wonderful and exciting tale of ben002 vs the dark forces of VILLAIN

7th entry (15. April 2018, year of the dog, early morning)

A man of faith, a man who turns on evil, a man who doesn't drop hope even when facing the greatest of terrors, who has sworn to combat darkness, whenever darkness crosses his way... such man shall be rewarded with the grace of gods and with their help shall harvest the greatest of riches.
My faith has been put to a test (see 6th entry)... The heavens were longing to know if I still would keep my trust with them when fortune in combat would change...
... I have passed ... and as I passed I once more was gifted with godly succour, protecting each and every of my steps. The last days of my campaign through the lands of NL2 weren't marked by battle. They were marked by single-edged victories, VILLAIN's henchmen fleeing in fear. No step did I perform which wasn't blessed and protected. Every breath I would take did sanctify my lungs...

Yep... I guess I really got kind of lucky there:

I. First Rencounters in NL5

I have left behind the wastelands of NL2 and arrived at a small outpost. Locals had told me that this is where VILLAIN houses his henchmen of NL5. Still feeling vigorous after the recent victories I decided to immediately go for the attack. The support of the gods hadn't left me and, although only short in time, the first rencounter with these servants of the dark lord can be considered another success. They wield stronger weapons. The riches they protect may be greater. But their hearts remain those of cowards and no force on earth can withstand those who are favored by the gods. Let's pray for our hero, that they still will favor him in times to come.

I am certainly not to complain... But I still would like to know how much I really contribute to all of that. As I am still keeping my single-table-policy and am not planning to change this any time soon it will certainly still take a while till I start getting a good idea of how much of eventual success can be attributed to myself and how much is just due to upswing/luck. Till then I should just relish on what was given I guess and hope that it won't change too drastically. Having said that, there are definitely some things in my game which need improvement:

II. Strengthening the Defence

The heavens have been merciful with my soul. But I know that their grace is not unconditional. To keep them from withdrawing it altogether I shall oblige myself to purge malicious influnces from my soul, which could constrain my capabillity to fight VILLAIN. My biggest problems seem to be:

playing value-hands too aggressively, getting small pots from folds instead of big pots at showdown

I recently have been focusing on value-betting a lot and I feel, that I already made some progress. There is still much room for improvement though. Just today during my first NL5 session I flopped top 2pair in a 3bet pot and raised VILLAIN's donk-bet because I was afraid of a possible gut-shot SD on the board (AKJr)... he snap-folded... just one example of how I am constantly missing out on value by not being prudent enough and not estimating well the real dangers when it comes to potential draws.

not taking some relevant factors into consideration when attempting to bluff

Although in many cases my aggressive bluffing got rewarded with VILLAIN's folds. I often don't know if I made a well placed bluff or if I just got lucky with VILLAIN not having anything and therefore folding. When I was bluffing in the past I was mostly focusing on my perception of VILLAIN's mistake propensities and if he showed weakness during the hand. Two of the most important factors I often ignored:
Does my hand have any blocker effects, which are reducing the number of possible value-combos on this specific board?
Are there any value hands in my range, which I would perform the same action with and which would beat most of VILLAIN's range?

not folding early enough

This is still a big problem for me. Although I feel that I already improved this aspect of my game and am now much more able to let go some hands and less obsessed with bluff-catching. I feel, that I am still losing a lot of value here. For my 9,774 hands of NL2 I've came out with a high WWSF stat of 56.14. Average All-In Equity on the other hand is only 46.99 though and WSD only 48.31.
Although the sample size is small these numbers seem to represent what I perceive my general problem to be:
I am fighting too hard for every single pot which lets me win many small ones without showdown but also lets me lose some big ones at showdown. I am having still a lot of problems, when it comes to estimating the strength of VILLAIN's range, which often leads to bad calls. I am still only breaking even with showdown-winnings.

still not having standard pre-flop 3bet-calling-/4bet-ranges

Not much to explain.

III. The Vow

As it is an eternal law that those who are ignorant of the path of righteousness can be forgiven for their mistakes, but those who know the way but refuse to walk it shall never find grace, I shall conclude this chapter with another vow:

I solemnly vow, that in the future...

I shall focus on the above-mentioned aspects when fighting VILLAIN,
I shall perform a close review of any situation where I felt that I performed very good or bad concerning these aspects,
I shall retake my combo-counting-drills when off the table!

May Fortuna favor all of you!
:f_thumbsup::f_drink::f_thumbsup:

Hey man, insane results for a beginning player (and now I know to whom my -EV losses went to ♦).
I think 99.9% of the time ultra aggro beginning players are broke within days. If you find the time post some of your winning moves with thoughts. I would love to see them!

Question: Overall luck bell curve. I never seen it in PT. Is it new or did I just miss a graph somewhere?
One more. Can you also post a graph of you showdown vs non showdown winnings? I'm curious if your red line is still as steep up as in the beginning.

