So I played two sessions of 0.05/0.10NL HE today. The first one was really cool, I couldn’t do much wrong and ended up 4 Buyins. Tonight I played in a 5+0.50$ MTT and found AA in LP on the 12th hand of the tourney…folded to me…damn…so I pop it up to 3xBB…1 caller…flop comes down K-Q-J…argh…that can’t be good, but I hope that my opponent only hit a part of the flop, so I shove after his min bet…he insta-calls…and flips over 10-9…damn…sure enough no 10 on the turn or river, so I’m out in 197th of 277. What does this tell you: even if you’re holding Bullets you can still easily lose a hand…especially if you don’t jam preflop (In this case it wasn’t a real error I think, with the blinds at 30/60 the save variant would have been to push preflop and take down the 90 chips, but who wants to win 90 chips with AA?!? Bad thing that he totally connected on the flop…)

Another session of ring games later and I’m down one buyin…one noteworthy hand: I hold 3-3 on the button…3 limpers…I pop it to 3xBB…two callers…flop comes down 3c-Qc-Ac, EP leads out with 2xBB…LP calls…I call…turn is blank….EP shoves…LP calls…now I’m faced with a tough one…did or didn’t he hit the flush or is he just holding a drawing hand like KJ or maybe just Ax….I fold…river is another blank…and to my surprise EP shows AQo and takes down the pot…argh…I would have so busted his behind…damn.

After that hand I think I was on slight “chicken tilt” and donked off my remaining winnings of the session in the next few hands (I was up 1Buyin at that point)…ah well…still slightly up for the day…so nothing to complain about.

I played my usual NL HE today and was able to finish ahead more than 5 buyins. Nice. Because of that I played another 2 table 6$+0.60$ token satellite (top 4 get a 26$ token, 5th gets 4$). One player at the table had the deck hit him in the face most of the first half dozen orbits and so he busted out 6 players in no time to chip up to 9k (1.5k starting chip count). Wow, haven’t seen that before – although I imagine that this has got to be a cool way to play such a SnG (get cards at the right time or maybe even cards at all time, then just sit around and watch the others bust out as the token is a lock unless you do something stupid). No such joy for me, but I hang in there until we were down to 5 players…at least I was down 2.6$ at most…unfortunately I was a big dog with 1.3k chips to over 4k (places 3 and 4), so I had to get something going with blinds at 100/200. I’m in the BB and look down at AKo…All-In…UTG who tried to limp in calls…the rest folds…he shows Ad5d…5 on the flop…no help for me…so that makes me 0/3 in those 2 table satellites for a 26$ token. Hmm…can it be so hard to get one of those? Not really as I’ve seen bad players hit it big more than once now…I guess it’s just a matter of time until I can catch a break on one of those buggers. Until then I’m going to win the buyin on the cash-tables first and then try again 🙂

Wow, I think that’s the new record for title length. I don’t want to go on and rant all the time about getting sucked out on, after all nobody wants to hear the same “Bad beat” stories over and over again, but hey, this is my blog…so here it comes:

I played the usual 17ET tourney at FTP and was running good…there weren’t all that many hands to remember, but I picked up bluffs, played a solid game, so nothing to cry about. What sucks though is that I can’t win THE hand – when it counts. Two critical hands (at least IMO) and two times I can’t win the thing:

1. I’m sitting in late position and look down at 4-4, not the best hand in the world, but a small pair in LP, folded to me, so I pop it up to 3xBB…two callers (Cutoff + Button)…flop comes down 4-K-6…now I’m thinking…yatzee…bottom trips, but I doubt that someone would have limped with K-K at this point…that and the fact that I got both players covered by a long-shot makes the decision easy: All-In…both call…CU shows 10-Q (wtf?) and button shows Q-Q…at least I’ll only have to dodge a one outer (Q) and two perfect running cards…sure enough the latter happens…J on the turn…Ace on the river…
Summary: I would have busted two players and as a side effect would have been up to over 10k (around 1.5x the average at that point)…

