Hellmuth and home games

[Please note: If you are bored by the logging of poker sessions, there is some wider-ranging stuff following the breakdown of last night’s play. ]

I got back on track. Four hours of poker for a profit of eighty-five bucks, which is fine by me. If I averaged out at that win-rate over a long period, then my ‘real’ job would not see me for dust.

It was a mixed bag of a session. First I played a little micro-limit five card stud, out of curiosity and while waiting for my PLO seat. I lost a couple of dollars, purely and simply because I called some hands deliberately with no hope whatever of winning, for information. Not information on specific players, but just to get a bead on what kinds of hands people in this game will play and bet. Conclusion: 50 cent/1 dollar five card stud looks like a monumentally easy game to beat, so if those are your sort of stakes then I suggest you take a break from the variance of Hold ‘Em and make some easy dollars.

Got my Omaha seat, and couldn’t get anywhere. I lost about half my buyin when I made top two on the flop, with second-nut flush draw also, and got check-called by a guy with bottom set. I checked the river through, and overall this fella failed to make as much money as he might out of me, while allowing me every chance to hit the quarter of the deck that would have seen me bust him.

During the PLO game I began a $10 multitable tourney with 383 runners. I quit the Omaha (seven bucks down) at the second break to focus on the tourney, with 150 players left and a reasonable stack.

I ended up cashing in 37th spot. (Yes, paying 40 players out of 383 seems too many to me as well!) I was very happy with my game, given that I saw AK once to win a coin-flip, AQ a couple of times, and no pocket pair higher than 6’s in the entire event. However, I cracked up in the end in almost the same way I wrote about yesterday.

The excuse, not that I am allowing myself one, is that I got a horrible beat. I managed to get A6 all-in versus my AT, and was looking good for a genuinely threatening stack, until a 6 came on the river. Even so, I absolutely did not need to make the same mistake as the previous day, trying a foolhardy blind-steal from early position with a dreadful hand, which resulted in the A6 guy busting me with AJ versus my K8.

Once again I went blind-stealing, unarmed, when I still had enough of a stack to wait for a real double through opportunity.

Never mind, back to PLO despite encroaching tiredness, where a couple of nut flushes enabled me to quit nearly ninety bucks winners and go to bed a happy poker player.

So, wider ranging poker talk now ensues as promised.

I bought Phil Hellmuth’s book last night after work. I was waiting for the bus and suddenly had a strong urge to have a quarterpounder and a read. One of my favourite pastimes, as it feels like everything else melts away and world stops for the period while I eat salty, addictive fast food and pore over a book or magazine or Spiderman comic.

So Phil’s book was there in ‘Borders’ and I just couldn’t resist. Earliest impressions were along the usual lines of ‘wow, this guy really doesn’t believe in under-selling himself’, and I was similarly amused by the way the usually low-key Andy Glazer really self-hyped the book in his introduction. For example, Glazer advises reading the book section by section as you work on your game, even though ‘you might enjoy ‘Play Poker Like the Pros’ so much that you want to read it cover to cover from the first moment you pick it up’. Well gee-whiz Andy, I might also want to shave off your horrible little beard, who knows?

Anyways, reading the book so far has been good for me. Somehow it has enthused me to get back into playing other games from time to time; maybe a little short-handed limit Hold ‘Em, a dash of stud, a sprinkling of split games. I play one game so much that I know a lot of the situations inside out and know the correct move a lot of the time.

In fact, I think the biggest thing the book awoke in me was a realisation of how little hand-reading I do. PLO doesn’t always require a lot of that, not at the level I play. If you flop something like top set with a flush draw or the nut straight plus two pair or any other such multi-angle hand… well, you really don’t care what cards your opponent is holding.

Playing something else, like the little jaunt into five card Stud last night, got me thinking again, got me trying to remember exposed cards, got me thinking about position in a different type of game, got me trying to add up betting actions on multiple streets, just made me feel a lot more awake in the game. All of those things must be good for the brain, for the card-sense, for profitability in more games over time and so on. And just as importantly, it was fun.

Frankly, a large number of my PLO opponents never really give me a tough decision - and while this is why I am able to win pretty consistently, it probably also makes me a little ‘flabby’. I’m like a big, blubbery, lazy frog sitting on its fat arse while insects fly happily into its open mouth. Its sometimes more fun to be a crouching tiger hidden dragon type of animal, making darting moves and using stealthy cunning to capture the prey. Uh, like, whatever…

So, that’s the Hellmuth book so far. Its cool how a poker book (or blog) can affect your game in the most unintentional ways. I haven’t gotten to the pot limit Omaha section yet, but it would be nice to find one real gold nugget in there.

In other news, my old home-game buddy popped up in the chatbox last night and should be back in town soon. Hopefully we will get the game going again. It is always just a £5 or £10 one-table NLHE tournament, with six to eight players. I always enjoyed it immensely, as playing face to face is always a pleasant change from the online game. Lots of banter, smoking, hilariously bad play, arguing and fun. Plus, now I no longer have to leave early to keep a girl happy!

Finally, I still keep trawling the blogs and enjoying it. Matt is a first-year pro who certainly doesn’t lack confidence in his game, nor contempt for many of his opponents! I don’t entirely like his trash-talking approach. In fact I hate it. Not for strategic reasons, but simply because I don’t believe in treating people that way. I’m not sure its consistent to lambast people in your blog because they reply with homophobic insults, if you think it is okay to make jibes about their mother as part of a cynical gameplan.

Still, it’s an excellent read and included one line about hand-reading that went ‘ping!’ inside my head. Well worth a look.

I'm off to the seaside for the weekend with two old mates. Mucho fun but - gnash! - no poker. When will I next get to take on a load of weekend players?