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It's genuinely an OK point to stab in a fairly small pot, OOP, with 3 oppos?
A bit of a rungood session and up to a new high point... I think I should be happy that there has been a higher-high every month since I've started, in spite of the to-be-expected rollercoaster.
There were a lot of short stackers around yesterday... at first I thought that might be skint players punting their cash rewards, but then remembered that won't happen until the weekend.
Some pretty maniac play at the tables though. At one table I was sat with two regular LAG players at NL10 immediately to my right and two new players immediately to my left that were taking it in turns to GII pre before the other one (pretty much every time) would call with ATC.
That was... fun.
I may need to leave this safety blanket of NL8 / NL10 and revisit NL20 this weekend.
And by weekend I most likely mean Sunday.
Brazil v Colombia (come on Colombia!) and France v Greece on Friday? Well that means sneaking out of work early and being in the pub from 5pm onwards.
Argentina v Belgium and Netherlands v Costa Rica doesn't inspire quite so much, but it's daft to think that I won't also have 6-7 hours of drinking on Saturday as well.
I think I need a holiday after this tournament ends, I feel knackered just watching.
This hand played out at the point USA should have snuck a late winner in normal time, before the player (wrongly flagged offside) sliced a tired shot over the bar (which, of course, not only would I have definitely burried, but my 92 year old near-blind Grandma would have scored).
I start to run out of fingers when counting the things I could have done better here:
Dare I say that problem 1 in this hand was still sitting at the table: 4-handed with two pretty good players and one (villain in this hand) that was pretty tight from the little I saw of them... not great in itself, before mixing in 5 other tables and watching the footy!
And yeah I have had a lot of set-over-set as well lately... I'm starting to reconsider whether lower PP are genuine opening hands from UTG (albeit in this 4-handed example they have to be). Seems to be mixed opinions on this depending on what you watch/read.
That's why 6-max is so popular though I guess, easy fold if UTG at FR, much more options at 6-max
I was lucky enough to be playing the TOTP game last night and in spite of being the fish at the table, managed to hang on long enough for £20 - so thank you's to the other 5 players and to Sky.
I'm taking that out and not including on here, covers a round while out for the QF games tomorrow night!
Back at the cash tables I was taking more blows than Rocky in his first fight with Apollo. After writing about the danger of small pairs yesterday I managed to leak money with a set of 3s to 6s a total of 8 times yesterday... a couple of them may have been good but after getting to the river and seeing 4 to a flush I had no choice but to fold.
Add in aces getting cracked by 84s hitting two pairs, a turned straight being countered by rivered full house and getting it on the turn QQ v Tx on a T high board that rivered trips...
...and I was genuinely surprised to tot up the days position and barely be £7 down.
I'm sure the Sky computer must have miscounted my ins and outs for the days, but certainly won't be challenging it with them!
Was definitely some run good coming my way yesterday although did foolishly get into some brain ache situations.
Must remember not to sit with maniac players to my left... yes they are going to leave the table skint most of the time, but mostly after taking my money and donking it to the players on their left
Can't wait to escape work and get set down with a cold pint and hopefully two great QF World Cup matches. No bets yet but I'm sure that'll change. If France start with the side that ended their last game then I fancy them to out-do the Germans... the two wide men could have a field day with the lack of recognised German fullbacks and a repeat of their friendly last year (1-0 France, Valbuena with the goal IIRC) or 2-1 France may get my interest if the odds are good.
Who knows what to expect after that. I think I win either way - my Neymar Golden Ball bet can only improve if Brazil win, my Colombia pick in the work sweepstake continues to improve if they win.
What a weekend ahead
I guess I should have bet bigger on flop and turn.
Should the river be a c/c or is shoving standard?
Had opened the CAP table inadvertently when I was quick scanning the lobby and saw a couple of names I recognised as worth sitting at a table with and opened without realising.
Spots don't come much sweeter than this!!
Quadzilla!
You know what, I didn't really have particularly good or bad cards over the bits and pieces I played at the weekend, but what I did have I think I played pretty badly.
Just couldn't really get into any of the sessions and although a number of plays I'd be happy with in a vacuum, I just wasn't adjusting to the opposition tendancies and definitely could have bumped the roll up a lot more.
I'm never great at this, I still don't 'get' new opponents very easily, the weekend was particularly bad though.
I also had a few brief trips to the NL20 tables and try to include those more frequently. There is definitely a mental block to break through here - even though I'm sort-of-OK-rolled for that level now, at least to the level of having 1-2 out of 4-6 total tables at NL20, I still feel like I tighten up way too much and miss spots / become exploitable as a result.
To that end I ordered Jared Tendler's Mental Game of Poker last night, which may help to overcome that issue (among other things).
Also wasted £1.91 ordering a second hand copy of Check-Raising the Devil (Matusow) to see what it is Hollywood are considering turning into a big screen movie!
