Cuteraven poker stuff

[CuteRaven]

Bankroll is now at 637,24 € after some more 3 tabling HU SnG. I played quite a lot today. I tried to count approximately how many I played in account history, I think I must have played 139 Sit N Gos and won 80 of them (it matches the exact amount of profit I made). The opposition seems soft enough for the most part (at least in the evenings). But who knows, it's hard to objectively know exactly how good I am at HU from a small sample of turbo Sit N Gos, but for now the direction of the profits is good. I'm not usually a fan of one direction, but this one direction I am definately a fan of :D

Today's ROI is 11.65% if I calculated correctly.

[Dennis_]

Very nice

Both profit and volume is insane

[CuteRaven]

Thanks @Dennis_ ! Lets hope it lasts

[CuteRaven]

Played some more €10 HU SnG today. Bankroll is now 770.44€. I was playing and especially running well at the start of the session. Towards the end of the session I started losing focus and tilting slightly and my results were breakeven, but probably would have been better if I was more focused (I slept about 4 or 5 hours last night so fatigue started catching up to me). Yet another reminder not to play too tired, emotional control is so much worse when tired and it's easy to play on impulses instead of logic :D. Anyway, can't be dissapointed with the results!

[CuteRaven]

So today was a pretty terrible day pokerwise. I decided to take shots at NL 25€ HU SnG. It did not go well at all. I probably lost 75% of the all ins that I played, especially towards the end of the session. The last game was pretty indicative of the session. I was up in chips and I lost probably 6 or 7 all ins in a row. My bankroll is now 376.64€. Not the end of the world, I can still grind it back up, but pretty tilting.

But I realized a few things about my HU game also when playing against the good regs at that limit:

-I need to study limp/push/fold ranges more. I thought I knew the correct Nash ranges, but I could be playing slightly too loose ones (or maybe the bad session is giving me the wrong impression? Idk)

-I probably bluff a bit too much in general. Estimating the best bluff frequencies against different opponents for different spots while 3 tabling HU is not that easy, but I need to get better at it

-I might have some timing tells, or maybe not. I think my timings tend to depend on if I have big decisions on other tables. So sometimes I act almost instantly, sometimes slower. Maybe I should just slow down in general.

-I need to play better against new ultra agressive opponents. If I don't have reads on an opponent yet, it is quite difficult to avoid getting run over by such opponents, because it's hard to tell if they are just running really well or are really bluffy or make very thin and very aggressive value bets (e.g all in with bottom pair). So it's easy to make either too loose calls or too many fold against such players.

-Maybe I need a bigger bankroll for taking shots :D. This result is a pretty normal bad run probably.

I programmed a quick calculator in Python that can calculate different possibilities for how many HU SnG games were played and won, and other stats, based on the profit/loss of the session (and buyin and payouts for the SnG). I'm too lazy to count while playing :P (so this is the easiest solution if I don't want to constantly bother Unibet employees for the stats). Here is the output:

You played 74 games and won 30 of them. You paid 55.5 in rake and your ROI is -21.35%

In the unlikely event that someone actually wants to use the calculator, here is the code (just paste in a python interpreter, change appropriate values and run):

#HU SnG games amount and games won calculator with ROI and rake paid#Calculator only works if rake 0% < rake <50% of the buyinbefore=771.64 #bankroll before sessionafter=376.64 #bankroll after session. Exclude any profits/losses from rakeback and other gametypes and buy in sizes.buyin=25 #buyin for the heads up sit n go in your currencypayout=48.5 #payout if you win the heads up sit n go in your currencypossibilities=5 #checks the first n possibilites profit=after-beforedef calc(profit,buyin,payout,possibilities,winslist,buyinslist,rakelist,roilist):    profit_remainder=profit%buyin    rake= 2*buyin-payout    n=1    while len(winslist)<possibilities and n<10000:        amountW=(n*buyin-profit_remainder)*1.0/ rake        if len(str(amountW%1.0))==3 or str(amountW%1.0).count('9')>=9:            winslist.append(int(round(amountW)))        n+=1    for i in range(len(winslist)):        amountG=(payout*winslist[i]-profit)*1.0/buyin        buyinslist.append(int(round(amountG)))    for j in range(len(buyinslist)):        amountR=(rake*1.0/2)*buyinslist[j]        rakelist.append(float("{0:.2f}".format(amountR)))    for k in range(len(buyinslist)):        amountROI=profit*1.0/(buyinslist[k]*buyin)        roilist.append("{0:.2%}".format(amountROI))def printer(profit,buyin,payout,winslist,buyinslist,rakelist,roilist):    print "After making a profit of "+str(profit)+" in "+str(buyin)+" buyin heads up SnG games with a payout of "+str(payout)+" when won:"    print "Possibilites:"    for i in range(len(buyinslist)):        print("You played "+str(buyinslist[i])+" games and won "+str(winslist[i])+" of them. You paid "+str(rakelist[i])+" in rake and your ROI is "+str(roilist[i]))        winslist=[]buyinslist=[]rakelist=[]roilist=[]calc(profit,buyin,payout,possibilities,winslist,buyinslist,rakelist,roilist) printer(profit,buyin,payout,winslist,buyinslist,rakelist,roilist)    

 

 

 

[CuteRaven]

So now my bankroll is 476.44 € after playing just a few 10€ SnG games:

"You played 23 games and won 17 of them. You paid 6.9 in rake and your ROI is 43.39%"

Wtf lol. I noticed it really helped to play slower though, to force myself to think of each decision longer when playing 3 tables. Anyway, I should really go to sleep now :P

[Dennis_]

If you are who I think you are we might have clashed for 4,5 hours straight:laugh:

My advice would be to play your BR up at 10€ and possibly 4€, should you drop any further, until you have 50 Buyins for 25€. There is quite a considerable skill gap between 10€ and 25€ which shouldn't be underestimated.

If you tell me your screen name I might PM you with whatever I noticed during our games

[CuteRaven]

Thanks for the advice. 50 buyins sounds like a good plan

[CuteRaven]

Well, I ran horribly today at 10€ HU SnG. When I bluffed they called, when I value bet they folded. There was one particularly annoying aggressive opponent who managed to somehow constantly have it even though they were almost constantly betting and constantly betting big, very hard to play against, and they won most of the all ins too. Not that I was running well against other players either. I started tilting so I had to stop. One of those days I guess...my BR is at 413,44 € after a recent high of about 550€

Since the last update: "You played 113 games and won 55 of them. You paid 33.9 in rake and your ROI is -5.58%"

[Dennis_]

So we are all going through a downswing then.

You haven´t got a sample yet. I was at -10% for some time at the 10s so don´t worry

[CuteRaven]

Thanks @Dennis_ ! If there was one good thing about the session, it didn't leave any doubt in my mind that today was up to much else than bad variance. The way I was running, the money was going to go in any case :D. And when playing against decent/good aggro players and they are running great, it is very hard to counter/adjust to them. It's easy to play too trappy/passive, or call down too light vs them and bluffing becomes scary if it feels like they always have it. Let's hope that we can all turn these downswings around soon :)

[CuteRaven]

So I have played a bit and results have been quite breakevenish. Nothing really that interesting, though I feel like I have been running a slightly bad in all ins at least so considering that I'm pretty happy with the results. BR is now 427.64€. These are probably my stats:

You played 82 games and won 43 of them. You paid 24.6 in rake and your ROI is 1.73%

I recently tried to learn better preflop strats, since preflop is undeniably such an important aspect in HU SnG. I have come to realize over time that my simplified start at around 15 to 25 bb effective stacks of limping colse to 100% was not very good. Sure, it made prices for 3bets worse for my opponents, but it also let my opponent in the pots for free. All the better regs had some minraises (and reshoves) at those stack sizes and intuitively it made sense too. I looked at the charts here to get an intuition for what sorts of hands I want to put in different parts of my ranges in general https://www.pokersites.io/heads-up-hyper-pre-flop-charts/. I was playing only 2 tables for a short while today so that I could learn to apply the new preflop ranges while playing at a relaxing pace (but then that got boring so I started a third table).