2. The second critical hand was just before the bubble. I’m in the BB (800 + 100Ante already in the pot) and look down at A-Q…considering my chipstack of < 3k it's time to test the water...Cutoff+2 raises to 2k...it's folded to me...what to do what to do...I read his move as a at least semi-steal as he's a big stack (> 10k) and probably hopes to pick up the blinds + antes easily (2.1k)…so I push…he reluctantly calls…with Q-J…totally dominated…as the flop comes down 9-Q-K I’m in a half-happy/half-worried mood and yell something along the lines of “no ten, no ten, no ten” at the screen…to no avail…the river kills me…

Even my opponent can feel my pain and apologizes…I say “It’s all good…” and leave. After all I didn’t do anything wrong, maybe I could have sneaked my way into the money (which starts really small…remember that this is a 1$ tourney, so 54th-46th is 1.76$), but as mentioned above isn’t really worth it without a (at least half-) decent stack. So this was the chance to double up right before the bubble when (at least some) players tend to stall, but it wasn’t to be. Nontheless a fun tourney again with 2h of ups and downs (mostly ups)…

In related news: At least play at the cash tables went fairly well, so nothing to dwell on.. 🙂

After my prior rant, I want to get back to a more “normal” post. After the disturbing tourney/SnG session earlier on I decided to give the ring games a whirl as this seems to be the quickest way to clear my signup bonus – after all you get points for every raked hand you’re in, so multi-tabling is definitely an option. So that’s what I did.

I finished the night slightly up despite running into some slow played made hands – sometimes it’s really ironic when you think that you’re slow-playing someone with a made hand, but (s)he thinks the same as his/her made hand is even stronger which happened on numerous occasions tonight (note to self: have another look at the board and if your current made hand isn’t the nuts try to find out where you’re at).

Preface: This is not a post about how online poker is rigged 😉 I know that it isn’t. I’m just trying to figure out what happened today..so I need to do a little bit of thinking aloud. I guess it could all be related to the fact that you’re paying more attention to “bad beats”/”miracle cards” (happening at the table not necessarily including you in the hand) when you’re experiencing a bad day poker wise…

Looking closer at the post title:

1. “miracle card” – What is a mircale card? I would define it as a card that saves your behind when you’re behind, usually on the river – although that definition is a little bit loose as this would be the same as an out (outs). So I guess it’s better defined as a single card (or a single card of one kind) that can save your behind, usually on the river (i.e. your opponent is holding 8c-9c, you’re holding K-Q, board 10c-Jc-8h-8s- ? The miracle card you need is any Ace which isn’t a club…so basically a three outer, even better: opponent J-J, you 10-10, board 8-7-8-3-? the only card that can save you is a ten – this example came quite easily as I’ve seen that exact hand and the miracle ten drop in one of the ring games).
2. “miracle cards” – you need two running perfect cards to beat your opponent, possibly while having to dodge some of those outs (i.e. you need a running 9 and 10, but neither of those can be of a suit (i.e. no spade)).

How often does a miracle card hit?

1. We all know a little “outs-theory”…so if you’re in need of ten to hit and you don’t hold any or see any there’s 4 outs…or if you need to hit a card of a certain suit and you hold two and see two..there’s 9 outs (unless one of the cards completes a better hand for your opponent)…I would say that a miracle card is more in the ranges of a one-three outer…
2. If we consider one-three outers to be a “miracle card” how come that I’ve seen such a miracle card around five times in 3 orbits on three different tables this evening? I mean the chances of a miracle card to hit the river is 2/52 (in case of a two outer…although this isn’t considering some information that we have got and some we haven’t got…hmm…how should I explain that: …you know that the deck consists of 52 cards…10 player table…10x 2 hole cards dealt (20 cards gone)…burn a card preflop (21)…drop the flop (24)…burn a card prior to the turn (25)…drop the turn (26)…burn a card prior to the river (27)… – so we know that 27 cards out of 52 are already gone…in an online scenario you only know 6 of them atm (your hole cards + flop + turn as the chance of peeking at your neighbour’s cards are non-existent)…and you know that there are 25 cards remaining…what you don’t know is if the miracle card is even still left in the remaining deck…I guess that’s why poker is considered gambling (to a certain degree) – after all if we all knew the “shuffling-algo” and all cards what would be the point of playing… 😉 )…pfeew…I lost my train of thought a little now…okay…
3. …so I guess you could say that the name is deserved and a miracle card shouldn’t hit the river all that often (after all that’s why such draws are often referred to as belly-buster or gutshot…)
4. I guess it was just a coincidence that all those miracle cards dropped on numerous tables at the same time…and that’s that? Or is there more to it? I guess not. At least nothing that could be proven without a huge amount of tests (and who wants to deal hundreds of thousands of hands manually and calculate the exact percentages considering that there are roughly 2.6 million (2.598.960 if I didn’t miscalculate) different hands (consisting of five cards))

