Month 3 as a Pro

so this post is a little late - my last day of work was jan. 6, so i've been trying to do these on the 6th/7th - but it's on the web, so that's kinda fancy. poker's still been going very well. i've still really been enjoying it; one reason i haven't posted earlier is that i really wanted to play. and i'm still making plenty of money, so that's good. i put together a graph showing how i've done since 2/20, which is when i moved to poker stars from party poker.

i made the graph at some point when i was in the middle of the unfortunate flat part from around sng #1000 to 1800. i hadn't really appreciated how rare it was for the first part of the graph to be so smoothly upward when it was happening. i put together 11 consecutive winning sessions at one point early on. the rest of the graph, unfortunately, i think is much more representative of what i can expect in the future. flat sections, drops, and erratic gains.

the graph also shows the result of my foray into the $225 buy-in sngs (i added them to my mix of $114s and $60s). shortly after the great big spike around the sng #1800, i added 225s. the first day was great, with my best day ever at sngs (the spike around #2000). the next day was my worst ever day at poker. bleh. i eventually decided to stop playing them after a string of pretty unimpressive results. here's a private message to 2+2er bigballzpokr, who, despite what you'd guess from the name, is a very strong player who has had success at the 225s:

yeah, i've given up on the 225s, at least for the time being. the obvious reason is that i wasn't doing well. i've played 271, with an roi of -3.0%. i think that i am a long-term winner in the game, and a lot of the bad results are coming from me losing 80% of my flips and 50% of my 65-35 favorite hands (not to mention running into AK every time i open-push from LP).

but i was finding it kind of stressful, which probably isn't a suprise. in my last session playing 60/114/225, i was down 3.5k with 10 sng's open, and decided to stop opening new ones, hoping to get back to down 2k by the end of the session. i finished on a nice run, getting back to -$200, with final results of -2.2k at the 225s and +2k at the 60/114. it was at that point that i said, "oh screw this, i'm playing 60/114." i might go back at some point, but at the very least i need a break from it.

since then i've had 5 nice, chill, profitable sessions at the 60/114 so i'm just going to stay here for now. i might work on getting up to 12-tabling for my next project.

the other thing going on in my poker world is that i'm trying to get stars to let me donate my frequent player points to charity. fpps are what they sound like - likes frequent flier miles for poker players. you can use them for various things like an ipod, poker chips, etc. if you have 3 million, you can even get a porsche.

when you have generated a ton of fpps, you become a supernova (after having moved up from silver star, gold star, etc), and at that point they say they'll let you buy what you want: "If there is something special you're looking for, anything in the range of approximately $3000 and up, just let us know and we'll personally see what can be done to make it happen!"

i emailed stars and told them i wanted to donate the value of my points to the charity Doctors Without Borders. they told me they didn't convert points to cash and that only management could authorize it. i haven't heard back from management yet (the first guy forwarded my message). it's not real interesting, but i pasted the email thread at the end of this.

here are my results for the month and overall
stats since last update, 3/7 - 4/13
60s: 754 sngs played, 14.4% roi
114s: 975 played, 9.3%
225s: 249 played, -2.8%

total stars stats, 2/19 - 4/13 (see earlier posts for party poker stats before 2/19)

60s: 1210 played, 9.9%

114s: 1504 played, 13.3%

225s: 271 played, -3.0%

this is my email exchange with stars regarding donating my fpp's. like i said, not a fascinating read. you should start with the email at the bottom and work up.
From: tourneyhistories@gmail.com

