I rule the sit'n'go

Which may be a slight overstatement as I am in fact slightly losing money at my new venture (to the tune of about 30 cents - ignore the number to the right, tis old). No idea what I'm talking about, well let me explain... I've been getting a bit bored with low-limit HE an because of this my game was suffering so I decided to venture out into other games... O8, NLHE and I learnt the basics but didn't get particularly excited by them, they are ring games after all, so SnGs are my new venture of choice. I played a few with mixed (but overall losing) success and I just felt I was being too passive. Last weekend I decided to do some reading, some learning and some applying and actually develop my SnG game. My main learning sources were
Wes's blog, Flopturnriver.com, sit-n-go.com and the occasional glance at twoplustwo. I used to spend quite a bit of time at twoplustwo but in all honesty there is too much rubbbish on there to make it worth trawling through...

In order to help my tracking and general expertise I am also using
Sit n' Go Tracker
Poker Tracker
Sit n Go Power Tools.
The last of these is a fantastic resource if only I could work out how to use it properly. In my opinion though it has been worth half the money so far and when some more lessons get written it will be worth the rest. Still a lot of learning to happen here! The thing I want most from it though is the ability to run the calculations when there are already limpers or raisers in the pot. This may help prevent me from being over-aggressive.

So, what has happened? Well I now feel comfortable pushing my chips in when I am behind but have a strong draw. I am also getting better at working out who the passive players are. What can't I do? Mostly it is wait. I have played crap like J10o from early position in the first orbit and found myself crippled, I have been overaggressive with QQ and JJ against multiple opponents and I have made good raises with QQ, leaving myself with the option of folding faced with a re-raise and then called the all-in re-raise. Sometimes I don't understand myself. Anyway at least I can see some of my faults. That's a start, isn't it?

So, where do I stand? Played 10 SnGs at Absolute $1+0.2 (9 handed) and am about break-even. I need to load the last few tourneys into pokertracker and then I'll give you the ITM and ROI percentages, but let me say now my ROI wil be about -0.5%. Hardly great, but I'm learning.

Big problem -- I am over-aggressive on the bubbble. Even when I am chip leader I can't stop myself and must learn to do this. Once it is down to three or heads-up and the blinds are high 150/300 or above I feel really comfortable about my play and think I can out-play or compete with people at this level (Note: I still suck at heads-up, it's all relative though), so why worry about an extra thousand chips or so when I can be more patient and get into the money?

My first home game

I was invited to my boss's house last friday to join in his 'regular' poker game. Hmm. Only provided $20 for them to share amongst themselves so not too bad. I've never played draw or stud poker before (guess what were the major games played?!) and they kept introducing variations that I'd never heard of and had no idea of how to play. There were a few fun games in there and it worked out a lot cheaper than a night in the bar. I would have loved to have played an hour or so of Omaha H/L eights or better (O8) so I could settle into a game and work out how other people played but the game changes every orbit and the variety changed most hands. Crazy.

Think I might learn Razz or Triple Draw Lowball so I can teach them that next time we meet!

Macs and poker

We all know that macs rule. I'm hearing no arguement here so let's continue (no, it's not because no-one is reading). But until recently my shiny little powerbook has been prety useless when it came to playing online poker. Well, there was (and is) a pretty good java interface for pacific poker and I believe pokerroom do to, but I never liked to trust them for long sessions there was just too much opportunity for being logged out and not being able to rejoin quickly. Back to the point... Just recently a few sites, led by Full Tilt are actually coming out with native mac software to give all the functionality of windows clients (hand histories, notes etc) with the benefit of a good operating system ;-)
If you google something suitable, there appear to be suggestions that other sites are starting to follow this trend, but they may be java interfaces and I was feeling too lazy to check. I don't have a Full Tilt account yet so maybe this will be my next stop. Sometimes I feel like I have too many poker accounts.

Oh Yeah. Norwich lost again. Had the lead twice and conceded the final goal in injury time at the end. Don't want to talk about it. Well I do, but I don't want to make myself miserable so I'm not going to.

Sorry Wes

Quite out of the blue one of my regular blog haunts has been deleted. By choice I might add, not for any more exciting reason. I will miss it, particularly as I hadn't made it back through the archives yet. Of course I had to post a comment about this but guess I missed the target motivation wise... shit does that make sense? You see now Wes why I prefer to read your blog and told you not to bother coming by here.

Anyhow I'm sorry if you took my comments to be derogatory, they were not intended that way and I hope you start up again soon.

Why does it happen?

I hate poker. You don't need to know the details, who wants to hear anyway, but why do I have to suffer all my bad beats in one session? I mean, give me a break. All on the river too. Pocket queens, never any good. Ace-high straight? Here comes a flush. You've got one out, well I bet you're going to hit it. Two outs? Likely hit them both.

The fact is I'm just as bored by this post as I expect you are. In fact I'm going to stop now. Why can't poker be a game where I always win? Or at least more often then. More on this some other time perhaps.

Definitely one of my more depressing days.