ChowChow's SH NL blog (Chowzor eats snow)

First

Quick Entry today as it is my shiny new blog I played very low volume, as i was trying to make sure I was thinking properly and getting use to software.

Let me tell you something this was like Ladbrokes:

Unfortunately my poker play was pretty brutal, That being said in the 100 hands i played I was running 75bb/100 which is just redonkulas (see what i did there ♦). Most of the big hands I lost were to fish chasing gutshots, flushes, 4 of a kind, and me being to non observant to see when they are completed. I posted a hand today, as it was the only one where I couldn't see my flaws after analysis.

Also a Reminder to myself:
DON'T TRY TO SLOWPLAY LOOSE PASSIVE, THEY WILL CALL YOU ANYWAY

Funny that this was talked about at the coaching I attended, just before i started playing , which this slow play rule was stated clearly: don't do it unless you know they are going to aggro you. Players who are 82/7 aren't gonna do this.

As for my bonus (and this will speed up once i start playing more than 2 tables) I got about 14 loyalty points / 100 hands. I need 12779.20 points to clear my bonus, which means 12779.20 * 100/14 = 91270.5 hands I have 8 weeks which means i need 11.5k hands a week. Which is like 1.6k a day..erg. So as I stay on NL5, (which I probably will be for a while cause I feel like a bad.) I really doubt I will make my bonus. Now, theoretically, if i jump to nl10 that will all get cut in half. 800 hands a day seems not to crazy. So, I am going to play at minimum (and I mean Minimum) 6k hands before I think about NL10, also, my BR is $210 CAD, and Ladbrokes is in Euros so I really need about 250 Euros for my BR, (as the last thing I want is to go broke). Converting 250 euro into cad (via google) that is 332 CAD. Looks like I am going to need to be playing some hands.

Hope I can run hot. I normally play 4 tables at a time which is something like 400 hands/hr avg winnings (I have read) is something around 8bb/100 so 32*0.1=3.2*conversion to Canadian = 4.2 an hour (w00t?) so looks like 30.2 hours worth of playing at 14 hours a week. Should take 2.2 weeks assuming no variance (which is never the case) so could be more could be less.
Either way I think I am worrying about things that really are not that important. I am going to re-read some of my material and play some more tonight, and will combine the results with how I do in my 2 hours tomorrow!

Things to remember:
Tight is right
Don't bluff if they don't fold
Fish still can have a hand.
Pay more attention to what the fish is doing and work on thinking in ranges.

I would post a graph..but it's of 100 hands and means absolutely nothing.
Okay I am ranting and I am pretty sure those of you who tried to read this are now face first into your keyboard asleep now so I think this is a good place to end!

I will leave you with this HE-MAN ear worm!

Any and all advice from you more experienced players is greatly appreciated! Again don't hesitate to add me on skype (throw me a friend request ♦) I love talking poker!

Hi, Chowchow12 and welcome to the blogging section!

I'm glad to see you took the beginner's course!

It sure made a difference for me.

All the best,
--VS

welcome to mGaming. Preapre to swing like you once did when you were a kid...its nuts..Just keep it simple and play the big value hands and be prepared to get mad suckouts. Though mGaming will be moving to iPoker somewhere in the future IIRC so the playerpool will change some. iPoker micros are not as gmablery typeas on mGaming.

GL at the tables!

Cool blog!

Welcome to the blogging section ♠_biggrin:

We're starting from the same place on the same software except I'm starting with PLO. Mgn can be swingy, but you'll do better on here than stars or FT.

The vip system on here is is pretty awesome too

Thank you guys for the warm welcome!
I played for a bit today but i only really played 1 or 2 tables since i am still trying to get comfortable. I am still making a lot of dumb mistakes, my ranges are wrong. So while i feel my results are very good, I am not happy with my play. I refuse to be results orientated.

Here are the 2 hands I posted:
Random shove on the river
AKo AI flop

So I can see the pattern from my bet sizing needs some work, though i am pretty sure on the non-monotone multi-way i didn't realize there was a 3rd person until after i bet. Still I will work on it more.

