Emitnulb's Blogs

5/9/12 update

Wed, 09 May 2012 1:48:47 -0500

Well I've been having some issues that have put me a bit behind.  The weather has been warm which apparently causes my computer to over heat from time to time forcing me to insta-lose all the games I was playing when it crashes.  On top of that, I'm running pretty bad and on top of that HeM is only recording like half of the hands in each of my sessions.  I really have no idea why it's having trouble recording my hands either.  Anyways, I'm down like 50 buy ins from my peak this month.  I guess this is probably just a standard downswing for the ST's.  My last 700 or so games have been pretty brutal.  I'm not only running below EV, but my EV is negative.  I have no idea if my EV line is actually working or not though because of my HeM problems.  At last check I'd fallen to 24th on the leaderboards, but I'm going to try to get back to raking 1k every week after this week assuming I can sort out my computer issues.

I don't know how high I'm going to be able to get on the leaderboards just because of how they calculate the points.  You get points based on the position you finish in a game and those points are weighted by the stake of the game and then multiplied by the longest win streak that you attain during the month.  Seeing as the games are super high variance, there's really no way to predict how many points I'll actually end up with because I'm capable of running super hot or super cold for extended periods of time and if I run hot for like a week and somehow get a 10 win streak or something there's a good chance I'll be able to crack the top 3, but if I never run well all month I'll probably be stuck somewhere toward the bottom.

I'm going to try to play at least 200 games tomorrow and thursday and then get back to around 300 or so for next week.

2nd day of May

Thu, 03 May 2012 3:52:32 -0500

So I had a pretty solid day today.  I ended up winning like 3 or 4 hundred dollars today.  I ran pretty well at the end of the day.  Today I decided to work on my early game play.  I realized that I was ending up on the short stack a lot around the bubble and I think that a big part of it is that I'm calling too tight early.  I loaded up a nash chart for 10bb effective stacks 6 handed (http://www.holdemresources.net/hr/sngs/icmcalculator.html?action=calculate&bb=100&sb=50&ante=0&structure=0.7%2C0.3&s1=1000&s2=1000&s3=1000&s4=1000&s5=1000&s6=1000&s7=&s8=&s9=).  So working with those ranges as a base line I'm adjusting my calling and pushing ranges based on the stats I've collected on my opponents.  I was talking to some guys who say that using nash is probably not the best idea, but when I'm playing the early game I typically have something like 12-16 tables running and it's so difficult to determine the correct ranges when you literally have like 10 seconds max to make your decisions.  After I am confident that I've memorized the early game I'll start working on my bubble and heads up play.  I think heads up is probably the easiest thing to figure out just because it's so straight forward.  You're always going to be between 3 and 10bb effective and a lot of hands play themselves.  The bubble is more of an artform than anything else and it's going to take a while to figure it out so even though it's where the biggest part of your winrate comes from I think I'm going to shore up some of my easier leaks to fix before I work on the bubble.

I'm going to post a graph with my red line today, but I'm going to say that I don't think it's accurate because my HeM isn't capturing a lot of the hands from my games (which is really frustrating when I try to review them) and the ICM calculation is for 65/35 payouts when the tourny's actually pay 70/30.  I didn't even look at my red line for DoN's because the majority of your edge comes from how you exploit the bubble and the red line was calculating the bubble for a 50/30/20 payout structure so you pretty much lose a ton of your actual ev due to the way the red line is wrongly calculating the payout structure.  The green line is pretty accurate though.

By the way, at last check I was around 14th on the leaderboard.  I'm guessing that only like half the people above me are going to keep the grind up all month, so I'm really hoping to be able to hit top 10.

May 1st (fml)

Wed, 02 May 2012 2:05:59 -0500

Yeah so I think we all knew that I wasn't a 15% roi player at the super turbos and the odds finally caught up to me.  I dropped about a grand from my bankroll since my last post, but I'm hoping I'll be alright to hit the leaderboards.  Last month I ended up in like 33rd position and apparently Black Chip has a rake race going on every month that I didn't know about.  I must have gotten like top 50 or something because today they gave me a 25 dollar bonus. 

I need to rake like $290 in the next two days to get to my rake goal.  I try to rake $150 each day and I fell a little bit behind over the last two days.  As long as I do alright for the next two days I'll get 600 in rakeback which would supplement my roll nicely.  Most of my losses in the last few days have come from losing at the $20 games.  I think the $10's are easily beatable for like 3-4% long term, but the 20's are a lot tougher.  Most of the good players play the 35's and higher and fill in their volume with the 20's.  Against good players you're going to be lucky to find like a 2% edge in these games because they have so many spots memorized and play very close to nash equilibrium in a ton of spots.

