Hi! Nice blog! Actually I'm from Brasil
It's suppose to be spring here, but it keeps raining like crazy and its freaking cold. I live ins south Brazil, near Argentina and Ururguay, so we do get some close to 0 (celsius) temperatures here. Keep on the good work!
I was quoting this post on first page, btw
lol
Originally posted by RahXephon1
13.8.2009Good morning to everyone. The last three days were really nice regarding poker. I seem to be finally acustumed enough to NL50. I mostly had green sessions so my bankrol now stays at a record 808,6$. I'm also on an upswing for the first time since I got PT3 and my green line is above the blue one.
I'm pretty satisfied with my preflop play, but I'm still much insecure about postflop. I play very agressively, raising most of the pots where I was the preflop agressor and it's working solidly, but sometimes when I'm slowplayed by monsters I question my play and think if I should see some hints that something is going on, or is that just a byproduct of the strategy.
Well have a nice day, I hope you are enjoying your summertime (well at least those who are not from brasil :)). I'm spending my days at my job so I didn't have any time to relax. Hopefully I'll get some vacation in september and the weather will hold till then.
6.10.2009
Hello everybody, finally another update. Sadly I don't have any good news about my poker result, blue line is still climbing and green line is still falling. I'm now on a 40k hands strech, where I made -100$. My EV in this time frame shows around +1.100$. Thats 60BI under EV. I know I shouldn't be result oriented, but sometimes is so hard. Sometimes I even think that Full Tilt is dooming me because I withdrew money.
I mostly get courage from my sessions that finish in positive even with that, but then my morale falls down when I get a loosing one. That is probably not the best mindset for poker, but I think I can go past this only with playing trough it.
At least I get some valuable experience from that.
Well writing that down already makes me feel better.
In other news:
This weekend a friend from our capitol was in my town with a friend that has a flat here. They are both poker pros. I hanged out with them a little and managed to get a short sweat session of NL shorthanded with him. Man is he crazy! He just bets, bets, bets untill everyone folds. Also he has some incredible handreading skills. Too bad we didn't have more time as short handed is the game that surely appeals me the most of all. Hopefully sometimes soon I'll get to visit him and repeat the experience.
That's it for today, bankroll update coming soon and I hope it will be a positive one. Otherwise I'll go and buy me some lucky charm.
Does anyone have a number of a good exorcist???
Just kidding folks!
Damn, I know how you feel. Can't offer much help though, you must find your way how to cope with the swings of our strategy. But you can try my way - play 40k hands in 4 days, so you only have a four day long break-even stretch
But seriously, at some point I started to ignore the green line and focused only on the blue line. And it really helped. I keep telling myself, that eventually they will meet and I do the most I can to push the blue line as high as possible.
Even worse than running below EV is when your EV is negative for a long stretch....It's been so for me for over 100k hands now. Having a bad run but with positive EV line seems like a dream to me now, haha.
Yeah Shorthanded can be brute, I experience it myself as well ( I even reduced my table amounts from 16(SSS Robot) to 9 (SSS with Reads) to 8 (BSS FR) to 6 (Where I thought was okayish for 6max) to 4 tabling SH ♦
Did you took a shot at 200NL already or are you stabilizing on 100NL and then with a conservative BRM take a shot at 200NL?
Take care!
Well I'm bankrolled for NL200 (even after the domswitch), but I'm taking it slowly for many reasons:
-I want to confirm to myself I'm a winning player (Peter principle)
-I use a conservative BRM
-I plan to cashout around 500 each month now, so I'm building a little slower
-I don't think higher level is important for my growth as a player, if I move up stronger, I'll crush it faster
-I need to improve my postflop play, since I feel I'm abused sometimes, because of the transparency of SSS
Originally posted by dandycal
Even worse than running below EV is when your EV is negative for a long stretch....It's been so for me for over 100k hands now. Having a bad run but with positive EV line seems like a dream to me now, haha.
yeah, that's the worst kind of variance imo. on my last downswing i had days where my all-in EV line would go down 15 stacks in less than an hour... (i mean the actual line, not the difference between the all-in EV line and the winnings), and that despite playing ok and playing on insanely fishy tables. that shows just how little point there is in looking at graphs ♦
Nice blog RahXephon1 and thank you for visiting my 1st new blog.
My fulltilt account is not link with PS and I am not receiving any rakeback. Besides the two months losing streak in Fulltilt, this is also the reason I transferred my roll to Pstars. I just want to maintain one account plus Pstars are having satellites and freerolls for our local big live tourneys.
Originally posted by RahXephon1
That's the graph frm my last 25 days, I don't know why I even bother!!!
HEY HEY HEY....
You my friend are a winning player.
Don't lose your focus because of a downswing...
Don't look on the short term results...
Keep playing your A game and you will keep growing.
Every time your opponent makes a bad call against you , you earn money , even if you lose that pot . ♠_evil:
C'ya at the table
It's not a downswing, just a breakeven period. Remember times when you ran above EV, but yeah 50k hands is quite a long breakeven stretch..
hi RahX, i have seen you at the NL100 tables on FTP
nice blog i promise i wont use the info here at the tables ♦
looking at your graph it maybe a good idea to reduce your number of tables, some people actually do a lot better that way.
dont worry so much about ev. in my experience its better to just believe in yourself and focus on percision play and dont worry about suckouts.
suckouts used to annoy me mainly because i though i had a right to win due to the high volume and many hours i played that there should be a pay off at the end rather than losing money after like 8 hours play.
now i set myself a target of 2-3 buyins to win in a day and i stop when i get my quota.
this is working really good for me at the moment, it takes me approx 30mins only a day to reach my quota! with such few hands to play a day i can focus very strongly.
