Getting it All-In Pre-Flop in Full Ring Play

Posted by icemonkey9 on Jul 30, 2009 in 100nl | 1 comment

As the month wraps up and I've passed the 10k mark for my new nitty Full Ring experiment, I was faced with a crap-hole trifecta today at the tables during a single session.  I usually play 7 tables of Full Ring play and get in about 450-500 hands per hour.  So during this single session this "trifecta" consisted of KK, QQ and JJ all running into AA pre-flop - in that order!

It was really crazy to have that happen but I was able to make the reads and really minimize the damage.  I was lucky that one guy actually showed the AA to make me feel better, the other guy I **KNOW** had AA and the third time I shoved into the shortstacker (so minimal loss).  It got me thinking about the last 10k hands and hands I've had (and run into) during an all-in pre-flop scenario at Full Ring play.  The rule of thumb is that AKs is the absolute bare minimum and usually isn't even good enough because most everybody won't even get in QQ pre-flop.  Welcome to the new world of nitty 100nl ($0.50-$1 blinds)!  I did a filter in HEM, and here's what it came up with for me ...

- JJ vs AA (shortstacker)
- AKs vs AA (shortstacker)
- KK vs AKs
- AKs vs ATo (shortstacker)
- QQ vs TT (shortstacker)
- AA vs KK
- AK vs QQ vs ATs (2 shortstackers)
- AQo vs A5o (shortstacker)
- QQ vs AA (shortstacker)

Out of the 9 times I've been in an "all in" scenario, a whopping 7 were against shortstackers.  Interesting to look at that and wonder what I'm doing right or wrong.  It's possible I'm laying down hands like QQ or even KK too often (well KK just once this month, and I'll explain why below).  Chances are though I've been making good reads thanks to the HUD and having looked through other villains it looks like I'm on the right track when playing against a fellow deep stacked opponent.

There was a hand, which happened today, where I laid down KK pre-flop.  I can't remember the last time I did that, if ever - of course that'd be a mortal sin in my normal 6max play.  This time around though let's look at the action and villain. 

- I have KK UTG and make it $4 to go.
- UTG+1, a 14/9/2 nit with 3% 3bet stat (note that it's 1% 3bet in EP) 3bets me to $13.
- I 4bet to $30.
- Villain insta-5bets for $110 more
- I tank. I fold.

Although there is no 5bet stats in HEM, I really didn't think I needed to see it.  I had 5k hands on this guy so he's someone I know pretty well and this was just so far out of the realm of normal behavior for him it wasn't even funny.  Given that his probable range was 1% as HEM said it was ... what on Earth could this guy be doing this with?  QQ? Impossible.  KK?  Very unlikely since I have it too.  AK?  Never ever.  JTo?  LOL, who knows.  AA?  That fits the bill perfectly.

I know a lot of players will blindly shove in KK even if the other player is giving off every possible tell they have AA because they beat all the bluffs, are a big favorite over AK (the unlikely possibility) and will suck out 20% of the time against AA.  But in the end, it's still a woefully losing proposition against THIS type of player I faced in the hand.  That's the important thing to note.

That's my 2 cents on the issue.  I'm hoping not to have a big pocket pair run into AA again anytime soon, I definitely had my fill today!

You Got to Have These Nights Eventually

Posted by icemonkey9 on Jul 28, 2009 in 100nl | 1 comment

First of all I'm on web browser tilt.  For whatever reason after upgrading to Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1 (or whatever it is) everything inside the browser took a giant e-dump and now lots of sites are showing up as not existing and it's SUPER annoying to have to hit the refresh button two or three times in order to get it to load (if it does at all).  I recently upgraded IE to its new 8.0 (or whatever) version and it looks solid enough and plenty fast.  Looks like I will just use this one for the time being until Mozilla gets their act together ... but the whole thing is just upsetting even though nothing has really changed (I'm just browsing web pages!).

