP status, even over 30% if your bet size is $2-20; please make equal bets throughout the bonus progress and never bet more than $20 at a time, to avoid being flagged as an abuser.)

* There, you need to use the keyboard arrows to make a man run left and right with a bucket and catch items falling from the sky. Every time when you've caught an item, don't wait until you see where the next one starts falling - instead, start running towards the centre immediately: if the next item falls on your side, you'll always have time to run back, but if it falls on the opposite side, you might be too late to catch it unless you begin the motion towards the centre before it starts falling.

The Party rep on 2+2 has stated that the VIP program is to undergo review soon, and perhaps this casino workaround will stop being most effective after the VIP store changes.

As for 888poker, I just score the missing VIP points by playing the Blood Suckers slot (with a 98% return to player and no skill required), which allows me to move up fast in Club levels and get 5% rakeback from the Club excluding scratch cards that also give 3-5%.

Thanks for stopping by!

Thanks for the reply, i'll give it a go. Sounds a lot easier then just building them up and hoping to have a large enough month to go up to gold key.

Good luck on the tables.

Thanks! GL to you in your poker and slot grind and life!

Just don't play in the casino when it's -EV - use it only in +EV situations (it's also an entertaining distraction from the grind once in a while). If you get hooked too much on a slot, remember that there's always the fun / play money option with the same sounds and graphics.

Originally posted by tonypmm
Just don't play in the casino when it's -EV - use it only in +EV situations (it's also an entertaining distraction from the grind once in a while). If you get hooked too much on a slot, remember that there's always the fun / play money option with the same sounds and graphics.

Cheers. Yea currently have casino self excluded as played them loads as part of advantage gambling but didn't want to risk losing my poker roll on it ♦

Well, such opportunities are the reason why I never exclude myself. I know how to keep my head cool. I've replied with another suggestion in your blog.

Meanwhile, I'm having disconnection issues at Party :f_cry:, hope they fix the software tomorrow...

On finding your niche in poker

As you all know, 'finding a niche' is key to being successful at business. But how to do it in poker? I mean, how to choose a game variation to play and areas to focus studies on so that we're uniquely qualified there and actually make some money there?

One of the top Google results about finding a niche is this article that sums it up well imo.

Dedicate one hour and spend 15 minutes on each of the below four questions to find a killer niche:

1. Identify the talents and skills you’re good at.
2. Out of the above talents and skills, what do you enjoy doing most?
3. Of those talents and skills you enjoy, what do people need?
4. From the above needs, what will people pay big money for?

While the first two questions are self-explanatory, the latter two require clarification when applied to poker.

When talking about 'being needed' as a player, most poker hopefuls mean being in demand as a coach, i.e. being useful to fellow regs. But that essentially limits them to being B2B enterprises.

Indeed, who are our, poker players', customers? Right - recreationals plus those weak regs who think they're stronger than us! How to encourage those who donate money to us (or to the reg pool as a whole if we're talking games without table selection, but at least partially, their deposits still come to us) to continue doing so? How to provide B2C service in poker?

Recs will keep coming if we're entertaining enough. This means being loose. Of course chatting is also beneficial; I was thinking about making special hotkeys for the old PKR specifically dedicated to emoting. Alas I'm asocial so I feel awkward about text chatting, should overcome this fear and respond to recs once in a while. Anyway, it's beneficial to find a way to entertain them that we're good at.

Weak regs will continue underestimating us and not studying us well enough if they think that we're fish and we've got our winnings only due to blind luck. This doesn't necessarily mean that we need to be fish in fact. Instead, we just need to know some aspects of the game deeper than them (the aspects that we're good at and they don't think about) so that some of our plays or habits look as if we indeed were fish.

This is how Isildur1 was getting action onto his tables. Just don't be afraid of looking like a clown. If you don't look ridiculous at least sometimes, then you'll remain a superstandard reg, and as it's barely possible to play optimally, this means that you'll be too predictable and exploitable, which is a no-no at high stakes.

An important sub-question of the 4th question - and it's asked in the article too - is:

What is scalable?

It actually limits us to poker variants that are interesting enough to the public to allow to play them at stakes high enough with traffic high enough to let us earn money that we're dreaming of. So the games that are traditionally called 'niche' - the 'old man coffee' games like Stud and PL Omaha Hi/Lo cash (as opposed to the NLO8 tournament mayhem) - are out of question*. On the contrary, we need to be at the spearhead of the poker progress, identify the games that have a potential for growth and study some unique strategic elements there that no one else has figured out yet.

* There's a reason for this. The games that are in demand are those with high variance... well, because most people play poker to get lucky, don't they? The higher the variance, the more sustainable the game.

Let me know in replies what you think about this unusual theory

Official GRoDT report

Week: 2
Tournaments: 267
Profit: -$42
Bankroll: $980

subbed !

In addition to my above Sept 3 post 'PSA about my partypoker activity', I've written an expanded review of 3 jackpot SnG offerings (Party, MPN, 888) in your blog, hope it's useful to some other readers too.

Official GRoDT report

Week: 3
Tournaments: 202
Profit: -$201
Bankroll: $779

The Sunday grind at 888's 15s went rather bad, but my EV data shows that I can still continue battling there, despite the fact that new decent regs (primarily fellow Russians ) are popping up there who have to be studied somehow.

Oh, and did I mention that the Russian parliamentary election has yielded predictably dull results (because of the switch from fully proportional back to half proportional / half majoritarian representation), with all the same 'United Russia' (responsible for the invasion of Ukraine) gaining an overwhelming majority (over 3/4 of the seats) in the lower house?