My Results

It appears that I'm doing somewhat better than I expected at no limit ring games.  This really is the first time I've tested myself over more hands than I needed to play to clear a particular bonus or to gain a particular membership level.  After nearly 6000 hands, I've been beating $50 NL on Poker Stars for just over $8 for every 100 hands.  Not too shabby at all.

Of course this started when I had a bonus to clear.  I still had about 1400 points left to earn towards the 1500 I needed to unlock a $150 bonus on Stars.  The bonuses now have an expiry date and I just couldn't see myself clearing it before June playing $12 turbo sit-and-gos.  $1 in tournament fees is 5 player points, so that'd be nearly 300 tournaments.

I started off by trying their $25 NL as I'd done OK at this level clearing Party Poker bonuses in the past.  It didn't take long to realise that you earn virtually no FPPs at this level.  $50 NL still doesn't generate the abundance of rake (and hence the freely flowing frequent player points) that you get from $2/$4 or $3/$6, but the last time I played fixed limit at these levels I was constantly frustrated.  I felt I was playing OK, but the game on Stars was tough and I wasn't good enough to beat the rake.  I maintained Gold Star status for a few months, lost a few hundred dollars but earned enough points to get a jacket I didn't really need and couple of hundred quid to spend at Amazon.  About even, obviously.

I'd also expected the no limit tables on Stars to be tough, but so far so good.  I've now hit the $500 profit milestone.  The graph from Poker Grapher uses my Poker Tracker database, which treats one big bet as twice the big blind amount.  So with $0.25/$0.50 blinds, the scale on this graph is 1 BB = $1.

It took two weeks to get here, and even though I finally cleared the bonus a few days ago I decided to keep playing as it felt like I'd fallen into a groove playing four tables at this level.  A good, winning groove at that.  I could get a rhythm going with up to 8 tables at $2/$4 but it was often be painful.  Literally.  If a session turned bad quickly I'd start to cramp up.  That just hasn't happened (so far) playing no limit.

It's still not a massive sample size but the graph direction is definitely reassuring.  I know there's room for improvement.  I'm going to find it and I've already spotted some pretty big mistakes.  For example, I knew pocket kings was no good to a fifth raise pre-flop, but I had to prove I was right.  Was the satisfaction of being right worth more than the $30 I lost?  Not quite.  It took nearly 400 hands (on average) to win that back.

But now I have a target, although obviously it if all goes tits up there's a chance I'll never write about it again.  If nobody has coined the phrase "blogger's discretion" yet, I want to be the first.  I'd like to think I'll stay on top of this one and in fact the timing works out just nicely.

Providing things stay good at this level, I'll move up in stakes once I've won $2000. I want to be comfortable playing $100 NL by the time I go to Vegas in July.

I'm sticking with $50 NL on Stars for as long as there are no bonuses I need to play anywhere else.  If a juicy reload comes along then I'll probably stop to play that through instead, but I'm hoping that Stars can be my home for a long time to come.

I decided to try something different while I contemplated my retirement from Gutshot's cash game with a perfect record.  So I went to The Vic instead.  Sitting proud on top of Argos - among all the retail space in Las Vegas, I can't think of a one casino that is connected to a catalogue store - The Vic boasts that it is "open from 11am to play on the slots".  If you need to gamble earlier in the morning - maybe to try to win enough to buy breakfast - a motorway service station is about your only option still.

38 players. It was a quiet night with a travelling contingent of regulars apparently in Manchester for the GUKPTK.  9 spots paid. Yes, they really did pay 23% of the field.  9 get paid here whether there's 38 or 72 players.  At least it goes some way to offsetting the variance in this crapshoot of a tournament that you get for £50. 

The blinds double every 20 minutes right up to 200/400, before finally slowing down a little but by the time it's at 300/600 it doesn't really matter.  The average stack for this level was only about 4000.

So I had to get lucky, and the way I got lucky was to somehow survive to the final two tables without really seeing any cards worth noting, having much of the garbage I threw away making monsters and dumping marginal hands that appeared to be way behind but in fact were winners.

6 limp, and only I fold with my 23o.  Of course it would have made a full house on a 3342 board, with plenty of action from pocket tens and a J7 who hung around long enough to catch top pair on the river.  Later, my 88 looked like nothing on a K9x board with a bet and a call ahead of me, but not only was I in front (against ace-high and a flush draw) but the turn brought another 8 and the river gave me what would have been quads.  You would think the crappy hands in that pot would never pay me off, but I just can't be sure.

