Howdy folks!

Lately I've joined a java class at my university and I've started writing down some code for a hand replayer/poker tracker. It's so much fun, like a page turner I just can't put aside.
At the moment I'm working on a hand parser for Europoker tourney histories,
and hopefully this will become a hand replayer in a reasonalbe amount of time.
After I finish that I might make it parse histories from other sites and cash games, and after that I will hopefully make it into a data base software, a little bit like hold'em manager, but my idea is to make it command based.
What I mean is that you will be able to type in commands to create any possible question about your poker history and quickly get an answer.
For example, such a question might be: how much money have I lost/won
by check-calling A-high flops with a flush draw but no straight draw with toppair and a kicker between 2 and 9, and the stacks were lmore than 50BB?
This would require the user to learn how to phrase such questions and might thus be less user-friendly than say holdem manager, but after learning this "language", it would probably take less time to execute exactly what you want.
Of course I could also make common commands available in graphical menus and hot keys.

Caveat: I have no idea whatsoever if the database part of the program will be efficient enough to handle something like 300 000 hands... :P well,well, holding my fingers crossed!

Now I'd like to hear, do you think that this sounds like the goods, or are you fully satisfied with the poker software you are using?

Is there any feature you've always wanted to see in poker software?

Greatful for any feedback :)

Cheers!

The story of people being hit with bad variance is an old one. Frankly, I find it quite boring when people complain about having long bad runs. However, I've not been doing particularly well in HUSNG, so I've started think about what the reason is, and what I should do now. My impressions so far is that people do, in general, play HUSNG quite poorly. I can also see some imperfections in my game; mainly my patience is not good enough and I get too easily emotionally stirred. Of course, my techinical side needs improvement also, but technically I feel I should have an observable edge over the opposition.

I think I begin to understand what it takes to really beat HUSNG's. You must have an almost inexhaustible supply of patience and balance.

The thing about variance is that its not the same for everybody. It's largely connected to how big your edge is. I think this has created a negative feedback loop in my case;
Unability to handle variance + eventual lack of skill -> Tilt/ bad decision making -> Less edge -> More variance -> More tilt -> etc...

At the moment I have a sample of about 1500 games with -2% ROI after a huge downswing (worst I've had so far). It's not a disaster perhaps, and after rakeback and bonuses I'm probably about break-even. However, I've put quite a lot of effort and time into HUSNG, so results-wise, its not worth it. However, I'm happy with the things I've learned along the way, so I have no regrets.

I'm unsure about how much of my poor results are explained by tilt, variance and the level of my A-game. Although 1500 games feels like a lot, there are big variations in samples of that size. A 3000 game sample would, however, give a pretty solid picture of what is going on.

As it is, I don't trust that I will be able to play my A-game after losing 30-40 buy-ins. So I think I will cut down my HUSNG volume to a fraction of what it was, only to keep in shape and keep evolving. Instead, I'm going to play some 6max/5max cash. I hope that it is possible for me to have a larger edge and lower variance.

In the future when I feel more stable again, I think I will give HUSNG another go :)

Hopefully, I will have some fun things to write about 5-6max games soon! Thanks for reading, and good luck at the tables!
/Ron

Whenever we start out playing poker, we are bombarded with statements such as "position" is everything in poker. In particular I've read that position is even more important in heads-up, but I don't remember why that is supposed to be.

I am a HU sit and go player, so although what I say may apply to other forms of poker, this is what I am thinking about.

I'm sure some people will be upset by this post and think that if I don't realize that position is key, I'm just a fish. The thing is, I'm not actually saying that position is not an advantage, I'm only saying that the common arguments are quite poor and don't prove the importance of position.

The general argument why position is important is that when you get to act after your opponent you have more information and can thus make better decisions. Usually this is followed up by examples where we get to play a hand in position and then compare the same hand with the same flop, etc, to see that everything is much worse out of position. It's harder to extract value, it's harder to potcontrol, and the flow of information works to the advantage of the button.

