Chip Up & Ship It (GGPoker, Spins recreational regular diary)

Today was a good session - finally decent ChipEv/Tourney (51 on 100s limit). But issues with HUD pannels positions really pissed me off. All the time I was playing - I was fixing pannels positions. Filed a support ticket on PT4 for this issue, hope they figure something out soon...

40K Profit Challange Week 24 Update

Profit Start of the Week 24: $8590
Profit End of the Week 24: $3490
Weekly Profit: -$5100

Number of tournaments: 630
Cash hands: 804
Hours played: 26.5

# Summary

Quite sad to report such a bad week. I'd like to blame run-outs and dealt cards, but I've made plenty of mistakes as well, -EV bluff-catching calls on rivers and unnecessary bluffs from my side. My monthly results are barely positive - constantly reg battling, the edge is getting thinner and thinner if there is any left of it. But in Poker, nothing is constant, gladly bad runs as well. I hope next week will be way better.

Listen to the advice of leveleleven47 and played 10s, 20s and 50s the last few days. It's interesting to see how limits that were scary 10 months ago are now perceived as a sandbox where people make such obvious mistakes. Playing higher limits sets higher standards for the game and ranges.

All games result screenshot and 100s limit under spoiler:

# Highlights
- Bought 3-handed HUD. I wasn't studying the 3handed part that much as I was studying HU. But after looking at different stats, now I found my own leaks and improvement points. Also, other people's leaks and possibilities for exploits became more vivid. Need to spend more time decoding those numbers and comparing to GTO stats
- Started a GoLang project to download data from GTOWizard analyzed hands. It is currently very basic, but I see a big potential in it, I'd like to build something like a leak-finder in PT4 based on GTOWizard simulation data

# Lowlights
- Results obviously, -$5100 is 2 average monthly household incomes in Germany. At the same time in order to play high-stakes constantly one should detach BI from real-world value, otherwise, it will affect mental state. Though the loss is big I'm feeling ok about it.
- Couldn't set up 3handed HUD to appear in proper places on the table. Sent a bug report to PT4, don't think that they will fix it anytime soon, but I'll try to raise it on different forums and channels. Working in IT I know how the most annoying users get support, so I plan to follow this strategy.
- I filed another bug report for GTOWizard as it is annoying to see the biggest EVLosses in misclassified stack depth hands. Will have to do a data cleaning during import.

For now, I'll put a pause on cash games and will not play anything above NL25, it is too expensive to learn on high limits...

Good luck at the tables

Ugh, tough stretch.
Variance can be brutal, but it's also what makes the game so unpredictable and exciting.

Stay positive, keep grinding, and trust in your abilities. This challenging phase will pass, and brighter days at the tables are ahead. Your resilience and dedication will pay off in the long run.

Wishing you the best of luck and a swift turnaround!

Thanks leveleleven47 for your support, appreciate it!

Today I've received a very positive private message here with supportive words as well as recognition of the impact and influence of my blog on someone who is playing poker as pro for 12 years. Reading it gave me goosebumps as well as boosted my level of responsibility of what and how I'm contributing to the community. It was an elevating moment, in a nice way. Suffering significant downswing, where I lost about 60% of current BR this message was exactly what was needed.

Today I'd like to dedicate a post to Poker Affiliates topic, that PokerStrategy is. Their impact on player's success is quite substantial and it bothers me for a last few weeks quite a lot.

While registering in 888Poker I missed a few steps to be affiliated with PokerStrategy and start getting Strategy Points, boosting my status. After awhile, thanks to this blog I get to know one of the readers, we chatted in private messages, then moved to discord. He mentioned that there are some affiliates that offer additional rake-back in form of rake races. I already had around 50-60% Rakeback that I considered very good. That's when I found out about Affiliate#1, applied there for re-tagging and got affiliated with them. In the first month I've received double payout that got me additional 25% Rakeback and my thought were "This is great, how could I not know about it before". Following months double payouts ended and I got about 10-12% rake-back there, that was also sweet.

