The Poker Moth

No. I do not want to restart my computer now OR later.

I need to go on an anger management course, I think. Either that, or buy a fucking Mac.

Dear Internet;

I’m having a lovely time. Weather’s horrible, but I own coats, so why would I care about that? Just nice to be on holiday, frankly; feet up, cup of tea, cigarette, a bun, a tweet (or twelve), a spot of Fallout 3. I don’t think I’ve sworn at anything this week – apart from when Scolari got sacked, of course – everything’s just nice and calm and relaxed. No stress, no gnashing, nor wailing, and certainly no chuntering. Put it this way; I’m listening to a lot of Fleet Foxes and Brightblack Morning Light, and I’m not even stoned!

Wish you were… oh, look, you are. Well, grand. Byeee!

Ah, it’s nice to have a holiday, and I’ve earned it. Not money-earned it, but grief-earned – the last fortnight has been extremely difficult, and I can’t solely blame bad cards for that, as I’ve definitely made things worse through bad game selection and worse me-management. As previously mentioned, I’ve been playing a lot of heads-up multi-table sit ‘n’ gos on Pokerstars, recently. This started off with me on a tremendous streak, quickly taking down several tourneys and banking a lot of money, and deriving a lot of enjoyment out of inputting my results into a spreadsheet, and watching the ROI ticking along at an (obviously unsustainable) 120% plus.

I’ve been around long enough to know how stories like that end, but even I was surprised by just how viciously my results corrected themselves. Sharkscope gives me a 70% ROI across all sit’n'gos over a statistically significant sample, and I was ready to see my HU SNG stats drop down to this sort of level. When the drought started, that happened quickly, but it didn’t stop there, and before long my ROI over the entire month long run of HU SNGs was down to 20%. When you consider where it was at after the first week or so, that’s a hell of a downswing.

So, what have we learnt, here? Well, heads-up tourneys aren’t just swingy, they’re SWING-AAYY. Swingy like Harry Connick Jr on a bungee, even. Not so much variance, as variouch. And also, more relevantly, we’ve learned that I’ve had a fucking horrible fortnight, riddled with swears and wails and gnashes and chunter. At first, I thought that I’d just stop playing HU, but making the adjustment back to ANY OTHER KIND OF POKER AT ALL is proving to be impossible. I’ve been turned into some kind of feral lunatic, and I simply don’t have the patience to play good poker. I just get adrenalised, and then angry, and then stacked. This isn’t controlled aggression, it’s madness.

So, I’m taking a break. I have no idea how long it will last – probably no more than a day or two; but however long it takes to recover my calm, controlled game. This obviously means that I will be playing a small amount of poker whenever I suspect my head may be in a good place, which means I technically won’t be taking a break at all, but I certainly won’t be playing because I feel obliged to earn money. The way things are at the moment, earning money seems an unlikely prospect, so I may as well relax for a bit, and maybe… err, yeah. Maybe do some of that freelance work which is massively overdue?

Anyway, file under: “skills every successful poker player needs”, namely – KNOWING WHEN TO STOP.

I’ve just realised I need a real, not-in-London holiday, too. Bugger.

I’m not just a poker player. Before I got involved in poker, I was (and still am) a pretty good backgammon player. My family are all -at least – pretty useful at backgammon, and I was taught how to play at the age of five. I’m a bit shaky on the maths of the game, but I don’t make many obvious mistakes, and have a respectable break-even record playing online for money. (Break-even’s pretty damn good in the bot-riddled world of online backgammon). I’m also pretty good at Scrabble – I play off a 1000 rating on ISC, and that’s purely from leisure play; if I could be bothered to learn all the two-letters and three-letters and hooks and vowel dumps and the like, I’m fairly sure I could play to a much higher standard… and I’ve always fancied my chances of doing well on Countdown; from the comfort of my sofa, I’m definitely competitive with all but the very best contestants on the show (although I don’t have to contend with the PRESSURE of the STUDIO) but like Scrabble, there’s no money in it, and I already own a dictionary, so there’s not much of an incentive there.

Chess is similar; I’m naturally pretty good, but have never had the patience to learn anything more than a few standard openings (which I have now forgotten), so I’m at a tremendous disadvantage against any fanatic. Again, the lack of a cash incentive means I simply can’t be bothered, and there’s also the small matter of the guy who stole my first girlfriend; a man of remarkably average intelligence who was hothoused by pushy parents into becoming a hardcore chess nerd. If a dullard like that can become a reasonably successful teenage tournament player, simply by sacrificing most of his childhood in order to memorise books of opening variations… why bother?

