…spent quite some time at bodog again today, grinding it out in the SnGs and throwing in a little NL25 action to spice things up. Played 8 SnGs today mostly two at once, it’s just too damn boring just playing one and boredom sometimes leads to stupid (action hungry) action which I like to avoid these days. Play wasn’t great at the tables, nothing new there, and I restrained myself from doing stupid things, mostly…one time I pushed my QQ into Ace rag although an Ace hit the flop – should have known better, but hey…it happens.

So, I cashed in 6 out of 8, but only taking down one win. I blame it mostly on the bad timing on some of the hands: today I didn’t only play and write down user notes on tendencies and stuff, but I also kept track of some of the usual situations that come up during a session, namely coinflips and their result and “coolers” – now I use the word cooler loosely, I mean it’s definitely a cooler when you’re Daniel Negreanu holding 66 against Gus Hansen’s 55 on High Stakes Poker (Season 2, Episode 11) and the flop comes down 965…and then the turn is another 5 and you lose to the tune of 300.000$ out of your own pocket, so excuse that I use the term “cooler” here at all (after all I’m playing LOW limits), it’s just that I fell in love with the expression as it totally fits when it comes down to certain situations (you are playing Fold’em for half an hour as you can’t even get SMTL or the hammer, left alone a “real hand”, so you get dealt AQ, AJ or whatever and every friggin time someone is holding a stronger ace).

So the stats for the two facts would be:

1. Coinflips played: 2, won: 2, 99 vs AK flopped a set, AK vs 44 hit a King

2. “Coolers”: AJs vs AQ, AQs vs AKo, A10 vs A6…and you guessed it, I didn’t get lucky on any of them and even got unlucky on the last one (board A-10-6, turn blank, river 6)

So all in all I almost doubled my deposit so far and I’m on my way of getting to the 200 bodog points, which will result in 900 PSO points soon enough…nice.

…it’s unbelievable how many hands can go absolutely wrong. I mean we all go through the motion and run bad sometime, but today’s SnGs just destroyed me. The only exception was one of the early one where I took down 2nd place, but apart from that one junk kicking, suck/resuck, suckout or cooler after another…unreal. My personal favourite hands tonight where the following two:

1. (I was too slow to do a screengrab, so here’s the lowdown) KQs in LP, I pop it up preflop, one caller, flop comes down J-10-4 rainbow. Caller in EP bets half the pot, now I’ve got to options: call or raise…I decided to go with the raise, because even if he has TPTK, I still got 13 outs (3K, 3Q, 4T, 3A) and he needs to make a tough call…so I push and he calls…well…turn is a lovely A…now he’s dead to one of the remaining two Aces and three Jacks. Ace on the river. Yuck! After the hand I can’t see a way I can get away from the hand, if I only smooth-call the flop the Ace hit’s the river and there’s no way in hell I can lay it down there. So the only true option would have been to fold after the flop came down, which I didn’t like: I already commited 20% of my stack, I’m in the SnG to win…

So that one went bad…dog preflop, lots of chances on the flop, golden on the turn, shit hit the fan on the river. That’s the way it is sometime. Made a nice comeback after that, but lost a random hand shortly after that to go out as the bubble boy. Annoying.

2. This one is so good it makes you wanna puke, at least it made me almost lose it. How the fuck can this donk call on the flop with top pair no kicker*? What made it even better is that this was the very first hand of the SnG, so can anyone tell me why he feels he needs to call of his stack there? Even better, after the hand he tries to lecture me about how badly I played the hand – damn he’s lucky that the “wireless-slap-down” (TM) wasn’t invented yet.

