New Blog Yo!

Check it out at http://www.nlhestruggles.wordpress.com/ and update your links. I will be deleting this blog a few days after this post.

This Blog

Well, I am just not a fan of blogspot. It is almost certainly user error, but I am going back to wordpress, so please update your links. The new blog is www.nlhestruggles.wordpress.com. Thanks!

Every

Hand gets there. Every prayer answered. Losing like mad. It's getting to be just downright ridiculous now. Fuck poker.

It's a 15 BI downer over my last 23k hands and breakeven for the 30k hands before that. It is just getting so damned frustrating at the moment. I am doing everything I can think of to improve as a player, but the constant coolers and ass raping suckouts are just crushing my spirits.

I will continue to try and improve my play and keep my foot on the pedal, because I really wanted a certain amount of debt removed before baby #2 gets here, which is in about 7 weeks.

Eesh

Played for an hour today and lost 2.5 BIs. This run is getting ugly. I just can't buy a bucket to save my life. I reviewed hands today and there just isn't anything I can do about these beats. I get coolered and sucked out on. I am going to keep getting in QQ preflop as I should and I am going to raise sets when I should and if they get beat, they get beat. I have to focus on playing good and solid poker and just trying to improve my play and eventually it will turn around. It'd be nice if it would occur soon so I can make some money and pay off some credit card debt before my second child comes at the end of July, but it isn't in my control, I just have to keep on keepin' on.


Also, Jim Joyce, the first base umpire during tonight's Tigers game, needs to lose his job. He blew the most obvious call tonight. The Tigers still won, but the blown call was for the last out of a perfect game. I feel awful for Armando Galarraga, since he won't go into the books as the 19th perfect game in mlb history, but he was very polite after the game and he never complained to the umpire about the call. He stood in disbelief, but didn't say anything to him until after the game when Joyce approached him in te locker room to apologize for blowing his perfect game. All Armando did was tell the umpire that no one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes. Maybe we can all learn something from him.


It wasn't really a close call, see the picture below.

You can read about it and see the replay on either espn.com or mlb.com if you like. Feel so badly for the kid.

Pocket 9s

Edit: I still don't get why blogspot is so crappy with editing posts (read: why I don't get how to properly use it), so I am writing in the formulas by hand.

I do remember a friend and very good poker player saying that when players got out of line with their 3betting, he would sometimes 4bet shove 100 bbs deep with a medium pp, and said it would show a profit. So I decided this morning to do some math and see if my 4bet shove BvB w/ 99 was nearly as poor as I thought it was. A key difference here of course is how often the villain will fold relative to the limits my friend played and also the difference in the calling range of players at the limits.

The first thing I did was make some approximations of a few calling ranges for villain. These calling ranges and my estimated equity against them include:

· JJ+, AQ+: 38%
· JJ+, AK: 32%
· TT+, AK: 30%

I figured the formula to determine my required fold equity would be as follows:

Win when called - Losses when called + Win when he folds = 0

The first term is what I win when I get called. Simply put, this is just my equity share of the pot multiplied by $100 and then multiplied by the probability that he calls my 4bet shove. In mathematical terms, it is:

100 * E * Pc

Okay then, what about the second term? The loss term for when I get called and lose is going to be villain’s equity share of the pot in place of my equity share in the term above.

100 * (1 - E) * Pc

Finally when villain folds, I win the $8 in the pot every single time and never lose, so that term is defined as:

8 * Pf

The probability he calls though is simply the same thing as the probability he folds subtracted from 1, so substitution and combining everything leads to the following equation:

100 * E * (1 - Pf) - (100 * (1 - E) * (1 - Pf)) + 8 * Pf = 0

At this point we can easily plug in our estimated equity share of the pot and calculate our breakeven fold equity required. Here is what I calculated:

· JJ+, AQ+: 38% à Fold equity needed: 75%
· JJ+, AK: 32% à Fold equity needed: 82%
· TT+, AK: 30% à Fold equity needed: 83%