So we come to the traditional post-preamble part of the post where I ask – what’s the point of this post again? Something about me being ever so clever, and just a tiny bit bitter about getting chucked for a chess nerd nearly twenty years ago? No, that’s not right. Something about…. Bridge! Yeah. Bridge.

The game has never interested me until recently, and in truth, I’m still slightly repulsed by it, with its ostentatious “look how complicated I am!” attitude. In many ways, it’s the exact opposite of Hold’em; it’s a simple game (whist) dressed up to look as fancy as possible, whereas Hold’em is a fiendishly complex game (poker) stripped down to the bare essentials. One goes out of its way to trumpet how brilliantly clever it is, and how brilliantly clever you need to be to play it, the other is content to let you discover that for yourself. Bridge is Lauren Harries, basically. Harsh, but true.

OTOH, there’s one key similarity between the two games. They both revolve around gathering information about your opponent’s cards, purely from their actions, and for that reason (and that reason alone), I’m trying to overcome all of the ridiculous hurdles that stand between the complete noob and the promised land of being a barely competent Bridge player. This is a chastening experience; after several years of being (at the very least) quite good at divining information about my opponent’s holding in a card game, I now find myself feeling like the world’s biggest fish. In fact, having spent a few days trying to learn the basics of bidding, I just sat down in my first ever game, and promptly – and very visibly – shat myself. The first board played out in a straightforward manner; I had a very unbalanced hand with a few high clubs, and so opened for 1c; the next guy (he’s on the other team, I think) then re-raised (sub: please check) me to 1s, which sucked as I had zero spades in my hand. Not knowing how to respond, I passed, his partner made it 3s, and they made their contract. The next hand, three passes to me, I made (what I believe to be) a perfectly legitimate bid of 1d, and then my partner raised to 2s! I’m sure this meant something, but I had no fucking clue what, so – to my huge shame – I experienced a *ahem* connection problem. I don’t think my partner will be too upset to see the back of me.

It’s clear that I’m not ready to play the game yet, as I’m only vaguely aware of how to open the bidding, and have very little clue how to respond to a re-bid from either my partner or an opponent. I suspect that my partners jump-bid indicated that he was drowning in high cards, and that I should immediately re-bid 6d, but for all I know he could have been playing some wacky convention where 2d was a request for me to declare how many red aces I held in long suits, probably by means of some kind of virtual masonic handshake, or WHATEVER.

Yeah, that’s what Bridge is. It’s poker for Masons. Anyway, all this shame and embarrassment is proving to be a very edifying reminder of what it’s like to be a poker noob. That wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped to learn from Bridge, but at least I’m learning something, right?

Anyway, I’m off to play some Scrabble, as I’m too tired for poker and have had enough of feeling like a complete moron for one day.

(As for the poker itself, I’m still grinding the heads-up SNGs on Stars, which is a predictably intense emotional rollercoaster-type deely; it’s either the easiest game in the world or the most irritating, depending on how the cards fall. It’s reliably lucrative, though, and I’m tired of flitting from one variant to another all the time, so I’m going to stick with it for now).

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’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

This video provides a chillingly accurate document of what it’s like to play tournament poker professionally.

(God bless Failblog)

I’m actually running rather well at the moment, as it happens, but it’s always worth remembering what lies around the corner.

Ah, I shouldn’t complain. I’ve just been knocked off the final table of the $15,000 Guaranteed on Pokerstars, finishing seventh (of 5841), spinning $5.50 into $554.90 in the process. This took a total of eight hours and twenty eight minutes, which is the longest MTT stint I’ve managed in a long time. (The record remains a ten hour marathon on Party Poker back when I’d just started playing; I finished third then for about $1500).

I’ve been due a decent score in a deep field MTT; I can’t recall making a final table in a 2000+ runner tournament this year. (I won a big freeroll a while back, but that doesn’t really count). Pleasingly, I pulled this off without getting anything like lucky until the eighth hour; the only suckout I managed until the final two tables came against a shortstack who barely had enough chips to cover my opening bet (her pocket jacks cracked by my flopped set of fours). I managed to win a couple of coinflips with Ace-large along the way, but nothing where I was more than a 45% dog. On the other hand, I saw overpairs setted on three separate occasions, all of them in huge all-in preflop pots; considering the way the cards were falling, I’m extremely pleased with my performance. It would have been nice to bag the $3,600 first prize, of course, but I ended up getting shortstacked after failing to knock out a shorty with 55 v AQs (a race which would have been worth $300 dollars if my hand held up), and then I cleverly ran AQs into KK on the next hand.

