After a long week and long day of “playing” with databases at work yesterday, it was time to hit the tables before heading out to a birthday party.

No long session but I managed to squeeze in 8 HU matches. 6Ws later and I’m out to party…

Forthcoming:

1. Post about today’s play.

2. Post about new opportunities to make some dough.

3. The first sponsored post in poker-tastic’s history.

4. Probably tomorrow: post about the last year (first year of poker-tastic in the online poker blogging realm)…yup, it’s almost a year since the first post on november 13th 2005

…so…stay tuned…

Wow, what a title. 🙂

Let me work through it in sequence:

I. Still running bad. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t seem to catch a break these days. Maybe it’s just the bad side of variance, or what not, maybe it’s just me being not up to par. I don’t know. But I guess it’s a mixture of all of the above…

a) Nice: hitting your two pair with crap cards on a ragged board against an opponent HU and getting all his chips in the middle.

b) Not so nice: exact same situation but you holding the TPTK (or similar) and getting all the chips in.

This situation made me pause today. It’s weird how nice it can be to be in situation a – you basically outflopped your opponent and don’t give it a second thought. Once the opposite scenario b arrives you curse your opponent and call it bad luck. Hmm…

II. Tilt: This happened to me again today after getting sucked out on in consecutive hands. I jabbed my way to a 3:1 chiplead and hold a monster after the flop. We get the money in and my opponent is nearly drawing dead. He needs to go perfect-perfect to beat me. Turn perfect. River perfect. Hmm…now we’re even in chips again, aka back to square one and the tilt-bells are ringing in my head. The very next hand I’m looking more than good on the flop again and guess what…he still calls my overbet and we get the rest of it in after the blank turn. River…perfect…boom headshot. Now the tilt-bells are so loud in my head that I can’t get my normal game on. I should have taken a pause right there, but didn’t…so I put a little dent in my HU record and my bodog roll…nothing too dramatic though.

III. Playing beyond the push:

Waffles wrote something interesting about postflop play and pointed to a nice post by the oreo man about the same topic.

Not pushing All-In preflop all the time, not looking to take races at all times, etc is something that has really been on my mind in the last few weeks, especially since I started to play an excessive amount of HU matches. It’s funny to see how often people are pushing in those things – without any necessity to do so I might add.
A few months back, I would have called some of these pushes in a heartbeat – nowadays I think hard and more often than not, I’ll not call. Why? Because I have to take a look at the situation first and there are MANY situation that I don’t want to risk a lot of chips, especially with five cards to come. Let’s have a look at two of those situations (especially in the HU SnG situation):

1. I hold a strong drawing hand (e.g. AK), BUT I have a substantial chiplead. Why should I risk bringing my opponent back by taking a coinflip (or worse)? I’m not going to start saying that I don’t like coinflips because I never win one, because that would be bs, but I don’t like playing a big pot with marginal edges/deficits, especially if there’s no need to do so (e.g. level 1 – the classic donk move: pot is 15 chips, players start with 1000 chips…third hand in and the donk opponent pushes preflop…hmmm….I would have to call of 990 into a now 1015 pot…hmm…good odds…no wait…are you kidding me? Unless I got Aces/Kings here I hit the fold button so hard, it’s almost crumbling)
2. I hold a small or medium pair, BUT I have a substantial chiplead.

I don’t know if it’s the tv boom and all the all-ins that are shown all the time or if it’s just the “ultimate equalizer”-approach of many (inexperienced) players. One way or another all the pushing is crap. During my excessive series of HU matches I found my love for playing pots again. Nothing is more satisfying than having your opponent right where you want him, “knowing” what he’s holding and acting accordingly…beautiful! Although it won’t work out every time, it’s still so much more fun than looking down at your cards and playing the old two-gear-box…push or fold.

