I had a really weird weekend. Friday I worked from home, so around three, I fire up four tables and, well, my luckbox was set to sucko. In less than 200 hands, took down $1750. My personal favorite was when a lag limped AA otb, SB completed and I checked KTo in the BB. Flop is QJ9 with a spade draw. SB bets $8, I raise to $26, button raises to $80, I repop to $240 and he shoves his aces and is drawing dead on the turn.

Unfortunately, just as I built up four figure-stacks on three of my four tables, all of the games died and the rest of the 2/4 tables were full. The site I play on has a terrible waitlist bug that ends up crashing my system and I didn't feel like dealing with it. So I quit with a big win and watch Lost then go out to dinner.

So I'm feeling good Saturday when I head to the boats with a couple people, including the legendary dukemuscle.

And I managed to lose $1150 in four and a half hours, basically in two hands.

First hour was pretty uneventful. Got up about $200 quickly at the must move table, then got moved to a main game and won a big pot quickly, and did it in a way that made me look like a donkey. I opened 87s in the hijack for $30, button is the only caller, eff stacks are $600. Flop comes JsJc9c. I bet $50, he calls after thinking a minute. Turn is the As. I bet $120. He tanks for a good two minutes, asks himself "Is this jack good?" and then calls. River is the Qs. I'm a little thrown by the jack comment and with him having just over a pot behind I'm not really happy about either his calling range or his betting range, but I decide to check (lemme know what you think about that in comments if you want). He checks behind and shows AK (no spade or club) and my flush is good.

So I really like my table image at this point and basically decide to play straightforward.

An orbit or two later, I raise JJ im MP2 to $35 behind an utg+1 limper. The limper was steaming after losing on the river with his flopped broadway. Luckily, he didn't raise any street after flopping the nuts and was smart enough to check back the river when the river paired the ace and the SB practically fist-pumped as she checked after betting flop and turn with the JJ she completed in the SB.

yeah, nothing but good players in live 2/5 games.

So anyway, I raise, SB calls, EP guy calls too and we see a three-handed flop of 4d3d2h. Checks to me, I bet a friendly $60, SB folds, EP guy calls. I have 900 and he has me covered. Turn is an offsuit ten, checks to me, I bet $135 and he checkraises to $400 straight.

Online, I fold this with almost no thought.

Live, the truth is I simply wasn't concentrated on the moment. I can't tell you exactly what I was thinking, but it wasn't "ok, limp/call preflop, check/call flop, check/raise turn, what does my hand look like, what does his hand look like and how are we doing against it?"

Mostly it was "Man, this guy wont shut up about that fucking straight, even though he played like shit. Well fuck you sir, I'm all in."

I was obviously drawing dead to his A5.

It's just a terrible shove. At the time, if I thought about a hand, I was thinking Axd, tilting and overplaying or 88 or something. But no one live plays like that. They play with their hands face up and I refused to believe it. Possibly the single worst play I've made all year.

So then I go card dead and manage to drop another buyin with queens vs. kings and it's not very interesting.

This sort of loss used to stick with me and really bother me and this one definitely lingered a bit, but after sleeping in, Bronwyn and I went to brunch at Wishbone and I was complaining a bit about how stupid I am and she said "Yeah, it's $1100, but I know that's not much money for you any more. That's like a slow week for you and you'll get it back and play better next time."

Which was awesome not just because she was trying to cheer me up, but because it's true and it's also a really hard to grasp poker concept (long run) that she completely embraces. That's an awesome girl.

So we went home and I put in a 950-hand session and ended up a $400 winner and went for a very happy 3-mile run, up about $1000 on the weekend and soon to be up one amazing wife.

I run sooooo good.

Oh, yes, well, where were we?

Well, the Santi has reminded me that I've been lazy about this blog.

Not a lot to discuss really. I haven't played live poker since my last blog about it. The holidays were busy and a combination of losses and withdrawals took away about 40% of my bankroll. So at the end of December I ground out a bunch of 1/2 hands, and moved up to 2/4 early January and have just run OK, but am getting comfortable with things.

I think I've made a lot of progress on some leaks. I had a different move up plan this time (basically a 10-buyin shot rather than a 4-buyin shot I would usually take). There was some math behind the change that I won't get into, but I think the benefits are beyond just mathematical.

