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Boy About Town
Sep. 6th, 2006 09:19 pmA rather crappy session early this month has put a bit of a dent in the monthly figures and has caused me to shift back from one game of $2-$4 and two of $3-$6 to two games of $2-$4 and one game of $3-$6. The god of variance is such that my inability to do anything wrong at $3-$6 last month (be luckier at the more expensive games, is my motto) has been replaced with an inability to do anything right. Them's the breaks, and since I'm playing more $2-$4 than $3-$6, my figures are still happily on the "black" side of the ledger (or "green" in pokertracker terms) for September; but that's only because of the bonuses that I write to book on the first of the month. I've still a ways to go to get "properly" into profit.
I don't think that I mentioned my qualification for the Silver version of the Full Tilt freeroll. I suspect that this was an error. I should have just qualified for the bottom rung (Bronze). Why? Because Fuill Tilt marketing department sent me an "encouragement" to move up in FTP participation - 10,000 FTP points if I qualify for Gold and a 500-piece poker set for IronMan.
Well, only a mug would go for the IronMan the first month. If I go for the Gold freeroll, I get the 10,000 points and the offer of a poker chip set will still be there for the month after.
I wonder if the marketing departments are bright enough to work out that we know this?
The value of the freeroll (Silver) looks to me to be about $20, which just about makes it worthwhile playing. Paradoxically, I get better "value" from these tournaments if I just go all-in on the first hand no matter what I hold, and carry on going all-in until someone calls me. Then I either double through (and get some practice playing a big stack) or get back to some proper cash games.
Unfortunately my innate sense of "this isn't how the game should be played" prevents me from doing this, and I have to play so that I maximise my EV from the tournament, rather than from the metagame. That will probably give me an "average" participation time of about 90 minutes, perhaps a bit longer.
Of course, all of this gets thrown out of the window if I chop off first prize for $3K, win the four-player shoot-out and then win the face-off with some 'professional'. I then start wittering about what great value it all was.
It's interesting seeing some of the "red names" in the No Limit games. Quite obviously in some cases they are up against "non-names" who have a bankroll that would put the likes of Matusow and others to shame, and probably have profit figures that would embarrass everyone bar Allen Cunningham. One thing's for sure; they wouldn't need Erik Seidel to spot them a fifty to pay for a meal at the Indian restaurant in the Rio (overpriced compared with the same chain in London, btw), as was apparently the case with one Full Tilt Professional during the WSOP.
+++++++
Flying out three weeks today, and I'm actually looking forward to it. Clearly after a couple of long stays in LV, seven to eight months is the time needed to rekindle the enhusiasm for the place. However, since this time I am only going for 10 days, I might be keen to get back even sooner (three or four months, mayhap). Depends on how well I run, I guess.
+++
I'm getting close to the end of Aaron Brown's book "The Poker Face of Wall Street", and it is highly recommended. He makes some very interesting points. As I said, you might not agree with all that he says (I prefer Sklansky's line on bluffing to Brown's, for example), but his points about game theory are superb, shedding new light on it in my eyes, at least. He also makes the interesting point that not many of the established books talk about multi-player bluffs, even though this is something that I wrote about in my stuff for Stan James.
What Brown writes about here also has some relevance to the overcall on the river. Caro writes that you need a much stronger hand to overcall than you do to make a call of a single player (and he explains the mathematics of it). However, this rests on the first caller being a kind of fictional "loose-passive non-thinker". As soon as the first caller reaches any level of competence, the rules completely change.
I'm developing some defences against the raiser in a multi-wayer who might just be clever enough to be trying to force me out because he thinks that he is beating the original LAG bettor, but isn't sure that he might be beating me. It's quite simple, really. Just use the line that Three-bet spotted in the 100-200 limit games. "I have aces". "I have aces too". "Hey! Me three!"
What that means, in English, is that if three raises are the maximum, sometimes it is better to put in the three-bet in a multi-wayer even if you think that there is a more than 50% chance that it will be four-bet back to you. This is particularly the case on a flop where you have position, but that you think that you might be well-ahead/well-behind to one player, while with the other player the situation is more fluid.
I don't think that I mentioned my qualification for the Silver version of the Full Tilt freeroll. I suspect that this was an error. I should have just qualified for the bottom rung (Bronze). Why? Because Fuill Tilt marketing department sent me an "encouragement" to move up in FTP participation - 10,000 FTP points if I qualify for Gold and a 500-piece poker set for IronMan.
Well, only a mug would go for the IronMan the first month. If I go for the Gold freeroll, I get the 10,000 points and the offer of a poker chip set will still be there for the month after.
I wonder if the marketing departments are bright enough to work out that we know this?
The value of the freeroll (Silver) looks to me to be about $20, which just about makes it worthwhile playing. Paradoxically, I get better "value" from these tournaments if I just go all-in on the first hand no matter what I hold, and carry on going all-in until someone calls me. Then I either double through (and get some practice playing a big stack) or get back to some proper cash games.
Unfortunately my innate sense of "this isn't how the game should be played" prevents me from doing this, and I have to play so that I maximise my EV from the tournament, rather than from the metagame. That will probably give me an "average" participation time of about 90 minutes, perhaps a bit longer.
Of course, all of this gets thrown out of the window if I chop off first prize for $3K, win the four-player shoot-out and then win the face-off with some 'professional'. I then start wittering about what great value it all was.
It's interesting seeing some of the "red names" in the No Limit games. Quite obviously in some cases they are up against "non-names" who have a bankroll that would put the likes of Matusow and others to shame, and probably have profit figures that would embarrass everyone bar Allen Cunningham. One thing's for sure; they wouldn't need Erik Seidel to spot them a fifty to pay for a meal at the Indian restaurant in the Rio (overpriced compared with the same chain in London, btw), as was apparently the case with one Full Tilt Professional during the WSOP.
+++++++
Flying out three weeks today, and I'm actually looking forward to it. Clearly after a couple of long stays in LV, seven to eight months is the time needed to rekindle the enhusiasm for the place. However, since this time I am only going for 10 days, I might be keen to get back even sooner (three or four months, mayhap). Depends on how well I run, I guess.
+++
I'm getting close to the end of Aaron Brown's book "The Poker Face of Wall Street", and it is highly recommended. He makes some very interesting points. As I said, you might not agree with all that he says (I prefer Sklansky's line on bluffing to Brown's, for example), but his points about game theory are superb, shedding new light on it in my eyes, at least. He also makes the interesting point that not many of the established books talk about multi-player bluffs, even though this is something that I wrote about in my stuff for Stan James.
What Brown writes about here also has some relevance to the overcall on the river. Caro writes that you need a much stronger hand to overcall than you do to make a call of a single player (and he explains the mathematics of it). However, this rests on the first caller being a kind of fictional "loose-passive non-thinker". As soon as the first caller reaches any level of competence, the rules completely change.
I'm developing some defences against the raiser in a multi-wayer who might just be clever enough to be trying to force me out because he thinks that he is beating the original LAG bettor, but isn't sure that he might be beating me. It's quite simple, really. Just use the line that Three-bet spotted in the 100-200 limit games. "I have aces". "I have aces too". "Hey! Me three!"
What that means, in English, is that if three raises are the maximum, sometimes it is better to put in the three-bet in a multi-wayer even if you think that there is a more than 50% chance that it will be four-bet back to you. This is particularly the case on a flop where you have position, but that you think that you might be well-ahead/well-behind to one player, while with the other player the situation is more fluid.