On another note: the push, depending on the situation, can be one of the biggest tells too. I mean, nothing is certain until the last card is dealt and the cards are turned over, but more often than not, the push will leave you with a hand full of explanations…you “just” have to make the right decision which one it is 😉

From my HU diary:

1. Push preflop as a massive overbet into a tiny bet…

I. Small pair [Player is scared to play postflop; 90% of the time at the low levels I play]

II. Medium to big pair [Player is sneaky trying to represent the “scare push” or totally inexperienced player or plain and simple a total donk]

III. Strong drawing hand (e.g. AK, KQs,…)

IV. Random hand
But enough talk about pushing. What’s even worse is all the fuss that is made about “taking coinflips”, especially over here in germany. With the poker boom finally hitting the main-stream television, it’s hard not to catch some sort of poker tourney [interrupted every 10 minutes by PokerStars or PartyPoker commercials] every other day and you wouldn’t even believe what crap some of the commentators are telling the viewer: (Paraphrased translations from their original (german) comments)

1. “What is he thinking about, he’s looking at a coinflip. […] He’s the big-stack, he should look for such situations” – yeah right, did you have a look at their respective chip-counts? Table-image? Prior hands? Nope? Didn’t think so…
2. “Coinflips, the situations you should look to take advantage of, especially in tournaments” – errm excuse me, what the fuck are you talking about? Are you retarded or what? How can you take advantage of a coinflip? Wheeeeee I’m a 2% favourite…I guess there won’t be a better spot in the next gazillion hands I can play with my stack…yeah right…

3. etc etc

Sidenote: Now we all know that you will have to win a coinflip or two (or some more) in order to win a big tourney, but why in the world would I look for those situations? Don’t you think that I would like to get my money in with the best (let’s say 60/40, 70/30, …)? Yeah, thought so…but that’s not something that isn’t said in those broadcasts…

So maybe it’s really the tv shows that are putting the “race me and push me for all my money”-crap inside many players’ heads…sad…sad…but enough of the rambling for today…

The next items are up for grabs…get out your wallets for this cool stuff…

Poker Blogger Package (Donkey Puncher, Bobby Bracelet, AlCanthang)

Poker table signed by a lot of pros

Autographed Fossil + Shirt by FossilMan

Mike Matusow signed Poker Jersey

The real old testament DVD

For more infos, check out the auction page…

…and still come out a loser. Well, I’m not mad, although I had to blow off some steam in between some of the SnGs due to some horrific cards. Just weird how you can get your money in with the best hand, often dominating your opponent leaving him with 3 outs or less and they pull the rabbit out of the hat every friggin time. Oh well, “That’s poker boys…”.

In total I played 7 SnGs at bodog and 1 MTT (100 points buyin, 25T$ for every 17 players entered). 4 out of 7 ITM, not a single win though…it was just not to be tonight, was heads-up for the win two times, got my money in 4:1 in the first one (QQ vs 88), turn 8…got my money in 3:1 (AQo vs KQo), K on the flop…and the other beats weren’t any prettier either AK vs AQ rivered a Q and AK vs A8 he flopped two pair, turned a boat and rivered quad 8s…way to go 😉

So I’m logging out tonight being down a little, but hey…there’s always tomorrow. On another note: I just found a way to spend my last 4000 PokerSourceOnline Points…Amazon has the “Phil Gordon Box Set” up for grabs, including The little green book, the little blue book and the little black book for as little as 37.80$…cool stuff. The only problem is that I already ordered the Little Blue Book on the german Amazon site back in august, now it’s pending shipment, so I can’t cancel the order…I guess I’ll have to wait until it arrives to send it back right away…

Hehe, I’m not sure about their official spelling, but I guess it’s 9poker, not that it mattered as both domains (.com) are connected. So, why am I even talking about that? Because I selected nine to be my next bonus hunt “victim”. After finishing bodog within such a short time (points still pending, I hope I’ll get them soonish) I was on the lookout for another good promotion. The nine promotion at PokerSavvy sounded good: the usual 50 deposit and you’ll need to get 250 Points with nine to get 700 points. Fair enough, so I got to it yesterday.

