bad beatz

Posted at 6:36 AM, 12/5/2006

Lots of bummed friends in the poker world lately. Many of us are frustrated with losses lately. Good (some great) players that are properly rolled for the limits they are playing. ReelCrazy, ConnJure, Headwaiter, Gumby, TajMahal, Titokhan and of course, your hero (uh...me).

I'm forgetting a few others but you get the idea.

I went on mega tilt last week in 2 different sessions. It's stupid and I know better. Looks like I have a lot to learn. NO SHIT, I have only been playing for about 3 1/2 years. Many are newer to the game than me. We gotta get better, shut off the steam valve and become better players and develop a plan to add to our bankroll even when in a bad rut.

Most are advocating taking breaks in our forum. I've had it with 2 outers and idiots chasing me to the riv is a common cry.

Many of our group only play multi table tourneys or sit n gos. High variance. Often fighting huge fields.

My Solution? idea? plan? Incoherent ramble: Play ring games. Play a level or 2 below what you know you can beat. If you play $100 buyin NL ring play $25 buyin for a week. Instead of playing 2 tables play 3. If you are a one tabler play 2. More tables less variance. Lower limits means worse players. 3 big things you are missing out on in tourneys (and sits) is deposit bonuses, reload bonuses and rakeback.

If you have not seen how much bonus money and rakeback you can make while 3 tabling you might be surprised. Those 6 hours you spent to get 2 outered on the bubble coulda been a 3 tabling session where you made some money and your whole 6 hour investment didnt come down to 1 or 2 HUGE hands. 6 hours to get beat by a guy that has a million reasons why he plays bad. "It was Sooooted", He "just had a feeling" on that gutter.

Lets go with a medium length session and low numbers to be conservative. You drop down to 1/2 limit ring, 6 max. 3 tablin. A 4 hour session where you play 1000 hands. You win at the rate of 1.0 Big Bets per 100 or $20 profit. Your rakeback profit would be about $33 (25%) and your bonus $$ cleared would be $25 (at some sites).

So you made $78 for 4 hrs or $19.50 an hour. If you have a bad session and lose $58 you break even. Note: At No Limit your rake will be about 30% lower. This hourly rate goes up rapidly at each limit/more tables. Also, strong players will have a much higher win rate. 2-3 BB per 100 is not uncommon.

Beat up on these horrible 1/2 players (or whatever level is low for you) for a while then go back to your tourneys. Hit a bad stretch in tourneys? Wash, rinse, repeat. As you improve add a table and move up a level. Many pro ring players can't afford to play tourneys full time! They don't wanna take a pay cut. Todd Brunson is a good example.

If you are struggling in ring and are not mainly a tourney player use the example above but just drop down a level or two. Let the high volume of hands against weak players lower your variance. Always have bonus money and RB to add to your profits or help soften the losses on a bad night.

If you need help getting rakeback or want a plan to always be playing off bonuses let me know. I did it for 2 years. shark@sharkpokertour.com

Grind out some profits when you are struggling. Restore confidence and punish all the new players at the low limit ring games.

Take a break if you need one. If you have done well in Tourney play why not crush low limit ring and take a break later with your BR flush?

When you are playing 1000 hands a day ( you see flop in about 250 hands) there are not any HUGE hands. Just a whole bunch of them. Easy, low stress, and good practice. In that 6 hour tourney you saw maybe 45 flops and 4 of them were huge and maybe 2 were coin flips. No wonder tourney players are getting burned out.

I'm no pro just a strugglin player and i'd love to hear other ideas or plans on getting our crew rollin' again

for the swedes

Posted at 6:30 AM, 12/5/2006

poker is huge in sweden.. and since I see in my stats I got quite some swedish readers and Im half sweden myself I'll drop some good urls.. the best swedish site i've found so far is poker puls. Amongst others ghey have all online poker reviewed.. and a Great poker rules section:
texas holdem
omaha ,
omaha high/low,
pinaple poker,

crazy pinapple .. and so on!

until next time, fold your queens!

Poker Session...

Posted at 5:07 PM, 11/20/2006

NOTE: This is the second in a series of articles about my attempt to play poker for a 24-hour session on April 22-23, 2006. Click here to read Part I.

In my first installment, I described how and why I decided to play a 24-hour poker marathon. But in reality, my game is kind of contrived. I'm doing this so I can describe to you, loyal audience, what the experience is like.

I still don't quite understand why, given the chance to get some sleep, someone would play for such a long time under normal conditions. Turns out, not many people plan on playing for that long.

Antonio Esfandiari, a professional player known by many as "The Magician," once played a 36-hour session when he was 19 years old.

