Dublin up

I popped over to Dublin at the weekend to play in the BoylePoker IPO. I nearly backed out with a bad cold, but glad I made the trip. The $250 NLHE main event was good fun, despite not cashing, and was another marker by which I could measure how much my live game has come on. I felt like I played pretty well for the first few levels but never got the right spots to chip up and make a deep run. Ah well, that’s how some tourneys go.

Then I tried my luck in my first ever live PLO tourney. The 165 euro buy-in was probably too big to enter for a first tournament but I did pretty well and although I made some fundamental errors and probably played too tight it was a learning experience and a fun one too. Will definitely have to play more soon. I may even play a bit more online.

But what made the weekend worthwhile was meeting up with some fellow On the Railers and just having a great time chatting, drinking and hanging out together. It felt like being on holiday rather than heading out to a poker tournament – and made for a refreshing change from many other festivals I’ve visited recently.

The funny thing about playing live is that I sort of enjoy it when I’m there but I always get the itch to get back online. I feel comfortable in my flat, with hoody on and mug of tea in hand, clicking away furiously across four tables and feeling totally in the zone. I know I have to play more to improve and make some money. I’ve been neglecting the game a bit recently so I’m going to aim to put in some cash hands this week and then have a day of tourneys on Sunday. Hopefully I’ll run good and win big. I feel ready for some success…

Live and let die

I played a live freeroll at the EPT a week ago and was reminded of why I play live poker so infreqently. Down to the final table with one seat up for grabs in a £1,000 tourney, I was doing okay in chips but everyone was getting short-stacked: it was shove or fold time.

An older guy to my left had been ribbing Greg Raymer (who for some bizarre reason was also playing) and trying to ‘outplay’ him. He talked between hands, during hands and was generally acting like a complete prick. When he did knock Raymer out by accident – bluff-shoving which actually turned out to be a value bet – I knew it was only going to get worse. In his ridiculous Cockney accident, which made him sound like one of the old gangsters in a Guy Ritchie film, he started talking about how he hates online players and how they constantly keep shoving all-in. I knew he was going to hate me.

True enough, just as I fell below 10BBs I started shipping it in and scooping up the massive blinds. He started having a go at me, saying we should play flops etc etc blah blah and I knew it was going to end with him calling me down light. As it was the final hand was my 88 vs his AT and he naturally flopped the straight. I went away thinking that in his head he probably thought the natural order was restored and the ‘correct’ play was rewarded.

My main problem with live poker is the reason most people choose to play – to make it a social game. But if you hate most people at the table (and let’s face it there’s a lot of rotters in casinos) why would you choose to play outside the house? Maybe a good compromise would be for everyone to be banned from talking…

Sickening

Can’t believe my last blog was about two months ago – where does time go these days?! I’m sure there’s less hours in the day since I turned 30 nearly a year ago.

Anyway, I want to say something about poker – I hate it. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! Just when you think you’ve got it licked it reaches inside you, rips out your heart and smushes it in its grubby mitt.

As I’ve said in previous posts I’ve finally made the conversion to cash games from sit-and-gos and tournaments, and for the most part, I’m enjoying it far more. No more playing for five hours to go out on the bubble, no more all-in fests with razor-thin edges if you’re lucky, and – I was hoping – I would have some lovely profit to show for it.

But I haven’t. It’ 1.54am and I’m writing this because I’ve had a couple of stinking days. I’m starting from scratch with 6-max cash games and trying to beat the 25NL and 50NL games before moving up. Two days ago I was beating the 25NL game for nearly 14BB/100 and now it’s down to less than 2BB/100 after about 7,500 hands. I was nearly sick in my mouth tonight with the amount of horrific outdraws, coolers and general bad beats. I played well at first limiting the losses, but I seemed to become a bit of a station towards the end of the session and that is something I know I’ll have to work on. But I know most of it was down to tilt.

Here’s a great illustration, though, from my last hand of the night. I raise UTG with JTs and get 3-bet from guy to my left; I’m tilting so I call. Flop comes 5-Q-3 and I check, he checks too, which I thought was very odd. One thought popped into my mind straight away though – he’s flopped top set with QQ and is now trying to slowplay. Anyway, turn is a J, so now I have second pair. I check, he bet $5 into pot of around $6.50. Everything in my body told me to fold, so I called. River is a blank, I check, he bets $11.25 and I of course make the call, only for him to – you guessed it- flip up QQ for top set. I laughed, immediately closed down the poker site and decided to write this. I have to get it off my chest and the weight does seem to be lifting as I type.

