Online Poker

It's been a few weeks since there was a nice juicy promo from Sporting Index.  In fact they tried to run one last week that I was going to play, but it got pulled due to "technical issues".  I was a bit worried they'd realised they were giving too much away, but the same deal is back this weekend: net losses refunded on their new virtual game up to £50.

Weekends apparently now start on Thursday morning too.

Springo is a spread betting game based on bingo where you can bet on all sorts of wacky number things.  There's a card with 24 numbers and balls are drawn from 1-80.  You could bet on how many numbers on your card are matched in 55 balls drawn (the spread is 17.4 to 17.8), or how many balls are spat out until your first hit (2.9 to 3.2).

You can also gamble on whether the numbers you match on your card form a particular patterns, like a plus sign, bullseye or heart.

Or for the truly degenerate, you can play one of the markets where numbers are multiplied together to get that oh-so important volatility.  The spread for "First hit x Last hit" is 1385-1405 - bet £1 per point and you could win £3845 or lose £1385.

So here's how I played it.  There's no even money bet in this game, or even anything that's equivalent to fixed odds.  So I took the least volatile market and the smallest stake possible: I played "Draw to a hit" ten times, buying at 3.2 for the minimum stake of 91 pence per point.

That bet meant the worst downside was £2 each game, with a maximum theoretical win of £43.50.  The maximum likely win is much, much lower, as you'd have to draw 55 balls without hitting a single one on your card and that doesn't leave much room for error.  That's every single number you don't have except one.  It's so unlikely, in fact, that I can't even be bothered to start working the odds.  Astronomical.  But there's still the chance of a decent win for a controlled stake if things go the right way.

The first two games I played I matched the very first ball.  That £4 maximum loss was not a good start, but playing this strategy it all comes down to the last game anyway: just try to lose as little as possible until you've qualified for the refund and then lump whatever you have left on one bet.  Or, if you win during the qualifying period, you can just take that money and leave.

After 10 spins I was actually up by one unit: a massive 91p profit.  But I decided to let it ride.

Buying for a pretty random £23.14 per point meant the maximum downside was £50.91 - perfect.  The result was a good one too... five balls before a hit!  A 1.8 unit win, or £41.65 in real money.  Kerching!

I've been 4-tabling 50NL on the iPoker network for about a week and starting to get some decent data into Poker Tracker.  Not yet sure if I'll make a mission out of it like I did on PokerStars earlier in the year - I'm not convinced it's a great game, and there's barely enough time before the end of the year to get in enough hands for a reasonable win goal.

Mostly I just want to retain the VIP level I achieved playing $2/4 limit (running like God for a couple of weeks, then crashing back down and giving up) for a sweet $100 monthly cash bonus.  Playing for points is only marginally foolish, of course.

I've been thinking that there are a lot of super-tight - I mean really stupidly tight - players on there and have been seeing some Poker Tracker stats to that effect, but I just wasn't really sure if it was just an anomoly at first.  There's always some nits in every game, but when I seem to be always sitting down to see table averages of % flops seen instantly pop up in single figures, it's a little unusual.

Sure, I still don't have enough data to know the figures are accurate, and I often have only half the table tracked, but it's still a whole load more rocks that you'd like to see at the table.

As my data is grows, these trends continue.  Just now I was playing against two of the nittiest players I've ever seen.

The first had paid to see 6.3% of flops - that's 30 hands played from the 480 I'd seen him be dealt.  Even 12% would be awfully tight, and he's playing half that.  It's just one every 16.  That's only just more than the frequency you should be dealt a pocket pair.  Even if that's not his strategy, we know he has a very narrow range of hands when he does decide to play which means he's a fairly predictable opponent (which I like) but he's using a seat that could be taken by a player who is more likely to dump off his stack the next time I get a lucky flop (which I don't like).

The other was an impressive 1.8% VP$IP ("voluntarily put money in the pot") over 220 hands.  That's just 4 non big blind hands played from a sample that's one less than enough to include every possible starting hand (it won't - that would be a statistical freak - but it's big enough to start seeing patterns).  Of those hands played, we saw two at showdown: he raised JJ from middle position and completed a small blind with 88.  Those crazy gamblers.

