VPPs for week 4: ~26k

VPP total: ~194k

Pace: (106,000).

Because February is 28 days long, I am going to count January 31st as my February, and March 1st as February’s last day. Therefore, my month is officially over.

On a good note, I was up for the week. I’m not sure how many buy ins, since its scattered across my desktop and my laptop, but it was a solid amount of buy ins.

I noted last week that I was going out of town this month and that I would make a good faith effort to put in full volume. I put in the effort, but it was just impossible. I was having such a good time on the trip, I wasn’t going to stray away from my desire to connect with my mom and friends just to play poker. Also, I can’t 6 table on my laptop, its way too hard. I either need to buy a laptop with a big screen like Max has, borrow someone elses laptop when I go out of town, or just use Max’s laptop when I’m out of town. Probably not going to do the first one, but may use Max’s, at least on trips where I’m with Max.

I think I could easily look at this month negatively and say I failed because I didn’t reach my monthly goal and I’m in too big of a hole to catch up. I may have had that perspective too, but I got better clarity about this challenge and how to handle the year when I talked to Jared Tendler this week. Talking to him made me realize a few things. One, I have never put in this sort of volume before, and I need to let my mind build its endurance up. I had a lot of times this month where my focus was lacking after a session had gone on for awhile and I felt like I was playing losing poker.  That may always happen occasionally, but I think over time of doing this for awhile my mind will improve and it will happen a lot less, if I stay mindful of it, journal, and work on it. But I also have to be mindful of my limits. So I have set this gameplan for the rest of the year:

Start out getting up to 6 tables. If I feel like I have lost focus or something of that flavor, I will go down to 3 tables until my awareness comes back to a more full focus.

I think this is a good plan, it will guarantee that I’m not sacrificing my best profit strategy at the expense of this challenge. I don’t want to play 6 tables of losing poker just for volumes sake.

The truth is, 194,000 is the most VPPs I have ever made in a month before. To expect myself to be able to do 300,000 right off the bat was a mistake. But I’m really confident I can make up the pace. I know that if I manage a session well, and as I get more and more used this regimen, I can put in 20-25k vpp days. Then if all goes as planned, and I’m making a large amount with my game selection strategy (which is basically play anyone), then I’ll be able to add 2k’s and 5k’s to my stake spread, which will allow me to make VPPs. What I’m saying is, just because I’m off pace by 100k vpps, doesn’t mean its all over.

My goal for next month: 250k VPPs. If 300k comes, that’s great too. But I’m going to try to not push it to harder than my brain is able to go. I have to remember that poker isn’t a normal 9-5, its so much more mentally draining, and therefore requires more care.

Yesterday I reached 100k Vpp for the year, which is actually slightly behind where I would like to be at this point but still a strong start.

Now for the analysis.

In hindsight, I think the hands I posted for the HoTW were a little too much of a leveling battle sort of thing to be analyzed very well to anyone who wasn’t in the match. Still, I think that they provide some good insight into how I approach these sort of spots and how I think about what certain things mean about how my opponent is thinking.

I hand 1, I actually think that on paper this is a fold. Although it seems like this player is running over me and must be bluffing me sometimes with his overbets, he probably isn’t doing it in this spot because:

a) His line doesn’t seem to rep much, however he probably has several hands in his range here that he would do this with for value: T9, AT, 44, and I think this player is actually capable of just having something like KK here.

b) He’s overbetting 3x the pot, which would be a very ambitious bluff especially since he showed me an overbet bluff before. It just seems unlikely he’d bluff in this way, I could see him twice pot overbetting or 1.5x overbetting as a bluff, but its rare to see anyone bluff 3x the pot.

However, I did end up making the call and…

villain 1: bets 1075 and is all-in
redgrape: calls 1075
*** SHOW DOWN ***
villain 1: shows [3d Ah] (high card Ace)
redgrape: shows [Ad 9h] (high card Ace – King+Queen+Jack+Nine kicker)
redgrape collected 2450 from pot

Even with the results, believe it or not I still don’t like my call. I felt like he was going to try an overbet bluff again because of how much I was folding, but I just don’t think the analysis adds up. I would like to say that I had a moment of clarity and just knew he was bluffing, but I didn’t.