To be honest, I've never trusted these arguments 100%. However, I do play tighter OOP and I do cbet relentlessly IP.

The problem is that, first of all, we are actually OOP pre flop on the button, and even post flop, we don't always get to act last: after we cbet the flop, Villain acts after us, and is often the one closing the flop action. In fact, we only get to act last if villain chooses to lead, or if we check back.

An interesting thought is that position might be good because people think its good. For example, if people think position is an advantage post-flop, they might play too tight pre-flop out of fear, and also fold to too many cbets on the flop or fold to that second barrell on the turn too easily. Another argument is that we have an accepted culture of cbetting something like 80% of flops and 100% of dry flops. Many players give away a lot of informationon the flop by their style. For example, a passive bad player will mostly check-call or check-fold the flop and a check-raise will almost always be a monster. Depending on the frequency of the check-call we can decide how strong it is. Against a rare check-caller we will only second barrell for value, and against a frequent check-caller we can multi-barrel-bluff on boards where there are a lot of hands that should fold -- especially if scarecards hit.The player IP is however giving out almost no information on the flop since all flops are played identically (cbet).

A good player will however check-raise bluff dry flops, might check-raise medium holdings, and will certainly check-raise draws. We also have to fear monster hands being check-called. Against this player we can't cbet 80-100%, so we start to leak information as well, and obviously, we can't read as much into his actions as we could versus a fish.

So as we approach good/optimal play, it is much less clear that position is an advantage.

Also, we read that position is more important with deep stacks. Now let's look into one example. You have KK on the button, effective stacks are 40BB. You min-raiseand get called. Flop is T42 ddc. You cbet half pot and get raised. You figure that villain can do this with KT+, 53, A5,A3, diamonds, and some combo/monster draw, and of course 22,44, (TT if he doesnt 3bet that). So you raise, because he might get it in, and you dont wan't him to draw to the nuts with great implied odds. He raises all-in, and you just have to call. He shows 24 ... f***.

This can only happen IP! The accepted theory says that the button can profitably open a very wide range to 2x or 3x. Thus the BB can call very wide for implied odds and have a great SPR (stack-to-pot-ratio) with a hand like 76s vs all of the premium hands of the button. When the BB calls pre flop, the action is closed, so a small pot is guaranteed. It is much harder for the button to have a 4BB pot with 65s vs AK+, because opening to 2x doesnt close the action, and precisely those hands that we hope to stack will 3bet us.

One more example: You have AK, Villain has AT, i.e. a setup. Are you rather IP or OP? If you are OP, you will get a 3bet pot, or possibly all-in. If you are OP, it is likely that your opponent will just flat. Then on the QJ8 flop, you check back and fold to his turn lead... :/ Sure, AT might 3bet, and sure, I haven't calculated the EV of being in a 3betpot with AK vs AT, but it should be good.

So in conclusion, I wish there were more deep-going analyses about position, (or maybe there is). However I think its much more involved than most people think, and the reason it's difficult is that the question is so wide. It's pretty hard to calculate the EV of a strategy IP and OOP because all poker situations and all counter strategies should be taken into account, and that would be like writing an essay on the whole theory of poker... :)

As an alternative one could try to "reason" about it. First think about the river; why is position good there? If it is, is the advantage bigger or smaller at the turn? What opportunities to increase or decrease potsize, at will, does the SB and the BB have? In general, I believe the power of the button is its right to check behind, and thereby limit - at least temporarily - the pot size. On the other hand, the BB has the power of check-raising the flop and thereby controlling when the whole stack will go in at the river, or only about the half stack.

I welcome any discussion this may lead to :)
Peace out

Making paragraphs in this text didn't work out... SORRY!