There are many more players sitting at about 10% VP$IP and that means I've been jumping around tables a lot trying to find somebody to actually play with.  There is the occasional juicy loose player that helps to keep the table average out of the gutter, but actually very few who fall in-between these extremes.  A cynical man might say it's just full of bots and shills...

It does seems like it's been much easier than I'm used to to steal blinds and stab at pots, but also much harder to get payoffs with monsters so I've tried to start adjusting accordingly.  I'm hesitating to go too far with the all-out aggression though because it just seems so unlikely that there would be so many players in one place - a poker site, of all places - who just don't want to play poker.

I was starting to think that it never, ever went to 3 bets pre-flop in this game, and that all-ins were never called unless it was AA vs AA, or occasionally KK on a short stack.  Plenty of ratholers about, but mostly also sitting back and waiting for a big pair.  Seemed like winning a full stack was virtually impossible.

But you wait around for a week, then two come along at once.

My pocket kings got it all in pre-flop against an ace-jack for a full stack and it held up, and I flopped the nut straight with AK and re-raised all in against two players to be instacalled by AT - bottom pair, but top kicker.  Yummy.

The other player - a 12% rock - said he folded a set.  I believe him.

Those two hands literally doubled my win rate on the week.  Obviously, I still need more data but here's a graph that I can savour for the time being.

There are no bad beats in Blackjack - one of the reasons I've been enjoying playing it so much lately.  What's the worst that's going to happen?  You've made a 20 and the dealer shows  a 6.  Two hits later he's got 21 and you lose.  It sucks, but he's going to beat you about 10% of the time here.

So it has to be a particularly lucky or unlucky streak to make it worth talking about, let alone posting a hand history - something I never thought I'd be doing.

I signed up a new account to William Hill Casino in a friend's name.  This is a trusting friend who isn't exactly up to speed with where I'm gambling on their behalf, but it's an arrangement that works great for me - I need more friends like that!

This gave me another go at their £50 signup bonus before it finishes at the end of this month - apparently to be replaced by a new and improved monthly bonus, which we'll have to wait and see but I would expect it means one of the easiest casino signup bonuses is not going to be around much longer.

So this series of hands (raw hand history here) is the first ten hands I played using that account.  Every single one of them lost.  Bad karma for cheating the system perhaps, but it definitely demonstrates that there's no such thing as "new depositors' luck" at this site.

No casino operator with a clue and the ability to rig things even slightly would want a new player's first experience to be ten losing hands of blackjack.  The odds are about 700-1 against.

Hand 1:
I'm dealt 17 and stand.  Dealer shows a 4, turns over another 4, then hits an 8 and then a 2 making 18.

Hand 2:
I stand on 18.  Dealer shows a 2, turns over a 3, then hits a ten and a 5 for a winning 20.

Hand 3: Another 17.  Dealer shown 8 and obviously has a ten in the hole.

Hand 4: With Q, 2 and dealer showing an ace I have to hit my 12.  I draw a ten to bust.

Hand 5: Dealer shows another ace and I bust after hitting my T, 6 and drawing a 9.

Hand 6: With a dealt 7, 3 at least I can't bust with a single hit.  Best I can do though is another 7, which isn't nearly enough to beat the dealer's J, K for 20.

Hand 7: Perhaps 18 can win this time with my T, 8 against a dealer's upcard 3.  Nope.  He's got a 9 under there, makes it a promising 15 and pulls a miracle 5 for yet another 20.

Hand 8:  I have to double down on my 4, 5 against the dealer's 4 and only manage to muster a 3.  Twelve doesn't beat much, let alone the dealer's piss-taking 21.

Hand 9: Soft 18 is a stand against the dealer's 2.  Can he beat it?  Yes he can: K in the hole, and 8 makes 20.

Hand 10: Can't split a pair of 7s when the dealer shows a ten, so I hit it.  At least the 4 doesn't bust me, but 18 isn't enough.  A 3 in the hole is promising at first, then he hits a 2 and 4 for 19.  Of course.

Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents' cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose.

-- David Sklansky's Fundamental Theorem of Poker

It's now pretty much a certainty that at least one player on Absolute Poker has been able to play real money games while being able to see all of his opponents' hole cards. 

Absolute are saying publicly "this never actually happened" but privately "oh shit, we're fucked".  I'm speculating, obviously, but it seems likely.   This is a poker site that used to dominate the BonusWhores.com newsletter with their almost-daily reload offers, but now they are top of their blacklisted sites list.  PocketFives.com have also stopped taking their advertising money, and I'm sure this is only the beginning.  Nobody with any sense will ever play there again for an amount of money that matters.

If you want to see the damning evidence and don't want to trawl through many very long forum threads, jump straight to the latest updates on 2+2 or read this excellent summary on Nat Arem's blog.

Or you could just hit play on this video.  Thanks to an administrative cock-up of gigantic proportions, Absolute have given out a master hand history that shows player POTRIPPER winning a $1000 buy-in tournament while playing just about every hand perfectly.  It really is just like he can see what everyone else is holding, over and over again.

This is just part 1.  Get parts 2 to 4 here.

Sure, he gets sucked out on a couple of big pots, but it's exactly like Sklansky says: if you can see everyone's cards, you're going to win money. 

The basic strategy is to see a flop with any two cards, and then:

- If your opponent has a huge hand, just check and fold.
- If there is any hand you can represent to scare your opponent, bet or raise.
- If you have a monster or your opponent has nothing, let them catch up or give them chance to bluff.

The chances of this playing style being legitimate are as close to zero as you could possibly imagine.

This was only a temporary blip after I left four tables simultanously, but it was still a WTF moment.

I'm not sure which I like more:

The fact that for a moment I apparently owed the iPoker network over ninety two quadrillion dollars, and that because they can handle a such a large negative number they must also have designed their systems to be able to deal with the same order of magnitude in a positive balance.  I'm looking forward to watching the $2bn/$4bn game.

Or the whole "minus minus two billion and something dollars point minus eight" thing.  There are just so many ways that it's not even a number...

Although Party Poker's reload bonuses are useless these days, there's still value to be had at Empire Poker.  The two sites are the same, it's the same players at the same tables, the only things that are different are the colour schemes and the loyalty point schemes.  So becuse Empire doesn't have Party Points, the bonuses still are awarded based on you having to play a specific number of raked hands.

This weekend's bonus was $100, with 1000 raked hands required to release.  Or, I noticed, the alternative was to cycle $1000 through blackjack.  Quite a difference from the last Party bonus I was offered, which would have required $120,000 in action!  As there's still very few full ring limit tables to grind this out on, using blackjack to collect my free money was an easy decision.

I've actually been playing a lot of blackjack lately, as I've rekindled my interest in exploiting casino welcome bonuses.  The last time I did this on any great scale was over six years ago, at a time where the play requirements were much less strict and you could often deposit, play and cash out a reasonable bonus in under an hour.

My strategy was to just blitz as many different casinos as possible, banking whatever small profit was forthcoming and moving onto the next casino.  It was very effective, and I even wrote a foolproof beat-the-casino system based on it.  It sold a handful of copies -  maybe as many as five...

Back then, it only felt right to take my ill-gotten gains to Las Vegas and give them back to the casino industry, which I happily did.  This time I still intend to take the money to Vegas, but my mission doesn't involve blowing a chunk of cash - instead I'm going to earn enough to pay for the house rental for next summer, which will be $2000-3000.  My incentive for doing well is to ensure we can get a place with a pool again!

Today, the play requirements on casino bonuses are much tougher, with many casinos excluding some or all forms of blackjack from the promotion entirely.  If you have to wager thousands on slots for your bonus, you're probably not going to come out a winner.  But if you can clock up the play using blackjack, even with a 20x or higher release restriction, you still have a big edge on that game.

