Mind Games

BC is remarkably beautiful. There is hardly any place I would rather live. Its a nice feeling when you are on vacation and after a few weeks you cannot wait to get back home.

As for Fraser Downs, thats my favorite casino. I've only played 5 tournaments there since they renovated to a 12-14 table private room. I've played some cash there too. The games are soft as well. Currently to date I have won a tournament outright, chopped a final table, finished 6th, and missed the money in 2. Pretty good record for a noob.

I would have joined you on the 24th but alas I will be acting belligerent at a batchelor party in Whistler that weekend. I wish you the best of luck in the tourny VP. Be aware though, they allow players who have been knocked out to rebuy as long as they do not exceed the 90 man cap. I find this good but some folks find it "unfair". Figured you should know.

Originally posted by Verre
BC is remarkably beautiful. There is hardly any place I would rather live. Its a nice feeling when you are on vacation and after a few weeks you cannot wait to get back home.

No arguments from me. I have to live in a city for my job, so if you have to live in a city, it might as well be Vancouver. Besides, Langley is rural enough

As for Fraser Downs, thats my favorite casino. I've only played 5 tournaments there since they renovated to a 12-14 table private room. I've played some cash there too. The games are soft as well. Currently to date I have won a tournament outright, chopped a final table, finished 6th, and missed the money in 2. Pretty good record for a noob.

I had the pleasure of working in mineral exploration in the north each summer from '72 to '77. I got paid to hike up and down mountains from May - Sep each year.

Nice to know about Fraser downs, and congrats on your showing.
My daughter's boyfriend plays there too. I asked him about Cascades in Langley, which would be closer, but he said that once the bad beat jackpot got so high on the cash tables, the tournament action dried up, and once the BBJ was won, all the tournament players were at FD to stay.

I spent the day with my 5-Card Draw database.
In order to make analysis easier, I created 3 lookup tables that serve to group hands.

I have simplified the problem considerably.
Just think:
There are: 8.06582 x 10^67 ways to sort a deck of cards
There are only 2598960 discrete ways to pull 5 cards from that deck
They make up 7462 possible poker hands.
Today, I narrowed down further to make the analysis simpler.

For example, for AAxxx, each set of kickers -- eg KQJ -- can occur in 384 combos, and there are 220 different sets of kickers.
For each of the possible 7462 hands, what if we ignored kickers?

Most* of the time AA432 is as good as AAKQJ.
If we look at discrete RANKS of hands, then there are only 309 possible ranks to consider.

I did all this to support my snivelling about losing all those 3-of-a-kind hands.
Results tomorrow.

*The rest of the time it bites you in the ass as you get out-kicked, but that's poker <sigh>

5-Card Draw Database analysis results

As I mentioned, I set out to try to prove that a bad run of losses holding trips is what is responsible for my downswing.

I am certainly having a bad run of losses.

However while checking to see how I did with pre-draw trips, I ran a query that resulted in the following table:

It shows the results for hands that are exactly the same after-draw as pre-draw -- except for kickers.

       Hand Type      Result      sawd   netwon
           Quad:         won        13    13.79

     Full house:         won        50    59.98
     Full house:        lost         5    -5.30
                                    55    54.68

          Flush:         won        59    70.28
          Flush:        lost        10   -11.59
                                    69    58.69

       Straight:         won        95    93.68
       Straight:        lost        23   -24.91
                                   118    68.77

Three of a kind:         won       700   737.43
Three of a kind:        lost       313  -346.42
                                  1013   391.01

      Two pair:          won      1138   857.28
      Two pair:         lost      1009  -752.58
                                  2147   104.70

      One pair:         won       1344   725.42
      One pair:        lost       2131 -1038.46
                                  3475  -313.04

    High card:          won         41     8.68
    High card:         lost        878  -236.74
                                   919  -228.06

Now, if you were me, would you be more worried about the 313 sets of trips that got beat, or the Two bloody thousand times I saw the draw with a pair?

If I had folded HALF of them I could have saved 1000 big bets.
A lot of these were probably folded AD, but why get there in the first place?
Also, some of these may have been checked to in BB, and checked down AD, but still...

At this point I don't know exactly what the leak is, but it is far more likely a spot to be looking than whining about losing with trips.

I *suspect* I am calling too many donks and too many CBets.

To that end, I will read up again on bluff-catching.

All the best,
--VS

What a wonderfull tool you have ! I know in my own case that I spew lots trying to bluffcatch way more than is correct when opponent is in " bluffing position"; that it is my primary leak. But you have actual numbers. And by the way, in regard you previous blog entry, AA234 is quite different from AAKQJ in some situations ; one example: in considering what to do with AAxyz in the blinds facing an open from co, the former has alot more value than the latter, because it is more likely that the opener has KK or QQ or JJ , hands he should open with, and hands you are beating.

