White Belt Poker

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a thirty minute programme last night about the $50,000 Man versus Machine Poker Championships that took place in Vancouver last July when Ali Eslami and Phil Laak took on the latest poker bot software created by researchers at the University of Alberta.

You can listen to the programme on the BBC website (probably for a limited time).

It’s an intelligent look at Laak and Eslami’s narrow win and the implications for the game, particularly online. There are interviews with the protagonists as well as other players like Terence Chan, who talk about how the increasing sophistication of poker software is likely to impact on their potential future earnings.

Hold’em: N/A
Omaha 8: 7 hrs
Razz: 2 hrs
Stud High: 6 hrs
Stud 8: 0 hrs

I’ve been considering diversifying recently. My intention was always to give myself a solid foundation in hold’em because it’s the most popular game at the moment and there seemed to be more books written about beginning to play hold’em than any other variety of poker.

Over the last month or so, I’ve begun to feel as if I have that solid foundation and now I need to look at other games to continue growing as a poker player. My bankroll still isn’t big enough for me to really play significantly higher limits, so to avoid stagnating and getting frustrated I believe that I have to branch out a little.

I may need to do this by necessity because I’m trying to make a $200 bonus at FullTilt and it’s not going to be easy playing low limit hold’em. There just aren’t enough games going on. Very often there are only one or two tables at the low limits and they seem to have some solid players there. There are very few fish from what I can make out. I’m convinced that I’ll need to play other games to get anywhere near making this bonus.

So the plan is to start learning to play Stud and No-Limit to begin with, then Omaha and maybe Triple Draw later. There certainly seems to be more action at the NL tables and armed with HDub’s excellent blog article about beating these low limit NL games I feel as if I could make some money. It’ll definitely be easier to force people to make mistakes in NL anyway.

My copy of Super System 2 turned up yesterday, so I’ll be delving into a few different sections of that over the next few weeks, along with more of Hellmuth’s book and Sklansky’s Theory. Actually I’m looking forward to learning some new games. I’m sure it’ll stop me feeling like I’m on a treadmill with hold’em – which I suspect could’ve been just around the corner without a bit of variety.

I’m not sure what made me do it. I hadn’t played at all for five days and my decision-making felt really sluggish, but I decided to try simultaneously playing two tables for the first time. I cose two of the lowest-limit tables at pokerroom.com ($0.25-$.50). I played for around an hour altogether and didn’t make any real mistakes. I’d wondered whether there was enough ‘dead’ time between hands on a particular table to allow you to really concentrate on playing well on two tables. Realistically, yes there is enough time. Very rarely was I making calculated decisions on both tables at the same time. The one occasion I can really remember was when I played AKo with a K on the board while I had two pair on the other table which became a full house on the turn. I won both hands. That really was an exciting couple of minutes having to bet or raise and keep each table compartmentalised.

That really is the key to multi-tabling – being able to separate your thought processes for each table. At a low limit you really don’t need to play the other players because they’re all pretty much similar. They’ll play dominated hands all the time – most flopped pairs, any old aces – and they come and go so often that it’s not necessary to memorise any tendencies.

The down side is that it was difficult (almost impossible in fact) to count the number of bets going into a pot. But it’s simple enough to divide the pot size by whatever the bet is and then just quickly add what’s in front of people still in the hand. I don’t tend to play a lot of straight draws anyway, so there’s less of a need to think about pot oddds.

Well, multi-tabling wasn’t something I’d really planned to do yet, but it worked out well. It was quite exhilirating and it certainly sharpened up my decision-making. I was concerned about whether I would be able to make decisions quickly enough because I’ve seen people playing multiple tables and really slowing a table down, but I got into a rhythm which usually involved folding one hand and then deciding which table I would have to make a decision on next.

The jury is still out on whther it will have a negative impact on some aspects of my game, but right now I need to build up my bankroll. For this one session of just over an hour I made 32 BBs. Even dividing that by two to account for the number of tables played, that’s a much, much higher return than I could’ve expected from playing one table at a higher limit. I certainly don’t think I’d be capable of making 2.5 – 3 BBs at a $3-$6 table at the moment. I’ll have to see if I can do this consistently. Even at 5-10 BBs, this is still the most profitable game for me at the moment. And the risk is practically non-existent. High reward, low risk – just what I need if I’m going to slowly grind my way up to the higher limits.

I spent two hours playing at Party this evening and the longer I played, the more comfortable I felt with my decision making. Lots of players had come and gone during that time, but I felt as if I was working people out quickly and making good decisions. The key thing that I’ve been working on is deciding whether to bet or call on the turn. If I’m betting, calling or raising on the turn, then I’m calling the river as well (unless it’s a draw obviously). I got caught a few days ago calling a raise on the turn when I knew I was likely to be beaten. It was a bad decision and it cost me four small bets. It was a good lesson to learn, because that’s a quick way to leak money.

I don’t often play for that amount of time and this is the first occasion when I’ve felt stronger at the end of a session than I did at the beginning. I felt as if I was flexing a muscle that was growing in strength. That has to bode well for tournament play in the future.

I’m going to try to play longer sessions over the weekend to see if I can keep this momentum going.

I’m also still considering playing in the $10+1 limit tournament on Sunday at Poker Room. I followed a similar tournament while I was playing today. They seemed to be losing roughly a player a minute for the first hour and a half. I didn’t see how it finished, but most of the $10+1 tournaments have been lasting for 2.5 to 3 hours. You’d need to make the final table to make your money back.