The 2nd hand I feel I played way better. When the bet happened, I actually immediately felt like folding even though he wasn’t really repping anything besides like AK and maybe a slowplayed boat or AA. It just seemed like an unlikely spot to bluff and I didn’t know if he was capable of overbetting as a bluff.

But there was one important thing that completely changed my mind, his chat. He chatted about 3 seconds after he made the bet, I hadn’t timebanked at all and there was no reason to think I was leaning one way or the other. Most professionals know that chatting usually means your strong, and I felt like that he may have tried to level me into thinking he was dumb enough to do that. But regardless of his thought process, the fact that he chatted so quickly made me think he was uncomfortable. And if he was, he’s probably bluffing.

The 2nd and less important thing is I have blockers to AK and AQ, which makes it less likely for him to have value hands.

I ended up calling and…

Villain 2 said, “big bet lol”
redgrape: calls 1180 and is all-in
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Villain 2: shows [6c 8d] (a pair of Nines)
redgrape: shows [Kh Qs] (a pair of Nines – Ace+King kicker)
redgrape collected 2860 from pot

VPP for the week: ~78k

VPP Total: ~168k

Total Pace: (57,000) VPPs

So I actually did it and then some. I made the amount of VPPs in a week I realistically needed to make to get this record. Unfortunately, I practically broke even doing it. I was down 3 buy ins overall, minuscule considering my overall volume.

Read the rest of this entry

Two hands from this week, all of them were spots that I rarely get put in. Overbet scenarios are mostly about capability, ranges, and gameflow, Is he capable of making this play with something other than the nuts? What is a repping and what does it look like I have? And does he think I’m going to call or fold?

Read the rest of this entry

So i played this player named C-J Rubin7 a lot today. Guy is a uncreative regular who I guess is a winner at lower stakes. Anyways, he’s quite terrible and really seems to hate me. He was basically chatting like this all day after I said “wp” once when he made a bad call. The only thing i really said after that was wp and nh. I actually blocked his chat for a while, but opened it back up and after seeing what he was saying I couldn’t stop laughing.

Here’s a gem from it:

“redgrape: nh
C-J Rubin7: lol
redgrape: wp
C-J Rubin7: u rivered me as usuall
C-J Rubin7: u moron
C-J Rubin7: u are dum
C-J Rubin7: lol
C-J Rubin7: wpwp
C-J Rubin7: PRETTY GIRL ROCK ROCK ROCK ROCK
C-J Rubin7: regret that 555 hand ?
C-J Rubin7: U EFFED UP
C-J Rubin7: MY WALK
C-J Rubin7: MY TALK
C-J Rubin7: ITS NOT MY FAULT
C-J Rubin7: SO PLEASE DONT TRIP
C-J Rubin7: DONT HATE ME CUZ IM BETTER THAN U
C-J Rubin7: DONT HATE ME CUZ IM BETTER THAN U

VPP for the week: ~30k

VPP Total: ~90k

Pace: (60,000) VPPs

Last week I got a lot of personal issues that came up and it made it nearly impossible to reach my VPP goal. Results wise it turned out a lot better. I was up 8 buy ins for the week. It’s really not that great for the amount of volume I put in but it’s a relief to get something positive going. It helps me stay more grounded when I’m playing if I feel like I don’t “have to” win.

Next week I really, really want to reach my VPP goal of 75,000 for the week. I’m going to wake up early a few of the weekdays to make it easier for me. I feel positive about my potential results this week. I’ve made it a point to talk with Max more about strategy and I’ve also made a few more general adjustments. I feel very confident about my game right now… I’m hoping the results will reflect that.

