DUBLIN BELLYBUSTERS

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Lappin feasted while Wall Street crumbled. I just finished another great session, raking in a cool 1K at my new/old home. How could I have forsaken you my dear 45 player SNG?

It was funny playing poker tonight. I had the BBC news on all night in the background with its analysis of the free-falling global markets and its apocalyptic predictions of chaos and meltdown. It was as though all I had to do was turn towards my screen and everything was calm and the world was okay. Life was exactly as it should be. Donkeys were donating. Sharks were devouring fishes. I even flopped a few sets. Perhaps Full Tilt should create a Wall Street On Fire Background to remind people like me that the world is in crisis.

Rome is burning and as I write this entry, it has just been announced that the $700 billion bail-out plan has been rejected. Wall Street is not going to be saved by the American Tax-payer - at least not under those terms and at closing, the impact was evident as the bell didn't ring - it tolled, 777 points being wiped off the share price. Cataclysmic Stuff, huh?

So, is the brief candle out? Will there be any more frutting and stretting. One thing is for sure. The poor player's hour is well and truly up. The lame duck President continues to hobble and everybody knows his tale never signified anything. He lied to his people over and over again and his reign will go down in history as a most shameful period for the US. November is creeping closer and the world is becoming a bleaker, more Beckettian landscape. Exit George Bush Junior. Enter The Four Horses of the Apocalypse.

What do you do when the financial world collapses around your ears? You put a bail-out plan into action. Poker players, like Financial Markets, rely on confidence so, after a rotten session on the Super-Turbos tonight, I decided to bail. I went back to my heartland, my true home, my beloved $24 45 player SNGs. And what happened? Like a prodigal son being given the fattest calf for dinner after a prolonged period of absence, I feasted to the tune of $700. Experiment over - I am back where I belong.

Ok, my slump ended on the super-turbos tonight. Now my stats might suggest I actually broke even for the night but they don't factor in the 'Apple' factor. What's that, I hear you ask? Well approximately half-way through my profitable session (2 hours and about 200 bucks), I started feeling frisky... poker-frisky that is. While I am usually extremely self-disciplined, I felt that these games afford you no real highs as they are such a grind and I might treat myself to a big one. So I registered for a $160 Super-Turbo and incorporated into my already full screen.

It was going well - an early steal or two. A call all-in with 77 from the BB to a short-stack that held. I had 620 chippies 4-handed. The blinds went through me and I was left with 530 - still plenty with an M of almost 6. I picked up Ace-Jack UTG and shoved. The BB called with A9. Sweet! I flopped a Jack. Sweeter! He turn-rivered a backdoor flush. I punched the keyboard. The computer shuts down, making a squeeling sound. I had to reboot - it seemed to take hours. By the time I got back to my other 7 games, I was either eliminated or my stacks depleted horribly.

In summary, I am a tool.

As far as the experiment with the Super-Turbos, the Ecstasy-tab of the poker world, I moved up to the $42 games for a substantial portion of tonight. I did so because the $28 game was getting cluttered by other good players and bizarrely the $42 game was playing softer. It worked out well (I think I had a 40% ROI in them for the night) until I dabbled in the $70 ones and lost a bit back. In total, I put about $4K on the tables to make a teeny-tiny profit but I'm gonna persevere with them for another little while - my Rakeback for the week is gonna be almost $400 which is rather tasty and I did probably blow about $300 tonight through sheer stupidity.

Remember when you were 14 years old and your friend told you about how he had discovered a cheat-code for the latest video game to make your character invincible... and then you went home excited, typed in the 56 digit code, pressed the A and B buttons simultaneously, did a twiddly thing with your thumbs on the controller and nothing happened. So you rang your friend and asked him what the story was - that you had done spent the past hour doing everything he said - but to no avail. And then you hear it. He cackles down the phone and you realise the whole thing was a hoax and there is no cheat code and you are on your own to battle the zombies without the power of invincibility.

Well fuck you Super Turbos! Fuck you in the eye-socket! I played about a hundred of you fickle bastards tonight and lost about $750. The honeymoon period is well and truly over. Don't get me wrong. I haven't given up on my experiment as of yet (and I am earning a pile of Rakeback) but I have come to discover that there are others like me. That's right. I'm the not the only half-witted poker player out there to see the potential dead-money in them. In fact, on doing my research on some of my regular opponents across the evening, it would appear that there were at least 8 of us (often as many as 5 on the same table) all stealing equity away from each other. So, I did what any self-respecting player would do in my position. I quit... I quit playing them that is and instead spent the next hour categorising the players at them based on their fishiness/sharkiness.