Quick review of my experience so far:

1. Signup was mostly painless, there were numerous inconsistencies and inconveniences though:

– the sign up is done via the secure part of their website, so far so good, the only thing they should explain to me is why I can use all letters, numbers and symbols on their website, but not in the poker client. I had the feeling that this was the reason I couldn’t login in the poker client. So I fired up Live Chat support and got the answer and the password changed right away. Fine, I still told the support guy to bitchslap the designers and that they should get this fixed…this is ridiculous..a simple character check in the sign up form shouldn’t be hard to implement *cough* 😉

– I deposited via the signup and once I was able to login I was facing the next problem: where’s my money? So I fire up the cashier, nothing, I fire up the FAQ, nothing, I fire up the account info, money there, but how to transfer it? Cashier, nothing. I fire up support yet again…aaaaah there’s another cashier, which is a symbol in the poker client. Error #1: I clicked on “deposit to poker” during signup, money still went to “normal” (sports betting) wallet. Error #2: Why would the “transfer funds from (other) wallet” be only a symbol, but the same functionality isn’t available via the cashier menu???

– The points you grind out are only updated once a day as far as I’ve seen so far…this sucks!

So after that little headshaking and laughing at the messy system I fired up some poker games and played for a while. As it was approaching early morning, yet again, I decided to quit though and so I pause my play until this afternoon. Impressions so far: the games are good, the sidegames (Chinese Poker, Guts, etc) are addictive, the traffic seems to be 98% from Canada (at least 90-99% of the players I’ve met so far were from Canada), the UI is not the best I’ve seen…I mean it’s pretty looking…

…but some features are just a big PITA, e.g. the raise function – the standard raise function is a min raise, so far so good, if you want to raise more though you don’t have a bar to pull right away, but you have to click on “raise other” first and then adjust the bar (or type in the amount) and then click the raise button…not really good.

So…so far I would rate the room with a two thumbs up for their quick and easy support (via live chat), two thumbs down for their inconsistent stuff all over the place, one thumb down for their poker client. Let’s see how long it’ll take for me to grind out the 250 Points…

On another note: Did you know that Matt from PokerSavvy added a nice little item to the shop? For every 450 points you can order a money transfer of 45$ to either paypal or Neteller. This really rocks! Now I don’t say that Gift Certificates are bad, but they’re limited in use (e.g. only for Amazon.com) and the other stuff is basically out of reach for international customers like me (shipping&handling is not worth it)…so instead of going a route like PP gift certificate -> PP acount -> withdrawal to Neteller, you can now go the direct way PokerSavvy -> Neteller/Paypal, this clearly puts PokerSavvy ahead of the competition, so I’ll probably focus my search on their partners once I’m done with nine.

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?!

I just had a trackback from a site I didn’t recognize. So I look it up and find that it’s one of the “zombie-blogs” popping up left and right. What is it all about? It’s providing “poker news”, namely taking parts of content from poker blogs, slapping some ads on it and that’s that. Then I go ahead and the server admin is telling me something along the lines of “if you don’t want your content available around the net, just stop pinging search-engines” – errm wtf?
The site in question, which shall receive no further link love through this post, is a clear case of content scraping in order to monetize other people’s content. The only thing that it’s keeping it from being outright 100% content theft is that it’s providing a “read more” link leading to the original authors blog, but does this make it any better? So you get a linkback, but the thing is that it’s still using the content in order to slap ads on them.

Anyone got some hands-on experience with similar sites? What’s your opinion on such sites? Does a linkback make something like this legit in your eyes?

First of all I would like to remind you all that the main event of this year’s WSOP has started. Some pros are already out, some others are still in contention.

