How has the life as a poker rookie been doing? Quite will during the last week! It was week 13 of my challenge and I was finally able to get some more time at the felt. I played a total of 4263 hands for a total profit of +70,19. This puts my bankroll at $891.71 to put my challenge at 8.7% of completion. Currently I am pretty much grinding full ring NL10 without much thought, just to get back into the game, as well as to reach my goal of hitting NL25 by the end of this year. At that point I will go back to the drawing board and start studying a lot more than I am currently doing. So far I am beating NL10 at a rate of about than 9bb/100hd over a sample size of almost 40k hands. While looking at my graphs though I realized, that I am indeed really lucky. I am currently running about 8 buy-ins over all-in EV which means I am still a winning player at the limit over all, but the cards fall quite well into my favor once the money is in the middle. If I'd calculate my winnings down to my all-in EV I'd only beat the limit by about 7bb/100hd. Lets see if I can continue to run as lucky as I do. I for sure will tell you next week!
How to loose $37 at NL10 going All-in preflop with A♠:T♦:.
Christmas is approaching fast and I already got two of the five presents with three days left. If I remember correctly that is a pretty good quota for my average Christmas. Besides that I had not much to do during the last week, which meant I had the time to switch to full on grind mode. During the last week I played more than a quarter of the NL10 hands, that I have ever played. Compared to last weeks 4.2k hands I scored a full 15.2k this week. Normally I played 2-3 hours per day, but this week I chose to start way earlier and played between five and ten hours. I realized that my win rate at the early hours of the day is way lower than in the evening, which somewhat makes sense, as the tables are way softer later in the day. As my current plan is to just grind my way out of NL10 to jump to NL25, I readjusted my playing hours a bit to get all my personal stuff done during daytime and grind starting at the afternoon until late in the night. Additionally I switched back to my full ten tables setup as I realized that I still have unused mental capacities playing my usual six tables which lead to me suffering from a light fancy play syndrome, as I got bored from time to time.
Friday was my biggest grinding day ever where I played a total of 5.8k hands in almost 10 hours. Around midnight one of my tables broke up and I sat down on another one that looked pretty juicy. It had a high percentage of players on the flop and a high average pot size. Additionally I had already marked one player at the table as "fun players". As I sat down I filled the spot of the marked player so I thought most of the action should be gone now, as he already busted. Never was I so wrong. Shortly after I sat down an Austrian player and a Brazilian player were in a hot debate about calling each other out as maniac and nit respectively. The Austrian maniac went All-in every single hand and told the Brazilian player he is to afraid to play with him. The funny part, whenever called and busted he reloaded for a full buy in. A silent agreement between the players made it such that once an All-in was called nobody else would interfere unless he had a very strong hand. Within the next 50 hands I ate stacks with 88, KK, ATo and got some more left over parts of stacks. At one point it became really interesting, as our beloved friend sucked out twice in a row and all of a sudden had a stack of almost fourty dollars. Whenever he went AI each caller was playing for a stack he never had before.
And so it happened that I called an AI with A♠:T♦: for $37 against T♥:9♥:. The flop looked dangerous, as it came 3♥:4♥:4♠:, and a crucial 9♦: on the turn killed what the 8♦: on the river could not save. All of a suddon I was done to $15 again and our friend had a stack of over $70, which soon became over $100 after another suckout. At that point he covered everybody at the table and huge stacks were at risk. As I was somewhat short again, it was okay for me to call an AI with a more risky hand again. I doubled up once more with A♠:2♣: against Q♥:8♦: and once my A♠:K♣: held up against his K♦:7♠: I was back to where I had been before and I even had the AI-EV to be at that stack size. Still having a stack of abovre $100 our beloved friend left the table. He joined us for almost 100 hands during which he lost more than $300. The average pot at the NL10 table was $19, while the average stack was between $40 and $50. Interestingly at one point the rager sat out a hand again, as he was not reloading automatically, but manually, and I 3bet a tight player with J♠:J♣:. I easily called his 18BB 4bet for set value, as we were 400B deep!
