Don't Give Up

I was going to do an "around the British Blogs", having wandered around a few last night, but I'm afraid I just don't have any time today.

So, some brief notes.

1) Along my previous posts on "90% of all poker-related advice is shit", I noted a thread on 2+2 about when to stop playing. The advice of TT, a moderator, while not descending into outright manure, is, I feel, typical of the genre.

Steamboatin had asked about stop losses. TT then wrote:

In short never leave a game that is good as long as your playing well until your ready to leave. Dont let the size of your winnings/loss determine when its time to leave when the game is good unless of course you don't have enough to continue playing.

Steamboatin replied If I drop 50 Big Bets in a session of limit poker, something is wrong and even if I was playing well, I won't be after dropping 50 Big Bets.

This strikes me as a line that makes a lot of sense.

TT, unfortunately, then lapses into the old favourite of "conventional wisdomitis" (a common fault on 2+2) and "I'm a great poker playeritis" (another common fault on 2+2), by replying with the following.

"Playing well includes thinking well. When your (sic) not thinking well, quit.
On a related note, I've never in my life lost 50BB in a live session. thats not pretty. "


To use a Sklanskyism: Can you see the flaw in this line?


While Steamboatin uses a physical, measurable parameter (the level of loss), TT uses a subjective analysis. Unfortunately, a subjective analysis at poker is a bit like a schizophrenic who forgets to take his medication one day and then starts thinking that he doesn't need his medication, because his failing to take his medication makes him think that.

That's the Catch-22 of "when you are not thinking well". If you are thinking well enough to know that you should stand up from a good game, the chances are that you are thinking well enough to beat it. If you aren't thinking well enough to beat it, the chances are that you aren't thinking well enough to stand up from the game.

And yet, time and again, we see the advice "stop when you are tired, or if you are tilting, or if you are making mistakes". It's like the advice of many an accountant (and I except Geoff from this, obviously); accurate, but useless.

++++++

One of the things I noticed on my blog travels was that Karen Birks is now events manager at Pokerstars. I mention this not because of the coincidence of the (relatively) unusual surname, but because there used to be a Karen Birks at my employer's (and, of course, events are one of our specialities). So I immediately got to wondering if it was the same Karen Birks. Even more curiously, I received an enquiry about her at work only a couple of weeks ago, since a parcel had arrived at the Mortimer Street office (we are, by the way, little more than a stone's throw from the Pokerstars office) and the head of the post-room wondered if Karen was a relation of mine.

So, Karen, if you get to read this, and you are the same Karen Birks, there's a parcel waiting for you in Mortimer House.

+++++++

I haven't been able to win an argument on Ultimate Bet this weekend, and I note that. since my peak last October, I am on a 320BB downswing at $2-$4. Nearly all of this was last October, since when I have been up, down, up, down.

Fortunately, given the number of hands that I play, rakeback, deposit bonuses and the like keep the graph trending upwards, plus some positive numbers at a few other games and levels.

But it's a bit disheartening to be down 320BB at your main level over a five-month period (or, if you want to look at it another way, level over a seven-month period), even if other matters keep you ticking along at six bucks an hour.

Is it worthwhile to give up that six bucks an hour and go into a month-long analysis? And, if I do, how would I go about it? Do I analyze my own performance with particular hands in particular positions? Or do I look at opponents' play and try to get more accurate range analysis (this is very useful for deciding whether to fold or reraise pre-flop). Or do I just rerun whole sessions, taking notes? Limit is harder on the soul than no limit here, because you don't have as many "key" hands. It's more a matter of general flow. This can make the identification of leaks harder as well. Plus, simply isolating certain situations (say, a continuation bet with AK against one,two, three or four opponents with three rags on the flop)from tens of thousands of hands that you have played, is not that quick a process, even using filtering.

I wonder how many players include R&D in with their hourly rate. My guess would be, not that many. In that case, they are deceiving themselves. R&D, if you could be playing profitably at the same time, is not free. You have to assume that it will generate a big enough ROR to make up for the hours forsaken. Now, perhaps that assumption is correct (just as a large number of things in poker which people think are "givens" are really unproved assumptions that happen to work, at the moment), but it remains an assumption, a "gamble" as it were.


Part of my R&D, now that my Noble Poker foray has come to an end, has been experimenting with certain styles of play and levels of buy-in at low-level No Limit (using Virgin, so that I am not temtped to rely on PT stats). Once again, I treat with the utmost scepticism nearly all the advice heretofore given, mainly because poker players as a breed are great ones for the pragmatic approach of "it works for me, so it must be right".

The two most useful poker books I have read in the past two years have definitely been "Zen" and "The Mathematics of Poker". And I haven't even finished the latter. In fact, I've got to the end of section III and gone back to the beginning, because I think that sections four and five are separate topics to the main mathematical line.

The great thing about this book is that I can see why many a poker player would pooh-pooh it. And I think to myself. Brilliant. Let them.