July worked out nice

I'm wrapping up this month at 8pm so as not to inevitably lose money on a Friday night - an event that I've now developed into a tradition. I've had a good "comeback month", and I'm looking forward to August now.

Here are my results and graph for the month:

My new 2nd site

I really feel that I've gotten "back into" poker this month. I'm in the mood to grind pretty often, and I feel like I'm playing in a style that suits my personality well. I'm looking forward to booking my month tomorrow and looking forward to nailing August and racking up some big months again.

I spoke to Vanessa/PrincessDonk for the first time in a while this evening and we were talking about this and that. We got on to how I rock at Full Tilt and suck at Stars. Well she was saying that I should try out UB/AP instead. I need two sites for game selection really once I'm playing 3/6 and 5/10, and I really do suck on Stars, so UB will be my new site. I played there a bit tonight at 2/4 to grind up some money on there, and I think it's definitely going to be a good choice. It is super fast though, and I'm not used to having no timebank so I'm going to take it fairly steady on there to start.

It's 00:45 right now and I'm going on some walk with some friends at 7.30 tomorrow morning so this'll have to be a short one.

3/6 tomorrow

I just got in 1600 hands today. I'm not too disappointed though because I woke up really early and I'm trying to make my playing time post-6pm as much as possible as the games get better then. In the day I'll play if they're ok, or otherwise I've been playing a bit of HU on Stars if I have spare time and don't want to play 6-max. So I actually put in 5 hours today between FT and Stars, which I'm happy with.

The good news is that I start back at 3/6 tomorrow. It's more important to play at the good times at 3/6 and above (mainly so that I have enough games to choose from). We'll see how it goes tomorrow and I can start to work out when I'm going to want to be playing.

Here's a semi-weird hand from today:

$2/$4 No Limit Holdem
5 players

Stacks:
Hero (UTG) ($814.80)
CO ($443.00)
BTN ($786.00)
SB ($402.00)
BB ($861.50)

Pre-flop: ($6, 5 players) Hero is UTG T Q
Hero raises to $14, 2 folds, SB raises to $48, 1 fold, Hero calls $34

This is a pretty loose defend here, and definitely not one I usually make, but this guy 3-bets a shit load and I definitely felt like I could play it well against him.

Flop: 9 2 3 ($100, 2 players)
SB bets $58, Hero calls $58

I decided to float the flop with a backdoor flush and straight draw and overcards. I think he'll play fairly honestly from the turn given I called from mp.

Turn: 9 ($216, 2 players)
SB checks, Hero checks

I think I could bet this turn to be honest, but at the time I felt like he could definitely check with hands like AA-JJ and even a 9x hand expecting me to bet my smaller pairs/floats a lot. I also think that if I check back he'll value bet those hands on the river allowing me to fold if he does and bet if he doesn't (with a higher chance of him folding the river than the turn).

River: K ($216, 2 players)
SB checks, Hero checks

So my plan was to bluff the river if he checked, but on this card I felt it looked a little suspect. There really aren't any hands I'll play this way for value aside from a slowplayed 9x (not common), or a delayed KJ/KQ float (which is unlikely). So if I bet here I think I can get called pretty damn light, or even check-raised as a bluff. I think there's definitely a chance Ace high calls me, and I beat almost all of the bluff part of his 3-betting range so I decided that checking would probably win me the pot a decent amount of the time and I didn't need to bluff. It worked out nice.

Final Pot: $216
SB shows: 6 8
Hero shows: T Q

Pool, tired, four tabling

I didn't get my full 3k hands in yesterday as I spent just over an hour chatting with Barry about some spots (thanks again for that, it really helped a lot), and then I went and played pool later on. I started terribly which was pretty annoying. I got a little better towards the end, but there's still a long way to go till I get back to my '07 standard (which wasn't even that great!).

When I got home I was super tired so just decided to watch a film, and I actually fell asleep before the end so I'm glad I decided not to play! I'm going to go finish it after I've written this. It's Run Fatboy Run with Simon Pegg. Hot Fuzz and Shaun Of The Dead are pretty funny that he wrote so I figured this one'll be pretty good too. I don't like it as much as those though, but it's definitely one of those films that's easily watchable and passes an hour and a half.

Today I'm going to play four tables just to try and focus a bit more and concentrate on specific spots that I've been looking at. I'll probably go back to six tomorrow/until I get to 3/6, but I think it's going to be a good exercise to cut back today. This means I'm going to just aim for around 650 hands a session and 2k hands today.

I also haven't put a hand in for a while, so I'll analyse at least one hand (and hopefully two) later on.

