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An idiots guide to finding leaks in your game when you don't know what you're doing or looking for by me, an idiot /html/images/emoticons/Asset1.png (2018 review - Part 1)

Back in February 2017 I took a look at analysing my HM2 database to see if there were any obvious leaks that could be plugged. I'm not clever enough to link the original post but it's the one with all the HM2 screenshots in it :) At the time I had a measly 30k hands to review so I figured now was a good time to revisit the post and see what's changed in almost a year now we have 160k hands to look at..

Again we're going to use http://www.pokerlistings.com/strategy/leak-finding-using-holdem-manager as the guide to looking up stats and we'll compare to what was happening back in Feb 2017 to see if I took any of my own advice from back then.

Preflop

First thing we checked was VPIP/PFR from early positions. Let's see what things were like back in February:-

VPIP/PFR (Total): 17.6%/11.6%

VPIP/PFR (EP only): 12.3%/11.3%

The article suggests your VPIP from EP should be roughly half your total VPIP so we were raising slightly more than suggested back in Feb. Fast forward to today and we have the following stats:-

VPIP/PFR (Total): 19.7%/14.0%

VPIP/PFR (EP only): 12.6%/11.8%

Seems like it's going in the right direction but possibly for the wrong reason. I've been playing more hands in general over the last year but my VPIP from EP has remained at the same level. I'm not sure if you can directly relate this stat to a range but I'm going to do it anyway.

range1.PNG.0f8404b16bc6194b672cf394766f7847.PNG

This would be the equivalent 12.6% as a range of hands. I think this seems like a fairly good opening range as well although it could probably do with a little tightening at 8-9max and a little loosening at 6 max. To check and see how close to this I'm actually opening it's time to do some filtering. First of all I made sure I put some chips in the pot as this will remove all the hands I open folded. Next I made the min stack size greater than 8bb. This is to eliminate any small all ins with any two. we are left with the following heat map for 4.8k hands..

heat1.PNG.70cfab07f65826ada4e0c6e456195b5c.PNG

There are some rogues on the map that should not be there so lets try and get rid of the pre-flop all ins and see which hands actually made it to the flop..

heat2.PNG.0b3a49641b8dcb36f19aae4f74321323.PNG

Ahh, appears we have a problem. There have been some nonsense opens it seems so let's have a look at a few examples and see if there is any logical reason for opening 64o.

hand1.PNG.b37212f7506937efcf6396afc5adc6b3.PNG

Misclick??

 

hand2.PNG.d2cef61f3f6d288be178e1d4357f0a80.PNG

Soul read?

 

hand3.PNG.4ebcdfcac57be56f38e450cf14fcdf9e.PNG

Who knows here, this hand should actually be filtered out but still appeared. Without knowing exactly when and why these rogue hands were appearing in EP it's hard to say why I did things. I'm not opening 64o ever with intent so we'll just call them anomalies. I figured a better way to check would be to see if I'm winning xbb/100 with the 12% range from above and if we're losing with everything outside that range.

graph1.PNG.bdb0b966a0856efb8e1d93f4707cd457.PNG

Not only am I winning over 100bb/100 I'm running under EV wqith hands outside the top 12%. Things change dramatically though when you remove the lower pocket pairs from the selected hands and we get down to a much less exciting -19.33bb/100. The only hands remaining that appear to be winning are KTs and some offsuit broadway combos. There is plenty more analysis that could be done to find out when the smaller pairs become unprofitable based on stack size and other variables but that's for another time. 

Let's look at the top 12 percent and see if we're winning with all of them.

range1.PNG.39b6c6eda983d0bc724258d4fc4794e4.PNG

Looks like it's probably worth dropping Axs up to about ATs is probably a good idea. All the hands below ATs have less than 100 hits so I don't think they're necessarily a huge leak but certainly something I'm going to try and curb playing in the next few months. The other thing that might be worth getting rid of is 99 which is a whopping -235bb over 163 hands. I can safely say this is me overplaying the 'Stars nuts' most of the time but maybe it's time to start playing TT+ to be on the safe side. I think ATo/A9o need to go too and possibly KQo or maybe just play them based on the table more than a hard and fast rule.

Let's have a look at what I concluded after the last check of the database..

"Even with the small sample I think there are hand combinations that I should be folding in EP that I just don't. I looked at pocket pairs first and did an additional filter to only see hands when I was 50BB or more deep. This is the kinda level when I get my head torch on and go set mining. It pretty much looks like the chart above, I'm losing at everything up to TT. It feels horrible to fold a pair at any time but the stats don't lie, they're costing me chips. There are a couple others I'll probably make a conscious decision to not play as well (ATo and KQo) especially when there are no antes."

So basically I've learned nothing apparently. I'm still playing the same hands and losing int eh same ways. That was until I remember that I should really filter the results to only show hands AFTER the last report. Turns out 99 has been profitable for 93bb/100 since March 2017 so maybe it's ok to leave in. Everything else matches up though and KQo and ATo were big losers again. From the small pocket pairs only 55 and 22 have resulted in loses and nearly every other hand combo that I played had <20 results so I've definitely tightened up which is good.

If you take the 12% and all pocket pairs out then it's still a negative bb/100 further confirming that these hands need to go so hopefully a post-it note on my monitor telling me to only play the top 12% from EP will help me loss less and win more in 2018 :)

Next time out we'll look at whatever was next on the report, I've not looked at it yet :)

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For early position opens, 99 should still be in your range, and possibly 88 too, but a lot of their EV comes from making sets. If you don't get lucky with sets over a particular sample size, you'll naturally lose money with hands that typically flop 2nd or 3rd pair.
If you want to open 12% in EP, then you should be less inclined to play offsuit hands, since these realize less equity than suited combos, so don't do well OOP. Offsuit aces with medium/bad kickers are particularly bad in this respect due to reverse implied odds. e.g. I would remove A9o and A8o (24 total combos) from that 12% range, and replace them with KJs, KTs, QJs, JTs (only 4 combos each). Even ATo is unplayable in EP if there are more than 6 people still to act. Use some more of the suited hands to balance your range and increase your #BoardCovfefe.

