A New Beginning?

Having played online poker now for over 7 years, I've been through a few rough runs.  I remember many nights of desperation.  The odd sensation you get when you just know the other guy is going to hit the river.... and then he does.  Early in my poker days this would happen a few nights in a row, and I thought I was the unluckiest person around.  I was so naive.....

Later I would run bad for a few weeks... what a terrible feeling that was!

Then I hit a stretch of 6 months in a row during my MTT career that came close to breaking me.  I still remember the feeling pretty clearly.  Anger, frustration.... fear.  My bankroll was in shambles, my confidence shatterred.  It was then I decided to take a big break from poker.

I always need something to work on, something to keep me busy.  For the next 6 months I decided to build our family tree.  I had recently found ancestry.com, and was amazed.  5 months later I had traced our family back to the late 1500s in Sweden!  How fun was that!  Another thing I gained though, was a renewed hunger for poker.  The break was the best thing for me.  I returned at lower stakes, and started building back up.  The following months would be some of the best in my poker career.  A $17k score in a $162 buyin MTT, and several other big wins got my bankroll back and rocking.


In my PLO adventures I have had a few more streaks where I run horribly.  I don't know if there have been any as bad as the 6 months of MTT play... but there have been nasty ones.  In the end though, I look at them now in a positive light.  Don't get me wrong, it sucks to run bad!  I heave learned from each one of them though!  I learned the importance of taking a break.  After another particular bad run (which I will post about another time), I realized my game wasn't all that good, and I studied and improved.  After almost losing my bankroll a couple times, I have also learned about the importance of bankroll management!  I know now that I have the ability to rebuild my bankroll... but also that I can greatly slow the ruin of it by dropping down when I should!

I also learned that as bad as a run seems... it can always get a lot worse.  I laugh now looking at my early poker days when I had a week of running bad.  I realize now that when I'm running really good, I need to recognize that and stay grounded.  And when I'm running bad... I need to focus more on my play and less on my results.  Alas, it's not always easy to do that!

Recently I've been through another bad stretch.  After a great start to 2012, my BR came crashing back to earth.  I had been up to $2/4 (30+ buyins normally for me), but was now back to $.5/1... and almost down to $.25/.5.  My nights seemed to be getting swingier (See Typical Night for what seemed to be happening), and my actual results compared to expected EV always seemed to be bad.  A few nights ago during another horrible night, I looked at my graph for the last month.  It was horrible.

I was running about $6500 below EV.  Why?  WHY??? Lol.

But then I noticed something else.  Why was my expectation so... ragged?  This was over 76000 hands, so while not long term.... I would expect more of a upward slope.  Well... I should expcet that.   A look over my lifetime PLO profit graph would show a beautiful mountain range... well, beautiful except it is a profit graph.  The graph for the last month suggested I would expect close to $4 every 100 hands.  As I was playing a lot of $1/2 over this stretch... I was only expecting about 2bb very 100 hands.  Not only that, but for the latest 40k hands, my expectation was about even.  Why?  I combed through Poker Tracker, intent on finding a leak.  It didn't take long.  As expected, I lose a lot in the blinds, and make most of my money on the button.  My early position earnings were not great.  And while I played more hands on the button than earlier, I was still playing almost 20% UTG.  That seemed awful high.  Then I saw my 3-bet UTG was actually HIGHER than on the button.  I was 3-betting 11% of the time UTG, and only 10.5% on the button.  What was I thinking?  Clearly not about position.  I knew right away this was a big problem.  I really had forgotten about position for the last while, and was becoming a bit of an aggressive maniac.  Any double suited hand was being 3-bet from everywhere, and I was getting in a lot more big hands.  Sure, if I was running good I would make a lot of money fast.  But I was running bad, and wasn't playing terribly well.

I decided there to start focussing way more on position, and far less on 3-betting pretty looking hands.  This started about 4 days and 11k hands ago.  (SHORT TERM ANALYSIS ALERT!)  So... while 4 days and 11k hands is WAY to few to make any assumptions, things are looking up.

I am still running bad.  My all-in EV (yeah, this calculation isn't perfect, but it's the best we've got!) was still over $1000 more than I was actually making... my expected value graph seems to have a nice upward slope.  I know eventually that ugly green line will get closer to the yellow one (at least I hope it does!), but all I should be focussing on is the yellow one.  Well, not completely true.  I shouldn't even focus on that.  I should be focussing on playing well!  Make sure I'm playing position.  Make sure I'm laying hands down when I know I'm beat.  Make sure I'm not 3-betting pretty, but pretty awful hands out of position!

My stats for the last 4 days suggest I'm doing that.  My VPIP UTG is now down to 16%.  That's 20% fewer hands than I was playing from there before.  Now... these stats aren't totally accurate.  I'm playing 16% from 3rd postion in PokerTracker's position stats, which at a full 6-max table is UTG.  I could find out the exact stats, but I'm lazy, and they're not that important.  My 3-bet stats showed a more significant change.  I am now rarely 3-betting UTG.  In 2nd position I'm 3-betting 11% still, which is higher than I have on the button.  It appears I still have work to do, but the changes are positive.