Anyways, I'm hoping to avoid another big downswing like this for a while just to try to get a good margin of safety in my bankroll.  I'd like to have something like 10k by the end of the month.  That means I'll need to have a small win rate to go along with the 3k or so I hope to have in rakeback and bonuses.

I'm going to post my graph in dollars for all of the games I've played since mid February.  the last 2500 games were super turbos which all took place over about 9 days as opposed to the previous 1500 which took place over 2 months.  Even a .5% win rate at these super turbos is a better hourly than the 3% I was getting at the DoN's.  The only problem is that the vast majority of grinders at the ST's are break even.  It was kind of the same story at DoN's, but these games seem much harder to beat.  I had one of the higher win rates at the DoN's so I'm hoping to make the transition successfully and actually be a winning player, at least at the 10's and 20's.  Once I move beyond that I think pure rakeback grinding is more feasable as I can probably get over 1k in rakeback in a week, but at the 10's and 20's that would mean grinding for like 50 hrs per week.  Good luck guys.

Equilibrium

I'm back with a new goal for May. Merge STT leaderboard.

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 4:04:05 -0500

Hi guys, I'm going for another goal this coming month and I'm going to post about it here. 

So since I last posted I've switched sites.  My cousin got a job working on some fantasy sports website (Draftday.com) and he introduced me to a guy who runs a different poker training site.  This guy said he could get me 50% rakeback (up to 60%) if I switched to BlackChipPoker.  So I was kind of hesitent to switch over because I thought it would be a hassle, but I had about 1.3k on Carbon and I thought it would be a lot quicker to grind out a new roll if I just switched over.  I bought 1.1k of BCP money and still have my money on Carbon.  That was in mid February.  I kept up my DoN grind and got to the point where I was playing high stakes.  The problem was that I couldn't really get much volume in.  I could play like 2 or 3 $50 games at a time and had to fill the rest of the games in with $20 games.  I could get some decent rakeback, but to get 60% rakeback I needed to rake 1k in a week.  Since I am only really comfortable playing like 8-10 tables at once and each game took like 30 min, it took me like 45 hours to grind out 1k in a week, and my average win rate was only about 3% which meant I would get like 1.2-1.5k per week.  Not too bad, but the problem is that I could never get beyond that level since I was already grinding all of the high stakes games that went off during my sessions.  I'd built up a pretty solid 5k roll from the 1.1k in about 2 months and I went looking for another game to grind. 

After searching around for a while I realized that 6max super turbos were hugely popular.  I decided to give them a shot and immediatly figured out why.  Fishes love them because of how simple and high varience they are, and regs love them because of the absurd amount of rake you can rack up.  The format of these games (for those of you who don't play on Merge) is 6 handed 1k starting stacks.  Blind structure is 50/100, 100/200, 150/300, 200/400, 300/600, 500/1000 3 minute levels.  The first few I played I lost a bit of money, but I knew that if I could figure them out I'd be able to pile on the rake back since my average game length was about 6 minutes.  I went ahead and bought SnGWizard (I'd reccommend it for anybody trying to learn sit and go's btw) and went to work learning.  I played like 10 games and then ran them through Wizzard, picked something to work on, played 10 more games ect... and eventually I hit a monster heater.  I picked up like 130 buy in's in 3 days of playing which was no small sum of money since my average stake was like $12.

Double or Nothing games do not count for the tournament leaderboard on Merge.  Super Turbos do.  I started playing them on April 20, raking around $100 per day and I was checking through the leaderboards 3 days later and noticed I was in the top 75.  I have played for 5 of the last 8 days and am currently at 40th on the April leaderboard with about 70% of the points of the guy in 25th.  I think the leaderboard is out of reach for this month, but next month I'm trying to make a run.  I'm going to aim to just get in the top 25 for next month which would mean I would get a $100 bonus.  The real money is in the rakeback.  To get top 25 I'm trying to rake at least 1k per week.  That means I would get $600 back every week.  Hopefully I have a win rate as well which could get me some serious cash.