Anyway, my Hold’em Manager graph is looking very sick, and according to the light green line I’m running nearly $400 below expectation over nearly 14,000 hands. At 25NL and 50NL!!! I think that’s maybe 6-7 BB/100 below EV. SICK!!

Back to the tables tomorrow I guess – would be nice to turn some kind of profit this month, and weekends are full of bad recreational players so hopefully I should get some back.

Exciting times

This is my first post since Vegas and, as predicted, the break was just what I needed. Despite losing money overall, mostly due to getting sucked out on three times in a drunken cash game in the Venetian, I now realise how much my game has come on. I mean, it’s obviously not that great or I’d be playing for a living, but sitting with the tourists and even keen recreational players in Vegas, I could see that my game and thought processes were so far ahead of theirs it’s not true.

So where do I go from here? Well, I can say with hand on heart that for the first time in months I’m genuinely excited by poker again. It feels like a brand new start and a fresh challenge now that I’m dedicating a lot of my time to playing cash. It feels like I’m learning poker all over again – and it’s great! That heady rush as you sit down for a session not knowing what’s in store and hoping for a table full of fish just waiting to donk off their hard-earned money. I can almost smell it.

Part of this great feeling I’m having definitely came with getting the sit-and-go monkey off my back. I had gone through a long and brutal downswing in SNGs and they are such a grind it’s not true. It really wore me down and was definitely stunting my creativity and enjoyment of the game. So I’ve finally quit them, and I’m enjoying playing so much more. For now I’m finding my feet in the .25/.50 cash games online and playing some MTTs and satellites for fun. And that’s what poker feels like at the moment – fun! Long may it last!

Despite the bankroll hit that I took with my SNG problems, at least I got something out of it – I cashed in my 50,000 FPPs on Stars and bought a new 32-inch LCD TV and 24-inch Samsung monitor. And once you’ve multi-tabled on a decent-sized screen there’s no going back…

Leaving…on a jet plane

Well, it’s been a torrid few months online and I can’t say I’m not glad to give it a break. It’s my annual sojourn to Vegas and I can’t wait. I probably won’t be playing that much given that I’ve got a ton of interviews to do for PokerPlayer, but I’ll look to get involved in a couple of deep-stack events (Caesars, Venetian probably) and some cash action in the Rio.

I’m hoping that my old adage of ‘run bad online, run good live’ comes true and that I’m swimming in a bed of cash by the fifth night of my stay. If so, I’ll probably blow it all on drinks and strippers but F it, it’s Vegas right?

I’ll report back on the ups and downs when I get back and commit to a new online cash challenge…

SitNGo Wizard Review

By Mark Stuart, Managing Editor, Poker Player Magazine

There was a time when winning sit-and-gos was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Unfortunately, those days are long gone. Now, across all the major sites, there are thousands of multi-tabling SNG career players each playing hundreds of games a day for big profits! So how can the average recreational player hope to compete with these SNG geniuses. The answer? Level the playing field. The reason these players got so good and are now able to exploit every edge, is through maths, studying the SNG format and, perhaps most importantly, the use of SNG software. And one of the very best examples of this is SitNGo Wizard. I’ve been playing sit-and-gos for about three years now and have made steady profits over more than 5000 games by using these kinds of programs. If you haven’t been privvy to this kind of analytical software yet, it’s time to join the party…

How does it work?
Sit-and-gos are typically very shallow-stacked tournaments with quick blind increases. As such, there comes a point in an SNG when virtually all the players are short-stacked in relation to the blinds. At this point the game becomes a mathematical exercise, where you’ll be either folding, pushing all-in or calling an all-in, trying to make the optimal play based on ICM. If you’re unfamiliar with this term you should do an internet search for ‘ICM’ and read up about it, as it is perhaps the most important aspect of SNG endgame strategy. Briefly it’s a way of calculating whether you should push, fold, or call in any given hand when players are looking to make it into the money and then go on and win the game.
Unfortunately, unless you’ve got a brain the size of Stephen Hawking’s you’re going to have difficulty calculating in precise mathematical detail whether to push or fold in the time it takes for the timebar to count down. That’s where SNG Wiz comes in. After you’ve finished a game you can load your hand history into the software and it will assess whether you made a correct decision, an error, or sometimes whether it’s too close to call. (It’s worth noting that you can’t use the SNG Wiz while you’re playing – that would be cheating – and the software will stop you from using the functions while many of the poker clients are open.)