Sent: 2006/04/11 14:00:02
To: support@pokerstars.com

- Hide quoted text -

Subject: Re: supernova concierge request

>I would like to speak to someone in management who has authority to
>authorize this. There are "large scale events" happening all over the
>world, and while they have not sustained the media's attention like
>Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami, people are suffering badly (e.g.,
Darfur:
>http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/sudan.cfm). These people need
>money to buy food and medical supplies, not ipods.
>
>I don't have any connection to Doctors Without Borders (other than being a
>contributor), if that's what you're concerned about. I would be willing
to
>give another charity instead if that would allay your concerns.
>
>I'm trying to do something socially responsible with my poker playing, and
>I'd appreciate it if you could help me do this.
>
>Dan Schwab
>
>
>
>On 4/10/06, PokerStars Support wrote:
>>
>> Hello Dan,
>>
>> I'm sorry but we do not covert player's FPPs into real money.
>>
>> Please know that we do donate funds to charities, however, this is a
>> management decision and usually happens for natural disasters and
similar
>> types of large scale events.
>>
>> A suggestion for you would be to use your FPPs to obtain items from the
>> FPP/VIP store and then you can donate these items on your behalf to the
>> charity of your choice.
>>
>> If we can be of any further assistance, please let us know.
>>
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Charles
>> PokerStars Support Team
>>
>>
>> —– Original Message —–
>> From: tourneyhistories@gmail.com
>> Sent: 2006/04/10 13:45:14
>> To: support@pokerstars.com
>> Subject: supernova concierge request
>>
>> >hi,
>> >
>> >i just recently became a supernova and i have a request for what i'd
like
>> to
>> >do with my fpps. i'd like to donate cash to a charity, Doctors Without
>> >Borders. i'd really appreciate it if you wanted to do some kind of
>> donation
>> >matching, or maybe just give me a good deal on coverting fpp's to cash.
>> >it'd be good karma :)
>> >
>> >thanks,
>> >
>> >dan schwab
>> >>> >>>
>>
>

Pushing hands: Some hands are better than others

It comes up a million times in tournament poker especially sit n go's: it's folded to you in the small blind, you have some marginal hand, you or the big blind is pretty short-stacked, and you have to decide whether to push. To simplify the discussion a little bit, we're going to ignore the possibility of just calling. Calling isn't a good idea all that often anyway once you're short.

So say it's folded to you in the SB and you have K7o. Is that a good pushing hand? Well, it depends on what kinds of hands the BB is going to call with, and that depends on everyone's stack sizes. Suppose that the BB is going to be very tight. For example, there are 4 people left in a sit n go, and three people have 3200 chips and the last guy has 400, and the blinds are 150/300, and the BB is one of the ones with 3200. Since only the top three get paid - 5 units for first, 3 for second, 2 for third – and the jump from fourth to third is a relatively large 2 unit jump, nobody wants to go out in 4th.

If you push, a reasonable BB will only call with a very narrow range of hands. He'd toss AJ without a second thought and may fold a hand as good as AK. You could guess a calling range for the BB – for example: AK, TT+ - and then do a lot of detailed analysis about whether you should push or fold your K7o. But that's not what I'm looking to do in this post. What I want to do is to correct the mistake that some people of not being able to rank which hand is better than others in certain situations. There are a lot of people who would say, “Well K7 isn't totally horrible, it's kinda high, I'll push it.” But these same people would be horrified if they had to show that they had pushed 23s, even though 23s does a little better against AK, TT+ (23.4% vs 24.8%).

On the flip side, trying to take a cute little drawing hand like 23s against someone who is going to call with a wide range is suicide. In that case, you just want a nice big club of a hand like K7o. It's not pretty, but it'll get you in as a ~62-38 favorite a lot of the time. Sure it's crushed against something like AK or AA, but that doesn't happen much. Say you're in the SB with a bunch of chips against a BB who has 400 left after posting 200, and we're nowhere near the money. The villain is going to be happy to call with anything that's not totally horrible. A reasonable guess might be everything except 93o-, 92o-, 52s-, 43s. This makes up 87% of the hands. Now K7o performs like a champ: it's 53.5%. 32s, on the other hand, is a big loser at 35.4%.

