Still floating around

Hey there... I am still floating around. I played in the $200K WPT last weekend at Chocktaw Casino in Oklahoma. There ended up being nearly 5,000 entrants to the re-entry tourney so it was massive. I did not have any expectations other than wanting to play for a few hours for the experience of a large live tournament. I had a blast and they had us in an auditorium that had 200 tables in it so it was quite the experience. I had TJ Cloutier seated at a table right behind me so that was cool. I played really well and was very happy with my play the entire time. We had 30 minute blinds so they did go up pretty quickly. I lost nearly 1/2 my stack pretty early on with a flopped set versus flopped flush. I was happy that I only lost 1/2 my stack versus the flush. I was stuck in that area and was really card dead for a few levels before I started to work my way back up. During level 8 I called someone's all in with Q-Q and found I was up against 8-8. I felt pretty good until the 8 came on the river. That was a pretty severe blow to my stack and put me back down to about 1/2 my initial starting chip stack right before the 2nd break. Coming back from the break the blinds were up to 500/1000 with a 100 ante and I only had around 5,000 chips. I pushed all in over an early position raiser with Q-Q again. I knew he was priced in to call so this was going to be it. He flipped over A-K for a race and the flop set me back with K-K-10 coming. A Jack on the turn made it a little interesting, but the river blanked for me and I was out after close to 4 1/2 hours. I was really happy with how I played though and I saw quite a few bad players roll through my table. I considered buying in again the next day, but decided not to. All in all I had a blast and will do it again if they come back next year. As far as my online play I have just been treading water and my bankroll is about the same still. I was playing one of the freeroll tourney's on this site leading up to the WPT tourney to get ready for playing large fields again. The freeroll averages close to 2000 normally so while not the same class of player it would be a lot of minefields to navigate. The weekend before the WPT I placed 10th out of 1700 and then 2 nights before I won it with around 1600 in it. Felt good going into the WPT that I had run deep back to back on a large field. This past weekend I played it again and came in 15th out of over 1700 so I am not sure what is up with that...I wish I ran that deep on my normal tourneys!!

Floating through life lately..

Well time does fly nowadays but that does happen when you are floating through life. I haven't been playing a ton of poker lately, but do try to play for 4 or 5 hours at least once a week. Still just been treading water on the bankroll and haven't made any further progress over the past month. One thing I did notice was that I had begun to multi-table too much for a while. When I was running well I was mainly playing only one table at a time with a little overlap sometimes if tournaments started. Last month I was starting to play 3 or 4 tables and lost focus. I am still not running particularly well and I haven't had any MTT cashes that mattered lately, but I think I am playing better again with more focus. It feels good when you are in real control during a game and know exactly where you are in each hand. One exciting thing I do have on the horizon is that the WPT is coming to a casino about an hour away from me next month. I am planning on playing in the $200K guaranteed for sure and possibly one other event. Aside from a few SNG in Vegas several years ago this will be my first live tourney so I am excited for the experience. It's only a $120 buy in so there will be a ton of people in there and it is going to be a blast. I might play an earlier event just to get my feet wet in a smaller field, but I am not sure yet if I will for sure. I am also considering playing more heads up SNG's again online. Before I started playing all the double or nothing type SNG's I used to play a ton of heads up and did pretty well at it. I have been throwing one in every now & then recently and have had good success with them still. My style heads-up tends to drive some people crazy as I play small ball heads-up. I literally min raise every single small blind I am in and then will 1/2 pot the flop every time. I always min raise preflop and never more and will flat call a raise back even if I have a monster. I never try to finish someone off fast even when I have a big chip lead. I just keep the pressure on and if they start pushing all in I will fold and wait until I have a hand that I am comfortable calling with where I am confident I am ahead. What I avoid is easily doubling up someone I have on the ropes and allowing them to get back in the game. This is just a style I adopted a long time ago and for some reason it tends to drive people nuts especially early on when the blinds are very small. Many occasions I have had people chat me asking WTF? I just prefer to play a lot of small pots and wait for a monster hand I can close the deal with. Heads-up is a brain drain though so I do dislike playing them non stop. When I am playing double or nothing type tournaments I am like a fan cheering on the others when they are against each other. I love seeing aggressive players going against each other as it makes for a fast and quick tourney for me.

Brutalized last night!