I also had a personal project to make a calculator for Sökö in Python. Sökö is a variant of 5 card stud. But it is much better than 5 card stud because it contains 4 card straights and 4 card flushes in the hand rankings (so it's actually feasible to chase draws, and what is a good poker variant without the existance of decent draws). Also unlike most stud games it is pot limit and not fixed limit (fixed limit is super boring :D). I pretty much completed the project today, and it has been interesting to learn about staring hand strategy (also now I have a calculator that I can adapt to other game types pretty quickly too if I want).

I think I am quite good at figuring out strategy games intuitively, but starting hands are the hardest part to figure out intuitively because the effects of starting hand selection are the the most indirect to the final results of the hands you play (there are still many betting streets to go and many brances of the game tree to take). Sökö is a game that can be played on only one Finnish poker site as far as I'm aware and there are little to no resources on the game. It's a fun challenge to figure out games that have not been "quite so solved" and to try games that are really different to NLHE.

I probably will be spending less time playing poker for the next few days. I want to try and get other stuff sorted (including my terrible sleep schedule).

[CuteRaven]

I haven't updated for a while, and I have not been playing as much recently, but I have played a bit. I had a really bad session earlier where I probably played between 20 and 30 SnG and I could probably have literally counted the amount of all ins that I won with the fingers of my hands (I lost about 130€ that session). Then I went down in stakes to 4€ heads up SnG and lost some more. Ironically I felt like I had been playing better than ever during those sessions but the variance was just not on my side.  After a low of about 250€, I managed to turn it around a bit and my bankroll is now at 326,32€.

I have strated to realize that I have been underestimating the variance in Unibets HU SnG games. If I compare the "typical swings" of HU SnG to the "typical swings" in cash games, I would guess the variance of 10€ HU SnG games are about equivalent to NL 25€ 6-max cash games (or maybe even slightly more?). Maybe some other players who have been tracking their results more closely (or Unibet itself) would have more accurate data on this. If you think about it intuitively, HU SnG is not super far from HU Banzai, except in HU SnG the starting stacks are slightly deeper and the losses are capped to the buyin amount.

From some of the articles that you see floating around online, a bankroll of 20 buyins for cash games is considered "very aggressive", 30 buyins is "aggressive", 50 buy ins is "medium" (this is the standard in someones fantasy world at least) and a "cautious" bankroll management involves 100 buy ins. Converting these recommendations to HU SnG on Unibet assuming the variance of 10€ SnG equals the variance of NL 25:

- 50 buy ins would be a "very aggressive" BR

- 75 buy ins would be "aggressive"

- 125 buy ins would be "medium"

- 250 buy ins would be "cautious"

I remember seeing a Youtube video where some cash reg (maybe Ryan Fee) claimed that the biggest downswing he had experienced in his career was about 50 buy ins. So maybe people who grind HU SnG on Unibet for many years can expect a 100+ buy in downswing eventually (and a upswing of similar caliber). Of course my estimates could be way off too. I probably don't have the patience to wait until 75 buy ins to move up in stakes, but maybe 60 buy ins with a stop loss of 50 buy ins will be my go to from now on.

I might also play more of the other game types. As much as I like the volume that you can get playing HU SnG and the large role of exploitative play that HU SnG involves, the hands played there just aren't as intertesting (hence the lack of discussing hands in recent posts) because of the short stacks. HU SnG are also "more solved" than many other formats like cash games, which makes it easier for the regs to be quite good (preflop ranges play such a big role, even though they are not the only important thing of course).