What I have in mind for this post is to talk in general about what lines one can take that are good for either getting value for your good hands or making a good bluff with possibly the worst hand. Obviously, understanding what your opponent's line means is equally important.
I believe that the art of good poker is [among other things] to become proficient at recognizing and interpreting lines. You should know what kind of lines are standard for various player types to take in various circumstances. A really good player will succeed more often than a bad player to differentiate between for example someone who is slowplaying, from someone who is pretending to slowplay or someone who is pot controlling. The good player will know if flatting is stronger than raising on a particular board and villain and so on.
I believe this knowledge of various lines comes with experience, and the more you focus on which lines you and your opponent are taking, the faster you will learn.
Of course many factors come into play when it comes to deciding what story a line is telling. I'm not going to make a complete list, but some of the most important are: images, dynamics, opponent's skill level and style, board texture.
Another important thing is the 'Mathematical Correctness' of your line. It's a bit hard to actually separate mathematics from psychology in poker. They are actually intertwined. Mathematics includes the game theory of the psychological deceptions we are making, and phychology is hard to do without ruling out mathematically horrendous plays.

Getting value and bluffing

The main theorem of value bets and bluffs is .....
You can't get value unless your hand can be percieved as a bluff,
or at least as a weaker hand that can get value from something else. Likewise, its not possible to get away with a bluff
unless your bet has a chance of being percieved as a value bet.

This is essentially balancing, i.e. playing your strong and weak hands the same way. However, often it is preferable to play an unbalanced strategy.
So we need a second 'theorem'....

The manner in which various lines are precieved varies from player to player, but many players share the same or similar perceptions.

This is called a population tendency, which means that you are really never readless! So we can exploit this tendency by playing our bluffs and value hands differently!
Again, the art is to know what the population tendency is. If you know that a line is generally seen as more bluffy than a ticket to value town, then use it to get value, and if a line looks like pure value, then use it to bluff.
An example is in lowstakes HUSNG: When you get raised on the river it is basically never a bluff, which often makes bet/folding the river a profitable play that exploits the population tendency.
Now let's go through some general examples of lines.

Value lines:

• The slowplay - can be good vs super tight players or vs ppl that always stab at weakness
• Pretended halfpot stab - good vs ppl who are fond of bluff catching and when you are both percieved as weak
• Pretended overbet bluff - when your opponent is percieved to have a pretty strong hand which is not folding to standard betsize (you need to have the nuts basically)
• Induction by pretended pot control - vs an opponent who can hand read and is capable of making moves esp. on the river, this is more of an advanced play.

Bluffs:

• The river overbet - obviously when a smaller bluff will not work, but a big one will work often enough
• Pretended slowplay - works better OOP since you could have wanted to c/r but villain checks back. also works better if you usually barrell. the typical situation is a dry board where not many hands hit, and it would be hard for you to extract value. actually you would balance here, that is play your strong hands slower too.
• Plain 3-street bluff - works if your opponent calls with too many marginal hands, doesn't expect 3 barrells, or board texture runs out really good for you
• Pretended pot control catching courage on river - if there are more hands in your range that would pot control and many semibluffs your opponent could jam on the turn, then on a safe river it makes sense to take a stab

The point is not to learn this list by heart, but rather to think about how each value line can make sense as a bluff, and how each bluff can make sense as a value bet.
Good luck with this!

So I'm finally back to the grind after celebrating new years eve in Beijing! The last time I blogged, I told you that I moved to the $22s husng from the $11s. I got a really good start, unlike the first time I tried to move up. However my sense of security was quite foolish considering the very small sample size I had (3 days of playing). Now after playing about 150-200 games in december and january, which is still a pretty tiny sample, I've had some up's and downs. I'm now break even, and EV adjusted winnings are -258$, and I have recieved 275$ in bonuses and rakeback.

These results don't say a whole lot, and what I think is more important is how I have handled swings. A downswing of say 7BI is 154$, which is of the same order of magnitude as my winnings/bonuses/EV difference. Thus a 7BI downswing feels really significant to me. At the same time I know that is ridiculous, because a 20BI downswing is something that is really common place and most really good players have survived 40BI downswings and worse.

The conclusion is that I have a LOT to improve on my mental game. Some things that I'm trying to do are:

1) Learn to quit. The problem with quitting is that I simply don't want to quit, I want to play poker and lots of it! The solution: let the dice decide how many games I will play each day - I'll probably roll 2 or 3 dice :). I hope this excercise will teach me to eliminate my desires and emotions from the process of deciding when to quit. Of course this excercise is only for a shorter period.

