The Poker Adventures

Normally at this time of day I’d be finishing up my tournaments and then doing some post-game analysis using Poker Tracker, by taking a look at some hands I’ve marked out while playing that day. After a long day, the post-game analysis is something I usually don’t look forward to, but I try to make myself do it anyway.

But today I’m sneaking off and writing up my thoughts, as I want to give myself a moment to review how I’m doing, and I might as well write it here. As a quick review, what I’m doing at the moment is learning NLHE, specifically in relation to Sit N’ Go tournament play (so, small tournaments) at micro buy-ins. The mornings and early afternoons are devoted to study via reading, watching instructional videos, and playing around with software; the afternoons are when I do a Sit N’ Go or two to put what I’ve learned into practice, and then the early evening is that jolly post-play analysis. So far I’m sticking to it pretty well, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot in a month and have worked hard at it.

I’m also improving emotionally with being able to handle bad beats/bad luck hands. I used to get anxious when a hand would come along where I was all-in and someone called me and it was down to luck who won thereafter, and then I’d get upset and grumpy if I was the one who lost, or feel like I hadn’t earned the chips I got if I won.

But the pros in the books and videos I’ve been reading and watching have shown me that these “coinflip hands” (as a lot of folk call them) are just part of the game, and they treat them with no more anxiety than other hands. It’s helped me accept that you might lose some but you also win some; it’s just the way it goes, and that makes it fair. In order to help me not get hung up on these hands I’ve taken the very simple but effective action of adding an extra ‘tag’ to my Poker Tracker software, so that if one of these coinflip hands happens I can just flag it as a coinflip hand – whether I won or lost it – and forget about it. This seems to have worked, as I know I can go back to find these hands again in the software if I want to, but in the short term it helps me let them go and accept that there was nothing I could’ve done to change the outcome.

That might sound like a small battle to win, but given how too much emotion can affect tilt at the tables, I’m pleased to have got this small thing under my belt.

There are other things I’m noticing, too. I believe my results are generally starting to trend upwards. I’m more often seeing the final table, or am at least close enough to be able to smell the stench of fear as everyone knows it’s approaching. I’m going to graph my results later to see if it’s a nice upwards curve; I don’t want to get hung up on results, but given I’m not turning the ROI I’d like to be at the moment, it would be nice to have something show that I’m going upwards.

Even better news for my game as a whole, I’ve managed to tailor my play to a specific player in a couple of hands this week, and thereby outplay them and make them make mistakes. This is really good news for me as it’s something I’ve struggled with up to now, and is a crucial skill if I want my poker career to grow. I’ve also started to get better at recognising players who fall into types of player, and am generally looking for ways to adapt my play to them. So this aspect of my game is moving in the right direction, albeit a little slowly, as I still feel like i’m playing a little nitty for my liking.

Although, I think I know some of the main reasons I’m playing nitty. The first is that I believe in very low buyin games it is wiser to err on the side of caution and play more straight forward than get into deep thinking. Indeed, in the past few days I decided to try to be more patient and wait for hands I could use, rather than trying to play fancy or clever, and generally I feel this approach is making my game more solid at the moment. I also suspect that you have to have a solid base before you can try to be particularly clever and tricky, and this “build your game up from the ground up” method seems to work well together with building up from the bottom buy-in games upwards.

There is also another problem area with my game, though. Once we get to the time in the game where you’re looking to steal the blinds and/or antes, I’m quite unsure what qualifies as a good stealing hand. I know it usually depends on what your table is like, how many players there are at the table at the moment, effective stack sizes, and who is left to act (and what they’re like). But generally I don’t feel at all comfortable with my stealing ranges. I think I can probably generally widen them and that this is one of the areas of my game where I’m most nitty, but I don’t really know what hands are +EV to try to steal with (and how these ranges change depending on the above criteria), nor how to find that information out. I’ve created another tag today, like I did for the coinflip hands, specifically for hands where I think it might have been ok to steal (or I took the plunge and tried). Given this is an area of my game I think needs work, I think being able to build up a library of these hands and then look back over them will be useful.

Last but not least, I feel that I should be quite pleased (probably more than I am) with one of my tournaments today. It was quite epic, really. Early in the tournament I had a bad beat which left me very short stacked, and I thought I was going to be finishing the tournament around 30-35th place (out of 45). I nearly mentally gave up on it and started another tournament. But I didn’t give up, and instead waited for some hands I could play, and took some scary but appropriate risks as my stack got shorter, and I managed to build my stack back up and come right back up to be one of the bigger stacks. Then, ofc, I had a mistake hand (which I’ll put below after the cut, mostly so that I have a record of it to encourage me not to make the same mistake) and lost a lot of chips; it was a hand just before the bubble and one I never really recovered from, but in the end after such a bad start and then doing my best, I ended up just inside the money.

Typically, I’m slightly disappointed I didn’t end higher in the money, and overall today I’m slightly disappointed with my results as the other two tournaments saw me go out to lost coinflips (and one of them was on the final table bubble). But overall, the point of this blog post is to remind myself to relax in the knowledge that I’m getting better, and that while not everything goes right it’s not meant to, and a lot of things are improving.

So yay me. Now off to do the shopping. Oh, after I’ve pasted in that mistake hand below the cut.

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