CuteRaven

@monkeyheavenNice hand! I can certainly respect the big bluff, putting maximum pressure on the bubble :D. I think only the better players in the pool are capable of bluffing in this situation. @GothMothThanks for the advice, I really appreciate it! Alcohol has caused me some problems in the past, although not that much. Usually after taking some amount of alcohol I no longer feel like drinking more (the exception is if I combine alcohol with weed, it removes all my natural inhibitions about drinking more and I can get really drunk. Anyway, I don't use weed anymore). I guess I'm pretty lucky that after some amount of drinking I no longer feel like drinking more. When I turned 18 me and my friends would go drinking almost every weekend, and eventually I realized that life started feeling more dull and tiring. I was tired during the week from school, and during the weekend from partying/hangovers 🤣. So eventually I started drinking only a little bit. But you are correct, the social aspect is the most difficult part, the temptation is there when others drink. Luckily my drinking friends don't judge me for drinking less (or drinking none), and I also have another group of friends where people don't really use alcohol. I have also been slowly drinking less and less (for over a year now at least), so the transition doesn't feel that tough. But the main reason I have quit completely, at least for quite a long time, is because even a little bit of alcohol seems to usually trigger my anxiety the next morning (or when trying to sleep), even if I have no other hangover symptoms. So drinking really just is not worth it for me anymore. Congrats on the over 10 years of sobrierty BTW! :popeye::happy:

Bankroll is now 5219.10€ Earlier today I studies some button ICM situations. It's pretty interesting! For example: If you were in the big blind with a stack of 10 BB and the button and small blind players both went all in (and they both had a stack of 20 BB), what sort of range would you call the all in with? Anwser: You can't profitably call any hands here. Unless BU and SB chop, you are guaranteed to be in the money when you fold.I played a short session of 50€ 5 man SNGs today. Once again the 50 € level ran quite nicely today, I was able to 6 or 7 table them quite easily! Maybe word of this promotion has spread and attracted more players to play for the leaderboard this week? Or people have more energy to compete for leaderboard prizes at the start of the week? I'm not sure. It went decently well otherwise, except I didn't run that great in HU. Good for a minor profit anyway, essentially breakeven result at these stakes, and I'm happy with how I played today. I'm currently 7th on the leaderboard. I decided to do some calculations myself. This week so far, last week, and the week before that, I have played about 300 5 man SnGs with an average buyin of about 36€ and profits of about 1600€ (based on my earlier blog updates and leaderboard scores). These numbers are not completely accurate but they are very close anyway. That gives me an ROI of about 15% so far. Of course the sample is tiny and I think there is no way that my real ROI is close to being that high :Rofl:. I must have been running quite well. How well, top 70% run, top 80%, top 90%, more? I'm not sure, it's very hard to estimate variance :Laugh: The 95% confidence interval for this sample is an ROI of -1% to 30%, and the 70% confidence interval is 7%-23%. Looking good so far, but I still need a much bigger sample to make conclusions. Here is an interesting hand from today (in a 50€ 5 man SNG), a successful bluffcatch on the bubble. Villain seemed slightly aggro but I had very few reads at the moment of this hand. Something about the fastish timing of bets and the runout made me a bit suspicious, and I had a flush blocker :Rofl:. Maybe a bit loose from me still. River was a tank call. *** Seated players *** Seat 3: Villain 2 (2983) Seat 4: Hero (3877) Seat 5: Villain 1 (3140) *** Blinds and button *** Villain 1 has the button Villain 2 posts small blind 80 Hero posts big blind 160 *** Hole cards *** Dealt in Villain 2 Dealt to Hero [3h 5s] Dealt to Villain 1 [9s Ah] *** Preflop *** Villain 1 raises 320 to 320 Villain 2 folds Hero calls 160 *** Flop *** [7c 2h 5h] Hero checks Villain 1 bets 240 Hero calls 240 *** Turn *** [7c 2h 5h] [Qh] Hero checks Villain 1 bets 560 Hero calls 560 *** River *** [7c 2h 5h] [Qh] [Jd] Hero checks Villain 1 bets 2020, and is all-in Hero calls 2020 *** Showdown *** Hero shows [3h 5s], A Pair of Fives Villain 1 shows [9s Ah], High card Hero wins 6360 Villain 1 finished the tournament in 3rd place *** Summary *** Total pot 6360 Seat 3: Villain 2: bet 80 and won 0, net result: -80 Seat 4: Hero: bet 3140 and won 6360, net result: 3220 Seat 5: Villain 1: bet 3140 and won 0, net result: -3140 Edit: Typos

