Glorious Silence

I'm sitting in my office, waiting for a SNG to start.  My wife just left to visit her mother.  The cats are sleeping. Nothing is going on outside.  It is totally, completely silent.  I live near a busy street, so even as I type this, I'm starting to hear a little traffic noise.  But just for a few seconds, there was nothing.  I was excited that it was so quiet.  It's hard to explain, but when it's really quiet, I feel better, the silence is uplifting.

Sometimes I forget how the slightest thing can distract me.  A cat that wants some attention.  A few words from the television heard through the office door.  Someone shouting outside.  It all matters.

Something a lot of people probably don't know about ADD is that priorities can get messed up, because someone with ADD can concentrate obsessively on something that he finds interesting, to the exclusion of all else.

Fortunately, I love playing poker.  When that SNG starts, I'll be locked in.  When it's this quiet, I go into a zone where I see things more clearly, and I pick up on small things like a player hesitating just a second longer than usual before he bets.  Sometimes I don't even realize where I am.  It's hard to explain, but I feel like I'm part of the game, inside it somehow, like I've stepped into the virtual reality of the poker table on the monitor.

My SNG is starting now, and it's still really quiet, a glorious, almost complete silence.  I can't remember the last time it was this quiet, both inside and outside.  Sometimes I wear earplugs when it's noisy.  Maybe I should wear them all the time.

I know of a poker pro who keeps an office in a building separate from his house. Today, I understand why.

Two Unusual SNGs, part two

Brief bankroll update:  Nothing has changed.  I'm in a breakeven stretch where my bankroll has been $87, plus or minus $5, over my last 30 SNGs.  That's not really surprising.  After all, there are multitablers who would scoff at the relevance of my numbers because they finish 30 in an hour.

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As mentioned in my previous blog post, I started a SNG and after eight hours, it still wasn't finished.  As detailed in the twoplustwo.com poker forums, here is what happened.  The post in red was made by a forum poster who responded to some positive comments about Americas Cardroom.  All of the other dated posts were made by me in the 2+2 forums:


3/4, 0954

My SNG started at 1837 US eastern time, then went down without an explanation (on the site or in this thread) at 1850. It resumed at 1918, then went down again at 1926 with the onscreen notice, "Tournament is suspended by the host." It's still suspended. I waited for a while, then started and finished another SNG, and it's still suspended. Some tournaments are still suspended, but others have restarted.

It's way past time for some sort of explanation, or at least a determination of what is going to be done with my SNG that was suspended 2 hours and 35 minutes ago.

 

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3/5, 1419

 

So nice to see someone actually happy with something that an online poker site did. These posts are often so full of venom!

 

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3/5, 1750

What you call venom, others might call righteous indignation. The performance of this site/network is bad on so many levels. When the site went down, why wasn't a rep posting in this thread within 5 minutes, letting us know what was going on?

While I was able to start and play other SNGs, one of my SNGs was suspended for more than eight hours when I finally signed off. No one could post an update on the site or on 2+2 in eight hours?

I also sent an E-mail to support, which has not yet been answered, and live chat was down.

Horrible, horrible customer service. If that's venomous, so be it.

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That's the story of unusual SNG number two.  It was open for more than eight hours, but officially it never happened.  I looked at the cashier page, and my buy-in was refunded.  I have not received a response to my E-mail, and no one from Americas Cardroom has anything to say, either on the site or on 2+2.

I'm already working on my next 2+2 post.  It feels like I'm tilting at windmills, not because what I'm doing is ridiculous, but because it probably won't change anything.  Post-Black Friday, we have the sites that we have.

WE ARE AMERICAS CARDROOM.  YOU HAVE FEW OTHER CHOICES.  WHAT ONCE WAS IS IRRELEVANT.  PLAYER CONCERNS ARE IRRELEVANT.  RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

 

Two Unusual SNGs, part one

Last night, I played what I think were my two longest SNGs this year.  One lasted 1 hour and 44 minutes.  The other one started about 8 hours ago, and it's not done yet.

The one that lasted 104 minutes was one of those where I knew who the other good player was, he knew I was his main competition, and we each knew that the other knew we knew.  Nothing was said, nothing had to be.  Sometimes you just know, early in a SNG, that you're going to be heads-up with that guy* unless something unusual happens.

About 40 minutes in, we were in fact heads-up.  He was by far the chip leader the entire tournament, but I trapped him with a lot of big hands just before the heads-up, and I went into it with a slight chip lead.  With 13,500 chips on the table, I quickly got him down to 3.000, he fought back and had me down to 4,000, back and forth it went.

