Mind Games

Originally posted by UPAY4DINNER
Pics of holiday please

Coming up -- still need to sort them all out.

VS

Originally posted by thazar
NH , my only question is why did you leave $1.14 on the table?

Hi Thazar!
On this site in general people seem to fold to shoves too much.
I thought more likely to get a call if I look like I'm bluffing the river.

Cheers,
VS

Today was suckout day
Here is my NL 4 graph after the first 60 or so hands:

Check out how the green line and yellow line go in opposite directions.

I was "pretty sure" I was ahead in both -- yes, even the first. I had seen SB shove needlessly prior, so I *ahem* assumed he was bluffing.

This last one is not exactly a suckout.
The game is 5-Card Draw 7-A.
It is actually 6-A when 5 people are playing.
The weird thing here is that a Flush beats a full house.
Villain limped and drew 2. I had a combo draw, but I only have 4 club outs, plus 4 T outs (maybe) so I just checked.

I was just playing the 5-Card Draw 7-A to get the hang of it, while I re-did all my equity calculations for this variant.
There are some surprising things about it.
If you get dealt a pair, and draw 3, it is highly likely you'll get two pair.
Mind you, they're likely not worth much, but it is a fun game to play.

Another oddity is that A can be the bottom of a straight or straight flush.
So T987A is a straight in the 7-A game.

I wonder how many of those I just folded because I didn't recognize it as valuable.

Peace,
VS

NLHE
Out of the blue I got a $500 bonus from PartyPoker.
I have a month to clear it, and it clears in $10 chunks, each requiring 80pts to clear -- or $40.00 in rake contributed per chunk.
So I need to generated $4.00 in rake per dollar received -- 25% rakeback.

I cleared my previous bonus playing NL 10
That bonus paid $20.00, and that one only required 40 pts to clear -- 100% rakeback.
I guess that is a bit much to expect every time...

So I got going on it, and dug right in.
BB is well known to me from the last bonus likes to 3Bet shove his 40 BB stacks -- and can do so with way worse.
My notes say he has done it with AJo and 99.
I *assumed* that I would drive CO out of the hand.
When he didn't fall, I started to sweat...

Interesting choice of action by the CO -- it makes you wonder how he got the 200+ BB in the first place...

Cheers,
VS

Bruce, that first hand with the A3 is such a bad call ♦. he is not bluffing often enough

Always put him on a range before you call. Not just he must be bluffing or hmmm I think he has it

it's more: What would have that he would bet that much with?

Originally posted by thazar
Bruce, that first hand with the A3 is such a bad call ♦. he is not bluffing often enough

Yes it is a bad call, isn't it? ♦
The problem is that this particular player had previously bet 5 out of the 9 flops he saw two others he delayed his aggression to the turn, two he folded. Of the 5 he bet, 3 were donks, two of those shoves. The other two were a shove in position, and a 2x pot in position. All pots he took w/o showdown.
He also took 2 pots open-shoving pre.

That has to widen his range considerably.
Also, he bought in with an oddball amount -- $3.41 -- and posted the BB out-of-turn

I'm not defending this as a wise play. Against almost any other player, I'd let him take the pot.
But like I said, I did think I was probably ahead of whatever range he might have, considering all his play to that point.

No I don't remember all that detail -- I had to look it up. I did note at the time, though that he was hyper active and hyper aggressive. After the third donk shove I figured I'd take my next decent chance.

I was wrong, but sucked out.

So it goes...
VS

fair enough in that case.... well I am not even sure it's ok to call ♦ but maybe haha

Originally posted by thazar
fair enough in that case.... well I am not even sure it's ok to call ♦ but maybe haha

Agreed.

In "The Mental Game of Poker" (I think that is where I read it) he calls the practice of calling out the maniac, "playing table sheriff".
I do this from time to time. I have no stats on my success rate -- but I think I am way ahead on that score, because I will let the maniac go unless I have some showdown value.

Cheers,
VS

NLHE
I finished clearing the first $10 chunk of the bonus.
40 more to go!
This chunk took 11 days and 3800 hands to clear at NL 10

Moving to NL 10 was a bit of a stretch for me. I played here before and did well, then for some reason it all went sour, so I moved down and struggled at NL 4 too.

I tried to play some full ring, but didn't like it. In order to get credited with rake, you need to play post flop, and FR doesn't lend itself to playing a lot of pots.

I am playing far more pots than I normally would, and I'm playing them *reasonably* aggressively.
My Afq is just under 50 and my AF is just under 2.
VPIP/PFR is a bit skewed, though. I played these hands at about 23/15 -- largely due to my habit of flatting a ton in the BB.
This cost me 2 BI playing FR, but is working well at 6-max, though I think I should raise more when limped to.

