A bottom smacked
Mar. 7th, 2005 07:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksDo not play when tired. It's an old rule, and one that I frequently ignore, usually without consequences of any gravity. However, after Bremner Bird & Fortune last night (a marvellous skit on Charles and Camilla, I thought), I decide to play for "half an hour or so" on betfair, given that I was down there for the day. Only seconds after I had sat down, up came the offer "Would you like to earn £6 an hour etc etc"?
Well, the six quid an hour is balls, of course (what do you expect from Betfair?). But you sometimes only have to play two or three hands before the short-handed table gets five players, and you get the minimum amount (£2) credited to your account.
Not this time. For a start, I should have been concerned that the other player had $250 in front of him. But, perhaps testosterone-fired from the Pot Limit Omaha below, I felt no fear. Bad mistake and lesson number one learnt. Do not go head-to-head with big stacks, even if you have a big stack as well.
The $40 or $60 stakes at $2-$4 are usually pretty clueless during the heads-up period, but this guy wasn't. It also didn't help that I got bad cards — and when I got good cards, they lost. You can walk away from bad cards in ring games, but not when you are playing heads up.
It also didn't help that the only new players who came to my rescue were short-stacked from the start and were promptly wiped out (admittedly, half the time by me). After 20 minutes of this hell we were heads-up again and I was $30 and he was $80 up. next thing I knew, he was $110 up and I was $60 down. The game now filled up ("congratulations! £2.95 has been added to your account. You will not be paid any more to play in this game, but feel free blah blah blah...). Foolishly I decided that I was "stuck" and that I would get some of the money back.
Meanwhile, over on the other table (oh yes, I was playing the ring game at the same time), my lack of attention was not having much effect, because I was getting stuffed. £20 without doing much wrong. But I had failed to keep track of the game and so I did not have the normal sense of the game, the players and the like.
By the time I was $130 on one table and £24 down on the other, my computer decided to crash as I downloaded some hands into pokertracker. On my return, I played a couple of rounds before the ring game table decided that checking was not an option for me. Seriously. The check button just disappeared. Clicking where the button "should" have been had no effect. Now, that is what I call quality software. I found myself with JT in the big blind on a board of AJ9 rainbow. Foolishly I bet this through to the end. Got called. lost. I rebooted the screen.
Incredibly, I then won a few hands and got myself back to "only" $110 down on one table and £13 on the other. I went to bed.
But a valuable lesson was learnt. I don't think that I did much wrong in my heads-up against this well-stacked opponent. It was just that he knew what he was doing. Nearly all the heads-up people I have met while waiting for the short-handed tables to fill up have been even more clueless than me about playing the two-player variant. In fact, one thing that I did notice was that, even though I was losing, I had a sense of the "flow" of the game. Heads up is a mysterious world, but potentially a very enjoyable one. Just don't play it for 20 minutes against someone who knows what he is doing when your cards are running bad and you are paying Betfair's usurious rake.
Well, the six quid an hour is balls, of course (what do you expect from Betfair?). But you sometimes only have to play two or three hands before the short-handed table gets five players, and you get the minimum amount (£2) credited to your account.
Not this time. For a start, I should have been concerned that the other player had $250 in front of him. But, perhaps testosterone-fired from the Pot Limit Omaha below, I felt no fear. Bad mistake and lesson number one learnt. Do not go head-to-head with big stacks, even if you have a big stack as well.
The $40 or $60 stakes at $2-$4 are usually pretty clueless during the heads-up period, but this guy wasn't. It also didn't help that I got bad cards — and when I got good cards, they lost. You can walk away from bad cards in ring games, but not when you are playing heads up.
It also didn't help that the only new players who came to my rescue were short-stacked from the start and were promptly wiped out (admittedly, half the time by me). After 20 minutes of this hell we were heads-up again and I was $30 and he was $80 up. next thing I knew, he was $110 up and I was $60 down. The game now filled up ("congratulations! £2.95 has been added to your account. You will not be paid any more to play in this game, but feel free blah blah blah...). Foolishly I decided that I was "stuck" and that I would get some of the money back.
Meanwhile, over on the other table (oh yes, I was playing the ring game at the same time), my lack of attention was not having much effect, because I was getting stuffed. £20 without doing much wrong. But I had failed to keep track of the game and so I did not have the normal sense of the game, the players and the like.
By the time I was $130 on one table and £24 down on the other, my computer decided to crash as I downloaded some hands into pokertracker. On my return, I played a couple of rounds before the ring game table decided that checking was not an option for me. Seriously. The check button just disappeared. Clicking where the button "should" have been had no effect. Now, that is what I call quality software. I found myself with JT in the big blind on a board of AJ9 rainbow. Foolishly I bet this through to the end. Got called. lost. I rebooted the screen.
Incredibly, I then won a few hands and got myself back to "only" $110 down on one table and £13 on the other. I went to bed.
But a valuable lesson was learnt. I don't think that I did much wrong in my heads-up against this well-stacked opponent. It was just that he knew what he was doing. Nearly all the heads-up people I have met while waiting for the short-handed tables to fill up have been even more clueless than me about playing the two-player variant. In fact, one thing that I did notice was that, even though I was losing, I had a sense of the "flow" of the game. Heads up is a mysterious world, but potentially a very enjoyable one. Just don't play it for 20 minutes against someone who knows what he is doing when your cards are running bad and you are paying Betfair's usurious rake.
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-07 10:52 am (UTC)Prop Offers
Date: 2005-03-07 01:08 pm (UTC)But the long-term maths of heads-up at the Betfair rake is impossible. Take it at 2 hands a minute, 25 cents average rake a hand. Thats $30 an hour in rake between the two of you. You are being "paid" $11 an hour, so you are in effect paying $4 an hour to play. That's about the same as I would expect to be paying in a full ring-game of $2-$4.
Betfair ring games remain fairly soft, although they are tightening up rapidly. Fortunately (for me) the multi-tablers at the levels I play are as easy to beat as the real loosies. It's just boring stealing their blinds and folding to their raises unless you have AA, KK or AK. I swear there are some players with a VPIP (voluntarily put in pot) figure of 8%. Needless to say, all of them are losers.
Right, must make my way to the Berkshire Hathaway annual report.