I'm also going to mention my bankroll management tactic for the month.  I currently have $6,949 in my roll.  If I have over 5k I'll play as many $20 games as possible and mix in some $10's if the volume at the 20's isn't there.  Under 5k means I'm only playing 10's, but that would mean I would need to endure something like a 100 BI downswing.  If I have over 10k I'll grind the 35's and 20's.  If I move up I'll also move up my rake goals.  I'll try to rake 1.3k per week as opposed to 1k if my roll is over 10k.  If I manage to get my roll over 15k I'll start playing 50's and try to rake 1.5k per week.

Anyways, wish me luck.  It's going to be a grind.  I'll post my results from the past months.

Here's my ST graph in BI:

Grinding a new roll, Water Achieved.

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 9:11:26 -0600

Well guys, I finished my goal.  I got to 10k points today with a $900 roll.  Not too bad overall, but I was getting owned at the end.  I started trying to 15-20 table at the end.  It's not as hard to do as I thought it would be, but it's hard to maintain aggression when you only have like 5 seconds to make decisions.  Maybe I'll be able to play 20 consistently some day, but for now I'll stick to 6-8.  I might move back to cash for a while soon, but we'll see how it goes.  I don't think I'm going to blog much next month, maybe once a week or less.  I'm just going to focus on trying to win money as opposed to volume.  I'd like to get another 10k points next month, but I'm not going to be super in to it like i was this month.  By the way, rakeback is so awesome when you're losing, I was breaking even when I was losing money.  So good luck guys, this is probably my last post for a while.

Grinding a new roll

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 1:14:48 -0600

Well I won some money today, that's good I guess.  Got to $980.  I got 7750 points now too, so my target is within reach now.  I've been adjusting my shoving ranges in a lot of situations because there's a lot of guys who call shoves with any ace if they think you are pushing ATC even if they need something like 70% equity to make a call.  I ran below EV again today, but my EV was way up, so hopefully my green line follows.  I ran good tonight which was long over due.  I'd dropped all the way down to like $800 before it started to turn around for the day.  Hopefully I can make up some of those buy in's that I should "theoretically" have in the next couple days.  This is a pretty severe downswing, especially for DoN's which are one of the lowest varience games.

Grinding a new roll, this sucks

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 2:21:20 -0600

Ugh probably running about as bad as I've ever ran in DoN's.  I dropped about 200 today, my roll is at $910.  I think I'm playing fine, but I'm just getting destroyed.  If I drop below 700 I'm going to have to drop back down to the 10's to rebuild, but hopefully it won't come to that.  I'm still getting tons of points thanks to my apparent gambling addiction, so I'm at 7150 right now.  I'll easily make it to my point goal if I can maintain my bankroll.  The problems I'm having have been mostly just getting called too light on my shoves.  I'm trying to adjust by shoving tighter and being more patient in bubble situations where I'm not the big stack.  I really don't think there's too much I can do though, this seems like just horrible varience because I ran like 13 buy ins below EV today.  It wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't working with such a fragile roll right now.  When I had like 5k on my Bodog roll and went on a big downswing it was only like 10% of my roll so even though it sucked I could still deal with it.  Just having a 13 BI downswing now is like 30% of my roll on Merge though, so it's really tough to handle.  I hope I can bottom out soon or I might be in some trouble.  I'm showing the daily chart for effect lol.

Grinding a new roll

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:08:49 -0600

I lost a bit of cash today, dropped down to $1096.  I managed to earn a bunch of points though.  I'm up to 6402 this month which means I need 3600 more.  I have 7 more days, so if I get 600/day I'll easily make it to "Water".  I'm still in danger of dipping below my bankroll requirements for the $20's though, so hopefully I can start winning again and coast to my goal.  I'll post my graph by day and in buy in's today just to switch it up.  I'm pretty much breaking even for the last 5 days or so, but there's been some pretty wild swings in the mean time.

Grinding a new roll, crazy day

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:54:40 -0600

Well I started the day with 5100 points and 1k in my roll.  When I started playing I lost, then I lost again, and again and again.  I lost about $150 which put me on about a $300 downswing.  I won the last 2 games of my first session and took a break.  Then I came back and won 10 more games in a row.  I ended up winning 14/16 games.  Then I played some more and won 4 more buy in's.  I got to my point goal for the day of 5700 and ended up with $1,160 in my roll.  Ended up being a pretty solid day overall.  I got a half of a bronze star next to my name now, I have no idea how you get those, but i guess people are going to think I'm a baller now that I have half of a star.

