Poker Round Up
Dec. 31st, 2010 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksWell, at about midnight last night I made it to Supernova, a move that doubtless impacted my performance in November and December, but which is worth well into four figures for 2011.
It has been a frustrating year on the felt – not just for me if I am to take other people's blogs at face value. Richard Ashby posted a sad tale of dumping over a million bucks in less than 24 hours (oh, ok, the net loss was only $700k, so that's alright then). Ben Grundy (MilkyBarKid blog) tore up all of the game plans for 2010 when the second half of the year turned into a nightmare. Clarkatroid's blog just vanished. In fact, generally speaking, the "gamblers" look to have had a tough time of it.
Meanwhile, in Grinderman territory, I felt that the last two months of the year taught me a lot, even if they were not that profitable in terms of hard cash. If you look at the performance of these massive multi-tablers, the one clear conclusion that one has to reach is that the only winner is Pokerstars. This is a theme to which many players return on 2+2; play fewer hands, play fewer tables, forget "hourly rate". Win more per 100 hands.
Indeed this year has seen my worst performance per 100 hands for many a year. That said, I think that my game progressed significantly. Of course, everyone else's game seemed to progress significantly as well.
The total performance in open play doesn't look that great, does it? The end of the year was definitely a fairly miserable experience, but, incredibly, the huge number of hands meant that I was actually slightly better off at the end of that bad run than I was at the beginning. So I'll mark it down as R&D and investment.
I perhaps moved back down from $1-$2 NL to 50c-$1 a little bit prematurely. Certainly the downswing was nowhere significant enough for me to conclude that I was a loser at the higher level. That said, there is no way at the moment that I could 12-table at $1-$2 NL. To be frank, it's marginal whether I can do so at 50c-$1.
I was thinking about this yesterday and it occurred to me how marginal the whole thing is. Suppose I am playing 600 hands an hour at 50c-$1 NL. What is the dollar value of the decisions I make? Well, 600 hands probably comes in at about 800 decisions if I am playing tight and perhaps 1,200 decisions if I am being laggy. What's the average value of each decision? Let's guess at $2. So let's assume I am making $2,000-worth of decisions every hour. This would mean that a shift from a $20-an hour average win rate to a $0 an hour average win rate would be an edge of just 1%.
In other words, if moving from six tables to 12 tables means that you play less than 99% as well as you did previously, then you shift from being a decent winner to being a break-even player.
This, undoubtedly, was what happened to me. I suspect that I moved from being a 3 big blinds per 100 winner to being a 1 big blind per 100 loser.
On the plus side, it is good practice for when you return to tiled tables, because you have much more time and much more information to play with. It's like practising batting at cricket with a stump and then going out to the crease with a full-size bat.
Sorry, the graphs are going a bit mad in size. Tinypic has suddenly stopped functioning and told me that it is now a Photobucket company, so I'm now learning how to use the Photobucket upload. Can't see how to change the size of the uploaded picture at the moment.
Anyhoo, 50c-$1 was a bit disappointing. A real case of three steps forward and three steps back. Part of this was the Pokerstars phenomenon. If I stuck to the weaker games on Party I suspect I would do significantly better in table performance.
So, here's the grim picture of the year compared with previous years. Worse than 2009 by far, and not even as good as 2008. On the other hand, still $14,000, which isn't too bad. But it was a lot of hard work, much harder work than previous years. When did I move over to that "work" part? I think that it was as long ago as 2005, when I calculated that 400 hands an evening and 1,500 hands a day at weekends (at the time, about 90 minutes an evening and five hours a day at weekends), would net me $2,000 a month if I could generate a win rate of 2.5 big bets per hour when 4-tabling at Limit $2-$4.
Clearly I ran well last year – particularly in that seven-month or so period up to November.
Equally clearly, I think, I have not run so well this year, and my feeling is that I have run slightly badly.
Here's the individual sites – and I think that the one plus of the year has been that I have broken the Full Tilt jinx. FTP is the only site where I have ever run out of cash. This year I managed to secure a rakeback agreement and also managed to win (just) in open play. I've built the bankroll up to a reasonable sum now (nearing $3k), which once again leaves me with three active sites (Party, Stars, FTP_ where I have working capital.