Anyway, on to the next chunk.

Here's the giraffe of the first bit.
Note the huge ups and downs in showdown winnings. At party, they don't do things in little bits. They shove rivers. Sometimes they haz it, sometimes they don't. So I try not to continue past the turn w/o nut potential. Sometimes I hitz sometimez I duzzint.

nice red line it seems to be at the expense of your blue line.

Maybe I can sweat at some point and maybe we can rectify that blue line :). it seems that you are not choosing your spots right

Thanks for the offer!
I'm pretty sure that you are correct.
I think I choose the spots correctly, but hang on to them too long.

I'm doing some db analysis atm, and it looks like I'm not overly aggressive -- freq about 50% and factor just under 2.
I'm looking for hands where I committed myself unnecessarily.

I had actually thought I had the opposite problem -- giving up too soon on hands that hand potential.

I'll post some hands.

If you see me on skype, give me a shout,
VS

Hi, sorry if it's not to the point,
do you know about "no play on PS" strike on December 1 till 3 ?
Any plan to participate? I am in

Originally posted by Anykey444
Hi, sorry if it's not to the point,
do you know about "no play on PS" strike on December 1 till 3 ?
Any plan to participate? I am in

Do you mean a lot of reg will not play December 1 till 3?
hmmm

Originally posted by Anykey444
Hi, sorry if it's not to the point,
do you know about "no play on PS" strike on December 1 till 3 ?
Any plan to participate? I am in

No, I did not know of this.
I'll probably open the client and watch the player count.

Incidentally, at the moment there are 112,900 players on PokerStars, 5750 on Party (according to their software) and about 6K on iPoker. Full Tilt is barely a thousand. PKR has about 2K. Does PokerStars really worry about people moving to other sites? Nobody else's software comes close.

I just remembered PokerScout -- I won't need to monitor the numbers:
http://www.pokerscout.com/

Cheers,
VS

There is no real player count as far as I know. Really it's just number of players logged in. It doesn't matter do you really play or not.
And it's better to compare say Wednesday with Wednesday.

When some people did a player strike about a year ago when Pokerstars announced their rake increase, the players on strike did in fact join the tables, but they just entered sit-out mode for the duration of the strike, while typing things like "can't play, rake's too high" in the chat. So there was more to it than just avoiding to play for a couple of days. I assume they would plan to do something similar this time.

They plan to do it in January, December is just a warning, like an alert in advance.

NLHE
I dug up a few hands from the last two days.

As Thazar pointed out, my red line is nearly flat, yet my showdown line is very swingy.

He may be correct in that I am either overly aggressive, or my aggression is misplaced.

For my first hand, I do the opposite -- I fail to be aggressive in a hand that I (probably) could have taken down on the flop with a decent CBet -- then call it down.

I think that crap like this -- more than over-aggression is the reason my showdown sux

OTOH, I do a lot of this:
Bluff or value bet -- you decide.

Here is a B v B situation
I tend to hammer min-raises from SB

And it's not that I *never* fold when my aggression is turned back against me...

Here is a case where I get shown aggression following a squeeze.
Villain has overbet ridiculously large post-flop twice to this point.
I figured this to be a semi-bluff possibly a flush draw. I think that a set or two pair would try to keep me in.
I was right -- but the wrong draw.
I also have a hand where AA loses to 73o on a similar board...

And finally, another hand where *not* being aggressive cost me.
Well, in reality it was failing to pay attention to board texture -- there are a lot of draws here, and I should most definitely raised this flop.

So my conclusion is that -- apart from sample size -- I'm making some serious post-flop mistakes but over-aggression isn't the worst of them.
Mis-placed aggression possibly.

Some stats:

   VPIP      PFR    3Bet     WTSD     W$SD     WWSF      AFq      AF     Cbet      ATS     Rce  
  23.79    15.51    4.04    35.56    53.67    47.45    48.98    2.05    50.99    33.65    1.39  

Those are over the last 4500 hands at NL 10 6-max on party -- but they're pretty much what I play everywhere.
I think that my PFR is low because I flat BB v SB so much, then hammer them post-flop.
I'll try switching to 3Betting BB v SB to see what happens...

Cheers,
VS

Originally posted by Anykey444
They plan to do it in January, December is just a warning, like an alert in advance.

So you're talking about this one, right?

Apparently, the idea of this strike is that players will withdraw their funds and send letters to Pokerstars to explain the reasons behind it.

Originally posted by thazar
Do you mean a lot of reg will not play December 1 till 3?
hmmm

There are some Registration threads like "Joint strike on the 1st–3rd of December" on most famous international and Russian poker forums. Last count was 277