Originally posted by norab
What a wonderfull tool you have ! I know in my own case that I spew lots trying to bluffcatch way more than is correct when opponent is in " bluffing position"; that it is my primary leak. But you have actual numbers. And by the way, in regard you previous blog entry, AA234 is quite different from AAKQJ in some situations ; one example: in considering what to do with AAxyz in the blinds facing an open from co, the former has alot more value than the latter, because it is more likely that the opener has KK or QQ or JJ , hands he should open with, and hands you are beating.

The tool is "pokerhands"
If you don't have it, add me in the community tool, and I can work with you to get it.

I have made some additions to the default database, and I have written a number of custom queries, that I use with Excel to do analysis.

I have several times lost w/ AAxxx vs AAxxx just by being outkicked.
Until now, I had preferred to play AA hands when I had some broadways in there, because they would be blockers to CO/BTN hands.

I'll hopefully be posting more analysis later.
It isn't pretty.

For example, I have folded a pat FH at least once from EP.
I'm hoping misclick, but I don't remember it, so perhaps I didn't even notice?

Yikes!
--VS

Originally posted by VorpalF2F
Until now, I had preferred to play AA hands when I had some broadways in there, because they would be blockers to CO/BTN hands.

Those are blockers to the hands that you want him to have. You're getting confused with AKKxx or AKQQxx, where you're blocking hands you don't want him to have.

Originally posted by jbpatzer

Originally posted by VorpalF2F
Until now, I had preferred to play AA hands when I had some broadways in there, because they would be blockers to CO/BTN hands.

Those are blockers to the hands that you want him to have. You're getting even more confused with AKKxx or AKQQxx, where you're blocking hands you don't want him to have.

there, that's better.

If I have AA in SB, you're saying I *should* prefer AA234 over AAKQJ because the former gives more combos of KK, QQ or JJ hands for him to have.

However if he DOES have one of those hands, would it not be preferable to hold the latter, since the blockers make it less like to *improve* those hands?

Furthermore, if he does hold AAxxx also, the latter is more likely than the former to hold up.

Pair v pair is already 80%, even without blockers. Don't be greedy!

5-Card Draw Milestone
100,000 hands

          Limit  Hands     Win%   Net Won  VPIP   PDR  BB/100 
         $3/$6:    277   14.44%   -$36.95  18.8  15.2    -2.2 
         $1/$2:   3207   16.65%  -$124.44  19.5  15.8    -1.9 
         $2/$4:    157   18.47%    $34.18  24.2  20.4     5.4 
   $0.10/$0.20:  63373   15.78%    $49.92  19.2  14.3     0.4 
   $0.25/$0.50:  32065   16.84%   $174.24  18.9  14.9     1.1 
      $0.50/$1:    922   16.70%    $25.21  18.4  14.9     2.7 

And the downswing continues.

I'm getting slaughtered in the mid-range hands.
I think I have improved my bluffing and bluff-catching, but it is hard to tell.

I have broken my database analysis into 3 parts:
♦  Hands folded pre-draw
♦  Hands played pre-draw -- includes blinds even if vpip = false
♦  Hands where sawd = true -- includes walks

Hands folded pre-draw
I looked for two things:
♦  Hands I open folded where my hand was > 50% of all hands
♦  Hands I folded where my hand was > 50% of villains opening range

I could find very few hands in the second group where the fold was unjustified, and I'll put those down to having a read on villain.

In the first group, there were 1000 hands I probably should have open-raised. Included in that are a full house (I timed out) a straight, and several sets of trips. I need to pay attention more.

I also have no easy way to find potential snows, flush draws or straight draws I folded pre-draw that could have been profitable semi-bluffs

So for the moment:
Lesson learned: Pay attention!

I saw that P*s has a FL tournament every day at 11:50.

Sux to be me -- I'm at work at that time, so today was my first shot at it.

Beginner's luck:

I took off like a shot, sitting in first place for the first several orbits.
Then a long card-dead period, that ended with a pat straight that got busted by a drawn flush. Back to starting stack.

65 entrants, 6 paid.
With about 24 left, I went on a tear again, helped by this hand:

This hand set me as chip leader at the final table -- not a position I'm used to..
As short stack, I think that everyone joined in to help drive me out.

Once we were down to 3, I was down to short-stack several times, leader several times, and it was getting a bit tedious.
At one point, the 3 of us all had 31K, and we decided on a 3-way even split.

Of course after that I could do no wrong.

See, now that looks like a fun way to play a tourney.

Wp sir.

Well done my friend. ♦

Nice one. FL MTTs are so tilting.

GG well done!

Always nice to bink something

thanks, all.
I had a really good day overall.

After supper I played some NL10 on WH for a bit -- and finished down 23 cents.
That was a pretty good result for me.

