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Harrier's Blog - Mixed Games & Mixed Drinks

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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

Originally posted by bacyla
Wery nice and common recipes. How do U mixing them and poker palys at the same time? how do the result of recipes helping for wining? :) as i am a begginer of mixing some drinks, so i found a new world here. GL. and TY.

Honestly, alcohol and poker is not a great mix. :f_biggrin: There is a reason why many casinos are giving out cocktails for free. Those drinks can be a nice treat after your games, though. Personally, however, I'm glad if I can find time for poker at all these days, let alone any drinks afterwards.

If you are interested in those recipes, be sure to check out the list I have linked in my signature, and if you are new to this, you may want to check out one of my old posts about ice and cocktails and the espresso martini recipe that follows it, which are also both linked in that list.


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

All Badugi, All Night

I'm a bit late with my update. Reason is, when I got done with my session shortly before midnight, I noticed that my laptop battery was almost empty, which surprised me, because it was supposed to be plugged in. After trying a few things, including checking the cable and trying different sockets, it became clear that it wasn't charging anymore. By now, I have determined that the AC adapter itself was the problem, so I will have to get a new one, and I have borrowed another one in the meantime.

Anyway, I played the WCOOP Badugi Side Events, and even decided on short notice to also play the $55 high event - I'm not completely sure, but this may have been the highest buy-in tournament I ever willingly played, disregarding that $100 misclick reg on 888 ten years ago, and a few games I may have sattied into, which therefore don't count.

Let's cut the BS and get to the one you want to hear about right away: The $55 tournament did indeed cash. :f_drink: I finished 16th out of 179 for $64.08 - unfortunately without any bounties.

This being a 2nd ladder finish, it at least put me into profit in that game, which was very important, as I don't have too much MTT profit to sit on this year. Shame about the lack of bounties, though there were some good opportunities. One time, I managed to put a now short-stacked player with a $50 bounty all-in predraw heads-up while I was holding a pat Q-Badugi. Roughly 53% equity for me, but he hit his draw.

In a more egregious situation, I doubled-up against a bigger stack by bluff-catching with a good value hand. I then isolated him (now short) with a pat K-Badugi, he made a pot-sized re-raise, but instead of calling with his last remaining 55 chips when I went all-in, he simply left and timed out. He was auto all-in in the next hand, but naturally, more players were now trying to get his free bounty, and someone else succeeded.

Other than that, I may have been overly tight near the bubble, but admittedly, this game was way out of my usual buy-in range.

Now the other tourneys: The $11 game did not cash, finishing in 170th place shortly before the end of late reg with 107 out of 721 paid. At least I picked up two bounties worth $5 in total. The $2.20 tournament was the latest one to finish for me. I got ITM, finishing 73rd out of 1,284 with 179 paid for $3.69 and $1 worth of bounties.

Putting it all together, this puts us at combined returns of $73.77 against our combined buy-ins of $68.20, so it was a slightly profitable night after all, though it is still in break-evenish territory with only $5.57 in profit. Still, it's nice to have secured a profit here at all. If I had bricked the $55, we surely would have seen it plain as day in this year's graphs.


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

Ah, and I forgot: Here's a little nailbiter from the $55 tournament, still a long way from ITM:

PokerStars, $50 + $5 - Badugi Pot Limit - 200/400 (50 ante) - 5 players
Hand delivered by CardsChat

UTG: 52,188 (130 bb)
CO: 86,589 (216 bb)
BU: 17,445 (44 bb)
SB: 52,645 (132 bb)
BB (Hero): 24,259 (61 bb)

Deal: (850) Hero is BB with 4 3 4 9
1 fold, CO raises to 800, 2 players fold, Hero calls 400

Draw One: (2,050) 4 3 7 2 (2 players)
BB (Hero) draws 4c 9h, CO draws 2
Hero bets 1,200, CO calls 1,200

Draw Two: (4,450) 4 3 7 2 (2 players)
BB (Hero) stands pat, CO draws 1
Hero bets 2,800, CO calls 2,800

Draw Three: (10,050) 4 3 7 2 (2 players)
BB (Hero) stands pat, CO draws 1
Hero bets 5,025, CO raises to 25,125, Hero calls 14,384 (all-in)

Total pot: 48,868

Showdown:
CO shows 5 A 2 7 (a Badugi: 7,5,2,A)
BB (Hero) shows 4 3 7 2 (a Badugi: 7,4,3,2)
BB (Hero) wins 48,868


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

Originally posted by Harrier88
when I got done with my session shortly before midnight, I noticed that my laptop battery was almost empty, which surprised me, because it was supposed to be plugged in. After trying a few things, including checking the cable and trying different sockets, it became clear that it wasn't charging anymore. By now, I have determined that the AC adapter itself was the problem, so I will have to get a new one, and I have borrowed another one in the meantime.