Tomorrow I will avoid the sharkier ones, registering only for the games that have 2 or less of these profit-leeches. Time will tell if this tactic makes a difference.

Remember when you were 14 years old and your friend told you about how he had discovered a cheat-code for the latest video game to make your character invincible. Well, ladies and gentleman, I have found the cheat code for Full Tilt in the form of the $28+2 Super-Turbos or 'Free Money' as I like to call them.

Since August 1st, I have played 416 of them (not an awful lot I admit but I shall be rectifying that forthwith) yielding me a 20% ROI and over $2500 total profit. Just to re-emphasise, these games are 9 handed, have 3-minute levels and you start with just 300 chips. They would seem, on the face of it, to be crapshoots - all-in fests with very little margin for profit-making. On the contrary, the standard of play in them is beyond horrible. In my opinion, nobody understands them properly, making them more juicy than the normal turbos. Not only that but the average game is completed in under 20 minutes. Okay, here comes the maths....

Average game time: 18 mins
Average Duration for a Profitable Player: 12 mins
Average Games Playing Simultaneously: 6
Average Game Unit time: one game per 2 minutes
Games per hour: 30
ROI Expectation (adjusted down): 15%
15% of $30 stake: $4.50
Expected Hourly Rate: 30 x $4.50 or $135

$135 is about 90 Euro. Not too shabby, huh? Well it wouldn't be if it persists. I endeavor to put some serious time into these over the next month to see if I could make this kind of return over a longer period. I will keep you informed as to the results. 

In the last three weeks, I have spent a lot of time watching my girlfriend Michelle play ‘The Endgame’. She also grinds the 45 player SNGs but mostly keeps to the $10 buy-ins. She ended last month with some bad variance. It was pretty standard stuff – the bad-beats, the coolers, the lost coin-flips in that crucial period just before the final tables but as the downswing extended into the first few days of September, she became convinced that something was awry in her game. So I watched her play – usually keeping an eye on her games from 15 players to go – and I noticed that she had developed two leaks.

The first was to do with making standard raises when she has 10BBs instead of just pushing all-in. The second (and possibly linked to the first) was her general lack of aggression. It was as if she had become a little gun-shy, giving opponents what I thought was too much credit and failing to loosen up sufficiently late on. She desperately wanted to make the final table and then when she got there, she desperately wanted to just make the money. The problem was her game had become too passive, too fearful and this was costing her a lot of chips in the period between 12 and 10 left when you are 5-6 handed and you have to go into attack mode.

It was a peculiar anomaly. In my experience with most players, a bad run makes them overly aggressive. They start forcing things, making too many moves and marginal calls. With Michelle, it made her scared. So, over the course of the next few nights, I re-enforced a few key endgame principles, argued occasionally over the merits of some plays (I am, for the most part, more aggressive than Michelle) and helped my lady get back on track. The main thing was that she started raising a wider range from the cut-off and button and started punishing limpers by being willing to shove her stack with any 2 cards as long as she had good fold equity. She became fearless again and that is a must for a good poker player. You have to be willing to donk the occasional tourney. You have to be willing to lose.

It’s like taking the 5 Euro Ryanair flight instead of the 80 Euro Aerlingus one. You take your seat knowing there is risk involved but in the end, whether you make it to your desired destination or are left standing on the tarmac in Beauvais waiting for the bomb squad to arrive (A story I will return to in a future blog), you will be richer for it.

I’m conscious that my initial blog-entries have contained more anecdotes and philosophy than poker. While I hope to strike a nice balance overall, I think the next few will be about poker strategy as there are some basic topics I want to work through. Firstly, I want to make it clear that, for a poker player, I am pretty risk-averse; I have a tight-pants attitude toward bankroll management and I almost never play over my head. I grind the 45 man SNGs, not only because they are super-soft but because I value constant income over ‘the big score’. I am in the process of making an adjustment to my balance of SNGs vs MTTs but only as my overall net worth permits.

