Still money left yet in SNGs?

It’s early, there’s not many games going and I’m just sitting here with some free time so thought what else better to do than to blog update. I thought I’d try to mix it up a bit in this post, so let me start by talking a bit about the state of the games. I’ll post a couple of random thoughts at the end.

As I said in my first post, there’s not one ounce of denying that even just a few years back you’d really be able to take the games for a lot more money than now. And that’s not just the case with specifically 6max SNGs, every form of poker – every game/every format has toughened and it’s rare to find an exploitable niche that’s not saturated with regs these days. The golden age of poker was considered to be early to mid-2000s. However, a couple of hands I played within the last 2 days which I’ll post in a moment came as a reminder that there may still be some money left yet to make in poker. The bottom line is, yes it may be the case of working harder for a lower hourly rate now, but it doesn’t change the fact it’s a game where those who work harder on and off the tables and do it right will gain a skill edge and be able to make more money (even if that edge is small) than those who aren’t.

The so-called “poker boom” was almost 10 years ago and the games have been growing and competition has been getting fiercer ever since – people are learning/improving like nothing else and there’s so many ways of going about this from reading books to watching videos or getting professional coaching online. But who says we won’t see a second poker boom? Black Friday was the day that the authorities seized control over three of the major online sites and consequently led to US players being banned – one of the darkest days in poker. The likelihood is it’s not a matter of if but a matter of when the Americans will be allowed to join us again. Having been starved from online poker for a year and a half now and counting, I’m pretty sure there will be a fair share of hungry gamblers looking to splash some money around when regulation passes, whilst the publicity of it all certainly can’t do any harm either.

Obviously ways to combat the competitiveness of the games is to table select and fit your schedule around to play in the most profitable games. This is fine if you’re just playing poker on the side to make an extra buck or two. If you’re playing professionally though you’ll be playing with regs day in day out and will have to accept that your skill edge may be very negligible in some games which will in turn increase variance/the amount of money you’re swinging. This can obviously be made easier by having a good mentality and being realistic and disciplined – but I’ll leave discussions for the mental aspect in poker for a future post!

Anyway, let the following two hands act as a swift reminder that there is still money left yet to be made in poker J. I will refer to the villain in each hand as “champion” because well, it’s what they are. Each "champion" is a different player from a different game.

Hand one

Hand played on Pokerstars

Seat 1: Player 2 ( $1500.00 USD )

Seat 2: Player 3( $1500.00 USD )

Seat 3: MikeyMcD45 ( $1500.00 USD )

Seat 4: Champion ( $1500.00 USD )

Seat 5: Player 4 ( $1500.00 USD )

Seat 6: Player 5 ( $1500.00 USD )

Player 3 posts small blind [$10.00 USD].

MikeyMcD45 posts big blind [$20.00 USD].

** Dealing down cards **

Dealt to MikeyMcD45 [  9s Qh ]

Champion calls [$20.00 USD]

Player 4 calls [$20.00 USD]

Player 5 folds

Player 2 folds

Player 3 calls [$10.00 USD]

MikeyMcD45 checks

** Dealing Flop ** [ Jh, Qc, 2h ]

Player 3 checks

MikeyMcD45 bets [$67.00 USD]

Champion calls [$67.00 USD]

Player 4 calls [$67.00 USD]

Player 3 calls [$67.00 USD]

** Dealing Turn ** [ Td ]

Player 3 checks

MikeyMcD45 checks

Champion bets [$20.00 USD]

Player 4 calls [$20.00 USD]

Player 3 calls [$20.00 USD]

MikeyMcD45 calls [$20.00 USD]

** Dealing River ** [ 8d ]

Player 3 checks

MikeyMcD45 bets [$282.00 USD]

Champion calls [$282.00 USD]

Player 4 folds

Player 3 folds

MikeyMcD45 shows [9s, Qh ]

MikeyMcD45 wins $992.00 USD from main pot

Champion shows [3d, 6d ] 

Hand two

Hand played on Pokerstars

Seat 1: Player 2 ( $1650.00 USD )

Seat 2: Player 3 ( $1490.00 USD )

Seat 3: Villain 1 ( $1360.00 USD )

Seat 4: Player 4 ( $1500.00 USD )

Seat 5: MikeyMcD45 ( $1500.00 USD )

Seat 6: Champion ( $1500.00 USD )

Villain 1 posts small blind [$10.00 USD].

Player 4 posts big blind [$20.00 USD].

** Dealing down cards **

Dealt to MikeyMcD45 [  Ks Kh ]

MikeyMcD45 raises [$60.00 USD]

Champion calls [$60.00 USD]

Player 2 folds

Player 3 folds

Villain 1 raises [$90.00 USD]

Player 4 folds

MikeyMcD45 raises [$340.00 USD]

Champion calls [$340.00 USD]

Villain 1 raises [$1260.00 USD]

MikeyMcD45 raises [$1100.00 USD]

Champion calls [$1100.00 USD]

** Dealing Flop ** [ Kd, Ad, 2d ]

** Dealing Turn ** [ 5d ]

** Dealing River ** [ 6c ]

MikeyMcD45 shows [Ks, Kh ]

Champion shows [4c, 5c ]

MikeyMcD45 wins $280.00 USD from main pot

Villain 1 shows [As, Kc ]

MikeyMcD45 wins $4100.00 USD from main pot

So I know what you’re thinking…Did I read that right? And the answer is yes…yes you did. In the first hand champion called us down with 6 high when we’ve represented such strength and he can’t beat anything. Infact, that’s wrong, he can beat precisely 3-4, 3-5 and 4-5 high – maybe he had a read and went for the hero call even though we’d show up with these hands 0% of the time? Not this time son, but good luck in future!