[psrquack]

I have read that others may have 3-4 months breakeven/losing streak in HU games, so variance could be very tricky. It may happen games here aren't so thight as at other providers, but I feel those numbers too low for a healthy bankroll. For me a doubling it would be ideal. On the other hand I don't have much experience in HU games, so you can skip this if your numbers doesn't match with your experience.

[FreedoM]

I think around minute 14:00 is the bankroll question. :happyshy:

[CuteRaven]

Yeah @psrquack, you could definately be right, my nunbers aren't really based on any real data beyond my own intuition. 4 months of breakeven sounds pretty brutal :o

@FreedoM Thanks for the link :). I like the answer, I do prefer more aggressive bankroll management straregy nowadays. Of course winrate and tolerance for risk affects how big a bankroll should be also, so I guess finding a fixed number on the internet isn't so useful. But I think it's an interesting way to (try to) compare variance of HU SnG to a gametype that many are familiar with.

[CuteRaven]

I played a pretty long session of 4€ SnG today. My results were ok I guess. Competition is quite soft at those stakes and I'm very happy with how I played today. BR is 346,40€ :

"You played 156 games and won 83 of them. You paid 18.72 in rake and your ROI is 3.22%"

400€ here I come!

[CuteRaven]

Right now my bankroll is at 450.02€. Since the last update my bankroll reached a high of about 380€ and then a low of about 260€. The low came after a 10€ PLO cash session a few days ago where I played badly, in that session there were some hands that I definitely should have folded that I didn't. They were the sort of calls where I kind of knew I was lost but called anyway for some reason, probably because of tilt. The ability to fold full houses with deep stacks is pretty important in PLO :D

Today/yesterday I played a really long session, starting from the 260€ BR. I was mostly playing 4€ HU SnG and 5€ Banzai. I started playing the Banzai originally because I wanted to complete the March mission "be all in in Banzai" section and there were no free spaces left on the tables in the 1€ Banzai, so I played 5€ Banzai. I stayed because the action was pretty good. I ended up getting almost 100€ on one table and about 120€ on the other table (I had 160€ on that table at one point). I think I won about 50€ from the HU SnG and about 150€ from the Banzai.

I got to play some heads up poker during the Banzai session, which was a lot of fun. Playing Banzai at odd hours seems to be a good way to end up playing HU cash on Unibet. Here is the biggest pot that I won during the Banzai session (I'm the player with AK. The pot size is misleading in the replayer, it is actaully 122.90€ in the end): http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/view.php/id/9889873. Villain was a player that liked going all in a lot whenever they had a good hand regardless of stack depth.

Hopefully I can stabilize the (hopefully upward) trajectory of my bankroll in the future. Maybe I need to be more careful with bankroll management and jumping into various different games when tired.

 

[CuteRaven]

My bankroll is now 670.70€

I played some poker the evening and night before this night (Wednesday/Thursday). I played a mix of 4€ and 10€ heads up SnG games, 10 NL cash games and a few 2€ Hexapros. I played a really long session that day and had a nice profit.

Tonight I hosted a game night, dinner and drinks with 2 friends. We played some board games and then some dealers choice poker with all kinds of weird games. The poker included 5 card double draw, sökö, 7 card stud, 4 and five card omaha and texas holdem. All games were no limit. Needless to say it was a lot of fun!

In general I am socially isolating myself and avoiding meeting everyone who is older (including my parents) and most other people who I'm not as close with. Considering the state of the world right now I think I am a pretty lucky person. I am young and healthy, financially ok, and I don't have the sort of personality that gets too anxious about situations like this. I live in a country with good healthcare and I have enough to do with the extra free time. I think the biggest issue I have is motivating myself with studies when all physical teaching has been cancelled (then again I'm not the greatest student anyway, so maybe I have more issues with this than the average person).

For some reason drinking alcohol causes insomnia for me (which everyone seems to find very strange) so I thought why not update the blog now that I am still awake (and a bad sleep schedule does not help with that either) :P

[CuteRaven]

My bankroll is now 958.96€.

