Maniatrix

Lesson 1 Homework

Question 1: What is your motivation for playing poker?

I find poker to be an interesting strategy game and I have always enjoyed strategy games. It is also a potential source of freedom. Freedom from having to stay in one place to make a living. I like to travel and stay in different countries for longer periods than just your average 2 week trip to the Mediterranean. My first goal is to make enough money on poker to make a living in Latin America while also being able to build a larger and larger bankroll.

Question 2: What are your weaknesses when playing poker?

I often try to play to fancy without considering that a more straightforward play would work better against the specific opponent type. I am also prone to tilts if I end up folding the best hand or if I keep getting 3bet or having my cbets raised by opponents with position on me.

Question 3: What does it mean to play tight-aggressive?

It means sticking to playable hands preflop, playing aggressively and being positionally aware. Same could be said about LAGs except a TAG would be more selective with his starting hands.

Hi Maniatrix,

Welcome to our Beginners Course!

Looking forward to see you on the forum and good luck with your studies!

Ingrid

Hello Maniatrix,

From my experience I would say that go move to SH. This is really a fantastic play. But now again some do like playing FR and do say that it's not even worth switching. Since you may even earn a lot more with playing FR if you like more to play straight forward/more table game. But of course mainly because of playing more situations in SH it allows you to earn pretty solid winning as well but now again you have to be good in postflop play and opponent reading.

As from my own experience I played up to NL200 FR and was pretty sure that I would never move to SH. ♦ But look now, I can't even play anything else anymore than just HU. :> Of course some SH/FR as well. But practically moved from FR->SH->HU. Gives you much more possibilities to play and mostly against the opponents not just only the hand only.

True that on FR you practically can earn pretty nice and solid earnings with playing just straight-forward. There is no need to pick even any fancy moves. Not until NL100. There you might start considering doing some moves and try doing some looser 3bet/4bets against specific opponents. But of course against well known opponents.

Tilting is a basic problem for most of the poker players. Every poker player has his own system, some use stop-loss technique. Some set a time-plan like on every day on specific time they play just 1h or depending how much they can allow. Some even listen to music since it calms down down, although I wouldn't recommend since music can still disturb your game. Practically you have to find out the way which works the best for you. Try doing some stuff what I mentioned, or try finding even our own way. What definitely helps in those cases is that the more you play, the less tilty you will get, the more situations you will go through and more losses you will have which gives you better experience.

Also for example even stacking the tables on stars or any other room works perfectly fine for some people.

Good luck in the Course. Earned your first points.

I also have to get a new computer and some decent monitors. I currently have a 13" laptop, which is not sufficient to multitable well. Stacking, combined with an old computer and bad internet seems to lead to some lag as well. And I really don't like stacking since I lose focus on what is happening at the tables.
I will give shorthanded a try, though my current goal is to reach 50k hands at nl25 just to have a decent sample at one limit so I can try to analyze my game from that.
After that I will actually give shorthanded a try, I will probably need a decent sample there as well to decide which format is best for me.

I still have the problem of decentizing myself to the money. It is not that I think of how what that $100 pot just lost could have bought me but just like being obsessed with my kill/death ratio in BF2 I am now kind of obsessed with building up that number in in the cashier.
Whenever the number increase I get excited and whenever the number decrease I get unhappy... Seriously, how can I ever withdraw money from my account now ♦

LoL. I guess you will never be able to withdraw money until you play on the highest limits.

Bankroll dropped from $2300 to $1900. This is my nl25 graph, just getting uglier every time I play. Even considering dropping down to nl10 to ride out the storm. Call it superstition but once I start losing I usually keep losing for a while.

Today I gave SH an attempt. I decided to play 2000 hands on nl25. I was 4-6 tabling and it took me about 5 and a half hours.
Probably got to play the same amount of hands as I would have 12-16 tabling fullring.
I realise now what I have been missing out on, removing the 3 early positions makes the game much faster and I don't ever have to look down on a nice looking hand and open fold it, which I have serious problems doing if I am on a downswing.

I didn't read that much up on the different strategy in SH but I just eliminated the early positions and decided to play as if it started on MP and everyone before had folded. My stats were 25/18 as opposed to 16/10 in fullring.

Bad thing is, I ran way below EV, but I can live with that more than playing bad. Though it hurts knowing my BR could be $2090 instead of $1950 if I had won my share of the flips. Ah well, it was fun and I will definitely keep playing SH. I noticed how much easier it was to isolate a passive fish and there were also a lot more aggro donks than in FR. People playing 35/20 was not uncommon.

Anyway, here is my graph of the day.