Psychologically, moving up is your most vulnerable time. The losses are double, you're terrified that everyone is better than you, you know the least about opponents (though you can overcome that with datamining), and I always find myself suspecting that people are taking shots at me, so I tend to spew.

Knowing that I've got a bunch of money behind me, money I'm willing to lose in order to take a good shot at being a winning 2/4+ player, is calming. I dropped five buyins my first two sessions, but turned it around and I'm a small winner over my 5,000 hands this month. I'm gonna try to put in a bunch more hands this weekend/week and book 10k hands for January. And hopefully be fully recovered from both the withdrawals and the losses in early December. Then I'm going to organize my money to let me take a few big swings at a main event seat whenever the satellites start running. Oh, and of course get married on Feb. 29.

Otherwise, life has been quiet. Bummed about the Packers blowing a golden ticket to the Super Bowl, but been working out all month. Not really losing weight like I thought I would, but my running miles are slowly building, and I registered for the Shamrock Shuffle, so now I has a goal, too.

Otherwise, life is boring, cold, but very good.

It's been a long lonely lonely time

So I've been absent for a bit. A few things you've missed while I wasn't updating this blog:

-I'm engaged to marry the lovely and charming Bronwyn Jones. She'll become Mrs. Bronwyn Jones-Mortell Feb. 29 in Honolulu. (beat: hyphenater. variance: who cares?)

-I'm fat (178), so I've embarked on a new commitment to excellence that includes some running and three trips to the gym every week. I'm hoping to be up to 10 miles a week by mid Jan. I have no lung capacity at all right now and my legs are shocked to discover how hard it is to drag my fat ass around the block. That changes pretty quickly though.

-I'm learning to cook. Mainly from Anthony Bordain's Les Halles Cookbook. This partially explains the fatness. French country food is delicious though. I have no problems working out a bunch to make up for one amazing meal a week. Saturday I made onglet de gasconge (hangar steak, in a white wine and mustard sauce) and bronwyn made a side of gratin dauphinoise (sliced potatoes cooked in cream, butter, rosemary thyme and butter, then baked with shredded Gruyeres over the top), all accompanied with a nice bottle of malbec. Life is good.

-I'm finally comfortable playing in games commensurate with my roll. I'm making the commitment to play in 2/4 games online whenever they are at least acceptable and definitely when they are good. This is a fair amount. So far, so good, but not a sample worth talking about.

That brings me to what got me writing this again. I've found a nice 1/3 game that usually becomes 2/5 by the end of the night. 100bb max buyin, and the game can quickly get deep as there are no shortstackers.

It's an interesting game that I'm being purposely vague about. But it's mainly regulars who tend to know each other. The dealers know the players, the players know each other, etc. There are one or two outstanding fish, but a lot of players are pretty competent. They have their leaks. Bet sizing, of course. Most are pretty passive when it comes to reraises, though they're decent about raising. There's almost no restealing preflop, and top-pair, ok-kicker is usually still worth a stack if you do it right.

But still, it's a game that isn't easily run over. Nothing at all like the soft 2/5 300-max down in Indiana. I suppose one answer is just go to the boats and fleece the donks, but this is a nice game, 10-minutes from the house, and I think there's something to be learned from it. I'm going to start with more patient aggression and see where it goes. C-betting in particular seems tricky and taking advantage of tilt, and taking advantage of it in the right way, seems particularly profitable. I think it comes down to an annoyingly vague concept--fitting into the flow of the game. Not forcing anything and being much more aware of what and why you're doing what you're doing.

I'm going to try to write a bit more about the games and see what I can find. I'll be playing most fridays, so hopefully something will come out of it. More money at the minimum.

Stars tournament

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 4833066

Cubs win! Cubs win!

I'm enjoying this, right now.

But I can't help but feel that it will always come back to this.

God save us all.

New rules

--No chat. If I chat, I quit.
--If I steam, I quit
--Stop playing weak hands OOP for a raise.
--Stop calling three-bets light in position, hu.
--Fold one pair on the turn to a raise.
--Bet the turn with one pair more often.
--Play for value, not for image.
--Enjoy folding.
--Stop caring.

