The Poker Moth

I’ve been playing a lot of heads-up SNGs, lately; specifically the 4, 16 and 32 player tournaments on Stars. (I currently run good). I mention this because today has been one of those poker days with a theme, namely opponents doing appallingly stupid things, and then calling *me* a donk. For example, it’s the first few hands of an encounter and I make a standard raise on the button with KJ offsuit. My opponent minraises back at me, I call, and the flop comes down KJx rainbow. There’s 200 chips in the pot, and my opponent shoves his remaining 1400 chips in with AQ, and THEN types “omfg donk how do you call preflop with KJ?” (He missed his gutshot, surprisingly). I mean, assuming I wanted to answer that question, where would I start? It’s amazing to think that one player could fuck up so badly, in so many ways, with just three clicks of a mouse, but it’s even more amazing when he then turns around and starts criticizing his opponent…

…I’ve always been fascinated by this sort of behaviour, for three reasons – firstly, it’s always funny to see the terminally deluded rail from the rail, secondly, understanding their motivation is a fast route to understanding the way they play, and thirdly, I always try to remain aware of the fact that I don’t necessarily know everything myself. I’ve blogged about my self-doubt in the past, but I know it’s not a major issue, because I can easily check my results and see that, yes, I am consistently profitable. This always comes as a relief.

ANYWAY, there’s a point to all this. After dispatching Mr Acehighshove, I had some time to kill before the next round started, so I started to read old posts on Ben Goldacre’s excellent Bad Science blog. (If you haven’t already read the whole caboodle from start to finish, I’d recommend doing so immediately). ANYANYWAY, I stumbled across this post, in which Mr. Goldacre discusses the uselessness of drug death statistics, and, more relevantly, links to what he describes as one of his favourite academic papers of all time. It is this -

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF)

Give it a read. It’s not overly heavy on the psychological mumbo jumbo, and it’s very well written. The conclusions are fascinating, and confirm a lot of my suspicions about the reasons why unsuccessful poker players continue to play the game.

I set up a Twitter account. This is not because I’m developing a (slightly) early mid-life crisis, and want to seem down with what TEH KIDS are doing. Oh no. It’s because I refuse to post about bad beats on this blog (unless they’re extremely interesting), but still feel the need to vent; up until now, the Poker Hof has been forced to listen to my tales, and they always go something like this –

MOTH – You wouldn’t believe what just happened. I’ve got this real live player to my right, and have been waiting to trap him for ages; he limps in UTG, I raise him 4xBB with AQs, he calls, the flop comes down AJ7 rainbow, he pots it, I push, he calls me with A4 and turns the bastard 4!

HOF – I just got one-outed. Piss off.

We can get very competitive about bad beats in Moth Towers. Anyway, read all about how bad I run here –

Bad_Beat_Moth

I stopped using Pokertracker last year. It used to be an integral part of my poker life, recording all my play and providing me with HUD stats on my opponents, but I’d been weaning myself off it for some time. As I moved from LHE grinding to being primarily a NHLE tourney player, it was relegated to being a handy way to keep a record of my wins and losses, and by last summer I’d stopped using it entirely. Who needs trackers? I don’t need a steenking database to tell me how to play.

Well, that and the fact that they released a new version, and wanted another lump of cash for it, as if this was 1997, or something. People don’t pay for software these days, guy! We’re all about open source, don’tchaknow. Except the open source community and poker…. well, it’s not the most obvious marriage, so for a while, there wasn’t a great deal of free tracker software out there, and certainly nothing that worked.

I’m pleased to say that’s changing, and there are now a fair few open tracker projects, some of which even work! And by far the best of these, from a Moth’s perspective, is the unbelievably wonderful and lovely Pokerhands. Wonderful and lovely why? IT TRACKS BADUGI! Oh, happy day. And, get this – it even has a HUD. An actual, factual, functional HUD. Also, most of the other gizmos you’d expect from a fully-fledged tracker, including sweet graphing tools and a hand replayer. Colour me amazed, and delighted, and about to embark on an epic multi-table limit Badugi spree.

It also does 5 Card and Deuce-Seven Triple Draw, and boring old Hold’em, and currently works with Full Tilt, Pokerstars, and Everest. It’s still in beta, but it works like a charm for Badugi, and I see no reason to doubt it’s skills for the other variants.

Short version of post – I’m in love with a database.

Download it here – http://www.cartridgesoftware.com/

I’m watching the Poker Hof on the final table of the 6k Guaranteed on Crypto at the moment… the table captain was reraised by a shortstack, and was forced to call with 74 offsuit (getting 5/2 on his money), and cracked AQ. The defeated shorty then turned the chatbox green, with a great deal of talk about AIDS and stabbing/raping people’s mothers (Crypto has to be the least classy of all sites), which eventually prompted one of the other players to utter –

“I’ve lost a green pen. Has anyone found it?”

I’m stealing that one.

*edit* More tales from the Crypto chatbox; early stages of the Super Series, with blinds at 15/30, and a player folds on the river to a nearly pot sized bet. He has 2150 chips left, but still feels compelled to type –

“why the fk does Will Hill rip me off all the time, I’m fking it off soon, poker stars hear we come”

Makes you wonder how he’d react to a bad beat, doesn’t it? I never fail to be amazed at just how unbelievably mental the players on Crypto sites are…

…alright, not another summer, no. Not yet, anyway. But! A new year is upon us, and I’m keenly aware that I need to FIGHT THE POWER, so it’s relevant.

The power, specifically, is the power to play *poker*. Not poker, but *poker* – clever, tricky, aggressive poker. The problem with being able to play *poker* is that you end up doing it in spots where it’s best to do the opposite, and that leads to gratuitously spewy behaviour. I seem to have been doing a fair amount of this at the moment, so it’s time to (kinda) publicly chastise myself in an attempt to add some much needed *decorum* to my game.

NOTE TO SELF – the best time for tricky aggression is on or near the bubble, and that’s especially true in low-limit tournaments,. Pushing people around is only worthwhile when you are SURE that they are capable of laying down a hand, and most people are not. BEHAVE YOURSELF.

This post has been brought to you by a sense of frustration from a bad week following a very successful December. And, fuck me, it’s twenty years since Fight The Power was released. I AM SO OLD