White Belt Poker

I’d been having a bad time recently. Well, I was at least breaking even more or less. But I wasn’t winning consistently the way I had been when I started playing a couple of months ago.

One of the books I’d been reading mentioned that cards can run cold for hundreds of hours. Given that I’ve logged less than 100 hours of playing for money, it’s too early to say whether I had got lucky early on but was now reverting to normal.

But it’s easy to blame the cards.

When I looked at my play through the stats in Poker Tracker I spotted some bad habits that I had got into. With any sport or game which requires repetative practice, there are flaws that can enter into your play that are so small as to be imperceptable over a period of time, but when they are analysed they become more obvious. I realised that there were certain starting hands that were costing me money. The biggest culprit was a suited ace. I had entered this fantasy world where I would play any suited ace from any position. I had convinced myself that Iif I only played them for their flush value then that was okay. The stats showed me otherwise. Although I would’ve sworn that I had won big money from making flushes from suited aces, there wasn’t any evidence of that. In fact, everything below AJs was costing me money – I was in the red. So I decided to go back to play AJs (and above only), unless I’m in late position and there are no raises in front. The other hand was KJ (again). I’d begun to play that pretty slackly, so I may just throw that away routinely unless it’s from late position.

I also noticed from the stats that I wasn’t being nearly aggressive enough – especially before the flop. That’s all tied up with loosening my starting hand requirements. So in the last few days I’ve tightened up and then been very aggressive. The results have been much better. I’ve only lost one hand that went to a showdown in the last four to five hours of play.

Finally made the $20 bonus after many hours of play, with two days before the deadline. That was a bit of a slog. Think I’m going to play elsewhere for a few days or maybe I’ll take a day or two off. Then I can get back to just playing without thinking about whether the pot goes over $10 or $20.

Talking of bonuses – where the hell is my Party Poker cap?? Well, at least they gave me the bonus money I suppose.

I may also have found a little niche in the market at PokerRoom. There seems to be a mostly scandinavian crowd there at around 6-8pm GMT with very few Americans. I made a very quick $8 in 30 mins before a pretty spectacular system crash locked everyone out for about an hour. I’ll have to keep an eye out to see if there are soft games like this every night at that time. A quick hour’s play while my brain is still switched on after work wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Probably the worst hour of my poker career so far just wiped out the previous two days worth of profits from playing at Pacific.

I lost $21 in an hour on a $0.50-$1 table.

It was ugly. Every premium hand I had got cracked. People were making back door straights and flushes on me, no matter how much I made them pay. If I had pocket kings, someone else had pocket aces. I wasn’t even as if I was tilting.

And I can’t even look at what I did wrong because I can’t get the hand history because the Pacific software is so bloody awful. It just always tells you to log out then back in again and when you do, the history still isn’t available!! Grr!!!

I’m going to watch some late-night TV with a cup of tea to unwind a bit.

I was getting little tired of playing at PokerRoom, so I just thought I’d spend some time at Pacific just for a change of scenery (okay, and because the players there are not the greatest). In general it’s a pretty soulless experience playing at Pacific – the software isn’t very attractive, there are no hand histories, you can’t add player notes or classifications, the chat window is horrible and keeps flashing, and the players you get there have a habit of trying to avoid blinds by sitting out (which obviously doesn’t work), so you have to be careful to keep an eye on your “auto post blinds” box.

After an hour and a half of getting dealt utter trash I was down $8 and feeling a bit down even though there wasn’t much else I could’ve done given the cards I was getting. Then suddenly I caught some good cards and within 10 mins I’d made $25.

I may need to play a little looser here I think, or at least try to stay in hands longer unless there’s a lot of betting. Starting hand requirements won’t change, but I’m going to try to look for chances to stay in pots longer when I have marginal hands. For instance, tonight I had two pair after the flop (8s and 9s) but feared overcards. I just checked and called a guy down – I think he had JJ or something and was gambling on hitting another one. I caught another 9 on the river but I may have won the hand without it anyway, but it’s so difficult to tell what people have at low limits. Raising and re-raising seems to have little effect at this level, people will stay in with practically anything. Staying in a hand for very little when you think you have more outs may not be a bad play on occassions. I think I’ll go back to read Lee Jones’ book on low limit hold’em again for advice.

I’m having to keep a separate spreadsheet for working out Pacific wins and loses because there are no stats or hand histories to speak that could be imported into Poker Tracker. So far my hourly profit is $4.50 over nine hours.

Took my first real beating tonight. Played for almost two hours at pokerroom.com at my usual $0.50-$1 limit. I was down $12 when I left. Table atmosphere was kind of unpleasant. Some guy called miroslav80 was telling people to fuck off when they beat him. He went from $32 down to zero, then put in another $10 and ended up at over $90 when I left. He had an unbelievable run of cards and seemed to be winning almost every hand – to the point where people were leaving. It almost looked suspicious.

As for my own play, I’m going to have to analyse it. The cards I had were poor, but I tightened up because of the maniacs to my left. I didn’t get a big pair all night, and even when I made an ace-high flush, it got beaten by a straight flush. I was pretty sanguine about it though. I didn’t tilt, which I was pleased about.

I’ve just looked through the stats of the session in Poker Stats and there’s not a great deal I could’ve done differently. Overall, I need to look at how I’m playing medium pairs (particularly in early position) as well as KJo, which seems to have got me into a lot of trouble.