Wednesday, April 30, 2014

#April#Month End Review#May Goals#Thoughts

#April#Month End Review#
Thank God for Rakeback

Not too much to say except, I ran extremely well throughout the majority of the month. Just goes to show how much variance can play into your win-rate and results. 

Throughout the whole month my game was all over the place; which usually was a result in over-adjusting to tendencies of opponents. I frequently found myself 3-betting 8-10% at the full-ring zoom games; which is certainly high by most standards. 

Easter weekend- gave me a huge upswing; shots at 200nl-zoom went extremely well and I believe that I've fixed a few leaks in my 6-max game. 

Typically speaking my full-ring zoom game is much stronger than my 6-max game, however for this month be it variance or just my style of play my winrate has been much higher in the 6-max games than usual. 

I'm not too sure why many players who post results are keen to hide their "VPIP/PFR/3bet" stat as those numbers tend to converge within 2-3k hands of playing and will give very little information as to how you play.  

Over-adjusting to "anomalies" was a huge leak of mine nearing the end of this month which I found. Rather than considering my entire range as well as opponent's entire range I found myself justifying plays by "feel". 

Not that I personally berate the idea of playing by "feel" or whether or not I "believe" that opponent will look me up light, or what my image was; I think those aspects are secondary to range-construction, pot odds, implied odds, position, relative hand strength. 

For the entire month I ended up playing roughly 183 hours; with around 7-10 hours of "off-table work" which almost entirely consisted of me browsing forums; watching old videos, and reviewing my own hands. 

Thoughts and Reflections


For the upcoming month a lot of factors will end up affecting the goals in which I have in mind. 

SCOOP is coming around the corner as everyone in the online poker world should be fairly acquainted with, and Pokerstars has given me the option of splitting up my 5200$- WCOOP main event ticket into smaller chunks. With that in mind; one of my goals is certainly to play in a handful of these events and hopefully cash in a few.

The weather is also starting to clear up with many more sunny days are predictable weather, and due to the nature of only 3-4 months of "sunny season" in Vancouver I'm inclined to drop my volume down a bit in order to enjoy the beautiful beaches. 

As regarding to moving up stakes; I use a fairly conservative bankroll- management, as well as regularly cash-out. I'm an avid believer of having multiple streams of income from different sources and have been actively putting away some money and riding the US.Bull market for the last year, as money sitting in my bankroll isn't doing much to increase my hourly.

Since I'm also looking into purchasing an apartment in Vancouver in the foreseeable future it will be awhile before I start building my roll large enough to handle the swings.  

There has been some scepticism that the current market is due for a correction in response to the last 30 or so of "boom". My guess is that the shift of money from the real estate market into stocks resulted in declining of real estate and interest rates. Immigration policy being tightened up is also a likely cause for the result in Vancouver however doesn't entirely explain the mortgage rates throughout Canada. Because of the speculation, I'm convinced that it's likely a good time to purchase property with the notion of either "rental income" or a rebound due to a shift of money from stocks into real-estate. 

Variance, psychology, confidence. 

I've gotten a few questions regarding whether as to why I'm not playing any higher than 100nl. The answer is quite simple and segregated into 2 parts. 
1)- It's all about the hourly, 2) The mental side.

I'm a big proponent of the ZooM games, for reasons which I will discuss in a future post. Since 200nl- Fullring zoom doesn't run, or hardly runs at all; my only remaining option is the 200nl-6max games. 

My 6-max results historically have not been my best and would much prefer to see a solid winrate at 100nl-6max over a large sample size (500k hands) before attempting to make the jump fully. With a higher stake, smaller edges, a increase in variance of "downswings" will occur. I don't think I've personally matured to the point of being apathetic towards the temporary loss of money as a 4-8k downswing at 200nl will certainly affect my mental game. 

So hypothetically speaking; if my "A-game" results in a "3-4bb/100 winner at 200nl", a variance induced downswing may result in a prolonged downswing via playing a "C-game" of "-5-6bb/100".  At 100nl-zoom on the other hand; I've yet to experience any down-swing of that nature in the last 8-10 months and am fairly confident that my B-game is still profitable enough to justify grinding. 

I will eventually make the jump after; 
A) Showing extremely solid results at 100nl-6 max over an extended period of time
B) Getting over the habit of constantly checking my results and losses/ letting it affect my game.



Goals for May

  1. Obtain a subscription to training site.
  2. Enjoy the weather, eat well and exercise.
  3. Maintain 50k VPPs for Supernova Elite
  4. Constantly work on bringing a solid A-game and A-Mental Game to the table.

Cheers~ Best of luck to everyone else on the tables~ =)

Good luck in May ! 


Wednesday, April 23, 2014

#Final Week of April#Best Month Ever#April Heat

#Final Week of April#Best Month Ever#April Heat

It's been about a week and a bit since I did an update. If you look carefully at the graph enough there's a ton of 5-10bi downswings including a 30-35bi downswing around hand 155-165k. 

