The Best Time To Play

Now when it comes to learning about the game there are a huge amount of areas to focus on but all of these fall under two categories: (1) Learning the strategies on a hand-to-hand basis - generally how you play your hands while at the table. (2) Learning certain disciplines while not at the tables - bankroll management, analysing, preparing, table selecting, dealing with tilt etc etc.

It's often been said but it's worth saying again: you may be great at knowing about category 1, in that you may have an in-depth knowledge of strategy and know exactly when to fold, call or raise etc, but if you have the odd failings in a few of the areas in Category 2 you may be on a hiding to nothing. There are loads of metagame mistakes that can easily take the edge away from perfectly good strategical players. One of these, especially for the amateur player, is not playing at certain times.

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Now I woke up this morning, sat up in bed, reached for my laptop and fired it up. During the first part of last year and without hesitation I would have dived onto the PKR site, joined the first table that looked all right, and started playing poker. Today, I didn't do this for three reasons: (1) I still have some admin work to do for work. (2) On a Bank Holiday Monday afternoon, the majority of players playing at $50nl - $100nl are going to be fairly decent players. (3) I've had a good start to the year, poker-wise, and want to spend my afternoon down the pub while in a good mood.

Now while some of these reasons for not playing may not be how a professional player thinks, I have decided that these personal considerations mean that it would be wrong of me to play poker at this precise time. To stress: I would like to play poker while I can play my "A" game and with a clear head. All this means, if I am going to play poker then I'm going to play later!

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Playing at the best time is only a tiny aspect of the game but it's a very important piece of the puzzle that should be firmly in place when sitting down to a game.

First MTT of 2011

Fittingly, my first MTT in 2011 was the $33 buy-in, $5K ADDED for Gold+ Members. There were 181 runners and I just played fairly safe and conservative. By limping in and just crawling along for a minimum cash place finish I certainly didn't deserve any more than the 28th place I nabbed and a payout of $93.87. Nevertheless, this did, at least, give me another profit of ~$60 for Day 2. The highlight, about half-way in, was nabbing this Queen on the river which I later found out, from the chatbox, was a 1-outer.

  

You may question my call of the re-raise but it's very hard to throw away QQ in that spot. Anyway, here's a nice screenshot of my 28th place and my first cash place finish of the year:

I ended the day with just a few orbits on a $25nl table and left while about $8.50 up. Now while I'm not exactly on a heater it's nice to be up after the first two days. However, one always has to be careful about obsessing over one's results. In fact, if you are too heavily results-driven you actually end up not playing your optimum game at the table. Understand that tomorrow is like any other day and anything can happen.

Anyway, in saying all that, I'll obsess one more time. At the end of every week (Sunday evening) I've decided to record my progress and keep a tally of how things are going - just to put things into context.

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ONLINE: WEEK 1 =  +$135 (~£70)  / JANUARY = +$135 (~£70)  / YEAR = +$135 (~£70)

LIVE: N/A

My Second Session of 2011

I will not be doing regular updates like this for all my sessions. It's just because it's the first day of the year and...er...well...ok...it's been a good start. My second session was done on my laptop between 9PM -Midnight while I sat comfortably in my nice armchair while the missus watched a TV drama about the early days of Morecombe and Wise. It wasn't crap TV and I was only single-tabling so I wasn't breaking any of my "Dos and Don'ts."

The session started with a $50nl cash game, single-table, session consisting of 84 hands. Truth be told, it was a tricky table, my results were dire and I was down ~$32 before too long. I then switched to single-tabling a $100nl game and played 77 hands. For about 50 hands it was the same old story - no decent cards, no opportunities, nothing doing and I was down ~$50 into the session. But then the breakthrough occurred:

 

Flush draw and straight draw - very nice. I aint going anywhere baby! - and certainly not for $16 on the turn!!:

I aint gonna go into the ins and outs of why I played it like this but my opponent questioned my call on the turn and although I was getting desperate I reckon it's not so bad. In any case it went towards giving me the positive start I needed and I end Day 1 being up $66. I'm now off to go kill some virtual orcs and dwarfs and such-like. I'm very aware of the story of the boy who blew his own trumpet too much and ended up turning into an ass but I'll leave you with a screenshot of my PokerOfficer graph for this second session.

