SwingSwingSwing's Poker Journey

From last night's PokerStars £2000 Freeroll.

Ace King short under the gun
Push. Two callers both Ace Nine
Nine On flop

OK, it's not really a haiku but I liked it.

I'm now only a small loser at the $2 heads up SNGs on Full Tilt. A run of eleven consecutive victories brought me back into respectability.

Meanwhile on Stars, I've been playing freerolls and crap like that. I've managed to qualify the for Turbo Takedown next week and on Sunday night I final-table-bubbled the UK £2000 guaranteed freeroll rebuy, finishing 10th out of 4500ish.

This is a strange wee tournament. It's a free to enter rebuy. So you get in for free and you can rebuy and get 1000 chips for ten pence. The great thing is that very few of the participants know anything about playing rebuys. Only one or two of your initial table will rebuy at the start and not that many take the addon either. This means it is an easy tournament to cash in. Just rebuy at the start and take the addon and you're almost there. I've played most of them this week and cashed in them all, finished 10th on Sunday night and had a top 200 finish as well. As it's essentially a freeroll, it also means there's a fair bit of overlay. Sunday night's total of rebuys and addons was only about £250 meaning there was £1750 added by PokerStars. And PokerStars even give you a micro stakes SNG ticket if you cash having rebought at some point. 

Easy money. OK, easy micro money but easy money none-the-less.

...it keeps getting in the way of me posting.

As a few of the BritBloggers will know, MrsSwingSwingSwing and I had applied to immigrate to Canada. Now this was a couple of years ago. Well, they've only gone and accepted us! They asked for our passports at the end of June and last week, we got them back with visas attached! But what's really set the cat amongst the pidgeons is that the visas expire in August. Yip, August.

After the initial panic, we've realised that we haven't got time to get everything sorted before the expiry date. So it'll be a two stage plan. Stage 1 - go over to Canada, go through the landing procedure which activates our permanent residents status, stay for a week or so, apply for various bits and bobs and then come back. Stage 2 - get the house sold, pack up and go.

Needless-to-say, we've got a million and one things to do so the poker has taken a bit of a back seat. It hasn't been totally shelved though. I've stopped playing on Stars for now, just to make sure I preserve my bankroll. But I have been playing on Full Tilt with my massive $80 'roll. I was just going to play for fun and see how much I could grow the 'roll playing heads up sit'n'gos. I'm not too proud to say that I'm running at -10% ROI so far, playing the $2s. And that's an improvement as I was running at -24% for a while! I am a fish of the highest quality. People have been looking up my stats and calling me a loser. Now I don't know what's sadder - that I'm a fish at the $2s or that people actually bother to use Sharkscope at that level. One guy in particular made me laugh. He had looked up my stats, saw that he was in for an easy time and played me for a bit. Of course, I won the majority of the games which put him on massive tilt, particularily as I did have a couple of suckouts! During that tilt, he was berating me big time for my poor stats and likewise I was berating him for even bothering to look up opponents at that level.

If you need to use Sharkscope to get a handle on opponents at the $2 level you are destined to spend an eternity at that level.

Despite having lots of other things to do, I played some poker over the weekend. To hell with the garden, and the fence, and fixing the blinds. See me, see living on the edge!

My Heads Up SNG adventures continues with my recent downswing now just a minor blip.

Stats are now:-
Played: 158
ITM%: 55.1%
ROI%: 4.9%

But I still need to get a handle on tilt. An example -  idiot opponent pushes 42s for 15BB or so and as he had been pushing quite a bit, I call with my 77. Flop comes A3x rainbow. Of course, you just know that the 5 is coming. And it does. Cue insane monkey tilt and I go on to lose the match. Arghhhh.

Although my Heads Up SNG adventure isn't exactly bringing in lots of money (yet!) it has definitely improved my overall game. Evaluating hand ranges, analysing flop textures, etc is much easier now and because of that I'm able to make better decisions.

For example, last night's BritBloggerment. It came down to dasertr and myself and the effective stacks were around 20BB, certainly not shove-fest territory yet, and I had the chip advantage. If I had been in this situation a year ago, I would not really have known what do. Stacks are too big to shove and my post flop play wasn't great. But last night was different. I went into the heads up battle, confident and eager.

And I won :-)

Once again, life has been getting in the way of poker playing. 

In May, I managed the grand total of 14 heads up SNGs. Mind you, I won 71% of them, i.e, 10 and lost 4 which was nice.

That wee run was fortuitous as I had a bit of downswing after my last post and at one point was back into negative territory winnings-wise at the $10 level. I was playing terribly and tilting badly. I came across one guy, Ali 65, who is, without doubt, the worst player I have ever came across. Sharkscope has his ROI as -52%. I think I lost three in a row to him. The tilt was unbearable.

Anyhoo, I've recovered now.