Actually, scratch that - my old charging cable is working as well by now. :f_ugly:

No idea what happened to it last night. I tried several sockets, I restarted my PC a bunch of times, I checked the connections... nothing worked then, now everything is working as intended.

I have no explanation for any of this - I just got trolled, I assume. Let's blame the Battery Polecats.


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Primrose6789
Joined: 01.07.2016

Awesome result, Harrier, congratulation! _love:
Looking forward to playing poker too after my vacation!


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

Final table in tonight's (standard) Badugi, finishing 7th for around $11 including bounties. Not a bad result, I hope there are more to come.

My Mondays are now finally sports-free again. WCOOP Stud Hi-Lo tomorrow, maybe?


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

All right, so I finished 161st out of 1,221 in the WCOOP Stud Hi-Lo. It's a mincash, returning $17.34 on my $11 buy-in - not bad. It means I didn't lose money during this WCOOP, because this was the last event I intended to play.

Vorpal got a little further, and I hear he just got out. I guess we can read about it on his blog any moment now.

And here's another nice troll involving those obnoxious session reminder pop-up boxes. I already mentioned them popping up at the most inconvenient times, bringing every single Pokerstars window with them, and in one case even obstructing valuable information on the table that was only there for a short time... but tonight, they outdid themselves. The reminders popped up - and I couldn't close them. It was stuck like this:

I was soon asked to bring in, and couldn't even click that button either, it was stuck on that window, which wouldn't go away. The only way to solve this was to close Pokerstars through the task manager and re-open it.

Anyway, WCOOP is done for me, I expect, unless I change my mind at the last minute with some tournaments. A little over $10 in profit, maybe... it's profit, so I won't complain.


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Super Moderator
VorpalF2F
Joined: 02.09.2010

Originally posted by Harrier88
Anyway, WCOOP is done for me, I expect, unless I change my mind at the last minute with some tournaments. A little over $10 in profit, maybe... it's profit, so I won't complain.

Congrats on the overall profit!

I haven't been keeping close track, but IIRC I've played 4 $11 ones and 1 $2.20, and today was my first cash.

Will you not be playing the $11 NL 2-7 Single Draw on the 20th?


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

Originally posted by VorpalF2F
Will you not be playing the $11 NL 2-7 Single Draw on the 20th?

Definitely not, I was never good at Lowball Single Draw. Triple Draw would at least be worth considering, though I don't feel confident at that one either. I assume the TD event is already over anyway.


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

.

Honestly, no. This shootout was just something I was vaguely aware of without ever looking into it. I guess I should.

Is it only once every Sunday? If so, at what time?


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

Poker could use some help these days, but it is not the only thing. Many things to be done... but today, I took an unashamed "lazy day", which also has its benefits every now and then.

Long workday tomorrow, and then, it is time to tackle all of these issues, one after the other. I will keep you guys posted.


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Primrose6789
Joined: 01.07.2016

You probably can imagine how much I need a lazy day (or even two :f_biggrin: :f_ugly: ).


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

Originally posted by Primrose6789
You probably can imagine how much I need a lazy day (or even two :f_biggrin: :f_ugly: ).

I guess we both need a few of those...

Well, it's not long until my well-deserved stay-at-home vacation. Just gotta hang in there.


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

Not a Mixed Drink, but...

Look what my tennis training partner brought me, after our last formal training session of the season:

Some lovely red wine from his native Chile. :f_love: Thanks, José! Really appreciate it.


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

At last, I have a week off. I still felt just as stressed as before last night, but finally getting a good amount of sleep helped matters. Not getting enough is a continuous problem for me in a normal work week.

Another big frustration was that my internet started having some serious troubles yesterday afternoon, it would be only sporadically available. It didn't improve today, but after completely unplugging the router for a bit, it should be back to normal now... fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Voluntarily spending a day completely offline can be a very good experience, and it is something I like to do once a week (until some time in the evening, that is). Having it completely gone, however, is still a serious problem. Maybe it's a sad thing that we are so dependent on it these days - but we are, for better or for worse.

The future of poker remains uncertain for me. Among other things, I would hate to simply cash out all those funds I so carefully built up over the years. I expect some way to carry on will be found, as usual. First of all, though, I really need to clean up that apartment. It is a total pig stall in some areas, it's no wonder if I get stressed and/or unproductive in such a place. Ideally, I would have done it during the week already, so it would have been ready for my vacation, but better late than never.


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

Back in Fantasyland

Yeah, about poker... I would love to get back into OFC, with the only big problem being that there are effectively no games. The one crypto site that had acceptable traffic discontinued it, and the other one shown above simply has no action. This changed today. Not only did I see another player over there, he even stuck around until 2 AM.

