Poker Blog – icemonkey9 on PokerStars

Wow … I really had one big goal and two small goals for October and speaking honestly I didn’t think I would accomplish any of them. The good news is that I did accomplish the biggest one of them all!

1. Watch a minimum of 4 Stox videos per week. 2. Continue to use FPPs for the 210fpp satty for rakeback. 3. OMG – 20k hands.

Goal 1: FAILED. Well I did not watch 4 Stox videos per week unfortunately. A lot of what I found for fullring play was for 100nl and above, which doesn’t quite help me yet.

Goal 2: PASSED. I cashed in no less than 14 of the 210fpp sattys! That means I made $154 in rakeback this month! Woo hoo! Considering that number used to be a big fat zero you can see why I am happy. I still have 3k of FPPs in the bank and I am playing in one right now (will count it for November) and now that I am goldstar I can definitely count on this amount going up in November.

Goal 3: OMG PASSED. It didn’t help that the first 8k hands of the month were breakeven but the beats I was taking once getting to 50nl were ridiculous. But that was part of the month and part of the learning curve and I am glad I did not get discouraged and posted an all time high of hands played in a month by shattering the old 13.7k record.

So How Did I End Up?

Well, I ended up way UP for the month obviously and when you add the cash game winnings + rakeback I obviously shattered my record for profit in a month (albeit nothing to get too excited about, I am only playing 50nl).

So for the month:

Cash Game Winnings: $721
Rakeback: $154
CardsChat Award: $25

Total Profit for October 2008: +$900

And it really was a tale of two periods for the month. The first 7800ish hands were break even, and the remainder I ran very well.

Profitability of bb/100 (big bets aka ptbb/100):

Entire Month:

3.63ptbb/100 is a pretty solid number. I’m not crushing the games but it’s decent. For this limit however of 50nl, I think it should be between 4 and 4.5 to consider yourself one of the better players.

Last 12,850 Hands (roughly when the break-even stretch ended to open the month):

Now this is more like it! 5.94ptbb/100 is in the “dominating” category and while I’m not totally destroying and crushing the 50nl limit, running at this over the last 3 weeks has felt tremendous, albeit with some hard work and ability not to let ridiculous beats to cause me to tilt for a prolonged amount of time.

Final Thoughts:

• I have gone from a B- poker player at the beginning of this month and I re-classified myself as a B+ player. Don’t ask me to explain, just accept it.
• Playing this many hands was NOT easy considering I have a job, side activities, a wife, and family to visit in San Diego.
• I was told that TILT was my biggest problem. It is, and always will be and I accept that – because it’s *every* poker player’s biggest problem. I have discovered though, through the course of the month and staying on top of threads on CardsChat, that my TILT problems are not as bad as others. They show me how detrimental a negative poker outlook can have on your life.
• When I first deposited $240 to start out this whole cash game online poker venture, I really wanted to be in certain places in a year. I am glad I really feel like I am finally on track.
• As good as October has been, I plan to put in the same amount of effort and time into November. I hope that profitability continues to be the same but I don’t really have a direct impact on that – just the ability to put in the hands, to study, and play my best.

As October of 2008 finally winds down and I look back at the month I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished. What is unfortunate is a really horrible run I am on since last Sunday. I have no idea why it’s happening, it “just is happening” with really horrible players hitting their cards hard against my monsters and come up best. The donkeys are unfortunately getting rewarded, so hopefully it can be won back by me! For now I’ll just wallow in their bad play and my loss of bankroll.

So … what does this mean? I am still ~300 hands short of my goal for the month so I guess there is more poker to be played but to be honest right now, I’m very much sick of losing for 3 straight days over about 5 sessions.

What was once a very promising month profit-wise has really been soured. Enjoy these hands of doom … I didn’t feel like going back over the last 3k hands so this is just from the last 500 I’ve played …

Good Grief, Really? AS@#((EWFK!?

Our villain in this hand is a 63/26/3 who donk bet a whopping 80% of the time. Wow. I knew I was beat at the river I really did … do you make this laydown? Really tough to do. My original PF read was JJ or QQ.

The Sad Thing is I Played Bad at the River

I knew I was beat at this river bet … do you lay this down … HONESTLY? And again, I know I am beat here at the river but it costs little comparatively to the pot to find out.

Tough Hand

This one was weird … it was a really REALLY loose table PF with lots of raising so I limped in hoping to get in at the right price but of course this was the one time every checked it around. Again I played this wrong trying to play to the way the table had been playing but nobody was biting. Villain hit it on the river, my set loses.

I Knew I Was Beat?