We can see, it isn’t really all that pretty. Was it profitable though? Does he fold enough? Well, I think in this spot, he most likely calls with JJ+ and AK. So let’s use 32% equity for our analysis. Let’s follow that with assuming in this particular spot, versus me, villain is most likely 3betting about 10% of the time. What percentage of hands constitute JJ+ and AK? Well, I have to think a little, since I don’t have poker stove with me and I know that there are 1,326 combinations of hands possible. I know that JJ+ and AK have 40 combinations, so that would mean that JJ+ and AK are ~ 3% of hands. So he is folding 70% of the time when I 4bet shove here.

That means my play is going to show a negative expected value. However, by how much? Plugging in a fold equity of 70% yields an expected value of -$5.20.

What if he does actually call with AQ? Well, my equity share of the pot increases but my fold equity decreases. Let’s see what happens. My equity share is now 30% and villain will fold 5.8% of the time. Plugging these values in the other equation yields an expected value of -$5.44. This is not really surprising when you think about it. My equity share goes up, but my fold equity goes down. We are adding in hands that flip with us, so it shouldn’t have too much of an impact on our bottom line, since it constitutes 25% of his range and not something like 90% of it, which would have a significantly larger impact.

Therefore, it was not a good play to 4bet shove 99 in that spot. However, it wasn’t the worst play ever and not nearly as –EV as I thought it would be. And these are all estimations of calling ranges and how often villain is 3betting. Obviously if his calling range is wider, I am in more trouble and if he is 3betting more often (very possible), it isn’t as poor of a play. It isn’t something I should lose sleep over, I should just focus on improving my play and not letting emotions get the best of me. I ran into KK but I easily could have gotten a fold or ran into AK and won a flip or heck, maybe sucked out! My point is that my actual value was far worse than my expected value for the play and I just need to learn from this and move on. There is nothing wrong with some 4bet bluffing and I do that from time to time with certain situations and better hands to do it with via card removal and whatnot, but this is not a play I need to have in my arsenal for these games.

Continuing to do analyses like this and think about how to exploit my opponents will lead to success, so the exercise is worth the time I spent and I can learn something from it. That is what is important. Next session, I will focus on playing solid poker and be mindful of the present and that should lead to a well-played session which is all I can control and need to be thinking about. That’s all for now!

Day 1 of June

Ouch! I ran super terrible bad and hard as I tried at first, I tilted very badly. It got to the point to where I had no clue of what to do on various hands. For example, what is your play when a recreational player leads into you on a TTxr board for 1.75x pot? You have KK and what do you do when he shoves 2.7x pot on an A turn? This line makes no sense to me! That isn't really tilt related though, but shortly thereafter I 4bet shoved 99 BvB into a reg who has a 3bet of 8%. I know that it may be higher because A) it is BvB and B) I fold too often to 3bets. I am not sure if this is a bad play or not though tbh, but I did it anyways and he snapped me with KK and I don't spike.

However, I buckled down and really focused and played solid poker. I got itback from -4 BIs to -1.5 BIs. Volume was good, where I got in 2,716 hands in 2.45 hours of play.

One thing I am really going to be doing is analyzing the play of regs since I come across them so often. The tables are full of recreational players and that will be the bulk of my profits, but really for the most part, it is just ABC poker versus those players, so not too much of my time should be spent working on that portion of my game I don't think. I am getting a new laptop soon and selling off my desktop and monitors, so that wil allow me to study on my lunch breaks at work like I used to do. My old laptop is just not cutting it anymore, I gotta get a new one and since it will be new and I am selling my desktop to a coworker, it will actually be close to, if not totally, simply a swap of computers, which is sweet.

I am bound and determined to succeed and do well. Nothing will stop me, because the only thing getting in my way is me and I won't let myself be destructive anymore. Tomorrow is a day off, it is my 3-year anniversary. :o)

June Goals

I have two goals for June:

1. Play 60k hands
2. Be positive about poker and live in the current time frame, not the past.

That is all.