December’s been pretty good to me so far. Christmas isn’t cancelled! And god help the world if I start to catch some cards…

Yeah, yeah, it’s been a long time. I’ve been busy conquering the wonderful world of Badugi.

if you’re unfamilliar with Badugi, it works like this: -

It’s lowball draw poker, with three drawing rounds – just like 2-7 Triple Draw. Unlike 27TD, you get four hole cards. The objective is to make the lowest hand possible, with no shared suits. If you can draw a hand which contains four unpaired cards of different suits, you have a Badugi. If you have paired cards or shared suits, you don’t have a Badugi, and any Badugi will beat you, so Ad 2h 3s 3c will lose to Kd Qh Js Tc. If no-one has a Badugi, the best three card hand will win the pot.

It’s a lot of fun, in and of itself, but what makes it truly fantastic is that no-one knows how to play it. Literally, no-one. The game originated in Korea, (and is sometimes known as Korean poker), and although it’s been spread on a few other sites  (Doyle’s Room offers it, I believe), there’s an incredible lack of information about Badugi strategy on the internet, and some of the strategy articles up there are just plain wrong. This is particularly strange because it’s really not that complicated; once you’ve worked out the basic mechanics of the game, most plays are obvious and automatic. And yet! No-one else seems to have grasped the fundamentals yet, and I am cleaning up.

It’s the wild frontier of poker, or something. There are no books. There are no strategy articles on Full Tilt. It’s the levellest playing-field of all, and if you know what you’re doing, you have a HUGE edge. Currently, Stars are only spreading STTs and 50c/$1 limit ring games, and I’ve been focusing on the STTs; I have a ROI of over 130% across all limits, and better still, I’m showing up on the upper echelons of the weekly leaderboards for low-limit STTs (across all variants) on Stars, which is something I couldn’t get near to playing Hold’em. My best run of form was eleven straight STT cashes, playing $3.40 and $5.50 STTs. ELEVEN! Including six wins. I’ve also had a couple of bad streaks (it can be a punishing game, especially if you get a loose table where you can’t protect a made hand from five or six people drawing at you, which is all too common), but overall I’m running at 75% ITM, which is what scientists are calling pretty sick.

Of course, what with this being frontier poker, and with a fairly small pool of players on Stars, I’m not going to be offering any strategy advice on this blog just yet. After 100 STTs, I reckon I’ve encountered two, maybe three players who have any clue what they’re doing, and I’m quite happy with that situation currently. But I’ll say this – if you have any understanding of the mechanics of draw poker, sit down with a pen and paper and work out the odds on key propositions, such as catching a Badugi card with one draw to come, and the odds of improving a strong two card draw to a hand that can beat an opponent drawing one card (and they draw to all sorts of nonsense; the biggest school of fish are the players who’ll draw one to a Jack, or worse…).

Or… don’t. Leave me alone in my Badugi paradise, please. It’s a completely skill-free game, designed for luckbox chasers, and it’s probably rigged. Yeah, that’s exactly what it is…

So, first of all; it’s been quiet around here. August went pretty sour after my last post, and I finished the month on a small loss. This had the usual detrimental effect on my workrate (and blograte) and now I’m hardly playing my bread and butter stuff at all.

I’m playing Stud/8 instead. This is a game that I’ve been trying to get my head around for years, with very little success; I’ve read Ray Zee, I’ve messed around in micro low limit cashgames, and I’ve encountered the game in HORSE, and I’ve never been able to understand it… until the other day, when I decided to enter a Stars Stud/8 freeroll. Four hours later, I had qualified for a proper tournament (scant reward for four hours of limit tournament play, but better than nothing), and more importantly, I finally understood Stud/8.

Or at least, I think I did; the usual caveats apply with regard to the deceptive nature of poker success. Four hours of superswingy hi-lo madness does not an expert make. However, it gave me some confidence to try some slightly higher limit ring games, and even better, it gave me the confidence to play HORSE sit n gos.

My pre-epiphany HORSE strategy would be pretty straightforward; punish the fish on the games I’m good at (O8 and Razz, and to a lesser extent, Hold’em – I hate LHE in tournaments, and it’s the one game where the average HORSE fish knows what to do), and then sit the hell back during the Stud and Stud/8 rounds. This is a pretty sucky strategy, obviously, so I pretty much stopped playing HORSE.

However, with my new found confidence and maybe-skills, Stud/8 is the HORSE round I most look forward to, and my straight Stud play has also improved of late, meaning LHE is now my least favourite game in HORSE. I genuinely didn’t see *that* coming, but now that it has, I’m delighted; since my Stud/8 epiphany, I have a 100% ITM record in HORSE sngs (admittedly over a very small sample, but still), and it’s rapidly becoming a candidate for bread and butter game status. And given my somewhat bruising experiences last month, it’s main competition for that place is not from NLHE tournaments, but Stud/8 ringgames.

STUD/8! It’s the future. Maybe.