Fish and Chips

A poker themed blog, charting the demise of my degree and the rise of my poker career.


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Thursday, August 26, 2004

All the Summer's poker news (Part Two)

...So I took a break. I was like "I'm gonna have a couple of weeks away from poker, I'm gonna re-read Matthew's book, browse the ITH Forum and spent a lot of time analysing my Poker Tracker stats" (Poker Tracker is a programme that downloads all your hand histories from the online poker sites and creats a massive database of them. From that it'll give you all sorts of useful statistics such as how often "Player X" check-raises the turn, for example. It'll also give you stats more pertinant to yourself like how much money you're loosing by overplaying AJ offsuit from early position. Basically it's an absolute must for any vaguely serious internet player. But anyway, I digress.)

Those of you who are aware of my fanaticism of poker are likely to be thinking "What the hell? Pinky couldn't stay away from poker for two days let a lone two weeks". Well, you're right I managed just over one day!

I did feel, however, that I went back to the tables with a much better perspective of things. Up till this point things had been kind of snowballing: The start was very gradual, but once I'd moved up a few limits, had gathered some deposit bonuses and was able to see some meaningfull profits materialising, it was as if my path to becoming a world class poker player was only a few similar steps away. Having had this fairly large collapse of bankroll gave me something of a reality check. The path to becoming a sucessful poker player does not happen overnight. It doesn't even happen over-summer! It's gonna take a lot of consistanly hard work and if things start going right that doesn't mean you can take your foot of the gas or play anything less than your 'A Game'. One guy on the ITH Forum has a post-it on his monitor which simply asks: "Is this my A Game?". I think that's one of the best things to be constantly asking yourself while you're playing. It's all to easy to lapse in self disciplin and start making bad calls.

So when I first went back I played a lot of really low limit stuff - 'fun stuff'. I played a lot of Omaha Hi/Low and even some 7 Card Stud. When I started taking things a bit more seriously my thoughts returned to rebuilding my bankroll.

I knew I would struggle to have the patcience to go stright back to limit but I had very little no-limit experince so I was reluctant to go straight into NL ring games. A reasonably large number of people on the ITH Forum play SNGs ("Sit and Go". These are most commonly one-table mini-tournaments (sometimes two or three tables). All 10 players pay a flat entry fee and the top three finishers get paid out of the prize pool, usually on a %50, %30, %20 ratio) From what I'd gethered these could be quite profitable and there was usually a choice between limit and no-limit. This seemed ideal, so I started playing the $10 dollar ones (+$1 entry fee).

Since then I have been playing a lot of these and, more recently, I've started playing low buy-in NL ring games also. So far this seems to have been working out reasonably well and I'm gradually on the road to recovery (I hope). I'm also going to start playing more larger tournaments as there is the potential for very large wins in these and it helps in providing a bit of variety. At the lower buy-in NL ring games, from what I have gathered so far and from what I have read of other people's experiences, if one is patient there is a decent amount of money to be made from other people's mistakes alone. In fact, it seems that one could build one's bankroll from small to medium in size much more quickly playing low-stakes NL rather than low-limit. My feeling is, however, that things would change once you have a reasonable sized bankroll and could be playing higher-stakes NL or higher-limit. I'm speculating here, but I'd imagine there would be an optimal bankroll size at which point it would be more profitable for you to switch from playing NL to limit, assuming you played each equally well. I'd like to ask some of the higher stakes players on the ITH Forum from each of the disciplins what there thoughts are on this.

Well that's pretty much where things stand at the moment, but there are still some stories of this Summer's live poker sessions to come.

Laters

Monday, August 23, 2004

All the Summer's poker news (Part One)

Since I've now started the research project for my degree, my Summer of hardcore poker playing has essentially come to an end - I'm now actually having to do some real work!

My research project is (loosely) on the SARS Virus. I'm going to be looking at the interaction of its surface Spike protein with a receptor (DC-SIGN) on Dendritic Cells of the immune system. My first week has been quite intense. Never having worked in a proper lab before or done novel research is quite daunting and I feel somewhat out of my depth. Last week I was being heavily babysat, but this week my supervisor is away so I've got to try not to destroy the lab and if possible, actually get some experiments completed!

