Bemusing Times
Jun. 29th, 2006 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksWell, unless I go through some kind of "best day in the universe" tomorrow, this will be my first losing month since September 2004 and my worst month since January 2004.
For the second time in succession this year I managed to lose more than $120 in clearing the $120 bonus on Pokerstars. Looking at my recent PT stats, I appear to be more than $500 down at $2-$4 over 15,000 hands. I'm up more than $3K on the site overall, so the money must have come from somewhere.
The final nail in the coffin today was finding a real fish on Stars (80% seeing the flop). These are rarer than hen's teeth and I wasn't going to leave the table until he did.
None of which did me much good. I lost about $50 on that table and $90 on another, just trying to clear the last 80 points of the 84 points needed to release the $120 bonus. Bloody frustrating :-)
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Things that I do that I shouldn't do when I'm running bad.
1) I play too much. I put in more hours in an attempt to make back my losses for the month. I know that the only way to win at limit is to put in the hours. So, to counteract the "running badness" variance, it's obviously necessary to put in more hours. Right?
Wrong. You don't play at your peak, you don't win your money back, and you get to the end of the day very tired and with a feeling that you have accomplished nothing.
2) I either go too aggressive or too weak-tight. I lose my sense of the game. Silly errors creep in such as missing the fact that a person has called when you are in the small blind, so you think that it is just you and the BB when the flop comes down (this is suprisingly easy to do when you are three-tabling and when GameTime is overlaying the table).
3) I get crabby. I don't get as crabby as some of the players, and I try to restrain myself. You certainly don't see me shouting at fish. But I do tend to have a go at the better players for minor transgressions that wouldn't bother me normally. As Caro notes, this only serves to inspire other players to play better against you, because they know that you are nearing tilt-level with the frustration.
4) When running particularly bad, I used to call people down even though I knew I was beaten, just to prove how unlucky I was. These days I may have moved too far the other way.
5) I value-bet and value-raise less on the river, because I know that my sense of the game is not at its peak.
6) I shout at the screen. Usually "Oh for fuck's sake, give me a flop".
Oh well, another day. I put in over 1,000 hands, on four different sites, and I should probably have stopped at 600. It just wasn't going to be my day, and running bad is twice as tiring as running well. I should have stripped some of the paint off the kitchen door instead. In the end I lost count of the bad beats and suckouts.
On the plus side, one of the last sessions (won $ when saw flop, 23%, compared to expected 36% to 40% average), saw me VPIP 19.85% (Pre-flop raise 12.2%), go to showdown only 20% of the time and win at showdown only 50% of the time. In other words, those numbers show no sign of serious deterioration in quality of play, no sign of falling beyond the threshold of pain. I wasn't playing at the top of my game, I know that. But I wasn't chucking money onto the fire. Mainly, I was just continuing to run bad.
It's just that, well, the short run can be longer than you think sometimes. Tomorrow is another day :-) The day after that is another month.
For the second time in succession this year I managed to lose more than $120 in clearing the $120 bonus on Pokerstars. Looking at my recent PT stats, I appear to be more than $500 down at $2-$4 over 15,000 hands. I'm up more than $3K on the site overall, so the money must have come from somewhere.
The final nail in the coffin today was finding a real fish on Stars (80% seeing the flop). These are rarer than hen's teeth and I wasn't going to leave the table until he did.
None of which did me much good. I lost about $50 on that table and $90 on another, just trying to clear the last 80 points of the 84 points needed to release the $120 bonus. Bloody frustrating :-)
++++++
Things that I do that I shouldn't do when I'm running bad.
1) I play too much. I put in more hours in an attempt to make back my losses for the month. I know that the only way to win at limit is to put in the hours. So, to counteract the "running badness" variance, it's obviously necessary to put in more hours. Right?
Wrong. You don't play at your peak, you don't win your money back, and you get to the end of the day very tired and with a feeling that you have accomplished nothing.
2) I either go too aggressive or too weak-tight. I lose my sense of the game. Silly errors creep in such as missing the fact that a person has called when you are in the small blind, so you think that it is just you and the BB when the flop comes down (this is suprisingly easy to do when you are three-tabling and when GameTime is overlaying the table).
3) I get crabby. I don't get as crabby as some of the players, and I try to restrain myself. You certainly don't see me shouting at fish. But I do tend to have a go at the better players for minor transgressions that wouldn't bother me normally. As Caro notes, this only serves to inspire other players to play better against you, because they know that you are nearing tilt-level with the frustration.
4) When running particularly bad, I used to call people down even though I knew I was beaten, just to prove how unlucky I was. These days I may have moved too far the other way.
5) I value-bet and value-raise less on the river, because I know that my sense of the game is not at its peak.
6) I shout at the screen. Usually "Oh for fuck's sake, give me a flop".
Oh well, another day. I put in over 1,000 hands, on four different sites, and I should probably have stopped at 600. It just wasn't going to be my day, and running bad is twice as tiring as running well. I should have stripped some of the paint off the kitchen door instead. In the end I lost count of the bad beats and suckouts.
On the plus side, one of the last sessions (won $ when saw flop, 23%, compared to expected 36% to 40% average), saw me VPIP 19.85% (Pre-flop raise 12.2%), go to showdown only 20% of the time and win at showdown only 50% of the time. In other words, those numbers show no sign of serious deterioration in quality of play, no sign of falling beyond the threshold of pain. I wasn't playing at the top of my game, I know that. But I wasn't chucking money onto the fire. Mainly, I was just continuing to run bad.
It's just that, well, the short run can be longer than you think sometimes. Tomorrow is another day :-) The day after that is another month.