Scores on the doors:-
$10 Heads Up SNGS
Played: 146
ITM%: 54.8%
ROI%: 4.4%

Not much else to report poker-wise.

I played a SCOOP event and cashed although looking back I wonder why I bothered. I won an $11 SCOOP ticket in the World Blogger Championship a while back. Browsing the SCOOP schedule I realised that there really weren't many tournaments that I would be able to use the ticket for. For most of the tournaments the "low" tournament entry was $22 or higher and of the ones that had an $11 low, the start times were terrible for a UK based player. The only real option was the $11 Pot Limit 5 Card Draw. I have played quite a bit of 5 Card Draw and, in fact, it's a game I really enjoy. But it's all been fixed limit. Pot limit would be new to me. But it was my only option so if I was going to use the ticket, that would be the tournament.

Having decided that, I then almost missed the tournament. If I recall correctly, it was 7pm start on a Wednesday evening. On that particular Wednesday I had decided to walk home from work (as part of my "fitness" regime - 5 miles and it takes me about 1 hour 20 minutes). I get in the door at 6.30, knackered, and the first thing I do after feeding the dogs is to have a bath. Now, the bath is where I do most of poker learning. My little netbook gets perched on the side of the bath and I lie back, have a soak, while watching a poker video or two and hoping that I don't fall asleep and drown.

So I'm in the bath, watching a video from SNG Grinders and I suddenly realise that the 5 Card Draw tournament starts at 7pm. Now I've got a dilemma. Do I curtail my bath, get out and play the tournament on the main laptop? Or do I stay in the bath and play it on the netbook? Given that I wasn't long in the bath and I wasn't that bothered about the tournament I decided to stay in the lovely, warm water and play it from there.

So I fire up PokerStars and get myself registered about 5 minutes before the start. At that point there were about 2200 players registered. Not too many, I thought, maybe about 4 or 5 hours to the final table. But, alas, I had not factored in the effect of the extended late registration period. As I played from the bath, the number of players grew and grew, getting past 2500, 3000, 3500 and then 4000 basically doubling the field. My estimate of 4 or 5 hours was now looking a bit optimistic and I seriously considering just sitting out. But just before the first break and I had managed to grow my stack quite considerably and was in a position to make a good go of it. The first break came around. I closed down the netbook, got out the bath and rejoined the tournament on the main laptop in the living room.

Despite this being my first experience of Pot Limit 5 Card Draw, I was doing quite well. And as the tournament progressed I was keeping my stack above average and got through the money bubble without any bother at around midnight. At 1am, PokerStars then decided to have a 15 minute break much to my annoyance and to other UK players. One guy said that if he'd know that was going to happen he'd have just pushed any hand and went to bed! My stack was getting small and I was getting tired. But there were lots of small money bubbles coming up. I went into short-stack ninja mode and ended up busting out in 222nd place of out 4500ish at around 2.30am when my two pair ran into a higher two pair. And my prize for 7 and half hours work?........$22.

Why the fuck did I bother?


PS For any BritBloggers reading - I've never played the BritBloggerment from the bath.

As you can tell by the even lower than usual posting frequency, I've not been playing much poker recently as real life stuff has been taking priority.

I'm still at the $10 level of my heads up SNG adventure. Results are good - my win rate over 81 games is 56.8% which translates to an ROI of 8.2%.

Lifetime heads up stats are:-
Games: 754
Winrate: 56.8%
ROI: 6.8%

Can't complain really! I just wish I could find some more time for playing and for watching training videos. I've got a PokerStars bonus to clear by the end of May which I'm only halfway through it so I'm going to have to pull the finger out. Which is probably a good thing.

So what have I been doing when not playing poker? Well, I've consolidated my network attached storage drives , giving me a 2TB RAID1 drive. With that extra disk space, I've consolidated all my various media files (music, video, poker training videos) onto that expanded NAS drive. I then installed XBMC on the laptop in the living room and added all the network NAS shares to it. I've got to say XBMC is fantastic piece of software. I just wish my TV was a bit better so that I could hook up the laptop to it and show off XBMC's full potential.

What else? Going back to my youth and digging out and playing my old vinyl LPs and in the process discovering that I've got some fairly collectable platters in my collection. Who knew that Venom's "From Hell To The Unknown" double LP with one in red vinyl and the other black would be worth so much? Ditto for Sodom's "Expurse of Sodomy" picture disc.

What else? Learning to ice skate at Murrayfield Ice Rink. Great fun. I've only fell over twice.

What else? Watching the Edinburgh Capitals ice hockey team playing in the Great Britain's top level professional league.

What else? Watching tonnes of NHL ice hockey on ESPN America. Go Canucks!

So pretty busy all-in-all.

A quick update on my shot at the $10s. I played 20 tournies over the weekend and I'm currently running at an ROI of 20%! I doubt that will last but we can always hope.

