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Mar. 31st, 2006 03:05 pmMore interesting stuff posted this week in the never-ending party that Is Pokerblogland. Zee Justin reappeared on his web site and posted an apology, although clearly he retains some anger at Party Poker, and he fails to address the point that he brought up in 2+2 -- one reason that he took on the additional identities was because people had sussed out his mathematical approach in the sit'n'goes, and were therefore calling him (much) more liberally. Once you lose all your fold equity as a high-stakes sit'n'goer, you have problems. But becoming a "new person" is not a legal solution. Read it at http://www.zeejustin.com/
++++++
A pointer in advance. April Fool's jokes on web sites are only funny for the people who create them. Trust me.
++++++++
Bad Blood posted something very interesting about moving up in stakes -- a point which, as you may know, I have been pondering on for some time. I have often felt that the siomple phrase "risk averse" did not really cover my own situation, since I've gone up and down four figures in the stockmarket and currency exchanges within a 24-hour cycle with nary more than a shrug of the shoulders. Bad Blood talks of "desensitization". Here's an excerpt:-
I may be stretching things, but I liken the fear of losing in poker to some form of mental anxiety. Look back at your own play over the years. Put yourself back in your own shoes from a year ago and think about the stakes at which you used to play. When I do that, and then think about losing at those stakes, there is no fear, no anxiety. Over time, humans adapt to adverse mental conditions by desensitization.
Desensitization or graduated exposure therapy is what allows us to eventually move up in stakes and play the game the same successful way. But it certainly isn’t easy. At least for me, it takes time to overcome the natural tendency to fear losing such that my play is unaffected. Different people require different periods of time in order to overcome the jump; and I believe that it’s mainly due to their mental capacity for re-training themselves.
****
In order to actually overcome this type of poker-based anxiety, you do eventually have to make that jump; you can’t just magically ignore the impact of playing at the higher limits. Successful reconditioning requires some form of progressive exposure. For me, this type of exposure was repeated attempts at moving up in limits, each time feeling less and less effected by the swings.
Just like the person with an irrational fear of snakes or spiders can manage their fears through the desensitization processes, so too can poker players overcome the same irrationality driven by playing at increased levels.
Now, if you are a winner at the higher level, desensitization is good. But if you are a losing player, desensitization is bad. Suppose I moved up to 100-200, had a good run, even though, in reality, I was a losing player at that level. Now, suppose I get "desensitized" to 100-200 stakes. Then the cows come home to roost (to mix a metaphor) and I start losing big time. Unfortunately, I have been desensitized to 5-10 stakes. Even though I can beat that game, my lack of appreciation for the value that other players in the game put on the money causes me to become a calling machine, or a raising machine, or any other kind of losing machine you care to name.
Feeney mentions just this point on moving up and then moving back down in stakes. In other words, you have to "resensitize" yourself to the lower stakes, which can take time. You need not just the right level of skill to beat games at any level, but you need the right level of sensitivity to the stakes. Too much sensitivity and you are in danger of becoming a weak-tight folding machine who thinks about the purchasing value of the final river bet rather than its mathematical function as a proportion of the pot. Too little sensitivity and you are likely to throw in the money on the flop because the amount is virtually meaningless to you. http://badbloodonpoker.blogspot.com/ for more on this matter.
++++++++
I shall decline to mention (well, I'll decline to mention in depth) the trip by Dr Pauly, AlCantHang, JoeSpeaker, CJ and others to the Playboy mansion for a charity tournament (won, incidentally, by Don Cheadle). If you are the type who does not need to be told who Julie McCullough is, because you are aware of her entire "career", then you might enjoy the tales of a weekend chez Hefner. http://www.alcanthang.com/poker/ has an interesting reference to Mr Negreanu, with the full gory details available at Pauly's blog http://mcgrupp.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_mcgrupp_archive.html#114361401393576758. If you want to see how poker is the new rock and troll, then this is for you, but don't expect any guidance on what to do with A23K double-suited in Limit O8 when in MP2 and facing just one limper.
++++++
After a month of silence Big Dave D returns to observe that nearly all blogs fall into one of two camps;
The first is the Internal Monologue. This takes the form of I played; I lost; I won; here’s the hand. You get the picture. Just as if you had really looked into the mental processes of a poker player, chilling thought though that may be, this can be a fun place to visit but ultimately unrewarding. WTFP. The other kind I term A Day in the Life Of. In these the poker is often a sideline alongside a lot of other Socio-Economic-Political-Military-Complex stuff. I respect that this is what blogging is all about, but personally if I want that kind of stuff I buy a newspaper, figuratively speaking.
