Keeping Warm in Winter

[AAroddersAA]

So this month has still not seen poker really going to plan.

Even though I am up overall in cash games I have played some hands really badly. Here are some examples for people to generally laugh at.

http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/view.php/id/5554095

Really hate my play in this one. Preflop is OK but I should really raise more on the flop as he is only conyinuing with an ace or draw so I could then bet the turn bigger. As played the river is a simple bet/fold. 62BB that I did not need to lose lost there.

http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/view.php/id/5554097

This one is even worse. I know this player 3-bets a bit from the blinds and c-bets most flops so I was trying to exploit this. I should have just raised the flop not caused a massively complicated situation for no reason at all.

http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/view.php/id/5554181

I am wondering if I can fold the flop here. People just don"t play draws this way. Do I actually beat anything? Pretty sure I should at worst be folding the turn.

My Stats for the month so far:-

VP$IP: 30.82%
PFR: 23.89% (that is a massive gap I only just noticed)
3-bet: 8.94% (Thats too small too)
Fold to 3-bet: 54.26%
Attempt to Steal: 50.6% (wtf)
Total Profit: $17.78 (@9.45BB / 100)

Not sure how but somehow or another I am still beating the game for over 9BB/100 this month. Not happy with my play though.

My MTT/180 manner game is also off by a lot this month. I have been playing the $2.50 and the $4.50 which has not gone that great at all.

Games this month: 66
Total Loss: $56.06

Had a couple of blow ups in these too. One from yesterday that I can"t decide if it is just a cooler or bad play is below.

Tournament is a $4.50 with 15 min blinds. Average stack at this point is about 15500. 17 players remain. Chip leader is on about 40K.

BB is playing 24/22/4 over 59 hands.

http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/view.php/id/5554403

So overall down about $40 this month on Pokerstars.

I did win some on Sky and lose some on APAT. Played the ECOAP online last night but did not trouble the scorers at all. I don"t seem to run that well online in these, even though I have run like god live. The annoying thing is it is ages since I really tried to do well in a live APAT but have picked up results here and there anyway. I do want to do well online but don"t seem to be able to put all the pieces together. Maybe it will happen next year. For now it"s waiting to see if I get selected to represent Blonde again for the Team Championship in Stoke. Asa is captain and has my application so I will wait and see, will be going either way and have booked my hotel already.Team Championship is a good event so will look forward to that one.

[AAroddersAA]

Yay, in the Blonde Poker team for Stoke representing Blonde for a 4th time. The team is very strong as you would expect from Blonde, it is made up of some Blonde regs who are ridiculously good players and some of the Blonde APAT regs but we have a habit of managing to not win these things and bombing early. I am confident this year will be different though. I will be travelling to Stoke on the Saturday morning as I am intending to give the poker game my full attention and not doing the same thing as last year and ending up with a really bad hangover on the morning of the event.

Played a little bit of cash and won a little bit, did have an interesting hand here on the PLO table. I know there are some good PLO players on here (much better than me at least) so any comments are welcome.

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?board=24.0

[AMRN]

Played a little bit of cash and won a little bit, did have an interesting hand here on the PLO table. I know there are some good PLO players on here (much better than me at least) so any comments are welcome.

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?board=24.0

AAxx with no suits and no connectivity is a pretty **** hand, and you do well to just play it passively pre, and not go mad with it - I see so many players, particularly in Zoom PLO, that see AAxx and can"t get their stack in fast enough preflop. It"s little more than a set or fold opportunity. 

I also don"t mind the continued passive play on flop and turn.... calling is fine, whilst raising will only fold out worse, or get stung by better. The 3 on the turn is irrelevant - if the other guy has a Q, you"re still losing, and if he doesn"t have a Q, then your AA was ahead anyway.  Once he"s jammed the river, I can"t see that you"re ever going to be ahead - you have two pair on a double paired, flushed board, and his line suggests he could easily have KKxx.

[Fatcatstu]

Yeah, just see a flop here and unless you flop a set or flush then you are done.

I would probably call the turn and then insta fold the river as he wins roughly 164% of the time.

[AAroddersAA]

What would you have done with the hand if the OR had repotted over the top of the 3-bet and you are left having to either shove or fold? I am guessing it is a fold? I can"t see what range of hands shoving would be profitable against in a spot such as this.

[AMRN]

Yeah, just see a flop here and unless you flop a set or flush then you are done.