This is probably the most interesting graph of the lot. Not because it shows how bonuses and rakeback have predominated in my earnings this year, but because of the rapid fall-off in the levels of bonuses come May/June. This was almost completely down to what seemed to me to be a drastic pullback at Party, where my effective rakeback seemed to drop from 40% to sub-20%.
As the year went on these bonuses picked up again -- helped by Full Tilt (effectively about 30% I think) and massively higher hand throughput on Stars.
Oh well, once again the line formatting seems to have vanished.
As I said above, November and December were not that surprising, annd if you look at the rake numbers, you can see that there was no serious damage done to the bank balance. And with Supernova in the bag and a strategy that will maintain it (relatively) easily over the coming 12 months, I'm willing to state that it was worthwhile. Of course, I would rather have won.
As it happens, the last few days weren't that bad, and I've developed a few strategies "on the fly" against the regulars on Stars. If I put in some research I feel that beating them when just 6-tabling will not be impossible.
I'm not sure how often I have to repeat this, but for anyone playing Hold Em online who can't figure out why they are losing, stop looking so much at the strength of your hand, and start looking at stack sizes. In fact, to be honest, I'd stop looking at any poker book at all and I would pay only scant attention to what's written on 2+2.
Go back to first principles and question every action that you had previously taken for granted. If a move that you are used to making (e.g., continuation bets) seems to be putting you in a lot of difficult spots, look at how you can resolve this problem, and think laterally. The biggest most important factor on Stars, against multi-tablers, is that if you can put them outside their comfort zone, if you can make them think then you have them at a great disadvantage, because one thing that they do not have is time to think. Their ability is mainly placed on having seen the same situation hundreds of times before. They don't care about their stack per se. That stack is less than 1% of their bankroll. If they are running down a well-known groove of decision-making, it makes no difference to them whether they shove or fold. It's all about process.
But if they find themselves in a situation which doesn't follow the prescribed patterns, then they have to calculate. They have to work out what is likely to be the right move.
This is what makes the looser and slightly more aggressive players harder to beat. Because there are fewer of them, and because their range of hands is wider and their style of play slightly left-field, it's far harder to play automatically against them. Every decision is a thinker.
It's not necessary to become a LAG to beat the multi-tablers, but it is necessary to think outside of the box, to keep them on their toes. This isn't easy, but if you try to out-TAG them, they will piss all over you. Because they've seen all of that before, tens of thousands of times.
As the end of the year approached and I saw table after table full of players against whom I had played more than 5k hands in the previous six weeks, I began to realize that, although many of us would bet and shove and fold and reraise and try to merge our ranges and so on, it made little difference to our expected win rates against each other, which, with minor variations, were not far from zero. Stars, in other words, was the only winner.
A quick look at the performance of these people on Poker Table Ratings confirmed this. More than 90% are at around break-even. Now, if you are clocking up more than a million hands a year, that's still an effective earn-rate of $15k or thereabouts. At the short-stack tables this is even more pronounced. As one regular put it on 2+2. "I win a flip - Stars gets $2. He wins a flip. Stars gets $2. And so on." This poster reckoned that none of the sustained multi-tablers at short-stack tables were winning more than 1 big blind per 100 hands.
But, on the plus side, and even though Stars is taking perhaps 80% of your "win", for many of these players this is the ideal world -- a steady income from rakeback and bonuses, with little volatility.
But I don't really want that world. Indeed, I want the best of both worlds. I really like the high rakeback levels that I get from high throughput, but I don't like winning less at the tables than I pay in rake.
So, what's the solution? Well, for January 2011 I'm going to try a system of "two-weeks' maintenance, two weeks' volatility". Or, in other words, spend a couple of weeks making sure that I keep Supernova on Stars and a modest IronMan rating on Full Tilt, and a couple of weeks going for table profits at fewer tables.