Well I was pretty brutalized last night at the tables. I guess it was due to come since I had been running pretty good lately. It has been a long time since I ran up against such a string of beats though and by night's end I was pretty pissed off and on full tilt. You know me..I hate flipping and prefer to be way ahead when I push all in. In every case I was well ahead until either the turn or river card and all the chips were already in the pot at that point. I was also not short on chips and had a decently healthy stack in each case so my callers were not priced in.

$5 sng double with 4 left. I have AK versus AJ. I do healthy preflop raise he calls. Ace comes on flop. We had some back and forth raises and were all in before the turn. He gets his 2 outer on the turn and I am out on the bubble.

$5 sng double with 4 left. I have A7 versus A5. He min raised PF and I called from big blind. Ace comes on flop and I push and he calls. He gets his 2 outer on the river and I am out on the bubble.

MTT tourney with 14 left and 8 get paid (74 runners). I have a slightly above average stack but we are getting close to push or fold time due to the blinds. I get AA in big blind and cross fingers someone pushes. I get my wish from someone with a slightly smaller stack than me. I would have been well in chip lead with this hand and insta-call. I find I am up against 22 and the 2 comes on the river to cripple me down to less than 2 BB. I push the next hand with A5 and A3 is priced in to call me and gets the 3 to boot me from the tourney.

I also had 3 other SNG that I crashed on where I was ahead when the chips went in but they ran me down by the river. I only cashed in one SNG for the evening and by nights end I was full monkey tilt. It was late and I had just enough wits to sign off before I really did some damage. I reviewed the hands again today to see if I could have done anything differently to induce a fold and in the 3 cases above it was destined to happen with how the hands played. A few of my other SNG I contributed by stringing them along with smallish raises and allowed them to catch up. I was pretty tired and was getting too timid and didn't stay aggressive enough when I had a hand. My bad and I paid for it. The semi good news is that I went ahead and played today and went 4 out of 5 SNG and got back over 1/2 of what I lost last night.

I AM BACK!!!

Well did Black Friday suck as bad for everyone else as it did for me?? After about an hour of being stunned from staring at the screen I kind of shrugged and told my wife I guess I was done playing online poker. I eventually cashed out my money on Stars and quit doing anything with poker. After about a year I went back on Stars and started playing play chips just for fun from time to time. I built it up to several million but play chips just didn't give me the thrill of playing so I stopped again. Then last year I started browsing online to see if any options had opened up yet and saw that there were a few small sites accepting US players. I checked them out for a few months and used play chips to get a feel for the software while checking the money side for what type of games they offered and stakes. A couple of months ago I went ahead and dropped my usual minimum deposit of $50 onto one of them and started playing again in limited amounts. The forced hiatus allowed me to look at the time I had spent playing poker (and not being with my wife and kids) versus my minimal return on my time at the micro stakes. While I had some fun playing it definitely was not worth the time away from my family. I do not play much currently and might only sign on once or twice a week for a few hours. It is truly a hobby only and I do not plan on playing any more frequent than what I currently do. This new site (I will leave it not named) does offer my double or nothing type SNG that I used to enjoy so I have continued to play those once again with good success. The games are even easier to beat now than they used to be on Stars at the micro limits. I remember running into gold and platinum players in the micro limits that used tracking software & multi-tabled like crazy on Stars and on this site so far I have not really seen the same person on multiple days. Since the site is small they do not have very many SNG's launching so I have played anything from $.50 - $5.00 depending on what is filling up and my mood on the day. I have run at nearly 40% ROI so far on the $3.00 ones which the my highest volume SNG I play (70% of all my SNG I have run). I have been playing some MTT also the past few weeks though and have had a lot of success on those. All have been very small buy-ins of $1.50 or less but I have won or placed 2nd in 6 of the 13 I have entered. The most runners was 57 in any of them though (small site like I said). I have nearly tripled my initial deposit so far with only a total tournament count (both SNG & MTT) of around 60. I might start switching from the $3 SNG to the $5 SNG but as well I am running on the $3 I am not sure if I want to move up just yet. I reviewed the weekly MTT they offer and there are some nice guaranteed low buy-in ones I am going to start taking shots at. There are three in particular I am going to look at: $.50 R & A with $500 guaranteed, $1.00 R & A with $2,000 guaranteed & $3.00 R & A with $3,000 guaranteed. The previous fields in these run around 200-400 players so they are some of the larger tournaments on this site, but nothing nearly as big as some of the Stars tourney's. I will post from time to time progress along with any interesting situations that might occur. Anyone else out there still playing domestically??
Dave

