Okay, well I’ve double-checked my spreadsheets and finalised the online poker accounts for 2008.

The headline is that I made some money this year. Not many hobbies actually pay people to have fun, so I’m pretty pleased despite the fairly pitiful hourly rate:

A little surprising to me was the breakdown between type of game, as summarised here:

Before doing this table, my impression was that I was ahead in cash but pretty much breakeven in tournaments. I guess that I had forgotten the over $600 won in freerolls this year!

The total for prizes, bonus, rakeback and other miscellaneous odds and sods was also surprisingly high. Over $500 of this came via Virgin Poker, through cashing in vpoints, festival league prizes, EMS specials and so on, so thanks to the guys at Virgin who have also really impressed me this year with their friendliness and efficiency. Even though the EMS league games are probably moving I aim to carry on playing at Virgin at least some of the time.

Also I hadn’t realised how much I had spent on staking people (family + others): over 10% of winnings spent that way!

I played on a lot of sites this year with varying levels of success. Reefer Poker has been astonishingly profitable whereas Jokerstars has kept its place as somewhere I just can’t win.:

Now here’s a month-by-month picture:

See how the year started really slowly but then improved later on? It’s not the first time this has happened, in fact in the five years I’ve been playing online poker I’ve never made a profit in the first three months of the year:

I think at least part of this is due to people having new year resolutions to “start playing properly”.

There’s probably an element of the fish having no spare cash, too. But whatever the reason I am going to be playing a lot less for the next couple of months. After 5 years I’m getting a little stale and there are plenty of other things I want to spend time on.

But I’ll still play league games so you probably won’t miss me.

Happy new year and see you at the tables!

With a couple of EMS regulars having a run at playing Sit and Gos recently, I was inspired to dig out my records of an attempt I made 18 months ago, before I started this blog.

I had played a series of 100 10-seater sit and go tournaments just to see whether I had the knack of them or not.

I remember that I had started with confidence - after all, I played nothing but these tournaments when I first took up poker - but that it didn’t go well and I didn’t make a profit.

Digging out the results it was worse than I thought:

To my eye this looks pretty clear: I will lose 20% of my money playing these games, plus or minus not very much. But a scientific analysis is possible as well: confidence intervals.

The idea is, if I played sit n gos for ever, I would have a long-run average return (positive or negative). There is a simple formula, conveniently implemented in Microsoft Excel, to calculate with a given level of confidence how far away from that long-run average a specific sample of results is likely to be. So I can plug in the industry standard confidence level (95%) along with the results of my 100 games, and Excel calculates the margin of error.

It turns out that my return is 95% certain to be at least -45% but no better than +5%.

Blimey. These damn mathematicians just won’t make their minds up will they!

But this result really is seriously non-intuitive. Could you visualise the extension of that graph lurching up to settle eventually at +5%? Or plummeting further down to settle at -45%? Neither can I. And that’s only with 95% confidence, one time in twenty it will be further out than that!! Assuming the mathematicians (and my calculations) are correct, this just shows how severe and unexpected variance can be - the long run is a very long time indeed.

If anyone wants to nick my spreadsheet and use it to plot natty RoI graphs and calculate confidence intervals, it’s here and also over there in the right hand panel.

I will use it again myself some time in 2009; I have it in mind to learn all about ICM (independent chip model) and its application to single table tournaments and see how well it works.

So there I was, playing a Virgin Festival daily satellite, cheap entertainment at €1.65 + 0.15

I pick up 3♣4♣ under the gun and go for the fold button…

***** Hand 1374022623 *****
75.00/150.00 Texas Hold’em (No Limit) - Monday, December 22, 2008 9:00:05 PM
Virgin Festival Sat (Real/Tournament)
Seat 1: Devilperch (312.00)
Seat 2: leggym4mbo (3892.00)
Seat 3: b52bomber (3141.00)
Seat 4: AAHall (1378.00)
Seat 5: Unknown (0.00)
Seat 6: ems.reload (973.00)
Seat 10: CrumbleEMS (4121.00)
Seat 7: Unknown (0.00)
Seat 8: shaggylppl (5582.00)
Seat 9: Pete_C (6101.00)
ems.reload post SB 75.00
shaggylppl post BB 150.00
** Deal **
CrumbleEMS 3♣4♣
*** Bet Round 1 ***
Pete_C Fold
CrumbleEMS Call 150.00

Oops. Misclick!