The myth of “live cards”

There is one tendency I want to warn you about. That's to underestimate how bad Ax hands do against strong ranges. Suppose you raise with A5o, and the BB raises all-in. You think he's pretty tight, so his range looks something like 77+, AT+, A8s+. Looks like you'd rather have something like 74o so that you would have live cards against all of his Ax hands, right? A4o is 28.3%, and 74o is 26.8%. The problem is that 74o is very not live against a hand like 99, whereas A5o is in bad shape but not terrible shape. If we expand BB's range to include some Kx hands, it gets more pronounced. Against 66+, AT+, A8s+, KQ, Kts+, Qjs, A4o outperforms 74o 34.2% to 28.1%

Here's a good general rule: “big club” hands like K7o and A4o do well against big wide ranges but much less well against premium hands. “Cute” hands like 46s and 23s and 22 will never do well, but they aren't too terrible against tight ranges. That means that even if you think a villain is a crazy maniac who'd push any hand he got, you shouldn't call his big push with a hand like 34s. You're probably not too huge of a dog. Whoopity. Wait for something more like KT.

The easiest way to get a feel for this kinds of things is to download pokerstove from pokerstove.com and use it to see how various hands do against ranges. It won't tell you exactly which hands to push and which ones to fold, but it'll help get a sense for how to avoid folding the good ones and pushing the bad ones.

Stealing by the Rhythm Method

when the blinds get high and everyone only has around 7 or so bb's, there are a lot of times when you have a hand that you could steal with, or you could fold, and it's pretty close either way. for example, Q8s on the button. it's far from a great hand, but you need to pick up a lot of pots to stay alive and build your stack, so you wind up pushing these things. but you can't push them every time, or people will catch on and start to call with you marginal hands like A7, which is horrible for you. so you have to push them sometimes but not others. i find that while i'm stealing i sometimes fall into two kinds of patterns - not as part of a preconceived plan, but it happens.

i'll call the first pattern back-and-forth. here's an example: it's folded to me in the sb. i decide to fold. then on the next hand it's folded to me on the button. well now i figure that i just showed everyone that i'm not pushing any 2 when it's folded to me, so i might as well cash in on my new tight image and steal blinds as long as i have something semi-reasonable. then if it's folded to me again on in the CO, i'm worried that people will remember my button push, and i'll tighten up. it can also go the other way - steal sb, fold button, steal CO. if i get a real stinker like 82 then i'll break the pattern and fold, and of course if i get something that's actually good i'll break the pattern and steal.

the second kind of pattern is on a different rythym - i'll call it the investment plan. here, when there are only about 2 hands left in the blind level, i'll tighten up. of course, i'm not folding good hands, but i'll take a break from stealing with marginal hands. then, once the blinds go up, i'll kick it back into high gear for the first couple hands. the idea is that i want to use the relatively less valuable hands at the end of a level to convince everyone i'm tight - or at least let them forget that i'm stealing more than my share - and then cash in on my newfound image by stealing once there are more chips in the middle.

these two patterns are sort of contradictory - the first means you're stealing every other hand, and in the second you're play tight for ~3 hands in a row and then playing aggro for ~3 hands in a row. but you have to realize that i'm not setting out to do either. it's more that i notice "oh, i'm doing a back-and-forth" as i'm doing it, or i'll say, "i've been stealing a lot a lot lately, let me take this one off and invest in the next level."

Month 2 as a Pro

this was originally on twoplustwo 3/6/06.
it's now been two months since i quit my job and started playing poker full-time. the short story is that everything is still going really well. i'm enjoying it more than i thought i would, and the results have been better than i'd hoped.
party's restructing was kind of a blow. i'd had a lot of success at the 55s and 109s at party, and i wanted nothing more than to get a few more thousand sng's under my belt to get a little more confidence that my results have some significance beyond a nice heater.

i tried playing the regular party sng's, but really didn't like them. they play much deeper around the bubble compared to the old sng's. i think the strongest part of my game is deciding whether or not to push 4- or 5-handed, and when there are 4 people left and everyone has 25 bb's, the game is changed pretty dramatically. i could learn to play the bubble with deep stacks, but frankly i like pushing pre-flop. there's a certain simplicity to have 1 decision per hand that i find appealing. also, when you're playing a lot of tables, reads become much vaguer, and reads become a lot more important when you're playing past the flop.