My volume is super low since I am still making mistakes I want my game to be as solid as possible. Anyway here is my graph!

I took a page out of Roo's book and painted out my name.
The circles are a direct result of bad play. So I learned my lesson there. I think I am really fortunate to have the hand evaluation forums. As they opened up to areas for work on. Realistic hand reading and bet sizing. Might have to read those bet sizing articles again. Looking at the graph and my play I think that I am getting some new room luck here since I am running pretty good. Up $15 in 350 hands is a pretty decent upswing I think. I just don't want to only work on my game when things are in the dumps. I do not want to be results orientated, but correct thinking orientated, and I won't be happy until i have the limit crushed ♦

So my goals for the week are:
Keep playing low volume until I make less of these silly mistakes!
Re-read the bet-sizing articles.
Keep playing
Run hot
Keep tight
Ball till I fall.
Finish the damn Newbie Course.

Give me a shout if you need any help with your paint skills

Well today was probably the worst poker session I have ever had. It was running bad compounded with mistakes. I am pretty disappointed in myself. There were so many times where I was just like WHY AM I CLICKING THE @#$# CALL BUTTON. The positive from this is every time I did something stupid I got my hand slapped.

DON'T DOUBLE BARREL FISH
it doesn't work.

Variance got me, and in my first session i should have been down, but not 2 BI. I think i am making some bad call downs, and getting into situations i really should not be. I am a full fledged fish. I found it hard to get any pay off when i did have cards. I think this may be due to the time i play, as 8pm in Canada is like 2-4am in Europe that leaves fewer people to play with and a lot more regs. With the regs the pace slowed down, and I really just gave the fish my money. To much, well lets "experiment" moments. Oh well we will move on.

I got pretty tilted and spewed off some stacks, and then i figured while i was already down, lets experiment. I defiantly paid for some things. Regs it felt like I had to be a a lot more tricky and that sucks. I may be switching the times i play up a little bit, so i'll play right after school then go to the gym then do homework. I'll see.

I went through my database and it was pretty clear on most what my mistakes where, so it's back to good old ABC poker for me. Now to make me feel better I am going to ms paint the shit out of my graph, proceed with calling me a stinking fish!

With that being said there are positives still, my range is getting down quicker, and my decision making is faster (I knew I was making the wrong decisions when i was making them)
So how am i going to counter this?
Well after some self reflection i realize than a winrate for most people is like 12bb/100 and outside of the times i was being a spewtard i was making some ok decisions, and until i gave them my money, had a pretty decent stack at the table. So the word for chow chow is: PATIENCE! the stacks are not going to spew into your pocket. (Maybe they should be?) I am kind of interested to hear about other peoples experience at nl5?

One of the things that I find to be frustrating was how hard it was to get value from hands today, it was like every time i had something I would get it to me on pre flop or on the flop, but every time i got the stupid idea to double barrel that fish, it would backfire. I was like well he folded the last 3 times i had a card maybe i should double barrel..BAD CHOW. This is going to take a while to get the money back that I lost, but i think it is necessary, since I am clearly not ready to move up a limit.

Any and all advice, or stories, would be great. I am pretty disappointed in how i played today.

Originally posted by Chowchow12...
With that being said there are positives still, my range is getting down quicker, and my decision making is faster (I knew I was making the wrong decisions when i was making them)

I'm not sure I understand...
How is it a positive if you are making "the wrong decisions" faster?

Originally posted by Chowchow12...
So how am i going to counter this?
Well after some self reflection i realize than a winrate for most people is like 12bb/100 and outside of the times i was being a spewtard i was making some ok decisions, and until i gave them my money, had a pretty decent stack at the table. So the word for chow chow is: PATIENCE! the stacks are not going to spew into your pocket. (Maybe they should be?) I am kind of interested to hear about other peoples experience at nl5?

One of the things that I find to be frustrating was how hard it was to get value from hands today, it was like every time i had something I would get it to me on pre flop or on the flop, but every time i got the stupid idea to double barrel that fish, it would backfire. I was like well he folded the last 3 times i had a card maybe i should double barrel..BAD CHOW. This is going to take a while to get the money back that I lost, but i think it is necessary, since I am clearly not ready to move up a limit.