Which kind of makes you wonder what he does want from a blog. Maybe a forum. But, in that case, you might as well start a forum. As BDD observes, it's a bit difficult to criticize blogs for doing what blogs are meant to do. Perhaps that's why he doesn't post so much, these days. A bit like the actor who suddenly realizes that, when you look at it deeply, it's all bollocks.
http://internetpokerpro.blogspot.com/
+++++++
MilkyBarKid falls into the "I played, I lost, I won" camp, except that it's for amounts by a factor of a hundred larger than many of us would like to play at. Pommo's blog is usually the same, although with Pommo you do get the agonized pain of suffering that NL players can go through if they are not completely emotionally attuned to the stakes they are playing for (see "desensitization", above). And Pommo, every so often, lays into one, which makes for great reading. Oh, and you can also discover how the other half (winning young poker players) spend vast wodges of their cash at swanky nightclubs. Personally I would spend a lot of money to be anywhere but at the next table to half the Newcastle United team, but, whatever rocks your boat.
http://milkybarkids.blogspot.com/ and http://dpommo.blogspot.com/
+++++++
ThreeBet33 (Eric fron Texas, now a pro player in Vegas), also made some very pertinent points on the implications of professional poker play. In fact, he writes about just what I was experiencing when I had that (successful) dabble at 15-30 last year. Here's what Eric said about his past few months:
I haven't been playing any poker! I played Friday night. Before that it was...er...March 9? So there really isn't anything poker-related to talk about.
I've been trying to focus more on other things. I pretty much let poker become my life, and that's not good. It's one thing to enjoy and play poker, even a lot, but when one's entire emotional state begins to rely on how the cards are running, it's time to take a break.
Many people have a family, a job, hobbies and whatnot so that's not really a concern for them. I'm single, and this was my hobby and became my job, so suddenly I was left with little to distract me from poker. This was good for my bottom line, but ultimately bad for my emotional health, and so I think this break is good.
I'm looking into developing other hobbies, creating more of a social life out here, and trying to find investments for some money I have saved up.
This was exactly the problem I felt developing last year. My entire emotional spectrum and focus was moving towards the next session of poker. No matter how successful I might have been, this was not-a-good-thing. So I pulled back.
Always a worthwhile read at http://threebet33.blogspot.com/ (plus some cool skiing pictures from Vancouver).
++++++
Mr Purle also reappeared, for the first time in aeons, posting on how as a youngster he got into a bit of bother by laying bets himself at Cheltenham rather than handing the money over to the bookies. The denouement?
Happily my father, once he'd stopped laughing, proved amenable to a gentle nipping. I hope he never told the other fella the truth, but I'll take 5-1 on that he did.
So that's alright then.
http://bitharsh.blogspot.com/
++++++
Jan Boubli, whose other half Katja has been called a Steffi Graf lookalike, but who actually reminds me of a rather younger Jennifer Saunders, posts some interesting comments on Davood Mehrmand, an infamous tournament player whom I have only seen once, at the Bellagio last December. Although he was quite loud, he was never out of order and seemed to take his elimination with reasonable grace.
http://50outs.blogs.com/poker/
+++++
Pokergrub, after a couple of weeks of silence, has returned with a rash of posts, one of them about a rash. I really like Grubby. He's clearly a very nice guy for whom things have gone ever so slightly wrong (although I hadn't realized how wrong). Part of the most recent post runs:
Sometimes I walk through a casino and consider grabbing chips from a table and bolting, thinking it would get me jail time for at least a year. I keep thinking if I can just make it to June 2007, I'll be okay. ....
I ran out of money in November. That's when I began using credit cards, beginning with a flight to California for Thanksgiving.
Yesterday I took the car in for an overdue oil change (5000 miles) and when I did, they of course found other things (axle, gas filter) that needed fixing. Socked with a $400 bill.
These car repairs plus April's rent charged to the cards makes me completely maxed out.
I've applied for more credit cards with a temporary 0 percent interest rate for balance transfers. All in an effort to make it to June 2007.