Bankroll is now 5152.45€ In the early afternoon I decided to buy seven HU SNG tickets with the bonus points that I had, but I accidentally bought seven Hexapro tickets lol. In the end I won two 125€ prize pool Hexas, so from a results oriented perspective I'm not too sad about the mistake. In the evening I decided to play some 5 man SNGs because the 50€ SNGs were running amazingly well. I was running pretty hot and ended with a decent profit six tabling. Towards the end I started to play a bit worse, I made a few silly bluffs and also one terrible ICM call. I knew the call was terrible immediately after making it, I'm not sure what made me to decide to call there TBH. I think I was getting a bit tired (well, I have been a bit tired this whole day, maybe evidenced by accidentally buying the Hexapro tickets earlier :p). I'm probably going to study ICM and bubble situations a bit more before playing the 5 mans again, so that I can be sure that I'm less prone to silly ICM mistakes.

I'm not sure I got my results last time I asked, could be that I also missed them somehow 🤣 For the last 12 months could I get: -HU SNG results separated by stake -Hexapro results separated by stake -NL cash game results separated by stake Thanks!

Bankroll is now 4569.11€. I will probably get an extra 30€ for 12th place on the leaderboard in an hour or so. I played a six hour session of the 5 man SnGs (25€ and 50€ stakes), playing between 4 and 8 tables. The player pool was surprisingly small today, I guess not many people play on Sunday evenings. There didn't seem to be that many mass multitablers today, maybe they were too burned out and had their leaderboard places secured already? Still, it was mostly full of regs. It's pretty exchausting to play these for a long time, dunno how people happily 12+ tables for 12+ hours 🤣. I was annoyed at one point, because I was bubbling a lot of the SNGs despite having a decent stack. I think part of it was just bad luck and part of it might be suboptimal bubble play, something to maybe work on if I play more of these. Anyway, towards the end I started running pretty well and finished with a decent profit. The plan to run over scared money still seemed to work decently well in these today! I've made a decent profit from them in the last few days from the 5 mans, but that could also at least partially be up to variance. I'm not sure how much I will play them in the future especially since the 50€+ stakes hardly run, and since it's pretty tough money with so many regs.

Nice @RZ_Sharp ! Cool to see that someone here actually grinds the Hexas too. Well, I have seen other multitablers the few times that I have played. I imagine it's better at higher stakes (100€ and 50€ compared to e.g 25€) because of better rakeback? GL, hopefully you win it next time!

Bankroll is now 4327.45€ Saw some friends this evening. We ate pizza and just chatted :D. The others drank a few beers, I'm still keeping away from even a little bit of alcohol and trying to live somewhat healthy to keep the anxiety at bay. So far, it seems to have been working! Anyway, I found a bit of time before that and after that to play 25€ HU SNG and 50€ HU SNG (and two 25€ 5 mans which I busted), and it was smooth sailing. 25 € HU: 8 played and 7 won 50€ HU: 23 played and 14 won Obviously I can't expect it to go this well every time, definitely some rungood involved :p.

@FreedoM I'm going to disagree slightly. First of all it depends on the SNG format. For example I have noticed that HU SNGs up to the 50€ level at least are beatable for sure, and not for a tiny amount either. I would argue that HU SNGs (up to 50€ stakes at least) are almost more beatable (if you play well enough) than many other formats, because you can use reads more effectively, and there's still enough of recs and bad regs in the pool (I played some HU SNG today :D). Of course against other good regs the winrate won't be great or you might be losing against rake. And bots are a growing threat for this format unfortunately. As for the 5 mans, I think the regs tend to be worst at deepstacked postflop (edit: and also in HU), especially since many are volume grinders and don't have much time for tough decisions. So being aggro early and getting a big stack to then hopefully apply pressure on the bubble seems somewhat effective. And also the game is so complex with ICM and changing stacks that preflop around 20 BB might be a situation where more edge can be gained by implementing a more complex preflop strategy (not sure how significant this is). But probably MTTs are much better value with more recs in the pool. Anyway, I'm not an expert on the 5 mans so you should probably not take my opinion as very credible for this format. It's one thing for a game type to be "solved" and something else entirely for humans to implement this solved strategy. Cash games have also to some extent been "solved" by solvers yet you can play them for good winrates if you are good enough.