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An idiots guide to finding leaks in your game when you don't know what you're doing or looking for by me, an idiot Smile (2018 review - Part 2)

Ok, I'm back again with more database mining and leak finding in an attempt to become above average at poker. Step two of the leak finding bible suggests looking at how you play when facing a raiser. Ok, I can do that, Date range set to 2017, preflop action filter set to 'one raiser' and VPIP set to 'yes' to make sure I actually played the hand and didn't fold...

124.22 bb/100 :Thumbsup:

Next I removed hands I played from the big and small blind because I know I defend really wide from the BB and am likely to flick in a call in the SB if the price seems right..

234.86 bb/100 :Cash:

Next up I removed any hand where I was all-in preflop to see what kind of hands I'm taking to the streets and we're still at a healthy 161 bb/100.heat1.PNG.930a1886601dcda95d051f09d7333452.PNGcount1.PNG.59c909596a8d7d8882dc4c279758048b.PNG

I'm not 100% sure how the hand count map works on the right but it helps add a little context to the random blobs of heat on the other side. I'm not sure if it creates a range it expects me to play based on the total number of hands but it doesn't really add up as all. It does however illustrate the hands I'm playing a lot and hides any random punts with J2o :) 

Leaks did start appearing once I drilled down a little further. If I just look at hands where I'm in EP (or just UTG+1 really) the bb/100 goes into the negative once I removed AA-QQ so it looks like I need to tighten up there. 

The easilet leak to find was in my big blind defence...

Heat2.PNG.d6849b9747624cdaf7b03ea36db0cdb7.PNG

What a pretty picture that is :Wow:. It's in the -24bb/100 range. Now this is an overall picture of every hand I played in the last year where I at least called a single raiser but it doesn't really highlight specific scenarios. Let's look at when we 3-bet the initial raiser :-

  • BvB: 390bb/100 (120 hands)
  • vs BTN: 81bb/100 (73 hands)
  • vs CO: 484bb/100 (34 hands)
  • vs MP: 617bb/100 (42 hands)
  • vs EP: 454bb/100 (35 hands)

Out of the 303 hands total only 92 of them even saw a flop. I could probably break this down further to which positions when a 3-bet fold the most often and possibly start 3-betting more but that seems a little advanced for just now so we'll just stick to the general rule of thumb that 3-betting from the big blind seems to work and that type of defence is fine.

Time to start seeing what we're calling with and when. First of all I filtered the hands to ensure I was facing a raise of no more than 2.2bb as I'm very likely to defend to a min raise or tiny open. Then I made sure there were no antes. I defended a min-raise 107 times with no antes in 2017 and it cost me 4.28bb. This number is a little skewed though as there are Spin'n'Go and variants of the format recorded in the filter so after removing hands with 4 or less players we're down to a total of 39 ante-less BB defends. The result is a miserable -68bb/100. There are 29 different starting hands on the heat map so we're only talking 1 or 2 instances per hand but even the winning combos were for less than a few bb so it doesn't seem worth it. Another obvious spot to tighten up and just let it go. Doing a little more digging showed that calling early and middle position raises was massively unprofitable where as against CO to SB it's actually profitable so I probably need to look at the position of the player raising as well as it's something I rarely do when playing.

Now it's time to add antes in things get a little worse. We're up to -55bb/100 when in the BB facing anything under a 2.5bb raise. A quick look at the heat map shows I've never just called KK, JJ or AKs over the 1300 hands for this scenario. I imagine that's unbalanced but nobody will have enough hands on me to know that. I only slow played AA, QQ and TT once each respectively with only QQ being a losing play. This overview states the obvious, defend less, but doesn't really say when so we need to use some other metrics to narrow things down.

My understanding of things is that it's better to defend when you have more chips so looking at what were doing at different stack sizes seems like a good idea to see if that theory is correct.

  • < 20bb: 38.84bb/100 (303 hands)
  • 20bb to 40bb: -101.05bb/100 (507 hands)
  • > 40bb: -61.47bb/100 (552 hands)

Well that theory sucked, kind of. Looking at the hands individually there are less bbs to win/lose when you start with less bbs in the first place so the swings will be bigger stacks. That being said there are clearly issues with the number of hand combos I'm calling with.

Next time we'll have a look at that and maybe do a January update as to what's been happening on the ol' Unibets.

 

 

 

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The Hand Count matrix isn't particularly useful when you're running filters, as it's just showing you how often you took a certain action. e.g. If the filter is "call", then it's just showing you which hands you called with more often than not (the white ones were probably 50/50). I only use Hand Count for determining if I've been card dead (or on a heater) over a certain sample. e.g. If (with all filters off), it says I've been dealt AA-JJ/AKs less often than expected, or I'm just getting way too much offsuit trash on the button, that's often all I need to see to explain some poor results.

One quick way of seeing how you're doing with pre-flop calls with HEM is to look at your POSITION report and then go to More Filters>Cold Call.
That quick filter will immediately show you if you're winning/losing in EP,  MP, CO, BTN, SB, or BB when you pressed the CALL button pre-flop. And if you then click on each position on the reports page, you can see the heat map for each position. This is a great way to find out which types of hands are doing well as calls and which are losing. e.g. You might find hands like JTs and 22 are losing when you cold call in MP (so you should #FoldPre), but in BB you might be making money calling with hands like K6s or QTo or A6o.

Some of the other Quick Filters built into HEM are also useful. (e.g. "3-bet", "3-bet light", "call 3-bet"). You can even look at graphs while you have a filter switched on. (If you want to see an epic redline, run the "3-bet" or "4-bet" quick filters and pull up the graph). Remember to deselect/remove each filter when you want to compare with your overall results, or run a different filter, because if you combine too many you'll end up with very few results to look at.

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Interesting analysis again. 👍

But remember when you look at a hand's winrate from BB you should compare it to -100bb/100 (no ante) or approximately -110bb/100 (with ante) which is the winrate when you fold. So a hand doesn't need to have a positive winrate from BB to be a good defend.