I can still keep it going at $14k a year, but it's a fairly crappy hourly rate and there are indeed other things that I would like to do with my time. In terms of opportunity cost it's getting near the margin. Unfortunately I so desperately want to build up a "life bankroll" before I am 60 that I don't think that I can afford to give up and go out to "enjoy myself". With the mortgage on my flat downstairs still in place, I just don't have the ability to stuff those worries in a bottom drawer and forget about them for a while
How people cope when they are actually in debt totally baffles me. I mean, if I were maxed out on a credit card, there's no way I would be thinking about a holiday. But that's what I see people do. One minute they are juggling debts to get through the month, and the next they are talking about their planned holiday in the summer. Maybe that kind of life, if you can live it, is for the better (carpe diem and all that), but it just isn't me. And when the shit hits the fan for these people (which, eventually, it usually does), you can't even laugh and say "Fuck you, pussies, I warned you!!!" because they put on such a sad face and the like that you feel sorry for them, and end up "doing them a favour".
Yeah, perhaps they ARE the people with the right idea . :-)
_____________
It has been a frustrating year on the felt – not just for me if I am to take other people's blogs at face value. Richard Ashby posted a sad tale of dumping over a million bucks in less than 24 hours (oh, ok, the net loss was only $700k, so that's alright then). Ben Grundy (MilkyBarKid blog) tore up all of the game plans for 2010 when the second half of the year turned into a nightmare. Clarkatroid's blog just vanished. In fact, generally speaking, the "gamblers" look to have had a tough time of it.
Meanwhile, in Grinderman territory, I felt that the last two months of the year taught me a lot, even if they were not that profitable in terms of hard cash. If you look at the performance of these massive multi-tablers, the one clear conclusion that one has to reach is that the only winner is Pokerstars. This is a theme to which many players return on 2+2; play fewer hands, play fewer tables, forget "hourly rate". Win more per 100 hands.
Indeed this year has seen my worst performance per 100 hands for many a year. That said, I think that my game progressed significantly. Of course, everyone else's game seemed to progress significantly as well.
The total performance in open play doesn't look that great, does it? The end of the year was definitely a fairly miserable experience, but, incredibly, the huge number of hands meant that I was actually slightly better off at the end of that bad run than I was at the beginning. So I'll mark it down as R&D and investment.
I perhaps moved back down from $1-$2 NL to 50c-$1 a little bit prematurely. Certainly the downswing was nowhere significant enough for me to conclude that I was a loser at the higher level. That said, there is no way at the moment that I could 12-table at $1-$2 NL. To be frank, it's marginal whether I can do so at 50c-$1.
I was thinking about this yesterday and it occurred to me how marginal the whole thing is. Suppose I am playing 600 hands an hour at 50c-$1 NL. What is the dollar value of the decisions I make? Well, 600 hands probably comes in at about 800 decisions if I am playing tight and perhaps 1,200 decisions if I am being laggy. What's the average value of each decision? Let's guess at $2. So let's assume I am making $2,000-worth of decisions every hour. This would mean that a shift from a $20-an hour average win rate to a $0 an hour average win rate would be an edge of just 1%.
In other words, if moving from six tables to 12 tables means that you play less than 99% as well as you did previously, then you shift from being a decent winner to being a break-even player.
This, undoubtedly, was what happened to me. I suspect that I moved from being a 3 big blinds per 100 winner to being a 1 big blind per 100 loser.
On the plus side, it is good practice for when you return to tiled tables, because you have much more time and much more information to play with. It's like practising batting at cricket with a stump and then going out to the crease with a full-size bat.
Sorry, the graphs are going a bit mad in size. Tinypic has suddenly stopped functioning and told me that it is now a Photobucket company, so I'm now learning how to use the Photobucket upload. Can't see how to change the size of the uploaded picture at the moment.
Anyhoo, 50c-$1 was a bit disappointing. A real case of three steps forward and three steps back. Part of this was the Pokerstars phenomenon. If I stuck to the weaker games on Party I suspect I would do significantly better in table performance.
So, here's the grim picture of the year compared with previous years. Worse than 2009 by far, and not even as good as 2008. On the other hand, still $14,000, which isn't too bad. But it was a lot of hard work, much harder work than previous years. When did I move over to that "work" part? I think that it was as long ago as 2005, when I calculated that 400 hands an evening and 1,500 hands a day at weekends (at the time, about 90 minutes an evening and five hours a day at weekends), would net me $2,000 a month if I could generate a win rate of 2.5 big bets per hour when 4-tabling at Limit $2-$4.