You just really want the guy to pull through, but then you wonder, will he learn an important lesson? Does anyone remember the opening scene in Croupier, where Clive Owen gives a guy some money back to which he isn't entitled, because he feels sorry for him?
http://www.pokergrub.com/#112190622670934504
++++++
Poker Nerd went on some insane quest to become a Supernova member at Pokerstars by April 1. This seemed to be so that he could pay $20K in rake in order to get $6K in electrical goods. The entire quest left me utterly bemused, and our heroic "degenerate underachiever' promptly collapsed under the strain and got sick. This is another "therapy in public" blog that reminds me of where I was 20 years ago, drinking alone, in a job I hated. In fact, sometimes the guy reminds me so much of me that it's scary.
http://pokernerd.blogspot.com/
+++++++
Felicia has gone into posting overdrive this month (is it something in the weather?) and has been writing about the "making money as a nut-peddling grinder" style (in her case, at Limit O8). Now, since much of my time is spent making money off nut-peddling grinders (see Ultimate Bet's $1-$2 games during the day US time for the largest collection ever normally seen in one place outside the Bellagio $8-$16 game on a Thurday morning) I have no objection to Felicia writing about it. While most players run a mile from these games, the restrictions on the times that I can play have forced me to work out how to beat them. Since "other good players" won't touch most of these games with a barge pole, I kind of have the field to myself, so to speak.
http://felicialee.blogspot.com/
+++++++
And finally, we have Roswell's tale of a 5K tournament in Reno. There are contrasting opinions on Roswell, with not a few people thinking that his attitude to the game and psychological make-up makes him a car crash waiting to happen. Others think that he's a quality NL player whose main problem appears to be donking off money (and that will be the last time you see me use that verb here, this month) when he isn't in the right mind-set. His techniques do not seem overly complicated (you can read his blog to see some of them), but the fish at the Bicycle seem to fall for them, and for large sums of money.
There is also an interesting tale relating to a hand against Daniel Negreanu. Did I mention that AlCan'tHang has a new nickname for him?
http://roswell-42.livejournal.com/
+++++
Here, as a final note, are my figures for March. I plan to do a "quarterly review" in the next couple of days.
<td>SITE</td> <td> </td> <td>$2-$4</td> <td>$3-$6</td> <td>$5-$10</td> <td>Bonus</td> <td>$4-$8</td> <td>$1-$2</td> <td>50c-$1</td> <td>Grand Total</td>
And with that, I'm going for my bowl of chilli.
++++++
A pointer in advance. April Fool's jokes on web sites are only funny for the people who create them. Trust me.
++++++++
Bad Blood posted something very interesting about moving up in stakes -- a point which, as you may know, I have been pondering on for some time. I have often felt that the siomple phrase "risk averse" did not really cover my own situation, since I've gone up and down four figures in the stockmarket and currency exchanges within a 24-hour cycle with nary more than a shrug of the shoulders. Bad Blood talks of "desensitization". Here's an excerpt:-
I may be stretching things, but I liken the fear of losing in poker to some form of mental anxiety. Look back at your own play over the years. Put yourself back in your own shoes from a year ago and think about the stakes at which you used to play. When I do that, and then think about losing at those stakes, there is no fear, no anxiety. Over time, humans adapt to adverse mental conditions by desensitization.
Desensitization or graduated exposure therapy is what allows us to eventually move up in stakes and play the game the same successful way. But it certainly isn’t easy. At least for me, it takes time to overcome the natural tendency to fear losing such that my play is unaffected. Different people require different periods of time in order to overcome the jump; and I believe that it’s mainly due to their mental capacity for re-training themselves.
****
In order to actually overcome this type of poker-based anxiety, you do eventually have to make that jump; you can’t just magically ignore the impact of playing at the higher limits. Successful reconditioning requires some form of progressive exposure. For me, this type of exposure was repeated attempts at moving up in limits, each time feeling less and less effected by the swings.
Just like the person with an irrational fear of snakes or spiders can manage their fears through the desensitization processes, so too can poker players overcome the same irrationality driven by playing at increased levels.
Now, if you are a winner at the higher level, desensitization is good. But if you are a losing player, desensitization is bad. Suppose I moved up to 100-200, had a good run, even though, in reality, I was a losing player at that level. Now, suppose I get "desensitized" to 100-200 stakes. Then the cows come home to roost (to mix a metaphor) and I start losing big time. Unfortunately, I have been desensitized to 5-10 stakes. Even though I can beat that game, my lack of appreciation for the value that other players in the game put on the money causes me to become a calling machine, or a raising machine, or any other kind of losing machine you care to name.