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@whereisrivaldo, the hands are filtered by VPIP = yes so the results don't include any hands where I folded pre, purely ones that I saw a flop. If I included the folded hand I would expect there to be more -bb/100 hands but they're not hands I'm actively playing so I got rid of them.

I think it makes sense to do that so that I'm analysing purely my actions?

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Yea of course. I was trying to point out that when you VPIP from BB and end up with a better winrate than -100bb/100 it was a +EV decision to VPIP. So  -68bb/100 and -55bb/100 winrates you got from calling a single raise in BB are not miserable and should not discourage you to defend less.

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January 2018 - Week 1

The slow 'downswing' that started happening in December has continued into January unfortunately. I'm in the same position mentally as I was after the last prop bet in that I find it hard to get motivated to play the normal schedule. So many of the MTTs in the €5-10 range are 6-max and I just don't enjoy that format as much as 9-max for some reason. Here is a quick look at how the evening schedule shapes up for me :-

9-max.thumb.PNG.e196b1aa92ddf126de66ac4da5f91a92.PNG

6-max.thumb.PNG.6dcbc30b78e6ba32705990fcd5a47335.PNG

It's great to see €5 MTTs thriving and getting GTD boosts and they are juicy prospects now but they can also be punishing if you're not in the mood to deal with the crazies of Unibet. The big 3 at the €5 (and the Gorsky) all play roughly the same too. They're all rebuy/re-entry so you can easily spend €10-15 per MTT and they all feel like the same sort of tournament when you play them. It's just not that exciting for me just now.

I should probably bother Leo to see if any changes can be made but I think I'll save all my gripes up and just do one big post in the future :). I'd like to see the €10 Meteor changed into a r/a as I think it could easily turn that into a daily €1.5k+ MTT and have either the Black Hole or Gorsky changed to 9 max, preferably the Black Hole. Anyway, I seemed to have gone off on a tangent.. let's get back to what's been happening in January.

With it being a new month there are a new set of promos and missions to complete. The prospect of completing the UO slots promo via SNGs sounded like a great thing until I realised I'd have to play 9 €10 SNGs a day to do it. I can't stand playing the 5max SNGs for very long so quickly realised I wasn't going to be completing the promo that way. I did try it out on the 1st and went 1 for 6 before giving up for the day. Only other notable win on Monday was a Sputnik sat for a €50 ticket on a day where I played 3 MTTs total.

Tuesday I moved my attention to PLO to complete the UO Slots requirements and had a decent day bagging nearly 3 buy-ins at PLO10. On the MTT side I played a mix of regular and sat MTTs and bricked them all.

Wednesday was a losing day on the PLO streets as I dabbled in PLO25, which I lost a buy-in at, and PLO10 where I lost a 1.5 buy-ins. MTT bricking continued apart from a single win in a UK4 for a €25 ticket. I've been actively burning through my UK tour tickets because I'm not going to get many chances to play the Final on a Saturday night because I'll either be DJing or out doing stuff so I'm not converting the tickets anymore and just using them for the target as and when I get them. There is still a Monday night 'seat only' sat I can flick in from time to time and I don't actually mind withdrawing to cover a buy-in if worst comes to worst if I really want to attend a stop.

Thursday, Friday and part of Saturday were spend completing missions and the UO slots. I didn't bother with the Slots promo on Thursday, broke even completing it on Friday and booked a €25 win on Saturday. I think I got a couple cash tickets out the spins which were promptly converted to playthrough bonuses as I don't have the time or patience for 350 flops or whatever the clearance is for them. One of the monthly missions was to get a bounty in a Shooting Star. This turned out to be a lot harder than I remember and took me 8 attempts before I finally got one on Saturday. Saturday also had a "Play SNG one day.." type mission so I binked a €10 SNG completing that. The rest of Saturday was filled with near misses..

  • UK25 - 4th with 3 paid
  • Milky Way - 12th with 9 paid
  • Event Horizon 20th with 18 paid
  • Sputnik Sat 4th with 3 paid

It wasn't all bad though as I won my Milky Way ticket in a €5 flip and picked up a Supernova ticket via tickets I'm now grinding. A losing day for cash but a winning day for tickets.

I type these out on the fly while looking at the results and thankfully there are some green cells appearing now :) Sunday started with a €4 SNG win, a 5th in a €5 Shooting Star for €10, 2nd in a €10 Singularity for €38 and direct bubbling the €5 Singularity in 10th with 9 paid. I also booked a 1 buy-in win at PLO25 completing the UO slots. I remember there being some server issues which made knowing where you stood in the evening MTTs pretty hard. I only played 6 with all the issues happening and didn't cash any. I direct bubbled the Sputnik sat for the second time in a row and then made up for it by binking another Supernova ticket to cover the one I had spent earlier in the day :)

All in all a pretty miserable week for the bankroll with multiple bubbles resulting in a -€220 red mark on the results sheet. 

On a completely unrelated topic I have now entered the world of cryptocurrency, much like most of the poker world and earth in general. I invested £200 total in various different coins and tokens at the end of last year and it's been fun watching the swings up and down. I'm not about to start talking about it actively here because I have a very basic understanding of the technology and even less understand of how to maximise returns on investments through trading and things of that nature. If you're thinking about getting involved and investing into the crypto world I have two pieces of advice that I think are worth considering.

Number 1, only invest money you are happy to lose because there is no telling what might happen with this space in the future. This seems like common sense but you hear of stories about people having over 50% of their net worth in crypto and that's just silly.

Number 2, if you're going to invest in multiple coins/token make sure you get $50+ of them. On more than one occasion I've found I could not get a crypto off an exchange because they were only willing to transfer/exchange over x amount and I had less than that as I was buying £10 of a crypto that was worth $0.01 or something. Something like $50+ in any crypto should be ok to deal with on exchanges but below that they get a bit fussy about it. They also tend to like converting Bitcoin and Ethereum into the the smaller coins so make you buy enough of either or both to cover any initial investments.