Down to two tables with still not many more chips than I started with, I picked up two decent pots by moving all in against a raiser and apparently having just enough to take it down uncontested both times.  Then I just blinked a couple of times while nine other players busted very quickly.  I'd only showed one hand (AK all in against another AK) the whole game right up to when I went out - obviously I didn't win, or I'd have said by now!

At the final table, three big stacks almost had enough to see flops and stuff.  Nobody managed to catch up, so these are the prizes I was actually playing for.

9th £60
8th £80
7th £100
6th £110
5th £150
4th £190

Only £10 more for 6th place than 7th, even though the bottom three prizes go up by £20 a time?  Obviously, once I'd spotted that 6th place was getting stiffed, my fate was sealed.

The perceived greatness of king-jack offsuit was all I needed to see to take a gamble after being whittled down to my last 2000.  I ended up in about as good shape as I could hope for, drawing live against A2 and AQ with an added bonus of 1200 in dead money from the big blind.

I'd not helped myself by making a super-weak fold with A8s when I should have pushed with 9 players left, simply because one of the short stacks would be forced all in next hand.  In fact he doubled up, and the ghost of Dan Harrington lingered as I walked home.  He was waving a little flag that said "first in vigorish" and kept asking what my M was.  I wanted to punch him, but he was a ghost.  Also a ghost of somebody who isn't actually dead.

£110 wasn't all I won tonight though... must be on a roll.

Not yet anyway

I played a satellite last night at Gutshot for the Party Poker World Open, one of those six handed made-for-TV efforts that wishes it was Late Night Poker.  I lost one race out of one, my AK not getting there against 77 and that was that.  9th out of 20.

The signs weren't good for this one anyway.  It was Friday the 13th and I was 13th to sign up.  Yes, there was a player called Jason.  No, he didn't have a mask.  (Edit: Jason came 2nd; it was Saturday 14th by then though).  It started at 11pm, and the fact that these numbers even got me thinking about that awful Jim Carrey movie is a very bad thing: 11pm is 23:00.  But wait, there's more.  23 is 13 plus 10, and ten is the number of players starting at each table.  The televised heat starts on the 27th of April: 27/4, and twenty seven minus four is twenty sodding three.  We started with 3000 chips, the levels were 25 minutes long and my coffee cost £1.50 and tasted like bleach.  What was my point?

As it was a late start, I spent the first part of the evening playing the £25-£50 pot limit game, and I'm now eight for eight in winning sessions and, on average, up £60 per session.  I may consider retiring with my perfect record.  It's only about a month until I'm finished working in London on a regular basis, and I'll probably have to work in the evening the next few times I come down anyway, so I can easily walk away undefeated.

On the other hand, Vegas is T-99.  And I know nobody will get this, but what the hell...

Double digits now, but it's still over three months away.  What am I going to do meantime?  I'm still running hot at Gutshot.  A good chunk of my £54 profit last night came from my AK top pair not losing to a massive 62s flush draw.  I think he'd paired the 2 as well, so it's obviously impossible to fold in that spot.  Yes, I did raise pre-flop.  How can I quit a game like that, even if I do owe it money?

Just time for a quick quiz for wannabe poker dealers:

Q: At showdown, the board reads 444Q2 and there's no flush possibility.  Two players flip over K9 and K6 respectively.  Do you:

a) Push the pot towards K9.  The board didn't help either hand, so the best hand pre-flop must be the winner.

b) Stare at the board until someone says either "nine plays" or "split pot".  It's their money: they're paying attention so you don't have to.

c) Anticipate the possibility of a split from the texture of the board.  Read the damn hands like you're meant to and chop up the pot before anyone gets chance to tell you how to do your job.

If you answered (c) please apply for work at Gutshot.

Seriously.  I saw split pots with three of a kind or two pair on board pushed to the wrong person by three different dealers.  Fortunately there were always plenty of nits who weren't involved in the hand to have a contest to see who could yell "split pot" first.

So I tried and just couldn't do it.  I started writing up my play-by-play for the GBPT Teesside £200 Freezeout and sent myself to sleep before I'd got half way.

So, believe it or not, this is the very short version - minus many of those pesky bet amounts and without most of the minor details about who was in the pot and from what position.  Doesn't really matter, does it?