Feeney mentions just this point on moving up and then moving back down in stakes. In other words, you have to "resensitize" yourself to the lower stakes, which can take time. You need not just the right level of skill to beat games at any level, but you need the right level of sensitivity to the stakes. Too much sensitivity and you are in danger of becoming a weak-tight folding machine who thinks about the purchasing value of the final river bet rather than its mathematical function as a proportion of the pot. Too little sensitivity and you are likely to throw in the money on the flop because the amount is virtually meaningless to you. http://badbloodonpoker.blogspot.com/ for more on this matter.
++++++++
I shall decline to mention (well, I'll decline to mention in depth) the trip by Dr Pauly, AlCantHang, JoeSpeaker, CJ and others to the Playboy mansion for a charity tournament (won, incidentally, by Don Cheadle). If you are the type who does not need to be told who Julie McCullough is, because you are aware of her entire "career", then you might enjoy the tales of a weekend chez Hefner. http://www.alcanthang.com/poker/ has an interesting reference to Mr Negreanu, with the full gory details available at Pauly's blog http://mcgrupp.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_mcgrupp_archive.html#114361401393576758. If you want to see how poker is the new rock and troll, then this is for you, but don't expect any guidance on what to do with A23K double-suited in Limit O8 when in MP2 and facing just one limper.
++++++
After a month of silence Big Dave D returns to observe that nearly all blogs fall into one of two camps;
The first is the Internal Monologue. This takes the form of I played; I lost; I won; here’s the hand. You get the picture. Just as if you had really looked into the mental processes of a poker player, chilling thought though that may be, this can be a fun place to visit but ultimately unrewarding. WTFP. The other kind I term A Day in the Life Of. In these the poker is often a sideline alongside a lot of other Socio-Economic-Political-Military-Complex stuff. I respect that this is what blogging is all about, but personally if I want that kind of stuff I buy a newspaper, figuratively speaking.
Which kind of makes you wonder what he does want from a blog. Maybe a forum. But, in that case, you might as well start a forum. As BDD observes, it's a bit difficult to criticize blogs for doing what blogs are meant to do. Perhaps that's why he doesn't post so much, these days. A bit like the actor who suddenly realizes that, when you look at it deeply, it's all bollocks.
http://internetpokerpro.blogspot.com/
+++++++
MilkyBarKid falls into the "I played, I lost, I won" camp, except that it's for amounts by a factor of a hundred larger than many of us would like to play at. Pommo's blog is usually the same, although with Pommo you do get the agonized pain of suffering that NL players can go through if they are not completely emotionally attuned to the stakes they are playing for (see "desensitization", above). And Pommo, every so often, lays into one, which makes for great reading. Oh, and you can also discover how the other half (winning young poker players) spend vast wodges of their cash at swanky nightclubs. Personally I would spend a lot of money to be anywhere but at the next table to half the Newcastle United team, but, whatever rocks your boat.
http://milkybarkids.blogspot.com/ and http://dpommo.blogspot.com/
+++++++
ThreeBet33 (Eric fron Texas, now a pro player in Vegas), also made some very pertinent points on the implications of professional poker play. In fact, he writes about just what I was experiencing when I had that (successful) dabble at 15-30 last year. Here's what Eric said about his past few months:
I haven't been playing any poker! I played Friday night. Before that it was...er...March 9? So there really isn't anything poker-related to talk about.
I've been trying to focus more on other things. I pretty much let poker become my life, and that's not good. It's one thing to enjoy and play poker, even a lot, but when one's entire emotional state begins to rely on how the cards are running, it's time to take a break.
Many people have a family, a job, hobbies and whatnot so that's not really a concern for them. I'm single, and this was my hobby and became my job, so suddenly I was left with little to distract me from poker. This was good for my bottom line, but ultimately bad for my emotional health, and so I think this break is good.
I'm looking into developing other hobbies, creating more of a social life out here, and trying to find investments for some money I have saved up.
This was exactly the problem I felt developing last year. My entire emotional spectrum and focus was moving towards the next session of poker. No matter how successful I might have been, this was not-a-good-thing. So I pulled back.
Always a worthwhile read at http://threebet33.blogspot.com/ (plus some cool skiing pictures from Vancouver).