In the second hand, we have our champion flatting our 3x UTG raise in the H-J. We then get 3bet and against an unknown have a pretty easy 4bet, but champion wants to stick around so elects to flat-call. Villain 1 then sticks it in, and I’m not going anywhere with KK against an unknown, and champion decides he wants to play too. Motherfucker!!!! champion has to have AA – no way he’d call his stack off early on with 2 players all-in before him, bastard, I’m so unlucky!!!! No. Champion has 4-5 suited – you did read that right. I suppose it was suited after all, should we let him off the hook?

I thought I’d finish this update by posting a couple of links I recently came across.

Game Theory 

I stumbled across this on Daleroxxu’s blog. I think it’s pretty cringe and the dialogue/acting sucks and they’re trying to be overly clever by using terms like “triple barrel bluff jam” when they could have just said “triple barrelled” whilst the ending is somewhat bizarre and dramatic. The guy’s reasoning in the hand they show besides being shit is full of flaws and contradictions, although it seems to be generating a good like to dislike ratio on the Tube. What do you think?

Finally, here's an interesting article I recently stumbled across:

New study suggests poker is a game of skill

Wow, what's that, another study suggesting poker is a game of skill?

"Players who are characterized by a tight and aggressive playing style generally perform better than their loose and passive opponents. Performance is also related to the number of hands that subjects have played over the previous period: more frequent or experienced players achieve better results."

Nothing we didn't know already, but it's always nice to see new evidence racking up to satisfy the sceptics.

That's pretty much it for now. Time to hunt down some tables!

MikeyMcD45

Pokes updates, Full Tilt reborn, and volume challenge!

Thought I’d drop in with an update since it’s been a while…

Well, around 1 and a half months in and it’s already been interesting. Things were off to an amusing start on the first day when I accidentally registered in a $500 buy-in game misjudging it for a $100 game from my lobby display messing up. Unfortunately I bubbled in a coin flip scenario! Mehhhhhhhh….At least it wasn’t any higher! A $1k or $2k game would have been devastating.

First month review

All in all though, in spite of my volume sucking I managed decent profits relative to the hours/games I put in. I only managed slightly less than half of the hours and games I had set boasting an ROI of 10.9% at an average stake of around $60 and managing a profit of around $3200 before bonus/rakeback. With such a short sample, these numbers are pretty meaningless in a game with so much short term variance. I did put in way more time than anticipated working on my game off the tables (hard to say how much, maybe somewhere between 10 and 20 hours each week), and whilst it won’t help achieve short term volume goals it should help boost my ROI and expectation in the long run. I did at least meet my exercise goals and put in around 194 miles on the bike for the month so at least that was something.

Remember remember 6^th of November  

The start of last month also brought great news that Pokerstars had purchased Full tilt’s assets with intentions of making full pay-outs to ex-players. It has now been confirmed non-US players will be paid out in full on November 6^th. As a former full tilt player, I had my most profitable month in poker at the time right before it shut down last June and had around a $4k bankroll on there. I had more or less accepted I wouldn’t be seeing this money again when a deal broke through around four or five months ago. However, rumours then surfaced that Pokerstars were in the hunt to buy over and since they seemed like the last hope, it was good news they were able to strike a deal. Whilst this is great for my money and will be an excellent boost to my current bankroll, it’s hard to say how good it will be for online poker in the long run. Pokerstars running the two biggest sites in the industry means a complete monopoly giving them the ability to increase rake/worsen bonuses if they so choose so only time will tell what happens. Hopefully it’s not long before the Americans are allowed back on which would likely create a second poker boom and increase the number of profitable games running.

Volume challenge

Off the table work is essential and there’s always stuff you can do to improve, but the idea is your time becomes focused more towards playing once you have a lot of experience under your belt and have spent plenty of time off the tables. With that in mind, I’ve decided to challenge myself to reach 200k VPPs before the year is up, which means at my current pace (around 76k) I’ll have to grind my ass off and average around 9k per week. For some, this would be a walk in the park but it will be a challenge for me, especially since I’ve only managed 76k for the entire year to this point which really does suck although not really a surprise given I’ve only grinded part-time until now. The reward for reaching 200k pays $2.6k alone along with multiple FPP bonus prizes along the way, so should be a profitable proposition unless I lose everything at the tables which is unlikely but on a horrid run could happen. The other potential downside is I’ll likely have to play in some games that are –EV before rakeback or a breakeven proposition which will reduce my ROI and increase variance/stress levels. If I start losing a lot I’ll just need to make sure I’m exercising good bankroll management and playing within my limits so I’m not affected as much, with perhaps adding in extra lower stakes tables to account for that and make up VPPs. My plan will be to hit supernova before or on October 1^st and unless I do so I’ll be making life difficult for myself in the remaining months and the challenge may not have much merit.

That more or less wraps up everything for now, I’ll be updating in the next day or two with another hand analysis, so until then …Peace out