I would probably call the turn and then insta fold the river as he wins roughly 164% of the time.

gonna be tough to flop a flush with [   ]  

[AMRN]

What would you have done with the hand if the OR had repotted over the top of the 3-bet and you are left having to either shove or fold? I am guessing it is a fold? I can"t see what range of hands shoving would be profitable against in a spot such as this.

If you think it"s likely to go to the flop headsup, then it"s not a massive mistake to get it in with a marginal hand, and hope to miss whatever draws he ends up with, but if it"s likely to go three way, then it"s a simple fold.

Ask yourself this though - how many times do you get to showdown in PLO and see a single pair hand win? Given the action, it"s highly likely that there are other Aces in play, which may mean your hand is destined to only ever be a one pair hand.

[AAroddersAA]

Surprised by the responses on Blonde. The general opinion was 3-bet and try to get it in. Still find it surprising how many levels of poker there are that I do not understand.

Below post from Blonde Poker

I wouldn"t fold no pre-flop. I would pretty much always just 3bet the opener here, they"ve opened UTG so usually have a pretty high card heavy/big pair range themselves and we do pretty well (even with terrible AA) vs that, we"ll very likely get it HU (although deeper stacks mean there is a little more chance of getting over-called PF) and we"re deep stacked, IP and the hand won"t be difficult to play for us really, 2 NF blockers, some connectiveity (A 3 7) and the hand which is often one of the better bluff catchers for later streets.

The other option to 3betting would be to play how you played and just set-mine with it, there is a lot of value to set-over-set people and obviously if you have AA you will never be on the wrong side of a set-over-set, so taking some rubbish AA multi-way is often quite good.

Once you been 4bet behind you can pot to $4.60 I think, which is what I would do now the action is back on me, pot will be like $14 OTF and stacks only a bit deeper than that - I think you"ll get calls pre-flop from hands that should really fold AKQ* and KK** etc which is a really good spot for you.

3betting defo the best option here though IMO, Iknow your AA is really bad but you are a good equity favorite over UTG right now and you have to hammer home that advantage, we can"t just wait to be dealt AA78ds every time before we start moving our chips about.

[Fatcatstu]

Surprised by the responses on Blonde. The general opinion was 3-bet and try to get it in. Still find it surprising how many levels of poker there are that I do not understand.

Below post from Blonde Poker

I wouldn"t fold no pre-flop. I would pretty much always just 3bet the opener here, they"ve opened UTG so usually have a pretty high card heavy/big pair range themselves and we do pretty well (even with terrible AA) vs that, we"ll very likely get it HU (although deeper stacks mean there is a little more chance of getting over-called PF) and we"re deep stacked, IP and the hand won"t be difficult to play for us really, 2 NF blockers, some connectiveity (A 3 7) and the hand which is often one of the better bluff catchers for later streets.

The other option to 3betting would be to play how you played and just set-mine with it, there is a lot of value to set-over-set people and obviously if you have AA you will never be on the wrong side of a set-over-set, so taking some rubbish AA multi-way is often quite good.

Once you been 4bet behind you can pot to $4.60 I think, which is what I would do now the action is back on me, pot will be like $14 OTF and stacks only a bit deeper than that - I think you"ll get calls pre-flop from hands that should really fold AKQ* and KK** etc which is a really good spot for you.

3betting defo the best option here though IMO, Iknow your AA is really bad but you are a good equity favorite over UTG right now and you have to hammer home that advantage, we can"t just wait to be dealt AA78ds every time before we start moving our chips about.

He is mind bogglingly good. If i ever try and play like him i will be busto in an hour.

[AAroddersAA]

Bit of an upswing in results this week which is always good. Back in the black for the month which is good for confidence etc.

Cash games were not that interesting I went up and came back down a bit went up a bit and came down a bit. Overall I won at holdem slightly more than I lost at PLO. The PLO hands were pretty much unavoidable getting it in good with made hands and losing to big draws, I was not a massive favorite in either of the hands so can"t complain. Still prefectly happy with my PLO cash game, I suck at PLO tournaments though (I really should do something about that at some point).

PLO Month to date

Hands: 617
VPIP: 18%
PFR: 12%
3-bet: 7%
Total Loss: $21.56

Hold "em was pretty standard all week. I will start to up my volume again soon but have just been keeping my eye in for now the MTD results are

Hands: 3004
VPIP: 29.05%
PFR: 23.2%
3-bet: 8.5%
Fold to 3-bet: 61%
Att to Steal: 47.3% (don"t know why that is so low this month need to look at it though)
Total profit: $41.32

Also played some of the 180 manners, managed to get a 2nd to recover a lot. Lost a massive flip that would probably have won me the whole think with AK < JJ.