Patience is for sure the key to survival.
But patience with balance -- esp at NL5
If you are TOO patient, when a good hand comes along, you get a chorus of folds. You need to be seen playing -- and IMHO the best way to do this is blind stealing.

Try to find tables w/ tight on the left, loose on the right, and bail on any table you don't like.

Be sure to watch pleno1's coaching tomorrow!

All the best,
--VS

I'm not sure I understand...
How is it a positive if you are making "the wrong decisions" faster?

What I meant was, i knew that the decision was wrong when i was doing it but i did it anyway, so I could have made the right one just as quick.

Definitely will watch his coaching, I watched his last two and thought they were really good. Thanks for the advice!

Well, in 1 session i got myself out of the hole! Good stuff.

Play felt better today, I am still going to need to work on my bet sizing, and getting some value out. I have been choosing my bluffs better, and today it felt like they worked out pretty well. Also with calling I kept tried and true to what Dr. Dunne said, you either think you can get them off the hand, or get their whole stack! It works pretty will with the aggressive fish, call, call, c/r and they rage push. At least that was today this may be a leak, but I will be very careful with how i proceed from here.

Time of day is a big factor, i played for my first hour before class, (morning for me) and then right when i got home from class (6pmish my time) felt like the games were a lot more juicy, and it worked out. Now I just need to focus on making sure i can get the value from the fish.

Not much else to say for today, and I am pretty tired, and glad I am no longer in the Red, just need to make up for lost profit.

Not going to post a graph, just imagine it came back up to the zero line. Profit making and BR building tomorrow good night poker strategy!

So another down day :(, I had made some dumb call downs. They are happening less and less. I am still learning, but at the same time I feel myself putting a lot of pressure on myself to crush the limits. I lost a coin-flip, and made a few call downs i shouldn't have. Was a bit of a rough day, I wasn't t hitting anything then finally trips on the flop, and the normally passive fish when nuts and all ined, he flopped a straight I am just to much of a fish to lay it down when I should have. Lesson affirmed. More leaks than a siv. Need to do the Canadian thing and break out the duck tape. Another 2 hours tomorrow, getting out of the red hopefully. Tommorow night I am going to go through my last 1000 hands, and try and do some database analysis, tag and post some hands. Been busy with school, so having a hard time doing this.
Here is the graph

2000 hands really isn't a sample size, but i feel like I am just a losing player by looking at it. Again anything anyone notices any and all advice is appreciated, I am in this for the long haul, so be blunt, be honest. Going to bed now, hopefully to dream about getting out of the micros.

Last couple of days were pretty bad, I just kept going down and down, and was hainvg a bit of a freak out. But today I kind of came back to it, and Still need to work on some things, and I think a big part is table selection. My confidence was really shot the last few days, and after reflecting on my stats i nitted up way to much, so i decided i needed to grow more of a pair and chill out. Made up the deficit, back to 0, so hope now I can go up!

Poker is hard. I was reading to much and taking things more literately I think I turned my brain off to be honest, and played to tight. Once I got a pep talk from a friend i opened my brain again, and did some figuring. Fish like the flush, if they are calling you and trying to blocker bet you on the flop and turn, you can tell they are on the draw. (Why wasn't i paying attention to this?) once I figured this out the world got a little nicer. I started thinking again, playing table mechanics and messing with some fish. It felt good, now I may have gone to far with a couple call downs, but all in all I was running good, and I was thinking about their ranges more. (I am still bad at it haha) So I had a better idea when they were full of shit, and when to back off.

The really juicy table had some big deep stacked tuna, and I 3 bet one of them (AK or something) so there was like a !.30 in the pot, but they wouldn't put money in until they hit they flush, or straight, it was funny to watch, when the straight didn't complete, Chowchow stuck a bet in and scooped a nice 30bb.

Now I don't think I am going to get into situations like this a lot, and these players were terribad. I was running a lot better, but having confidence is huge.