Then to kill off some of my remaining BR at a certain site I don't name, I played a $1 STT SnG.

Card dead most of the game, but 5 others fell on their swords leaving me short-stack on the bubble.

But I can push and fold with the best of 'em and hung on until 2nd place took his AK to the wall and lost.

Woot! ITM in a SnG!
Who'd have believed it?

I actually made it to chip lead but ended up in third.

Today, I played a short 300-hand session of 5-Card Draw with a winrate of nearly 7 BB/100

I have concluded that I do best when I play against stupid people and hit my draws.

I even tried for another gutshot SF but not this time.

Peace & have a good week!
--VS

5-Card Draw
I have noticed that I tend to have higher winrates in shorter sessions, with a sweet spot at about an hour (300 hands)

So I have played only 300-hand sessions for the last couple of days, and doing fairly well.

NLHE (NL10)
I have also been playing some NL10 with a view to managing my inability to fold when necessary, and bluff with appropriate frequency.

Once again, it was something in jbpatzer's blog that clued me in:

Originally posted by jbpatzer
Do I need to put in lots of volume now? No. Do I need to put myself under pressure to make money? No. So, I'm going to cut it down to two tables of Rush, and try to get into a routine on each hand that involves thinking about Villain's range, thinking through the previous action and looking at the appropriate stats. It sounds obvious, but I've been doing it in such a haphazard way that sometimes my thought processes are OK, but often they're more 'Errr. Oh? Bet!', which is less than ideal. I began tonight with a couple of tables of NL25 and started trying to develop some good habits. I'll make it NL50 next time.

Well I have that!
Remember PHASER SHOT
Pre-Flop
PHASER
Position / Patience
Hand
Action before me
Stats / Stack sizes / Steal
Ego/ Equity
Range

Post-Flop
SHOT
Strength / Stack-to-Pot / Size of Bet / Stats
Hand
Odds (includes Implied Odds) & Outs
Texture

So I played 3 1-hour sessions of NL10 2-tables only, and tried to get into the habit of using the mnemonic on each hand.

I remembered a bit more than half the time. Well done me.

However the effect was certainly positive -- up just over 1 BI in around 200 hands.

Mind you, I did take a stack off one guy just cuz I didn't believe his turn shove.
I think I might have heard him yell, "Fold you stupid fish!" He was from Russia, and sound travels well over the pole, I'm told:

I think just playing by the numbers makes this a fold.
But I can't imagine he has the straight, so if he has an overpair I'm toast, except I also have an oesd, so what the heck
If we give villain:
77+,ATs+,KQs,QTs+,JTs,ATo+,KQo,QTo+,JTo

According to Equilab, I have 64% equity on the flop, & 68% on the turn, so maybe not so dumb since his shove means I need to put 4.95 into a $15 pot with 68% equity.

I'll post this in the han devaluation forum.

Mrs Vorpal is back home tomorrow, so the grandson and I got all the dishes done and the laundry and the etc etc.

Good work, boys.

Peace & tranquility!
--VS

What's going on with the comedy bet sizing Mr V?

I really need to try the Fazer Shot technique

post flop I disagree with the range you have given him

after the flop he has IMO 1 combo of A :club:T + Let's say AK as pure bluffs if you want to give him some and pairs. Most people call low PPs especially to a 2.5x raise So I would put add 22-66 to his range. I'd normally remove KK-AA as he probably would 4bet you.

he could have more suited aces as well and a few suited connectors out of which all the flush draw could potentially play the same

you still have the odds to call but it is a completer flip though imo:

Board: 2♦6♣4♣ 8♦
       Equity     Win     Tie
MP2    50.12%  49.47%   0.65% { QQ-22, AKs, AcQc, KcQc, AcJc, KcJc, QcJc, AcTc, QcTc, JcTc, Jc9c, Tc9c, 9c8c, 8c7c, Ac5c, Ac4c, Ac3c, Ac2c, AKo }
MP3    49.88%  49.23%   0.65% { 9d9c }

5-Card Draw
Still getting beaten up.

I think, though, that I now know why.

Since I spent all that time and effort on learning the ranges, and what beats what, that is how I've been playing.

I've been playing mechanically, and mathematically -- but not aggressively.

In NLHE they call that style "weak-tight" and it is passive and you lose.

I'll dust off my manly aggressive hat and wear that for my next session.

Or maybe not.

I played the last 200 hands tonight balls-to-the-wall (whatever that means it sounds painful, but aggressive) and erased the losses from the previous 400.

Hmmmm.

Along the way, I locked down SilverStar for another month.

Woot!

I wonder of you've been suffering that old chestnut of having so much information you forgot to play? I see it a lot with people in coachings, etc., where they want to see a HUD all the time.

Or you could just run better!