Devilperch Fold
leggym4mbo Raise to 300.00
b52bomber Fold
AAHall Fold
ems.reload Call 300.00
shaggylppl Fold

Well I can’t fold now can I, I’m priced in!

CrumbleEMS Call 300.00
*** Flop(Board): *** : 4♦K♥K♠
*** Bet Round 2 ***
ems.reload Check

You know, I could be in front here!

CrumbleEMS Bet 450.00
leggym4mbo Fold
ems.reload All-in 673.00

Oops. Maybe I’m not in front after all. But how can I fold for just another 223??

CrumbleEMS Call 673.00
*** Turn(Board): *** : 9♣
*** River(Board): *** : 4♥
*** Showdown *** : Rake: 0.00 Total Pot: 2396.00
ems.reload T♠Q♠ Two pair kings and fours Win: 0.00
CrumbleEMS 3♣4♣ Full house Win: 2396.00

When you’re hot you’re hot! I went on to win this tournament via assorted suckouts and lucky guesses. The final hand was all-in, 5-5 vs A-A and the inevitable 5 on the turn gave me the seat to Sunday’s weekly final.

Now if only I could run like this in a BIG tournament…

My regular reader will have noticed I haven’t posted much about my 2008 Challenge lately; my attempts to get good at short-handed no-limit hold-em.

This is because I haven’t played much lately.

There are several reasons for this:

• I’m low on cash in Virgin Poker, having swapped it for money in PokerStars;
• I’ve been a bit busy (understatement);
• I just can’t seem to find a profitable table.

It’s this last one that worries me.

Earlier in the year it was easy to find $50 short-handed tables with easy meat on them; players bad enough that even a marginally profitable player like me can exploit them.  But the last few months they seem to have dried up.

I have a theory and it is this: the profitable tables rely on there being significant numbers of marginally unprofitable players: people who win sometimes but don’t mind reloading a hundred or two on a fairly regular basis out of their normal income. Recreational players, salt of the earth, happy to donate small amounts for their entertainment.

But recently people have been looking at their outgoings, counting the pennies, wondering how to survive the coming depression. The friendly semi-fish are not redepositing.

If this is true, the effect would be most noticeable at the lower levels I believe, where the recreational players hang out. And I think this is what’s happening: the $50 tables now contain almost exclusively players who were previously successful. The result: players who previously turned a small profit have turned into prey for the best players, the bigger sharks, alongside whom they used to feast on the smaller fry who are now extinct.

For me, I’ve been dipping the odd toe in on the most likely looking tables, losing the odd buy-in and getting out of the water again pdq.

I suppose I could be wrong about the tables changing, maybe it’s just a confidence thing. But I don’t think so.

Still, maybe the Christmas holidays will bring the traditional influx of fat, slightly inebriated, bored fish prepared to increase their January hangover debt problems by giving me some of their credit card cash. We can only hope!

I’ve been reading Bill Bonner’s economic essays again (see Blogroll on the right there).

Bill is the gloomiest economic commentator of them all,  so obviously he’s in his element right now. But he still hasn’t gone into “I told you so” mode, he’s spending his time telling us how this recession is different from any previous one. In fact if you listen to him we are now entering the First Global Depression (GD1). Blimey.

Mostly I read Bill so I can try and pick holes in his arguments, but sometimes he comes up with interesting evidence. This one caught my eye this week, talking about the behaviour of the US Federal Reserve Bank:

From the day of its founding in 1913 the Fed’s assets – the foundation capital of the US banking system – grew, reaching $1 trillion on the 24th of September, 2008. But then, something extraordinary happened. Something breathtaking. And for a classical economist – something incredibly reckless. In the next 6 weeks the Fed added another trillion. And the head of the Dallas Branch of the Fed said that he expected to add another trillion before the end of the year.