It's been an interesting space to watch over the last few weeks and if I was to cash out everything now I'd have made £50 for basically doing nothing. I expect this sum would have been higher had I done more research and learned about transaction fees and not bought Bitcoin so high but I'm happy just sitting with what I've got and just seeing what it's worth in 6 months or a years time. It certainly doesn't seem like a technology that is going away soon, even if the value of the assets does from time to time. I'll add a crypto update in the end of month review if anyone is interested in how it's going and will answer any questions with wildly inaccurate statements and misleading financial advice as required :)

 Int eh next post we'll go back to the HM database and look at some post-flop play and, depending on when I type it out, a week two recap.

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Sorry to hear about the downsw0ng.
Thanks for the crypto tips. I'm still yet to get involved, but I'll probably only invest 200 quid or so in the first instance and not get actively involved in trading the various coins. (Trying to predict which altcoins are gonna go up and down in value sounds way too complicated, time consuming and risky). #HoldPre.

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Just full blown LOL at bitcoin and the like. Stay at Unibet for your gambling fix. Small investors, when will they learn???

We're gonna win on so many levels! We're gonna win, win, win. You're gonna get so tired of winning, you're gonna say: "Mr. President please, we don't wanna win anymore, it's too much!" And I'm gonna say: "I'm sorry, we're gonna keep winning because we're gonna make America great again!"
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  • 2 weeks later...

Lots of good advice re the database analysis.  I’d add that,

1. To do meaningful analysis with tournaments you need a lot of hands, collected over a short time period (your game should be evolving, even if it isn’t other players are, older hh aren’t as useful), and from the same game type.  So much of tournament play is situational you will often find you have to filter extensively to analyse a certain spot, and then when you’ve applied those filters you often don’t have a meaningful sample size. Back when I was on stars I’d do this kind of work, I was generating up to 200k hh a month and it wasn’t always enough to do what I wanted.  

2. If you don’t have enough hh, look for videos and other resources where good players share their ranges in certain spots, and start to move your range in the direction of that players (copying ranges is usually a bad idea, but knowing if you should be looser or tighter is often helpful).  

3. Re Folding 99 preflop in EP; you probably know that you should usually be opening 99.  If you’re losing a lot with 99 (and it’s not just variance) look at how you play TT and 88 (assuming you play those hands profitably) to give you some ideas on how to possibly play the hand differently.  

4. You’ve said that you’re a casual player, so I hope you don’t take offence, but often when you find you’re losing money with a hand, the answer isn’t to start folding pre, it’s to understand how you are misplaying the hand and work to correct it.  

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@monkeyheaven wrote:

Lots of good advice re the database analysis.  I’d add that,

1. To do meaningful analysis with tournaments you need a lot of hands, collected over a short time period (your game should be evolving, even if it isn’t other players are, older hh aren’t as useful), and from the same game type.  So much of tournament play is situational you will often find you have to filter extensively to analyse a certain spot, and then when you’ve applied those filters you often don’t have a meaningful sample size. Back when I was on stars I’d do this kind of work, I was generating up to 200k hh a month and it wasn’t always enough to do what I wanted.  

2. If you don’t have enough hh, look for videos and other resources where good players share their ranges in certain spots, and start to move your range in the direction of that players (copying ranges is usually a bad idea, but knowing if you should be looser or tighter is often helpful).  

3. Re Folding 99 preflop in EP; you probably know that you should usually be opening 99.  If you’re losing a lot with 99 (and it’s not just variance) look at how you play TT and 88 (assuming you play those hands profitably) to give you some ideas on how to possibly play the hand differently.  

4. You’ve said that you’re a casual player, so I hope you don’t take offence, but often when you find you’re losing money with a hand, the answer isn’t to start folding pre, it’s to understand how you are misplaying the hand and work to correct it.  


Thanks for the responce @monkeyheaven. You're right, with most of my volume being on Unibet I'm never going to have a big enough sample to make any defining conclusions. I'll be lucky if I make 200k hands in a year, let alone a month (I'm at 17k for Jan) so I'm aware I should be using and results as a guide and not a hard ruling.

Completely agree about using as many resources as possible to study the same kind of situation. I'll be honest and say I watch a lot of poker on Twitch but rarely pay any attention to it, it's just background noise while I play. Absorbing more information is something I need to do more.

I wasn't suggesting TT+ was going to be a EP open rule explicitly, more that I would just take a moment more to evaluate whether anything below that is a good open on the table I'm at. I went back and looked at the smaller pocket pairs and 88/77 are both profitable. The 99s seem to just have had more big bb pots where they've ended up losing. Post analysis, just looking at 2018, 99 is still a losing hand in terms of bb/100 (where pairs above and below are not) but when you just do a count of hands where it won chips vs lost it's ahead so it's not a major concern. #SampleSize too. 

As a reassurance I checked VPIP for the pocket pairs in 2018 and 77+ is in the 90%+ range and below that there is a sharp decline to 22 with 15%. In 2017 22 has a VPIP of 50% and then every pair above that is 70%+ 🤣. I think that means I'm heading the right direction at tightening my range and sample size shouldn't really matter as VPIP should be pretty static if I'm onpening teh same range all the time, I think. :)

To your last point, I completely agree as well. It just so happens that the article I was working through started at Pre-flop analysis so it looks heavy towards that just now :) We'll get into vast array of post flop mistakes in good time.

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January 2018 - Week 2

The second week of 2018 started pretty well. Picked up a little profit chasing UO slot spins and then binked this little diddy..