Now, there is another hot Affiliate#2 on the market that gives a sweetest deal for BLAST players. I was asked not to share it, so I won't name it, but say on top of all 888Poker bonuses and promos this affiliate offers additional tier-based rake-back that can result in 100%+ rake-back, this is insane. Needless to say, that I've sent the application for re-affiliation, but was rejected as I'm already tagged to Affiliate#1.

What's the punch-line of the story? That affiliates can make a huge difference for poker players. 888Poker Affiliate program gives 20-40% ( https://www.affiliateprograms.com/p/888-affiliates/) of the rake generated by attracted user by the Affiliate. Now, imagine if Affiliate would distribute most of those profits back to the players in a form of either RakeRaces (say top-3 places would get "60%, 50%, 40% and so on..." of the generated rake) or some sort of Tiers with fixed rake-back - that would be awesome for the players and very profitable for affiliates as anyhow most of the rake is generated at the tale of the rake race,

My problem at the moment is that once you register with affiliate, you can't switch, even if someone else offers crazy-high rake-back promo. This introduces un-even playing conditions to the players. It triggers my democratic assumptions that everyone has an equal rights and that your options are not limited by place of origin, race or culture, only by your skills and competencies. In this case it's not - the moment of your registration and choice of affiliate would determine your win-rates and edge to the field, the model how affiliates distribute their commission can have a very big impact and is not transparent at all, as those deals lie "outside of the poker room".

What would you do in this case? You have a big disadvantage to the newly registered players, you need to win 15 Chips/Tourney, where they need only 8 Chips/tourney, or even 0 to maintain exact same hourly rate. Would you register another account on your sister / wife / friend name, would you swallow and play further or would you just be angry on this injustice, study and grind your way further?

Right now was the shortest 25x multiplier game for me. Not happy about this hand, not because it was a big multiplier, but because I had a good read on the opponent, but failed to follow my own notes:

I'm glad that November passed.
It hit my self-esteem, BR, and hope for a bright future very hard. Will write a summary a bit later this month as we are going to Dublin to visit my cousin on the weekend.

November summary

# Key performance indicators
Number of games: 1791
Number of cash hands: 5906
Rake: $10017
Rakeback: $5285 (52.7%)
Profit: -$5396

Hours played: 100
Hourly: -$54

Profit and Bonuses graph (Spins)

Chips EV and Won graph:

# Overview
This month was very hard. I had quite a big upswing at the start, where I ran 18K chips above EV line, placing a few days on the top of the Leaderboard. But then the downswing hit me hard in the second half of the month. The more I was losing, the more I wanted to play to win it back and the vicious cycle of tilt and downswing got me.

On top of this my Coach said that PartyPoker cut their bonus and rakeback program. As an echo effect I see more and more recently registered strong players on the high limit. I assume those came from PartyPoker and started dominating the lobby. I have this suspicion about new Affiliate offer - that everyone now signed with them and get additional rakeback on a side. Usually, regs on 100s limit would play necessary number of games (30-50-80) to qualify for Leaderboard and that's it, because every other game would not bring any potential rake-back and therefore not that profitable anymore, now I see regs battling constantly independent of Leaderboard completion. Another theory is that I'm now marked as "Big Fish" in their notes and they keep playing vs me as it is so profitable for them )))

Indeed, this month is the worst month judging by ChipEV. Some regs (gombhal1993 for example) have 30+ ChipEV/Tourney in HU vs me (11.5 BB/100).
I don't think I'll make it in 40K challenge as the timeframe was till the end of the year, therefore would better focus on rebuilding my BR back step-by-step. Not playing 100s this month and following the rule "it is better to win small, than to loose big".

For the next days, I'll take a pause from the tables and have a Poker Vacation for a while.

40K Profit Challange Week 25-26 Update

Profit Start of the Week 25: $3490
Profit End of the Week 26: $1037
Weekly Profit: -$2453

Number of tournaments: 864
Hours played: 28.9

OVerall Chip Graph:

# Summary
Those 2 weeks were full on traveling around Europe, we went to Dublin last weekend and this weekend went to Rome. I needed this break to not think about poker as lately my game and results are far from my expectations.