To find the house edge, you can plug the exact rules into the Wizard of Odds House Edge Calculator.  In the Empire game (8 decks, dealer hits soft 17, double after split, double on any two cards, split pairs up to 4 hands, cannot resplit aces, cannot hit split aces, dealer checks for blackjack, late surrender available) the house edge with optimal play is 0.57%, and with realistic play 0.66%.

Therefore after $1000 in play, the house should expect to win $6.60, leaving you with $93.40 of your $100 bonus for yourself.  Even if there was a 20x or 30x play through required, there'd still be plenty of bonus left over.  10x is very generous indeed.

The last time I played a Party Poker bonus for the same amount, it took up six hours of my life playing 4-6 tables of poker and I paid about $35 in rake, so effectively they paid me about $11/hr to be there before any wins or losses are taken into account.

Playing the bonus on blackjack took me just 2.5 hours to churn through 1000 hands at $1 each, for a theoretical hourly rate of $37.  In fact, for the results oriented, I also won $27 on top of the $100 bonus!

Blackjack has its advantages over poker when it comes to racking up bonus play.  The game is available around the clock without you having to contend with a waiting list, or wait for enough players to fill a new table.  To find 4-6 tables of limit running, you can only play at peak times.

It also doesn't really matter whether you play $1/$2 or $5/10 or higher, you'll only earn slightly more raked hands as you increase stakes.  The only way to clear the bonus faster is to open up more tables.  With blackjack, however, if you want to get through your bonus quicker, you can just bet more per hand.  You trade a higher chance of wiping out for the higher hourly rate, but your expectation on the bonus remains the same as long as you're prepared to deposit more money to finish it off if necessary.

Most importantly, you absolutely don't have to put your life on hold to play casino bonuses.  Take a break whenever you like, there's no panic if the doorbell rings in the middle of a hand, and no need to wait for the blinds to come round on every table if you need a dump.  I even managed to run through this bonus while I was four-tabling poker for another site's bonus at the same time... multiple whorage!

The only thing I'm missing with blackjack is the four colour deck... why won't somebody make that an option?

This player knows class when he sees it

I'm definitely taking it as a compliment.  It was only my second session playing on that site and at the time I was actually stuck about a hundy.

I've had a bonus offer from Party Poker sitting in my inbox for nearly a week now.  It actually expires at midnight tonight, so I've really left it until the last minute.  The problem is that I just can't find a way to convince myself it's worth depositing for.

This is a pretty depressing time.  Any Party bonus in the past has always been a must-play situation.  I'd hate myself if I found I missed one.  Until just now, it's always been a number of raked hands that's required to clear the bonus.  You contribute rake on roughly two-thirds of the hands you play at low stakes fixed limit hold'em (even at $0.50/$1) and on about half the hands at any no-limit from $0.25/$0.50 upwards.  It's always been really easy to clear their bonuses at low stakes, even with a raked hand requirement equal to 10x the bonus dollar amount.  Play no more than 2000 hands for a $100 bonus?  I'd get eight-tabling and bash it out in two very manageable evening sessions, and only go a little square-eyed in the process.

Those days are gone.  Instead of counting raked hands, you now have to earn a set number of PartyPoints to release a bonus.  In the case of the bonus I'm about to let expire, it would be 6 points per $1 in bonus.  I've also just had another bonus offer that's even less generous at 8x points per $1.  Frankly, I'm not sure why they think I'd take the second if I ignored the first, but it's nice to be missed nonetheless.

So, earn 600 points for a $100 bonus?  What does that mean exactly?  It's complicated.  Playing the old standard $0.50/$1 or $1/$2 limit you earn 3.5 points for every 20 raked hands so that's nearly 3500 raked hands needed to clear this bonus.  There's only seven days to meet the requirement before you lose the bonus completely so that would take me every evening.  Because obviously I'd never dream of playing poker during work time.

No limit is no better, with 20 hands earning you 3 points at $0.25/$0.50 and 5 points at $0.5/$1.  Double the blinds again and it's still only 8 points per 20, and I never really got the hang of playing more than 4 tables of no-limit anyway, let alone trying to 8-tabling a $100 buy-in game for any length of time.  I just can't see how a casual player has any chance of doing this at small stakes any more in the seven days allowed.

