Multiplicity

I still can't shake this damn throat, coughing, tiredness virus. No doubt continued smoking doesn't help, but that's not my fault, its down to the toothpick manufacturers.

Tuesday night I recorded a small win, two-tabling a 6-max and full table, and coming nowhere in a multi at the same time. Last night I enjoyed a pretty stellar hour before going out; two 6-max tables at once for the first time, yielding $87 very nicely.I really cannot understand why I have spent so long playing just one table. Perhaps I wasn't adept enough at the game in the past, but now I have found playing two PLO cash games to be no problem at all - including two short-handed tables last night for the first time. Its a tiny, meaningless sample so far, but the hourly rate has been huge.

There are lots of factors in play; I have certainly run good, but I also believe the two-tabling makes it easier for me to fold marginal hands pre-flop and avoid loose, cheap flop calls. Meanwhile, the potential negative of not being aware of one's opponents is mitigated greatly by the notes that I have on many players now, and the fact that two 6-max tables only give me one more opponent than a single full ring game.

Actually, coincidentally there is a longish thread on the 2+2 PLO forum right now about multi-tabling. Varioius people claim to be playing three, five, eight, ten, fifteen tables at once. At first I wondered if some of them were joking, but as the discussion continues that seems not to be the case. I don't think I could play such large numbers of tables, and I am not sure I would want to. To play anything more than four tables would neccessitate, I believe, an approach of doing nothing but nut-peddling. Hitting a flop hard and betting hell out of it, otherwise getting straight out of the pot. That means leaving a lot of money on each table, and - importantly to me, at least - not having a whole lot of fun. I enjoy my poker, and would still want to enjoy it even if I were doing a multi-tabling pro approach, so I can't imagine playing so many tables that I cease to be able to bluff-raise that guy but fold cheaply to this guy, and so on.

Still, two-tabling proved so easily-manageable that I will certainly add a third table as and when there is a suitable one to play - table selection can't go out of the window just because you're playing loads of them, after all. A good point raised in that 2+2 discussion, by the way, was that Omaha is an excellent multi-tabling game because it is so much slower than Hold 'Em.

The sit and goes have gone more or less out the window this week. My stats after 30 of the $10+1 tourneys show 14 finishes in 4th or 5th. Yes, FOURTEEN. Turning just four or five of those into cashes would have made the thirty tourneys a reasonably worthwhile investment (given the very low volatility I experience in them). Maybe I need to be prepared to go out early a little more often. However, I still feel that I have experienced a disproportionate number of bad beats when just outside the money, lately. I'll play them here and there and keep building up the sample size. I had a strange itch to play some limit Hold 'Em the other day, but it passed. Right now, having gotten to grips with 6-max and begun multi-tabling, I cannot see any reason to play anything but god's own poker game, Pot Limit Omaha.

And in other news... Boy Genius is probably my favourite poker blogger, insofar as his blog is about poker at all. He slated Andie MacDowell the other day, sadly. I used to be really into her; I think it was the accent as much as anything else. Anyway, she gets a lot of unfair stick as an actress; for heaven's sake, haven't these people seen 'Sex, Lies and Videotape'? Don't they agree that 'Groundhog Day' is a modern classic? She can't be that bad of an actress.I'm house and cat-sitting for my friend again tonight. Crack open the cigarettes and fire up the laptop.

Push and shove

If push came to shove, I believe I could support myself with my poker as long as I played two tables at once (or more, obviously). I picture doing it in two hour shifts with breaks in between, because it would be quite intensive.

So, I tried it last night as an experiment. I had a 6-max table, a full ring game, and then a sit and go as well for about half the time. It was indeed quite intensive, but then I didn’t stay true to the experiment entirely because I also had two instant message chats going on as well. Without the chat, I like to think I wouldn’t have kept the tables waiting a little too often by being slow to act – I hate being guilty of that.

It was an interesting exercise. I did feel at times that I had to make some decisions on the fly, particularly at the full table and the sit and go; naturally I was focussed most on the 6-max game because I played more hands there. A positive effect was that I found myself less emotionally involved in the outcomes of each hand on each table, because there was always something else going on at the same time. I became more focussed on my decisions and actions than on the results, simply as a natural effect of the overlapping action.