Clearly I ran well last year – particularly in that seven-month or so period up to November.
Equally clearly, I think, I have not run so well this year, and my feeling is that I have run slightly badly.
Here's the individual sites – and I think that the one plus of the year has been that I have broken the Full Tilt jinx. FTP is the only site where I have ever run out of cash. This year I managed to secure a rakeback agreement and also managed to win (just) in open play. I've built the bankroll up to a reasonable sum now (nearing $3k), which once again leaves me with three active sites (Party, Stars, FTP_ where I have working capital.
This is probably the most interesting graph of the lot. Not because it shows how bonuses and rakeback have predominated in my earnings this year, but because of the rapid fall-off in the levels of bonuses come May/June. This was almost completely down to what seemed to me to be a drastic pullback at Party, where my effective rakeback seemed to drop from 40% to sub-20%.
As the year went on these bonuses picked up again -- helped by Full Tilt (effectively about 30% I think) and massively higher hand throughput on Stars.
| 2010 | Hours | Hands | $USD | $USD/hr | $USD EV | Avg Players | VPIP% | PFR% | 3Bet% | Agg Factor | WTSD% | W$SD% | Rake |
| Dec | 150.3 | 84338 | ($915.01) | ($6.09) | ($1,136.77) | 8.1 | 12.4 | 8.8 | 3.1 | 2.95 | 21.8 | 59.1 | $3,887.07 |
| Nov | 110.2 | 58846 | ($708.95) | ($6.43) | ($1,205.22) | 8.1 | 12 | 8 | 3.1 | 3.59 | 20 | 57.3 | $2,771.88 |
| Oct | 112.0 | 46456 | $988.53 |
$8.83 | $733.00 | 7.9 | 12.7 | 8.8 | 3.6 | 3.5 | 21.1 | 57.5 | $2,234.85 |
| Sept | 79.5 | 23930 | $629.68 |
$7.92 | $892.23 |
8.1 | 11.8 | 8.1 | 2.9 | 3.61 | 21 | 56.2 | $1,315.34 |
| Aug | 91.7 | 28959 | $5.67 | $0.06 | ($231.66) | 8.1 | 10.8 | 8.2 | 2.6 | 3.83 | 21 | 58.6 | $1,590.11 |
| Jul | 127.5 | 43235 | ($1,687.66) | ($13.24) | ($1,476.10) | 8.1 | 12.4 | 9.9 | 3.4 | 4.8 | 19.5 | 49.6 | $2,260.30 |
| Jun | 89.0 | 27765 | $492.09 |
$5.53 | $397.81 |
8.2 | 11.7 | 10.1 | 4 | 5.66 | 20.6 | 54.9 | $1,258.65 |
| May | 115.9 | 35492 | $965.65 |
$8.33 | $1,038.24 |
8.1 | 11.6 | 9.6 | 3.9 | 4.73 | 22.8 | 55.9 | $2,018.06 |
| Apr | 108.9 | 34200 | $784.24 |
$7.20 | $819.78 |
8.1 | 11.6 | 9.7 | 3.9 | 4.44 | 24.5 | 55.7 | $2,090.10 |
| Mar | 131.1 | 45994 | ($1,823.99) | ($13.92) | ($246.09) | 8.1 | 11.3 | 9.7 | 4.5 | 5.43 | 24.1 | 49.4 | $2,454.32 |
| Feb | 106.6 | 36528 | $2,736.01 |
$25.67 | $2,191.06 |
8.1 | 12 | 9.9 | 4.5 | 5.3 | 23.4 | 54.1 | $2,608.46 |
| Jan | 122.5 | 39099 | $457.59 |
$3.74 | $337.47 |
8.1 | 12 | 9.3 | 3.5 | 4.83 | 23.8 | 53.6 | $2,650.01 |
| Total | 1345.2 | 504842 | $1,923.85 | $2.30 | $2,113.75 | 8.09 | 11.86 | 9.18 | 3.58 | 4.39 | 21.97 | 55.16 | $27,139.15 |
Oh well, once again the line formatting seems to have vanished.
As I said above, November and December were not that surprising, annd if you look at the rake numbers, you can see that there was no serious damage done to the bank balance. And with Supernova in the bag and a strategy that will maintain it (relatively) easily over the coming 12 months, I'm willing to state that it was worthwhile. Of course, I would rather have won.