2) If I make 1BI/day on avarage I'll make 30BI in a month, which is probably more than I've ever made in a month. Thus I have to realise that when I win 5BI in a day, its not pure skill, and it's not anything I can hope for repeating it self very often. I believe that in order to eliminate big emotional swings as a result of bankroll swings, its not only necessary to reduce frustration accompnied by downswings, but also to eliminate excessive joy from upswings.

There are many many other things I need to improve, but as I wrote in another post, I believe its difficult enough to learn one thing, so I'll just focus on the points above.

Point two may sound a bit zen ... hehe I was actually very inspired by a kung-fu show I saw in china. An old master said the following to the young shaolin monk Chun Yi:
"When you feel you are the strongest, you are sometimes the weakest."

In general I think poker players have lots to learn from zen/eastern philosophy. I might later do a post about "zen and the art of poker" :)

Hope you are doing well in the new year!

Hello!

Yesterday I decided for some reason to move up to the $22 level for heads-up sit-and-gos. I didn't really feel ready for it, because my results for $11 were break even after 500 games (which doesn't really say that much).
I guess I was a bit tired of playing $11 dollar games and I also recieved some nice bonuses from poker.org.

I thus decided to move all my funds from full tilt poker, since I don't play there anymore, and now I feel I'm rolled pretty good for the $22.
My first two days went really really well (+10 buy-ins in about 35 matches),
so that's pretty nice.

Last time I tried to move up to ~$20 on full-tilt I got completely crushed and really got fully tilted , so it feels good to at least not get slapped in the face immediately.

Moving up is fun and exciting, and also important to do, but from my previous experience I'm trying to take it easy and do everything I can to play my A-game.

I'm ready to move back down to $11 (although that would really suck) if I run really bad or something.

So far the competition has been quite poor. I didn't see any difference from the way people at $11 play. For example shoving all-in with air on a flop when their bet is 15 times as big as the pot and other fun stuff

Next week I'll try to keep running hot, and playing as much as possible, because after that I'm going to China for two weeks, so no poker then!

Hope you're all crushing, and have a merry merry X-mas
/Ron

This is the third and final part of the series "Attaining a winning edge and increasing it". I feel a little silly about putting that title because so far my results haven't been all that great...

When I started out playing, I read, or someone told me, that the mental side of pokeris AT LEAST AS IMPORTANT AS THE TECHNICAL. I simply refused to believe that. I thought that if you are technically strong then a "mental issue" isn't a real issue. Just ignore that mental BS, play your game and win!

Boy was I wrong. Today my perception is the complete opposite. Now I'm thinking I really need to improve my mindset, and its so hard to do that! Can I really change how I am and how I react to poker? I hope so, because it may a bigger leak than all of my technical leaks combined. Now I understand that it will actually also require WORK to improve my mindset.

If you are a beginner in poker, you may also react as I did, but although poker may seem easy and fun for some period of time, the mental challenges will come to you sooner or later, and when they do, make sure you recognize them instead of closing your eyes, and start WORKING to overcome these problems.

Through the course of your poker experience you will gather lots of good advice about things you should do and habits you should have. I will give you some examples:

- Have a stop loss. Stop a session if you are down X buy-ins.
- Don't rematch someone to whom you have lost Y games.
- Before each session gauge your emotional status - even if you are going to play regardless of the result. Are you hungry? Would you rather do something else? Are you tired? Are you afraid? Are you bored? Are you stressed?
- Before/during a session, ask yourself: Are you results-oriented right now? Or are you preparing to make reads and adjustments?
- Ask yourself if you should be playing right now, or if you should review your last session where you made tons of mistakes which you could learn tons from?
- Before a session, review previous mistakes, and keep a pen and paper, or a textfile, ready to write down new ones.