* after all he runner-runnered a better boat than mine so he’s a genius. Wait, not really. I just told him that he’s a fish and that at least the dough I invested was a good investment as it was material for yet another bad beat post – that and that he had every right to call in that spot, after all his TPNK was s0000ted 😉

So anyway, enough of the rant, if you come across the player x (name removed, after all there’s more than enough fish around bodog, so no point in even going after such a low limit donk), feel free to skin him, he’s a stuck-up, arrogant donkfish, but beware of his unbelievable vaccum-like suckout powers… 🙂

After that lousy shit in SnG after SnG I thought I’d give NL25 another whirl and promptly doubled up…so I’m still up for the session, which is nice, but money can’t buy back the nerves I lose due to such donkeys stealing my money and time…

Man, you wouldn’t even believe how long a friggin SnG can take if everybody, and I mean everybody literally, is a total rock at the table. I tried to switch my style accordingly, but it’s a dance on the razor’s edge as mr. rock x..y will play his Aces just like his old limping ass hand. Sometimes I doubt the randomness of the shuffle and while I know that that’s bs it’s sometimes the only way to cope with the shit, just put it on the rigged deck, lol. I can’t count the number of times I waited for good cards tonight just to push them right into the nuts and I’m not even counting the vicious dominated hand-suckouts (AK vs AA three times, AQ vs AK two times, etc, and  as sure as hell (one of the) case ace(s) showed up every friggin time). Anyway, so I was able to win one nontheless and score a third place to end the SnG session just a little down for the day. Not bad, so I jump into a MTT and the same shit happens. So I decided that tournament poker was not very kind to me today, so ring game time it was.

Donk around a little on the NL10 tables, but was quickly bored with the scared folks folding even to minor bets. So I jumped into some NL25 action and came out ahead by a longshot. Nice one, especially the one hand I stacked a player flop J93 rainbow, he checks I bet, he calls, turn is another J,  he pushes…now he either has the case Jack (with a hopefully worse kicker, which is not playing) or a boat. I call…he shows QJ, I show KJ, river is blank. So all in all a nice session tonight and I’m a step closer to getting the 200 points I need to clear the PSO bonus (9000 points).

I didn’t have the time to finish up a long ass post which I started yesterday, hopefully I’ll have the time to finish it soon – it’s working title is “The Poker Preacher (Part II)”…should be interesting to read, at least I think so, so stayed tuned…

Yes, tonight the poker preacher, aka me, myself and I, held court on bodog’s low limit SnGs. Yes, I signed up with bodog yesterday and no, I didn’t sign up because of mr. WSOP Champion 2006 Jamie Gold. I signed up because I wanted to continue my bonus hunt and bodog seemed like a fine deal. As my favourite online site for free poker gifts doesn’t have a deal with bodog atm I had to look around for another way to get something extra. So I fired up PokerSourceOnline (feel free to use referral code Ingoal if you want to sign up with them) and yup, they’ve got bodog in there list.

So I opened an account and started by depositing some dough – which in term lead to a nice middle in the night phone call to Neteller as I hadn’t confirmed my identity before. Amazing that people are working 24/7 in those call centers. Even more amazing that they have interpreters around, too. Not that I really need one, but the automated phone system said that they had german speaking staff members so I asked for one. Instead of a german speaking staff member I had an english girl plus an interpreter in the line, which was quite funny 🙂

But back on topic. I only played a few minutes as it was really early, yet again, and so tonight was the real first session. I played 6 SnGs and two tabled some NL10, which was fun, although I made a tough laydown which turned out to be a bad one – QQ in the hole, flop is A73 rainbow, I lead out to see where I’m at two callers, turn is another A, I check, one player bets, the other raises. Now I gotta give one of them the Ace, at least that’s what I did. So they push each other all-in on the river and what do they show? 88 and JJ…damn, that would have been a nice pot in that spot.

But back to the SnGs, I realize pretty quickly that the easiest way to make some dough was to wait for monster hands and push with them. You wouldn’t even believe how many times I got called. In return you wouldn’t believe how often I got sucked out on in the later stages (3 handed). But that’s alright, it happens and that’s why poker is fun. You win some, you lose some. But then something happened in the last SnG that just made me go off (a little): I didn’t curse noone out or nothing, I just tried to educate some people – hence the title: the poker preacher 😉

