Monday, November 30, 2009

a thousand hands in 4 hours

VACATION THIS WEEK, hip-hip-hooray, and scarcely little to do except play poker. The wife and kids are out working and schooling, and I'm home all alone. Poor, poor me.

I set the goal for myself to play 1000 hands of .10/.25 capped hold-em today, and I completed my task in just over 4 hours. At the peak, I had 4 tables going at once. The action was fairly fast, but I managed to stay on top of it all for the most part. I made one mechanical mistake - folding a small pocket pair I wanted to limp - but I would have missed my set anyway, so no harm done.

Did I do well? Not really. I lost $23.39, or 4.64 BB/100 hands. Not a good rate over the long term. As I like to do, let's study my biggest losses and see if I made any real mistakes.

1. I raise a limper with AsQs, and a player cold calls behind me. She is a 75/8 through 24 hands. Not enough hands to get a true read, but limping with three quarters of the hands in just about any sample size is usually a mistake. The flop comes ace-eight-seven, but all clubs. I bet for value, then shove the turn, she calls with ace-king. Arrrrgh! This hand tilted me the most, even more than the bad beats. She plays 3/4 of her hands but gets ace-king when I have ace-queen. No justice. She goes just as broke with AJ/AT here, even with no club in her hand.

2. I raise up AsQs (again, looks like a bad hand for me), and I'm called from the blind. Flop is TT3, two spades. I cbet-he checkraises, I get it all in with my flush draw. He has king-ten. I miss. Do I fold the nut flush draw after he raises? Maybe in a capped game, yes. I had trouble putting him on a ten, though - his stats were 9/3 after 33 hands. I thought maybe he was taking a stand with 99/88, and my overcards were good as well. Maybe a small mistake, but not a huge one (feel free to disagree).

3. pocket aces, cracked by pocket queens. No mistake here.

4. pocket aces, cracked by AT suited (runner-runner-flush). Ooofa.

5. pocket kings, cracked by Q8 (top pair on flop, 8 on turn). Lovely.

That's it for getting stacked. I have plenty of 2.50 - $4.50 losses, most appear to be strong preflop hands that whiff and there is action on the flop, or my c-bet is floated.

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I did some analysis of isolating limpers for the month (ever since I did the research on how and when to do such a thing). I must say that isolating limpers is like printing money. For the month, I am winning .90 big blinds per hand. Basically, every time I raise a limper, I win a big blind. So far, I'm only doing it with a specific range of of hands - I wonder what happens if I open up my range even wider?

The filter that you need in PokerTracker 3 was tricky to create, but it came down to "Any Preflop Raise and NOT (Raise First In) and NOT (Facing Raise Preflop)".




2 comments:

Forrest Gump said...

For the first two, I'd take similar lines often in tournament and almost never in cash games. With the aces was it allin PF?


FG

matt tag said...

yes, it was all in preflop.

these are CAPPED cash games, the most you can put into a pot is 30 big blinds, so they play like SNGs