cya at the tables
Originally posted by Ishindar
hi RahX, i have seen you at the NL100 tables on FTP![]()
nice blog i promise i wont use the info here at the tables ♦looking at your graph it maybe a good idea to reduce your number of tables, some people actually do a lot better that way.
dont worry so much about ev. in my experience its better to just believe in yourself and focus on percision play and dont worry about suckouts.
suckouts used to annoy me mainly because i though i had a right to win due to the high volume and many hours i played that there should be a pay off at the end rather than losing money after like 8 hours play.
now i set myself a target of 2-3 buyins to win in a day and i stop when i get my quota.
this is working really good for me at the moment, it takes me approx 30mins only a day to reach my quota! with such few hands to play a day i can focus very strongly.cya at the tables
![]()
Thank you for your response. I must say though that your proposal makes no sense. How can you have a goal to win a couple of buy-ins in a session? What do you do if you are 2 buy-ins down? Continue playing until you even up? It's not possible to get positive in every session.
I think I'll try to keep the volume because only after a certain volume our results can be objectively judged.
I agree though that by playing less tables I could do better, but still I'll take 1bb/100 while 16 tabling over 3bb/100 while 4 tabling.
its something im testing out at the moment and its kind of the opposite to conventional grinding. I have refined SSS to quite an acomplished level 6.2bb/100 while grinding. with this new strategy
im currently running at 22.6bb/100!
obviously i continue to play if i go down 2 buyins
but i use a stop loss of 4 buyins. in my experience of SSS, in a session I often have a cycle. u can run good for a while and then usually it turns the opposite way, sometimes its the opposite, i run bad and eventually it turns. So i just aim to quit while im ahead and just a modest amount. its important to quit while im ahead!
so i have this 2-3 buyin goal every day and so far it takes about 30mins on average to achieve it.
so for 30mins a day it has little impact on the rest of my life and I stand to gain 1500$ per month! not a bad return.
because I play so few hands i can be very very focused and as a result things are working out.
im doing this for 2 weeks only so its early days yet but looking good!
[ ] sufficient sample size
I'm running way below EV too, about 1k$ below this month over 67k hands.. online poker is rigged, nothing more to say
I have played 435k hands in NL100 and I'm about 4k$ below EV, it's almost 1bb/100.. I wonder what is the appropriate sample size that is needed for things to even up.. maybe 10M hands? Because it seems, that 500k hands is a pretty small sample..
13.10.2009
It's quite a long time from my last update. This time I'll write a more optimistic post instead of the last week whining. It's surely wasn't the right attitude from me and I surely need to improve, if I want to handle this better. Feelings of entitelment, rage, desperation, euphoria are for gamblers not for serious poker players. Hopefully this rough patch will help me in my growth, so next time I'll be better prepared.
In the last two days I reviewed some of my sessions. It's funny to note how I manage to donk a stack in almost all my sessions. I don't think this is very critical, as I'm not that experienced in poker and I believe every player makes mistakes. The important thing is to see that if I'm able to limit this I can be a winning player even at the times that the cards don't fall perfectly. This is the thing on which I have some control, the cards are falling randomly, so there is no point in loosing my mind about them.
And now for the important news. Yesterday I took my first shot at NL200. I wanted to play some nice looking tables in between my NL100 session, but since the betsizes look so funny, I closed the NL100 one and kept on playing NL200 for around 35 minutes. I played an average of 4-6 tables.
So what are my impressions?
From what I saw is a very different animal from NL100:
Players seem willing to open much wider ranges, which is good, but they also raise smaller and know to fold the worst hands to a reraise ,which compensates for that, as you need a bigger equity advantage to stay profitable
Call in position is made with a wider range also
Agression level is higher (as is usual for each level jump)
There still are some shortsacker playing ABC SSS which is not that bad as they should be exploitable. At least this seems to be the case after the couple of hands I collected
I must admit I had some scared money issues, which is normal since I doubled the stakes. Scared money in my case usually means overagression. Overall I finished a stack up which is nice for a start. I plan to play some more in this days and hopefully get acustomed to it without loosing too much BR. Probably playing 4-6 tables on this limit will do me some good for improving my play also.
I had a 1st had experience in playing NL200 SSS in FT. At one point in time, I was able to reach a good bankroll but lost most of it because I played bad or on tilt.
I like the players on NL200 more compared to the players of NL100. In a sense regulars on NL200 are more willing to gamble and take the coinflips. Most of them passively defends their blinds and can be easily expliotable with a Cbet.
I strongly advise that you stick with 6 tabling because as I have experience you might have a hard time doing table selection in this level during off hours.
Good luck in your games.
Hi Andrej!
I am very very sorry that I wasn't able to do a coaching with you, as you may have heared during the coaching: i wasn't really energetic to do the coaching but I made the best of it
So are you continueing doing your shots at 200NL ? seems fun but how do you prepare for it? I found 200NL FR FTP much harder than 100NL FR imo
In terms of my internet: I heard fiber internet was activated yesterday so I should be up and running this week (if not then I will be on lifetilt
)
We will keep in touch & good luck!
I'll probably make some more this week. As far as preparation is concerned, the most important thing will probably be playing less tables as postflop skill of the opponents should be much higher.
Also pushing preflop gets much less profitable because of smaller raisesizes, since we usually commit ourselves with any raise and villain just commits 3 bb., therefore with a tight calling range our resteal range can become unprofitable if our equity isn't ahead enough.
I really want to try the Xarry2 tactic of calling on the button against agressive BB as it should bring nice results, specially against bad agressive players. I'll probably experiment with that on NL100 though.
As for our session, don't worry, we will do it when you have time, I'm not in a big hurry.