"I never planned on playing that long," Esfandiari said. "I usually don't play for more than 12 hours unless there are serious pigeons in the game."

Chris Akin, a player in my weekly home game, once got a group together to get a hotel room for a night at Foxwoods. After checking in, they all dropped off their suitcases and proceeded immediately to the poker room. While the rest of the group eventually cashed in their chips and crashed for the night, Akin ended up playing for 27 consecutive hours. He left without seeing the hotel room again, jumping in the car once the rest of the crew was ready to leave. "It just sort of happened," Akin said of the 27-hour marathon. "The other people at the table were all relaxed and having a good time, so that made it easier to stick around."

A

Todd Yellin, another regular in our weekly game, also has experience playing extended sessions at Foxwoods. Like Esfandiari and Akin, he never plans on a long session. He only plays through the night when he's had a run of bad luck early on.

"What usually happens is that I drop a couple hundred bucks, and I'm stubborn enough to sit there until I make it back," Yellin said. "I think I always have (made it back) on these sessions, given enough patience and time, which is why I keep (playing)."

Yellin also believes that once he reaches a certain point in the night, it makes more sense to wait for the sun to rise before making the two hour trek from the casino back home to Cambridge, Mass.

"They lay out muffins and stuff around 8 a.m., which helps energize me," Yellin said. "Also just having the natural light wakes you up if you were dragging a bit. Usually, I'll have won my money back by that point, which means it's time to leave."

Larry Olmstead of Hartland, Vt., however, takes the cake. Two years ago, Olmstead played for 72 consecutive hours at Foxwoods, setting the Guinness world record for consecutive hours of casino poker room play. Unlike most marathon players, Olmstead planned the session to gather material for a story published in U.S. Airways' Attaché magazine.

"A few years ago, I had gone to Las Vegas and played for 45 straight hours," Olmstead said in a story in the Valley News. "But that time, I was drinking constantly and just doing it for fun. I figured doing it one more day without drinking and being focused would be okay. It was a little harder than it looked."

Okay, so my 24 hours looks wimpy in comparison, but hopefully I can pass on enough knowledge from my experience to give you the tools to survive a marathon poker session, whether you plan it or not.

My Last Marathon Session

Posted at 5:06 PM, 11/20/2006

Donning a PokerTips.org t-shirt, I made my way to the poker room in the Venetian with the goal of playing a 24-hour session. At 6:37 pm, I sat down at a $1-$2 no-limit hold'em table. Already feeling tired and overwhelmed at the quest ahead of me, I bought in for the max of $200. I immediately noticed that the standard raise at this table was in the vicinity of $10 to $15, rather than $5 to $8 like you might find at an online game.

To keep myself entertained during periods of rapid folding, I started up conversations with some of the dealers that I thought were pretty cool people. One guy named Jake had some pretty interesting commentary on the cocktail waitresses in Las Vegas. He basically said that they're all driven by money and have no soul. Now, while that's obviously an exaggeration, I found it to be quite hilarious. An hour into the session I have a streak of 10 hands where I am dealt 66, 77, 88, and 99. My stack is at about $240, and I'm feeling pretty good.

Around 8:00 pm, I make a $75 bluff on the river into a pretty big pot. When my opponent folds, I let out a sigh, and realize I have built up to $395 pretty easily. My confidence only continued to grow when I manage to lose less than $20 while holding T9 on a TT7 board against a very tight player (who was trying to trap me with KT). My first casualty of the night comes when I double up a girl while holding 57 on a Q75 board. She had QT, and I stupidly put all of my money in after the turn came a ten.

The players at my table seemed pretty friendly. I noticed that a lot of them were mentioning they were from New York. At one point I asked them if I was the only player at the table who wasn't from New York. Only the dealer came to my rescue by saying "I'm from Iowa". I bet $10 with JT on a JJ7 board. The tight player I mentioned earlier made it $30. I fold to him cold and show him the Jack, saying "I know better against you." I felt like a god when he said "nice fold" and showed me QJ.

I kept a notebook with me to detail some of the moments of the session. The notebook seemed to be quite a topic of interest for my opponents. Throughout the session people kept asking me what the notebook was for. When I told them what I was doing, everyone was like "ooooh, you have to mention me in your article!"

At 9:37 pm, exactly 3 hours into the session, I stood up from my chair for the first time to stretch. At this point, I was feeling pretty good, and had little doubt I'd be able to play for 24 straight hours. I get my stack up to $440 when I make a great call while holding TT on a T9764 board. I couldn't rationalize my opponent holding an 8 in the given situation, so I picked off his $100 bluff, which felt good.

