Move

Same mut, new address:

PhantomMut

This site stays for historical purposes, but I have re-created recent posts on the new site just so the first few real posts don't get lonely.

So if you want to read the continuing donkalicious exploits of an amateur poker geek, you know where to go.

But Wait! There's More!....

Money (v.001)

Played my first real-money (well, as real as a $1.20 buy-in can be) Sit & Go tourney. (Drumroll please.....)

I came in fifth, which is kind of disappointing as I had first, second, or third place for most of the tourney:

Not much to say about my play. I caught cards early on, played bully for a while, didn't catch so much later on, but still managed to steal some pots. I think I played pretty well until the blinds started squeezing, then pushed with AJ on the button (which I really didn't need to do at the time), ran into Big Slick in the big blind, and that was all she wrote.

Still, after just shy of two hours of play, I'm up a whopping $2.80 over what I had to start the night. Woo hoo!

Bankroll status: 4.05M PSD, 53.45 USD

But Wait! There's More!....

Bluff

I went to Dawn's Crackhouse Game last night. I was honored by the invitation to come return the money I had luckboxed away last week. So I played and I did. Left down multiple (3? 4? but hey, who's counting?) buy-ins.

But I went in with a plan, and while I left not exactly happy with the lighter wallet, I did have a good time and I did succeed in what I specifically set out to do.

Bluffing online (at least on the play money tables) is damned hard to do. Basically, nobody respects anything, and any two cards are good for just about everyone. Catch rockets in early position, go all in with a full buy-in, and you can still expect anywhere from three to eight callers.

What this means is that I have no real practice in the art of the bluff.

So while I was hitting everything last Crackhouse Game (and probably looked loose as Paris Hilton) last night I decided I would actually be loose and aggressive. It was to be my (self supervised) bluff practicum.

I'm actually reading Jay Greenspan's Hunting Fish right now, and he has an excellent passage about poker players and gamblers. He points out that even very good poker players have very different feelings about gambling.

Gambling here refers to how much risk a player is willing to accept in a given situation. Poker being a game of imperfect knowledge, there is (nearly) always some level of risk inherent in every decision, every poker player has to be willing to gamble to some extent. But every player has a different (and very complex) natural profile in how they balance changing risk versus changing reward.

So the art of the bluff is to push hard enough to make the apparent risk outweigh the apparent reward of the next card (or the completed hand) without making the bluff obvious (Unless the hand is strong, and the bet is meant to look like a bluff. After a while, thinking about this stuff makes my brain hurt.)

Example: Early in the evening I tangled with Alceste, who is tight, agressive, and strong and, unfortunately, sitting to my immediate left. (In other words, a damned good poker player in the "Mut Killer" seat, but take it as given from this point that I was playing with a whole table of very good players. Looking around, I knew I was the mark, because I couldn't identify anyone else as the mark.)

Anyway, I had a pretty marginal hand (Q8 offsuit, if I recall correctly), but this being BluffNight, I bet it pretty hard. (Three bucks, with the usual caveat that amounts may be wildly inaccurate, but that the texture of the situation is accurate.) He calls, so I know he has a hand, probably a strong ace, probably NOT Aces, Kings, or Big Slick. Rest of the table folds.

Flop comes out, and while I can't remember exactly what it was, it screams at me that Alceste has hit a straight to the Ace. It also whispers to me that two of those cards are diamonds.

I bet out another three, Alceste calls. So yep, he probably has the straight, or possibly the nut flush draw.

Next card is a third diamond. That gives me a flush draw. I bet ten.

Alceste thinks, thinks, calls. Damn, definite straight, and I didn't quite push him off it. Unless he was playing a very deep game with me (bluffing being nearly bluffed off the hand) I had almost but not quite found the right bet. This is when I knew I was probably rooted.

River pairs my Queen, but I miss the flush, so I'm 99% sure I'm beaten like a rented donkey. I go all in.

Alceste thinks, thinks, says it's just his first re-buy, calls my all-in, and I am a much poorer mut.

So, horseshoes and hand grenades and all that. Against a weaker player, I'm sure I take that pot down. As it was, I very nearly did, and later in the evening one of my bluffing hands (J4 off) turns into Jacks and 4s on the river, I push all-in, Alceste calls with his pocket Aces, and my two pair hold up.

I think that the earlier failed bluff set up a couple of hands like that, where a bluffing hand went Dutch and I got paid off decent-sized bets.

So yes, I was pleased with how I was betting.

Now, the trick is to do less of it.

Risk, reward. I was taking too many risks with too little regard to reward. I caught a couple of bad breaks last night, but mostly I was just exposing myself to too much risk, buying a few small pots but losing ground by chasing and mucking on bigger ones. By the end I was tired, worried about PhantomWife, and ended up donking off a lot of chips to Fisch. (Who then apparently lost them to his nemesis, Evil Dawn.)