A lot of requests.... I know.

PS It took me 200K hands to move up.. you go in 10K. Congrats!

Originally posted by RubbyDubby
Question: Overall luck bell curve. I never seen it in PT. Is it new or did I just miss a graph somewhere?

Hi RubbyDubby,
Have a look at this video from PT4's site:
https://www.pokertracker.com/videos/PT4/view-stats-leaktracker/view-stats-leaktracker-overall-luck-bell-curve

It explains this very well. Like you I had never heard of it, so I looked it up.

I've always thought that some players must be luckier than others (do you hear that Phil Ivey!?) but after being the luckbox myself from time to time I realize that it is just what we call variance -- not the mathematical/statistical variance, but the expression of the randomness of randomness.

What I mean is that for a large number of players with the same base win rate, and the same number of hands, some will win and some will not.
Have a look at this:
This represents 1000 80,000 hand sample runs for a player with a 2BB/100 base winrate, and an 80 BB/100 standard deviation.
(or, perhaps 1000 different people)
Scary, ain't it?

This chart comes from http://www.pokerdope.com/poker-variance-calculator/ -- play with it.
This is why PokerStrategy.com stresses bankroll management so strongly.
The poor bugger on the brown line is tearing his hair out, analysing hands right and left -- he's down 5000 big blinds and he has done nothing wrong!
The guy on the blue line thinks he's the second coming of Doyle Brunson.

Cheers,
VS

Originally posted by RubbyDubby
It took me 200K hands to move up.. you go in 10K. Congrats!

Yeah... I really don't know if it is wise though and VorpalF2F's post makes me doubt even more. There is no denying, that I have been running hot for my first few hands. Question is if I am the average maniac running hot or somebody who is capable to beat NL2. I guess I would need much more played hands to really know. As I don't want to change my only-one-table principle I think I still can justify moving up now. After all my 10k hands already took me 94:24 h (!!!) over the course of the last month and I feel that I have made some progress during this time. Also I can't lose money as quickly with only one table. So I decided that I can dare to move up at 20BI of NL5 and drop back to NL2 if I should come down to 25BI there. I feel that almost 100h should be enough for a first attempt.

The thing about me posting bluffing-hands is that I often times don't really know if I am doing the right decision or just getting lucky with it. Which holds at least for the more spectacular cases. I think for stuff like that it would be better to turn to people who actually know what they are doing. I think most of my good non-showdown winnings (those which didn't result from collecting folds with value-hands) are due to very mundane stuff like aggressively attacking or defending the blinds, when I have the impression that my opponents are weak in this regard. I also always try to use small sized bluff-bets to exploit people who seem to play a "fit or fold"-style. Also some people would almost always Cbet the flop but "play fit or fold" OTT. They are very prone to floating. And so on. All the cases, in which I am more or less confident with my decision don't appear to be very interesting. Having said that, it might be actually a good idea to analyze closely some of the more spectacular bluffing-hands to see if it was actual good play or not. If I do so I will post the results here !!!

The graph still pretty much looks the same:

edit:
I have played around with the variance-calculator and am happy to say, that according to it, there is only a 3.5950% probabillity that I on the long run I would be below breaking even at NL2.

8th entry (17. April 2018, year of the dog, early morning)

555 hands into NL5 and already running ...

Spoiler

:sfishy::sfishy::sfishy: HOT :sfishy::sfishy::sfishy:

:sfishy::sfishy::sfishy: AS :sfishy::sfishy::sfishy:

:sfishy::sfishy::sfishy: F :sfishy::sfishy::sfishy:

:sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy:

:sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy:

:sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy:

:sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy::sfishy:

This doesn't even feel like playing this game anymore.

I have finally checked your blog and I have to admit, it is very original Sadly I dont have enough time now to read all your long posts, bud will do so ASAP. Firstly congrats on beating NL2 so quickly, that is extraordinary. Especially in 2018 when many say that NL2 is now more difficult than NL100 in 2010.

But those graphs man, they are totally different from anyone´s I have seen so far. Your redline is totally insane That is almost scary. I would love to see you in action. Have you considered recording a live session? I have always had "redline issues" as I play tight ABC poker and you might call me one of those exploitable regs.

Hi Dandiiik,

thanks for the compliment on my blog! I am having a lot of fun writing this. I don't really know if it's worth reading through all of it though. I think it is already quite lengthy.
About my graphs and moving up quickly:
I most likely got very lucky with my first couple of thousand hands. I don't know how steep my green line would look if I actually would have got dealt normal cards.
One thing which I might do differently to a lot of beginners is that till now I never bothered about what would be considered "standard" to play but instead focused my theory learning only on fundamental things so that I can try to make my own decisions. I think this probably lead to a different mistake-profile and that I am still doing very stupid things in spots where other people wouldn't even have to think about the right decision. On the other hand I sometimes get away with things a lot of people wouldn't even attempt in the micros. A lot of my non-showdown-winnings are still comming from mistakes (also that) and are actually soaked from my showdown-winnings. This might fall on my feet once the lucky days are over.