We were doing exactly what good players are supposed to do.  I adjusted, he adjusted to my adjustment, and I adjusted to his adjustment to my adjustment.  In game theory, theoretically two such players can adjust to the adjustments until they are both unexploitable.  This is a practical example of the Nash Equilibrium.  For a while I had a sense of what that must feel like.

Of course, in the real world somebody has to win.  The point of poker is to win money, not to reach an equilibrium.  And most of the time in poker, we are trying to exploit the other player (find his weaknesses) rather than trying to play unexploitably.

I eventually figured out that he was a "calling station" (someone who tends to call any bet that you make), and I made up a big deficit by making big hands, value betting, and knowing that my value bets would almost always get called.  But by the time we were heads up, he had adjusted, knowing that I was always betting strongly with my good hands, and he started folding more often when I would put a second or third bet in the pot.  Again, none of this was said, we just knew.

That's how it went, back and forth, one of us would be agressive, the other would figure out what betting that percentage of hands meant, and he would adjust.  He was one of the best heads-up players I've ever been against, and at one point he jokingly asked if I could see his cards.

The thing that, after more than an hour-and-half, finally broke our flirtation with Nash was that he got tired (this was a little after midnight.)  About 95 minutes in he said that he was tired, and that he was going to go all-in every time until someone won.  And he did exactly that.  Nothing is more exploitable than doing the same thing every time, unless it's telling someone that you're going to do the same thing every time.  After I folded to four straight all-ins, I knew that he meant what he said.

The problem was that I went completely card dead.  He would go all in, and my hand would be 83s, or 74o, or some other junk hand that didn't warrant risking all my chips.  I lost half my stack folding my garbage, and finally got to the point where I had to pick a hand and call his all-in.  Of course, I don't remember what the hand was (I would be really good at this game if I had didn't have the short-term memory of a goldfish), but I finally picked a hand and went with it, and he won.  He told me exactly what he was going to do, he did it, and I couldn't do anything about it.

Frankly, I don't think either of us wants to face the other heads-up again.  In fact, good profit-mazimizing players often practice "game selection" or "table selection," or sometimes even "seat selection"** to avoid certain players.

Normally I don't pass up any SNG on Americas Cardroom, because it takes too long for the next one to start.   But if I see a SNG, check the tournament page, and see that Pauls927 is registered, I'll probably move on to the next one.  With only three players cashing, why should I risk my buy-in playing against someone that will probably get one of those three spots?

In a local chess tournament, I enjoy being challenged, and I don't know what players I will be matched with.  That's fine for recreational chess, but with poker, it's all about the Benjamins.  A serious poker player will do anything that he ethically can in order to mazimize profit.

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*My practice is to use male nouns and pronouns when a field is mostly male, as is the case with poker.  Likewise I refer to a nurse in the abstract as "she" or "her" since most nurses are women.  As those conditions change (women predominate in US law and medical schools) I will change with them.  Five years from now I will probably refer to an unknown doctor as "she."

**Seat or table selection is usually possible only in live cash games.  In tournaments, whether live or online, seats are usually assigned.  In the local charity room, I picked a number out of a hat to get my seat assignment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

Results for February 2013

The results are pretty much the same as my last post.  I broke even for most of the month, then made all my money the last week.

Net profit: $21.58
Bankroll: $86.28

I hope to do much better in March, but poker variance being what it is, we shall see.

Week of 2/17-2/23

I said in an earlier post that I'm not going to mention weekly results very often, and I stand by that.  A week is way too small a sample size to worry about.  But last week went well, was interesting, and is worth mentioning.

I always try to get in at least 40 hours a week, and I seldom succeed.  Last week I was close, with 36.5 hours.  The hours were proportioned pretty close to what I shoot for, which is 25 hours playing poker and 15 hours studying.  I was a bit under in both categories.

Financially it was a good week.  I was up $29.37.  If I can have more weeks like that while only playing $1, one-table tournments, it should set me up for bigger and better things down the road when I have a reasonable bankroll to work with.

I'm playing two tables most of the time, and my brain isn't fried yet.  Despite having good results so far, it's going to be a big adjustment, and there are things that I have to work on.

The big problem is that I'm too busy watching the action, and figuring out how much to bet, to take many notes.  Long-term, that's not a good thing.  If someone is a particularly good or bad player, I need to know that, along with the details about what I saw.

I had an opponent today that was very tricky. I had trouble figuring out what his bets meant, and he twice caught me with much better hands than I expected.  Now that I have that note, I'll be on guard the next time, and probably avoid playing pots against him with marginal hands.  Part of being a good poker player is figuring out who the good and bad players are, then trying to play more and bigger hands against the weak players, and fewer hands (and seldom out of position) against strong players.