Some of the hands that made me run -EV:

PokerStars - $0.25 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 5 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 3

UTG: $34.45
Hero (CO): $32.46
BTN: $28.02
SB: $39.48
BB: $72.81

SB posts SB $0.10, BB posts BB $0.25, UTG posts ante $0.05, Hero posts ante $0.05, BTN posts ante $0.05, SB posts ante $0.05, BB posts ante $0.05

Pre Flop: ($0.60) Hero has Q♥ Q♦

fold, Hero raises to $1.00, BTN raises to $3.00, fold, fold, Hero raises to $7.50, BTN raises to $27.97 and is all-in, Hero calls $20.47

Flop: ($56.54, 2 players) A♣ J♠ A♥

Turn: ($56.54, 2 players) J♥

River: ($56.54, 2 players) 9♦

Hero shows Q♥ Q♦ (Two Pair, Aces and Queens) (Pre 69%, Flop 1%, Turn 0%)
BTN shows A♠ Q♣ (Full House, Aces full of Jacks) (Pre 31%, Flop 99%, Turn 100%)
BTN wins $54.54

PokerStars - $0.25 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 3

BB: $27.89
UTG: $25.60
Hero (MP): $26.42
CO: $70.67
BTN: $67.69
SB: $86.24

SB posts SB $0.10, BB posts BB $0.25, BB posts ante $0.05, UTG posts ante $0.05, Hero posts ante $0.05, CO posts ante $0.05, BTN posts ante $0.05, SB posts ante $0.05

Pre Flop: ($0.65) Hero has Q♣ Q♥

fold, Hero raises to $1.00, fold, BTN raises to $3.30, fold, fold, Hero raises to $8.75, BTN raises to $67.64 and is all-in, Hero calls $17.62 and is all-in

Flop: ($53.39, 2 players) J♥ 8♠ 7♦

Turn: ($53.39, 2 players) A♦

River: ($53.39, 2 players) 8♦

Hero shows Q♣ Q♥ (Two Pair, Queens and Eights) (Pre 57%, Flop 75%, Turn 5%)
BTN shows A♠ K♥ (Two Pair, Aces and Eights) (Pre 43%, Flop 25%, Turn 95%)
BTN wins $51.39

PokerStars - $0.25 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 5 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 3

SB: $36.95
Hero (BB): $60.00
UTG: $30.49
CO: $29.27
BTN: $39.88

SB posts SB $0.10, Hero posts BB $0.25, SB posts ante $0.05, Hero posts ante $0.05, UTG posts ante $0.05, CO posts ante $0.05, BTN posts ante $0.05

Pre Flop: ($0.60) Hero has 6♥ 8♥

UTG raises to $1.00, CO calls $1.00, fold, fold, Hero calls $0.75

Flop: ($3.35, 3 players) Q♣ 7♥ 5♥
Hero bets $2.00, UTG raises to $4.00, fold, Hero raises to $14.00, UTG raises to $29.44 and is all-in, Hero calls $15.44

Turn: ($62.23, 2 players) K♣

River: ($62.23, 2 players) Q♦

Hero shows 6♥ 8♥ (One Pair, Queens) (Pre 40%, Flop 56%, Turn 30%)
UTG shows K♦ Q♠ (Full House, Queens full of Kings) (Pre 60%, Flop 44%, Turn 70%)
UTG wins $60.23

PokerStars - $0.25 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 3

BTN: $25.00
SB: $72.68
BB: $63.63
UTG: $31.91
MP: $77.26
Hero (CO): $40.48

SB posts SB $0.10, BB posts BB $0.25, BTN posts ante $0.05, SB posts ante $0.05, BB posts ante $0.05, UTG posts ante $0.05, MP posts ante $0.05, Hero posts ante $0.05

Pre Flop: ($0.65) Hero has T♦ T♣

fold, MP raises to $0.75, Hero calls $0.75, fold, fold, BB calls $0.50

Flop: ($2.65, 3 players) T♥ 8♦ A♥
BB checks, MP bets $1.50, Hero raises to $5.00, fold, MP raises to $17.52, Hero raises to $39.68 and is all-in, MP calls $22.16

Turn: ($82.01, 2 players) A♠

River: ($82.01, 2 players) A♦

MP shows 8♠ T♠ (Full House, Aces full of Tens) (Pre 16%, Flop 0%, Turn 2%)
Hero shows T♦ T♣ (Full House, Aces full of Tens) (Pre 84%, Flop 100%, Turn 98%)
MP wins $40.01
Hero wins $40.00

For myself what I sometimes do is that if I see I am having a huge downswing on 1 pokerroom I just switch to some other. Since I can easily move around my money and also have on different sites. Since I have been through a lot of bad beat sessions, long runs of loosing sessions and you just have to find a way how to adjust to that. Some may say ye like oh why don't you just continue playing on the site. But if it's working for me then why not to use it? It makes me less tilt and also gives the possibility to play even on different sites. Obviously nowadays I even have to use different sites since I play HU mainly.

About the SH is that I do also like it, especially because I can play against those bad players and even more against just them when in FR there will be more opponents you have to play against.

But your graphs look really nice and I wouldn't really worry about the run. Seems that you are able to hold very long sessions which will pay-off anyways in long run.

