Wednesday, November 3, 2010

So Far Sorta Meh

Three days of "Jesse Takes His Act To the Interwebs" are in the books, and the results are, by every metric I can think of, 2 out of 3. For two of the three days I enjoyed what I was doing, didn't have much trouble getting volume in, and in general considered the day a success. Yesterday was a bit of a clusterfuck, but I learned a good bit from it. Lessons so far are:

1. For now, 5 tables is my max. Any more than that and I start to lose track of the action from time to time and do weird stuff, like donking into the preflop raiser thinking it was a limped pot, etc etc. Also I lose a bit of creativity, and when your edge is extremely small to begin with and 1 big bet per 100 hands is extremely small any way you slice it) you can't afford to lose any edge whatsoever. For a little while one day I was experimenting with up to 8 tables and that was just a disaster. I was kidding myself thinking 6 was OK, and it sort of kind of is, but really for now I should stick to 4 or 5. Hopefully I can add a sixth at some point.

2. I am only allowed to check my results between exactly two hands once every 24 hours, preferably when I think I'm done playing for the day. I did well with this on Monday and today, but not on Tuesday, and I ended up spending a lot of brain cycles tilting myself about the fact that I was stuck like 100 bets or whatever it was. Today I played all day and didn't check my results until about 15 minutes ago, after I closed out my 3rd session of the day. I spent the day somewhat happy, basically not sure how I was doing. More importantly, I didn't waste time thinking about it, which is the whole point.

3. You've gotta take notes. Really if I'm going to be putting in this much volume there is no excuse for something that seems to happen to me a lot. A guy 3 bets me, and I hover my mouse over his name to see what I know because I have a thousand hands on him and....nothing. Really Jesse? You've played 1000 hands with a guy, the equivalent of 25 hours of live poker, and he hasn't done a single thing worth writing down? Fail. So now I'm taking notes at the highest rate I can, which seems to be a couple every orbit. I have to keep them short because realistically the way they are used demands it; when you're 5 tabling you're not going to parse 300 words of notes on a guy. 3 to 5 pieces of info is all you're gonna get before it's time to act.

4. They love to donk. It's as if all the loose passive 20/40 players I know who check/call with basically anything just decided that if they were going to call one bet why not just donk? It's incredible and it still has me confused, because it does seem to mean very different things for different players. I saw a guy donk K3o on t 754r board into 4 opponents in a raised pot. I mean, really? What is your thought process there? Anyway, taking donk specific notes is very important.

5. Use the HUD popups. This is freaking critical. You can only have so much info sitting there on your screen, especially if you're playing full ring, but there is so much more to be had when you have a couple thousand hands on a guy. So I'm using them more and more, trying to get into a pattern whenever I get headsup with a guy of checking my notes, then checking a popup for any specific information that might be relevant (is he more aggro on the turn, how much does he showdown, etc, etc).

So so far, so good I guess. The Big Potato just texted me with a very salient point:

I need to put some hours in (online). If you don't play online regularly you are going to suck. Hard to get around that.

So maybe I am going about this the right way. And in closing, my results so far for 3 days are somewhat encouraging. I have played 7602 hands and am winning, overall, at a rate of 1.69 bets per 100. Sadly I'm not actually up as many dollars as that number would suggest, since I've lost about 50 bets at 3/6 and won about 150 bets at 2/4. I've also played some 5/T and 1/2 and as you might suspect at first blush have obliterated the 1/2 games and lost a little in the 5/T (the sample sizes on these are truly meaningless, literally less than 300 hands total). If there's not a systematic reason I seem to crush 2/4 and struggle at 3/6 things should be a little more even moving forward. Here's hoping.

1 comment:

that_pope said...

Here is some advice:

#1) Donking into the preflop raiser. You can either a) set the chat function to have the dealer state every action and refer to that when you lose track. This makes chatting impossible, but may help your winrate or b) count the pot and how many players are in, pretty easy to see if someone raised or if it was limped. Now you just need to figure out if it was you who raised! This is the way I do it.

#2) Considering I have over 1k bets online for every game I play except when I shot take at 8/16 and 10/20 it is crazy that I am still unable to do this properly, but I can't. So no advice here.

#3) Good notes to have include what he 3bets you with, what he 3bets out of the BB with, and if you 3 bet him if he calls the flop and c/fold the turn, so you know he is less likely to bluff. Also in the games I play, learning their donking range is so important. Doing this is like gold.

#4) Hey, I mentioned this before I read it. LEARN WHAT EACH INDIVIDUAL DONKING RANGE IS. I have been donked into on the flop w/ the nut full house, flush draws, top pair, bottom pair, straight draw, gut shots, A high, and complete air. LEARN THEIR DONK RANGE.

#5) Meh, I have very few players with over 1k hands played, so most of those statistics aren't very significant yet for me. I am sure you get a much larger sample with the regulars because it is harder to avoid them in 9max games than 6max.

And onto stake specific advice, playing on FTP is a huge benefit for changing stakes compared to Stars because at FTP it is always a 1 2 structure for the blinds, where at Stars 3/6 and 15/30 have 1 3 or 2 3 structures, which changes your range around, which luckily we don't have to worry about.

As long as you keep playing full ring, I wish you 100% of the best of luck. If you start venturing into 6max, I wish you 100% luck when not at my table :)