That 103BB/100 of you dwarfs my lousy 20BB/100 at 5NL but I run out of luck lately

I just stopped winning.. I'll show my results so far in a day or so.

Cheers!

9th entry (26. April 2018, year of the dog, early morning)

@RubbyDubby I also finally got my cooler.
Feels refreshing!

Descent to Mortality

After a time of overwhelming success I was finally cast down back to the cold truth of the the warroirs path. Fortune in battle may change as the wind does. I am thankful it did change for me, as it did permit me to now feel grounded again and once more focus my consciousness on deemed trivialities, which in reality never were trivial and never will be.

I. Repeating the basic steps

I finally seem to have arrived in a place with my game, where for most situations I have a vague idea about what to to. So it seems to be the right time to now once again put special focus on some aspects and start deepening my understanding of what to do in certain spots. The first topic I dug into was c-betting. I consumed some theory about it and now try to put it into practice. Still one-tabling I try to think now about each occurence by itself considering VILLAIN's range as well as my own together with possible exploits. This works with mixed success and it happens quite often, that the very second after my decision I get the epithany that it most certainly was the wrong one, which partly angers me and partly gives me hope, as it feels as if I would be just one inch away from becoming a better player. I was somehow still too lazy to dig into 4-betting a bit deeper but I also think that post-flop play might be more important for now and it's also more fun for me. In the end every pre-flop strategy also is dependant on the way I play post-flop. So I somehow deem it to be a waste of to try to come up with a really thought-out pre-flop strategy as long as the way I play post-flop isn't at least settled a bit.

II. The gloomy lands of NL5

My first advance into the lands of NL5 was still propelled by the fire of NL2 success which had enlightened me. Fortunately the time of profitable decadence finally came to an end and I am back at a state where my decisions seem to matter again and I can't blindly trust in the goodwill of the heavens anymore. Although I still feel quite blessed in fact:

The main difference between the NL5-stooges of VILLAIN and those of NL2 seems to be, that the former ones are at the same time tighter and more 3bet happy then the latter ones. For my first 3,150 hands I have been playing with an average of VPIP 31.56 and PFR 25.46, which I feel is the way to go, as there usually is a lot of fold-equity pre-flop.
All in all I have to say, that it feels very refreshing to not have a giant luck-induced winrate anymore. I am still lucky. My winrate still is nothing to complain about. But at least I have to work a little bit for it and it is so much more satisfying to know that you have won money also because of some right decision you made and not only because of your lucky charm. I feel that this happens more often now then before. All in all I have the impression, that NL5 is the place where I should be at the moment. I think I might still play a bit worse then most regs on here, which seems to be a good point to start from.

III. Still haunted

Although their grasp isn't as tight anymore as it used to be, the demons of blunder are still haunting me, attacking every opportunity to make me stumble in my task to fight for the good. I have been focusing a lot on becoming more disciplined especially with my folds. It still happens though, that I can't let go of a hand, despite knowing that it would be the rational choice to do. I started to be happy about every session without a hand where I gave away a BI because blundersome temptations defying rationality. That said, my game already feel much more tamed then it was before with more prudence and less mindless aggression, which feels like a major step into the right direction.

IV. The scholar's path

Besides the above mentioned c-betting theory I started to read "The Grinder's Manual" by Peter Clark. Which seems to be a very good book to read for me now as it sums up and deepens a lot of concepts I already vaguely understand and thus strengthens the fundament on which I hope to build later on. I gave up on Janda's "Applications" for now as I think I first should foster a more general and intuitive understanding of the game before I can start refining things with more maths-based theory. I also can proudly say, that I managed to fit some units of combo-counting-drills into my daily life, which hasn't really shown effect on my playing till now. But I stay hopeful that it will in the future.

V. New perspectives

It took me a whole while till I understood how awful the PT4 default HUD actually is. Not only that it distracted me with a lot of irrelevant information, which I never should have used due to small sample-size. It also teased my tilt-nerve with it's malicious display of the BB/100 stat in the pop-up, which eventually lead to me checking it after every hand, which of course was more then just mildely detrimental for my game. So I fianlly put in the effort in building my own HUD. I also forced myself into the attitude to mostly only consider VPIP and PFR if anything at all. One-tabling doesn't exactly help for building up big-enough sample sizes, so I really shouldn't bother with most stats for now. Here is my new HUD :f_biggrin::

VI. Hands

Here are some hands I have played:
[NL5] Did I get myself into trouble? (TT / squeeze-pot / all-in OTF)
[NL5] BvB ATs; Can I fold TopPair OTF?
[NL5] TPGK on wet board as PFR

Greetings, luck and blessings!
:f_thumbsup::f_drink::f_thumbsup:

Did the dark forces of VILLAIN took over the world??