Moan moan moan moan moan

I feel like a stuck record. Or, to be more contemporary, a stuck CD.

I'm just having an horrendous run of beats in Omaha. I'm playing well, being bold when the situation demands it, taking down a fair few pots with bluffs and semi-bluffs; but when the money goes in for a big confrontation I simply can't have a hand hold up, nor hit a strong draw.

Last night I played for about two hours and finished down $24, after a series of hands where my flopped set (usually top set) got run down by straights or flushes. The one time the board paired, it gave a dude with higher two pair the full house - but I have to hold my hands up and say I should not have gone past the flop with that hand. Having the shrewdness and ability to fold a flopped bottom set is one thing that can separate good and bad PLO players, and I couldn't bring myself to do it, so I am not putting that one down to bad luck.

This morning's hour and a quarter (so far) has been galling. Basically, if I have the set then the board fails to pair and the other guy hits his draw, and if the other guy has the set then my monster draw misses. I'm down when I could easily be sitting at the table with over $250.

PLO can be a madening game. I am in that 'theoretical dollar' hell I used to drone on about; where my money is going into pots with an enormous positive EV; where mathematically I 'own' a huge proportion of the pot on the flop and/or turn; only to own none of the pot at all on the river.

I am just about managing to keep my head, while the hyper-aggressive player accross from me is having the amazing good fortune to have his sets hold up time and time again.

Enough of this. Time to get my hair cut...

I met a lumberjack

I didn't bring my sunglasses to work today, which was a tactical error; I place them under my monitor so I can see anybody coming up behind me.

Yesterday took a turn for the better. I checked my (real life!) bank balance, something I am horribly averse to doing, and found I had more than I expected. Knowing that my online bankroll will not need to be drawn upon again for a while gave me the determination and freedom to go home thinking 'Right, it's not money, it's just CHIPS, for keeping score. It's a GAME, and you are good at games.' The three quick pints after work with my mates didn't hurt either.

(A joke I made up on the spot: 'I was in the bar the other day and I met a lumberjack. I offered him a cigarette and he said "No thanks, I'm cutting down"' Geddit?)

And I did okay. I got nicely ahead in a PLO game through good, fearless play. Particularly pleasing was when I check-called flop and turn with top set that became nut full house, then bet or raised (I already forget) the river. Got called and won. Next hand, same opponent, I check-called flop and turn again with Ace high on a drawing sort of board, then bet the river quite big and he folded. It was a nice opportunity against an opponent hurting and scared from my previous hand.

That game broke up, unfortunately, so I played another for a while longer where I never really got any big hands but stayed aggressive and booked another (much smaller) win.

There was still time to lose yet again at heads-up limit. When I am beating an opponent because he folds to all my bets and raises, I really must learn to shut down in the odd hand where he calls or raises. Very simple, yet I can't put down top pair, reasonable kicker in those situations even when I know the guy has to have better. In heads-up I am developing a terrible case of 'non-believer', too proud to fold. Ironically, when I began, I used to fold more often than many of my opponents and I won hand over fist.

That's about it. Paul at tao of poker (curse this new blogger where I can't make links unless posting from my laptop) has a nice post about the types of screen names you come across. I am going to add a bloglist on the right any day now, to get round this problem. It won't be very long, as I will only be listing my idea of the creme de la creme of the blogs.

Back to screen names, mine is slightly sexually ambiguous I suppose, which does lead to the occasional person trying to chat me up. I doubt it does me much good though, especially as I like to chat quite a bit (about any old shit!) and that gives away my gender. On top of which, the pool of PLO players at my site and level is not huge so people tend to know most of the names. Which reminds me, I was actually quite chuffed by that comment I got on Wednesday from somebody saying they liked my play. Besides the flattery, it can be useful to know who respects you as a player. There was one chap ages ago who thought I was brilliant for some reason, which meant that I was able to relentlessly knock him off hands and out of pots because he feared me.

Hey, that actually makes me sound like a half-decent poker player!

Don't take your foot off the hose

So much for ‘The Dream’.

Since having a small winning day on Saturday, I have recorded 8 losses in 9 games, for a total loss of almost $300. This is shocking. To all those mathematicians, statisticians and probabiliticans who say that the outcome of hand doesn’t affect the outcome of the next, I say ‘Bollocks!’

My results never seem to follow a pattern of win, win, lose, win, lose, win, win, win, lose, lose, win and so on. It is always win win win win win, then a switch is flicked and it is lose lose lose lose lose. Don’t tell me that streaks don’t exist.

Okay, okay, I know I’m talking nonsense of some kind or another. But this does always happen; I can go hour upon hour without suffering a bad beat, and then they suddenly come in a big rush, like water backed up in a blocked hose. And I get drenched.