Now for the goal of the week:
Start posting some #@#$@ing hands!

Here is the graph, and hopefully next time i get to post it it is uppp.

Any and all advice encouraged!

Hai, so it has been a while since I have posted, but rest assured I am not dead. I took some time off as I was getting pretty heated with things.

After about two weeks I knew I liked poker to much to quit forever, so I while I was tossing and turning to make the decision to stay with cash or switch back to Sng's, I decided that I was to stubborn to let stupid NL5 beat me. So I am back, I am making a few changes to the blog, I felt like the last few posts were just a lot of me complaining, and so none of that. Also going to post some hands in here, and hopefully track and review my progress. So some of the big changes I made: I studied up, I rebuilt my game from the ground up, starting from pre-flop ranges to post flop plans. I am very slowly adding more tables, I started with 2 and added my up to to 4 which is where I am going to stay until I have the limit crushed. I also got some feedback from my coach Bierbaer, who I have to say is excellent, that man makes you think and come to the understanding on your own, he does not simply just tell you what to do, he get you to find the contradiction in your own logic. Big upps to Phil G.

So after I redid my game there was an issue of tilting, which is something else I am working on. I did not realize how prone i was to it. Just simply takign a break after a bad beat, or ,since I am in nl5, physically putting $5 on my table and seeing all I lost isn't that much, really helps. Had a few bad beats today, but didn't let the tilt get the better of me.

The first 500 hands I played were all tilt, and I was getting pretty mad, and about to switch again, but I just remembered the point of what I was doing. That was to simply get better at poker, not win money, or get to NL10,25,50etc, just to get better, and then the money and higher stakes will come. This means I shouldn't be afraid to make mistakes, it was quite a revelation. I would rather make the mistakes on NL5 than have to learn them at NL20, or NL50. After that, I just played my game, like in the theory of poker, just doing the best I can to get that hourly rate. I came back from the red 2, 3, 5, 10 dollars at a time. The confidence then came back to me and I truly understand the meaning of the term grinder. Grind it out. I also had to switch to pokerstars as with my summerjob being 9-5, and being from Canada, there was no one on ladbrokes when I could play. So this means I am not being tracked by ps.com, but that's ok, I will buy a gold membership when I need it. I love this site.

Only played about 6k hands, but I am liking the way my graph is:

So the goal for the next bit is to start raising some flops. I have done it a bit the past few days, just need to pick it out a bit more, as that's the reason for the drop in my red line I think. At this Limit it is interesting, I found that while a lot of players will call it, they put the breaks on, and it is kind of interesting to the reacation. I have had a few where they call the raise, then check the turn then check river, and I can fire the bullet on the river and take the pot. Will give more updates on what I have learned about that later.

All in all I am feeling pretty good about poker right now. I am avoiding marginal situations, and the times I lose money from coinflips I think I make it back up with some good decisions. I actually have a stop loss now as well. 2BI which is something I can make up in the next 2 or 3 days. Now if I lose a coinflip it doesn't count, but If I lose 2 it counts as 1, cause I will get pretty tilted.

Well good to see you getting back at it, they're in trouble now by the sound of your planning! ♠_cool:

Please tell me that's a drawing of our beloved coach bierbaer, please!? ♦

Mal.

haha no that was suppose to be me doing a victory stance. I will put Bierbaer in the next one tho I promise.

just passing by to say u got some crazy paint skills. Keep it up ♦

Well the past few sessions have proven to be..interesting. Generally when I learn a new concept I go through a "breaking in period" where I am over, and therefore, miss-applying the concepts. Because of this my red line has taken quite the hit. Yesterday I also experienced "over confidence" tilt. Which was a little more like back in the day, so I am going to tighten back up again here, and cool it with the aggression. I also am getting to showdown a lot more, so that may be the reason for my red line dropping, who knows. It's only over like 1k hands so It could just be variance. So this weekend was pretty break even. Which is fine I feel like I was running pretty hot anyway. The one thing I did learn with all this raising I have done is that value raising is super key. I have found a lot of people just won't fold on the raise, but then try to get to show down as quickly as possible.