I had a real interesting day at the tables.  The first two sessions I had were "lost a big hand early then made an epic comeback" type of sessions which were fun and had me feeling great.  The last session was just plain weird.  I played about 600 hands in a little over an hour and had to review things to make sure what I thought was happening really happened.  What "happened" was that in 6 hands out of those 600 I got to the river making a value bet only to see it face a sickening raise.  It's just one of the worst feelings in poker to see your river value bet raised.  You're just almost never good and it takes some sick hand reading ability to sniff out the rare bluffs.  Fortunately my radar was on and I'm pretty sure I made some good laydowns and I did make 1 good call but in the end it was only a -1.5 buyin session so nothing huge and I think I was actually up like $20 or whatever on the day, so definitely not complaining after such a weird session like that.

Another really "smart" thing I did was play the Midnight Madness $11 tournament tonight ... wow that was dumb too because nothing is less productive for me than playing in a multi-table tournaments.  I don't run particularly well in them, at least, I don't play enough of them to justify dabbling in them so I can make my expected ROI.  Anyways in this one I actually came out with a great lead and a top 100 stack out of the starting 2,300-ish players.  Then with a 7k stack and blinds at 80-160 it all fell apart.  Someone with 2,500-ish shoved into me and I got AA.  He shows 22.  You guessed it, AA<22 AIPF, so I see my stack roughly cut in half.  Literally next hand UTG I have AQ and I made a raise, 2 callers and the flop is QT6 rainbow so I go ahead and shove and get called by 66.  And that was that ... lol, gotta love tournaments!

Anyways so I have my mental razor working to delete those entries from the memory banks and actually am happy I'm not upset in the least bit, just kind of smirking at hands like the KK<K9s in the 3bet pot at 100nl.  Just weird stuff went on today, so I can just forget about it.  These kind of days/sessions will occur and make the rest of the winning ones just that much sweeter.

Poker-wise that's about it.  I'm hoping to put in a good amount of hands in at 100nl Full Ring before the end of the month and look at my nit-ville approach and see some decent indicators of success.  At the 2p2 forums it seems like 4 or 5 regulars from 200nl are dropping down but I don't think I've spotted them just yet, but I don't know their screennames so who knows.  I hear so many conflicted reports that 200nl is  reg-infested and tough ... while others say the regs are bad and 200nl is actually easier than 100nl.  Who knows, right!?  All I can do is just keep my head in the game I am playing and take 100nl literally one hand at a time.

Random Thoughts For Now…

Posted by icemonkey9 on Jul 24, 2009 in General | 2 comments

Usually I have some great update or information and topic to share and rant about, but as you can tell this month, I've been a pretty mellow fellow. I think the blog's entries are dwindling in number due to the fact that:

• I am tilting less thanks to a new focus in life and poker and don't need to "rant it out" on here
• I don't want to post results and +/- here anymore, because that's really none of anyone's business but mine
• I don't want people hunting me down for information about my game ... that's why I've kept my SN and the site I play on secret (shock - NOT icemonkey9 on Pokerstars exclusively!!!)
• Just been tied up with playing, forum drama and real life

Anyways, that's what's been up with me. I got an interesting comment from a new reader here about my last post. It seems this person wanted to see an insight into what makes a poker player tick ... here's one of his comments so I'll just respond to that ...

i really don't know you or your friends so it's hard to tell if you actually have any activities non-poker related

Obviously, this person (who incidentally didn't leave a return email address so I could respond directly) kindly says he doesn't know if me or my friends have any non-poker activities, but really seems to make a judgment that we don't do anything but log in, play poker and take money and gamble (you can read the entire comment in the previous post) and do nothing else with our lives. Frankly, that's a load of "it" if you know what I mean ... this is clearly a poker blog and if I started writing about religion, cooking, dancing, what Smurf is the hottest or about television shows a lot of you would get real bored quick. It's a blog specific to a subject, and that's why people visit it.