P.S. Tomorrow is the $5K ADDED MTT for Gold+ members (buy-in $30) on PKR and it's pretty much the only tourney I really try to make a habit of entering. Unfortunately, I have to finish off some boring admin of the highest order for work so I'll try to finish this by the time the tourny kicks off.

SnGs & MTTs - Sharkscope Stats Reset

In the spirit of resetting all my records back to zero for the new year, I have decided to reset my sharkscope graph so I get a clean and fresh start. I subscribed to sharkscope to do this ($9.99 for 200 searches) but I think it was worth it. My graph, or rather non-existent graph, now looks like this:

SnGs - I will not play these often.

MTTs - Entry to fast-structured MTTs will be kept down to a minimum with the odd entry to freezeouts with a $30-$50 entry fee. I'll enter the $5K ADDED MTT for Gold+ members whenever possible.

Satellites - I'll enter a few of these with an entry fee of around $10-$40. 

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For the sake of posterity I'm going to post my sharkscope graphs as of 31st December 2010. Yes, you're absolutely right, I probably wouldn't do this if they were below $0 but you know how it is, poker players are painful egomaniacs at heart.

GRAPH 1 - This is my SnG graph up to the end of December 2010. All sharkscope graphs for PKR start from around mid-December 2007 or, if beyond that, whenever the player started playing.  I started playing at PKR from December 2006 so this misses pretty much my entire results for 2007 but does track my results over three years from mid-December 2007.

As you can see I had a great first 600 games before things started to go horribly wrong over the next 200 games. Only a 1st place finish in the "Phase Tournies" managed to wipe away the deficit.

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GRAPH 2 - This is my MTT graph up to the end of December 2010.

In my humble opinion, as you can see, this graph shows that I'm pretty damn shit hot at MTTs. However, joking aside, it's a bit of a swizz as the sample size (490 games) is so small. Let's be fair, I got very lucky by getting back-to-back final table finishes in two MTTs where $5000 was added to the prize pool! Furthermore, I believe that the game around the 470th mark that shows a ~$500 profit was my PKR Live 5 place - a tourny where I actually won Sweet Fanny Adams! Anyway, onto the last one...

GRAPH 3 - This just shows all games played up to the end of 2010.

This graph shows my results reaching up into the stratosphere in 2010 (relatively speaking, of course, this is a tiny rise in comparison to many others). Nevertheless, I'm still of the opinion that to make big money in MTTs you need a lot more luck than those who make big money in cash games.

Anyway, the graph has been reset, the new year is upon us - onwards and upwards!!!

My First Session of 2011

This session lasted from about 12:30AM - 3:30AM. I single-tabled $50nl for a while, then went on to single-table $100nl. I had all my chips in twice with KK (see below) and lost both hands. I started off fine while picking up a few small pots here and there at the $50nl table. Then a player (ept78) sat down to my left and was sitting out for a while. In his first hand at the table this happened:

Although his call on the turn did send alarm bells ringing it's tough to fold KK in that spot against a newcomer to the table who's playing his first hand. You may also question my call on the river as well but by then I was committed. Anyway, straight after this, he buggered off and left the table with $30 of my chips. This meant I was down ~$30. I carried on playing but then had a hankering to play $100nl. All was well for a while and then this little curious hand happened:

This 3-way, AA v KK v QQ, pot has happened to me once before (while I held QQ) at an MTT at The Vic and it's one of those "wow" moments. However, it's not as uncommon as you might think and typing in QQ v KK v AA on youtube will get you quite a few hits. This one actually has a 55 and a 77 thrown in as well!! Anyway soon after this, while I was still down ~$40 I found quite a nice little $100nl table where I managed to build a starting stack of $100 up to $140. This final session, within a session, meant I finished up $5 on the night!!

I leave you with a screenshot of my PokerOfficer graph showing how the evening progressed: