Snakes will smoke

Originally posted by NutzAreOk
Well 13bb efective on that first hand so quite short. You can argue to play TT in this spot but not by 3betting small. Just ship it because there should not be any hands raise-folding this short. This is freelancer freeroll after all so there should not be many players who don`t understand stack sizes.

Yeah, I think you have a point. I'm still not sure, though, whether I would really be ahead of villain's raise/push range in this spot, considering that he's in a relatively early position. What do you think about flat-calling?

I didn't play many tournaments tonight, but I at least I had a min-cash in the $1.10 Bubble Dash tournament. Apart from that, I also played a Courchevel MTT, for no reason other than the fact that I never played it before and I wanted to try it out. I picked up a very nice stack early on and eventually finished somewhere in the upper half, which shouldn't be too bad if you keep in mind that I literally had to look up the rules a minute before registering.

This kind of reminded me that I never really gave PLO a serious try. I actually tried to get into it a couple of times and learned about the basics, but I never really got to the point where I could seriously work on my game, Maybe this could be something to try in the near future. The variance may be enormous (I believe one member once remarked that Craps had less variance), but it is a dynamic and fun game that supposedly has a much softer player pool than Hold 'em.

But whatever the case, this has to wait, because I remember my promise:

Originally posted by Harrier88

I hereby officially declare that I will not play any cash games until March 20, the first day of spring.

In other news, I had a minor success at the archery range today. It is actually starting to look more like archery now, and less like "hurling arrows towards north-west".

I wish I would have something to report... but that's not really the case.

SNGs have been on a minor hiatus so I could focus on MTTs for a short time. I think I can get back to them now, which of course doesn't mean that I have to stop playing those MTTs in the evening. However, I might take a few days to try some other types of STTs, like 6-max or hyper turbos. I can still get back to my usual 9-man turbos after that.

Another thing I have been considering is moving a small part of my bankroll to my old 888 account, so I could play some MTTs over there as well, which would give me a bigger selection of scheduled games to choose from. I don't think my bankroll is currently big enough to make such a move, though.

My first experience with 9-man hyper turbo SNGs was... interesting to say the least. It's like the ultimate kind of "let's cut the crap" poker. No careful stack building, no fancy deepstack moves, hardly any postflop game at all, just a red hot all-out ICM massacre. It's certainly not the right game for anyone who doesn't like bad beats, or variance in general, but I've always a bit of a masochist, so why not?

If I want to go for volume, these games would surely be a good choice, since they're typically finished in a few minutes, which makes them ideal for grinding. What bothers me a little is the fact that the lowest stakes on Stars seem to be the $1.50 games. While my bankroll could easily cover them at the moment, I'd really prefer to have an even bigger financial cushion for such a variance-heavy format. Remember my goal for 2015:

Originally posted by Harrier88
Don't go broke.

Anyway, I think I might have a plan. Stay tuned...

So what's this plan I was talking about earlier this week?

Basically, I just wanted to move $50 to 888 and play MTTs there, while I keep grinding SNGs and some scheduled tournaments at Pokerstars, depending on how much of my bankroll is left there.

This will have to wait for a bit, because I remembered that by default, cash-outs at Pokerstars automatically use the same withdrawal method you used last time. The problem is that my latest withdrawal went to my Skrill account, and long-time readers will remember me freaking out last year when I discovered some unauthorized transactions that took a huge chunk of money straight from my bank account, which led to me closing my account at Skrill once the money was retrieved.
This means that I would have to contact Pokerstars' support to change my withdrawal method, but I'm too lazy for that right now.

About those Hyper-Turbos I played, I can say that while I do kind of like them, they feel a bit too much like a casino game to me. Whenever I need a quick poker fix, these games will probably be a better choice than spewing chips at Zoom, but I'm not sure if I really want to seriously grind them.

The 6-max SNGs, however, were actually really enjoyable. I used to stay away from them, because the top heavy payout structure scared me a little, since I never really considered myself to be a good heads-up player. But when we get down to it, is the 65%/35% payout really that much worse than the standard 50%/30%/20% I'm used to in full ring games? Who cares about that extra 10% for 2nd place, once you're in the money you're playing for 1st place anyway.