My ups and downs of the WSOP so far:

Ups:

1. There are more and more “amateurs” (aka online players, online (semi-)professionals, …) every year. I don’t have the exact number, but it’s safe to assume that they’re making up the majority of this year’s events and it’s already more than likely that yet another amateur will rise to WSOP championship glory this year – any bets on the online poker room they qualified on (it seems that PokerStars is having the biggest number of runners so they might have their fourth WSOP ME Champion in a row, although I wouldn’t underestimate some other poker rooms’ incentives, which could be the extra motivation – as if anyone needed extra motivation with 10.000.000$ up for grabs along with the fame (although 10+10mil sounds even better – the FullTilt deal))?

2. At least some people are still trying to work their butts off to bring you interesting stories, updates and recounts as the “we sold exclusive rights, so not all goes”-approach allows. Quick reminder: Otis, Wil, Dr. Pauly, CJ and some other guys are delivering some awesome content over at the official pokerstarsblog. Dr. Pauly delivers some more of his wsop goodness, especially blogger updates over at the Tao of Poker – although the frequency of the “Last 5 Pros I Pissed Next to…” segments is steadily declining.

3. Phil Hellmuth won his record-tying 10th WSOP bracelet. While this might be a surprise, I gotta say that this is truely an up for me. He’s on of my favourite players: he’s not only one of the greatest when it comes to tournament poker, but I really enjoy watching his rants at the tables, especially when another donkey “who can’t even spell poker” sucks out on him…

4. Daniel Negreanu’s video blog…I really enjoy watching his updates.

5. Some video updates from cardplayer were quite interesting. The regular coverage mostly sucks though, so no link love for you.

Downs:

1. Coverage. While some bloggers are trying their best (see above), their efforts are still undermined by the official and exclusive coverage (chipcounts, etc). Sorry, but an update here and there with numerous errors (e.g. hand history posted smack in the middle of an update shows that someone won with a boat, yet the text says he won with a flush, etc etc etc) and delays is just not good enough (although the situation has slightly improved since the start of the WSOP).

2. TV coverage. While this is the “biggest event in sports”, there’s no coverage to be found anywhere around here. Some stations are having a poker summer and showing the WSOP – the bad thing though: that’s the WSOP 2004, yawn.

…but enough of the WSOP and off to my own playing. I decided to consolidate my bankroll by transferring money from numerous poker rooms to a select few poker rooms. It’s just not good to spread out the roll over many rooms. So I pulled the plug on mansion (too little traffic atm, I might had back sometime later) and UltimateBet (haven’t played there in ages anyway). Before I fire up the roll at Stars though I wanted to give a “newer” room a shot. WorldPokerExchange is the only poker room offering rake free play. It would be better to call it 100% rakeback as you pay the normal rake and then you get it all back after some days (once a week as far as I can tell). While traffic isn’t great (the times I played so far the numbers were something like 1-2k players), the prospect of saving all the juice is groovy though. After going through my logs of different rooms I found that what many already said is true: it’s hard to stay ahead of the rake at the low limits, especially when you count normal variance. So I’m going to play most of my SnGs on WPX for a while and see what that adds up to – I’m sure it’s going to be quite a lot as the usual rake per SnG is a flat fee of 10% which adds up, especially if you’re playing SnGs almost every day.

I mentioned firing up the roll at Stars earlier on. This is due to the fact that I set a new goal for myself. I want to take the game to the next level and out of the online poker realm. While the home game series I play in is getting better and better as we bought casino style poker tables and just started a championship race which will determine the best player over the course of a year, I would love to get in some real (casino) tournament live action. So I’ll try to qualify for one of the EPT events! I don’t know which one it’ll be, but my current favourites are London and Baden, Austria. I don’t know which qualifying route to take yet as there seems to be a lack of double shootouts, which would have been my preferred option. I’ll keep you posted on the status of my qualification…

No poker content today, I really needed a break from poker today after yesterday’s live game. So nothing special today, apart from a little information piece:

If you’ve got a ghey diary or poker brog aka poker blog feel free to comment for inclusion in my blogroll. In addition to that you can get yourself some link love by submitting your blog to one of my directories (head over to this page and submit, I’ll approve you)…that’s all for now…cya tomorrow at the BloggerPods tourney…