You may think that the game must have been worth it if I chose to stick around for so long as well, and you are correct. I finished over 650 points up for the night. Only once did I have a better session, when I played two bad regs at the other crypto site on a Friday night in January until 3 AM.

While those are absolute nano-stakes where each point only represents a quarter of a micro bitcoin, it helps my bankroll on that room nicely. More importantly, it was a big confidence boost for poker in general. Finding the right games is not getting any easier, but at least I saw tonight that when I do find them, it's all worth it.


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

I was about to make a post about the lack of poker tonight, particularly the lack of OFC which I had attempted to play on three consecutive evenings, only to find not a single opponent on the one site I know that still runs this game... but as it turned out, I found one opponent tonight. And it was the guy against whom I had my great 650 points winning session the other day. And he was sitting at a table of the next highest stakes.

This time, we had some up and downs, especially when a third player joined - I don't really like playing three-handed OFC. At one point, I even got "stacked" by losing the maximum 100 points in a round, but other than that, it went very well overall. 198 points were my profit tonight, or rather 198 µBTC after rake. 1 point is equivalent to 1 µBTC at those stakes.

This enabled me to break several milestones. We now have over 2,000 points in profit for the year on SwC (in addition to over 3,200 on CoinPoker earlier), a yearly profit of over 500 µBTC, and we are really close to reaching the 1K µBTC bankroll goal, which even was breached for a brief moment during the session.

You may not remember my New Year's post, where I had set some poker goals for 2023. We will surely have to take a big L on most of them, but note that an OFC crypto bankroll of 1K µBTC was among those goals, as well as winning stats at the limit I was playing tonight. This may be the one goal that I really could make - not to mention that I have had some good success on CoinPoker too, when it still had those games.

Other than that... yeah, there really has been kind of a lack of poker over my vacation. I haven't even prepared stats for September yet. We will get to all of it eventually, I suppose...


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

.

Thank you. :f_drink: I'm actually not much of a wine drinker myself, I only have it occasionally with certain meals, especially on a Saturday evening. So I haven't yet tried this wine. Maybe it's time for some fine lasagna next weekend, should be a good fit.


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

All right, back to work tomorrow. The break was much appreciated, I feel a lot more ready to take on my daily challenges now.

Poker will probably stay on the back burner for a while, especially now that I have to get up earlier in the morning. I would like to get back to it, but it is not getting any easier. I have my other projects, of course, you may already know about my sporting challenges if you are following my Troll Challenges blog, and there are a bunch of extra ones I don't post about too. Apart from that, I would like to learn new things and dabble in subjects like digital music making, 3D modelling, game design and other creative endeavors. There is only so much time and energy you can spare every day.

Besides, online poker is not quite what it used to be. I miss the days of waiting lists, Russian recs, grindable 5CD SNGs and FL cash tables, no table restrictions, no annoying playing time pop-ups every hour, no irreversible self-exclusion buttons to tiptoe around, and being able to open as many poker rooms at the same time as you want. As much as we may long for them, these days are gone. We will simply have to adapt, the same way people had to adapt after the infamous Black Friday in 2011. I joined the world of online poker one year later, I can only imagine what things were like at that point.

Either way, no choice but to adapt. Maybe I will find a way, maybe I can even make a big breakthrough to things I never thought possible before, or maybe my golden days are simply over. Or maybe things will suddenly look a lot different in a year or so, just like that. Whatever it is, I'm sure I will stick around one way or another, so let's make the most of it. :f_grin: And who knows, I also already considered my playing career over in early 2016, before making an unexpected breakthrough with Badugi that led to a whole new start.

Let's hope for some sick runs to post about by the end of the year, at least, and just enjoy the beautiful season of Fall. Still no September stats, though... maybe next week.


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Harrier88
Joined: 01.05.2012

Lack of posts usually means a lack of poker. The only thing I have been trying to play this week was some OFC in the evening, but I couldn't get any games going all week until today. The games I did find this evening went so poorly that they single-handedly undid the promising progress I made with my amazing sessions earlier this month. Looks like OFC won't be the saving grace for this year's results after all.

Other than that, I still have no idea how to carry on. The only playable game I still have some kind of confidence in is Badugi, and that one is now inconvenient too because of my work hours.

It is sad... 2023 was supposed to be my big poker breakthrough, especially after the good 2022 results. Instead, it now seems increasingly likely that I won't even be around by this time next year anymore. Believe me, I would love to find a way to make this work. I really would. Poker used to be such a rewarding experience. But even after sizable breaks and exploring all kinds of options, it doesn't seem like it is getting any better for me.


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