April bills mission: see Apr 27 update!!

Prizepool Madness Freeroll on Stars

I'm ITM for $12.50+ with a short stack.

SDK1987 is running hot with the 55th stack out of 800-something

Update: I'm out with $13.83, should have used the timebank in the last hand to ladder up for $1.46 more. I'd made a non-all-in all-in and underestimated how fast the players were dropping out (there were 661 left, with the 647th place getting the payjump). I hope I've earned karma points for being too ethical and passing up on the free $.

Our mod is out with $18.72 won, sorry for the jinx

I almost didn't grind for real money today, so the BR remains at $29 (of which $15 are still on Skrill)*, as I knew I was going to lose the Silver status here (that will be back in about 10 days), so I binge-watched Moshman's 18-man videos instead.

One particular bit of analysis that I appreciated was the one of ROIs at the end of a stream where he was finding leaks of a reg who'd been running at 17% at 3.50s but 3% at 7s-15s, and the projected numbers for his expected ROIs that Collin gave were 12%/7%/3% for 3.50s/7s/15s.

What surprised me was the larger gap between 3.50s and 7s. Maybe it's still present, maybe it has shrunk since the chests were rolled out. Curiously, the traffic at 7s tends to be sometimes lower than at 15s (though 15s are still less populated than 3.50s), which suggests that 15s have overskilled regs who'd play 30s if they ran (they almost don't), but 7s are somehow not saturated yet, so maybe they're still beatable easily enough.

Anyway, I know that game selection improves the ROI dramatically anyway and is particularly vital at 7s+, though Stars' recent changes are forcing us to do it manually.

* I'll possibly deposit $20 instead of $15 on Tuesday if there's a decent value Stars promo requiring it, but most likely, it will be giving Sunday Million satty tickets which will be of hardly any short-term value because of the variance.

Perhaps I'm sacrificing some short-term value by doing so, but I've made a difficult decision to return to spins on a full-time basis

The factors favouring it were:

1. My end goal is to become a midstake Spin & Go Max reg anyway, and the required skillset for that overlaps with the usual Spin skillset by 25-35%; it's probably a bigger overlap than with the 18-man SNG skillset, even though the knowledge of ICM ranges is handy in the early-middle game of SAG Max (esp. when 3-4 places are paid) and to understand weak regs' late game ranges (when 2+ are paid) as well.

2. I do have a recent (last 6-7 months) sample at Stars $0.25 spins with >90 cEV, which is worse than the 120-140 chips that most regs would have, partly because I wasn't that serious about peak performance when having higher equity tables of other SNG formats on the side, but I was still +EV:

Stars (90% 0.25s, 10% 1s)

Party (35% 0.25s, 65% 1s)

3. As a tiny boost to the ROI in the otherwise tougher games, I've got a reload offer from Party (extra 25% rakeback on the next $200 of rake) because I was dormant there.

4. In the very unlikely scenario if I ever need a stake, a recent sample at (non-Max) $1s would be a bonus.

Aaaw, a new blog? I´m in. ♠_love:

I hope it doesn't last long, though :f_tongue:, in the sense that I learn to make a sufficient monthly profit quickly.

A little brag: I've been at a table with a newly signed partypoker pro (Ryan Schoonbaert from Canada)! It was in a starting hand of an early morning $22 PKO that I played because I'd got an MTT ticket as a reload bonus. Sadly, we both openfolded, I was reseated to another table and, shortly after, had my acies cracked by ATs that flopped a flush

Curiously, I've had acies cracked in the last 3 Party MTTs (all PKOs) in a row that I had to enter because of the reload offers. Where's my tinfoil hat?

Oh no! That even hurts to read! I feel your pain. For me this was a good reason to stop grinding MTTs - they can be cruel as heck! You play for hours and hours, you´re almost ITM and then: AA < xy (you name it) or KK < you-name-it.

Well, every poker format is painful in some way, especially if a site like Party stakes you to play abnormally high buy-ins where, to add insult to injury, the free version of PartyCaption doesn't work (it shouldn't be launched at all in such cases because it will then attempt to close Party tables with BI>$3 and possibly crash the client altogether, oops) and thus bets have to be sized manually.

I mean, it will hurt the same way if they start giving $5 spin tickets instead, for example.

On a side note, I'll most likely update the title to $50 -> $250 (or $x -> $200+x depending on how well I run at Stars this week) because I'm really tempted to take Party's another reload bonus that I still have on offer and might need to tap into my offline wallet once again and withdraw that money back in a few days

The chance is high that we meet at the SnG tables on Party I play the 9max and DONs there.

Wait, isn't most of your volume at Stars right now? I might be gone from Party before you return there.

Originally posted by tonypmm
Wait, isn't most of your volume at Stars right now? I might be gone from Party before you return there.