Grinding a new roll

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:42:36 -0600

So I made a post yesterday and for some reason it didn't save, but nothing much to update over this weekend.  I won a bunch and lost a bunch and eventually ended up at $1,000.  The good news is that I'm well on pace to hit 10k points.  I have 5100 points right now, so I need about 550 points per day to get there.  As long as I don't go on a downswing to the point where I dip below my safety margin for playing the $20's I'm confident that I'll make it to 10k.

Grinding a new roll

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:48:05 -0600

Was back at it today, got the 600 pts that I needed to stay on pace.  I played 2 sessions today.  The first session was going horribly, but I would up breaking even.  The second session was good overall, I won a bunch of games in a row right in the middle of the session and then won a few more buy in's after that.  I wound up winning 8 buy in's or $160.  When I imported my data to HeM I got a few more errors, but apparently it has me running way above EV, so we'll see if I wind up crashing back down.  I was running above EV in my first session when I was actually running really bad though.  I don't put too much stock in the stat, but some people live and die by it so I always keep it in my graphs.  It's just one out of a thousand factors that make up for overall luck in poker.

Grinding a new roll (Fire VIP achieved)

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 1:07:12 -0600

Well today went alright overall.  I was going to play a session this afternoon when I got out of bed, but volume was very low and I just decided to go shovel snow after my first five games.  The good news is that I won all 5 games.  My roll was up to about $940.  I still had like 500 VIP points to go to get to "Fire" though, so I thought that I should probably try to get there today just so I could give myself a good shot at achieveing my goal.  I decided to go ahead and grind a marathon session from 8:00-1:30 tonight (I took a dinner break).  It was a very frustrating session though, I broke even for sooooo long.  I was down to my last 3 games of the night and I needed to win 1 of them to breakeven for the session, but I ended up winning 2 of them. 

Well now I've earned 30% of my goal in points and by my count I have 12 days left to earn the other 70% (7k pts).  I need 600 points per day for the rest of the month.  I started out pretty strong so hopefully I keep it up.

Here's my holdem manager graph.  I'm not sure it's 100% accurate as every time I import my sessions I wind up with a few import errors.  Sharkscope is tracking me differently from HeM.  I don't use a HUD while I'm playing so I import after each session from my saved history files.  I'm up 600 in winnings + rakeback/bonuses and HeM shows 430 while Sharkscope shows 530.  So obviously I'm missing some games in HeM.

Grinding a new roll

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:27:51 -0600

Alright guys, I played some more today and all and all had a pretty solid day.  My bankroll ended up at $827 and I've now got 2322 VIP points.  I had a sick session to start the day where I ended up winning like 80 bucks.  I was on fire.  I had already reached my daily point goal and decided to play another session at night, but I decided that since I'd had more than 40 buy in's for the 20's I'd take my shot at them.  I wound up having essentially breakeven session where I lost 7 dollars.  I made a few mistakes that I was kicking myself for early in the session on two different hands.

The first hand I tried to steal from the hijack with A2cc and got a caller in the CO.  JQ7hh flop and for some reason I decided that I should cbet and he immediatly shoved all in.  He only had 400 chips left (I had 600) and I had a bd flush draw with the ace so I reluctantly made the call.  He was slow playing aces for some reason.  I think I should have c/f the flop as it was so wet and I really had no equity.

The second hand I decided to open TT from MP when we were 6 handed on the bubble.  Blinds were 75/150 and I opened to 400.  I was even with another guy in chips at about 1650 and everyone else was between 2200 and 2700.  After I opened the other guy with 1650 shoved from the BTN.  I knew I was at best going to be flipping for my tourny but I called anyways.  He wound up also having aces and I got knocked out again.  It sounds like it would be a nitty fold in that situation, but in a DoN it's such a standard fold.  I made a stupid decision.

After I got knocked out of those games I won a few and was actually in a very good position to end the session in the black when I had 3 games left, but I got sucked out on like 5 times in a row on two of my games and wound up winning the final game after winning a flip and doing some subsequent bubble pwning.

Good day overall though.  I got 500 points which gets me pretty close to Fire.  I might make a run for Fire tomorrow if I can stay at the 20's from now on.  I ended up winning about $70 in total and I'll get a few more bucks tonight for clearing bonuses and rakeback.  If I finish playing the 10's for good right now I'll have had a 14% ROI all time.  That's pretty sick considering the payout structure of DoN's.