I threw that $4 river bet thinking that if he had the K for the straight he’d raise otherwise he’s calling with a lot of hands I have beat. WHOOPS.

Saturday was my friend Mike’s wedding and that was a lot of fun. I joked with Mike before the ceremony, “So what are you doing after this, because I want to go to Barona and play some NL,” and everyone laughed. Fortunately my friend Marc was down and sure enough after the wedding we ran off and played in a ridiculous $1/2 NL game with a max buyin of $60. I call it the “Push n Pray Special” but we just wanted to catch up on things, hang out, and have fun – mission accomplished! I left +$4 than I came in with which is fine too!

I got in a session on Sunday that off the top of my head was +38 that went well. The weekend crowd is just so horrible. Then last night I was chatting with C9 and BW and they got my juices going so I put in 1 more session and MAN did that go bad. One of the first hands I flop trips and stack off against a dude that limped in with KK and hit a boat on the 9K9 board. Then there was this absolute donkey/superuser that kept showing me the nuts against my big hands. I’d have a straight, he’d have the nut straight … I’d have a flush, he’d have a boat. It was maddening that a 52/0/1 was kicking my ass. I stayed hoping my luck would change but when someone’s on a heater, there’s nothing you can do and I got too tired and frustrated to continue … fortunately I only ended down something like -$75 for the session so the damage was minimal considering the string of coolers.

So it looks like the 20k milestone is a lock and I have 3k FPPs to blow so I think I’ll playin 5 or 6 more of em by the end of the month and hopefully cash in half. I’ve been mentally bouncing around my month recap because I’ve really grown more this month poker-wise than in all the months before combined … I really truly feel that way, but with some perspective maybe that will change.

Also, a really nice guy “michael” left a comment before that I wanted to answer:

“Do you find the weekends more swings on the weekends than during the week? During the week, I do pretty well but the weekends have such high variance. Weekends are by far when I tilt the most off.”

I don’t get to play much on the weekends but I can definitely say the Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon crowd is nothing short of terrible. I’d almost advocating playing up a level in stakes! But – don’t, because what happened to me last night could happen to you and you just hit that rough patch of coolers and it sucks and you could tilt to an extreme degree. With the higher rate of reward there is some risk, and with that risk comes a greater chance of tilt.

The best advice I can give is to play each hand individually, and only to retain tendancies in play from hand-to-hand and erase results like a whiteboard. You will win against the fish in the long run and never forget that so just keep plugging away and don’t let wins/losses affect your normal gameplan when in a hand (betsizing, raising, folding, etc).

Well I got to play a lot of poker today thanks to nothing happening at my mom’s house here in San Diego, and my nephew being at day care, and my wife being away in Phoenix and all my work related activities already wrapped up for the week.

I was playing well but MAN today was crazy as you would expect on a Friday with the “general fish population” coming out for us sharks to feed on. Unfortunately some of these fish can sometimes choke a shark unintentionally! Anyways I had fun and if you scroll down you’ll notice that I did in fact achieve GOLDSTAR status at PokerStars this month after playing about 18,500 hands at 50nl Full Ring. Acheiving this basically means I’ll receive about 50% more FPPs per month, which I use to enter the 210fpp tournies and sell off the winnings … this month I’ve made over $130 already with maybe a few more wins coming in, so it’ll mean that much more in November.

I think it’s a good possibility now that I can nail that 20k mark for hands played, as I am only 1,500 hands away. I know tomorrow through Tuesday though it’s very doubtful I’ll find the time to play so it might come down to a few last minute late nights on the 29th and 30th!

There really weren’t any “huge hands” to show off but I do remember hitting top two pair with something like AQ and stacking off at the turn against some guy that had Q4 for two pair and he hit a 4 on the river, but he only had like $30 to start with.

So that’s that, this month has gone okay overall, that first ~8k stretch was brutal but I’m glad I battled through it.

I thought about playing more but the idea of going through another rough session just turned me off to poker for the rest of the night. The hands that were being played are some of the stuff that usually get me to tilt, but I shrugged it off and am feeling fine. In part of my ‘therapy’ I thought it would be funny to think “Just how would Phil Hellmuth react to these hands” if it was on ESPN. It was one of those days highlighted by:

• Unavoidable Coolers
• Villains showing up with their absolute top end of their range
• 3bet / 4bet heaven whenever I got into the pot

Ever have one of those days? Yeah, I am sure you have. It definitely has me rethinking about publishing my last post, as most poker players (including myself) are irrationally superstitious. Posting “good news or good results” is a huge no-no in terms of poker-karma. I thought I might get off easy since I was so humble in my last post, but alas (sigh), I was not spared. I did tip over the 17k mark today for hands, and am only 250 vpps away from Gold status. I guess I was “lucky” though, I only dropped less than 2 buyins today.