Each of these habits are actually fiendishly difficult to implement in your life (at least for me!). Of course I can't give you any magic words that completely solves this problem. What I think is important, is that there is always a way to improve, but YOU NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. No one can really tell you exactly what the steps are. There are however a few cornerstones which I believe apply to everyone:

- You have to make a commitment to yourself that you are going to think about your problems every day and think about what you can do to improve. I guarantee that all problems disolve after a certain time if given attention on a REGULAR BASIS. On the other hand if you either ignore your problems or think that there is no hope, for example having thoughts such as "tilt must be a part of who I am, its something that can never go away", then the problem will not go away.

- Don't underestimate the difficulty of getting into habits and staying in them. It may help to have a written plan on which habits you are going to learn. Expand that plan GRADUALLY. If you can get into one single new habit, you should be very satisfied and congratulate yourself. The plan doesn't have to be written. If you mentally go through it every day, then that's just fine.

- Don't rush yourself. Rushing is counter-productive. If you don't give yourself enough time to make the habits permanent, they might slip away. I strongly believe that seeing a slow but steady improvement is far superior to improving "fast" while being overwhelmed by information and pressure. Actually, SLOWER IS FASTER! So how slow is slow? Probably slower than you think.

The plan I have made for myself has the following items so far:

1) Take time to review 1 out of 13 hand histories.
2) Prioritize playing concentrated over filling your volume goal.
3) Minimize emotional outbursts.

We shall not forget the topic most frequently associated to mindset issues: TILT! The next time you tilt, you know you are tilting, but continue playing, consider the following fact:

In poker if you are good you are hoping to have a 5-10% ROI. Tilt can turn that into-5 or -10% ROI. Why are you even trying to have an edge if you are willing to work for a negative salary?

To conclude: Find things you can do to improve yourself as a poker player. Do a little at a time. Have a precise structure of what you are going to do and how much, and DON'T deviate because of some wishful and/or irrational thinking.

A final disclaimer...I wish I could say that I've tried this and that I can guarantee it works. Unfortunately I have a long way to go before I can put a leash on myself. Somehow I'm still pretty sure this is what you _should_ do

Hi folks!

Here's two quite fun hands I played today. The second might seem like a goofy call, but the first one set up a dynamic which led up to it.

One of the first hands in the game was this:


My thoughts were that both of us know the otherone probably doesnt have anything. The reason he raised is probably that he thinks I will fold.
That is precisely why it may be profitable to jam anyway. Sure he could have A-high, but it's also likely he will just float with that hand. Also I could have a pocket pair, so its not that easy to call even with A-high.

I might have taken a crazy line, but without any calculation I feel this should be +EV since we were both readless.

Then came this hand:


I think if I would have bet the flop I would be the wrong level, and I would risk being raised off my hand because of the previous hand.

On the turn I think its an easy call, but on the river something interesting happened. I figured that since I checked all three streets in this hand, the dynamics of the earlier hand should make Villain think I have given up on the hand.

So can we take something else away from this?
Well, the early "extreme" hand in this match formed a leveling dynamic
which affected the rest of the game. When that has happened there is a natural structure of levels: Level 1 is that I like to check raise paired boards.
Level 2 is that I know he knows that, Level 3 is that he knows that I knows that he knows, and so on.

If you think you can out-level your opponent, I believe its good form this dynamic on purpose by doing something random and extreme that you will both remember for the rest of the match, and then try to put yourself on the right level whenever that situation comes up again ;)

Actually the easiest and most common version of this, which everyone knows intuitively is to raise and be really aggressive early on in order to get value later. Thus you manage both to bluff and valuetown your opponent The obvious merits of this is that eventually Villain will have a smaller stack and will be fed up and forced to make a stand. But there is also a leveling component if Villain actually thinks that your are still bluffing.

I would be happy if you try to pull something like this off and tell me about it! Good luck

Fellow gamblers!

Today I've probably had my worst run ever, so I just had to come here
and whine about it ;)

I played 17 heads up matches. I lost all-ins with AA vs K5o and 33, I've lost
4 consecutive all-ins in one game, and I'm 75$ below EV according to Holdem Manager, which is 7.5 buyins.