Ok @Dennis__ . I've been experementing with some open limps. Some hands like 78s or A3s feel like they don't play as well as minraises, because it's hard for them to call jams, but they play well post flop. Other hands like KK or ATo seem to have incentives to either push more equity or take the pot down preflop, and probably play well as minraises. Then there's stuff like 55, which might be nicer to just jam in since it plays so badly postflop. I don't know if these hands are actually good examples, and it's quite tough to balance, of course. Gotta throw in some of those traps, or maybe it's just better to not use a mixed strategy. But yeah it's a bit weird to play postflop vs a 100% big blind range if it folds through after a limp :p

Bankroll is now 4029.95€ I played for about 5 and a half hours today with a few breaks, mostly 6 tabling. At first I was playing the 25€ 5 mans since nothing higher was running. My bankroll was going around in circles, I was losing a lot of all ins at one point and running bad in the HU phase. I had also taken an afternoon nap today (bad idea, you just wake up more tired than you started :p), and I was initially a bit tired from that. I eventually recovered to slightly under breakeven, and was planning to end the session there. Then I saw that some of the 50€ were running, so I decided to still join those, and ran pretty hot. Nice to end the day with some profit :D. The more I play this game type, the more interesting it becomes. For example, if the SnG is 4 or 5 handed and I'm UTG with about 15-20 BB (and average stack is about 20 BB), should I have a jamming range, minraising range, or limping range? As far as I have understood, the anwser is yes to all three :D. It's pretty fun trying to find the balance, while taking exploits and ICM into account. ICM adds a lot of complexity to the gametype too, especially on the bubble. I'm 12th on the leaderboard right now, that probably won't last though, it's quite likely I won't be able to play tomorrow.

Ok, there were two players that were on all or almost all of my tables. One was "Cursedin50s" and the other one was "Suarez" or something like that (some latino surname sounding name), I assumed those two to be the highest volume players/ leaderboard contenders during my session.

I thought most likely was "CursedIn50s" (well there were two players at one point with roughly this name. Human avatar, not the tiger avatar.), also before reading your post. But maybe I'm wrong :p

Oh no, that's a terrible run :/. While playing today, I was thinking that some of the highest volume players on the tables seemed streched a bit thin by playing too many tables (or could just be tired). Folding a lot to aggression, timing out, never really bluffing...I was thinking that by playing so much volume it's possible to lose much more EV than the prizes of the leaderboards are worth. I don't know if this applies to you as well or not (although I think I know which alias you played with today), or if it applies to any of the players. Could also just be some sort of small sample size illusion of mine. GL in recovering from this downswing :)!

Bankroll is now 3888.28€ Remember when I mentioned that I might get a used Windows computer for playing more than 4 tables of poker? Well, I got that today, a decent used Lenovo for about 150€, it has some cosmetic blemishes but works just fine under the hood. I had forgotten how buggy and slow Windows can be sometimes though :P. Why does it need a minute to start up instead of 10 seconds? Anyway, that's a first world problem, it works just fine for it's intended purpose! Once I got home in the evening, I decided to join the late 5 man SnG action. I started by placing 8 SnG tables on 2 monitors, but that was really tilting. I had to constantly turn my head from one monitor to another, and it was a bit hard to keep up. I decided to instead tile the tables on the same monitor so that all the tables were viewable at once, and reduced the tables to 6 or 7, that worked and was quite a relaxing pace to play. I might up the amount of tables for next time. The 50€ started running properly quite soon after I joined, so I could exclusively play 50€ SnGs for a while, before the action dried up (which is also when I stopped playing). My session length was about 3 hours today. In the end my results were: 6 25€ SnG played (2 wins and 1 second place) and 27 50€ SnG played (8 wins and 4 second places).

Must be satisfying to fold and see that runout :D. Yeah, I think the calling range is ridiculously tight, like only AA or something!

This is a call I'm pretty sure, you are still far enough away from being in the money. Apparently this is the GTO calling range, I would have guessed something a bit tighter even. But it depends on how wide villain is shoving, of course (GTO shoving range is apparently 44%, but many players could be much tighter than that):

