Poker Blog – icemonkey9 on PokerStars

Hi all, so after downloading a few videos from people on the CardsChat.com website, I decided to make my own. First, I have to give some mad props to a great program I’ve discovered called Camtasia Studio 5 – it’s the single best PC screen capture (video) utility I’ve ever used. It has all the bells and whistles, is extremely easy to use, and boasts the Apple H.264 codec so you can export QuickTime movies that look great and are small on file size!

I’ve created a tutorial on how to compress videos captured with the program, and anyone can download the tutorial video. Check it out here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DQ4A3OJS

Enjoy!

Man, talk about going from “Devastating” to “Devastated” in about 48 hours. I went to Melissa’s poker/Oscar party last night in LA and walked into a land mine. Actually, what it felt like was being led to the firing squad, only I’m not the one blindfolded, it’s the entire firing squad that is. The game was VERY slow, filled with noobs, and I think every single hand went to a showdown. It was a ridiculous game, one that I shouldn’t have put $40 on, but whatever. I played well, I just took some hard core bad beats, including:

A10 vs 10 9. I’m a 71-27% favorite. I lose.
10 9 for a made flush at the flop vs Q J for top pair. I’m a 97-2% favorite. I lose (runner-runner for a boat)
KQs vs 3 9 off. I’m a 70-30% favorite. I lose.

The kicker is that I came home and played and a $2 Turbo SNG on PT. I was on the bubble and pushed it to the felt with 10 10 after the SB clearly was trying to steal my BB. He has to call my all in because of pot odds. What happened?

10 10 vs 84 = He hits trips 8s on the flop, and a full house on the river. I was a 86 to 14% favorite on that one.

It made me wonder if either “luck” or “chance” exists … it’s one or the other right? Since I took statistics in college, I believe in chance and playing odds … but yesterday made me think the moon was in some odd orbit or some planet was misaligned with me, for me to take 4 such bad beats all in a row. Statically speaking I should have only lost 1 of them. Oh well, maybe I’m getting those out of the way and will go on a nice run now. One can ONLY hope.

If I keep this up, nobody is going to want to come to my monthly super home games. We play a $20 buy in, No Limit game, with blinds at .10/.25 with unlimited rebuys for this cash game. As you might remember last time I bought in for $20 and left with $59.

This time I bought in for $20 and left with $79. I played my cards well, picked the rights spots to call an all in when I thought a player was simply getting impatient (worked twice), and didn’t over play AK or AQ. All in all it was a lot of fun, and fortunately, everyone that came (we had 9) had a good time too.

Today its off to another home game, my good friend Melissa is hosting a Poker/Oscars party which promises to be a lot of fun. We’re starting off with a $20 tournament (she said we might have 10 to 12 players), and afterwards we’ll jump into a cash game. FUN!

So I’ve decided to take part in the public beta (free & open to all) of PokerTracker v3. It’s a powerful data tool that tracks all your hands and sorts and mines the data for you to analyze not just opponents, but most importantly, your own game.

After 4 tabling it up the past two days (yay I know I am getting crazy), I have seen a couple of holes in my game. My VP$IP was really solid, as well was my Aggression factor, but my PFR (preflop raise) wasn’t high enough, and I adjusted my play accordingly.

The results have been great. Yesterday and today I have seen a steady 10 to 13% ROI on my play, at the microstakes tables of .05/.10, which is a notch below where I regularly play. I’m playing there because I am not used to 4-tabling it up and not used to actually analyzing my play in such depth.

The program offers some amazing features, including 2 that I am absolutely in love with. The first is the hand replay, which lets you replay the hand in a mock video-replay mode, and the second is the automatic graphs that track your progress. It all puts my sad-sack Excel spreadsheet to shame.

I’ll definitely be purchasing the program once it’s out of beta, or perhaps I can swing a free copy from the developers in return for an in-depth review at our new poker site once it launches. Anyways, any smart poker player should invest in this program … but I almost DON’T want to endorse it to keep the rest of the rounders online DUMB

So I was visiting my sister in Washington State, and from the CC (CardsChat.com) group I was suggested to play at the Muckleshoot Casino, apparently the biggest poker room in the state. It worked out wonderfully as my wife and sister wanted to go to something called the “super mall” which was enough for me to beg them to drop me off to play some cards while they shopped till they dropped.

They don’t have No Limit in Washington – it’s illegal. Stupid. They have a game called “spread limit” where the maximum bet is $500. The blinds were $3-5 and the buyin was $500. Too much for my bankroll! They had 4-8 limit and were waiting on signups for 3-6, but given my distaste for limit poker, I played in the $65 no limit tournament (apparently legal), and was given $8k in starting chips. I was thinking – awesome, plenty of chips to actually play some poker! But I was woefully wrong on two accounts:

First: The blind structure was really dumb.
25-50
50-100
100-200
200-400 (25 ante)
400-800 (25)
750-1500 (50)
1500-3000 (100)

With 15 minute blinds, clearly by the 45 minute mark there were plenty of shortstacks, and after 1 hour it just got ridiculous for every stack in the tournament. So the deep stacks were nullified.

Second: I couldn’t get two cards to save my life (seriously).