As it happens, the last few days weren't that bad, and I've developed a few strategies "on the fly" against the regulars on Stars. If I put in some research I feel that beating them when just 6-tabling will not be impossible.
I'm not sure how often I have to repeat this, but for anyone playing Hold Em online who can't figure out why they are losing, stop looking so much at the strength of your hand, and start looking at stack sizes. In fact, to be honest, I'd stop looking at any poker book at all and I would pay only scant attention to what's written on 2+2.
Go back to first principles and question every action that you had previously taken for granted. If a move that you are used to making (e.g., continuation bets) seems to be putting you in a lot of difficult spots, look at how you can resolve this problem, and think laterally. The biggest most important factor on Stars, against multi-tablers, is that if you can put them outside their comfort zone, if you can make them think then you have them at a great disadvantage, because one thing that they do not have is time to think. Their ability is mainly placed on having seen the same situation hundreds of times before. They don't care about their stack per se. That stack is less than 1% of their bankroll. If they are running down a well-known groove of decision-making, it makes no difference to them whether they shove or fold. It's all about process.
But if they find themselves in a situation which doesn't follow the prescribed patterns, then they have to calculate. They have to work out what is likely to be the right move.
This is what makes the looser and slightly more aggressive players harder to beat. Because there are fewer of them, and because their range of hands is wider and their style of play slightly left-field, it's far harder to play automatically against them. Every decision is a thinker.
It's not necessary to become a LAG to beat the multi-tablers, but it is necessary to think outside of the box, to keep them on their toes. This isn't easy, but if you try to out-TAG them, they will piss all over you. Because they've seen all of that before, tens of thousands of times.
As the end of the year approached and I saw table after table full of players against whom I had played more than 5k hands in the previous six weeks, I began to realize that, although many of us would bet and shove and fold and reraise and try to merge our ranges and so on, it made little difference to our expected win rates against each other, which, with minor variations, were not far from zero. Stars, in other words, was the only winner.
A quick look at the performance of these people on Poker Table Ratings confirmed this. More than 90% are at around break-even. Now, if you are clocking up more than a million hands a year, that's still an effective earn-rate of $15k or thereabouts. At the short-stack tables this is even more pronounced. As one regular put it on 2+2. "I win a flip - Stars gets $2. He wins a flip. Stars gets $2. And so on." This poster reckoned that none of the sustained multi-tablers at short-stack tables were winning more than 1 big blind per 100 hands.
But, on the plus side, and even though Stars is taking perhaps 80% of your "win", for many of these players this is the ideal world -- a steady income from rakeback and bonuses, with little volatility.
But I don't really want that world. Indeed, I want the best of both worlds. I really like the high rakeback levels that I get from high throughput, but I don't like winning less at the tables than I pay in rake.
So, what's the solution? Well, for January 2011 I'm going to try a system of "two-weeks' maintenance, two weeks' volatility". Or, in other words, spend a couple of weeks making sure that I keep Supernova on Stars and a modest IronMan rating on Full Tilt, and a couple of weeks going for table profits at fewer tables.
I can still keep it going at $14k a year, but it's a fairly crappy hourly rate and there are indeed other things that I would like to do with my time. In terms of opportunity cost it's getting near the margin. Unfortunately I so desperately want to build up a "life bankroll" before I am 60 that I don't think that I can afford to give up and go out to "enjoy myself". With the mortgage on my flat downstairs still in place, I just don't have the ability to stuff those worries in a bottom drawer and forget about them for a while
How people cope when they are actually in debt totally baffles me. I mean, if I were maxed out on a credit card, there's no way I would be thinking about a holiday. But that's what I see people do. One minute they are juggling debts to get through the month, and the next they are talking about their planned holiday in the summer. Maybe that kind of life, if you can live it, is for the better (carpe diem and all that), but it just isn't me. And when the shit hits the fan for these people (which, eventually, it usually does), you can't even laugh and say "Fuck you, pussies, I warned you!!!" because they put on such a sad face and the like that you feel sorry for them, and end up "doing them a favour".
Yeah, perhaps they ARE the people with the right idea . :-)
_____________