I decided to stop the 40K Profit challenge here as grinding my way up to 40K goal doesn't seem to be sustainable. I've lost 80% of my roll that I kept on the platform and now need to return to the 20s limit. Now, I want to set some more reasonable and achievable goals for myself to turn meaningless -EV grinding into deliberate practice.

In my last coaching session, Coach pointed out that my Cbet strategy is really poor, I started working on it in GTOWizard and he's right - I'm firing those CBets with no solid plan. Besides that coach suggested I apply the 2x-no-limp SBvsBB strategy in 15bb games and the 2.5-no-limp strategy in 25bb games. This changes quite lot. This clicked in my head that I was playing sub-optimally the whole time relying on field softness and once it hardened a bit my strategy cracked. So this was a wake-up call for me.

888Poker introduced a breaking change to 100s Blast Leaderboards. Now they are unlimited, meaning all results count into LB for the day. This lead to regs grinding like crazy, or it just showed other folks volume more vividly:

For simplicity of calculation, 3.5 LB points on average is earned in the game. Before the change I could play ~30 games to have a good start of Leaderborad run and 50 afterwards to have a shot in top-5, that would generate around $500 in rake and top place would give you that rake back. Now to get the first place one need to grind 500 games, generating $3K in rake that would give only 15% Rakeback.

Now, without that deal, I mentioned in my previous post from Affiliate that gives 60% Rakeback, 100s are unbeatable for me. I've reached out to that affiliate to be retagged and they gave a condition for a switch - I need to generate $11K in rake in one month, that's unrealistic at this point.

I've decided to focus on more rewarding and realistic goals and activities. I want to double down on studying and bring my game closer to the Game Theory Optimum.

For now, I want to hold on setting the new goals and committing to anything so will do a few coaching sessions till the end of the year and put more efforts studying and doing drills in GTOWizard

So what sort of BRM does your coach recommend to these games? I would think 100bin is actually quite small for this format to have easy time to handle common swings.

We didn't go too deep into this topic. He plays in the pool where he gets payout based on chipEV, I prefer to play on my own. It also depends on the ability and willingness to move down the stakes if needed and the ability to deposit if needed. As I'm not relying on poker income so I decided for myself to go with aggressive BRM, but now I'm rethinking this strategy. Not having an option to re-deposit in Germany (1000 EUR monthly deposit limit) makes it super-hard to recover after a downswing. At the same time keeping 30K on the poker room, and playing 100s limit seems like a risky approach as well. Those would be dead money that would be best to keep in stocks with 10% yearly ROI

Howdy,
sorry to hear about your recent downswing. Of course, as requested, I took you out of the BR challenge for now but expect you to be back, soon!
For that reason gonna leave your BR challenger badge straight on!

Thanks for stopping by and keeping my badge. I think I'll come-up with something interesting and challenging next year

Had a great coaching session today that I enjoyed quite a lot. We touched the topic of studying spots, what are the most important and frequent spots, and designed a study plan for me around preflop, Flop Cbet and Facing Flop Cbet spots in HU / SNG (0-5bb, 5-8bb, 8-10bb, 10-15bb and 18-25bb) spots. That will require a lot of new drills creation in GTOWizard and lots of charts uploading in my memory.

It all started with my little project to get more statistics from GTOWizard. I wrote a little helper to get the data and import it into Excel for analysis. From my first trial, I got stats for 4220 decisions that I've made and were solved by GTO, distributions of them by Game Type / Street is:

As you can see, HU decisions are more frequent than Spins and more deeper (more actions are taken on Flop, Turn and River), whereas the 3Handed part is very preflop heavy leaving only a fraction of decisions to the later streets.

When it comes to stack-size depth in HU part 5-13 are the most popular depths where in 3handed part 8-16

As for the LostEV KPI it seems that I'm leaking mostly in HU SB (preflop, turn and river) spots and Spin BB (Preflop, Flop and Turn) spots:

Maybe it doesn't make much sense to you, but with my obsession about graphs and Excel pivot tables, I now have plenty of interesting numbers to play around, build charts, and improve upon.