I nearly got in a mess early on with pocket queens.  I had one caller pre-flop and took it down with a re-raise on a J33 flop.  I bet, he raised, I thought and eventually managed to raise without moving all in.  The pot was getting far too big, far too quickly for my liking and even though I suspected the usual overplayed KJ, I didn't like my hand that much I didn't like the thought of being pot committed with that hand.

From the small blind, I raised six limpers with ace-king and five of them called - seven times the big blind!  Then I didn't really know what to do on the ace high flop, out of position.  It got checked around on the flop, I bet the turn and check-called a small river bet.  He had jack high and I wasn't quite sure where all my chips had come from.

I faced off against three short stacks before the blinds became silly: My AK beating AT; QQ losing to A6; KK actually dominating KQ.

I check-raised all in with a flush draw against an agressive player who had minimum-raised from first position.  I'd called on the button with AQ, the flop was three small spades and I held the ace of spades.  He thought for about a week before showing one card that made an inside straight flush draw.

I laid down A9s to an all-in re-raise preflop getting about 2.5-1 on the call.  I'd called with worse the night before, but this time I figured the chips I already had were more valuable given the speed the game was moving, but I thought about it for too long and as a result the big blind went up just seconds before it reached me.  By now, an average stack was less than ten big blinds, and I now had an average sized stack.

There was an early position raise and a short stack moved all in for less.  I found AK in the big blinds and re-raised all in.  The raiser folded so I got some change when I lost to pocket aces.  The short stack said he'd only looked at one card.  I said bullshit.  He said no really.  I said nice hand.

In the big blind for 4000 I had to call a push for 6100 more.  My Q9 lost to a mighty 94.  Racing off garbage like this is what poker is all about.

I moved all in with A6s and got called by AT.  The board brought K244... I called for another 2 or 4, but a jack was just as good, and I was the only person in the room who realised it was a split pot.  The dealer fumbled a bit but I got my money back.

It was folded to the small blind who moved all in and I found ATs on my big blind.  Instacall.  I lost to QT and went home via the late night garage for a consolation flapjack.

I'm still due some luck then.  Today it wasn't a case of being crippled because I couldn't win 50/50s, it was that I couldn't win the hands where I dominated.  I finished 19th from 100, lasting long enough to collect the goody bag they gave out to the final three tables, but not long enough to collect any cash.  Still, I'm now the proud owner of a GBPT swimming bag which came preloaded with a t-shirt (size L, and not good enough to motivate me to lose that much weight),  a pen, a chip, a keyring, a pin badge and a card protector which is actually rather nice.  Oh, and the obligatory pack of cards, but the guy next to me spoke for everyone when he said "like I need another one of those".

I'll probably post some pictures of the freebies when I get home, along with as much as I managed to photograph of the local places of interest. They're not all that interesting at all - I was bored after not much more than an hour of driving round trying to find stuff.  I'd seen a sculpture of a train made out of brick, which "pushed at the boundaries of brick technology" - boy was I impressed - and a transporter bridge, apparently the world's longest but so much less useful than a road bridge that you could cross at any time without stopping, instead of at fifteen minute intervals during the day and not at all at night.

Yes, it's grim up north.  This far north anyway.  This is up beyond Yorkshire, where you have a city with rich Roman and Viking history in York, the fastest growing city in the country in Leeds and a lot of picturesque moors, which have only been spoiled by the occasional serial killer.  Up here in Cleveland, the world is stuck in a timewarp, and not in an endeering way.  Parts of the towns I explored could very easily have been the set for any period drama based in the 1970s.  It may well already have been used for that, I just can't be bothered to check.  Getting back just now I filled my car up using a petrol pump that had a mechanical seven-segment display, none of your newfangled liquid crystal that's becoming so popular with the rise of the pocket calculator.  Not quaint, just crap.

I also wondered if we were stuck in the 1970s after an indicent at the poker table.  One player had raised pre-flop and got one caller.  The board was queen high, the raiser bet and the caller called.  The turn brought another queen, the raiser bet again and the caller moved all in.  The raiser must have had kings or aces and eventually folded and the caller - a dark skinned fellow, seemingly of Indian origin but a Teesside local through and through - showed his king queen.  Disgusted, the raiser shouted across the table, "Why don't you go back where you came from?".  For a brief moment, if felt like things might be about to get ugly.   "Whadeeya mean, like?", he asked.  "Back to that other table", came the reply.  Oh right, he hadn't long been moved here.  False alarm then, probably.