i tried the party speeds, but they have the opposite problem. as someone (ilya?) pointed out in a thread, you often get to a spot where it's 7-handed and everyone has around 5 bb's. then it's so hard to steal pre-flop that there's less room to pick up pots because the button's going to say "well, i've got A7 and we're nowhere near the money. let's see what you got."

getting rid of the 75/150 level sucked, and i thought it was kind of shady how they obscured it by doubling the starting stacks and increasing the starting blinds (i.e., there is no 150/300 level now). i have the same complaint about how they shortened the starting stacks from 67 bbs to 50. one of my qualms about playing sng's full-time is that i'm not sure how well it translates to other forms of poker. since no one plays ring nl with 50x stacks, i think they've effectively made the transition from sng to ring just a little tougher.

the clincher was when my party software crashed for the second time. it was pretty frustruting, as i bubbled out a sng where i was tied for 3rd without playing a hand, and missed a bunch of hands in other sngs. i emailed party and told them i was leaving for stars and withdrew all of my money. they wrote me a semi-incoherent email ("the connection problem must have been on your end since the other players remained connected" when the problem was not my connection, it was that their horrible software locked up. i'm positive i could work with a programmer friend and a graphic design friend and we could write the best client in a day or two, but that's another story.) anyway, to their credit, party gave me $100 and a 20%/$100 deposit bonus with no clearing requirements, so i deposited $500 and immediately withdrew the $700.

the other recent excitement is that i finally became a real poker nerd and bought and a second monitor. i had been 6-tabling stars turbos and decided to take the plunge. it is somewhat easier to play, but i thought it would make more of a difference, to be honest. it takes a second or two to figure out where i'm supposed to be acting sometimes and i time out probably once every couple of hours. when you have 5+ tables on one screen, there's overlap of the tables, so the way stars pops the most urgent window to the front makes it very clear where you're supposed to be. i'm usually playing 10-tables, 5 on each monitor (my laptop and a 2001fp), so i can use that effect, but a lot of times i'll only have 8 or 9 up while i'm waiting for another to start. it's annoying to look up from one table and there's basically no visual cue to tell which table to act on. there's just that little "time 30" circular timebank button on ones where it's semi-urgent, but there's no way to tell if you have 15 seconds to act before your hand is folded or 1 second (assuming you haven't put chips in yet, in which case it would go to the timebank automatically.)

the second monitor has also had the effect of reducing my mobility somewhat. it used to be that if my roommates were watching a movie in the living room, i'd bring my computer out there and split my attention between the movie/friends and playing. probably not great for the roi, but good for quality of life. now i might do it, but since i have to drop from 10 tables to at most 8, it's a little less appealing. also playing 8 tables leaves a lot less mental energy for hanging out. when i was 4-tabling party it was more doable.

my biggest complaint about stars is the number of games they have running. when you play party, at tuesday at noon you can fill 4 109s within a few minutes and play a lot more without any problem (at least you could, not sure what the scene is like since the upgrade). but right now there are only 3 114 turbos running right now, so it's impossible to 10-table without playing a mix of buy-ins. even at peak times you can't 10-table 114s.

so for a while i was playing a mix of 60s and 114s. i've mixed in a few 225s in the last couple days. i probably won't do that except for peak times - i can't imagine the monday at noon crowd is a bunch of executives on the tail end of 48-hour meth binges (the sunday crowd plays that way sometimes).

one thing i've really enjoyed about stts as opposed to mtts is the way you see the same people over and over. the old empire 10k guarantee was kind of like that, but now you really see the same people a ton. one day i noticed i was playing on 7 tables with the same person (rainkhan on stars). it adds another dimension to things - "i think pushing 24o here would be profitable, but if i get called, the bb is going to remember this, and i play with him a ton, and i don't want to loosen up his calling requiremnts." i've also gotten to know some of the 2+2er stt crowd (in the internet kind of way, im's and pm's), which is cool. i had the same kind of relationship with some mtt'ers when i posted there a lot, but with stt'ers it's different because you see the same people at the tables a lot, whereas it was pretty rare in an mtt with 400 people. last night i got heads up with wpr101. he has the same name on stars, but mine's different, so i knew who he was but he didn't know who i was. i outed myself, and it was cool to chat while playing heads up. we got all-in on the flop an early hand with his oesd against my top pair and he hit, leaving me with ~500 chips. then he went card dead and i climbed back to a small lead. we got all-in on the flop with his top pair against my pair + flush draw and his hand was good and there was no second comeback. it was a lot of fun. i was winding down for the night so i was only on a couple tables, so i could chat. it's a little funny to have a nice conversation with someone while you're playing for several hundred dollars, but you get over it pretty quickly.