Nearly at 3/6, but not quite

I actually had a pretty frustrating last session yesterday. I'm going to have to just watch myself a bit as I was a little tired, and found six-tabling a bit hard. Once I get back to 3/6 I'm going to be four-tabling anyway, so it's not too much of a concern to be honest. I thought I was going to be back at 3/6 today, but unfortunately I came up around $800 short of the $50 I needed to make in the last session so it's 2/4 again until I make a couple more buy-ins.

I'm enjoying the grind at the moment. Having a plan for my day makes me much happier and more satisfied than not having one. When I haven't had other plans in between poker (and when I can't be bothered to do any of the numerous chores/tasks I have waiting for me around the house), I've been trying to watch a lot of films. Any suggestions will be welcome.

Tonight I'm off to play a bit of pool with a mate. The old skool blog readers of mine might remember that I used to play in a pool team. I think I'm going to start back with them whenever the season starts and I get the chance, so I'm using most Mondays as a chance to get back up to a reasonable standard.

Fixed sessions help me

Played my 3k hands today (3032 to be precise), and made a nice $2139. In my middle session (playing three a day) Ian sweat me, and I think it was probably my worst play since starting the challenge. The good thing about grinding a lot of hands though is that you soon forget about it and just get on with the next session.

In the last session it started off really poorly and I felt a bit frustrated for the first time in a while, but knowing that I'm going to play two hours/1k hands regardless really does help things. When I'm focussing on how many hands I'm going to play, and I know when I'm going to quit my session, it seems easier to deal with things. I don't stay and play longer than is probably good for me if I have good positions/tables, and I don't quit early when I've booked a good win. I just stay and play my hands. This probably sounds pointless/stupid to some of you, but just setting my sessions to 1k hands has really helped my emotions.

I can't be bothered to do any hands now as I'm tired. I might stick some in here tomorrow morning.

Schedule not there yet

I didn't manage 3k hands yesterday. I'm in the process of changing my sleep schedule to waking around midday and staying up till around 4am. This is simply going to get me the best games to play in. I try not to play for a good 3/4 hours at least after I've woken up as it takes me a while nowadays! At the moment I'm used to waking up between 8 and 9.30, so it's taking a little while to adapt. Yesterday I'd planned to play my last session around 1am-3am, but I was just so tired I had to sleep.

So yesterday I got in 2030 hands and made $208. It was really disappointing actually as I was up around $1.8k after 1900 hands. The last 100 weren't so much fun! I seem to have developed a habit of losing a stack on the last table when I'm either mp or utg and waiting for the blind to come around. I'm going to give it one more chance, and if it happens today I'm going to start quitting the last table after I've played my co.

In the AThh hand from yesterday the guy ended up having 88 for a flopped set. I'm still not sure how I feel about that hand. I think my analysis is sound, however it's probably the case that the weaker regulars at this stake just aren't bluffing in spots like this ever/often enough. I'll probably keep calling until I get shown the nuts a few more times though.

To finish today I'm throwing out a little "Readers of Dodgy's Blog Service Announcement". I'm reminding you today that we win money from poker by playing pots against fish. That is your target. Find tables with some fish. Get in pots with those fish. Win money. Sometimes we have to play pots with regs, and sometimes we spot leaks in them that we can exploit, but the goal is to play pots with fish.

Here are three big pots from yesterday that are all against fish:

Are you concentrating and realising the implied odds you have here against two fish preflop, or are you autopiloting?

Are you 3-betting hands like KJo to isolate against reasonably loose fish?

Do you get maximum value in a river spot like this?

Yesterday's hand analysed

I decided to look at the hand from yesterday further in this blog. I'm hoping I'll remain motivated enough to analyse tricky hands fully in here as it's so beneficial for me. I can't find a good converter to use for this purpose, so if anyone knows of one please leave me the link.

$400.00 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Thursday, July 23, 09:10:06 ET 2009
Seat 5 is the button
Seat 1: heel012 ( $492.30 USD )
Seat 2: GuyNextDoor ( $435.00 USD )
Seat 3: DODGY ( $573.20 USD )
Seat 4: Sfurtherz ( $439.30 USD )
Seat 5: FISH ( $369.50 USD )
Seat 6: REG ( $400.00 USD )
REG posts small blind [$2.00 USD].
heel012 posts big blind [$4.00 USD].

** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to DODGY [ Ah Th ]
GuyNextDoor folds
DODGY raises [$14.00 USD]
Sfurtherz folds
FISH calls [$14.00 USD]
REG calls [$12.00 USD]
heel012 folds

** Dealing Flop ** [ Qs, 8c, Ac ]
REG checks
DODGY bets [$34.00 USD]
FISH calls [$34.00 USD]
REG calls [$34.00 USD]

** Dealing Turn ** [ 3h ]
REG checks
DODGY bets [$110.00 USD]
FISH folds
REG raises [$352.00 USD]
DODGY calls [$242.00 USD]

Hands the regular will overcall in the SB will be something like {AQ, AJ, AXs, KQ, KJ, KTs, QJs, QTs, JTs, J9s, T9s-65s, TT-22}. He plays around 24/19 so I got the feeling he'd be more inclined to flat than squeeze in this spot with a lot of playable hands. However, I do think he'll be squeezing hands like AQo, AJo, KQo, TT sometimes.

Assuming that he doesn't turn a hand like KhQd into a bluff on the turn, what hands are strong enough to crai for value or as a semibluff? I would say {AQ, A8s, 88, KQcc, KJcc, QJcc, QTcc, JTcc, J9cc, T9cc}.

If his flop call and turn crai range consists of 100% of those combinations, I have 31.6% equity against his range on the turn. I need 28.4% equity to call.

Given that I think he'll squeeze AQo types sometimes, and I think he's more likely to check raise a two pair+ hand on the flop than a draw (even a combo draw - I bet into two people on a wet board and a fish called, he doesn't have that much fold equity), I think this is definitely a call. There's also a chance he makes this play with KQ sometimes (although he should fold the flop with that normally), and he could occasionally do it with 76cc or 65cc.

End of day 1

I just finished the first day of my challenge. I'm aiming to get 3k hands of 2/4 per day at the moment. My plan is to do it in three sessions of around 2 hours each.

Today I played 3052 hands and made $1256. It would've been more but on my last hand I lost A3 on A93cc after some guy raised then shoved over my 3-bet with 74cc. The cool thing about putting in a lot of volume is that beats like that don't bother me as much because you just lose a stack so often in a day. Today I won a full stack eight times, and lost a full stack seven times.

This is probably the most interesting hand of the day. I felt like I needed to bet the turn for protection as there are so many draws out. I also thought that a better hand would raise the flop - certainly from the guy who overcalled (and then check raised). The guy in the middle was a fish, and the other guy was a regular.

Let me know what you think of this hand - any way you'd play it differently, any different thoughts, whatever.

A challenge for myself

Yo. I decided to get this blog back on the road for now. I'm not sure if I'll stick with it long-term, but I will be updating it regularly for a couple of months at least.

To give a very short update, I did a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do with poker over the last couple of months. In the end I decided to carry on playing, with view to getting some other stuff going on and playing it part-time. At the moment though I'm really not sure what other stuff I want to do (in terms of job-type stuff). I've played about 10k hands this month at 2/4. I cashed out most of my roll a while back and I'm going to build it back up starting there. This should give me more of a focus, and hopefully bring my skills back up to date.

I've been finding it quite hard getting motivated to play recently. I think my biggest problem is that I have no major direction with poker at the moment. Therefore I've decided to make some goals and use this blog to follow how I'm doing with them.

At the moment I have about 42 buy-ins for 3/6 online. I'm going to move up to 3/6 when I get 50bi for that level. Then I'm going to move back to 5/10 when I have 50bi for that level. If I slip back to 50bi for the level below at any point, I'll move back down and grind it back up.

Time-wise, I need to make 12.5bi at 2/4 first. At 4bb/100 this should take around 15k hands. I'm six-tabling at the moment so I'm hoping to do this in 5 days at 6 hours a day.

Then I need to make just over 33bi at 3/6 to get back to 5/10. I'll be four-tabling at 3/6 and above so it should take around 48k hands (at 3.5bb/100). I'll be going for 2k hands a day, which would be 24 days.

So if I start today it should take about 30 days to get back to 5/10. I'll almost certainly have some days off (I'm planning on going away for a few days with a friend on the Aug 3rd week), so I'm hoping to get to 5/10 by Sept 1.

I think this is a pretty tough challenge, and I'm not sure how achievable my bb/100 numbers will be (given I don't think I'm as good as I used to be relatively), but hopefully I'll be able to achieve it.

Once I'm at 5/10 I'm planning on playing 2k hands a day for 50 days in Sept and Oct. This will obviously get me 100k hands, and if I win at 2.5bb/100 it'll net me $50k and my roll will hit $100k. Once I get anywhere near that I'll start to think about what I'm going to do once I hit that.

So there's my aim from now to Nov 1. Get from 2/4 back to being a winner at 5/10 over 100k hands. Get from a $25k roll to a $100k roll.

I'm not sure whether to post results everyday. I think I probably will as it gives me chance to vent/celebrate, and most people probably are more interested if I do. I'll try and post as many interesting hands with my full thought process as well.

I'll be back with my first update within 24 hours!