I have been to focused on that, and not the value betting either, I have been winning a decent amount of showdowns, but not for as much as I would like. Maybe this is the way it's suppose to be? I don't really know. Going back to get back to normal tommorow. This is just all part of learning.

So while this weekend I should have been up a few BI's I am actually down $3, but that's ok.

Well the rest of the weekend didn't go to well, the bluff raising lost me a decent chunk of change, and then I got pretty frustrated and tilted off some more money. To which I then nitted right up and had a bad run and lost some more money. To say I felt pretty mad, and doubted my game once again.

I took the rest of the day off, got a good night sleep and then today, took a bunch of those poker quizzes. I cleared through the bronzes ones pretty fast, and did prety well, but the silver ones really showed how much of a nitter I was, and how lost I really was post flop. They forced me to think in ranges and hand read. Needless to say it really cleared up a lot for me, and was a good day for learning and feeling better. So this changed a lot when it came to playing. I cut back down to three tables, since I was actively forcing myself to think our the opponents range, and force myself to figure out what they could be doing this with. When I did terrible on those quizzes, I re-read the silver articles, and they cleared up a lot as well. Mainly the turn, and river articles, and then took a break and redid those quizzes. I forced myself to re-think those questions and think, again, in ranges, and roughly calculate the equity in my head. Before this I was still in a bit of auto-pilot mode. Anyway, it really helped that when I fired up the tables to play, I ran pretty hot. I only played an hour and got up 2 BI, so that was nice, it made up for those rough past few days. It was nice, I hit on a bunch of the really passive short stacks. Got them all-in in 3 streets and collected their stack. I then had this hand, which probly looks a little spewy, and maybe it was, but I had a few reads on this player which made it worth it. I saw this player get stacked once before with Ahigh on a crazy high card board, was stacking off preflop with QT, generally just couldn't find the fold button. So, and maybe I over thought this, but here goes

Poker Stars, $0.02/$0.05 No Limit Hold'em Cash, 6 Players
Poker Tools Powered By Holdem Manager - The Ultimate Poker Software Suite.

BB: $12.64 (252.8 bb)
UTG: $5.30 (106 bb)
MP: $18.51 (370.2 bb)
Hero (CO): $5 (100 bb)
BTN: $12.50 (250 bb)
SB: $20.75 (415 bb)

Preflop: Hero is CO with K K
UTG raises to $0.15, MP folds, Hero raises to $0.45, 3 folds, UTG calls $0.30
standard..

Flop: ($0.97) 8 9 6 (2 players)
UTG bets $0.20, Hero raises to $0.80, UTG calls $0.60
Very drawy board, hit the ranges pretty hard, I was expecting a call here, like I said this player was chasing EVERYTHING

Turn: ($2.57) 2 (2 players)
UTG bets $0.20, Hero raises to $3.75 and is all-in, UTG calls $3.55
Here looks pretty spewy, but the small betsize, was standard for this player, her AF was like 20, everytime he or she had a peice of the board they would do this, now the player was a spazz so I figured with a second flush draw on the board, and the fact the player didn't hit his or her straight, or else I am positive he or she would have shoved. I felt like a flush draw or OESD would be the worst, or maybe a combo draw..again at worst, and I have seen this player do some werid things, I was pretty sure they were calling here. so with 3.75/10 so i guess 40% and with a combo draw with clean outs liked 7xdd or he had (8+8(cause i had a diamond)+3 for an ace high)*2= 38% at most, and I wouldn't put it past him to do this with stuff like oesd flush draw, again this was just rough stuff, but if in that stuation he had 38% I had a minimum 62%, so it was getting shipped.

River: ($10.07) 3 (2 players, 1 is all-in)

Results:

:/....well I'll take it.

Anyway was a good day all in all, still making some mistakes, but you can't plug all the leaks in a day. Today got my profits back up to where they were before this bad few days (maybe $1 less) so hopefully tomorrow brings more good luck. I only played for an hour today, so was a short session but proved to be useful I think.

Anyway, thanks for reading and goodnight!