Earlier in the night, I was playing very loose-aggressive and was generally very interested in the action at the poker table. At 11:00 pm I was running cold and getting hungry. With a stack of $300, I ordered an over-priced chicken-caesar salad. I thought it was kind of fun having food delivered to the table. One girl, who insisted I refer to in this article as the "poker goddess", told me the salad smelled amazing. It was okay, but certainly not worth the $20.

For those of you who haven't played much live poker, I think you will find that most people are pretty friendly at the poker table. Most of the games I have sat in are full of people willing to make casual conversation. Sometimes when I take a big pot off of someone that I've been chummy with, it makes me kind of feel bad. I guess it's against the nature of the game to be really friendly with the players at your table.

Around midnight, things are going awful for me. I rebuy for another $80 to get my stack back up to $200. At this point, I was in for $380, and running a little low on cash. To be sure I made it through the night, I called TwoGun to borrow a couple hundred in case I had to rebuy at some point.

My first huge pot of the session came at 12:30 am. With a stack of about $300, I raised to $13 in early position with JJ. An aggressive (and drunk) player on the button re-raised me to $35. I figured his range could be pretty huge here, but didn't want to make it four-bets with JJ and risk punting $300. I called his raise, and we took a flop of AKJ. At this point I knew I was going to go broke if he had pocket kings or pocket aces. I checked to him, and he instantly bet $35. The speed in which he bet made me think that he didn't have aces or kings, so I went ahead and raised him all-in. He instantly called, and flipped over A3. That got my stack up to $587, which had me feeling great.

Around 1:00 am, I started drinking green tea to help keep me focused and awake. Maybe it was just a placebo effect, but the tea seemed to really work for me. I didn't want to drink Red Bull because it often makes me really jittery and sometimes nauseous when I'm tired. The green tea gave me more of a mellow concentration which was exactly what I needed to keep playing good poker through the night.

At 2:12 am, my friend Dave, who was also playing at the Venetian, walked over to check on me. I told him that I really wanted to go to sleep. To keep myself awake, I started talking with a pretty cool guy sitting next to me named Joe. I found out he lives in Austin, Texas. I was playing a lot of uncontested pots and was slowly increasing my chips.

Around 2:30 am things started to change for the better. A very cool (but highly intoxicated) guy named Daniel sat down. He was in his mid-30s and was from Canada. Along with being very friendly, he was also pretty bad at poker and did quite a bit of donating. After I had taken a couple hundred off of him, I got involved in a huge hand with him. I held T7, and the flop came 775. To me, it immediately became a game of "how can I get this guy to give me his stack for the third time?" Needless to say, all the money was in by the turn. After he had called himself all-in, he flipped over 55 (to my horror). My stack was saved when the river gave me quads. He was a really cool guy and I felt bad I put such an awful beat on him. But, all the same, it got me up to $565 and gave me a second wind.

Canada Dan continued to donate to the table. At 6:37 am, exactly halfway through the session, I was feeling tired, but content with my $655. At this point in the night, the game had surprisingly gotten very sharky. All of these younger guys were trying to rack up hours at the Venetian in order to qualify for a huge freeroll. Most of them played very well, and I couldn't help but admit to myself that I was far from being the best player at the table.

At 7:33 I made a note saying "I want to die". However, I was playing pretty good poker. Against a young guy who was clearly a very strong player I played AQ masterfully and got my stack up to $760. This guy had sat down with $200, and built it up to $1,100 in less than three hours. It felt nice to take a pot off of him.

One of the young guys at the table says to me "I haven't seen you move your face in the 3 hours I've been sitting here". I tell him that it's not my poker face, it's my "I'm too tired to make a facial expression" face. The table laughs, and one guy who has been at the table the entire time that I have comes to my defense and informs the kid that I was quite animated earlier in the night.

At 8:27 am, the only remaining player from my original table left. Now the table is composed of guys who have been awake all night and are trying to chase their losses.

I kept falling asleep around 9:30. When the dealer kept waking me up to inform me that it was my action, it started to dawn on me that I might not be able to make it another 9 hours. I mean, there I am, in my PokerTips.org t-shirt, having to be tapped on the shoulder by the players around me to keep me awake. At about 10:00 am, I tucked my tail between my legs, and left the table. I walked off with $710, making me a $330 winner on the night. I went back up to the hotel room as TwoGun was starting to wake up. He said "uh-oh, this can't be good" (assuming I had lost all the cash I had on me). I told him "Oh, don't worry, I won money, but just couldn't play for another second". I have nothing but respect for players who can handle marathon sessions. Pooping out after a mere 16-hour session made me realize that I am a weak, weak man.