I know a lot of players bi&ch about not getting cards … well I was keeping track. I played for 1.5 hours and never saw a single pocket pair. The highest hand I got was A9 suited ( a hand I won ), and saw KQ off twice. So I was playing “extremely creatively” to save my life but in the end, if you don’t get some cards, you really can’t do too much without a couple of lucky double ups at the end to extend the visit, and hopefully start seeing some cards to play with.

Overall:

There was one hand I was beating myself up with, but after thinking about the hand, I think I played it right. I had Q9 off and the flop came Q T 4 with two spades. I bet the pot as the BB and got two callers right away. I figured I’m outkicked or they might be drawing. Sure enough, the spade turns, I bet it anyways for about 1/2 the pot. Yikes – two smooth callers. I’m beat. Checked it around, and sure enough one idiot was playing T2 off for midpair, but the other guy had AJ spades for the nut flush.

The tournament was okay, the people playing were awesome and were really nice to talk to between hands and at the break. In retrospect I should have asked about the blind structure, but I didn’t want to sound like a dork so I just bought in. Maybe I would have had MUCH better luck at the 3-6 limit game since it looked so soft once I became a railbird.

So it looks like the dialog between Mike and myself has led to some real planning. This has motivated Mike to work in his spare time on the master poker cool kick ass website I have in my head, and I think it’d be cool enough to where people wouldn’t mind spending a few bucks a month belonging as a member. I’ve got a really great design almost down, so we’re not talking about 99.9% of the poker websites out there done by obvious first timers armed with Front Page.

Well, once again I crash and burn at the cash games, only to find myself winning money at the Sit n Gos. I spent a good hour at 2 Full Tilt .10/.25 NL tables, only to leave down $4. So I licked my wounds, and headed to the UB poker room and played in a 10 handed $5.50 NL SnG.

Early on I score KK, and the UTG raised 2.5x the BB. I raised the minimum amount, hoping to induce a huge raise or an all in. Two players after me, he goes all in, it’s folded to me. Well, if he has aces, fine. Nope – he turns over (are you F’ing kidding me?!) 77, and my KK hits trips at the river for the win and the quick double up.

I’m pooping along fine, unable to really wield the big stack properly due to the wild nature of the table. Finally I play a hand, hit top-top at the flop, make a big bet, and get 1 caller. The board shows two hearts and two clubs, (I have neither), but I still have my top pair top kicker. I bet huge again, hoping for a fold because the odds just are 3-1 for someone drawing to the flush. He calls. Weird. River is a heart. I check, he bets a small amount, I call, and low and behold he hit the heart flush. Back down to about 1800 (start stack was 1500) so it didn’t kill me.

I fought my way up and down until the final 4 where I was the short stack, and the session dragged from there. I got the big stack to make some seriously horrible all-in calls (my A5 vs his 57) and doubled up enough to get down to the final three and in the money. From there the big stack simply gave his money away, and I rode it out to a nice 2nd place finish for a $15 prize.

So, following my 47.1% “In the Money” percentage from last month, I’m now at 100% (out of 1 lol).

I am trying to start a business poker mixer at my office once a month in hopes of establishing camaraderie with existing, new, and potential clients. It feels like poker is the new golf, but better, because you can host 18 people without missing a beat, while in golf you can really only give 3 or 4 people at a time your attention.

The results for the first event were pretty good, the turn-out itself was slightly below what I was expecting, but I am sure the last minute nature of the invitations were the result. I think I received about 20 “next time for certain” responses, which is great!

Talking strictly poker, I was cleaning up the joint. Usually for “home” games we strictly play it SnG style with a 50-30-20 percent payout if we have 8 or more. This time, I wanted to change things up and allow people to rebuy and buy in whenever they showed up, so we played a cash ring game.

Using Mike’s handy dandy chip distribution tool (http://www.socalmike.com/test.php) it was very easy for me using my chips to distribute for the $20 buyin. We set the blinds at .10/.25 and got a good 3.5 hours of poker in.

How did I do? Wow was I on fire. I think my play has dramatically improved, and on top of that, I really saw some decent hands post-flop. I think that’s a result of me opening up my game to a looser strategy, not being afraid to bluff in spots I’m unaccustomed, and really knowing how to maximize my hands when I have the hand won.

For my $20 buyin, I left the table with an amazing $70! A $50 profit is pretty amazing considering my buyin, so from a poker perspective, I had a great night. Hopefully future nights yield similar results!!

Alright, I know its 8 days late. I’ve been putting off the old blog, but I refuse to give it up!

So here’s a quick breakdown of January : I Lost. Sucks!

Overall : -$0.45

I know! I lost .45 cents. Unreal. What happened was on the last day of the month I went on a sh*t streak and blew my winnings for the month. Let’s break it down by game type.

SnG Profit: $13.03
Tournament Profit: – $ 8.15
Cash Game Profit: – $ 5.33

So it looks like I’m a very proficient SnG player, while I’m not at tournaments and cash games. My “In the Money” percentage for SnGs is a whopping 46.2%! My ITM % for tournaments is at 20%. In the cash game I had 20 out of 26 sessions end in positive gains, but obviously, the losses of those 6 losing sessions greatly outweighed my winning ones.

It’s just the first month of tracking, so we’ll see how things end up, but a 45 cent loss isn’t anything to hang your head over, so I feel fine about it all.