So, very briefly, here's a bunch of things I am into that don't involve poker:

• I teach a children's class once a week on weekends teaching "moral values" to under-privileged youth that are universal in wholesomeness.  Last week the lesson was "music" and how music is important to people.  We've also had classes about justice, truthfulness and other human virtues.  It's my way of giving back to the community and the class is aimed at a general message of doing good no matter what your religion/race/origin/whatever.
• I regularly donate platelets at the Red Cross.
• I spend a lot of time with family, and most specifically my wife.
• I'm a console football junkie (Madden)
• I play several organized adult league sports, specifically ice hockey and baseball

Anyways that's just a taste of my life.  Poker's not on that list because you know it's already on the list, because if it wasn't this blog wouldn't exist and wouldn't have a theme, it would just be the Me-Blog which would be super boring for the majority of the internet.

Writing Articles...

If you didn't catch them, I recently interviewed 2005 World Series of Poker Main Event winner Joe Hachem at Poker News Daily.  In addition I interviewed friend Fredrick Paulsson about his WSOP ME and Vegas experience and both are fantastic reads that I highly suggest all poker fans take some time to read.

Software ...

I am real glad the folks at Tilt Buster have come back with their new editions to Full Tilt mods.  I like the Full Tilt software but absolutely hate the artwork done for the tables, but these guys really know what they are doing.  Well worth the $20 imo...

Unfortunately a lot of software specific to Full Tilt hasn't been working right ... however I know people are working around the clock to get it to work with the new client.  I've had to keep up with this for my assignments for various websites ...

OH!  Totally forgot to mention that I ordered the upgrade edition of Windows 7 a few weeks ago.  The deal was that it was half-price if you pre-ordered before July 22nd, so I went ahead and took advantage of the offer.  Everyone (well, that means the handful of people I've talked to and a few tech blogs I've read) have given Windows 7 a big thumbs up after giving a big middle finger to Vista.  Apparently the new programming team got the OS right this time, so I am gonna try it out (after installing it first on my wife's laptop!!).

What's Going On with RESULTS!?!?!

This has to be the most common question asked because I think it's been like 2 months since I've posted results here.  Like I said before, I don't want to post about results or money anymore. It's nobody's business how much I win or lose in a month, but some have interpreted this as me losing and going bust.  So, I'm forced to assure people, I am definitely NOT losing this month and doing just  fine at the cash game tables playing 100nl ($0.50-$1 No Limit Texas Hold'em), thank you very much

Cash Game Casualties

Posted by icemonkey9 on Jul 21, 2009 in General | 2 comments

Today sucked in terms of announcements and realizations from some of my poker friends. Although I am not shocked to hear the news, hearing it in its finality really sucked today. Three friends of mine that grind online poker games quit ... and maybe for good. The first was BW07507 who was, at one point, 100nl's top winner at PokerStars for a solid month and was in the top 10 for a good chunk of the start of 2009. Unfortunately, BW's tilt problems and high variance LAG style simply became overwhelming and it greatly effected the personal relationships in his life. After what he said was over 100k+ hands of break-even and losing poker, he cashed out and left just enough to dabble in 25nl for fun.

Another person hanging 'em up is King Curtis, who is genuinely one of the good guys online. He doesn't play high stakes at all, but has done really well considering his small bankroll grinding out tournaments and Sit & Gos at various poker sites. His claim to fame was taking down a tournament for over $10,000 which is just an enormous score. Curtis tried to move over to cash game poker for a while and was doing okay at 25nl as he got his feet wet. Due to his family situation and life, Curtis entered into the Air Force, which I find noble and fantastic for him (coming from an Air Force family myself!). His creativity and intelligence will be appreciated in this branch of the military. He leaves any day now for Basic Training and will be 100% out of touch until October 1st, and then from there most of his time will be dedicated to his new job and/or family.