technically my official month ends at the end of the day on the 6th of the month, but i'll jump the gun a little. i've been doing most of my non-playing non-social stuff during the day because there are more/better 114s at night. things like posting, errands, taxes (arrrrrrr, what a headache, can't wait till i finally finish it up). so without further ado, results (including month 1):

party
speed 109: 76, 8.6%
55: 362, 24.6% (3- or 4-tabling, all pre-split)
109: 607, 22.4% (4- or 5-tablind, all but ~20 pre-split)

stars 6- to 10-tabling

60: 456, 2.6%
114: 529, 20.8%
225: 22, -4.5%

the stars results say something about variance in roi. obviously it's not the case that my "true" roi is to kill the 114s and eke out a small profit at the 60s. i am surprised to see such a big disparity after ~500 of each though. i've been pretty lucky in where my wins have come: my roi at stars if you weight by the buy-in is 15.1%, but if weight all of the stt's equally then it's 12%.

and btw, i will be starting a blog of sorts pretty soon, just like "every other self-respecting poker pro," in the words of one poster. i'll let you know when it's up.

Month 1 as a Pro

this was originally on 2p2 2/7/06.

so today i finished my first month as a pro poker player. it's been pretty awesome. i started off playing a mix of mtts and stts, where i would generally play one or more mtts in the 55-215 buy-in range and then add in $55 stts till my monitor or my attention was full.

this is what i did for the first 3 weeks. it didn't go very well. at first my mtt's were characterized by getting to the final 30 of a 500 person tournament with a very healthy stack and then busting out in 24th. it's really annoying that making the top 2% of a tournament only pays out a few buy-ins. the stt's were going pretty well though, and i finally broke through for 3rd in a PS 22 rebuy for 2k, and that was enough to put me at even for my first three weeks. not exactly a great start, but i've always known that mtt's were ridiculously high variance (and i rode the variance wave to a great november/december).

then about 10 days ago, i decided to just play stt's for a while and see how that went. it's been great, both in terms of the results and the quality of life. i like being able to play whenever i want, and to not be committing myself for hours every time i start a game.

the results have been unsustainably good so far, which is always a good place to be.

55s: 362 stts, ROI = 24.6%
109s: 199 stts, 18.0%

all in all, i'm pretty psyched that i quit my job. having time to play poker has been great. i really like playing.

Chips and Cash: The need for an empirical formula for tournament equity

this was originaly published in Twoplustwo Magazine, May 5, 2005. since then i actually tried to do the analysis discussed in the bottom part of the article with a few other people. we made some progress, but eventually lost steam and gave up. rvg on 2p2 did some related work. at some point i might try to write up something more thorough on my experience and rvg's results, but not now.

Recently I played in a 10-player no-limit hold 'em tournament where an interesting hand came up. There were four players left, and I was in the big blind with 1,300 chips left (written T1,300) after posting the big blind of T200. The under the gun player (T6,000) folded, and the button (T1,200) raised all-in. The small blind (T1,200 after posting T100) folded, and it was my turn to act with

AK

Of course I called the additional T1,000, as ace-king suited is a big hand when you've only got about seven big blinds in your stack and you're heads up against a button raise. My opponent flipped up

44

As the board was dealt out, I began wondering whether or not I would have called if I had known what my opponent held.

I have 48.8 percent equity in this pot, so with the blind money in the pot, I knew that, on average, I could expect this call to win me chips. The total pot is

1,200 + 1,200 + 100 = 2,500 so my equity in it is

48.8% * 2,500 = 1,220. I only had to call T1,000, so my expected, or average, win is T220.