VPP total: 60.5k

So if you didn’t already know, I’m going for SNE this year. It’s my first time going for it and I’ve got to say I’m pleasantly surprised at how easy its been so far. I’m usually playing 2 tables at a time (almost never more than 3) and mostly at the 570 and 345 level. I didn’t play the first 4 days of January so getting 60k vpps in what is essentially 8 work days is pretty awesome. My goal is to get over 120k vpps every month and hopefully get this thing done by September, giving me the last 3 months to squeeze out the 1.25 mill milestone bonus if I choose to do so.

I’m very very happy with my play so far this month. I’m transitioning back from Superturbos on ftp, so I have a great foundation in my 25bb and under play. Sadly, my 30-70bb play wasn’t really up to par, and consequently I went on a little downswing. Now I think that a lot of that was bad luck, but over the past weeks I’ve been watching videos and talking to Danny a lot, and I think my play has improved drastically already. If I continue to put in the studying and work with Danny over this entire year, I think that I can achieve a extremely high level of play.

I also find myself getting really excited over the prospect of Danny getting the vpp record. What he’s doing is truly astounding and I suggest you watch him play if you get the chance, the level of play he’s able to achieve while playing over 6 tables at a time is totally insane.

Go Danny!

I am having a home game tonight, coinciding with Thursday night NBA games, and I’m excited to watch. In the past several years, the only sport where I could stand watching a team that wasn’t “my team” was the NFL. But this year, I actually find myself enjoying watching the NBA this year, even if it’s not my team.

I saw this coming as soon as Wade, James, and Bosh all decided to play for the Miami Heat. For the entire week after “The Decision,” everyone in the media and who I talked to seemed to hate the move. I personally hated it too. But later I realized it was probably the best thing to happen to the NBA. I knew it when I was watching the Heat play after I busted out of the NAPT LA HU event. For some reason, I really wanted to see them lose. I actually cared. I had never cared about whether a team won or lost about any NBA team except my own. And it seemed like everyone wanted to see something, whether it was the Miami Heat becoming the greatest team in NBA history or failing miserably.

The NBA had already been making a comeback in recent years with the renewing of the Celtics, Lakers rivalry. The Miami Heat drama added more steam to that train. But as the season went another reason to watch the NBA came about: There are several teams that are championship caliber. Last year, it was only the Lakers, Celtics, and Cavs. This year, you have Orlando coming on strong with a double digit win streak. You have a team like Oklahoma City with a ton of talent. You have the Spurs with the best record in the NBA. And you have an improved Chicago team who seems to be able to beat anyone. Then there is Miami and the Celtics, with a huge possible Eastern Conference championship. And still the winner of that has to beat the defending champion Lakers in the finals.

Now when the NFL season ends I’ll have another sport to obsess on.

You guys like the snazzy title? I’m going to post weekly in my blog, every Saturday or Sunday morning, to give an update and general thoughts on my chase to get the Pokerstars VPP record. Thanks for all the support from the readers. I was surprised to see how many people gave me a “good luck”-ish remark either in chat or during a game.

VPP pace needed: 75,000

Weekly VPP: ~60,000.

Ahead/Behind pace: (15,000)

Overall, this wasn’t a good week. I fell behind pace mainly because I wasn’t doing too well results wise and it was affecting me emotionally to the point where I just had to quit for the day to avoid playing my C game and losing money. For week 2, I’m not sure if I can totally gain back my pace, but I am confident by the end of the month that I will hit my 300,000 VPP goal.

Reflecting on this week, there are two things that stuck out in my mind.

1. I got a lot of action from regs and they were playing a lot differently than they normally do. I am pretty sure that because I’m such a huge lobby whore, my bad results of late, and the general tightness of the sng community that, at the very least, I have been the subject of strategy discussion between some regulars. A lot of the regs I were playing were making some good strategy adjustments against me. To combat this I decided to lessen my table load and play the regulars one by one, think about their strategies, and come up with the optimal counter strategies against their play. . I found that after I did this I started to objectively feeling more confident that I had an edge. I’m going to keep doing this in the future for players that I tend to play a lot.

2. I have to be confident in my ability to play well. I had a lot of strategy discussion with Max this week and it caused me to adjust my general strategy for the better. But it also caused me to overthink things a lot and make poor decisions.   When I am losing, it often comes to my mind that I need to drastically change my strategy to get back to winning. But it’s a fallacy. Whether or not I play well has very little correlation to whether I am winning or losing. Even if this was the case, when I start to make generalized strategy adjustments it causes me to lose focus on the aspects of the game that have caused me to win over the years, and therefore make me play worse. An example this week was “I need to be more stationy.” Simply, I felt that I was folding the best hand too much. Meanwhile, while I’m in a spot where I normally fold because of reason x, y and z, all I can think of is “But you need to be more stationy.” And I make a bad call.

Because of this, I have a goal for next week. The goal is to just play poker, not overthink it, and trust that when the time comes where the new strategy thoughts I have had throughout the week becomes relevant, that they will sway my decision with the right degree of intensity. Because as I learned this week, forcing in new strategy thoughts causes me to loose sight of the most important factors in decision making I already know.

It was really hard this week to stay happy in and out of poker. I found myself having a hard time enjoying myself. But I’m optimistic next week that I am going to do well. And if I don’t, I’m going to try to enjoy myself all the same.

Most of people I talked to and some who commented on the chapmoney hand had differing opinions on whether this was a call or fold. It’s definitely a tough and interesting spot, and what I like most about it is it isn’t marginal, the difference in EV of the correct and incorrect decision in this hand is huge.

Here are my thoughts:

1) Here are the 8′s he can have from the flop, 84, 85, A8, then 8xdd. I’m gonna discount 87 because I think most players elect to c/r the turn with it. The hands above make up only a small portion of his calling range, which is as wide as K high, good Q high hands or even some suited 3′s and 2′s that this player is very capable of playing pre.

2) The turn definitely narrows his range, I expect him to continue with a pair of 6′s or better, and all of his pair with draw hands. I also expect something like K7 or K8 to continue here. T

3) Now on the river, I immediately think back to the flop where it seems implausible that he has very many 8′s. I also look at his betsize, why is it so big? If he is going to put me on a hand like I have, which I think he will, does he really expect me to call? He may have also correctly assessed that I don’t have many 8′s in my range. Lastly, I highly doubt he would ever make this bet with worse than an 8 high straight, because if he had a set he would have raised at some point, and this would be an absolutely retarded bet to anyone with a brain with two pair.

Now should I call? There are two issues with my bluffing assessment:

a) What is he bluffing with? There are only a few hands I can think of, the few busted diamond draws that didn’t make a straight and he didn’t 3bet preflop, this would be like QTs and J9s, but there really aren’t that many. He could turn a pair into a bluff, which is plausible, but it would have to have not made two pair or a straight, which means hands like K7, or K6/ Q6. Combining these two sets of hands still does not make up a very large bluffing range.

b) Is he even capable of this ballsy overbet bluff. Very debatable.

What ended up happening is I called and he showed me 89dd for a fd rivered into the stone cold nuts. I think that I overlooked issue “a” here, there’s not many hands for him to have that are bluffs. I put a little too much weight on issue “b”, which I thought was true, and the betsizing, which may have meant more “I have the nuts” instead of “I think you’ll fold.”

If I had to guess what he was thinking here, I’d have to say that he probably realized that even with a hand as strong as a set here I would have to check back the river, which means he has to bet. As to why he bet so big, I’m not sure if he was aware that I would think it looked like a bluff or that knowing he couldn’t be beat and that he had to bet, just chose the biggest bet because he felt like I wouldn’t be able to fold a set or two pair. I’m guessing it’s more the latter.

In hindsight, I think this is a fold, but in a similar spot where he has more hands he can bluff I would lean more towards call. However, I’m starting to think that I give my opponents a little too much credit for making a good bluff, and I’m probably going to start tightening up in those spots.