I wound up in my first leveling war on Merge today.  Some guy named rakebackpro992 was playing really aggro against me all day and he's pretty much the only good reg playing the $10's.  I could tell he had a specific read that I was going to fold a ton against him as we played about 20 games together today.  In one game after we had been doing various aggressive moves against each other for an hour or so, we found ourselves 6 handed very early in the game (level 2).  He was on my direct right and we were the short stacks, each with our starting stack of 1500.  The rest of the table had taken at least half of a stack from the 4 guys who had been knocked out.  When I was BB I knew he would be opening atc against me because in general it's super profitable for him to do so.  I had 63o, but since we were both the short stacks I thought that the winner of this pot was at a huge advantage going forward in the game as they could potentially knock the other guy down to under 1000 chips.  He 2.5x'd me like I assumed he was going to and I called planning to float most flops.  The flop was super dry, Q74r.  I had air and he cbet about 2/3 pot.  I floated and the 3 hit the turn.  I was going to fold if he decided to fire again as I didn't think he would think that I was floating, but he checked and I bet 2/3 pot and took it down.  He was left with something like 1100 chips while I had 1900.  He was much shorter than the rest of the table and wound up losing the game when he had to bluff shove into a big stack to steal the blinds.  I'm pretty sure that my play on him was the deciding factor in the game.

Grinding a new roll

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 3:25:21 -0600

Hi guys, I finally decided to try to quit bodog and play on Merge.  I decided that I'd take 400 bucks and put it on the site to try and build a roll from low stakes.  I'm trying to accomplish fairly agressive goals so I thought I'd share and document them here.

I deposited 400 on January 12th.  My goal is to make "Water" VIP status on Carbon Poker by the end of the month.  I'm trying to do this through grinding double or nothing sit and go's.  These games are pretty much my specialty.  I was pulling around a 10% ROI on Bodog before they switched over to anon tables, and after that I was actually making a higher ROI over about 500 games but there was no longer any games running above the $20 level so I was winning WAY less money than I had been previously.  Now I find myself on Carbon under rolled to even play in $20 games.

Anyways, "Water" VIP status is essentially 23.8% rakeback and the way it works is once you obtain a certain VIP status you retain it for the following month.  If I get 10,000 VIP points I'll hit "Water", and if I get between 3,000 and 10,000 I'll be at "Fire" which is only 18% rakeback.  I'm probably going to be shooting for "Ether" next month, but I'll need to build a roll up before I can make an attempt at that.  "Ether" status is 45% rakeback which would be so awesome.  1 VIP point is awarded for every 10 cents in contributed rake.

My plan for the remainder of the month is to play DoN sit and go's 6 at a time.  I'm currently playing the $10 games and I've had a pretty good start.  I have an 11% ROI over my frist 250 or so games and have built my roll to $670.  I have earned 1500 VIP points so far putting me on the second level of their program.  I get about 15% rakeback right now if I take the points to cash option, but only 7.5% daily rakeback.  I get credit for like 2 bucks every morning lol, but if I can bust out of these micro games I expect to see a significant increase in rakeback as I advance through VIP levels.  I also get 5 bucks toward clearing the first deposit bonus for every 375 points I earn.  So far I've gotten 20 dollars in this way and I'm able to clear $400 in total.  I would like to build at least an $800 roll before I start playing the $20 games.  I am trying to earn atleast 250 points per day to stay on pace for 10k on the month, but I'm really coming up on a time crunch.  Fridays are double points days and by my calculations I will need to earn 1500 points on the two remaining fridays along with 500 points each day after this friday for me to make my 10k point goal.  That means that if I don't want to either increase the number of tables I'm playing or the amount of time I have to spend each day grinding I'll need to move up to playing exclusively $20 games by this friday, January 20.

So that's where I'm at.  If I can do this successfully I'd hope to have over 2k in my roll by the end of the month and then be able to make a run at "Ether" next month by incorporating high stakes games into my play.  We'll see how it goes.  I'll try to remember to update this post.

1/17/2012:

Had a slightly winning day going until I played a session at night in which I pulled a 6 game win streak to end the session.  Got to $752 and should have a couple bucks coming in bonuses tonight.  1795 VIP points and counting.  I'm going to need to increase my volume because I origionally thought my points were doubled on Fridays, but I guess they arent.  If I can start grinding 20's and maintain my ROI I should be able to pull off Water though.  These $10 games are very soft, I'd say they are just as soft as Bodog's games.  Regs call/shove way too nitty on the bubble and fish call way too light.  I think it's only a matter of putting in the volume before I can manage to get the roll to play only $20's and higher.  Unless I start running very bad I think I'll be able to move up in another 50-150 games.  By the way, I'm playing as emitnulB on Merge if anybody want's to add me as a friend.