I used the binomial calculator to see what the probability of running this bad actually is. I plugged in my winning probability to be 55% and I lost 11 games.
The answer is that there is only a 3% chance of running this bad. You can find the calculator here.

So actually this "should" happen about once a month. So I guess this is something I just have to accept.

One good thing about this is that before playing I set myself a non-tilting goal, and actually I'm surprised that I didnt get more frustrated than I actually got. I also feel that my decisions were probably not affected by this poor session, or hardly affected.

As a side note there are three common goals people set for them selves when playing.

-Results goal
-Volume goal
-Time goal

I think the first one is something you should try to avoid. And a good player once said that volume goals have one danger - if you are forcing yourself to play a big volume you may start to play just to end games and you are not focusing on playing optimally.

So what I think is the best goal should play your A-game for a number of games/hours/whatever.

Gosh tomorrow I have to try to recover from losing about 25% of my BR in 17 games!

I signed up for a rakeback deal about a week ago here on poker.org for the site Europoker (Ongame network). My experience has been very positive so far, so I decided to write a post about rakeback in general. I am also going to explain why it's important from a mathematical point of view.

First my results so far: I've played 138 games on this site and my winrate has been 55.5%. If there were no rake my, ROI would be computed as 2*(5.5%) = 11%. However, the rake is 10%, so that adds a negative ROI of 1/11 = 9%. So my actual ROI should be 11% - 9% = 2%. For some weird reason Holdem Manager says it's 0.7%.

The rakeback deal I've got here on poker.org is 40% which means that instead of subtracting 9% I only subtract 0.6*9%, that is, I gain 0.4*9%=3.6%. So instead of having an ROI of 0.7 (if HEM is correct) I get about 4%. So I go from being a break even player to being a winning!

A winning player typically has a winrate of 55%-60% in HUSNG's, which is 2%-12% ROI. Adding 3.6% to that is a substantial amount.

Another perhaps sad fact I want to point out: (This is actually explained in the beginning of the book "The mathematics of poker"by Bill Chen.) One often assumes that the distribution of all poker players' ROI's or winrates is the so called normal distribution. This distribution has a bell-shaped graph and implies that most players have their ROI near a value -- the avarage ROI of the entire poker community. Guess what value that is...The answer is given by the rake; 10% rake implies the avarage ROI is -9%.

The other factor that determines this normal distribution is how wide or narrow the bell-shaped curve is, that is how close most ROI's are to -9%. This width is controled by a mathematical concept most of us use more often than we change our socks.That's right: Variance.
(This is not to be confused with variance associated to the randomness of your BR. Here we are concidering random selection of a player from the poker community.)

You might also recall from school the notion of standard deviation, which is the square root of the variance. Sorry, this isn't supposed to be a math class :P On to the point:

Chen makes an assumption about how big the variance is of this normal distribution,and this is summarized in a table which says the following:

70% of all players are loosing
20% are break even
10% are slightly winning (1BB/100 in cash games)
2% are winning a bit more (2BB/100)
0.25% are decent winners or big winners (atleast 3BB/100)

Here's a picture showing the situation.


If there were no rake then 50% would win and 50% would loose, (if the normal distribution agrees with reality). I think this explains why rake should not be underestimated and why you should click rewards above and get rakeback or VIP as soon as possible!

The ironic truth about all of this is that everyone wants to be a big winner. Who doesn't want 5% ROI or 8% or 12%? Most players aren't really realistic. They don't know the mathematical fact that only a small fraction can be winners due to rake. The difference between the majority and those 10% of the population that are actually winning, is that they are not just hoping to get lucky. They put in more effort than the avarage players and take the game more seriously.

Now the happy conclusion: I personally believe that almost anyone can become one of those 10% players, because there is, there has been, and there will always be an overwhelming majority of players who are not putting serious effort and thought into the game and about what separates winning and loosing players. So start investing in your development if you haven't already, and get rakeback