If I don't have time to take notes, that's a problem, but it should (I hope) get easier after after a while.  I don't react, I analyze.  Making faster decisions will be very difficult.  I can't imagine what goes on in the head of someone who is playing 24 or more simultaneous tables.

I remember an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Data was listening to and analyzing nine symphonies at once.  When Riker walked in, his reaction to the cacophony was priceless.  That would be me trying to play 24 tables.  If you've seen the movie Scanners, my head would probably explode just like that.

I'm A Multitabler Now

It's only two tables at a time, but you have to walk before you can run, right?

I decided that I had no choice, and that it was the logical solution to a problem.  That problem is that I never know how long it is going to take a SNG to fill up and start.  If I am the first player to register, I might wait five mintues, or twenty.

I had been trying to find other things to do during the indeterminate wait time, but the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it was.  I would join a SNG that was half-full, start working on something else, and then three minutes later the SNG would start.  The next time, I would be first to enter, and it would take ten minutes.  It's hard to do something useful with time frames that are both so short and so uncertain.

Yesterday I committed to sessions of several hours, playing two tables at a time.  Whenever I was down to one table, I started another one.  At one point yesteday, in 4.25 hours I finished 8 SNGs.  That's a big increase in volume, compared to single-tabling with an average SNG playing time of 51 minutes.

I was concenered about how much my profit per SNG might fall off, and I wasn't sure whether playing more of them would make up for it, which is the general idea of multitabling--less profit per table, but more tables, equals more profit.  I need not have worried.  I've been on a great run since I committed to 2-tabling, and I have a decent shot at getting my bankroll back over $100 by the end of the month.

I think it might have something to do with ADD.  A lot of 24-tabling online pros say that playing one table is just too boring, and some of them in fact do have ADD.  Maybe that's why I did so well, but then again, about 20 SNGs over two days (so far, the night isn't over yet) isn't much of a sample size. Maybe variance was on my side.  I think that both are true--I managed continuous two-tabling better than I expected, but I also ran very well.

SNG Cheat Sheet

SNGs and MTTs require very different playing styles. Nine-player SNGs are about making it into the top 1/3 of the field.  There are nine players, and the first three places are paid.

MTTs are a different animal.  There can be hundreds, or even thousands of players.  Usually somewhere between the top 10% and the top 20% make the money, and getting a minimum cash barely covers the tournament buy-in.  For example, in a $10 MTT with 1,000 players and paying 150 places, places 150-140 might win $12 after playing for three hours.

The real money in MTTs is at the final table.  That same 1,000-player $10 tournament would pay something like $3,500 for first place and $2,100 for second.  The serious players aren't trying to get in the top 10% of the field.  They are trying to get into the top 1%, even if it only happens a few times a year.

I am a former SNG specialist, and I've been studying two of Johnathan Little's Books so that I can learn how to play the looser game that works best for MTTs.  I got to the point where I couldn't think about playing any other way, at least as my default style.  When I switched to playing SNGs full time,  I was trying to play a hybrid style that some MTT specialists use when they play SNGs.  A few of those players make it work, but not many.  I certainly didn't.

I knew what I had to do to change back to a good SNG style--play fewer hands, especially in early position (first or second to act in the hand.)  So I started looking at hand ranges and percentages, and fooled around with it for a while.  For example, if I decided that I should play about 20% of my hands from the cutoff (second-to-last to act), I took a look at how Poker Stove quantified the top 20% of hands, which are: 66+, A4s+, K8s+, Q9s+, J9s+, T9s, A9o+, KT0+, QTo+, JTo.  ("+" means that the lowest card is that high or better, "s" means suited, and "o" means offsuit.)

So, I tried different hand ranges, seeing not only if the hands from each position made sense, but if they worked together. For example, was I adding too many, or too few, hands when I figured out my requirements when betting in second position compared to first?

It took me an hour to get something that I thought would work.  I was sure it would need some adjusting, but after working on it for an hour, then playing a few SNGs, I think I nailed it.  I'm sticking pretty close to what's on the paper, and it's been working well.  A month from now I hope to have my bankroll back above $100.

Once I'm there, I can consider some other options, such as mixing in some 2-tabling, or moving up to $3 SNGs.  I very badly want to play MTTs.  There is nothing like the excitement of getting close to the final table, knowing that a first prize of around 100 buy-ins is waiting.

I have to keep my head in the game and know what the goal is, and why.  It's about using SNGs to build my bankroll so that I have at least 100 buy-ins for MTTs.  Then it's not a big deal when (not if) I fail to cash ten straight times.  In his book Treat Your Poker Like A Business, Dusty Schmidt explains that every business needs inventory.  For poker players, money is our invertory, and we have to keep plenty of inventory in stock.