I was home sick the last couple days. Fever, cold, not feeling great. Obviously, I played 5,000 hands of poker. And blew through nearly $3,000. I'm sick to my stomach about it. Not the money really. I'm still well rolled for 1/2. More the utter lack of self control. I burst right through threshold of pain, yesterday afternoon and didn't look back. There were a lot of sick beats, but a lot of horrible plays as well.

So I took all my money offline. I'll be back playing Saturday, but I'm taking the next few days off. I'll play live on Friday, and if I behave well, I'll put the money back on Saturday (bronwyn's out of town for the weekend) and play Saturday and maybe Sunday.

If I behave badly or tilt on Friday, I'm taking two weeks off.

I behaved like a child, particularly yesterday. If you're going to play a competitive game, you need to be able to lose graciously. I have failed miserably at that, and it's unacceptable. If I keep this up, I'll quit and put the money in an Roth and maybe keep a few hundred to play in the micros.
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In other news, I decided to accept Andy's invite to run the Indy half marathon with he and Donna, Memorial Day weekend. I may give Dave a run for best jog blog on the web. With seven months to plan, I think I'm going to shoot for at least a half hour off my 2:30 last year.

Attachment, part 2

So, I was thinking more on this notion of attachment in poker. I think the simplest way to think of attachment is to say it's what happens when you inject emotions into your relationship with things.

You get a pair of aces, and your heart beats a little faster. You triple up early on in a session, and suddenly you don't feel like pushing edges so much, you don't attack. You just stack up your chips. Cut and count them. Then stack them up again. You don't want to use them. They're a trophy now.

A lot of times, attachment shows up as results oriented thinking. ROT is really insidious, it's amazing the places it shows up, and who exhibits it. The fundamental theorem of poker, for example, is basically ROT. It's impossible to use the FTOP to solve any kind of poker problem without knowing the other guy's hand. It's only after the hand is over that you can use the FTOP to evaluate anything. And what's funny is that online, most people use the FTOP to combat ROT: "You want him to call your raise with eight-high, because if he could see your set, he would be making a mistake."

It's insidious, it's everywhere. Look out!

Anyway, a good deal of what I blogged about last time really comes down to ROT. I had goals, I succeeded. Now I'm outside the cycle of working at it, and so a thing like a bankroll suddenly becomes money.

I don't know why, but I'm constantly fascinated by how much of a mental game poker is, and how much of a struggle it can be. It seems to me that the biggest leak I could plug is to simply see the game for what it is. In a lot of ways, the path to thinking clearly come from simplifying how we think.

This is how Phil Galfond put it in an old 2+2 thread:

Don't hope your opponent bets the turn so you can checkraise. Don't get mad when he pots the river when you have 3rd pair. Don't pray for a King to flop.

Every card that falls, and every action that your opponent takes is simply another opportunity for you to make the correct decision.

Attachment

I spent $300 on a jersey Monday.

It's a 1984 Cubs road jersey, Sandburg and 23 on the back, the Division champs patch on the sleeve. It's fairly awesome.

I just had an itch to get one. No idea why, but I had it, had the money on my poker card, so I did it.

It's been freaking me out ever since. Feeling like I'm losing all my bankroll discipline, it's the beginning of the end, one bad streak and I'll be wiped down to only 30 or 35 buy ins for 1/2. Crazy stuff, basically.

I've gone from this place where I spent all my poker winnings all the time (mainly covering other stuff), to finally having built up a ~significant roll, and now I freak out over every little bit.

Is it weird that every paragraph has started with an I?

In any event, I have no idea why spending $300 should bother me. I made $500 playing for a couple hours on Sunday and just got a transfer for $250 for rakeback on Monday. So it's not like I've even take a hit.

I suspect what's happening is a form of attachment. We all know that you can't think of chips as money. They're tools. We use them for different purposes, with the ultimate goal of collecting more. But the key is to never be attached to your chips. If you need to make a bluff or a value shove, you can't think of the money. You can't think of the jersey they could buy. You can't think of the dinners or how long it would take you to earn the money in real life.

It's no big deal. They're just chips.

It's hard to sustain that detachment when you slow down though. When ego is involved, it finds ways in. Right now, I've reached a bunch of goals and landmarks, and so I find myself with less purpose and less focus. And so attachment returns.

11 months ago, I basically had $500 online and decided to learn NL or quit poker.

Does a "1" count as an "I"?