The situation: I hold two pair in the early stages of the SnG and the board is pretty scareless for me so I bet all the way. The only hand that could beat my top two pair would be 9-10 for a gutshot. Sure enough the dude calling off half his stack was holding just that to make him the straight on the river. Alrighty, you made a “bad play” and it payed off – more power to you. But then it happened, yet again: a player at the table goes ahead and tells him what a “nice hand” that was. Excuse me? Let me get one thing out of the way first: we all know that “nice hand” (nh) and “good game” (gg) are overly used these days – because if people were honest they wouldn’t say it all the time, as there’s no need to overuse it, or am I off on this one? But even knowing that, I still can’t understand why people are saying “nh”, “well played”, “wow, …”, “whatever, you’re so groovy,…” on such hands. What’s the point? If I lose a monster vs monster hand (e.g. Kings Full vs Quad Kings, like it happened in one of the SnGs tonight) or I lose to a good hand, because I didn’t believe him/her or because I couldn’t laydown my own (good) hand, then I’m more than happy to say “nh” and I might even add a “(very) well played” if that was the case in the hand. But on such miracle/suckout/draw with incorrect odds/… hands I refuse to say “nh/…”.

Why? Because I don’t like to encourage people to play that way. I mean it’s alrighty to play happy go lucky and neither should or can you assume that everybody (or even anybody at any given table) is playing the game “correctly”, but that still doesn’t mean that everybody needs to get sucked into the “fake poker world”. I mean, new(er) players are brought into the game watching the WSOP, the WPT or poker shows like High Stakes Poker, which is fine, but an edited poker format which only shows “interesting hands” (big bluffs, monster pots, etc) is not the real deal. Why do some players on those shows play they way they play in some of the hands they show you? It might be because the know each other so well, because their observations about the play that session/night/day justifies it, because they know that the other player(s) can laydown a hand (especially out of position), etc. Information is key and knowing basic stuff like outs, pot odds, etc is the only way to make money in the long run. There’s no game without the occasional suckout (even when “perfect players” square off), but don’t let yourself be fooled by such a miracle hand. Yes, you made money with it this time, but x out of 100 times you will lose money with it. Think about it! Think!
So those new players (although I wouln’t want to exclude all the “oldtimers” who still play like shit and get payed off by magic cards sometimes) might not even know what they’re doing “wrong” – which explains why some people are so quickly offended once any player at the table says something about the miracle card or how bad they played that hand, although it’s safe to assume that many of those are just dickheads anyway who feel they’re entitled to win that hand because they made such a “brilliant call/bet”.

Which brings me back to the “poker preacher” title: Although I know that it’s mostly a waste of time trying to educate even one single player at a table at any given time, as most feel that you’re being a “wise-ass” or that they’re soooo good and/or better than you anyway, it might still be worth the time in the long run. I know, some of you might say that it’s not worth the hassle and that educating the “fish” might be a bad move as it’ll be more difficult to take their money and I hear you, but I still think that if the level of play improved just a little bit for everybody, there would still be more than enough dough to pick up, with (a little) less nerve-wrecking junk-kickings 😉
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, after all my regular readership includes many good and even some great poker players, who are more than aware of this and much more, and who are trying to both spread the good word and elevate the level of the game at the same time, but it’s what was on my mind tonight and a good topic to blog about. So excuse my long ass sentences, feel free to add your own perspective about this whole thing and remember: educating even a single player might prove to save YOU personally money, if you happen to cross his/her path, by letting him/her laydown a hand and not outdraw you with incorrect odds 😉

Sick, sick sick sick. No, not the cards or that they don’t fall my way or anything, nope. I’m sick, sick as a dog. I can’t even remember the last time I was this sick, coughing, sneezing
and snoting like crazy – I guess it’s due to the fact that I don’t get sick very often (a cold every two years or something and that’s about it). So not too much poker played in the last few days.

Today was the first day I felt like I could get some hands in again though. Bad idea. You shouldn’t be playing if…

…you’re misreading the board on a consistent basis (yay I got two pair, wait, no I got one pair, d’oh)! This usually doesn’t happen to me, so I can attribute that + my impatience at the table to my cold + headache…so I’m not going to throw more money into the fish tank today. Hope I’ll be back in better shape, both physically and hence mentally, soonish.

…not much going my way today. Too bad, boohoo…I spare you the rant and leave you with my final hand of the night…

No, I’m not dead…I just didn’t have that much time to really play a decent amount of poker over the last few days, so just a quick roundup will have to do, for now.