Not sure how many findings of my poor game I will share here though as I learned that some regulars of 100s limit are reading this blog which made me quite happy on one hand and a bit cautious on another )) to Special0815 and schomobeto

By the way, in the recent turn of events I was reckless enough to lose my BR playing shallow on 100s limit and having a very good run EV-wise, but not winning-wise. So my next post will be about my attempt to prove that micro stakes are beatable, while I'll be working on my game to prep for 100s limit come back

Beating micro stakes Challenge

After opting out from the previous 40K Profit challenge and taking a break for 1 day I've decided to give it a try to beat microlimits and climb my way up to the highest limit. So the first challenge is: 100$ -> 500$

Starting BR: 100$
Target BR: 500$

# Strategy
I'll be playing according next BRM:
- BR<150 - 1$
- BR<250 - 1$-2$
- BR<500 - 1$-2$-5$

# Beating 1$ stake
1$ is hard to beat due to 3 main factors:
1) Big Rake (9%)
2) 1MILx multiplier, that messes-up with other multipliers frequencies and makes it hard to get Leaderboard points to get part of that Big Rake back
3) Shallow stacks (regular games are 7.5BB starting stack and "deep games" are 12BB deep). Meaning there is little room to realize an edge over the field

As always, on 888Poker the biggest value lies in its Leaderboards and 1$ limit is not an exception. First place gives 25x2$ tickets which would be my main target. Today "Mixalis333" achieved it by scoring 68 points. It's really hard to get 10x (1 in 250 games) or 25x (1 in 1750 games) multipliers on this limit so I'll continue with my strategy of opting-in before winning a 5x multiplier (1 in 15 games)

Wish me luck

Goood stuff sir. Wish you luck and i hope that you will share some insights and strategies in this blog.

That's interesting! Also 100 buyins are not really much. What you will you do if you run into a downswing at the beginning of the challenge? You will start playing the 0.10 blasts? These have no leaderboards. That will be really tough.

Originally posted by Kostja007
That's interesting! Also 100 buyins are not really much. What you will you do if you run into a downswing at the beginning of the challenge? You will start playing the 0.10 blasts? These have no leaderboards. That will be really tough.

Good question. In case I run out of BR on $1 I'll redeposit and consider this challenge failed. In reality, if I couldn't redeposit I would focus on playing freerolls instead of grinding $0.1 - this limit seems like a tire that Is not possible to get out from

Originally posted by Studentishe

It all started with my little project to get more statistics from GTOWizard. I wrote a little helper to get the data and import it into Excel for analysis. From my first trial, I got stats for 4220 decisions that I've made and were solved by GTO, distributions of them by Game Type / Street is:

That is impressive. I thought in Spins you have way more Push/Fold decisions - according to your stats it is only 8%, can that be true?
To clarify - is this based on real hands or just GTOwizard?

That depends on the push/fold definition. If we take GTO strategy, in HU stage push/fold starts at 5.5bb depth for SB (28% of preflop decisions). In 3Handed phase, it is a bit more complicated, for BTN it starts at 9.5bb (37% of preflop decisions), for SB it starts at 6bb (11% of preflop decisions).

What 8% are you referring to?

All those stats are based on bulk uploads of real hands played, that got solutions on GTOWizards. It might miss some of the post-flop spots as in case I diverged into the decision node that GTOWizard gives 0% frequency, then all following actions don't have the solution and therefore EVLoss estimate, that I'm most interested in.

Yesterday I've downloaded solutions for all 100s games played in November-December - that's a full histogram of preflop / flop / turn / river actions per format and position:

It has a big spike around 15bb in Spins, naturally as it is a starting stack for 90% of the games and this where I plan to put the most GTOWizard drilling. You can see that there is no post-flop on lower stack sizes, indicating push-fold strategy. Another insight is how few deep games action there is (that little island around 24bb in Spins) compared to normal games (2x and 3x multiplier), and how important those games are as chips in those games are 3x+ more valuable than in normal games. I want to dedicate studying those stack depths more, but GTOWizard has no solutions ofr 25bb 3handed games with ante, only classic option (((( Well, I'll do what I can and drill 25bb classic games

Note: it's quite obvious how HU stack depths are calculated, but in 3handed I'm relying on GTOWizard depths classification, that's quite opaque for me