Capture.PNG.2bf4885d4460d65649dad29c7755b344.PNG

Ended up HU against NMPfan and luckboxed my way to the win. I'll be using this in Glasgow and hopefully picking up another one so I can have a spare bullet if required. I've completely stopped playing the qualifiers to the package with the final being moved to Saturday so this is my only route from now on. It never get's enough runners to clear the overlay so it's good value but much higher variance. I direct bubbled a DSO sat and bricked two tournies but finally winning a seat to a Unibet event on merit was enough for me :)

Capture.PNG.b2f460d208cd5666d643105bc01f01a0.PNG

It's easier just to show the results for the week and highlight any major incidents I think. Tuesday-Thursday were all pretty miserable and also spelled the end of my slots quest. Sitting in PLO10 or 25 was just not worth it and I was losing more than I was making so I gave up for the month. Most of Fridays loses are not loses, it's a withdrawal of £150 (€168) which was migrated to another site ;). I cashed two Shooting Stars on Saturdays to turn a profit and then mincashed the Nova on Sunday to make a tiny dent in the loses. 

 

January 2018 - Week 3

Capture.PNG.e276cf9501b47e4a9cbe5e0d702884f6.PNG

A profitable week for a change but a low volume one. I played a total of 12 MTTs between Mon-Sat as my desire to grind the evening schedule continues to wain. I just can't bring myself to play things like the Black Hole and Gorsky and would rather play $1.10 MTTs somewhere else with less crazy plays and with teh ability to track hands. Lappin spilt the beans on a MTT series coming in March so that might perk up my interest but other than the Nova I have very little desire to open the client just now.

I tried a full session on Sunday and managed two cashes, a 2nd in an early €10 Singularity and a min cash in the €50 Sputnik that I satted into. Finished 13 places off the money in the Nova but won a sat to cover the ticket for that so it was a decent session to round off the week.

 

January 2018 - Week 4

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Another big dent in the BR after this week. I'm playing too many satellites basically. 18 out of the 38 MTTs I played in week 4 were sats. Normally this is ok if a) you win tickets and b) you convert those tickets into cashes but I wasn't doing either very well. With not really wanting to grind the normal schedule the only things I was really regging regularly were the Nova and Sputnik sats. Sometimes I'd play the Titan or Event Horizon but other than there there are not many real MTTs. The only winning day actually came on Friday where I played 3x €25 SNGs against Lappin and won two. Only thing I did on Saturday was sat into the Milky Way and then not cash and Sunday was a typical Sunday :) 

Where do we go from here then? The plan is to protect the bankroll basically. Filter out qualifiers and everything in the €10 and above range. I need to get back into winning ways so I have to get back into the mean streets of the €5 (and possibly €2) MTTs to get some green cells on the spreadsheet in preparation for this MTT series. The Nova sats are so juicy so I can't drop them completely but I'll leave the DSO and Sputnik for just now and maybe start chopping up Nova tickets to lower the direct pain on the BR when I play them. 

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** END OF MONTH REVIEW (January 2018) **

  • +/- for the month: -€633.25* (BR Total: €1106.13) *Includes €168 withdrawal so -€465 really.
  • Days played: 29
  • Losing days: 21
  • Winning/Break Even days: 8
  • Sessions/Games played - Cash: 27, SNGs: 13, MTTs: 182
  • ROIs - Cash: -15.42% , SNGs: 49.27% , MTTs: -16.79%

Not the best way to start 2018 was it :Annoyed:. Finished the month with 3 more losing days to round off January in style. I actually played my first session using the new filter plan I mentioned in my previous post and it worked out ok. I didn't win anything and had a miserable session, including direct bubbling the Gorsky, but I was mentally prepared for the madness and didn't want to smash my laptop up too much at the end of it.

I did want to smash my laptop after this though..

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This would have put me comfortably in the top 50 places in last nights Powerfest event and an almost lock for a cash but ultimately turned into the beginning of a demise that ended in me being called by Q9o vs 55 AIPF and losing the last of my chips about 100 from the money an hour later.

Anyway, enough with the bad beats, let's look forward. The Queen of Flips is here so I think I'll play some more SnGs this month to clear the bronze tier. It would be 25 games a day to get all the tokens but the Ts&Cs don't stipulate table size so you could rattle through some HU €1s shoving every hand and letting variance balance things out :) The page for the Promo is not very clear and I can't remember the promo so I'm not sure if you can only win lower tier prizes with a bronze token or if you can win the big prizes but you just have to get through more flips but after day one I'll know either way and be able to work out if it's worth doing. If it is worth doing I might take the odd shot at PLO25 to get a silver token but that'll be based on MTT results.

Other than that it'll be the regular MTT grind and mission completing as we rebuild the BR. I have a solitary Supernova ticket left and then I'll be ticket free. I've got about 3700 points in the shop so I'll probably get a couple tickets from that and fire the sats to start a roll again there. This will hopefully mean I'll be playing the Nova for the foreseeable future.

As a final thought I wanted to touch on @4soul's comment about being a pro. I consider myself about as far from a professional as a player can get :) First and foremost it's not my main source of income so by the very definition of the word I can't be a professional. I also don't have the work ethic that a pro needs to have and don't put in the hours required on and off the virtual felt despite having almost daily results. I consider myself a 'Rec Reg' which might sound strange but there is some method to my madness.

A number of words get thrown around when describing poker players, Pro/Rec(reational)/Regular/Casual, and I think they sometimes get muddled up. A lot of the time people use 'Rec' and 'Reg' as a way to distinguish between a player that plays a lot and player that doesn't but this actually doesn't make sense. To do something recreational is just to do it for fun, the amount of time you do the activity doesn't really matter. Someone that plays video games every day isn't instantly a pro gamer and neither is someone that plays poker. They just do it because they enjoy it but it doesn't automatically make it a job or profession.

'Casual' and 'Regular' seem to me to be much better way of describing the type of player someone is in relation to how much time they spend playing. If you're opening the client a couple times a month then you'd be a casual player IMO and anyone opening it weekly or more would be a regular.  

With the last two paragraphs in mind it's much easier to classify myself as a 'Rec Reg'. Someone who plays for fun and plays a lot. As much as I'd like to quit my day job and study/play poker as a profession it's not going to happen :) I don't have the work ethic to study enough to get better, I don't have the discipline to always follow what I've learned and I just don't have enough time to do the study in the first place.