Finally, I found out another player that plays HU went busto, and I'll not mention his name because I am not sure if he wants me to announce it publicly. He's a good guy that I've occasionally butted heads with but overall think is a funny and nice guy. Of the three, I think he has the best chance to bounce back quickest, although if he gets his head straight on, BW could come back "best" if given the opportunity. Anyways, I was real sad to hear this 3rd guy went bust, but he admitted to play HU severely under-rolled, so that's the risk he took.

It's just the risk that we run playing online poker ... certainly playing a LAG type of game induces tilt due to the swings the game will take you through, and life stuff happens and can easily take you away from the game. Since I started playing recreationally online about 1.5 years ago I've known these guys so seeing them leave the game is a new experience. I've now outlived some players. Will they be back? I wouldn't be surprised at all to see it by the end of the year, and certainly hope that's the case.

In terms of other things going on I've been grinding out full ring with a new mindset and strategy and so far so good but it's been way too short a range of hands to draw any conclusions, so I'll be sure to check in with results type of stuff (since everyone craves that info) by the end of the month.

Dreaming About Poker, Full Tilt Poker Software, Phil Ivey and More

Posted by icemonkey9 on Jul 16, 2009 in General | 1 comment

One thing I omitted from my last post about the whole Vegas experience was that I had a dream about poker my last night in Vegas. This new conscious mentality of putting tough hands out of mind and memory might be highly effective, but I am not sure it works for my sub-conscious. The night that I took that set under set loss I went to bed later that night, and re-lived the hand all over again in my dreams. I woke up when I saw my opponent had the TT for the bigger set and had a ache in my heart which was racing. It's funny now to think about but I remember that night thinking what a terrible nightmare! So later that same night I went back to sleep and had a conversation with Mike Matusow about Full Tilt Poker and how he was helping develop an iPhone application so we could play real money poker from our iPhones. I was very excited to hear the news in my dream, and when I woke up in the morning actually looked it up at the iTunes App Store (perhaps I had a vision of the future?!) but alas, no Full Tilt Poker application exists.

Speaking of Full Tilt Poker, I've been playing there recently and couldn't have picked a better time to re-establish my game there. They recently released a completely new edition of their software (backend really, everything looks the same to me) which rendered everything from AHK scripts to graphical mods completely useless. In addition some bugs have cropped up, including one "patch" they released which caused the dealer button to appear in the wrong spot during a hand! This actually happened to me while I was in a hand, thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, and upon reading about it at the 2p2 forums promptly emailed FTP Support for a refund of that hand (I lost $2.50). I have yet to hear back. The good news is that software is coming in the form of Poker Shortcuts and Table Ninja Full Tilt both of which are collections of shortcuts and assistants to help players multi-table. In addition I just checked and saw that new editions of some real slick table and card mods for FTP are up over at TiltBuster.com.

In terms of my game, I'm 6-8 tabling Full Ring because I haven't really played online poker in any sort of regular fashion for 3 weeks. That's actually a long time off and I think easing into things rather than jumping into 100nl 6max is better for my mindstate.

Last night while following the eventual November Nine via the updates from Andrew Feldman at ESPN, I got the bug to play in some tournaments, so I registered in a $3 KO, a $5 PLO, a $5 STT SnG and a 5 FTP Points Freeroll. After 2 hours of play between the four tournaments, I ended up -$0.96 lol! I had fun, and thanks to Combu for hanging out. I think me and the rest of the poker universe was rooting for Phil Ivey to make that November Nine, which he did, which is absolutely awesome.

Finally, that wraps up the blog entry ... but not before we get back to our first topic - dreams! Last night I had another poker dream, but this time it was me at the Main Event and I was able to shortstack my way into the November Nine! I was not at the Rio but for some reason at Commerce (here in Los Angeles) and was absolutely ecstatic that I made $1.1 million just by making the final table and kept looking around for someone to bring me my check. I remember calling my wife and mom in my dream, both of whom were really happy for me. The worst part about that dream was waking up!