One day of NL20 and losing a buy-in which I don't think I could do much more with.
One day of foolishly seeing some unrecognised names that turned out to be pretty decent and saw me dribble a bit more cash away.
Sigh.
Saw a link through the Poker Player facebook page for GrinderSchool which, despite sounding like quite a ropey link to click through to, seems like it may be a good resource for improving through the levels. Post World Cup I'm definitely going to sign on for the trial period and give it a bash for a week/month.
Plus side, the complete lack of value in the footy matches has stopped me betting... definitely a good thing as I was toying with a draw/Germany approach last night... good luck to anyone who covered correct score / winning margin / over 7.5 goals etc last night!!
I may have inadvertendly slung a decent chunk (for me) on Messi to win the Golden Ball at between 3.35 and 3.7 on the fair for bets. Probably shouldn't have been online after the pub in truth.
Essentially that's a price for Argentina to qualify for the final (I think), so squeaky bum time tonight. They always want to crown a known superstar so he could take the title even if the Germans win the cup... a way more 'popular vote' winner than Neuer or Muller... possibly even more so in light of the sad news about Alfredo Di Stefano. Just hope I don't jinx him as much as Neymar
Should I be putting many hands into their range that aren't AK/JJ/QQ/89s when they have called a 3b from UTG+1? Do JT/QJ/QT peel here and make the same play? Would a Kx hand be likely to do this?
Villain is unlikely to play any Kx hand like this. Every Kx hand they call with pre-flop is going to have at least a pair on this board barring AK so there's no need to jam like this.
As villain cold called your 3-bet you can rule out 89s. If there tight it's likely to be a range of AQ/JJ+. Id rule out any J10/Q10 combos. You block most of them anyway having 1010 yourself.
If your being generous villain can have 2 combos of QJs that your ahead of.
AK/JJ/QQ is 22 combos.
Hard in game but I think you can find a fold here against a tight reg
I think calling shove is fine i really disllike his shove tbh. I think your will see 2pr and pair straight draw combos enough of the time to make this +EV
Well done on hitting 1k, very nice going:)
Gl with 20nl, I would say take it slow and steady, it's quite a different animal to 10nl.
The hand ranges quoted/inferred possibly show the difference starting to sneak in from NL10 (where all hands Craig lists are probably viable) to the less-leaky hands suggested by Chris and Liam?
I muttered 'sigh AK' or words to that effect before eventually calling the all in.
I guess learning to actually find the fold button as opposed to 'getting curious' is a big difference between a break-even / losing player and being able to keep eeking out small wins!
Yeah I think the big bit at the moment is trying to get some notes/feel for the new opponents, whenever I remove the safety net of playing the same old names at NL8/NL10.
I suppose that means a short-term loss could well be likely without necessarily playing completely horrific... It'll only be the odd table here and there at NL20 though, until/unless I get comfortably north of £1k.
In truth there wasn't a huge amount of poker over the weekend as I went out Friday and remember nothing between sinking a 3rd free jaegerbomb of the night at sometime just before midnight and waking up on the couch with half a burger stamped across my face at about 8am Saturday morning, washing it off and very unstably getting up the stairs to bed. I am beyond being too old for this nonsense.
That did leave me booze-free on Saturday night though and, having enjoyed the late lie in, played a few tables till about 1.30am... the 797m hand looked like it may have come with the speed the hands were ticking over in the run up to midnight but it obviously slowed right down after then. Dropped a tenner or so in total.
Sunday morning I then fired up 10 tables, albeit a lot of NL4, to see if I could be online for the magic hand... not even close lol... I've missed playing such a daft number of tables though - from a technical point of view I think I possibly play better because it tightens up my starting range massively... from a player point of view I'm useless... as witnessed by losing a stack to one of the mega nit NL10 regs when getting it in on the turn with TP&NFD (he, wholly expectedly, turned over a small made flush and held)
So the poker roll continues to drip away after the positive start to the month. The frustrating part is that I don't think I can really blame variance, there have been too many errors (opponent specific) that I could and should have avoided.
In other bits:
Played a little micro PLO on Saturday night. Fun game but, even after reading a few articles, I still don't really know what to do except try and (exploitably) nut peddle. Would love to improve here but nothing seems to click yet.
Messi taking the Golden Ball - probably not justified after his last 2 games, but got me out the hole in WC betting so am happy to applaud the corrupt FIFA officials this time... they were always going to want a known star to take the award.
Now the WC is over, I need to sharpen my act and get fit. Pretty sure my current unhealthy body = unhealthy mind for poker. Have been nothing but lazy since busting my back and need to regain a regular gym schedule. May lose the amount of time I can play cards, but am certain that will be compensated by better quality.
Personally, I blame my consumption on my mates being a couple of years younger and me being easily led