I continue to play most of my SnGs over at WPX and so far so good, I almost double my deposit, w00t. 100% rakeback helps, but it’s not just that. I like to play shorthanded SnGs, so WPX is a perfect fit as their shorthanded SnGs are really shorthanded – 5 players at the table, 2 ITM (70/30 cut). It took a while for me to adjust to the 10 hands/level structure (instead of the x minutes/level which is used by most other rooms), but now I enjoy it – in the beginning it’s easy, you get to be the BB twice per level, then after a few eliminations things are speeding up, which is a good thing. The highest (in game) levels I’ve personally seen thus far were 500/1k with a table full of rocks, usually the games are much faster though, especially if you’ve got dudes at the table who like to severely overbet the pot or outright push from EP with blinds of 10/15 – good idea donks…no…your pair of treys is not good there most of the times, duh ;)  One of the ups of playing that many SnGs in such a short amount of time is the biggest downside as well: you get to experience quite a decent number of junk-kickings – I have never ever lost such an amount of dominating hands in such a short period of time, but I didn’t let it get to me. Most of the times I was even able to come back despite being severely crippled by dominating hands (AQ vs A6, AK vs A3, etc etc, 80% favourite – runner runner straight, 73% favourite – runner runner flush, etc), so I can slowly but steadily see some major progress in my game: a few weeks ago I would have (tilt) pushed the next hand in order to end the SnG and/or donk off my chips in the very next SnG – now I can sit there, steam a little, but don’t cloud my judgement, which is really good to say 🙂
As the WSOP wasn’t on around here (and I was too cheap to cough up some bucks for the final table PPV) I relied on Pauly’s coverage along with updates from pokerwire. I couldn’t follow the last few hours as I was heading out to an interview for an internship (my last requirement prior to writing my diploma thesis), so I missed Jamie Gold taking down the win and 12 million. I’m hoping to get my hands on a recording of the final table once ESPN airs it, should be fun to watch. So, bye Joe Hachem, hello Jamie Gold – newest hot commodity of poker. I guess we’ll find out soon enough if the fact that yet another amateur won will bring us the next “boom” / “explosion” in poker…and I’m also wondering if bodog is going to market the shit out of this (which is almost certain) and if they can catch up in terms of traffic.
Over to Full Tilt: I received an email today that the stuff I’ve won in the WSOP Fantasy thing will be credited in points. Cool stuff, so there should be 2200 Points more sitting in my accont shortly – I had won 4th place in one of the early events which was good enough to win a FT baseball cap (which equals 2200 points). I guess I’ll be using those points for tournaments instead of the cap. As I finished in the top 20 of one of the freerolls during the fantasy promotion I had the chance to win a seat for the 2007 WSOP tonight…wasn’t meant to be. Started out good by busting some dudes, but then I pushed right into the nuts to lose half my stack (hammer flop 772 rainbow, I hold 1010 and push, one of the guys in LP calls, he shows 77…ouch). Then I lost some coinflips and I was gone – upside: I went with my gut feeling, made the correct reads, put the money in (way) ahead or at least even money (e.g. a player in EP overbets the pot by some hundred chips, I put him on a small pair…I push with AK…he shows 33…but I don’t improve) the cards just didn’t fall my way sometimes and while that would be awesome (cards falling your way all the time) it’s just not the reality, so I’m good.

Over to poker books: I finished reading the book of bluffs and while some stuff in there was obvious, some stuff just made me think a little more about certain situations and I think it helped my game – short term: check, long term: we’ll see about that, but I’m confident.

That’s all for now, time to catch some sleep before I have to get up for footie training in less than five hours from now, yikes! So I’m leaving you with two of my new/old favourite SnG/MTT mantras:

1. “You must be willing to die, in order to live.” (Amir Vahedi)

2. “The best you can do is get your money in the middle when you have the best hand and hope it holds up.” (unknown)

The next items are up for auction at ebay. So head on over to either ForPeyton.com or check the seller’s listing directly…there’s a lot of groovy stuff including signed and framed Photos, signed cowboy hat, signed jersey, etc etc…what are you waiting for?!

Today I was planning on doing a “little” server upgrade. So I go ahead and backup all the shit that’s sitting on the server (which is quite a lot of stuff) using both self-engineered linux script goodness and the integrated backup solution of my server-admin-tool of choice (plesk 8 ).