$2/$4 limit is clearly the level where they start to make some serious rake, as the reward value shoots up to 11 Party Points for every 20 raked hands.  That's triple the rate of $1/$2!  I'm fairly happy playing $2/$4 and for a juicy bonus I'd be prepared to open up as many tables as I could fit within my field of vision.  It would leave me with a much more achievable release condition for the bonus - 1100 hands.  11x raked hands is almost back to how it used to be.

Just one minor drawback: nobody actually plays $2/$4 on Party!  I've been keeping watch all week.  Tonight there are actually two full tables, but the second has only just started up.  There was just one table struggling to get going at 6pm UK time, so I think I'd struggle to get in enough hands even if I played as many as both tables all night, every night.  Nope.  I just don't think I can do this with poker.

So how about the casino?  I've started to get back into playing blackjack for casino bonuses again (more on this will surely follow) so I could play it through that way.  But it says you earn one Party Point for every $200 bet, which would make the total wagering requirement a cool $120,000.  Compare that to the $500 bonus I just got from Sky Vegas for $10,000 in action.  It's not even close to being worthwhile.

Even if you could find a way to do this (you'd either have to use a bot, or play $100 a hand, surely?) and even if their blackjack game is excellent (and fair, of course), just a 0.1% house edge would win back a theoretical $120 for the house by the time you'd cleared the bonus.  No value there whatsoever, and I haven't even bothered to check out their blackjack rules - I know it's going to have a higher edge that 0.1%.

Their sportsbook then - a last resort?  The best rate you're going to get on a straight wager is one point per $5 in bets.  On popular sports it's $10 or $15 for the point.  If I deposit $500 for the $100 bonus, let's say I can earn 100 points through risking it all on a game.  If I win and double up, I could risk it all for 200 points, and then I'd only nede to put $1500 on the last game to get to 600 points.  It's possible, but it's not for me.  If you're not putting your entire bankroll on every game, sports just won't happen fast enough to get through the bonus in 7 days.

I guess I can understand why they've had to tighten up, because they were literally giving away their chips with these promos.  Whenever I've calculated just how much, it's been very good news for the player: for a $100 bonus, they were paying out $45 more than the rake I had generated at $1/$2 limit, and $65 more than their revenue from $0.25/$0.50 no-limit.

The only other option I can come up with is to deposit a smaller amount - it's a percentage-based bonus - and play enough hands at $2/$4 in a week to earn maybe $20.  You know what... I just can't be bothered.

I got a $10 free play use-it-or-lose-it bonus on Ultimate Bet today.  I can't remember the last time I played anything on there properly, and I'm sure last time I logged in was just to play through another $10 bonus, which I moved all in with - and lost - in one hand of poker.  I'm not complaining though if they keep giving me free money to come back, and then don't realise if it didn't actually work.

I thought I'd give their Roshambo a try.  That's Rock, Paper, Scissors played online for real money and as far as I know it's still unique to UB.  I sat down for one $10 game, and was happy to assume this would be a coinflip.  It's played as a best of three contest (whereas the World Series of Roshambo - you think I'm making that up? - is a best five-out-of-nine format), so I really don't think that's long enough for anybody to figure out my playing style.  If indeed I even have one.  Does a skillful player have a long term edge?  Possibly.  But with just two or three throws deciding the winner, not today.

Naturally, as I sat down at the table I cranked up a screen recording program so I could make a video for the blog, but as I clicked to start the game and then to start recording, the game window just blacked out.  The recording tool uses an overlay window to mark the area of screen you want to record, and the application started to die so the overlay blocked everything I needed to see.  In a bit of a fluster, I tried to drag the game window onto another part of the desktop but just ended up slightly resizing the dead screen recorder program.  Then everything else froze.

