My Results

I keep finding three chips in my pocket that I came away with from The Vic last week.  A reminder to actually write down what happened on my first visit there, I suppose.

I usually play the 1 rebuy tournament at Gutshot if I'm in London on a Wednesday but the last week in each month is now the Team Gutshot satellite.  I didn't qualify for any bonus chips (awarded for playing regularly or finishing on a final table) so essentially I'd be starting with a crippled stack

So last Wednesday I went to the Vic and played their £30+£3 freezeout.  I handed over two twenty pound notes and got a £5 and two £1 chips as change.  Naturally, I never cashed these in before I left.

Although I did actually forget I had them after I busted out, I may well have bottled it anyway for the sake of £7, hoping that I'd go again soon, get more change in chips and eventually have something resembling an amount worth cashing in.  Not that I'd feel quite right about even bothering to cash in £7 of chips there.  It's a very swanky joint, considering it basically occupies the attic above Woolworths on a street of tower blocks.  Too much for me - I ran straight back outside after registering and found a nice cosy McDonalds.

With their scratchcard promo I won a McChicken Sandwich for next time.  You have to scratch off two panels from four to win (a 1 in 6 chance of winning, assuming there are only two symbols the same).  The card I won with had the matching symbols behind boxes 3 and 4, as did another I lost on.  I've since seen another three scratchcards which all had their winning symbols behind doors 3 and 4, but have just decided to try to lose a stone before Vegas (let's see how long it lasts this time) so probably won't get chance to see whether this is always the case.  I make it 1295-1 to find five out of five with the winning symbols all in the same position.  I'm sure Claire will correct my maths if I'm wrong...

Back to The Vic.  Back through the revolving door, and God forbid you push the door round yourself - they have someone to do that for you (this place is wasted on me - all I could think is how much they would save by investing in a door motor).  Back upstairs to try and find the other half of the cardroom.  The one I'd found, and registered at, had tables with numbers nowhere close to the one I was meant to be sitting at.  It turns out there's more tables on the second floor, where I'd accidentally stumbled earlier to be greeted with stares of "you don't really know where you're going, do you?" from someone in some kind of uniform at the top of the stairs.  Ha!  Turns out I was meant to be there after all.

Regular tournaments are limited to 72 players.  That's 8 tables of 9.  The worst way I can think of to describe the shape of the tables is like a 50p coin, but with two more sides.  The correct word, I always thought, was nonagon, although I've since discovered that enneagon is also acceptable.  I'd never heard that word before, and I've also never seen a poker table like these.  Not only were they an unusual polygon, they also had chip racks embedded in which everyone was using.  Stacking and riffling chips was possible, but I didn't want to be the only one doing it.

The tournament kicked off very slowly, with 1500 chips each and 25/25 blinds, moving to 25/50 and 50/100 after 20 minutes.  Then it went mental, taking nearly ten minutes to remove all the 25 chips (I nearly said "green chips" instinctively, but of course they were some other colour that I can't remember, but probably different to anywhere else) without stopping the clock and jumping straight to 100/200 for the remaining half a level then on to 200/400.

Double, double, double them blinds.  And so the crap shoot began, and I stayed lucky long enough to make it down to the last two tables, along the way apparently forcing 99 to fold on a very low board when I moved in with my pocket 8s.  KQo called me with his overcards though.  Can't ask for much more.

Then with blinds at 600/1200, rising to 800/1600 within a couple of hands, and a stack that had dwindled to 4900 after a couple of rounds with no opportunities, I felt I needed to push with any two cards when it was folded around to my small blind.  For Harrington fans, my M is less than 3, and with 14 players remaining, the average stack of 7,700 was still in the red zone.  I ended up in very bad shape with my Q2 racing against QT and not finding the miracle it needed.  The poker in this tournament was long gone, and I didn't quite get lucky enough.

And they're still looking after another seven quid of mine.

Exhausted!  Took advantage of daylight savings time and got up at 7am to start playing as many multi-table tournaments on Empire Poker as I possibly could before I dropped dead.  Discovered the hard way that Empire doesn't allow more than six tables to be open at a time (I'm sure it used to be 10..). In the end, I played 29, cashed in 7 and walked away with a profit of $131.

More importantly, though, I racked up 77 regular VIP points and 841 bonus points (29 squared!).  If I'd really tried I think I could have squeezed in maybe three more tournaments, but it's not a bad effort.

Seven or eight more days like that and I'm in the Royal Flush Club!

I really don't want to say this.  I'm still not completely sure I believe it.  But the figures look good - there is a very real chance that I can actually beat the $2/$4 game on PokerRoom now, and for a decent rate too.  There have been two monster bonuses the last couple of months - $250 and $500 to mark the launch of their Silver Room and Gold Room programs respectively.  This has given me a much bigger sample to look at than any of the Party Poker bonuses I've played, and then posted up the mindnumbing stats.

Here are the equally mindnumbing stats from my last two months grinding PokerRoom.  I've really had to guess at how long I spent playing in total, sometimes I only played two tables, but usually, and particularly the past few weeks, I played four at a time.