Tony, no "volume" at the moment - just a comeback in tiny little steps. Stay there! As soon as my BR and I recovered, I´ll be at the 5.50 $.

Well, I'm never going to play 5.50s - I'm going to play spins exclusively whenever the BR is too large for 2.20 9-mans.

The reload bonus does skew the choice in favour of 9-mans because, assuming that 9-mans and spins are otherwise equally profitable (which may be still wrong because the poker market is generally inefficient, but Collin's videos have been ensuring that 9-mans never fly under regs' radars), the 3% boost to the ROI in 9-mans raked at 12% is a bit nicer than a 2% boost to the ROI at spins raked at 8%; however, I do have to rake at least $1 at spins daily to qualify for the SpinStorm freerolls.

Dig in, Tony! I´m enjoying a "fun-break" from grinding, which means I do not grind, but play 100 % recreationally at the moment, so I can just play DONs when you feel like playing the 1.10 $ and 2.20 $ 9max on Party. Go ahead and enjoy! Meanwhile I enjoy some fun play for my tortured soul

Party's software tilts me too hard

Hence the $36 upload originally intended for the Party reload bonus has gone to Stars instead, making the Stars balance $54, with $10 remaining at Party for 2 more days to qualify for the SpinStorm freeroll once.

Besides, I'm tired of the abundance of postflop play in 3-handed spins, though I haven't yet exported a PT4 report to Google Docs to compare the number of decisions per game for spins vs 18-mans.

Somehow, 18-mans are still a poker format that hasn't tilted me all that much, probably until a large sample proves that my skill level isn't superhuman either there

I guess 45-90-mans wouldn't have tilted me either if I hadn't tried to 20-table them with StackAndTile, pushing my old laptop's CPU usage and my decision speed to the limit.

18-mans are easier in this respect, as I can just tile 12 tables and pre-fold junk hands, and still get enough food for thought, at a more consistent pace.

That said, if I succeed at plugging a 2nd monitor in, I'll be able to tile 20 tables of 45s/90s/MTTs too, though I don't like committing myself to 10-hour sessions.

Crippling general anxiety did me in, so I merely got in 600 games (spins and a bit of 9-mans), not nearly as much as I should have :f_cry:, only won ~$40 at Party and broke even at Stars, was rescued again by my wonderful brother.

The spin chip EVs are dreadful in the current DB: ~95 at $0.25s over 1182 games (86% Stars, 14% Party) but ~45 at $1s over 445 games (43% Stars, 57% Party). The maximum likelihood estimates of my true 3-tabling cEVs over these tiny samples, assuming that the gap between the stakes is 15 chips (3% ROI difference) and the poker market is about efficient, are:

90 at Stars 0.25s
80 at Party 0.25s
(the same 8% ROI as at Stars due to cashback)
75 at Stars 1s
65 at Party 1s

(another reason for the gap between Stars and Party is the slowness of the latter software, reducing the number of hands per game a little bit, especially at 10/20 and 15/30).

So if I were in a stable, I wouldn't even be promoted to 3s with this performance.

While I have to play spins sometimes for training because they obv have a substantial skill overlap with spinmax - I estimate that the HU skillset is ~15% of the spinmax one, and the 3-max winner-take-all one is ~25%, while the remaining ~60% is specific to spinmax - and even despite the Stars-UFC partnership, I think there's a bit more shortterm value in hyper-super-KOs right now just due to the Monte Carlo update of HRC beta.

And obv, the $0.10 360-mans are good until May 1 (in the sense that 15-tabling them is the least swingy way of earning $1.5 an hour) because Stars' milestone hand promo awards $0.10 tickets to a lot of non-MTSnG players that can't be used elsewhere, so the traffic has become unusually great in the 360-mans.

From now on, I'll mostly keep silence as to my own poker performance, but whenever I want to b:censored: about my laziness, I'll do so in an older blog that happens to have some super-KO content already.

The money graph for the lulz incl. a shot at $3s and a 25x$1 Party spin ship, not incl. $12-15 in cashback and promo tickets. That's exactly how spinners' money graphs tend to look like - very raggy

Thanks for reading and

Oh no! Tony, get well soon! I know you can do it! But get well first!

Thanks, stay well too

I don't think I have enough disposable cash for a really good psychiatrist, so I've decided to restart taking a very weak Russian OTC anxiolytic called fabomotizole and may also visit a neuropathologist in a freemium state clinic soon to address my myoclonus (that, fortunately, happens under severe stress only).

Keep on fighting, Tony! Anxiety suxx dikk! But you can overcome it!

Tony!!! !!!!!

Lost the battle but not the war! Keep fighting 🤺
That gif is hilarious tho