I may not have made the greatest game selection decisions over the last two nights. I played heads-up PLO (as discussed last time) and took a battering, even against the same player I beat previously. And last night, because I couldn’t find a game in ANY of my favourites, I sat in $50 No Limit Hold ‘Em. And I took another battering, $100 in less than two hours.

That was a weird game. Nobody would bet, nobody would raise more than one big blind pre-flop (except me), nobody appeared to bluff (except me), and nobody would actually bet their hand either, apart from the smallest possible bet size.

I couldn’t work it out at all, and it took me a little too long to realise that everybody wanted to slow-play to the nth degree, which cost me a few bucks.

Besides all that, I couldn’t get a break. My top two pair on the river made a ridiculous straight for a guy calling my bets with a total of six outs. And when I went all-in with JJ on a 567 (two spades) flop, hoping to get called by a draw or top pair or something, I got called by a guy with the spade draw and a gutshot. That actually made him a marginal favourite, so fair play to him; but losing coin tosses is even less fun when you then go onto Omaha and lose as a 9 to 1 favourite after monster raising the turn.

In short, its been rubbish rubbish rubbish. I don’t think I have played badly, but I shouldn’t have sat in the Hold ‘Em game and should have left it sooner.

I need a win desperately, but I must avoid my old habit of trying to ‘manufacture’ a win. Just keep playing, dude.

My ex is in town at the weekend. I will see her at a party Saturday night and then we should be spending most of Sunday together. I can’t wait to see her.

Self-flagellation

My two and a half week sojourn of solitude ends today. I don’t think I have made the best of it, particularly since Friday. I haven’t watched any DVDs – well, one – or read very much, or written very much. Poker has been good of course – but I have got a bit unfocussed over the last few days thanks to silly personal things.

Yesterday was a case in point, when I threw away a reasonable win at five card stud through complacency and a lack of patience and application. The wins at stud or heads-up are rarely, if ever, as exciting (eg as large!) as the PLO wins, and I have started to not treat those games with respect as a result. Which is ridiculous, because I want to WIN. Not to have fun and make fancy plays – well, okay, I do want to have fun as well – but to WIN. A ten buck win is infinitely preferable to a lazy, foolish, needless twenty buck loss.

Unless I want to force myself into playing higher limits, which I am loathe to do, then I have to regain my remorseless focus on grinding out profits. I intend to make my next session of five card stud incredibly tight. Ridiculously tight. People will still call me down, will still call bets on third and fourth when they cannot beat my board.

I read about ‘the Delta principle’ in somebody’s blog yesterday (sadly I forget which blog), which simply states that to beat a game you need to play differently to the other nine (or whatever) guys. In five card stud I think this is very true. With so much of your hand on display, so little hidden, it is possible to play ‘correctly’ quite a lot. But hardly anybody does, because that means extreme tightness. I drift into it myself, calling bets that I know I shouldn’t - and it is a compounding error because it is very hard to fold on the river in a game where people often (correctly) bet Ace or King high.

Well, ‘Delta principle’ by my side, I am going to embrace that extreme tightness tonight, or whenever I next play. And I am all but certain that if I can do it, if I can stop frittering bets on hopeful bets and hopeless calls, then the game will be very profitable.

That’s unless it is short-handed by the way. I find that five-handed or, better, four-handed, I do very very well in the game – way better than at a full table. Suddenly it seems to pay off to pay attention to the exposed and folded cards, it becomes easier to read hands, easier to value-bet or call down bluffs, easier to occasionally bluff.

Enough with the five card stud already!

So, I need a win. There hasn’t been a real enticing Omaha game for a few days, and my other games have gone badly for reasons discussed above. Yesterday continued the trend.

5 card stud: Blew back a decent win through impatience and fancy play syndrome.

Heads-up limit hold ‘em: Annoying. Played a weak guy. He got ahead early with a couple of big hands, such as flopping a straight when I had Aces. I battered him to get ahead myself in a few minutes, he caught a nice river to go back marginally in front and immediately left.

PLO Sit and Go: Fifth. Again. One guy had 2/3 the chips with five left. He raised from the button and with a semi-decent hand I decided it was time to show some fight and hopefully gather some chips. I re-raised pot, putting me virtually all-in. He called, and I flopped a decent straight draw, slightly better than a mere open-ender. He proved to have nothing on the flop, but hit a runner runner straight that didn’t join mine up, and that was that. I was a huge favourite, so that’s fine. I am down after ten or eleven of these $10+1 games. Not too concerned, but they certainly are nowhere near as easy as the $5 games.

Heads-up PLO: Yes, I tried a bit of this when I got home drunk. My notes told me this guy liked to show bluffs and was a reasonable player. I proceeded to batter him for a while with aggression and good starting hand selection. I was up about $30 (he sat with $20 initially) at one point, when he hit runner-runner flush versus my flopped trips to reverse the damage. I quit (wish I hadn’t had to) up about $7 in the end.