Hands played:  9140      (for 7500 FPPs)
Hours played:  132.6     (approx 40 man hours)
Rake paid:     $796.00   (they make $46.00 from my action)
Amount won:    $827.60   (2.26 BB per 100 hands)
Win rate:      $20.69/hr
Bonus awarded: $750.00
Rate w/bonus:  $39.44/hr

Now, if you don't mind me saying so, this is bloody good!  I've made more than two big bets per 100 hands in a sample size of over 9000 hands.  Not a massive sample by any means, but big enough to suggest to me that, even if I did run pretty hot towards the end, I could turn a steady profit here.  Before this, I have 13,000 hands logged from PokerRoom $2/$4 and ran at a a loss of $168 (0.33BB per 100 hands).  The deposit bonuses more than made up for this, but it didn't leave me with a great hourly rate.  I don't know how significant this really is, but I'm staring at a losing record before the summer and a winning record since I got back from four weeks in Vegas...

Here's the vitals.

Vol. Put $ In Pot:       15.97%
Pre-flop Raise:           9.77%
Post-flop Aggression:     3.35
Won $ When Saw Flop:     38.62%
Went to Showdown:        30.72%
Won $ At Showdown:       57.41%
Folded SB to Steal:      87.76%
Folded BB to Steal:      55.92%
Attempt to Steal Blinds: 36.30%

I won more with KK than with AA, even though I had it fewer times, and my worst losing hand was AQo ($76 lost in 84 hands).  I was profitable with KQo to the tune of 50 cents.  Still room for improvement then...

Only problem is PokerRoom have already stopped American players depositing, and in less than two weeks they'll be blocked from playing completely.  Even if the games are still suited to my style with whatever players remain (I still don't feel confident enough to call the games "soft" with any certainty), four-tabling there is not going to be possible very often.  I think it might be time to try PokerStars again and see how badly I get my arse kicked on there now.

Here's the thing with tournaments.

Played 10, cashed once.  Net profit $386.

A terrible record, but a nice result.  I ran sooooo cold to start and wasn't getting anywhere.  I'd already given up - for the second time today.  The first time saw me heading down to McDonalds to be comforted by a Big Tasty and a BLT Deli Sandwich. The diet resumes tomorrow in theory, so I'm allowed a little something with my burger....

I'd decided that the $10 rebuy would be the last I'd play, even though I'd planned on doing a whole lot more (because of the way bonus VIP points are given on Empire, they increase exponentially the more tournaments you play in a single day).  I'd also been playing a few $6.50 turbos on PokerStars, backed into 4th place (4 get paid) once and came nowhere near on the rest of them.  Nothing had gone my way.

I was in this rebuy for $40 - two goes at the rebuy bug to top up my stack without going broke and an add on after the first hour.  That gave me a little bit less than an average stack at the break, but it was plenty to play with.  The top 20 from 190 were getting at least $70 back, but I was over $300 in the hole and really needed 7th place to get even on the day.  It's a funny old game - I ended up outlasting 187 non-Americans before busting out 3rd.

For a $40 investment, not bad at all.  It only takes one good hit to swing you back into profit in multi-table tournaments, which of course I already knew it's just nice to see it happen once in a while.  And I should be a hundred or so VIP points closer to being able to get some Empire Poker junk too.

Party Poker have cancelled virtually all of their guaranteed prize pool tournaments.  That includes the Sunday Million, which tonight was replaced by a $530 tournament with no guaratee.  The actual prize pool was $85,000.  They had 170 players.  The $215 Sunday event on PokerStars, on the other hand, is still going strong.  6157 players turned up, putting over $1.2m in the pot - I think this is a record!

The Party Poker lobby stopped reporting their total number of players connected after they shut down for the big American boot-off on Friday. PokerSiteScout says Stars has about three times as many players right now though.

It's time for Party Poker's occasional, but always welcome, $100 deposit bonus. I played this in almost exactly the same way to the last one, so let's see how it compares, shall we?

Hands played:  1474 (for 1000 raked hands)
Hours played:  20.1 (approx 10 hours, playing 2 tables)
Rake paid:     $54.75
Amount won:    $35.87 (1.22 BB per 100 hands)
Win rate:      $3.59/hr
Bonus awarded: $100
Rate w/ bonus: $13.59/hr

Always good to see Party Poker losing money. They lost $45.25 here.

My win rate is almost half what it was last time, but I had three horrendous beats which I copied the hand histories of, determined to write up into a ranty blog entry. But then I thought better of it, you'll be glad to hear. Each time I lost with a very strong, but still second best, hand and for such monster vs monster situations to happen three times so close together was unusual. If I look back and think there might be something worth talking about, other than just my rotten luck, I may still post them. The poorer win rate shows just how much bonuses rock though - overall I only dropped from $15.98/hr to $13.59/hr - so not huge bucks but nothing to be sneezed at when I can be doing it at the same time as clearing the crud from my email inbox, or coordinating a server reboot.

Non-geeks may look no further.

Vol. Put $ In Pot:       15.94%
Pre-flop Raise:           9.90%
Post-flop Aggression:     2.93
Won $ When Saw Flop:     37.97%
Went to Showdown:        29.70%
Won $ At Showdown:       50.63%
Folded SB to Steal:      92.31%
Folded BB to Steal:      62.50%
Attempt to Steal Blinds: 35.62%

So compared to last time, I saw slightly more showdowns (29.70% vs 26.35%) but won at showdown quite a lot less (50.63% vs 63.01%).  Last time I noted that I may not be paying enough river bets, but my win rate was much better then.  Maybe this was just the cards - nothing can be proved from a 1500 hand sample size.  I don't really even know why I post these stats... maybe somebody finds them interesting!