So without further ado, let me introduce today’s horror stories (just in time for Halloween)…

AA Cooler with a Hellmuth Rant

Inspired by the recent WSOP ME coverage, here’s my Phil Hellmuth like rant:

“Are you kidding me? Do you know at this level of 50nl JOKE poker that when I stack off I’ve got the goods? I can’t believe that even when I have the best hand, outplay my opponent, and make him look silly it’s up to dumb stupid luck for this idiot to get lucky and take me down. It’s so hard being the best player at the table sometimes because your mockery of poker makes me want to jump off a cliff. Enjoy my money for the next 10 minutes buddy, because after that you’ll be broke.”

Hand 2 – Screw You

Hellmuth: “You have got to be kidding me. Here you are sitting with $10 at the 50nl table as some stupid shortstacker and you don’t even know how to properly play this type of situation. Yet here I am playing poker the expert way and you show up with the absolute best hand at the right time, and it holds up for you. Then you take off like some pervert watching a girl taking a shower and giggling all the way while you enjoy the scraps from my table.”

Hand 3 – Why I hate Shortstackers

Another Hellmuth rant: “This is just crap. You frickin’ call me with a pair of eights with a diamonds on that board figuring you’re drawing and you hope to win. Well good read buddy but next time I’m taking home your money, car, watch, and probably your wife too.”

Hand 4 – WTF Was This Guy Doing?

The Hellmuth response: “Okay bud you are so bad at poker you should just cash out now and never play the game. I’m dead serious, you’re not just an idiot, you should check yourself back into kindergarden. You limp call with KK and then bet into me and flat my raise. You must be the worst poker player so far, even after I’ve said all these compliments towards the rest of this motley crew. You not only can’t spell poker, you can’t even spell ESPN.”

Today I was playing well and making money. Take a look at the screenshot below from Holdem Manager…
A very nice clip to be moving at, and basically its been 7+ptbb/100 for the last 10k hands or so, and hopefully I keep playing well and avoid coolers to keep going at this pace, because it sure does feel great.

One thing that is also great is that PokerStars finally released their auto-chip-reloader so I don’t have to constantly push F9 after every hand to get myself up to 100 buyins every hand. That’s been real nice and it’s another example of PokerStars continuing efforts to keep their players happy (this was the “one big thing” that FullTilt Poker had that PokerStars did not).

Today saw some pretty crazy players at the tables. I am not sure if there was some drunken spewover from Game 1 of the World Series but I saw some “weekend fish” at the tables and I was happy to see that. Check this maniac out:

This was an example of me paying attention before play began for me in the big blind. I was watching this guy just bet big and really look like he was bluffy and bad and simply winning pots by pure wreckless and nonsensical agression. In the end he was 81/16 over 20 hands.

Anyways I am now up to 16,816 hands this month which is of course a new record but the goal is 20k and there’s still an outside shot I can make that. With GoldStar status only 375 vpps away that seems like it’s a lock, but we will see.

I played a total of 2.2 hours today 6-tabling 50nl FR and got in 734 hands. I hit a few sets but unfortunately that did not mean positive money in my direction as I hit this lovely one:

Set under set loses … that’ll happen, and I played it right and this is just your standard cooler. There really wasn’t too many interesting spots tonight … nothing worth putting in the HA thread that I don’t already know. I’m getting ever closer to Gold Star status which is going to be awesome because it’ll mean more rakeback (50% more) next month. So far this month I have accumulated well over +$110 so that’s a great thing I’ve got going there.

Other than that not much going on, been real busy with work which is a great feeling, and my wife started her new job and that keeps her really busy too. Tomorrow night I’m playing Rock Band with the cousins and friends, and I’m headed back down to San Diego on Thursday night through the weekend.

Looking at my schedule it’s real dicey to hit 20k hands this month. I think between Wednesday and Friday I can get in another 2k hands … but I really don’t know when I will have another block of time to dedicate to poker, which would leave me around 17k hands for the month.

So after the baseball game tonight (Wow Red Sox force a game 7) the family went to bed and I had my handy MacBook Pro here ready to play some poker. I had used the demo before but today I ‘took the plunge’ and found a good coupon online and bought Parallels, which allows you to put PC software on your Mac and essentially run Windows XP (or Vista) as if it were running in a window like any other program. I also installed HEM (2nd license allowed) and imported this month’s hand histories and then loaded her up and BAM I was playing 4 tables of 50nl.