It isn't just preflop that I'm changing.  I'm trying to use my positional advantage more postflop.  I'm not firing away like a madman every time I'm out of position, and I'm controlling the pot better when the situations warrents it in position.

So far so good... hopefully this nice trend continues, except for the run-bad.  I hope that turns around!

2 weeks until VEGAS!!!!!

DWDuck

Typical Night?

My poker nights have had a pattern lately.... I'm not sure if there is a reason for it or not.  A graph of a recent "typical" night is shown here.

Typical Night?

Now... many of the nights aren't quite this dramatic, but I seem to loose a bunch of buyins, sometimes level out for a bit, then spend the last bit of my night climbing to a small profit.  This is certainly better than what might have happend 7  months ago, where tilt would have caused that downwards slope to keep going!

Am I changing my game part way through?  Am I taking a while to find my 'A' game?  Is this simply a short term thing, and my sample size is way to small?  I'm not sure honestly.  I think I have a tendancy to get a bit more aggressive when I am stuck... although that sounds suspiciously like tilt.  Controlled tilt maybe?  I think I 3-bet a bit more than usual... although since I often have position against the mark on the table, in this case I'm building a bigger pot against somebody I should outplay.

Right now I'll see how long this continues.  I'm trying even harder to play a smart game the whole session.  I've come to the realization that many of losses earlier in my PLO days were due to tilt and bad play.  Runbad and bad beats will happen, and I'm getting better at being ok with that.  There are also times where I've run hotter than the sun.... I know that I'm not a 50 bb/100 player!

My brother suggested I start my night at the bottom of the valley.  I'm trying to!!!

DWDuck

Getting Started....

Right before Christmas of 2004, the DWDuck household was a busy place.  Two young daughters (the third would come late the next year), lots of presents to buy, and seemingly no time to do any of it.  In order to save time and further anguish, my wife and I decided to buy presents for ourselves instead of trying to come up with something clever for each other.

For my present, I decided to try out online poker.  My wife agreed but was nervous.  The agreement was I could put in $100.  If I lost it... that was as far as my online career would go.  Because of this, I decided I better learn more about what I was doing, so I dove into some books.  SSHE by Sklansky got me off and running.  I hopped around sites picking up bonuses, and eventually got a bankroll.  I settled onto Empire poker, and spent my first many years playing MTTs and SNGs.  In May of that year I entered my first WSOP satellite, an 81-person double shootout.  My boomswitch must have been on that day, because somehow I managed to win!

Over the next 5 years there were many highlights.  2 more WSOP sat wins, many WSOP events (cash has eluded me thus far however), winning a $5 MTT 3 times in a row, a WSOP and $109 freezeout win on the same night, and a few 2nd place finishes in the $162 nightly on Pokerstars, and countless other MTT wins.  SNGs on Empire and Party was a gold mine back in those days.  I foolishly figured that would last forever..... if I knew then what I know now, I would have played a lot more!

For the last year and a half I have settled into the 6-max PLO on PokerStars.  I still enjoy MTTs... however I was in need of a change.  The feeling of a final table in an MTT is still unmatched for me in poker, but the game of Omaha proved to be consistantly far more interesting to me.  NLHE was becoming a bit stale.  Sure, you could get creative... but usually it was solid steady poker that got me deep in MTTs.  PLO was different.  People are more willing to gamble in PLO.  The other, and more important key to me, is that the game is more difficult to learn.  The game is enticing to people new to the game, and the variance is high enough that the poor players feel like they know what they are doing at times.  With a bit of work, there is a lot of money to be made in PLO.  Sure, it's not quite like the good 'ol days  But I think PLO cash is about as close as we can get right now.

I'm don't claim to be an expert at PLO.  I'm beating the game, but certainly not by an awful lot.  I'm slowly figuring out my flaws though, and I'm hoping posting on this blog will keep me honest with my progress.

DWDuck

It begins...

Wutup blog world!

I created this blog to provide an outlet for my poker... PLO in particular... adventures.  I share stories with my friends and family... however as none of them play PLO, it's hard for them to really understand what an online PLO player goes through.  My plan in this blog is to discuss anything and everything about PLO, and potentially throwing in other stories of my life in and out of poker.

Who am I?  I'm a Canadian amateur poker player.  By day, I'm a hardware designer.  I write code for FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array), verify them, document them... really I spend a lot of time on the computer.  I'm a married father of 3 beautiful girls.  After their bedtime my poker evening begins.

I'll say more about myself, and how I got started in poker on my next post... no sense rambling on too long in my first one.  I hope you enjoy following!

DWDuck