That foray into heads-up PLO has got me thinking. I believe I have a decent feel for heads-up PLO; I’ve been heads-up in a number of the sit and goes (although of course that is somewhat different) with reasonable success, and I spent an evening a few weeks ago dealing hands to myself and exploring how the game works one-on-one. So, I think I will play that as and when I get a chance, especially since the guy I was playing wasn’t a bad player but I felt well in control. One concern there is the rake; I will have to look closely at that in my next session.

And so on to ‘real life’. I got chatted up at the bar last night by a rather fit young blonde thing. However, she was rather drunk and also very young (I guess eighteen max) and didn’t seem like my type of person. And I was there to drink and talk rubbish with my mate, not leave him sitting there while I chatted to a girl. And besides, I am trying celibacy for a bit.

This morning I was very late for work, having stayed up ludicrously late and left the cleaning up of the house to the morning! I got a slight telling off, which is quite a stretch for my mild boss. I felt like ‘screw you, nobody tells me what to do!’ and started dreaming the dream again, even though my results and bankroll make it patently ludicrous.

I also felt a little bad about it, but mainly because I am a mess of a man. Disorganised, feckless, irresponsible, lazy, selfish, immature, self-indulgent and a master procrastinator. I would feel a lot better about myself if I could just muster the discipline to get out of bed on time and give up smoking. Those two small things would make quite a difference.

Weekend washout

What a washout of a weekend. I didn’t play as many hours as I’d like – only about twelve in total, which is poor for Friday night through all day Saturday and Sunday. And I came out almost even. Down seven dollars, to be precise.

Extraordinarily, the biggest factor in that was yet more losses at heads-up limit hold ‘em. I seem to have gone to pieces in that game, but the real blow was losing an astonishing fifty bucks to one player in about an hour. I felt all the way through that he wasn’t anything special, but I simply could not win a showdown to save my life; the stats (which I haven’t really looked at in heads-up before) showed that I won only 23% of hands. Basically, when there was a showdown, he won it – if I pushed middle pair he would have top, weak kicker; if I had top pair good kicker he would two-pair up; if he had a straight draw he would hit it, and so on.

It was quite an eye-opener. And alarming, because even taking that session out of the equation I have clearly stopped winning money at heads-up after doing so well early on. I think I have to be more ruthless and predatory in terms of opponent selection, and in getting out when I am losing to somebody who is as good as me or better. I need to play doofuses, and only doofuses. I am not even up $2 an hour after twenty hours (about 3000 hands) of this stuff!

Other high or lowlights of the weekend: I played three $10+1 PLO sit and goes, and came second in two of them. I was on course for my first win at that level when I went all-in (with a fractional chip disadvantage) on the turn with the broadway straight. My opponent made what I consider to be a terrible, terrible call with only the flush draw – even if I had been bluffing or semi-bluffing his hand would likely have needed to hit something – but the spade came and I was runner-up again.

Five card stud went well, thanks largely to one game winding up short-handed with one idiot bluffing off his chips. And PLO, well I had a losing session (fifty bucks) yesterday, after eleven straight winners. I am up $19 an hour in that game over 24 hours since I made my deposit at the end of August. I cannot stress enough how the major factor in that fantastic result is the game selection, game selection, game selection. I am no great shakes as an Omaha player, but I am only sitting down at the moment when the game looks soft and suitable. Every time I don’t sit, because the game is too wild, or has too many strong aggressors in it, I am contributing to the growth of my bankroll, by not blowing chunks of it off against better players.

Try it; when ‘your’ game looks tough, or is short-handed when you like ring or vice versa, or features a couple players you fear, don’t just sit down anyway figuring you could still do okay. Of course you could, might, maybe; but go play something else instead if you have the poker itch. Play smaller, or – even better - experiment with a new game. Finally learning to NOT play just because Omaha is ‘my’ game is the best thing I have done in poker.

An interesting experience: I watched a $10/$20 blinds PLO game for a little while on Friday night. That’s a pretty big game. I saw one chap bet flop, bet turn and call a smallish raise, then bet the $1500 size of the pot on the river, with a board showing straight and flush draws. His opponent took most of his time, then folded. The aggressor showed his hand of nothing but bottom pair… What struck me about all this was that his opponent (who wasn’t exactly impressed) is a good strong player who used to run all over the low-blinds games with fearlessness and aggression. The point being, there is always somebody higher up the food chain than you, there is always a bigger shark out there. What also impressed me was the beaten guy left the game just a few minutes later, rather than steam and try to get the other guy back.

And finally, I did buy an MP3 player on Friday after work. Only a cheap, small memory model for £50, but I already love it and am a convert. I wasn’t sure how much I would use one, but something so small and convenient which doesn’t skip no matter how much you move around – what’s not to love? I think it might reawaken my musical tastebuds. And you know what? I wouldn’t have bought it if it were not for winning at poker. Sweet.