So far, I have a really good feeling about them, and it should also be easier to get a decent volume in, since these tournaments are a lot quicker. I may have found a new main game, as unimpressive as that may be, considering how often I have been changing formats in the past...

Oh, and I used to have some problems with PT4, where it wouldn't display any results for SNGs and other tournaments for some reason. I just managed to fix it, though, so let's take a look at some graphs:

Hyper-Turbos:

Doesn't look too good, but it seems like I was running quite badly. These games are certainly a poor choice for anyone who considers variance a curse word.

6-max SNGs:

Quite useless sample, but at least there is a detectable upwards trend. It's been a while...

Just had my first "all losses" session tonight. (I still play sets of six tournaments, as usual)

Apart from that, though, it's going well. I will post an updated graph tomorrow, when I hit the 100 games mark.

Looks like Pokertracker is doing that thing again where it displays 1st place finishes as 0th place finishes, screwing up my statistics and making it look like I lost consistently in the last 12 games, when the last session was actually break-even.

So I decided to put my mad editing skillz to use and post a graph for my first 100 tournaments that should be a bit closer to my real results:

Well, after playing another session, it seems like PT4 is now displaying the graph correctly, so here's the real one:

Also, here's the updated graph after my latest session (which was quite hot):

This week didn't go so well. I believe it was mostly a break-even stretch, but with a very poor session at the end. I could post the PT4 graph, since I'm nearing the 200 games mark, but there were so many "0th place" finishes that it would hardly be representative, and I wouldn't even know where to make corrections.

I do have some good news, though. After over one year of searching, I finally got an internship position at a small Frankfurt based company that specializes in providing financial market data. I'll be starting in the middle of April, so I better enjoy my two months of free time. It will be a long train ride every day, and I'll have very little time for poker and other leisure activities.

But I'm very glad that I found something and I will finally be able to wrap up my university degree.

Well, it's been a while, I guess it's time for another update. There isn't really much to report, though, since I've pretty much just continued to play the 6-max Turbo SNGs and I've been more or less breaking even over the last week.

I did, however, decide to play sets of four SNGs instead of six from now on. I'm sure that this will improve my overall performance.

Once again, I failed to cash in last Sunday's Freelancer Freeroll, finishing 63rd. For some reason, my HUD didn't work at all for the first hour or so of the tournament, so let's just blame it all on that, shall we?

There was one hand relatively early in the tournament that made me think a little. I open-raised AQ, got raised by a player in MP (or CO, I can't remember) and called. The flop was xAK, I bet 50-66% of the pot and got called. The turn was a J, I checked and my opponent made a bet that would have most likely forced me to go all-in if I were to call it. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to fold instead, because I thought that most of the hands he would have played that way would beat me in this situation. I don't think he would take this line with a weak ace or king.

Like I said, my HUD wasn't working at that point, so I can't really present this hand in any other way. Sorry about that.

It's quiet around here. Not much to do, not much to talk about.

My plan was to grind my bankroll up to over $350 playing 6-max SNGs, but despite a promising start, it didn't go as well as expected, and I hardly played at all in the last few days. Therefore, I decided to finally follow through with my previous idea: withdrawing $50 from Pokerstars and trying to build another bankroll back at 888.

I actually received an email by 888 recently, where I was offered $5 just for coming back. Taking advantage of this offer, I thought about how glorious it would be if I could use that money to build a bankroll from practically nothing, so I made an emergency exception to my vow not to play any cash games until March 20 and tried to grind it up playing NL2 Snap poker.

And guess what, it went quite well!
... until that other session, that is, where I lost it all again, so now I'm broke. Which is a shame, because I could have used a little confidence-builder right now. Maybe it was a bad idea to play after midnight, when the tables might be a bit more reggy.

Oh well, it was worth a shot. I'll just deposit the $50 tomorrow and continue as planned, which also means that I'll stay away from cash games until March 20.

Having spent some time at 888 now, I can say that the player pool is actually a lot more fishy than I expected. I would have thought that there should not be too much of a difference from site to site at the lowest stakes, but some of the moves I've seen were just without any rhyme or reason and they're easily exploitable.

This makes me interested to see how the cash games are going over there. I'll probably give it a shot in about a week.

Unfortunately, the traffic is also a lot worse than I remembered, and it can be tough to get a decent number of SNGs started if it's past midnight. Maybe a bunch of players migrated to Stars and other sites in the past few years, or maybe I'm just used to better traffic by now.