Moving

On a non-poker related topic looks like I am going to be moving soon! I am getting a transfer with the company I work for and have to relocate to the DFW area. I am going to need to be there sometime in early March, but my family won’t be following until school is out in June. It’s going to be tough not being with them for 3 months, but it’s for the best financially for us. Loneliness aside it’s going to reverse my normal Poker routine I think. I usually play very little during the week. I will put in 4-5 hours on either Friday or Saturday night and then maybe an hour or so during the week. Once I move I will have nothing to do during the week, but plan to travel back to the family on a lot of weekends. I have a feeling that I will end up doubling my normal table time each week because I will most likely play 3-4 hours each night during the week and then not play at all on the weekends. Since I am not used to playing that much every day hopefully I won’t get a case of burn out. I do enjoy playing poker and if I ever stop enjoying it I just won’t play anymore. I am sure I will like it for the first few weeks, but we will have to see after that. It might start to feel like a job playing everyday so I might have to force myself to not play some nights during the week.

On a poker related topic… I am nearing my BR limit to start taking shots at the $5.20 DoN’s. It’s about damn time!! It took me a lot longer this time to grind it up because I am not playing nearly as much as last year. It’s been hard to only see the BR go up a few bucks at a time and not get antsy to move up. Once I get up to the $5.20 level the BR progress will go much faster. I just hope that my first few shots go well so I don’t have to step right back down again. If I take a shot and lose I will have to play another 12 $1.10 DoN’s just to get back to even at my current win rate avg. It’s such a huge difference in this first step up going from $1.10 to $5.20. I wish they had an intermediate step in the $3.00 range for these like the regular SNG’s. Last year I was extremely lucky to have started off with a perfect 8-0 record in the $5.20 DoN’s. I know that won’t happen again but hopefully when I get there I can win the first one or two of them to give me just a slight cushion so I don’t have to drop back down immediately. I haven’t played one hand in over a week now since I got sick. Between being sick and throwing in a trip to DFW to look around I haven’t had the time or really felt like playing. I think that will change now some since I am finally feeling better…just couldn’t knock this crap out..it just lingered and made me feel worn out all the time. I did play a few DoN's finallythough over the weekend.

C-ya
Dave

BR$ 79

Pokerstars FPP points

o.k. now.. what the hell are you supposed to do with these things if you are a micro limit player like me with low volume? I won’t ever really have enough to do anything with even if I saved them up. I guess I could save them for like a year and get a t-shirt??? LOL The past month I did around 150 tourneys and ended up with like 80FPPs roughly. Even as I move up in stakes I don’t plan on really playing much more so even if I get to the $10.40’s I will only bring in around 330FPP/month. At my crappy volume I would have to be playing the $20.80’s to even have a sniff at Silverstar. The obvious choice when you are only generating 15FPP/wk is the 10FPP & 20FPP MTT tourneys they offer each day. I used to play those some last year. The problem is that most likely you will end up playing for a few hours and get maybe $.35 for your trouble. While it’s better than a poke in the eye it’s not how I want to spend my limited table time. There are a few Hyper-Turbo satellite options you can use them on, but talk about a crap shoot! At least you don’t need to worry about playing for a few hours for $.35!! LOL… I am always looking to get the most bang for my buck or FPP points in this case. There is a 70FPP satellite to the Sunday XXXXX (look it up) where there are a 100 runners and top 10 get a $11.00 Ticket. Hmmm.. 1 in 10 chance to get 86% of your rake back? I’d take my odds of beating 90 people instead of 7 chances in the 10FPP MTT to win $11.00. If you win a ticket just unregister and you get your money in $T to use. I did this twice last year out of 3 tries so I got 57% of my rake back for my trouble. Then again you could always play the tourney and go for a nice cash (after 10 hours of play that is). The other option I kind of like is the 60FPP satellite to the “Steps” tourneys. Again there are 100 runners and top 10 get a Step 1 ticket (worth $7.50) and the winner gets a Step 2 ticket (worth $27). The problem with the Steps is that you are stuck in them until you hit Step 4. The good thing is that you are in a 1 table SNG with a chance to really move up into some high buy-in Steps and you earn more FPP’s with each tourney. I did this twice last year. The first time I won a Step 1 ticket and came in 4th in my SNG. The second time though I won a Step 1 ticket, then a Step 2 and then a Step 3. I crashed out pretty bad in my Step 3 tourney so I didn’t get a real cash return for my FPP’s but I got some experience playing with some Platinum & Supernova guys and I racked up another 52FPP points along the way so it only cost me 8FPP for the experience. If I had managed to make it one step higher I would have cashed out a $215.00 MTT entry! My vote is for either the 60FPP or 70FPP satellites depending on what you want back. I think for your time you will get more in return there. At the end of the month I had enough FPP’s to try one of these. I went for the 60FPP Step satellite and I crashed out in 13th.. so close and it sucks to go completely card dead at that stage ( I am talking about 7 hi card dead for 2 entire orbits!). Oh well.. maybe next time..but I think it’s better to spend an hour there instead of going for a $.35 cash in a huge MTT. I am about ½ way to enough FPP points for my next shot and once I move up to the $5.20 level I should be able to do one about once a week. Fun.fun.fun.

