:Pot Stuck

Everyone seems to hate variance and bad mouth it at every opportunity they get.  Sure, we all want a constant winrate with swings that never really move our bankroll, but are we willing to give up on profitable situations for a reduction in variance?  Obviously the thinking poker player who is playing within his bankroll will say No, but I think most people will pass up on +EV situations because the risk is simply too high.

Players that are willing to pass up these situations create a very exploitable area for us.  It increases our folding equity by a few points, which allows us play more aggressive and raise our bluffing frequency.

People we can abuse with this style are very easy to spot.  Most of them are tight, never bluff raise the later streets, and only show down with the nuts.  These players are mostly exploitable during hands and situations they are unfamiliar with, such as playing 200+ BBs deep.

The general fear of variance and large swings creates a nice inefficiency for smart and thinking poker players to take advantage of.

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Full Tilt amazes me with their stupidity and laziness. For the last six months I have had major lag issues with Full Tilt, usually after playing 1,000 hands. The software starts to run really slow and ultimately crashes. I have emailed them about this numerous times and they always give me some BS reply while never addressing the problem. Since I can easily play 2,000 hands a night, but only 1,000 on Full Tilt, they are losing roughly 50% of my rake. That comes out to a few hundred a night and easily six figures a year. Oh well, their loss.

I actually ran pretty well tonight. 1,300 hands and 3.5 buyins (about 13ptbb/100 I think). You can see towards the end of the session the graph starts to trail off, a result of me having to click a button five or six times until Tilt actually ‘understood’ what I was doing. The massive clicking and lag was causing me to timeout on all my other tables and really giving me a headache. Thank god the software crashed quickly after that or else I would have gone slowly broke.

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I just played a quick 1,200 hand session. I decided to quit early because there were not many games running and overall that were all really tagish.

There were no interesting hands or though spots really. However, there was a hand where a 11/6 opened from MP and I 3bet the button with AK (150bb effective stacks). He called and the flop came K72 rainbow, I bet around 70% of the pot and he called. The turn was a 5 and we checked it through. This guy was extremely tight/nitty and there is no way he gets to the turn with anything less than AK. On the river he checked, which I found interesting and decided to do something I never really do. I overbet pushed all in with the plan to make him fold a chop. I think if has better he leads the river and if he has worse he is going to check/fold. He let his timer run down and then he folded.

I am not sure if my play was right because I think I could get value from hands like QQ and JJ more often than he folds AK in that spot. Then again, I dont ever see him calling the flop with a QQ or JJ hand. So was I right?

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Below are two pictures of the setup I am playing poker off of. The pictures didn’t come out that great. Oh well.

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I was in Vegas this week staying at the Bellagio and it was the first time since November that I was able to log a few serious sessions of live NL. Since Nov 2006 I have been playing nothing but online no limit and the difference between live and online is huge.

The first thing that I found so interesting was the over betting. In a 10/20 NL game the standard open was $80, which is fine, but once three players took a flop massive over betting would occur. The pot would be $240 and all of a sudden a guy who cold called a preflop raise would lead out for $320 from the SB on a 27T rainbow board. Wow?! This happened 5 or 6 times, sometimes the lead would even be as high as $500.

When I play online I make a lot of my money from 3 betting light in position. Always alway always 3 betting. It was hard for me to adapt to live at first because players would either never open raise or only open raise with the top 2 or 3 hands. After about an hour you could figure out who you could 3 bet light, but these situations do not come up nearly as often as they do online.

Your image at a live table is so easily craftable because of the amount of time between hands. One night when I first sat in the game there was a big fish directly on my right. He would limp probably 90% of his hands and then play so passively postflop. So of course every hand he limped I would immediately make it $100 in order to isolate him. We would see a flop, I cbet, I win. After doing this 5 times in 1 orbit a player at the table made a comment about how stupid aggressive I was. Anyway, the fish busted and left so I stopped doing this. I think I went 2 orbits (which was probably and hour in this game) without seeing a flop. All of a sudden that same player that called me stupid aggressive made some comment about how I was the tightest player on earth and he was going to start folding AA face up to me. It is so awesome when another player makes a comment like that out loud to the entire table. He thinks he is harassing you and trying to goat you, but he is just giving you the exact table image you need.

The last thing I noticed, and was really impressed by, is that the live NL pros do an amazing job of keeping the fish happy. They never berate them, always make small talk with them, and keep telling them that they played their hands fine whenever the fish takes a beat or plays a hand poorly. Tons of these fish struck me has huge degenerates with no life and money to burn. I am sure these fish view poker as a social thing and the pros really do a great job at providing a nice comfortable setting for them.

I don’t think I could play live all day, but it sure is a great break from playing online.

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