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John's Barmy Fish theory
Date: 2006-06-30 10:22 am (UTC)could a factor in the losses be a shortage of fish? I've theory that the proportion of fish playing is a lot lower than it was a year ago - I've noticed that on PLO on PP where really bad fish are no longer hanging around in vast schools.
The problem is that if new players are really fishy they get churned, the names I see that are still around are the better players who have actually improved their games (on the whole) since last year. All the low value PLO tables on PP seem to be tighter and tougher. There are also more 'grinders' out there.
Funnily enough even though I only manage to break even unless I find a really juicy table (or get good cards), I enjoy the challenge of the tougher games. Maybe the world is evolving - fish either get eaten or grow. All the 'established' players may have initially fed on the growth of poker, but I can only see it getting harder as the standard of play increases.
I like the challenge of improving my PLO play to get into a position to beat the grinders, the fish and the other regulars. I've decided I'll never probably make money out of this, but I don't have to reload at the moment and I entertain myself.
Re: John's Barmy Fish theory
Date: 2006-06-30 10:44 am (UTC)The Party $2-$4 tables has a number of multi-tablers who could do quite well single-tabling at $15-$30, but who choose the lower variance lower-stakes multi-tabling option. The same names are there virtually every day. Occasionally a new one appears.
Poker is a supply and demand game that, at multi-tabling $2-$4, does not require a great deal of capital.
Eventually these players will get fed up with their low rate of return, and leave for other lands outside poker. What the "stable" rate of return is depends on how much people are willing to accept for their multi-tablinf hours. Given that a number of these people are probably students, or living in eastern Europe, it's probably a fairly low stasis level, say, $10 an hour.
The technique, as I've said before, is to play at a level where you are beating the grinders. I could play at a much higher level and beat the fish (there are fewer, and they are trickier, but they exist). To be honest, after this month, some genuine gambling at $20-$40 had its appeal. But I think that this would be a bit tilty, so I avoided it.
No, bad months happen. I was running at 2.5bb a 100 for two months on Party before this month, which was better than the 1.5bb per 100 that I averaged last year. However, in addition, the games are tougher. I'm seeing plays at $2-$4 that I used to only expect at $5-$10, and I'm seeing them with increasing frequency. It doesn't bother me, provided that I know they are happening, and the difference between the $5-$10 and the $2-$4 is that at $2-$4 the play might be made, but it won't be made with the same subtlety. In other words, you can spot it, once you know to look for it.
PJ
Tougher Games
Date: 2006-06-30 02:01 pm (UTC)I have to believe I'm better than I was a year ago, but generally I was making staedy money on the lower end PLO tables on PP. I now find it hard unless I'm a lot more selective about when I play and who I play against. It was common on PP to see players burning the $25/$50/$100 buy-in repeatedly and quickly. Maybe I'm unlucky, but I see very few of those now.
The other beast was the over aggressive player who would occasionally build a big stack and be prime target to take down - I remember one such player allowing me to treble up in no time. I very rarely see a big stack blow out thses days.
I still enjoy playong PLO or PLO8 even.
John
Re: Tougher Games
Date: 2006-06-30 02:52 pm (UTC)Americans come into PLO, have a good time, and get slaughtered fairly quickly because they overrate Aces and underrate position. It's long been maintained that PLO is an unsustainable home game. People think that it's a game of wilder swings, but it's actually rather mathematical. At lower levels, you often know precisely where you stand and precisely whether a call is correct on the flop or the turn.
I seem to recall BDD thinks that bad players can survive a long time in PLO, but I think that what he means is slightly bad players (such as there were at the Vic) can survive a long time in PLO, because they are often 48/52 when all the money goes in and they can get lucky in very big pots.
At lower levels, they are often putting in their entire stack with what they think is a good hand but which in fact has one or even zero outs.
Limit hold'em is more a mainstay game, and vaguely competent players can survive a very long time, even forever, having good and bad swings but not losing entire stacks. Their poker spending money can cope with a single $2-$4 table every Friday night, even if they play like maniacs. In PLO there's a chance they'll be standing up from the computer 20 minutes later.
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I've just had another nightmare session on Virgin (0 for 5 with KK, anyone?) and I didn't even enjoy the game, because the quality of play was so bad that there was no point in trying to outthink your opponents. They weren't thinking at all. The euro games in particular attract people for whom the major comment is usually "doesn't look like he knows the rules". OK, I exaggerate, but I've seen some staggering plays that made no sense whatsoever on the cognitive level.
So, as with the $2-$4 game in the Flamingo (which it most closely resembled) you just have to sit there and play mathematics, rather than psychology. It's tedious, high variance, and requires the simple expedient of getting good hands that stand up, or making your nut flush draws. When it doesn't happen, you lose a lot of money. But even when, say, 200 euro down in a 4-8 euro game, you are often only one good hand away from getting out of it.
Trouble is, that hand will probably cost you another 30 or 40 euro to find out :-)
Here's one example (a hand that I won, actually). I have no idea what my opponents had, but I'd love to hear some guesses.
Hero, SB, As Js
Fold to MP2, who calls.
Fold to Button, who calls.
Hero raises. BB calls, MP2 calls, Button calls.
32 euro in pot.
Flop: Ah, 8h, 5s
Hero bets
BB folds
MP2 calls
Button calls
Turn: Ah, 8h, 5d, As
Hero bets
MP2 calls
Button calls
River: Ah, 8d, 5d, As, 5s
Hero bets
MP2 calls
Button calls
Hero shows full house, Aces and fives
MP2 folds
Button folds
Anyone got any ideas what they might have? Or what they were thinking?
PJ