How does the Fed get these “assets?” Simple. It buys them. Where does it get the money to buy them? Simple again; it creates it. It makes it up. It conjures it out of nothing.

Bill reckons that all the western governments and central banks are just pumping air into a burst balloon, a futile attempt to re-inflate the bubble of spending and debt we were all in. And while it might work for a short time, it’s bound to end in tears eventually - and the longer it’s delayed the worse it will be.

Hey ho, never mind, it’ll soon be Christmas. Lots of people with a few drinks inside them trying to earn a little extra cash on the poker tables…

I haven’t felt like playing cash poker for a while now, which is why I haven’t been posting much.

But this morning, after reading a post by SteveDaRake on EMS, I thought it would be fun to learn how to play shortstack poker.

It was Ratattack who pointed me at Pokerstrategy.com as somewhere to learn the basics. So I had a look, did the quiz and settled down to 4-tabling on PokerStars.

The basic idea is simple: It is very difficult, maybe even impossible, for a big stack to simultaneously play correctly against shortstacks and other big stacks.  So, the shortstack at a table full of big stacks can have an advantage, because it makes sense for the big stacks to play the other big stacks and try to ignore the shortie.

The recommended style is to play very very tight ABC TAG poker.

So tight that you get to play about 4% of hands, which is why I had to multi-table so as not to tilt. In fact the style is very easy to multi-table because it is pretty much a one-street game.

I chose $50NL at PokerStars for this, buying in for $10, topping up if I dropped below $8 and leaving if I got above $13. This is what happened:

So as far as I can tell it’s a breakeven way of playing.

Frankly that’s a whole lot more profitable than my usual short-handed full-stack strategy, but I think I would go mad if I had to play this tight all the time.

I stuck faithfully to the recommended strategy throughout, even though I’m pretty sure I could have adjusted it to make it more profitable on the Stars tables. Still, I’m surprised at how well it worked, even against some reasonably savvy players who often wouldn’t pay me off in full.

The PokerStrategy site reckons this is a good style for beginners. I have to agree up to a point. The downside is, it isn’t really poker. Still, I’m glad I tried it; it will hep me against shortstackers who come to my cash table when I’m playing a more grown-up game!

Yesterday I was reading Bas’s write-up of a recent live tournament on EMS.

The article made me realise yet another similarity between my two favourite card games, bridge and poker. That is, the key difference between ordinary players and really good ones (such as Bas) is the clarity and simplicity of their thought processes. It is given away by comments like

I fake dwell and show my jacks, I was always folding, cos I know his range there is QQ-AA, if he had AK he’d have raised bigger.

Like all good players, Bas is constantly refining his estimate of the range of hands his opponent is playing as the hand progresses. Simultaneously he will be refining his estimate of what the opponent thinks HE has. This is the foundation for all good poker play, because without it there is no way of judging your equity in the hand.

Personally I too often make the mistake of playing on autopilot and only stopping late on in the hand to try and replay in my head exactly what has happened and what it means. Too often this means I either run out of time or just give up with an expensive “sod it, I call”. But by doing it as a matter of routine as the hand progresses the decisions become so much easier.

I have the same problem at bridge. Sometimes I get late on in a hand and have to reconstruct the hand by trying to remember what cards each of the opponents have played and then deduce what they have left. Often getting it wrong, because it’s quite difficult to do. But when I used to play bridge a lot I found on good days I could keep track as a hand progressed. Then when it got to trick 10 I would know without conscious thought that the last three cards of the man on my left were (say) two small diamonds and the king of Spades.

The fascinating thing, though, is how easy both games become when you use the right thought processes. And how hard when you use bad ones!

Walking to the office this morning, I took one of my favourite slight detours: the Thames Path between London Bridge and Tower Millennium Pier. I like to look at the tide and count the cormorants.

But this morning, I was forced to take a detour: they have removed a small flight of steps on the Path and are in process of putting in a ramp instead.