I started off todays session by losing a solid 100€ after 29 games of HU SnG. After that I briefly played 5€ Banzai and broke even.

Then I realized that the daily Hexapro race is a thing and I decided that there is no better time than now to grind Hexapros. So I 4 tabled mostly 5€ Hexapros for about 4 and a half hours and that was good for third place in the low leaderboard (and the 10€ prize that comes with it :D). Hexapros are pretty similar to HU SnGs in my opinion in terms of strategy. There is no ICM and there is only one more player who taggs along for the first two or three hands (before they punt it off with Q4 offsuit by going all in preflop). I felt like I had a pretty big edge on the field.

However I don't know how much credit I can really take for the winnings today. I ran pretty good obviously and winning the bigger spins (especially the 50€ ones) can be hundreds of euros difference in profit :D The variance of this gametype is definitely big, though I do appreciate Unibets lower variance prize poor distribution compared to some other sites.

I have started feeling a bit I'll during the past few hours. Hopefully it is lack of sleep and not Corona (unless it's the Corona beer I drank yesterday) but I guess I'll see where this develops. Hard to know if I have a slight fever since I don't own a thermometer. I really should get one I guess :P

 

[CuteRaven]

My bankroll is now at 1228.78€

I had a pretty good session today. At first I played a bit of 10€ Hexapros, which went well enough (about 120€ profit). However I did experience some technical issues including one where Unibet logged me out during 4 tables of Hexapro and I couldn't log back in until I restarted my computer (I definitely lost some value there, one of the tables was a 100€ Hexa and when I came back there were only two tables left). I guess I will write up a bug report tomorrow when I have more energy (there are too many screenshots :P).

I tilted a bit because of the technical issues and played three 50€ Heads up SnGs against some rock and roll avatar reg. I won two of the three luckily, but it's not a good way to handle tilt. Later I played some 25€ HU SnG which is a more appropriate stake. I played 8 and won 6 of them. I think I was pretty lucky, there were no obvious fish there even though I felt like I had some edge against some of the players at least. I ended the session earlier because I strted feeling quite tired.

Regarding the suspicions of getting sick that I had yesterday, I feel fine right now, with maybe a mild cough at most. I might have something mild that was then compounded yesterday by being very tired at one point or because of sitting down for quite long. I'm not sure.

[Dennis_]

Seems like a steady climb for you, keep it up👍

And yeah, taking tiltshots will break your neck one day so better let it be.

[CuteRaven]

Thanks @Dennis_ ! Yeah, you are def correct about the tiltshots.

[CuteRaven]

Bankroll is now at 1659.78 €. I played mostly 10€ Hexapros today. Lets see for how long I can keep this up before the inevitable downswing happens. I also played three 25€ HU SnG games and won two of them.

I'm probably done for today pokerwise. Playing 4 tables of Hexa is exhausting 😏. You start to feel your mind melt if you go on for long enough.

[CuteRaven]

Bankroll is now 1221.04€. I played some of the 25€ Hexapros on Sunday and quickly decided to end the shot after losing about 200€ playing those (seems also more reggy than the 10€ Hexapros but that was probably because you need to play 25€ for the daily mid Hexapro races). I also lost about 100€ in 50 NL a about 100€ in 10€ Hexapro. Overall I'm still pretty happy with how I have played despite the recent dip. I think that I will stick to 10€ Hexapros and 25€ HU SnG for now and move down if necessary to 5€ Hexapros and 10€ HU SnG. I think I will wait for the rake changes to happen before playing 50 NL again, and maybe I will try some 10€ PLO at some point.

People seem to like reading bad beat stories given the popularity of that content here (or maybe people just like posting them?). Here's a funny hand that I lost against pocket 99 in a 100€ prize pool (10€ buy in) Hexapro. http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/view.php/id/9903013 . Not such a bad beat in terms of absolute hand strength but still a pretty ridiculous situation :P