So what do you Pokerstars players usually use your FPP’s on???

Until next time,Dave

oh..I was sick all weekend so I hardly played any.

BR $71

Follow up to previous post

One of my many followers made a comment about my profits on the previous post..LOL…I have sooo many followers.. He seemed surprised most of my profits came from DoN SNG’s. The obvious reason is because that is what I play 95% of the time when I am online. The real question is why though?? There are several reasons why I focus on DoN tourneys instead of all the other options I have. 1) EXTREMELY LOW variance. I don’t think there is anything else out there with nearly as low of a variance as DoN SNG’s. You only need to beat ½ the table and there is always at least 5 losing players at each table in the low buy-in levels. Low variance for me means less chance to go on tilt. I am in the money 70-75% of the time in these at the $1 & $5 levels. What’s a good standard SNG rate? 35%? I used to be and most likely am still a horrible tilter so this is a safe game for me. 2) I HATE to gamble! A 50-50 coin flip makes me sick. That’s not good enough for me.. I want 80-20 when I put all my chips in. I did a regular SNG last night just for a change. I had 4 coin flips during the tourney..luckily I won all 4 or I would not have cashed. I went to heads up dead even in chips with the other guy and got my 80-20 and he went runner runner to get a straight to give me a 2nd. I can live with losing the 80-20 at the end, but I hate playing tourney after tourney flipping coins. In DoN’s there is no need to be flipping coins and since you only need to beat ½ the table you can be more patient and wait for the 80-20’s more often. 3) Every type of game has it’s own nuances that you need to know to really be good at it. There’s a certain feel and flow to each type of game and if you are out of synch with that flow it makes things tough. I am really in synch with that flow on DoN’s. I know exactly when I need to change my style and when to attack or when to fold. So basically I think I have figured out how to play a DoN well and when I say “figured out how to play” I mean in repeatable execution in actual game play. I KNOW how you are supposed to play a regular SNG or a MTT and even a cash game ( I’ve read all those fancy books remember! LOL ). But “knowing” how to play and actually doing it in live play is two different things. I just am not in synch with those nuances in the other games very well. Needless to say I was not comfortable in that regular SNG last night and kind of felt like a fish out of water.
A couple of drawbacks to the DoN’s that I have seen and heard other complain about is their earning potential and how boring they are. A good MTT player or a good SNG player is going to make more money than a good DoN player playing equal number of tourneys, but DoN’s really lend themselves to massive multitabling because the endgame is so different. They also don’t last nearly as long as a regular SNG so if you are multitabling you can put in a much higher volume with lower variance on DoN’s. The other main complaint I hear is that they are boring. What does that have to do with anything? If you are just an action junkie you are going to probably be a losing player anyway so play something else then. Your other option is if you think they are boring just play more tables. You get enough tables going and you should be able to stay plenty busy.
So that’s “why” my profit comes mainly from DoN tourneys. At least from my point of view..but then again.. I suck at poker. As long as I don’t suck as bad as five other people at my table though I am o.k. LOL

Until next time.
Dave