But an absolutely great learning experience.

Other things learned:

• I'm old. And pop-culturally senile. Dawn put on a playlist of popular TV show theme songs, and I didn't recognize anything produced after 1979.
• I'm blind. Even with my ugly glasses, sitting at the end of the table I couldn't really read the cards. Time for Lasik.
• I'm old. (Did I already say that?) Besides for the "Bad husband!" reasons I shouldn't have stayed out as long as I did, today I am totally zonked.

Bankroll status: 3.94M PSD, 50.75 USD

But Wait! There's More!....

Dime

Quick status update, and a few notes:

• The Dime tourneys at PokerStars are like crack.
• In one of said Dime/Crack tourneys:
  • Holding pocket 10s, stack size at roughly 4000, blinds at 50/100, in early position, I open betting with 400.
  • Folds around to a late position caller with something like 2200 in chips, who calls.
  • blinds fold.
  • Flop is QQ2 rainbow.
  • I go all in.
  • Insta-call -- Mut has just bet into trip Queens, Ace kicker!
  • ...which evolves into Queens full of Aces!
    
    I still don't know whether my play was awesome but unlucky or simply stupid. (Numbers may be wildly innacurate, but ratios are correct.)
    
    
• After that, my tourney life was exciting and brief.
• $.01/.02 cash tables are tight.
• $.01/.02 cash players are either weak fish, or absolute sharks.
• If it isn't clear by now, I prefer the $.05/.10 tables.
• It's good to take a bad beat from a fish sitting directly to your right. Call his crap with good cards, and benefit from the entire table trying to cash in.
• Quads still stalk me; Les Deux Orangs dropped quads on my boat last night, and another player hit them in a hand I got away from on the turn.
• Oh, and I had a hand in an early PSD session where my 7c 9c turned into a straight flush on the flop, and I earned bubkus. Played it as slow as I could, and the designated donator still folded on the river -- only won about 4000 with it.

Bankroll status: 3.94M PSD, 50.75 USD

But Wait! There's More!....

Image

A lot of stuff happening in the mut's life of late. My mind's not been focused on my poker, and it's shown in my play (and, of course, in my bankroll).

So last Saturday the 28th the PhantomWife has gone to bed, and I've gone to the kitchen to play poker. First table I'm at I play like a total goofball, losing 100,000 PSD in relatively short order, but not worrying much about it because I'm goofing off. (Today's word is "goof".)

I decide to get serious, switch to .01/.02 USD, and discover my head isn't in it enough to play that, losing a real dollar in a really short time.

Being a goof but not yet an idiot, I decide to focus on the social aspects of poker and flee from the real money tables, looking for someone I enjoy playing with. I find the Evil Denmother and elements of the Degenerate Cubscout troop. Play some hands, get my head back into pokerspace, and start pulling away. Actiongomez shows up, but I'm in a decent state and actually refrain (or at least moderate) my taunting. After a couple of hours I'm sitting pretty on something like 285K PSD, and combined with some winning from Thursday night, I'm actually over the 4 Million mark.

Then comes the suckout.

It was late, and I don't even remember the guy's handle, but a player who showed up and immediately Dutched his way to 200K goes all in from early position, and I'm holding pocket aces.

His Q8 (but they were suited!) turns into a straight to the ten (yes, four cards to the straight busted my rockets) and suddenly I'm down to about 85K in front of me.

And yes, tilt ensues.

Made worse when Dutch donks off all the chips that used to be mine to gomez.

Ah well. Long story short, I ended the evening way too late in the night, down to 3.44M PSD. And yes, that's by far the biggest swing I've seen in one session.

I promised Les Deux Orangs last night that I would post about embarrasing mut-poker today; that's my embarrasing mut-poker.

Last night was a lot better, although I still made one hugely stupid play.

First, a bit of revenge, and how image came to be the title of this post.

Found the Degenerate Cubscouts again (Les Deux, Death-to-Poochie who had a huge stack, NoStaticAtAll, and the Evil Denmother), and after getting felted by Evil Denmother twice (on hands I should have been able to get away from -- once trip jacks, queen kicker beaten by trip jacks, king kicker, the other IIRC trips taken down by a boat) I had settled down and was slowly gaining chips. (The hands against Evil Denmother were stupid, considering how often she's felted me in the past, but defensible I think.)

I was also doing something I don't generally like doing, which was playing two tables at once.

Last night I decided to sit in on one of the Turbo Dime tourneys, and actually caught some cards early and was doing well. During a tourney hand that required concentration, a new player had taken a seat at the cash table and pushed from early position into a TTK flop where I happened to catch trip tens.