My definition of "learn" was basically to be able to beat 1/2. So now I'm doing that. But I haven't really learned poker. I've learned a lot, but there's a lot more to be learned.

I guess the problem is quantifying, encapsulating what there is to be learned.

Here are things I work on right now:

-River value bets
-Steam control
-Calling/shoving/folding frequencies when I get reraised
-Hand reading on turn and river

And I guess you can add PLO to the mix as well.

But I definitely need a new goal. Not really sure what that is yet.

Actually, I've always sucked at goals. That's why I like stuff like running. It's easy to set goals in running. Pick a distance, register for a race, pray you finish.

Unfortunately, there aren't races in poker. Just the constant clatter of chips moving clockwise around the table.

More to come on this, I hope.

Poker is not good for you

So, Sklansky and Schoonmacker have a 6,000 word article on 2+2 about how poker is good for you, and should therefore be considered a socially acceptable game and treated differently, presumably under the UIGEA.

It's complete nonsense.

For one thing, many of their "life lessons" learned from poker, could just as easily be learned from golf, or tennis, or wakeboarding, or even wandering the streets aimlessly and begging for money. Poker teaches good decision making. Poker teaches how to analyze risk-reward situations. Pap. Piffle. Blarg.

So, fine, it's glib. Ok. That doesn't necessarily make it wrong, does it? Well, maybe.

Take this:

Poker teaches you to think of risks and rewards before acting. If it taught nothing else, poker would prevent some young people from making terrible mistakes. More generally, most of poker's lessons will help young people to make critically important decisions.

This is true for some people. Primarily, those people are winning poker players. Not everyone is a winning poker player. Very few are actual winning poker players. This is true for a couple reasons. Rake for one. Another is that very few people who are likely to play a gambling game have the impulse control necessary to have or learn the discipline needed to think before acting.

So really, what the article is arguing is that being a winning poker player is good for you. That's kind of pointless. Being a good cardcounter at blackjack might be good for you too, but no one is going to argue that it legitimizes teaching junior high kids how to count cards.

What this really gets at is the notion, that many people have, that since poker is a beatable game, it's different than gambling. Gambling is something suckers do. You don't have an hourly rate if you're gambling, just a negative expectation.

Blackjack is gambling. Poker is a game of skill.

Both of those statements are true, but they're not talking about the same thing.

Blackjack is a game that by rule prevents a player from gaining a positive expectation on any given hand. The only limitations on a player's expectation in a poker game are the rake and the other players.

In blackjack, you play, and ultimately lose to, the rules of the game. Unless you can count cards, you can't maintain a longterm +EV.

In poker, you play, and ultimately have either a positive or negative expectation based on the structure of the game and the other players. It's very likely that while I'm a winner at 1/2, I would be a longterm loser at 5/10.

So what Sklansky is really arguing here is that by becoming winning players, people will benefit, not just fromt he money, but from the knowledge gained along the way.

The trouble with that is that if everyone really did try to become winning players, the vast majority of them would still be losers. It's the law of the jungle. So arguing that through "skill" one can benefit automatically is just false. Winning players rely on people being worse than them. It's not a fixed level. At $25NL you may only need skills A and B to win. If everyone playing $25NL actually tried to get better, then eventually, you might need skills A, B, C and D to win, and even that might not be a guarantee.

What is absolutely certain is that even if everyone played a "perfect" TAG game of 20/18/3.5, with an ATSB of 33%, a wtsd of 24, and a W@SD of 51, not everyone would win. Someone would adjust. Someone would find cracks. Someone would run good. The rake would eat away at all of them.

And most would end up losers.

Poker is built on the corpses of losers. Putting on this mock-happy face of "Hey, look, poker teaches you all this good stuff too. It's fun and wholesome!" is just crap. It deludes those who think Sklansky is God and even worse, it all but concedes that "gambling" is bad and should be confined only to those dens of iniquity (Gary, IN) where even a gambling establishment might not pull down the public morals.

That's conceding their point. That's telling Joe McCarthy that "yes, we need to root out the Commies in Hollywood, but really sir, I'm not one. Please don't hurt me."

Fuck that.

People like to gamble. They bet on dogs, horses, little bouncing balls, Bingo, cards, slots, whatever. They don't care what, as long as they get a fix. We should spend less time telling people how awful they are for being normal. That's my answer to the UIGEA. Shut the fuck up you freaks. Crawl back into whatever snake-handling pit you came from. and leave us adults alone. We're the normal ones. You bible-thumping jackasses are the freaks.