++++++
Mr Purle also reappeared, for the first time in aeons, posting on how as a youngster he got into a bit of bother by laying bets himself at Cheltenham rather than handing the money over to the bookies. The denouement?
Happily my father, once he'd stopped laughing, proved amenable to a gentle nipping. I hope he never told the other fella the truth, but I'll take 5-1 on that he did.
So that's alright then.
http://bitharsh.blogspot.com/
++++++
Jan Boubli, whose other half Katja has been called a Steffi Graf lookalike, but who actually reminds me of a rather younger Jennifer Saunders, posts some interesting comments on Davood Mehrmand, an infamous tournament player whom I have only seen once, at the Bellagio last December. Although he was quite loud, he was never out of order and seemed to take his elimination with reasonable grace.
http://50outs.blogs.com/poker/
+++++
Pokergrub, after a couple of weeks of silence, has returned with a rash of posts, one of them about a rash. I really like Grubby. He's clearly a very nice guy for whom things have gone ever so slightly wrong (although I hadn't realized how wrong). Part of the most recent post runs:
Sometimes I walk through a casino and consider grabbing chips from a table and bolting, thinking it would get me jail time for at least a year. I keep thinking if I can just make it to June 2007, I'll be okay. ....
I ran out of money in November. That's when I began using credit cards, beginning with a flight to California for Thanksgiving.
Yesterday I took the car in for an overdue oil change (5000 miles) and when I did, they of course found other things (axle, gas filter) that needed fixing. Socked with a $400 bill.
These car repairs plus April's rent charged to the cards makes me completely maxed out.
I've applied for more credit cards with a temporary 0 percent interest rate for balance transfers. All in an effort to make it to June 2007.
You just really want the guy to pull through, but then you wonder, will he learn an important lesson? Does anyone remember the opening scene in Croupier, where Clive Owen gives a guy some money back to which he isn't entitled, because he feels sorry for him?
http://www.pokergrub.com/#112190622670934504
++++++
Poker Nerd went on some insane quest to become a Supernova member at Pokerstars by April 1. This seemed to be so that he could pay $20K in rake in order to get $6K in electrical goods. The entire quest left me utterly bemused, and our heroic "degenerate underachiever' promptly collapsed under the strain and got sick. This is another "therapy in public" blog that reminds me of where I was 20 years ago, drinking alone, in a job I hated. In fact, sometimes the guy reminds me so much of me that it's scary.
http://pokernerd.blogspot.com/
+++++++
Felicia has gone into posting overdrive this month (is it something in the weather?) and has been writing about the "making money as a nut-peddling grinder" style (in her case, at Limit O8). Now, since much of my time is spent making money off nut-peddling grinders (see Ultimate Bet's $1-$2 games during the day US time for the largest collection ever normally seen in one place outside the Bellagio $8-$16 game on a Thurday morning) I have no objection to Felicia writing about it. While most players run a mile from these games, the restrictions on the times that I can play have forced me to work out how to beat them. Since "other good players" won't touch most of these games with a barge pole, I kind of have the field to myself, so to speak.
http://felicialee.blogspot.com/
+++++++
And finally, we have Roswell's tale of a 5K tournament in Reno. There are contrasting opinions on Roswell, with not a few people thinking that his attitude to the game and psychological make-up makes him a car crash waiting to happen. Others think that he's a quality NL player whose main problem appears to be donking off money (and that will be the last time you see me use that verb here, this month) when he isn't in the right mind-set. His techniques do not seem overly complicated (you can read his blog to see some of them), but the fish at the Bicycle seem to fall for them, and for large sums of money.
There is also an interesting tale relating to a hand against Daniel Negreanu. Did I mention that AlCan'tHang has a new nickname for him?
http://roswell-42.livejournal.com/
+++++
Here, as a final note, are my figures for March. I plan to do a "quarterly review" in the next couple of days.
| PTY | $305 | -$303 | -$196 | $88 | -$105 | ||||
| UB | $58 | $27 | $30 | $100 | $12 | $226 | |||
| Virgin | -$78 | $112 | $784 | $50 | -$161 | $706 | |||
| PS | -$2 | -$338 | $120 | $7 | -$213 | ||||
| Betfair | $3 | $3 | |||||||
| Win | $283 | -$164 | $280 | $358 | -$161 | $14 | $7 | $617 | |
| Hours | 40 | 9 | 26 | 0 | 8 | 10 | 0.25 | 93 |
And with that, I'm going for my bowl of chilli.