I feel that I lost the right to play more than 4 tables yesterday after going on tilt and playing when tired and freaking out. That’s just bad on my part but I could already feel about an hour after leaving the computer that my tilt was wearing off. I think recognizing the triggers and thinking about the big picture, and also “releasing the tension” by ranting a bit and then getting some tough love from friends at Cardschat really get me over the hump and back to playing my “A GAME” which is a damn good game at this point in my poker career.

I can’t remember playing on a Saturday night EVER but I am sure it has happened before. Anyways the competition was laughable and at some tables I just knew I had to sit back and wait for a big hand while others I could run over with aggression. The HUD stats just help so much on weird nights where you aren’t playing a table full of 10/7/2 nits like I usually do during the week at the late night hours.

Anyways got in 702 hands, ran very well (~20ptbb/100) (also PTBB/100 means Big Bets/100) for +3 buyins and am feeling good and confident.

Here’s a fun hand … hit a set and had a gross river card fill a flush and a possible straight and saw my opponent just SHOVE on me. He wasn’t particularly good and seemed the bluffy type, and I also figured there was no way this player would take me to valuetown like this at the river. Not an easy call, I went with my gut, and it paid off.

Today was a very horrible day poker wise. You might think, “Wow he lost like 8 buyins!” but no that didn’t happen. In fact I ended the day -18. Not bad at all and when you think about it very small in the grand scheme of things. But I was up to +110 before it all came crashing down. And one thing I can say by playing all these hands I know 100% what causes me to tilt … and I think that’s the first battle in me fighting it.

I know I’m tilting and smart enough to know I can’t play logical poker right now. The tilt *is* affecting my play so I know its time for yet another break … so this does put my 20k hand goal in jeopardy but better that then tilting off my entire month of very modest profit.

Here’s the kind of stuff that gets my blood boiling:

- Hitting Sets or Straights at the flop in multiway pots and having everyone fold it to you. Today I had 6 sets in 1 session only to see 5 of them gain about +$9 collectively. Very frustrating.

- Getting my money in good against a shortstacker, and seeing it blow up in my face. AA < JJ.

- Hitting a set at the flop, stacking off, and seeing your idiot opponent hit a damn ROYAL FLUSH at the river. Good to know I can be on the wrong end of a 1 in 650k opportunity.

Anyways … obviously this is a rant post and I do apologize for it. I stopped when I dipped below breakeven and recognized I am not playing right and thinking right. That’s the first step in tilt control. The next is to just bounce back for next time.

Positives:

1) I went 2/2 in the 210fpps so the irony in all this is that the $22-$18 = +$4 on the day.

2) I am 1k VPPs now away from GOLD STAR status which is cool and will mean more rakeback.

3) I didn’t set fire to my local El Pollo Loco when tilting.

September was a really trying month for me personally. The last week of September saw true pain and suffering to the people I love in my life and really put into perspective how trivial win/losses of online poker really are. I think that’s been my biggest tilt control lesson to date – and also a gut check in terms of time management and priority levels for life even if (*just* for the sake of example) I were to suddenly be given Johnny Chan’s abilities and play 600nl and win it for 154bb/100 and do this for a living.

October brought new hope and new perspective in life, work, and my main hobby (poker!). A month of optimism and hope began. I was able to play about 11,000 hands this month in (I think) 10 days. The first ~7,000 hands honestly were a mix of the following:

• Me learning the ropes at 50nl and proper bet sizes
• Me learning what bets mean in certain spots at 50nl (especially preflop)
• Sick sick beats (confirmed after post-game inspection)
• More sick beats

Stats during this stretch (from Oct 1 to Oct 7th):

• Dates: 10/1/08 to 10/7/08
• Hands: 6,980
• Profit: -$46.35
• Win Rate: -0.66bb/100

The second part of this run, which really encompasses the last 33% of the hands saw me really start to assert myself at 50nl Fullring. Some of the sick beats were gone but I also saw some of the weirdest hands that reduced what should have been an ever better win-rate (2 times losing with a Boat to Quads for example). Here are the stats for the last ~4,500 hands from this month:

• Dates: 10/8/08 to Present Day
• Hands: 4,419
• Profit: +$320.00
• Win Rate: 7.24bb/100

Quite a difference wouldn’t you say? Again I haven’t played any poker since the morning of the 11th (4 days ago) so who knows what this means as a whole. I am not planning too deep a reflection at this point – that’s really to come at the 20k hand mark, so I really should cut this short here.

Anyways, that’s the update and here’s the obligatory graph so far this month…