Good luck on the tables and don't be result oriented.

Thank you for the encouragement.

I have been scouting various sites for fish and I do plan to move some money off to Ongame as it appeared to have even more fish than Pokerstars. First I will just clear what remains of the deposit bonus as I expect that would be forfeit if I withdrew anything beforehand. I think I will do a little bonus whoring at Ongame once I'm done grinding the bonus at PS. I just have to figure out which of the Ongame rooms has the best cashback and then I'll move whatever matches the deposit bonus over there.

Also, I ordered a Neteller prepaid credit card. I want to use this for the future if I need money urgent and have to use some from a poker account. While beer often feels urgent, I'll try to avoid making my poker accounts into free beer money this time around.

I have been playing on Ongame for some time and I find it very loose. Also the bonuses should be great. Even the bonuses from PokerStrategy are very good, abuse the $10k freerolls if you can. Also the freerolls have a nice package in it which would be nice to win.

If you want to catch a very fishy site you can try out Unibet poker - Prima network. ♦ Also PokerStrategy has very good offers for it. Rakeback was even up to 50%? - not sure thought, you might have to Check for it.

The credit cards are just so nice, I have been using MB one for longer time and it really helps to have it. On a trip very easy to pay and of course you can withdraw money fast. Trying to get neteller as well so I would have $ account and € account.

Just finished a session play just 2 tables SH. Just wanted to try a really crazy loose style and decided I had to give each table a lot of attention. Ran 33/28 over 500 hands, $20 profit. Table selection this time was weak semi loose fish on my right and nits on my left, had to switch some tables to get this perfect setup.

I loved how easy it was to isolate the 30/2 limp-calling fish when the other regs at the table were 16 tabling rakeback grinding nits playing 14/12 ♦

Isn't Unibet part of Microgaming, I did scout it but it seemed to have fewer tables than Ongame. Traffic is important too. $10k freerolls, that's awesome

I can't use MB as they won't issue credit cards for Norwegians, Neteller seemed to be the only option. I figure if I use the money abroad they won't be taxed, but I will check up on that...

Hehe, yea. I do the same sometimes with the 2 tables. It's really funny and also you practice a lot more your hand-range reading.

Unibet is part of Microgaming = Prima and that's true that there are less tables. But enough for me to find some HU action since I multi-site for HU.

Question 1: What do you think you could play differently than how it is in the BSS Starting Hands Chart, and why?

I am usually doing a mixture of the standard and maximal open raising ranges if you were to put it in a chart. It is quite difficult for me to say exactly what I raise from which position as it is very much based on factors such as opponents and what I assume my current table image is. If the open limper is a fish who limp calls a lot and folds a lot to cbets I will raise very wide. If there are ultranits in the blinds I will open raise almost anything from the button.
I'm feeling comfortable preflop, most of my issues are postflop related.

Question 2: Post a hand for evaluation where you have a question regarding your pre-flop play. ( Post your hand in the Handevaluation forums, and provide a link to your hand in your private thread in the Locker Room.)

I will try and find one...

Question 3: What is the equity of AKo against the top 5% range? 5% means: 88+, AJs+, KQs, AKo?

How did KQs and AJs become better than AQo? Anyway, I'm guess it's a flip or slightly below. If you add AQo to the range then AKo becomes a slight favorite.

Oh and I noticed my bankroll is back up to $2300 and I only have $100 left to grind of Stars bonus. My PT3 trial ran out. A shame I downloaded it one month before I started using it. Ah well, guess I have to fork over cash now.

Played 4 tables today over 1k hands. Spewed horrible in the beginning with experimental plays that cost me a bit but climbed back up to the plus zone so I can't complain. I found one experimental play to work a lot in this small sample though, the river overbet bluff when opp clearly has a marginal hand. Small raising for cheaper showdown on the turn and extra value from draws did work but not against donks who have the habit of donkbetting rivers.
I almost got into a flip for 400BB in a 3bet pot but my opponent backed out after I raised him big on the flop.
I had 9 8 and the flop was 8 7 6 :spade:. He asked me in chat "set or flushdraw" before he folded. I figured he had QQ+. He told me he had QQ so I'm inclined to believe it. That would have been an epic flip.

Hello Maniatrix. Your graph looks very nice. Do you plan to keep playing SH exclusively now or FR as well? Tell me also how difficult is to clear PS first deposit bonus?

I think I will mostly play SH now, though I won't shy away from a FR table full of fish. And of course, when I'm on my next bonus clearing I will go back to 16 tabling FR.
Bonus isn't that hard to clear if you play enough tables. I still have until the end of december and only $100 left to clear.

hey maniatrix do you have a blog? would be interesting to read one from you - i like your graphs they are very motivating ♦

Yeah, here it is, the downswing graph was motivating? I was feeling depressed myself. Feeling good again now, then again Poker Tracker is depressing me by forcing me to buy it ♦