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about poker so here we go...

Around the time of my exams I was exclusively playing limit Holdem ring games. I'd been steadily building my bankroll and, by transferring it from one site to another, I was able to take advantage of a glut of redeposit bonuses that were being offered at the time. By this stage I was playing limits of $3/$6 and was feeling pretty comfortable and making a steady profit. I'd worked out that one of the most profitable times to play was early in the morning (UK) so that it was late in the evening/night in the US and therefore more players would be tired, drunk, frustrated etc.

I had also ordered a mountain of new poker books from Amazon and started to make my way through them. I read "The Theory of Poker" by David Sklansky, which is a very general but also very fundamental book, followed by "Holdem for Advanced Players" by Sklansky and Malmuth. This latter book is, I'm sure, an excellent resource, but I think I was both not ready for it and much of it did not really apply to the kind of poker I was playing on the internet (i.e. relatively low stakes and against weaker players than the type that the authors were used to playing against). It assumed that the reader was a very experienced and competent player and I should have realised this from the title before I bought it. Most of the ideas and concepts that it dealt with involved situation that occur infrequently - moves it suggested were mostly borderline plays to be used only when the conditions were right and they were the kind of moves that would turn and already profitable poker player into a slightly more profitable player if, and only if, used correctly. I started trying these kinds of plays too frequently and against the wrong type of opposition (most of the people that Sklansky plays against would be capable of laying down top pair to his raise with only a flush draw or would raise the turn as a semi-bluff and therefore would need to be either raised or called down, but the fact remains that against merely average players one can - and I was - win money by playing a very straight forward game. It turned out, therefore, that it was not only the case that I was probably not ready for the material in the book, conceptually, but that I didn't even need it yet.

My reading and misusing of the above book was not the only reason why my summer's poker did not go according to plan. In fact if I had only read that book and changed nothing else I would probably have minimised my losses to such that I would still now have the banbroll to be playing 3/6 (this is probably not the first hint that you may have had that things have not gone entirely to plan this summer - weeks of no post may have been a bit of a clue!)

My biggest mistake of the summer was deciding to move up from $3/6 to $5/10. Or maybe more crutially, not moving back down to 3/6 soon enough. Not only is there a big increase in the size of the bets and the size of the pots when going from 3/6/ to 5/10 there is a big increase in the skill of the players. Up to this point there had been only very small changes in people's ability as I had moved up the levels (all the way from $0.25/0.50 to $3/6). The majority of players were still weaker than me and the number of complete baffoons did not really decrease. At 5/10 however ther were a noticable number of very good players and a large number of the rest were also better than me.

My decision to move up to 5/10 was not entirely ill-advised. There is a very useful chapter in Matthew Hilger's book (Internet Texas Holdem) that deals with bankroll management and my bankroll was just about comfortable for the 5/10 limits. Playing at a level suitable for your bankroll is essential because everyone has bad runs of cards and needs enough capital to absorb these, but not matter how big your bankroll is, if you're not a winning player a a particular limit then you should quite obviously not be playing it. My mistake, therefore came in not realizing soon enough that I was not yet a winning player at 5/10 and moving back down to 3/6 before my bankroll took a beating.

My bankroll took a beating.

Not only was I too stubborn and bigheaded to accept that I wasn't ready for 5/10, I made the cardinal sin, which should possibly nominate me for the "Fish of the Year" award! I decided that in order to rebuild my bankroll I should play at the $10/20 limits. What a jerk!

My bankroll took another beating.

By this stage I was left with nothing like enough to carry on at these limits however stubborn I was going to be. So finally I got the message and moved back down the limits. Thankfully I hadn't completely exhausted my bankroll and in fact I still had more than I initially started with back in April, but the limits that I was able to play at now (which to be safe were around the £1/2 level) just weren't fun anymore. I'm not wishing to sound like an addicted gambler here, who once he's tasted the high stakes action he can't look back. It took me months of hard work to get to the point were the money I was earning was beginning to be significant. I was now in the position where I had to be just as pacient and work just as hard as before for about quarter of the hourly rate. It was going to take months more hard work to get back to where I was and right now I really didn't have the pacience .