Now that I’ve got that off my mind I can get some well-deserved sleep (and maybe laugh at the stuff I’ve written above tomorrow morning…although I’m getting more and more excited about getting to work on some of the math that is poker related – maybe I’ll even (at least) try to refine some of the concepts for my use…we’ll see)…night night…

Slow day for me today. Just played a few orbits of PL Omaha H/L at UB again…it’s hard to step down and play at the pennies again, but at least I had a winning session again, so that’s a good note. Got bored pretty quickly though, so I moved to PokerStars and continued my quest to conquer the SnG throne…

Played one PL Omaha H/L and two NL HE – with similar results: couldn’t get in the money to save my life 🙁

Couldn’t get much going in the Omaha 8b one and I’ll save you the “bad beat” stories of the two HE ones…just a quick note: whether it’s A-Ks or A-Ko it’s not enough to win against a dominated hand (K-J and A-10 respectively)…

I’m off now…got a dentist appointment tomorrow, yuck…this should be fun…NOT 😉

After dropping 2 Buy-Ins (or 40xBB) in 10 hands ( 🙁 ) I decided to change my plan. Instead of stepping down in limit, I’m going to try it with Limit Omaha H/L at the 0.25$/0.50$ tables. Maybe the craziness of PL Omaha H/L just wasn’t meant to be (yet). Let’s see how this works out…

Update:
Okay I give up…another 30 hands later and I’m out of another 20xBB which brings me back to my original plan as I dropped 100x BB in 3 days (2 playing days with a pause of 1 day, yesterday)… 🙁

…can be fun, but it can hurt, too.

So, I decided that it would be a good idea to change levels in Omaha H/L, after all I grinded out +100% (not quite 100% if you count the earned bonus, substracting the bonus it would be more like 90%) in the 0.01$/0.02$ PL Omaha H/L ring games.

The jump to the next level is a little bit big though as the next available PL Omaha H/L level at UB is 0.10$/0.25$ and as you can imagine that is quite a difference to pennies. Combine that with a (bad) run of cards and you’re out of the “hard earned” money quite quickly. I played three sessions today and finished two of them down, one even. So I’m out of 2 Buy-Ins (20BB each) and second guessing myself. On the other hand a step up in levels is inevitable as the daily grind in the penny sections is not only sucking the life out of you, but it also doesn’t get you anywhere (at least not fast or quickly).

So I guess I’m giving it another shot tomorrow and we’ll see how that plays out, we all know that swings in poker are normal, but the effects are bigger the higher you go in terms of blinds.

My plan is going to be:

1. Play the normal tight style that brought me this far in the pennies.
2. Stop playing this levels if (-100x BB)
3. Step up a level if (+200x BB)

I’ll keep you posted…

As it was my dad’s birthday today I didn’t play much (just two orbits just yet) and I just couldn’t play any longer after dropping the hammer to crush aces (unfortunately I was too slow to take a screenshot as it was a turbo table, so hand history will have to do)