I would extend this risk-aversion to my playing style as well but don’t for a moment misinterpret this for me saying I will let my stack blind off while waiting for a big hand. It doesn’t. For me, it would be risk-averse to allow my stack to dwindle by staying inactive. This idea is analogous to an inexperienced investor opting for a guaranteed 100% return after a 5 year period by putting 90% of their portfolio into government bonds, thus ignoring the time-value of their cash. The point I am trying to make is that we are always gambling. We are always making active ‘betting’ decisions – even a passive decision to put your money under your mattress can and should be viewed as an active decision to wager against inflation.

So, in a poker tournament, I will always try to do what I have to in the name of an optimal (long-term profitable) strategy. The increasing blinds and antes are the poker tournament’s ‘inflation’. It is therefore optimal to keep yourself active in pots where possible (and prudent) because if your stack remains the same for an entire level, it has actually become devalued.

The bottom-line is hourly rate but it is not the only consideration. I want to play in the games where I can make the most amount of money per hour but I also want to prevent long dry spells as a period of bad variance can shake my confidence and make me develop a less profitable game. I know all to well how psychologically tough it is to deal with downswings so I think it is acceptable bankroll strategy to give up a small amount of equity in exchange for a more consistent income. My flatmate Dave, (yes, there are a lot of Dave’s in my world) who is a markets analyst, asked me the other day if I would prefer to flip a coin for $2K or have $900 guaranteed. I told him I would flip the coin for $2K but if you were to make that figure $20K, I would take the $9K. Hopefully, there will come a point in the not-too-distant future when I will flip for $20K but there will always be a figure for which I would take the guaranteed 90%. The simple reason for this is that I am not a gambler. I am a poker player and as a poker player, I take measured risks and gambles for small percentages of my net worth and only when conditions seem right to do so. It is exactly like why I will refuse a definite coin-flip in the early levels of a tournament – If  a large portion of or my entire net worth is on the line, I sure as hell better be good enough to find a better spot.

I have just put in a 5 hour session on the tables and thankfully, I think a corner has been turned. I went really deep in the 5K Pot Limit Tourney, holding the chiplead with 40 to go, before two moronic plays by my opponents were rewarded and I got felted in 25th. The rest of my session was about a dozen $24 45 player SNGs and about the same number of $28 Super Turbos. I finished up about $400 which, while being no feast is, at least, a decent evening and my first profitable one in about 4 days.

I got back to the grind last night, putting it a losing session on the Full Tilt tables last night. Last month was a huge month for me financially and this month started off in the same vein. That was until about a week ago when a long overdue period of bad variance crept up on me. Not that a down-week could ever make me gun-shy but it did cross my mind to hit another live game while I'm here. Dave took me to The Empire Casino on Leicester Square last Monday (the venue for next week's WSOP-E). Well suffice to say, the 1/2 NL game was soft and it certainly had more drama than my average night of 8-tabling. I made about 80 pounds and I know if I had stayed another couple of hours, there was a good chance of doubling or tripling that. But Dave had work the next day so we left. I didn't mind as I was pretty tired anyway but I had gone through my 'sussing out the table' phase and was well into my 'pass the bacon' phase.

By my estimation, there were only two other players there of any caliber:
 
- a young bespectacled Hungarian bloke who liked the speech play and clearly knew the weak points at the table (I took my lead from him)
- a blonde 20-something who played the prima donna/femme fatale at every available opportunity but had developed a way to maximise her gains from the older gentlemen by using her assets (if you know what I mean)

They were both solid opponents who played position well and knew who to value-bet to the max. The rest of the table were a variety of Asian Maniacs and loose-passive donks. I played very few hands early on but about an hour in, I flopped bottom set and managed to get two players to call my turn and river bets after I had check-called the flop. On a board of 3JQ28, I had managed to extract 100 pounds each from both Q9 and KJ. That's right! They both called 25 on the turn and 55 on the river.

So, maybe I should return tonight, stick a couple of hundred pounds down and try to turn a wee profit. Or maybe I'll curl up with my laptop and go back to the grind, spreading 600 dollars over 25 online tourneys. To be honest, it's not really a contest. I love the convenience of online play - how I bring my laptop with me when i want to make coffee, how I can just play 4 games and easily maintain a conversation with someone in the room, how I can wind down partially (to 7 tables) so that I have room on my screen to watch an episode of a poker show on YouTube and how there is a suitable game filling up every nano-second.