It's very easy to play a few tables while you do other things like watching TV/Twitch or making dinner but you can't study and do those things. I'm easily distracted and if given the choice between studying and playing + some other activity I'm going choose playing almost every time. It's something I want to change a little this year because I think improving is good and helps the enjoyment of the game and I actually quite like running ICM sims and looking at hand histories but I don't plan on having it take over my life or be a priority.

In summary, this means I'll never be a professional poker player and I'm perfectly ok with that :)

With that strange ramble about nothing over we'll wrap things up for another post. I've got at least one more DB review post in me at some point but mostly things will be back to the reviews of the daily grind from now on. I bet you can't wait! :)

 

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I like your ideea being " Rec Reg " , i will use this term forward , and i hope will become a national or international thing in poker....because, for shure, most of us are just like that: work full-time (8-10hours per day to a job) , and 4-5 hours are for poker (almost everyday :D) , as you can see my blog , also i am playing like 71/87 days of challenge (which means at every 30 hours i have a session in mtts+cash). SO, fortunally i am also a recreational regular.

@MoreTBCmay the February be with you! Do you play banzai sometimes?

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

February 2018 (1st to 17th)

It's been a mixed bag so far in February as I continued to battle with a lack of motivation to play on Unibet. I still can't explain why I'd rather get beat up in tough 1000+ fields than actually win some money playing in lower variance and generally perceived softer MTT on Unibet but it's what I've been doing. I remember listening to Davitsche talk about this on his stream once when someone asked him why he doesn't play on Stars. His short answer was because he wanted to make money. This is something I completely agree with him about. For all the glitz and glamour of massive prizepools PS can generate it's incredibly difficult to actually get the gold trophies and requires much more work and effort than on smaller networks.

To prove this I went and checked my sharkscope graph and Pocketfives results for PS.

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I have 2 outright wins on PS in my entire playing career, just two. They were also in 2014 and 2015 which would have been a time where I didn't know anything about poker beyond the hand rankings so can easily be put down to me being smacked with the deck. I have played thousands of MTTs since 2012 (which is the first result P5 gave me, it could easily be longer than that) and only won twice. That's pretty grim in terms of making money. If you go and take it a step further (and sorry for throwing you under the bus) everybody's favourite ChapInAChair has played on PS for 10 years plus and never won a single tournament. I consider him a much better player than myself so that gives you an indication of how difficult is is to win any decent money at the top.

Now if you compare this to Unibet I've probably won at least 1 tournament a month on average for almost the last 2 years and sometimes more than 1 a day (#thinbrag). Unibet is the only site I can safely say I'm in profit on (from poker anyway.. damn you slots!!) yet I'd still rather play elsewhere to chase the title. I'm in it for the glory it seems, not the financial gain. I just want to be able to say I won a 'Big' something or a whatever other mass field and well known MTTs are called. The closest thing for me on Unibet is the Nova but that's only once a week :(

Anyway,  it's time to see what's been going on in the first half of February. I started off the 1st with a fairly mixed session. I wanted to see how easy it would be to earn some flips so I played some PLO and some SNGs. I didn't enjoy either and didn't win at either :). I also didn't enjoy the actual flips as I only got to stage two once. I did cash the big 1k €5 Multiverse for €30 to stem the bleeding but ended the day down about 10 euros.

Friday was a slight winning day thanks to a 6th place finish in the afternoon €10 Deep Space but that profit quickly disappeared after Sat-Sun. Sunday was particularly painful as it saw me losing with Aces in the Supernova for the 3rd week in a row and I also direct bubbled a Sputnik sat. I ended the first week down about €95.

Then I took a week off. I didn't stop playing poker, just on Unibet. I had absolutely no desire to open the client let alone complete the mission I was on, which was the MTT one. It may have been one of the best decisions I've made.

I came back on the 11th with a renewed enthusiasm to grind. I started off completing the MTT mission by playing a Singularity, Multiverse and Shoorting Star. I min cashed the Shooting Star, soft bubbled the Singularity and finished 10 off the money in the Mutliverse. Picked up a ticket for the Ice Giant Bounty in a Sat which I then finished 5 off the money in (but got enough bounties to make it a profitable tourney). I skipped the Nebula and Spectrum and played an Odyssey sat instead which ended up in another ticket collected.

The Odyssey went well, really well. By the time we got down to the last two tables I had the company of Lappin and Iany (although they were both on the other table). Lappin managed to survive to the FT but poor Iany did not. I felt pretty comfortable on the FT and felt like I knew how most of the opponents were playing. At that point in the night I was down to one or two tables so I was really paying attention to every hand. The tournament ran long into the night. It was just after 1am I think when I eventually called a flop all in 3 handed and lost with the nut flush draw. Tiredness and a lack of patience played major factors in my decision and I think if I didn't have work in the morning I would have folded and waited for a better spot. It was still good for €870 which is not bad at all from a €5 sat investment. Lappin went on to win the tournament and was very complimentary on my play when he streamed the next day. Almost too complimentary, bordering on insincerity, which makes me wonder if he's just feeding the ego of a fish he can catch regularly. I'm on to you Lappin!

The 2nd full week of February started with the excellent news that Unibet would be running an online MTT series for two weeks. I have already drawn up a schedule.

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A couple of notes to go with this schedule. Firstly, I'm probably not going to play all the high events, I just filtered by 'High' to de-clutter the full schedule. My plan is to play all the 'low' events and play as many of the high events as I can based on tickets I win beforehand and my BR in general. Regarding the colour coding it a simple scheme. Green should be playable, orange are a maybe and red is unavailable to play. I think it's going to be a fun series to play and with the added incentive of the leaderboards I plan on playing as many events as possible.

With that in mind Monday was made up mostly of sat grinding. With the official UOS sats not in the client yet I fired things like the Milky Way sat and the Sputnik to try and get some tickets together. I collected 1 ticket, a Supernova ticket. Only other cash in the session was a 15th in the Black Hole for €25. Not the best start to UOS prep.