I'm not writing a match report tonight, but I probably will.  I have to be in Hanley tomorrow afternoon for an eye test, and so sleeping before the three hour drive (Autoroute said 2h15 but I don't believe it) is a good idea.  I have notes from all my key hands and this time there were a few interesting confrontations.  However, for at least the last hour I was there, the tournament structure left a person with an average stack less than ten big blinds, so there was no poker left to be played.  Short stacks had to move all-in with any old garbage and big stacks had to call them with not much better, and everything just went a bit random.  In the midst of that, I couldn't get lucky enough to capitalize on the strong position I'd got myself into during the first four hours.

The tour hits Nottingham next month, I might get to have another crack.

I don't get the A1(M).  There are motorway parts that are just two lanes and non-motorway parts that are three lanes.  Aside from making life difficult for learner drivers, what's the point?  One sign on the way up this afternoon advised me that "narrow lanes remain in place for my safety".  Clearly much safer than those pesky wide lanes.  And why is Scotch Corner signposted from 40 miles away when all that's there are two roads and a Travelodge?  I was somewhat underwhelmed.

So today begins by two day poker trip to fabulous Teesside.  I'm staying near Darlington in a very new looking hotel right off the A1(M).  It's nothing fancy, but it would do just fine for anyone considering the Alan Partridge lifestyle in this part of the country.

Did I know how to use the swipe card to get into the room, the receptionist asked me.  "Isn't it just ...?", I asked, accompanied by an obvious action.  I started to wonder whether electronic door locks were just too modern for northern England.  If training was available, could I get a certificate?  But in fact it was me who is behind the times.  First time I've seen this: you have to put your key card in a slot on the wall to turn on the electricity.  Great for the environment I'm sure, but no good when I needed to leave my iPod charging when I went out.

So onward to Stockton I went, and there's not much to report really.  I got about half way, lasting 3.5 hours.  I lost two out of two races and that was enough to do me in.  No interesting hands.  Sorry.

I'm still not sure if the real reason I busted was that I was hungry.  I'd arrived at 6.30 for a 7pm start, but there was no food available until after 7.  Although I did see someone else order food at the table, I was never really comfortable enough about my chip position to do the same, and glad I didn't too as it took over an hour for a chicken salad to arrive.  I was holding A7s in the big blind and after everyone folded to the small blind, he moved all in for virtually the same chips that I had.  7k to call, blinds at 500/1000 with a 100 ante.  Eight handed, 2300 in dead money on a 7000 call wasn't that great, but his range was that wide that I figured I could be ahead often enough to make it not a dreadful call and to go much further in this tournament now I had to gamble to get ahead.  He turned up KQo, the flop brought an ace and a king, and he hit a second pair on the river.  With a classy hand clap and a little scream of joy.

I just crunched this through Poker Stove.  Getting 9-7 pot odds I needed 44% pot equity for a breakeven.  A7s is 43.9% against a range that only includes any pocket pair or any ace.  If he would push with any other hand than these - which he surely would, and should - then it's apparently a +EV call.  If he'd push any two cards in this spot, I'm 60.9% to win.  Doesn't make me feel a whole lot better about busting with ace-rag (actually it was the next hand, I had 275 left and forced all in on my small blind) but it turns out that I've made worse decisions.  Maybe I'm just in denial about my subconscious desire to go broke so I could get a burger though.

For the first two hours I was playing on a table that was so well padded it felt like a bouncy castle.  Chips would not stand in stacks of more than five or so unless you used the rail to prop them up, so players just started to gather mounds as they won pots.  Three tables were built like this, apparently - someone must like foam.

Whoever chose the chip colours needs to be shot too.  I can live with non-standard colours (altough why the hell not just use a tried and tested scheme?) but they need to be better thought out than this.  25s were red and 100s were purple, with the Great British Poker Tour logo taking the majority of the face of the chip so the value numbers were tiny.  These two looked virtually identical, even close up.  500s were green and 1000s yellow and with the grey edge spots - the same colour on every chip - being bigger than the amount of chip colour left visible on the edge, it wasn't exactly easy to see at a glance how many chips another player had.  Even the cheap composite bought-off-ebay chips that they poured over Michelle from Liberty X would have been better.

Anyway, back tomorrow.  Same structure, more money.  And it'll be my turn to get lucky.