Games: 89
Total Loss: $8.86

Dec Overall Profit: $10.90 (up is up and all that)

I have actually also made about £100 at cash on Sky but wasted about half of that trying to qualify for their silly UKPC. Lost a small amount of APAT poker but got it back by winning one of the FPP sats for a free National Championship seat.

[AAroddersAA]

Think this one is a pretty easy fold tbh

http://www.boomplayer.com/en/poker-hands/Boom/6626986_F7017BCCEE

[MintTrav]

Think this one is a pretty easy fold tbh

http://www.boomplayer.com/en/poker-hands/Boom/6626986_F7017BCCEE

Nice swerve. If you don"t get out at that point, you can"t avoid doubling him up by the end of the hand after he flops well.

[AAroddersAA]

Think this one is a pretty easy fold tbh

http://www.boomplayer.com/en/poker-hands/Boom/6626986_F7017BCCEE

Nice swerve. If you don"t get out at that point, you can"t avoid doubling him up by the end of the hand after he flops well.

Yeah sucks to have to fold AA in that spot but my gut was telling me that something was not right. He likely had a very strong hand himself also if I shove the chances of him calling are extremely high and then he will win.

I am happy with how I played it. Some people will say I should have shoved but I think you need to take the whole situation into account.

[AAroddersAA]

So December and 2013 are coming to an end. 2013 is offically for the first time in at least 6 years a losing year.Mainly due to the car crash (in poker terms) Vegas was but hey that"s Vegas what am I going to do, stay home? LOL. 2012 and 2013 have been fairly quiet for me in terms of poker. I became complacent and my game fell behind the curve, I was trying to do the same thing that I did in 2008 / 2009 and it was not working people have moved their games on a lot and it really is tougher now.

Plan is to turn it back up now in 2014. I have worked really hard in a lot of things this year and spent hours sat in front of poker tracker gaining a better understanding of many spots and learning the way you really do have to think more deeply about the game now, played many many hands of $10nl Zoom poker, annoyed lot"s of good players on Skype with questions and in general got my cash game back to the point where I am again very confident against the field on Pokerstar"s. I have over complicated some things recently as well but Ger gave me some excellent advice not long ago which seems to have helped a lot with that.

Plan for next year is to play $25nl Zoom and the 180 man games (both the $2.50 turbo and the $4.50 non turbos).

As I have not played high volume at all this year I thought I would try and turn it up a but this weekend and see how I did. Here are the results for cash:-

Hands: 4097
VP$IP: 24.01%
PFR: 19.1%
3-bet: 5.36%
Fold to 3-bet: 41%
Att to Steal: 44.1% (hmm)
Total Profit: $147.63 @ 14.41BB/100

There were some interesting hands but I have posted some of them in PHA and on here already.

Tournaments also went well

Tournaments: 15
Total Profit: $84.24

So month to date is:-

Tournament

Games: 118
Profit: $41.84

Cash

Hands: 8154
Profit: 156.64 (@ 8BB/100)

Total Profit Dec: $198.48

Next year is going to be good. I have some targets for myself for Jan. Trying to make it easy on myself to start with but these should be doable.

1) 4 live tournaments

2) 5000 hands of $25nl (I just played 4K in two days so not very hard)

3) 100 180 man games

4) Player review on the top 3 players (cash) I play the most hands again in each session

5) 5 PHA posts

6) Respond to all holdem posts (cash and tournament) on The Strategy board

The live games are the ones that are going to eat up the time but the local lice games are so soft that if I am specifically trying to make a profit then I have to play them.

Let"s see how it goes. Happy new year to you all.

[AAroddersAA]

Just made a big call against a reg whose play I reviewed last night from PT. I spent some time last night making notes on some of the regs from hands in PT. Never really tank but took over a minute to make this call, still unsure if it is right.  My notes on the player are below:-

Raised AK and fired three times on dry ace high flop
3-bet preflop with TT
Slow played set on ace high flop - (ie called flop raised turn)
Made massive overshove with flush draw and got there
Cold called 3-bet with AQ and called down on queen high board

http://www.pokerhandreplays.com/view.php/id/5586114

Still not sure if it is a good call or not I have added to the notes he probably now has me noted as a massive fish