Wednesday was a much better day all round. Picked up a UOS 50 and UOS 10 ticket out of my 7 attempted to get a ticket. Also direct bubbled Supernova sat to miss out on my second ticket which was a shame as I'd made a good shove from the button and got called light. Probably one of those situations where I should have just folded into the money. I also picked up a 4th in the Event Horizon after max late regging it for €90 and picked up my first trophy for February by shipping the Gorsky. Good to finally get back on the winners podium after a bit of a dry spell.

Thursday and Friday also both went well. 3 more Supernova tickets and a UOS 50 collected over the two days and cashes in the Black Hole and a €10 PLO singularity on Thursday to boost the BR. I rounded off the week so far with a small session on Saturday where I bricked everything.

That brings us up to today, Sunday the 18th. At this point things are looking good for the UOS. The ticket roll is at €540 (I had some €10 tickets left over) and I still have BP to use in the shop to get a few more so it's a good start. I'd like to have at least 2 bullets and an add-on for the Main Event so we're on track to have that by the start of the series and I'm sure there will be plenty of extra sats running during as well. The actual BR is looking healthy again too after the Odyssey cash and is now sitting just above the €1800 mark. I fully expect this to go down over the next week and I'm ok with that so long as real world €'s are being converted into tickets for the UOS :)

Right, time for a shower and some food before the big Sunday grind!

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

February 2018 (18th to 28th)

The countdown to the UOS was still on so ticket hunting continued to be my priority on Sunday. I only ended up play 4 actual MTTs and they all ended in deep runs but not enough to cash. On the sat front I picked up 2 UOS25 and a Supernova ticket to continue building a fund for the UOS events. I was also invited to play in Ian's Battle Royale as a thanks for being the worst mod he has :) I of course luckboxed my way through the 9 handed SNG and took down the €66 first prize and am now in the final for what I think has a UK tour package for first. Not knowing is probably confirmation about my poor mod skills :)

Week 3 started by picking up a UOS 50 and UOS 100 ticket on Monday, skipping Tuesday and then cashing the Black Hole and Titan for €80 combined. Thursday had another Black Hole cash for €58 and I didn't play Friday.

I withdrew some money on Saturday to play a series on another site and played a small losing session. Sunday was pretty terrible as I only cashed in the first tournament I played in and then bricked everything else. The highlight of my brickathon was lasting 20 minutes in the Supernova as I lost Full House vs quads for all the chips. Not the best of preparations for the UOS :(

26th of Feb

So here we go then! Day 1 of the UOS and I was pumped up. I had/have no intention of playing anything else other than the 6 events per day and was ready at 6pm for the first events to kick off. I want to give them my full attention and I really want to win an event! I did not win an event on day 1 however. The closest I got was 12th in E1 which was the €50 FO which was worth €170 in profit. I didn't manage any other deep runs but did get some small points scores for being in the top 50% in a few events. As the tables started closing I added a UOS25 ticket sat and scraped through to pick up some more UOS funds.

27-28th Feb

Brick city. I started late on both days, felt tired and really wasn't in a good mental state to focus and play my best. Multiple bullets fired at the L and Nano rebuys to no avail and single bullets in the H resulting in nothing as well. I also accidentally fired my 3rd/4th bullet in the €10 E14 last night thinking it was the Nano event.. €20 I wasn't expecting to spend on that :Laugh:

 

** END OF MONTH REVIEW ( Februaryy 2018 )**

  • +/- for the month: €325.71* (BR Total: €1431.84) *Includes €146 withdrawal
  • Days played: 19
  • Losing days: 14
  • Winning/Break Even days: 5
  • Sessions/Games played - Cash: 10, SNGs: 9, MTTs: 167
  • ROIs - Cash: -36.34% , SNGs: -87.07% , MTTs: 50.08%

 

The Odyssey score really saved my ass this month :) I was expecting a losing month in February as I tried to convert €s into UOS tickets so to end up positive is great. I still have €500 worth of tickets (mostly in Nova/E79 tickets) so the conversion process has gone well and when I focused I am doing well in the Sats. Volume was low but that's to be expected when you take a week off and I also didn't bother completing the missions which normally generates SNG and cash games. That MTT ROI though :Inlove:

Going into March it's all about the UOS. It's been awesome to see all the GTDs get smashed and everyone really getting involved. There seems to be a buzz from players of all stakes and BRs about competing for the leaderboards and for the first time it seems like the MTT side of Unibet is important to players again. I think I heard that they plan to do these after each UO so that sounds amazing and with the potential addition of a new game type there is room for the series to grow into something people get as excited about as *COOP or similar regular series.

I'll try and get this thing updated a bit more often during UOS with leaderboard places and things like that.. but I need to get on the leaderboards first :Rofl:

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March 2018 - End of UOS week 1

Event 19 through 24 ran on Thursday and it was a reasonably good day. Top 50% finishes in 5 out of the 6 events and a min cash in a nano :) Picked up another E79 ticket which meant I now had 3 so that got chopped up into 4x €25s to use in week 2. I'm sitting on 4x €100 tickets (2x Nova and 2x E79) just now and 3 bullets plus an add-on is about all I'm willing to fire on the main event. I've looked at the structure and I think there will be enough chips flying around, as the starting stack is 5k instead of 15k, that building a big pile of virtual chips should be slightly easier than in a regular Nova. It might turn into a Spectrum/Nebula puntfest as well though so we'll have to wait and see on the night.

Friday and Saturday were write-offs as I was DJing both nights.. well I was supposed to be. I ended up getting a text from the boss at around 9pm on Saturday telling me they were not going to open so I missed out on events I could have played :( I did play some sats and small tourneys and picked up a UOS 50 on both days but no cashes. Turns out I now have 4x €50 UOs tickets and I'm probably only going to need 1 more. Week 2 has 3 €50 events, one each on Thur-Sat. I know for sure I can't play the Friday and Saturday is unlikely so I'm left with Thursday as my only day to play. I'll just split the others into €25s I guess as there are a number of rebuys in week 2.