Actually, they have been at it for a couple of months now, which has given me plenty of time to ponder its significance.

Ramps have been springing up all over the place for some years now. It’s not just London, but everywhere you go in Britain they are putting the things in and making routes more circuitous for everyone with two working legs.

I’m sure you all agree with me that the stated motive for this - accessibility for the less mobile - is a worthy aim. But it occurred to me recently…

WHAT IF IT’S ALL A COVER-UP?

What if Davros is controlling the minds of staff in the Mayor’s Office? What if, right now, there is a Dalek ship in orbit around the moon, waiting for the right moment to land and annihiliate all humans?

I know that Daleks have levitational powers nowadays, but it surely must burn a whole lot of energy to keep a Dalek aloft. Even Daleks must be subject to the second law of thermodynamics, so the ubiquitous ramps will make their victory simple and certain.

Ever since this occurred to me I’ve been carrying a packet of blu-tak in my pocket just in case I need it to blind a Dalek invader or two.

I suggest you do the same. Watch the skies, people, watch the skies!!!

p.s. normal poker commentary will resume soon once the work-life balance is reinstated. In the meantime I have no time available to play so my reader will just have to wait a little longer.

I’m off for a few days late summer sunshine with my regular reader, funded by my internet poker winnings. As a result there will (probably) be no new blog updates until next weekend.

It will be strange to be away from poker; it’s many months since I’ve not played a game for three consecutive days! Still, I expect to come back refreshed and ready to recommence the cash tables grind.

I’ll see how I feel, but right now I’m thinking I need a new approach whereby instead of hunting for increasingly scarce fish I should be chasing the weaker regulars.

This is the approach taken by online player Boywonder and documented eloquently in this thread on the 2+2 forum. Worth a read I think, the methodical and zen-like approach has worked really well for this guy. He plays a couple of levels higher than I do, where the fish stocks are quite likely even more depleted, but it’s only a matter of time before microstakes is just as bad. It’s entirely logical, too - if there are no fish to feed on you have to become a bigger shark that feeds off the weaker sharks.

I’m not sure what the endgame looks like; does it play out with end with just a small number of very big sharks who instantly eat up any new players that dip a toe into the world of online poker? Or is there a more optimistic ending? Maybe I’ll think about this while I’m away from the tables. Or maybe I won’t!

Missing you already!!

I read an article the other day about dealing with loose aggressive opponents. Basically the advice was to make your decision early, pre-flop or at the latest flop, then grit your teeth and go with it.

I’m glad I remembered that when this hand came up today (a change of site and I have to type out the hand history):

NLHE Cash, $0.25/$0.50
Hero $103.65
MP $52.28
CO $50.00
Button $82.66
Villain $63.14
BB $48.00
Villain posts small blind $0.25
BB posts big blind  $0.50

This table has two sides: BB, Hero and MP have been fairly tight while CO, button and Villain have been getting busy with many more hands.

Villain has been playing a variety of hands, usually calling raises and getting tricky post-flop. It’s been working pretty well for him over the last half an hour.

The stage is set…

Hero is dealt K♠K♣

Crumble raises to $1.50
MP folds
CO folds
Button folds
Villain raises to $2.50
BB folds
Hero raises to $8.50
Villain raises to $14.50

Blimey. Two minraises? What’s this guy up to? He’s been loose and tricky but he hasn’t played a hand this way before. Could he actually have a decent hand this time? Maybe I should stop raising…

Crumble calls $6.00
Dealing flop: 5♦4♠3♠
Villain bets $48.64 and is all in

Well it sure looks like a monster from here. He pretty much knows I have QQ or KK. Can I call? What can I beat?

Frankly I have no idea what he has, it just looks like he has it. But I’m not good enough to fold here…

Hero calls $48.64
Dealing turn: 6♣
Dealing river: 9♦
Hero shows K♠K♣
Villain shows A♥J♠

Say what???

Hero wins pot $122.78

Mustn’t grumble I suppose, but I do hate being forced to make wild guesses by the lagtards. Can’t we play poker instead of this wild gambling?