It was time to take a break from poker...

Sunday, August 22, 2004

"Internet Texas Holdem" (ITH) 1st Anniversary

Again, appologies for the lack of recent posts. We still haven't got internet installed after our recent move.

As you may have gathered from the title of this post, today is the 1st Anniversary of www.internettexasholdem.com. I can't recommend this site strongly enough and for those of you who read my blog regularly and have not yet had a browse on this site, then shame on you!

The first poker book I bought, after a couple of days of fooling around on the 'play-money' tables, was "Internet Texas Holdem - Winning Strategies from an Internet Pro" by Matthew Hilger. This is an excellent book. He also set up ITH, the website, as a means of being able to answer questions about his book and as a forum for internet poker players. Over the last year the site has grown massively and yet it has still been able to maintain its incredible community and friendly atmosphere that is not even come close to by other poker forums (ahem: 2+2). The atmosphere aside, there are some extreemly expeirinced and talented players that regularly post on the site, offering strategy, hand examples, critique, and some great stories, including Matthew himself. There is enough information on that site alone for one to be able to become an extreemly acomplished poker player. If all this wasn't enough of a reason to visit the site, you can get his book for free by following various links on his site and opening a poker account at one of various online poker sites!

A recently added post on the forum(click here), looks back at one year of ITH.

My favorite post of all time is the one about "The Super-Duper System". For those of you less in the know, "Super System" by Doyle Brunson was one of the first really insightful books written by a poker professional and allowed many merely good players to become very sucessful professionals and paved the ways for many more intsructive poker books. For those of you who have played a bit of poker (especially internet poker), you will be familiar with some of the horrendous plays made by inexperienced players who then get horribly lucky to beat you on the last card. The Super-Duper System is a brief poker mannual for these kind of players. Even now when I read it, I end up in floods of tears.

Tonight, there is a huge tournament being held on Paradise Poker for active forum members of ITH. Because of our lack of internet at home and the firewall on the college network I've been running around like a headless chicken trying to find some way of being able to play in the tournament tonight. After trecking round most of the internet cafes in oxford which all close to early, I manged to install the software on one of the computers in the Graduate Common Room in college, which doesn't appear to be as fiercly protected as those in the undergrad room!

I'll let you know in due course how I do in tonight's tournament and I promise a full update on my last two month's poker exploits really soon (there's sure pleanty to tell!). In the meatime peaceout and roll with those badbeats!

Thursday, August 05, 2004

News Flash - I'm not dead!

Serious massive grovelling appologies for the lack of recent bloggage. I've got lots of excuses but none of them is particularly valid.

So, for the last month I've been mostly getting paid for socialising with American college students. It's a pretty tough job, but I guess some poor soul's gotta do it! Natrualy, I've been playing a fair bit of poker, but more on that later.

I've also just moved house (within Oxford). We were living in a very student-dense area which was pretty vibrant, but it also atracts some fairly dodgy characters. We were living right opposite a graveyard which saw a fair amount of drug related activities as well as attreacting some of the local Inidan and Pakistani gangs. In the 12 months we spent there we gave statements for what, if it were ever to go to court, would probaly be attempted murder right opposite our house. We also had riot police arrest someone in our front garden at 5 in the morning and to top things off I was started on twice by different taxt drivers - nice! Our new place is rediculusly nice - it just shouldn't be allowed for students to rent such a nice place. The only down side is the lack of late night eateries and drinkeries!

This is the second year that I've been involved with an American university's Oxford Sumer Program(me) and it really is a fantastic job (see bottom of post entitled "Results!" for a brief run-down of my 'responsablities). Yet again they've been a great bunch to hang out with and what's more they've let me take all their money playing poker with them!

I think I'll stick the poker stories from the last month in another post, so check back soon!