If you find the inputting of numbers and studying of push and fold tables all a little bit too tedious and geeky, you can also play the quiz, which is a neverending series of questions in a wide variety of situations where you simply have to take a look at the simulated table and say whether it is best to push, fold or call – it’s a nice little feature that should get you thinking about the dynamic of short-stacked play in no time.

How will it make you a better player?
Quite simply, by reviewing your hand histories and getting a definitive answer on which is the optimal play in a given situation you will start to make the right pushes, calls and folds more often, which should see you cashing much more frequently. In no time you’ll be the shark exploiting weaker players who have no idea of correct ICM play at key stages of the sit-and-go.

Any drawbacks?
It can be a bit fiddly inputting hand ranges and creating theoretical situations, but there is a video tutorial on the site for quick set-up and guidance, plus a dedicated forum. If you’re not an analytical person (I’m definitely not) you probably won’t end up studying all the graphs, charts and playing around with the wealth of stats that are available. The cost – $99 – might put some people off, too, but there is a 30-day full working trial, and a three-month money back guarantee offer, if you really don’t like it.

To sum up
In short, whatever stakes you play at and however many SNGs you play, you really need a piece of analytical software like SNG Wiz. It’ll pay for itself after just a handful of games, and you should start playing a near-perfect endgame strategy with just a few minutes study each day. The quiz section alone should improve your short-stack play immeasurably. One thing’s for sure, if you don’t find out where your leaks are and what the optimal play is, you’re giving up a huge edge on the competition. Because you can bet all the dollars in your poker bankroll that the very best SNG players are doing exactly that after most sessions.

Check Out SnG Wizard Now

New challenges

I’ve recently returned from holiday where I had a chance to think about where my poker is faltering. Yes, I’ve been running exceedingly bad, but my passion for the game has withered in recent months and I think I finally worked out why. I was mostly playing sit-and-gos, at which I’m a decent player and I know a lot about the game, but it was killing my creativity and interest for poker. After all, it’s not much fun grinding for hundreds of games a month only to find you’ve been winning $0.10 a game.

I had in fact been on a massive downswing in them and it just kind of made me think, what’s the point? Ok, I can see why you might grind them for a living as a slightly lower risk and easier way of paying the bills, but when I’m working full time and only getting chance to play for, say, 10-20 hours a week, I think it’s about time I used my time better and to (hopefully) win more money.

So I’m finally going on a great big cash adventure. I said I’d do it at the start of the year, but I somehow didn’t follow up on it. Now, I’ll be honest, I’m not the world’s best cash player. Years of tournament play has stunted my ability to play through the streets and some of my decisions I know are very poor at the moment. But it’s going to be a fun ride learning, and hopefully by the end of the year I’ll be a winning player at $.50/$1.

My aim in June is to play maybe 10k hands and see how I’m doing, and if I can get that sweat session off Mr Wealthall I might just have a chance of turning a profit in my first month. When are you off to Vegas, Nick?

Desperately seeking something…

It’s depressing that my very first blog for On The Rail is such a negative one, but I feel like I really need to put my feelings down on paper (well, a screen at least anyway) and get some stuff out of my system. Over the last few months I have become totally disillusioned with poker. The main root of my pain is that I’ve been running bad – so bad it makes me feel sick. This is easily the worst few months of my four years playing poker, and I don’t know how to emerge from the funk.

I’ve tried giving it a break (I barely played during April), mixing up my games between SNGs (my usual fix), MTTs and cash, and even changing poker sites (from my beloved PokerStars – damn you doom switch!!). But even a foray on iPoker, which is by the way so soft it’s not true, has not brought about a change in fortunes. I somehow managed to come fourth in a $55 tourney for a little over $600 on Saturday night, but even my exit hand was a joke. I set a guy perfectly to come over the top of my c-bet on a Q-high board, he obliged with his A-J, and I snapped him with K-K. So it was just perfect that the turn and river were both Jacks. FML.

I thought maybe I’d turned the corner though….. until I sat down for a session on Sunday. It was just one long day of bad beats. I mean, it’s sickening to think of how amazing my SNG ROI would be if I’d had even half decent fortune. And it’d be off the scale if I was on a heater.

So where do I go from here? Well, I’m on deadline this week and I go on holiday to Italy this coming Friday. So it’s going to be another couple of weeks before I’m able to get back in the game again properly. Time enough to reflect on exactly what I want from the game, how I intend to get there, reinvigorate my ethusiasm, and (hopefully) see a turnaround in my fortunes. One thing’s for sure, it can’t get any worse…