@monkeyheavenThat's a cool strat! I hadn't thought of that, thanks for sharing. I looked at that situation a bit in Icmizer, apparently you can minraise a much wider range than you can jam at 2.4 BB (52% vs 38% range). I guess the small blind can not guarantee that the button would bust if it just called the minraise and won the pot (because the button is not all in). If the small blind wants to force the button to be at risk of busting it needs to reraise/rejam, but that is of course more risky than calling with the big blind still to act behind, so the small blind has to play tighter like you mentioned, I guess that's why at least. If the small blind folds the big blind jams any two and button calls every time. I looked at the stack depth in that situation where button can start to minraise-fold hands vs a jam from just one villain. Button starts minraise folding if it's given a stack depth of about 6 BB or above. If button is given a stack depth of about 8 BB or above, open shoving becomes more profitable than minraising. Looking at it even further though, I decided to test what would happen if button open limped with 2.4 BB, apparently it can open limp with about a 70% range 🤣. And the big blind player can only shove vs the limp with a 13% range. Maybe open limping is an even better strategy? Or maybe not, because some of the premium hands have lower EV as limps, but maybe the weaker hands having higher EV can make up for it. I'm also not sure how well Icmizer takes postflop play into account. I probably have to do some more investigation to understand what is going on. Or maybe I have gotten my the settings wrong in Icmizer somehow (I set FGS to 5). If I had seen someone open limp the button with 2.4 BB I would have thought they were more likely to be a fish, maybe not after all 🤣

Very nice! You dug yourself out of the hole in only about a weeks time. Funny looking ICM spot. I wonder how these sorts of dynamics affect postflop play, probably the small blind can play pretty crazy aggro 🤣. Maybe a lot of huge overbets to threaten stacking the big blind (if the big blind is aware of ICM)?

Thanks for the great analysis! @Dennis__ That's really interesting, never thought of the dynamics between the stacks in that way. Hmm, I guess the threat of losing blinds also becomes bigger with a shorter stack when each blind starts becoming higher in value?

I played 6 of the 50€ SnGs and won 200€ (2 wins, 2 second places). Bankroll is now 3513.27€. All I can say is: Not a very clever or original alias, I know 🤣 Obviously I ran reasonably hot over the small sample, unfortunately the player pool started to dry up and I didn't feel like one tabling. There was a lot of 25€ action, but I really don't like mixing stakes (and I didn't feel like moving down), something about some tables being less important than others is pretty tilting. For example if I would run well in the 25€ and badly in the 50€ that would annoy me a lot. Also the desolate HU SnG lobby didn't inspire me and I didn't feel like playing cash, so today was a short session. I will probably focus more on the SnGs in the weekend (or whenever there happens to be a bigger player pool). I played around in ICMizer with the situation from the first screenshot from the previous post (2.4 BB on the button) and it is pretty interesting: -The button could actually jam wider if it had a stack of about 4 or 5 BB (rather than 2.4 BB) in this situation. I think it is because the big blind player can call less hands vs a button shove of 4-5 BB, which makes the button shove more profitable in the ICM world (risk of busting on the bubble becomes smaller). -If the button has a stack of about 4-5 BB to around 17 BB in this situation, the shoving range gets narrower again. This is quite logical, because the button is at risk of losing more value as the stack depth increases, if called by the big blind. -If the button had a stack of over 17 BB (so a stack bigger than the one of the big blind), the button can start jamming a wider range once again. In fact, at this stack depth the jamming ranges seem to be at their widest (close to a 47% range), this is probably because the button would now never be at risk of losing their whole stack (which is the big disaster in the ICM world, especially on the bubble) so jamming more hands is less risky. ICM is pretty funky 🤣 Life goals have been going well, apart from the steady sleep schedule. I seem to really be a fish at keeping sleep schedules steady, will have to try and correct it tonight again!

I decided to do some ICM practicing in Icmizers SnG coach, I did the 120 daily questions for a 6 max hyper format. Sometimes I really don't get ICM 🤣. Any ICM wizards out there that understand what is going on in these situations? Seems like ICM is something that can't really be memorized, and I just have to develop some intuition for it (as well as keep in mind to take exploitative adjustments into account).

Well done! Pretty insane if 13 hours of grinding only barely gets you into first place on the leaderboard 🤣

@Dennis__That's ok! You could search it with the hand ID in the screenshot if you are curious, but no need to. I ended up folding, I figured that my 3 might block some bluffs and it's not the easyest situation to bluff in when multitabling anyway. Probably lots of 95o type stuff in the range for value. But pretty interesting river decision in any case.

I don't think leaving the tables when you win counts as ratholing anyway :). I think it's ratholing if you leave with the intention of coming back immediately/soon with a shorter stack.

Bankroll is now 3317.27€ I played some 5 man SnG. A few 25€ ones but mostly the 50€ level. So a good minor profit! I played 12 of the 50€ SnGs (2 wins, 4 second place) and 6 of the 25€ SnGs (1 win, 2 second place) so a small sample today. I'm only 18th on the leaderboard so I'm far from a contender for the volume prizes right now! I saw @Dennis__ on most tables and ended up HU with him 3 times 🤣. Also bluffed my stack into his top set once, so those chips got torched hard 🤣