Sunday was an absolute ❤️♥️❤️show :waterfall:. I ran miserably losing pair vs lower pair more times than I want to remember. I busted out of the Nova AGAIN with Aces all in pre, this time against fives with a five on the river. I was down to 2bb at one point so I thought the comeback was on when I got dealt the AA but it wasn't to be. Busted 4 off the money in the L rebuy and got a few points in the Nano rebuy. Direct bubbled an Odyssey sat as well, which was lovely. Did pick up a €25 UOS ticket in a sat but at that point I wanted to close the client and didn't really care, I'd had enough. My only game on Party, that was just ITM and I was doing well in, crashed during the evening as their servers went down so it was a pretty poor evening all round.

If tickets were cash I'd be about break even for the month so far, but they're not, so I'm down about €250 :) Plenty of big events to play in the next week though so hopefully I can cash one or two of them. I really want that winners avatar! Leaderboard standing after one week are as follows:-

nano: 159

Low: 200

High: 80

Overall: 85

That deep run in E1 is really saving my ass just now :) Top 10 finishes in any of the leaderboards are probably out of the question now, bar some sort of sun run, so I guess the goal now is to just try and get in the top 100 of each and claw back some money from all the buy-ins :) Tonight is all rebuys so it could get expensive, especially the 4 minute (hyper) rebuy later on. I might also miss the PLO rebuy tomorrow as it's VTL and the blinds are probably going to be too high by the time I get home and can late reg an hour in. Maybe I'll just go nuts and double stack and make it a €75 donation :) Most of the rest of the week are €25 r/a so I'll be playing sats to try and have enough bullets for all that and/or torching BR going for glory :)

Once the dust settles at the end of the week I'll post some results and possibly begin rebuilding my bankroll from 0 again :D

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

March 2018 - UOS Week 2

Week 2 of the UOS began in exactly the same fashion as week 1 ended.. with bricks flying everywhere. No UOS cashes and barely scraping the top 50% in a handful of events. The only cashes I had between Monday and Wednesday came from a min cash in the Black Hole on Monday and HU SNG wins on Tues-Wed to complete a mission.

Things picked up on Thursday with a cash in E64, a €25 event. 12th place was good for €100 and some much needed points. Also picked up a bronze medal in the €10 Titan for €120 and made 1.5 buy-ins at PLO10 completing 'Moving on up' to chalk up the first winning day in March.. finally.

Was DJing on Friday night so missed out on the events that night and bricked the few sats I played in the afternoon. Saturday was a strange one. I ended up down about €100 for the day even though I final tabled E77, a low r/a. I thought I was going to be DJing Saturday night so exchanged my €50 ticket for €25s but it turned out the club decided to close so I ended up buying in to the €50 UOS with cash and only got a single bounty. I also played many sats and bricked them all.

Main event day! This was the one MTT I wanted to do really well in so I got all my real world stuff out of the way early, got myself fed and watered then I was ready for a big Sunday session. Started off with a little cash to get some missions out the way so lost a little playing NLHE and won a little playing PLO. The first 'MTT' I played was a flip for a UOS E80 (low main) which I managed to bink for a ticket which was nice. I went on to bink a second ticket in another flip as they were running all day to keep the ticket fund topped up. Placed some bets on the rugby to try and clear the bonus I got for being on the FT on Thursday and then the real work started. Picked up a E79 ticket in a supersat, good.. bricked every other sat I played, bad. The UOS events went pretty terribly in general. In the high main I'd fired 4 bullets before the addon period and because I didn't have any more it ended pretty abruptly. I did a little better in the low main after getting through 2 bullets and an add-on I finished 50th, 14 or so places off the money. No result in the Nano and no real results in the late events, although I did finish two off the money in the Nano after the lobby glitched and I thought I was already ITM.

Luckily I registered some other tournaments and they went much better. I picked up a silver medal in the Cosmic Rays, which is a MTT I normally do horribly in. It was a swingy FT but I couldn't clinch the victory and had to settle for 2nd and a tasty €655 profit. I also picked up another cash in the Titan for €40 and I won all my rugby bets and picked up €50 or so from them. Not the ways I wanted to make a profit, I'd have rather made some day 2s, but you can't complain with a profitable Sunday.

UOS Leaderboard Results

Nano Leaderboard: 154th - No Prize

Low Leaderboard: 102nd - No Prize

High Leaderboard: 67th - €30

Overall Leaderboard: 66th - €20

Not the results I'd hoped for but I really do feel I was running bad during the series. It wasn't Merenitsu '0 lucky' level but I was getting it in with the +50% side of the coin flip and losing more than what felt normal. It might be a bias towards remembering the bad beats but it sure felt like those runner runners were coming think and fast :) I really enjoyed the series and I had no problem playing all the levels knowing that a cash in Nano didn't mean to much but the points sure did. I really hope they leave the leaderboard structure the way it is for future events. I know it means there are better players in the lower events and that some people feel they are a waste to play but I see it as a way to boost the prize pools and increase the awareness of the event. I was in it for the glory of being top of the leaderboard, the money is just a nice bonus :)

Going to take it easy for the next few weeks I think. I've been flicking in €10 UO sats every now and again to make a half-arsed attempt to get to Malta and I may do the same with the UK sats to try and get a second bullet for Glasgow. I've moved some of my off-site BR around to take advantage of some deposit bonuses so I'll mostly be playing them and seeing what else the poker world has to offer. I also have this to contend with going forward..

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MiniTBC is on the way and is 12 weeks old. Time is going to be a lot more limited after September so I'm going to need to get as many hands in as possible before then :Rofl:

I'll probably be back at the end of the month with the usual review unless something really exciting happens. Shout out to @theMachine for crushing the blog section of the community with his genius incite into the Nano world and to Lappin for being the end boss he is and winning the UOS leaderboard.

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@MoreTBC 

Congrats bud, an all in that finally paid off.

Have you come up with any poker related names for the wee one.

Lots of community guys coming to scotland for uk tour. If you find out who the father is, we can help you kick the crap out of him.

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