Play is definitely tougher than the $5 although there are plenty of fish. I played a series of three games against a guy who had a tendency for huge overbets at any stage of the hand. He was a definite fish but his overbets did cause me a bit of bother. He won the first match but I took down the next two.

The trickiest set of games were last night against a very aggressive player. I had just busted out of the weekly BritBloggerment and wasn't particularily happy, having run into big hands at the wrong times. I knew at the time that I should have just closed PokerStars down but it was still early so I went to the HU SNG lobby.

I found a player sitting who had a Spanish sounding screenname. And his screenname had a space in it. I've come to the conlusion over time that this can sometimes be an indicator of fishiness so I jumped in. Unfortunately, he was aggro to the extreme, raising nearly ever hand preflop and forcing me off hands with some unexpected and large check raises or river raises. Post flop he was absolutely owning me.

This got to me. The first two games he won easily. One of them was when he raised with 52o and I called. I think I had top pair on the flop and made a big bet. Unfortunately, as the board had brought two fives I was toast.

Now, at this point I should have walked away. But no, I rematched him again, which he was loving. "You are a loser" and "I like you" were a couple of his comments. For game three, I decided to make the game more of pre flop affair. I started pushing over the top of his raises with decent hands and he would fold. He then started limping, which suited me fine as long as I kept it very simple and didn't let myself get into any tricky situations. He got bored with taking these little pots that he went back to raising preflop. To which I responded to by pushing over the top. He was still in the lead when I picked up a pair of tens. He raised, I pushed, he called with A6s. And hit an Ace on the flop so it's now 3-0 to him.

Christ, was I angry and immediately rematched (which again was probably the wrong thing to do!). But I think I had a strategy that would be successful. Game four was over pretty quickly. I had pushed over the top of couple of raises to get a small chip lead then had Kings on the button. I just push it all in. He calls with king ten offsuit. Yip, KTo. Now it's 3-1.

Games five and six followed the same pattern. I just kept pushing over his raises with decent hands and when he called he had the inferior hand.

At 3-3, he left which I regarded as a moral victory for me! Yay.

Looking back, I got off lucky in that series. It could have been much worse had I not won my 60-40s.

So let that be a lesson to you all, never play when you're in the wrong mindset. Just don't do it. It will cost you money.

I hate to say it, but for added ambience while reading this post, sing "Moving On Up" by M People in your head!

Finally, at last, at long, long, last, I've hit 20BB profit at the $5 heads up sit'n'gos. And the game that took me over my target was probably the easiest ten dollars I have ever made. The way my Canadian opponent, gerald, played it was as if he was playing his cards face up. He bet big when he had something like top pair or better. He bet small when had something small like botton or second pair and checked every other time.

Easy peasy,
lemon squeezy,
nice and easy,
one two threesey!

My stats at the $5 level are:-
Games Played: 377
Win%: 55.4%
ROI%: 5.6%
Winnings: $110.75
$/hr: $0.99

That's right - I make one dollar an hour playing heads up poker! This time next year, I'll be a millionaire.

The stats are nothing special. In fact, they should be higher but I'm fairly happy. There were times during the $5s when I was playing poorly and I lost money. But I was able to step back, review my play and get myself back to winning ways.

So now I'm going to take a stab at the $10s. Although I've got the bankroll to stay at the 10s, I'm going to set a 5 buyin stop loss, i.e. if I'm down $50, I'll drop back down to the $5s for a bit.

I suppose I shouldn't have phrased that as "going to take a stab" as I've already started. After taking a night off after reaching the 20BB target, I sat down last night and watched the $10 lobby for a bit and observed a couple of games. What struck me immediately was the level of traffic. At the $5s, you'll get an opponent in under 15 seconds. At the $10s though I saw waits of over a minute before a table filled. Anyway, after spotting (and avoiding) a couple of multi-tablers, I jumped in for what would be my third $10 SNG since I started playing heads up poker. And I won. Although my opponent was poor, which always helps.

I played 6 tournaments in total, winning three and losing three which is fine. Of the six opponents, I would only classify 2 as fish. Of the remaining 4, there were three that I wouldn't want to play too often. The other guy - undecided. He might be good or bad. Overall, from that small sample, the players are better so I'll need to be careful.

As you may know, PokerStars are hosting the World Blogger Championships of Online Poker, a series of free events just for sad buggers like me who blog about their poker experiences.

The first event, a no-limit holdem freezeout, was on Monday night and I bombed out fairly early. Last night was Pot Limit Omaha and despite never having played it before, I gave it a go.

And I cashed! 89th out of 1500-odd.

PokerStars have been encouraging participants to live blog and tweet their progress in the series and after two nights I have came to the conclusion that Twitter is a pile of self-indulgent wank. Come to think of it, blogging is a pile of self-indulgent wank but Twitter is an even bigger, more putrid, smellier pile of self-indulgent wank.