I do what I nearly always do in that situation; I go all-in. I get an immediate call; either the turn or the river (can't recall which) gives me a boat, and I felt the new guy his first hand at the table.

The new guy, it turns out, is gomez, who'd caught Big Slick on his first hand.

Talk about a "Wrath of Khan" moment.

(Won the tourney hand too, but that's all I remember about it.)

A little later my hugely stupid hand (see, I got back to it) was calling gomez' all-in with an ace on the board while holding second pair (Jacks) with a King kicker. Donked off most of half my stack to some random player's AQ. (Gomez caught a small piece of that pot; he had a bigger stack than random player going in, but his kicker was weaker. As I recall Gomez ended that hand at about 17K.)

Yes, it was stupid; I was trying to nurse a small stack in the tourney, and I was, I admit, back in a bit of goof-mode imagining the tilt that would ensue if my Jacks tripped, or if I caught a King for two pair, because gomez' all-in was screaming weak ace.

Finished the tourney not long after in 133rd place, earning a whopping $.32 for a .22 cent profit.

Woo hoo!

But about image.

My play on the felting boat hand was purely reflexive. (Which is why I don't like playing multiple tables; that kind of thing should never be reflexive.) But whenever the odds say I probably have the best hand, and I find an unrecognized player pushing into me, I push back and push back hard. (BTW, the same instinct really screws me over in tourneys, but that's for another post....)

I often win these hands, either by having the agressor muck or by showing down with the better hand.

Even if I don't win those hands, I hopefully establish that bluffing and loose play both carry risks. (Against guys like the earlier mentioned Dutch that can be a vain hope, but hey...)

In Doyle Brunson's Super System, he talks about forcing your opponent to think about the bet after the bet. To place into that person's mind the idea that a bet (or a raise) may not be just for the chips going out now, but possibly for all the chips in his or her stack.

I'm not going to go into all my thinking about image (gotta keep some secrets) but I don't think I'm letting too much out of the bag in saying that I always want to project an image of strength at the table. Which means calling B.S. when I think I see it.

(The risk, of course, is pushing beyond "strong" into "stupid", but again, that's another post.)

Postscript: Unfortunately, I think I've pissed off Evil Denmother, who apparently counts gomez as a friend. Part of image, at least as important as strength in all likelihood, is demeanor.

My demeanor towards gomez at the tables has frankly been awful. (See the running trash-talking in the last post for an example.

If I do progress as a poker player, I will inevitably run into people who emulate the worst of the poker loudmouths, and I'll have to have a strategy for dealing with them. While it might be fun talking back and possibly tilting these people, the bottom line is there are others at the table who may or may not be enjoying the show. And at any given table, if I plan to stick around, I want these other people happy to be playing with me, and I really don't want a quality player (such as, say, Evil Denmother) gunning for me because of my 'tude.

That's just not smart poker, and therefore it's really stupid to let that kind of trash become part of my image.

Bankroll status: 3.54M PSD, 46.11 USD (After many hours of "donkalicious entertainment", down less than a healthy PSD raise and one USD. Hard to get better value for your insomnia-killing play- and/or real dollar, huh, Senator Frist? Hope you enjoy your well-earned minority status.)

But Wait! There's More!....

Luckbox

That was my role at Dawn's home game last night. Not so much my way-too-late play Tuesday evening.

No way I can top Dawn's write-up, but I do want to note that I was even luckier than was apparent in her post. I mean, I got so many boats last night I could have opened a marina. In addition to being Dawn's nemesis du jour, I sucked out on F-Train's nut flush by catching a runner-runner post-flop pair, elevating my flopped trips into a winning full house.

So when my signature quad magnet skills turned Brian's pocket Threes into pocket Kings-killing quads to lighten me by ~$28, it was simply the universe correcting the karmic balance a bit.

About Tuesday night: Bad cards, combined with bad play, combined with a conviction that my luck was going to change produced a pretty significant draw-down on both fake and real bankrolls. The fake I don't care so much about. The real loss upsets me, because I knew my Inner Donkey (whom I shall now name Dutch) was pissing away real dollars, and I just let him do it. Bad Dutch!

Time to start channeling my Inner Dan Harrington, I think.

Bankroll status: 3.55M PSD, 47.45 USD (Please note: "USD" refers only to online holding. I have to consider whether to keep a separate "kitty" to hold real-world money. Probably a good idea for the future.)

But Wait! There's More!....

Rabbit

The rabbit is dead, Jim!

For the chronologically challenged, bunnies used to give their lives to ease (or increase) the anxieties of potential parents. This sacrifise is no longer required.

(No rabbits were harmed in the production of this post.)

But Wait! There's More!....