Easter weekend was quite good and fishy allowing me to make a full recovery and then some. I'm thoroughly surprised at my results this month as it broke my previous record for best month


I figure as long as I put in decent amount of volume and don't get into a major down-swing I'll end the month in the 20-25k profit range.  Made 66,206.83 VPPs this month and 58% of the way to my 200k milestone which would be an awesome boost. 

The volume has been coming at a much more natural rate this year, without the "pressure" of having to make Supernova elite pace. This allows me to take much more frequent break, days off, all in all not pressured to grind excess volume when I'm not playing my best.

Took a few shots at 200nl- this month and ran extremely well all around. 

Since I took a complete month off in January and didn't play in mid-February I'm going to try and really kick up the grind a little bit more than usual. 

I probably should have taken shots at 200nl during the weekends, however I ended up grinding there only when the full-ring-zoom games are dead midweek 1am--4am PST. 

Hopefully I continue to improve my game better and add a little bit more 200nl-zoom next month. I'm almost exclusively 6-tabling whether it be (3 200nl-6max, or 3 -100nl-fr zoom) alongside the 6-max zoom tables. 

I experimented with dropping to 4 tables of zoom, and oddly enough those were one of my biggest losing nights. Having more time and energy to focus on 4-tables made me level and overplay/overadjust/fancy play a ton. . . 

7-more Days Left in April! 

Good luck to everyone on the tables ! =)~ 




Tuesday, April 15, 2014

April Mid-Month Update #Upswing#Heater#$14,000

April Mid-Month Update #Upswing#Heater




It's been a long time since I lasted updated this blog, primarily due to the amount of run-bad and spew I had in March. Last weekend had one the sickest single most heaters of my life at around hand 80k-ish or so. I typically don't get too involved deep. 

Spent the entire month at 100nl- 6max and 100nl- full ring both zoom tables, maybe if the heater continues I'd set a new monthly record for myself. I personally don't think I've changed my game too much recently and almost 100% of the results are a result of variance and being able to control tilt.

Despite how smooth the results may seem I've actually spewed a ton this month, probably due to playing a lot of hands extremely deep vs a few regs. 

I've realized how easily one can underestimate variance, the good kind as well as the bad kind. It's easy to change your game due to variance induced downswings, and fall into the trap of "Changing what Ain't Broke". Attempting to change a "winning game strategy" completely because of a mild downswing or run-bad can result in further downswings. 

Over the last 140k hands works out to be about 7bb/100 which is quite awesome, but unlikely sustainable at 100nl-zoom tables. Also the first month I've made more at the 6-max tables than the full-ring zoom tables which is new for me as well.

Good luck to everyone else on the tables =)~ 

Saturday, March 1, 2014

#February Review#March Goals#drdannyyyyMIA

#February Review#March Goals

Month Results



Poker

Since I hit Supernova Elite in December I took a pretty long break away from poker and spent a lot of time working on other things in life. I anticipated a pretty hard hit on my game ; but apparently despite an extended break from the game it seems there's still tons of money to be made! 

Rakeback is set at around 60% due to the fact I'm starting the year off as Supernova Elite. and approximately 80 hours played this month. The bulk of the variance in the graph comes from 6-max and such as you'll notice from my "filtered for 7-10 players" graph below.

Although that seems like a "low amount" of hours spent grinding ; I've spent a lot of time brushing up on my skills by watching a few videos every week and going through some notes on poker.


Filtered for Full Ring
Clearly a long break from poker either affected my 6-max game in a negative way; or the style of play in 6-max change a lot more than I thought! 

Perhaps I should have 4-tabled fr-zoom for a larger duration of the month but rather jumped right into 6-tabling zoom (3 of both fr and 6 max). 




I'm not too sure what my goals for 2014 is ; as my original plans were to be returning to University in September . . .on the other hand opportunity costs tend to sway my decision the other way. 

I don't have any immediate plans of moving up stakes as the relatively low variance (monetary) and (buy ins ) swing are reaching a level of which I'm rather comfortable with. 

At the end of the day it's all about the $$ banked, whether this amount is Larger volume; lower winrate or Lower win rate higher bonuses(rakeback).  There's always the option of being in school and taking poker on a part-time level, however multi tasking mental tasks tend to be extremely taxing on me. 

It's one thing to balance working out, chilling with friends, and poker. It's a complete other thing with balancing down swings, midterms, and finals. 


March Goals

  • Positive winrate at 6-max
  • 2-3bb/ 100 winrate overall
  • 10k Month
  • Workout Regularly
  • Update the blog a bit more regularly
  • 200k hands
  • 50k VPPs


Tuesday, December 24, 2013

#Supernova Elite#ZOOM#December Review#

#Supernova Elite#ZOOM#December Review
This month was was most certainly a success in my books; hitting Supernova Elite yesterday for the first time ever! Overall win rate for the month was around 2.7bb/100 running a bit above ev. It was most certainly a rough challenge for me chasing Supernova Elite at 100nl. I've had ups- and downs grinding massive amount of volume facing all kinds of downswings and variance but none the less I was more than satisfied with my results for this month.

47k VPPs for the month; 110 hours.
[ ] Ordered Supernova Elite T-Shirt