Of course, it is easy to say that I was less emotionally involved – because I was winning. Let’s see how level-headed I am when I am down a buy-in at two tables at once! But last night, no trouble. I got ahead on both tables quite quickly for moderate amounts, never really pushed on at the full table, but hit a lovely nut full house versus two other full houses in the 6-max game. The blemish came in the sit and go, where I played really well but came in 6th. Twice I was 2-1 favourite in huge confrontations on the flop, twice I lost; the first prevented me becoming a really big stack and eliminating a player, the second eliminated me. I’m really having a tough time having a hand stand up in these tournaments, but I’ll gladly take the beats there (instead of the cash games) every time.

I made $107 in my two hours, which was very satisfying. Clearly I should quite my job and go professional immediately. (On a more serious note, if I did not have to repeatedly pillage my bankroll then I would have it at a level where I would half consider that).

Anyway, a pleasant evening, but today I am starting to feel ill again. I don’t think I have ever quite shaken off the virus I had a couple of weeks ago. It meant that today at lunch I didn’t buy any cigarettes, and spent the money on a liberal leftish magazine instead. Maybe a reaction to reading Lord Geznikor’s latest post. There seem to be quite a few Republican bloggers, which can seem a little surprising here in Britain where there is a widespread perception that only morons vote for Bush.

Mind you, who are we to talk? We have twice elected a Prime Minister who is not only devoid of principles and integrity, but also embodies the betrayal of the ideology and history of his political party.

Toothpicks taste bad

A lax week of blogging. I’ve become a little more circumspect about updating at work, and had a lot of nights out.

Actually, I also don’t have a lot to say. Or, I feel that a lot of what I say is boring crap. Mind you, I write this primarily for myself. So for me, reading back in six months’ time, it might be interesting to record that I got a spot on my face last week, for the first time in at least a decade. Or that I continue to half-heartedly try to quit smoking. I have been managing 36 to 48 hours before cracking. If only so many of my friends didn’t smoke, and if only chewing toothpicks didn’t taste so bad.

I didn’t play many hours at all last week due to all the going out and being tired. Got eight hours in over the weekend, the usual thing of playing 6-max PLO with a sit and go as second table. Really I ought to play TWO cash tables (assuming decent line-ups) plus a sit and go. Anyway, I made seventy bucks over the eight and a bit hours, which is okayish. I took a fair few bad beats, although never in huge pots, and made two or three crying calls which were losers – as I knew they were. I really do need to trust my reads a little more; I call a little too often just because the pot is big, and fold to very suspicious bets too often, as I mentioned in one of my recent posts.

I’m not doing too bad though, the hourly PLO rate is still very respectable given the size of game I play ($50 max, 50c big blind – I don’t like the sound of these games where you only get 50 big blinds). The sit and goes make me a little extra, although not as much as I’d like at present. I have had a ridiculous amount of bubble finishes lately, and am still trying to decide if that is due to pushing too hard with four left (folding into the money is more viable for $9 profit than it was at the $5+1 level!), or letting myself get too short-stacked too often, or just a bad run of luck.

Just a quick mention of last night’s cash session. There was this one girl playing who, some time ago, I educated out of buying in with a tiny stack. Silly of me, but I’m a sucker for women. Last night she bought in for the maximum, and proceeded to win hand after hand after hand, hitting the nuts repeatedly on flop or turn, and making some very slim river hits (including an irritating – although not too costly – couple against me). She had her $50 up to something like $250 pretty quickly. I was salivating, because one or two things had made it clear she still wasn’t that good a player. I just had to wait.

Sure enough, she ended up donating a large pot to me which effectively formed my entire profit from the session, and when I quit for bed she was back down to about $100. I like her, she’s spunky, and we had a little dubious chat going on about her caning and whipping me.

Which brings me neatly to an update on the quest for a shit-hot woman. So far, so bad, but I am chatting to a very, very attractive nurse on that dating site, who lives and works in my town. She’s being quite ‘hard-to-get’ and I’m trying to strike the balance between ‘pursuing’ and being ‘cool’. It is so nice not to be too hung up about all this anyway; there was a time I’d be getting obsessed with girls and having all that angst-ridden self-loathing any time a bird didn’t fancy me.

Postscript: I must take a look at the fact that my hourly rate at 6-max is actually somewhat lower than my overall rate. Am I being seduced by the pleasure of the game, even though it is not as lucrative? I don’t have enough hours yet to make too firm a judgement, but I clearly must resume at least looking at the lineups on the full tables.