After everything is done I flip the switch to upgrade to the new OS (Suse Linux Prof. 9.3 to OSS10) and wait till the setup is completed. Then I go ahead and try to restore everything using the integrated backup solution. Errm yeah. Let’s just say that it didn’t work out all too good – can anyone tell me: who in their right state of mind would program a backup tool which supports both local and remote backups with a restore tool which supports one thing: “browse”…you know the good old file button which brings you to the explorer on your desktop? This is ridiculous! Why should I do a remote backup (to another server with a kickass connection) just to find out that I need to download the shit to my desktop computer to upload it (via the not so groovy dsl connection)? Oooh well, so I only restored the domains with little content (size wise) and did the rest via scripting. *Sigh*

So, as you see, poker-tastic along with most of my other sites are up and running again. Coolio. So now I fire up WPX for one SnG, then it’s time for some sleep – almost 2am, my neck and back are killing me. Which brings me to the “I can’t talk about it”-part of the post: you know you shouldn’t dare to talk about a good run, so I’m not going to do it. What I’m going to do though is talk about WPX: It rocks. Plain and simple. While the traffic is still not really good (the most I’ve seen online at a time were slightly under 2k players, compare that to 70-100+k on Party and Stars), the games I frequent (low limit games along with low limit SnGs) are only a few minutes (max) away…and the 100% rakeback, w00t. Let’s just say that my constant SnGs along with some ring action is adding up…more than I thought it would. So I’m going to continue to play most of my games there, at least for now. I guess I’ll have a better idea of the total rake saved once I’ve played a whole month there.

Off to the Iggylicious part 🙂 Yesterday I finally had the chance to listen to the episode 81 of cardclub, which featured an uber-interview with the blogfather himself, Iggy. If you haven’t heard it yet, go ahead and download it, now, damn it! 😉

…or at least most of it. Haven’t had such a rollercoaster session before in my “poker career”. As I said in an earlier post I moved most of my play to WPX, at least for now, as I really want to see how much the juice was really impacting my limited bankroll. So the majority of all events took place there today. Sidenote: I’m taking extended notes on all activities on all poker rooms, but I just noticed today that my notes were incomplete, so it’s nearly impossible for me to calculate all the juice I payed on rooms other than WPX. So from this day forward the notes are going to be extended by some more columns. Why? Because I think that what keeps me down (apart from the fact that my roll is pretty limited) is the juice. Given the usual limits I play (as I don’t play cash games as much as I used to, I often play NL10 or NL25, which equals .05/.10 or .10/.25 blinds), so I gotta stay ahead of the rake and a “normal” small winning rate is not nearly enough to move up. So I’m really forward to the final rake stats once I’ve got the first month of play down at WPX. It could be quite a revelation and for now I’ll keep attacking the cash games a little more often as the SnG suckouts against all those donks keep putting me down (not money-wise, but mentally)…

The session included:

1. Stacking some random fools in two different cash games…no, your second pair weak ass kicker is no g00t…even if they were s000000ted 😉

2. Getting hit by suckout after suckout in the SnGs…unbelievable with what crap people are willing to call off their whole stack, without any need to do so either, but that’s besides the point. The suckouts included: runner runner flush, runner straight, two outer on the river, three outer on the river, counterfeit two pair on the river (worse kicker for me with my small pair of course), Ace baby rivering aces up against my big ace, the usual cold-deck flush vs flush, rivered boat over boat. Nice to have all those things in a span of maybe 90-100 hands. At least I won some coinflips, heehaaw!

3. Having to deal with some jerk-heads calling player names because they alarmed support – there were some hungarian dudes at the table chatting in hungarian – the player objected and they didn’t listen. This fool then went ahead and tried to put him and others (including me) on bullshit-infected-tilt, which didn’t work of course. So the good ol’ mute switch got flipped and it was all peace and quiet again…

After the up and down I spotted another triple shootout on Stars, so I jumped in…big mistake once again. I’m not going to play one again, ever. While the format of shorthanded tables is groovy and all, I just can’t catch a little momentum. Isn’t the old rule that you should only hit the flop 1 out of 3 times? Not in this ones…or I’m the problem, my 1 out of 3 coincides with at least one other player at all times, needless to say that if I flop TP he will def have his TP+kicker playing, etc. So FUCK YOU triple shootout!