In the end, I think it all seems promising enough, and I'm glad to be back. I haven't completely abandoned my Pokerstars account, though, and you can expect me to donk around in some MicroMillions tourneys.

Okay, so here's the plan. I will play the following MTTs at 888 on a regular basis:

- The $100 German special for $1, starting at 19:30 CET.
As the name implies, it's a small MTT, typically with around 50 players, that is restricted to players from Germany (lol, fish!). Rebuys are available, but I won't take any.

- The $1K Battle of Nations Freeroll, starting at 20:05 CET.
Has a big field of around 1-1.5K players, but it's quite fishy and the top 5% will win a ticket to a bigger freeroll. I'll probably play this one as long as this promotion lasts.

- The $300 Poker World Cup for $1, starting at 20:12 CET.
Players pick teams to play for any country they like (I always choose Israel), and 30% of the prize pool goes to the members of the top 3 teams. It may not be the most profitable tournament, but it's quite fun. Even if you're completely card dead and nothing works out, you can at least root for your teammates and hope for a small cash if they do well.
No rebuys for me, unless I'm out very early.

Apart from that, I'll play some regular speed $1 9-man SNGs if I have the time.

I'll also do some studying on cash games and then try my luck at the regular NL2 6-max tables this weekend, but if I'm not feeling it, I'll go back to tournament poker again.

Oh, and like I said, I'll play in some MicroMIllions tournaments on Pokerstars. I won't use super strict BRM guidelines for that since my main focus is now on my 888 account, but I won't overdo it either.

Just shipped the $100 German Special for $29.

Well done!
Shipped as in 1st place? Nice -- I've never done that in a NLHE tournament.

Congrats!
VS

Thank you!

Yes, 1st place. It was the first time for me as well in a scheduled MTT, my best results so far were two 2nd places.

It may have been just a small tournament this time, but a win is a win.

Finished 1710th out of 61K in the $0.10 R&A MicroMillions event for something around $2.60. But I've had to reload so many times that I don't even know if I made that much of a profit.

I also finished 55th out of 1,208 in 888's Battle of Nations freeroll, earning me $3.90 and a ticket for the $20,000 tournament, since I finished in the top 5%.

Hopefully I can keep the momentum going. I'll probably try my first cash games some time tomorrow, let's see how this goes.

The Harrier's on a roll, guys! I had another top 5% finish in the Battle of Nations freeroll for another ticket and another $3.90. I think I finished 48th this time, but I'm not sure.

While the rest of the team didn't do so well, I also cashed in the $300 Poker World Cup, finishing 19th.

My experiments at the cash tables went okay as well, I picked up about a buy-in at NL4 SH. Actually, I wanted to play NL2, but for some reason, the maximum buy-in at 888's SH NL2 tables is 50BB - good luck playing speculative hands over there. FR tables and any other limit seem to accept the usual 100BB buy-ins. Strange...

About the fishiness of the cash games, I did see some shockingly bad moves, but nothing out of the ordinary really for these stakes. I guess I'll do all right.

It seems like I got so used to 888 by now that it almost feels weird to play on Stars. I was just eliminated in a $2.20 MicroMillions tournament, and I'm completely dissatisfied with the way I played. My two most costly hands were quite unfortunate situations where my opponents flopped a full house with 93 or a wheel with A3, but both of them gave me plenty of opportunities to see what's coming at me and get out with only a minor loss.

It was quite disappointing, because I actually managed to pick up a nice stack before that and I could have had a decent chance, and then basically just threw it away. Maybe I simply wasn't on my A-game because the tournament started close to midnight.

At least the games on 888 are going well so far, and I've already doubled my initial deposit of $50. The $20,000 Battle of Nations tournament will start tomorrow at 21:20 CET. For those of you who are not familiar, there will be a $15,000 regular prize pool for most players, while the other $5,000 will be divided between the participants who are from the same country as the winner, so as long as some German wins the tournament, I should have a decent payday, even if nothing else works out.

Of course, I could just play it safe and ship the tourney myself.

I just found the two hands I was talking about. Like I said, not my finest hour.
It should be noted that CO in the first hand had played every hand he was dealt at this point.