All I could see was a small corner of the game window with a timer in it, ticking down from fifteen seconds.  Things didn't recover quickly enough so the timer ran out and I had no idea whether I'd somehow forfeited the game.  Maybe it automatically made some kind of gesture that always loses.  A fly, perhaps.  A fly would be swatted by paper, if it was rolled up the hands of an irritated human, or crushed by rock, if the rock was rolling fairly quickly down a hill and the fly had it's back turned, or dropped from a reasonable height.  I really don't know what horrible death would occur with scissors, but a fly certainly couldn't beat them.

In fact, I'd thrown paper.  Twice.  Without choosing it, and without seeing it.  I only found this out from the game history feature, and it actually worked out pretty well for me.  The other guy was going for the avalanche gambit (rock, rock rock - you think I'm making that up?) and I crushed him.  Well, actually I covered his ass with paper, but you know what I mean.

So, in the end a pretty decent result for a totally free game that I had no control over.

However, I still have absolutely no idea how the game is played online, and I'm just not interested enough to try it again with my own money.

Thanks to the boffins at Party Poker, you can now watch episodes of the first series of Late Night Poker Ace - among all kinds of other stuff - at any time over the web.

I can now relive the excitement of my road trip to fabulous Cardiff two years ago anytime.  I actually met Jesse May, dontchaknow.

If you'd care to share in the drama - and if you're one of the lucky few that I haven't ever tried to feed a DVD copy of the show - go to www.partypoker.tv and click "Watch PartyPoker TV Now" to open the player.  It's under "Archive", then "Late Night Poker Ace", then Episode 3.

It's quite possible that it's been there for ages and I haven't been paying attention.  However it looks like this new source of streaming poker TV is meant to coincide with the new qualification period for Late Night Poker.  The route into the $320 satellite is via a $35 turbo crapshoot, which itself has turbo sub-qualifiers that cost a massive $0.80.

With rebuys available for the first hour, some of those first round gamboolies may last as long as an hour and fifteen minutes.  It's a game of skill, obviously.

If you ever thought the chat box in an online poker game was inane, try online bingo.

Yes, I do have a very good reason for playing bingo.  There's a fantastic offer on quidco.com right now where you get £30 for registering a new player account and betting £10.  It told me I already had an account, so I had to do some jiggery pokery using my full name and a different email, but it tracked in Quidco immediately once I'd played through the £10.

I didn't win anything, but that's probably because I'm a bingo donkey.  I expect I was seeing too many tickets with weak balls.  I guess I also need to try to dab more aggressively with my good numbers.

However, the £20 overall profit from the bonus just about makes up for having to endure an unbearably cheesy online gaming experience.  My avatar was a cartoon dabber with a big grin - do I need to go into this any further?  It really hurts to think about it now.

Looking back at this screen full of chat is especially painful.

We've got the universally standard gl, wd and ul (good luck, well done and unlucky) making an appearance.  The tg suffix means to go, so many of these comments are players announcing how close they are to winning a prize - tactics designed to put fish like me on tilt for sure.  Makes you want to mark off a whole bunch of numbers much to hastily.

The one that took me a while to figure out was wdw.  It means well done winner - a fabulously impersonal way of fake-congratulating an opponent who just outplayed, outclassed and outdabbed you.  It's not like you don't know who won - it tells you their name and shows you their winning ticket!

It's like "well I know I didn't win, so I don't care who did" so I imagine wdw is said sarcastically just as often as nice hand is used in poker to actually mean nice suck out. 

As I didn't stick around very long, I will just have to pretend that this was a real bingo conversation:

wdw lucky fish u suck
nice miracle numbers
poor play rewarded again
so sick

It could be ...

Remember what I was saying about cheap limit tournaments, where most of the players don't actually want to be there?  I had the pleasure of getting my pocket aces cracked by one of them just now, but it was more than made up for when I flopped a set a little later.

This is a $1k guaranteed tournament on Empire Poker that I dropped on during late registration.  With 299 players and a $6 buy in, it's somewhat different to the uber-tight $215 tournament I played last week.  There's just 159 players remaining at the first break - one hour in and nearly half the field has gone broke already.  I expect most of them wanted to.