If only I were in Congress.

Commitment and pot size

I did a review at +1 of Professional No Limit, vol. 1. I won't repeat it here, but I will say again that I think this is a really, really interesting book. Just remember the wisdom of Izmet, "Books are meant to be thought about, not agreed with."

Even if you disagree with some of the particulars, there are a lot of big concepts that are not really invented, but re-emphasized in the book. One of them is planning your hand before you put any money in the middle. What you should plan your hand around most of the time is either stealing or committing all your chips.

A lot of times, you may think you're doing this, but then you realize how often you see your two cards, bang the "bet pot" button to open the pot, get called somewhere, bet the flop for 3/4 of the pot and really at this point haven't even thought about what to do next. At least, that's true of me, and I suspect most people, even good SSHE TAGs. Maybe especially them.

The big part of this plan is understanding, through the hand, when you're committed and when you aren't. When you're not committed, you usually are looking to play a small pot against a wide range. When you're committed, you're looking to play a big pot against a smaller range that you still think you beat.

Here's a hand where my plan changed on every street, and it fucked me badly.

SB is a 53/4/.8 fish. Very bad player who has sucked out on a couple of others recently. We start with effective stacks of 315.

I open As5s from the co for $7. SB is the only caller.

The button was an unknown, the BB was a known TAG regular, so I'm stealing here. I dont' want to play a big pot without a big flush draw. I'm happy to make a standard raise, keep a lot of money behind, and pick up the pot preflop or on the flop. That's pretty obvious, but just worth noting. I has a plan: Steal.

Flop is 8s7d6c, pot: $16

This is the kind of flop smacks a fish's cold calling range in the face. All those junk Kx, Ax hands that he just has to call with now have either an OESD with a 9, a pair with an overcard kicker, or maybe pair+draw. None of these hands ever fold, I have a weak draw, we still have more than $300 behind, so there's no reason to bet. I can maybe steal this on the turn or river, or I might get lucky and hit a four and get some value from 7x or 8x. I check.

Now, my plan hasn't changed, I'd still like to steal this pot, but I have almost no chance of doing it on this kind of flop, so I choose to keep my stack intact and see if I get something to work with on the turn or river.

Turn is the 4s. Pot: $16. SB leads for $10

Jackpot. I not only turn a straight, but pick up the nut flush.

Now, I want to make a small raise. I want to get value from two-pair, pair+9 hands, and I want to set him up for a big river bet in case I river the nuts. So I make it $45 and he calls.

A couple things I should have noted here that I didn't. The first is, we still have $260 left behind, and the pot is only 105. I have a big hand right now, but I'm not yet committed to anything. I have plenty of room to fold, and more importantly, unless i spike a spade, if something happens that leads to us getting all in on the river, there's a good chance I'm chopping at best.

River: 9d Pot: $106. SB checks.

I'm not amused by the river card. I'm more concerned that he can get away from two pair. He might freak out now and think I have a ten for some reason. I think fish genuinely think this way. There's no reason to think he has a ten, but I dont' want to worry him too much, so I want to keep my VB small. So I bet $60.

SB checkraises all in for $254 total, and it's 194 for me to call.

Now, there are a lot of ways to look at this hand, but I really think that commitment is clarifying a lot of situations for me. Actually, I think commitment is just about pot size, and understanding what size pot you want to play immediately, and how you need to calibrate each action based on what the pot is, what it might be based on a bet/check/raise, and how the pot will dictate your reaction to an opponent's bet/check/raise.

I've been playing PLO the last few days, too distracted with moving and everything else to put in a NL session, and the same principle is applying--looking at hands immediately and asking "what size pot would I like to play," and then evaluating that as one of your action criteria postflop makes the game make sense.

I have to admit, I'm pretty dense about this stuff. I'm sure for a lot of people, this is headslappingly obvious. For me, it's explaining a lot of what limit didn't teach me. I really for the first time feel like I'm playing hands with a strategy that isn't just a modified version of a limit game, where you can isolate actions and evaluate them individually.

Poker is fun when it makes sense.

Coming soon: Pix of a new apartment and ytd results