PokerStars Game #3627828185: Hold’em Limit ($0.02/$0.04) – 2006/01/13 – 21:32:46 (ET)
Table ‘Janus III’ Seat #10 is the button
Seat 3: Ingoal ($0.44 in chips)
Seat 5: sarasfw ($1.16 in chips)
Seat 7: Am_I_Spam ($0.20 in chips)
Seat 8: pawliwalnuts ($0.27 in chips)
Seat 9: jean1977 ($0.36 in chips)
Seat 10: i love eggs ($0.31 in chips)
Ingoal: posts small blind $0.01
sarasfw: posts big blind $0.02
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Ingoal [7c 2h]
Am_I_Spam: folds
pawliwalnuts: folds
jean1977: folds
i love eggs: folds
Ingoal: calls $0.01
sarasfw: raises $0.02 to $0.04
Ingoal: calls $0.02
*** FLOP *** [Js 7h Jd]
Ingoal: bets $0.02
sarasfw: raises $0.02 to $0.04
Ingoal: raises $0.02 to $0.06
sarasfw: raises $0.02 to $0.08
Betting is capped
Ingoal: calls $0.02
*** TURN *** [Js 7h Jd] [Qc]
Ingoal: bets $0.04
sarasfw: raises $0.04 to $0.08
Ingoal: calls $0.04
*** RIVER *** [Js 7h Jd Qc] [7s]
Ingoal: bets $0.04
sarasfw: raises $0.04 to $0.08
Ingoal: raises $0.04 to $0.12
sarasfw: raises $0.04 to $0.16
Betting is capped
Ingoal: calls $0.04
*** SHOW DOWN ***
sarasfw: shows [Ac Ad] (two pair, Aces and Jacks)
Ingoal: shows [7c 2h] (a full house, Sevens full of Jacks)
Ingoal collected $0.72 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $0.72 | Rake $0
Board [Js 7h Jd Qc 7s]
Seat 3: Ingoal (small blind) showed [7c 2h] and won ($0.72) with a full house, Sevens full of Jacks
Seat 5: sarasfw (big blind) showed [Ac Ad] and lost with two pair, Aces and Jacks
Seat 7: Am_I_Spam folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 8: pawliwalnuts folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 9: jean1977 folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 10: i love eggs (button) folded before Flop (didn’t bet)

Hammertime:ÂÂ

Oooh what a day. Played an even wider mix of games today in order to, hopefully, get my bankroll (which was micro to begin with) at AbsolutePoker back from life-support. I played in various HE games ranging from fixed limit 0.10$/0.20$ to 0.10$ NL along with the usual session of Omaha H/L. I couldn’t get much going and so I decided that it would be a good idea to play some S&Gs.

Good idea. I won the Omaha H/L one, bubbled in a HE NL and finished outside the money in the other one. Nontheless some solid playing time without risking too much. I guess going with multiple S&Gs Omaha 8b is the way to go if I want to rescue the remaining few dollars there.

So that’s what I’m going to do! Either I run up my bankroll at AP over the cashout threshold or I go bust…whatever…it doesn’t get me anywhere anyways…the ring games are just too tough (either you play against the calling stations hustling for a (re-re-)draw all the time – after all you can’t push a calling station out of a pot especially in limit or low-limit PL and even if the cards fall your way some of the time, it’s not enough to seriously build up your stack – or you face a NL crowd with a fat roll…you just can’t survive with a minimal bankroll…at least I can’t atm)…

But enough reporting/ranting…I’m going to watch the final table of the “Battleship at Atlantis” Heads Up tourney now…should be interesting!

Side Note: the main event of the PCA is a done deal, check out Brad’s (Otis’) coverage here if you haven’t already. Spoiler: 22 year old student and PokerStars regular Steve Paul-Ambrose has won the thing…1.363.100$ + the WPT championship seat (25k$) not a bad pay-day for a student(!), ka-ching!

I played a wild mix of games today ranging from the usual penny PL Omaha H/L to 0.25$/0.50$ Limit Hold’em. Was able to stay ahead in Omaha over at UltimateBet, but busted myself out of 10$ over at Absolute Poker, although I held quads twice…just a bad swing today I guess as I wasn’t able to catch anything while holding good hands (Hold’em: K-K…nothing apart some aces on the board; A-K – blank board; Omaha: A-2-3-x, board is something like 2-3-K-10-Q, etc etc)…