Overall the grind week was a success again. My total profit was +$65,33 which puts my bankroll at $957.04. With that result the challenge is at 10.1% of completion. I almost doubled up from my starting bankroll!
Until next week I wish all of you a very merry Christmas!
Peaceful days I had over Christmas. I visited my family and we had a lot of food and lots of drinks over these days. I still managed to sneak in some poker and oh boy was the last week swingy. After a successful grind the week before things pretty much started exploding at the beginning of the week. While so far I had a win rate of about 9BB/100hd over 50k hands at NL10 I played my first hour on Monday afternoon and won $65 during my first 650 hands. That is a win rate of 1BB per hand. Yes, per hand, not per 100 hands. I played about 350 more hands and won another buy-in when I took my first brake of the day. At that point I realized, that I had already hit my goal of reaching a bankroll of $1000 to move up to NL25. I cashed in my $10 4k VPP reward and at that point had a bankroll of $1039.
After a healthy break I started my first NL25 adventure reducing the number of tables down from 10 to 4. I only played for about half an hour until calling it a day with a slight profit of $10 which put my bankroll at almost $1050. The next day I continued this exiting journey. In two situations I ran a double barrel bluff against tight opponents to get them to fold middle pairs, but in both situations they had a hand near the top of their range. The first hand was a blind battle were villain flatted my button steal with the good old AA. After calling my two bets on flop and turn he lead out the river with his overpair. Fortunately I just hit my set on the river and we raised each other a couple times. I stacked him off while the pot was just about $5 after the turn. The second time was blind battle again and this time around villain chose to flat with AK. I barreled twice, but he already had top two pair. This time around I hit a gut shot on the river which lead to another raising party until I stacked him of with the nuts. My first journey to NL25 at that point seemed to be blessed with luck and my bankroll was up to $1104.
Came Christmas my karma chose to catch up with me. I started loosing stacks with straights against higher straights, full houses against nut full houses, aces got cracked several times. After about 3k hands over the next three days my biggest loosing hand by far was AA. Once they got cracked for an $80 pot preflop AI against 55 were I even flopped top set. That made up for all the luck that I had during my previous poker journeys in a single hand (regarding AI-EV). Besides all the run bads I also had the feeling that I got constantly outplayed. I was facing lots of raises in difficult spots and whenever I chose to play back they actually had the nuts. My bluffs were caught regularly, while my value hands were not payed off.
Came Sunday I lost almost 12 buy-ins at the new limit and my bankroll was down to $813. That was the point were I chose to step back to NL10 again and grind in a familiar environment to build up my confidence. I played about 2k more hands that day during which I felt like unbeatable again. Lots of players were punting stacks into me while my bluffs were working at the right times. After that session my bankroll was back up to $883 and that is were I stand right now.
Currently my plan is to grind some more NL10 until I reach the 5K VPP reward of $50 for which I only need about 100 points more. Once I hit $1000 again, I plan on giving NL25 another try, but before I do so, I will analyse a lot of my hands that I played during the first visit of the limit. During the whole last week I lost about $74 which does not seem all that big, but winning $150 than loosing $300 and than winning $75 again is an interesting experience for sure.
I am sorry folks, but this weeks update will be rather short. I am pretty sick at the moment and am not able to write all that much. My last week has been a huge adventure as after having to move back down to NL10 from NL25 after my first try, I was able to move back up again about two weeks later and this time around I started with a huge upswing instead of a downswing. I will tell you all the swings I had in next weeks post, but let me just tell you during week 16 of my challenge I almost increased my bankroll by 50%. I played a total of 16333 hands (2459 NL10 + 13874 NL25) for a profit of +$404.52. That puts my bankroll at currently $1288.15 for a completion of 17.5% of my challenge. I hope I will be better next week to give you a more detailed look into my grind again.