In a cash game, this would be an easy call, but this was a tournament, so there are other factors to consider. Only the top three finishers would be paid (50% - 30% - 20%), so going out in fourth was quite unappealing. The small blind was naturally thrilled to see the button and I tangle, since he and I must lose something by getting all-in. This effect is amplified because the under the gun player has a huge stack. Even doubling up leaves any of the three others as a big underdog to win the tournament, so there's more incentive to try to hold on and make it to second or third rather than gamble and play for first.

In order to determine whether I should call (knowing my opponent's hand), we need a formula that will calculate the expected win in real money for a particular chip distribution in a tournament. The most popular such formula is the independent chip model (ICM). I won't go into the details of how the formula works, but you can learn more about it (and use it) at: http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~sharnett/ICM/ICM.html

If I fold my ace-king, the chip distribution will look like this: T1,300 (me) - T6,000 - T1,500 - T1,200. According to the ICM, my expected win for this situation will be 19.6% of the prize pool. If I call, there is a 48.8 percent chance I win and the chips will be T2,800 (me) - T6,000 - T1,200, and my expected win is 33.0 percent of the prize pool. There is a 51.2% chance I lose and am left with T300, and my expected win is 6.2 percent. Taking a weighted average of those two shows that calling gives me an expected win of 19.3 percent of the total pool. This is lower than the 19.6 percent I have from folding, so, according to the ICM, I am better off folding.

This is useful analysis, and most people agree that the ICM is roughly correct. But there are a number of important factors that it fails to consider. One is the location of the button. With very large blinds, it can be very significant who has to pay the blinds next. Many people also feel the ICM short-changes the big stack, by not taking into account her freedom to steal blinds frequently.

Perhaps most importantly, the ICM is just a model. It has not been tested empirically. In the days before internet poker, it would have been incredibly difficult to do so, because one would need a very large data set. Now though, the technology exists to find an empirically-determined formula for converting tournament chips to real cash, one that can include factors like button position and a player's position to the right or left of the big stack.

If you open a single-table tournament on Party Poker, the hands are automatically saved to your hard drive. For a good programmer, it would be a fairly simple task to write a program to open four tournaments and then after 90 minutes close them and open four more. One computer could then accumulate complete histories for 64 tournaments per day, a number that could be multiplied by accounts on different Party skins.

Using a text parser, data on tournament results would then be culled from the hand histories. The chip stacks of the final four players could be recorded, and considered alongside the end result of the tournament. For example, one tournament's data could be something like (2,000, 4,000, 5,000, 1,000, 1, 3, 2, 4) to indicate chip stacks when the tournament got to 4-handed, and ending position. The math involved is outside the scope of this article, but it is then possible to compute a formula that estimates the likelihood of the different outcomes based on the actual observed tournaments. The likelihood of different outcomes could then easily be converted into expected cash winnings.

None of these steps are inherently very difficult, and the formula would allow us to answer some important questions. For example, it could be used to determine fair deals at the end of tournaments.

In addition, David Sklansky has written that chips in a tournament have decreasing marginal value. But Daniel Negreanu once wrote that he made a call that he knew would cost him chips (in expectation) because if he won the pot he would be "in the driver's seat to win the tournament," implying that although the call would (theoretically) cost him chips, it would gain him cash (again, in expectation). Sklansky's and Negreanu's ideas are directly contradictory: If chips do always have a decreasing marginal value then it is never correct to take a gamble that has negative expectation. An empirically-derived formula would help us settle this debate.

One limitation of this approach is that a formula would only truly apply to an "average" Party Poker player, and thus could not directly address Negreanu's claim. It could be the case that for most people, it is always a mistake to take a negative expectation gamble, but for a player of Negreanu's caliber it can be correct. Respected Two Plus Two poster Gigabet made an argument similar to Negreanu's in this thread.

Although it would not be perfect, an empirical formula would be a valuable step, and a marked improvement over using the untested ICM model.