As no hand history convertor appears to work with limit tournament hands, I'll have to do my best to recount the action using actual words.  Skip about four paragraphs if you want to avoid what is technically a bad beat story, even though I couldn't really less about losing that hand.

I have pocket aces in middle position.  There's a limp and a raise ahead of me, and I 3-bet.  Six players see the flop: 5c 3c 9d.  Yes, six.  I pinched myself to make sure I wasn't in Vegas yet.  Sadly not - it's still seven days away.  I check/call the flop hoping to see a good turn card so I can punish the draws on the next betting round.  A risky play, but nobody's folding for one small bet here, and I don't expect anyone to raise ahead of me if I bet.

OK, one player folds for one small bet when it comes from the player to my left, and five of us see the turn: Kd.  It looks like a good card for me, except that there's now two flush draws to avoid in a 5-way pot.  I can't let anyone draw for free, so I bet.  At first I'm happy to see the next player raise, although when I work everything out it's not as good as it first seemed.  I realise that I'm way out of practice at counting large multi-way pots: anyone else tagging along now is going to get pot odds of at least 6-1.  It's really as much as I could hope for to try to force out the draws, but it's not quite enough.

However somehow we're heads for the river: Jc.  It's now just a case of whether I actually have the best hand and I should probably bet/fold here, but I check/call instead.  Of course he had rivered the flush with 7c 8c.

Let re-evaluate: (1) cold-calling three bets pre-flop with a very poor hand (2) open betting a weak flush draw and gutshot on the flop and (3) raising the turn when calling with this draw would be infinitely superior.  This beat was actually great news for me.  His flop play wasn't terrible, but I now know that this player wants to play big pots and won't give up with much of anything.  He is playing a death-or-glory strategy and has potential to throw his chips away.  I just need to get lucky to capitalise.

Getting lucky happened with pocket deuces.  I'd limped and our friend raised pre-flop so I stuck around to see three more cards.  One of them was exactly what I wanted.  The flop: Tc 2s Kc.  Can I check/raise him here?  You bet.  I check/call the flop, hoping to win at least half a big bet extra by waiting until the turn to speak up.

It works.  The turn: a harmless 5d.  I unleash the check/raise and he makes it three bets.  Well, if I've been screwed by another set-over-set here so be it.  Much more likely he has one or two pair.  I cap it.

River: Ts.  Not great.  Although I have a full house, he just caught up if he had KT.  But, given the high likelihood of spewage, I decide to go for it.  I lead straight out, he raises, three from me and he caps.  His ace-king is far from good, and I rule.  Hello the chips.

A result in this tournament isn't going to be life changing, although $388 first prize isn't bad at all for a $6 investment.  But still it's more much-needed limit tournament practice, and hopefully once the field has thinned a little it will play a little more sensibly.  I just need to run well enough to maintain a playable stack for a few more rounds.

EDIT: 4th for $104.65.  Woohoo.  Trip report may follow tomorrow, not sure yet

So did I learn anything from the $215 limit tournament that, truthfully, I should have never played?  Yes I did, but it definitely wasn't worth the money.  I'm sure I could have learned exactly the same thing from a $30 or $50 tournament.

One thing I'd forgotten is that fixed limit poker plays out much slower than no limit, and how significant that could be in a tournament.  Because many more hands go to a showdown, you get to see play hands per level.  Even starting with 2500 chips (62.5 big bets at 20/40), it didn't seem long before everyone was short stacked.  After an hour, 29 players (of 36 in total) still remained but with the next level being 150/300 and the average stack at just over 3100 chips, most players are already just two pots away from busto.

Players don't go broke in the early stages, and even the very worst - or the very unluckiest - bleed away slowly, so unless you can accumulate a lot of chips (usually by runing very hot) you end up like the rest of the field: waiting to see a big hand and hoping it holds.  Therefore I suspect that, during the first few levels, looking for opportunities to play hands with big pot potential like suited connectors and small pocket pairs cheaply is much more valuable than trying to milk a tiny edge from your very strong hands pre-flop.  One extra bet won in level 1 is only worth half a bet as soon as the clock chimes in level 2.

The main point of strategy I'd overlooked though was blind play.  Whether it was trying to defend against suspected stealers or finding opportunities to steal myself, I never really got it right.  With more severe blinds stealing becomes more attractive and defending with marginal hands - particularly out of position to a button raise - becomes a very volatile strategy.

With a short stack, blind play requires great care indeed.  There is no such thing as a resteal move - the best you can do is offer the raiser 5-1 pot odds to see a flop - and you cannot open-push in order to put maximum pressure on the blinds.  If you decide to raise, you have to be prepared to play a flop.

The biggest mistake you can make in limit hold'em is to fold the best hand for a single bet.  However in a tournament, making thin value calls can be devastating when that single bet represents a large proportion of your stack, or even your last few chips.  Now that I am a little more prepared to think ahead, hopefully I will be able to avoid going too far in situations where a crippling river call would be mandatory.

I made many notes to try to convince myself I was getting something of value of the tournament.  I forced myself just to pick just one hand to write about.  I began with 1130 in chips - just over 5 big bets at the 100/200 level:

Preflop: Hero is SB with A, Q. Hero posts a blind of 50.
6 folds, Button raises, Hero 3-bets, 1 fold, Button caps, Hero calls.

Flop: A, 6, 5 (2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets, Hero calls.

Turn: 9 (2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets, Hero calls.

River: 2 (2 players)
Hero checks, Button checks.

I found myself insta-raising with AQ from the small blind when facing a button raise.  As you do.  However, I'm pretty sure this was a mistake when the reraise already committed about 30% of my chips to the pot, and possibly more if it was capped.  Although a smooth call encourages the big blind to come along for the ride, in this situation I think it's a risk you have to take.

I should have chosen to control the pot size, rather than to force out the third player in the hand.  I figure that my hand is probably the best and I definitely want to see a flop, but I'm not going to check-call off almost all of my stack one bet at a time with just ace high.  Leading out when I miss the flop is going to be the only chance to bluff at this pot, and the smaller the pot, the more significant my flop bet will be.

So with the pot as big as it could possibly be, I immediately decided to just check-call with the top pair in an attempt to lose as little as possible.  His pre-flop cap showed strength, or so I thought, so AK was a very likely holding.  I couldn't lay the hand down, but I did not expect to be winning.  This thinking is dreadful.

Had I thought ahead like I was meant to, I would have realised that one more small bet and two big bets would have left me with just 230 chips - barely one big bet, and almost no chance of recovery in the tournament.  The decision to go all the way if I hit the flop should have been made pre-flop.  Then, when I do hit, the objective is to get as many chips into the pot as possible.

That means I have to try to get in a check-raise for a big bet.  So I should check-call the flop and then let him bet again on the turn - as I did, but for the wrong reason, and without firing the check-raise with a hand that was committed to this pot.  If there's no turn bet it means I've got it all sewn up so then I can lead the river (but probably don't win any more money).

Trying to trap here, even without being at all certain that my hand is best, gives him the opportunity to lose money with worse hands than mine, and I don't scare off unimproved pocket pairs by admitting that I liked the ace on the flop.  It gives me the best chance to get all my money in the pot, which is what I clearly have to do if I make a hand that I'm prepared to take to showdown.

He showed JJ, and I survived - for a little longer at least.

Here endeth the $215 lesson.

Well I'd been hoping to drop on a non-stupid fixed limit tournament all week, and it just happened.  Right there staring at me in the Poker Stars lobby the minute I signed in... way beyond my bankroll but how could I possibly say no after all this time?

$215 Weekly Fixed Limit Hold'em - Late Reg.

Baptism of fire coming right up then.  It's 10/20 blinds in level one with 2500 starting chips, and I got a walk on my first big blind.  Definitely playing a little tighter than I've seen before.

EDIT: Nitted my way to 14th place.  Wasn't as useful as it should have been for $215 but at least I did pick up some things to consider.  Probably post some hands tomorrow.