End of feburary update and goals for march

Well, the last week of the month has been my first losing week yet :( Due to some bad luck and some equally bad spewy play i've finished this week down, thankfully though i racked up enough fpp's to play in another 210 sattelite and placed again , thats 3/5 now, so my roll has increased but not through the 5nl tables.

It all started with a big losing session on saturday night, i ended up down about $30, and since then it's just been about trying to build back from there really, technically i've made $22 this week, but overall i'm down $7.30 on the cash tables, which is only 1.5 buyins but i was kinda hoping to clear the $200 mark this week.

I've upped the amount of tables i'm playing now to 6 because i felt that i was starting to get too comfortable playing 4 and was making some plays that i was looking at afterwards and being quite dissapointed with, it's crazy how i used to have trouble playing 2 tables at a time and within a month i'm playing 6 quite comfortably, i think its going to be better in the long run because i already noticed yesterday that across the 6 tables i was playing between 15/10 and 17/13 which are good stats imo.

So a quick summary of the month as a whole then:

Starting Bankroll: $100.34

Hands played: 10,941

Profit at 5nl: $52.44

Profit from 210fpp satt's: $32.01

Total Profits: $84.45

Running at: 4.79BB/100

Current Roll: $184.79

So not bad really, i've played nearly 11k hands which i'm happy with and i've made 10 buyins at the 5nl tables so i can't really complain, the fpp sattelites have been a nice source of income too so, as they did this week, hopefully they'll help out a lot when i'm having down swings. Not as good as custo but i've made money, what more can i ask for really :D

My goals for next month then are:

Play 15k hands.

Get roll up to $250

Be playing 10nl by the end of march

Not many goals at the moment lol but at least it's a few things to aim for.

GL at the tables everybody, til the next update, goodbye.

My best week yet

Hey, this is going to be just a quick update as i am feeling a tad rough after last night and as it's such a nice day i'm going to go freshen up with a good old fashioned walk with the missus :)

As the title says, i have had my best cash game week since i started! I feel like i'm really edging towards 10nl now and it feels like i've done it quite quickly as well, only 3 weeks has gone by and i don't know if i'm getting stupidly lucky or what but i've been a very consistent winner at 5nl. 

As always there are still a lot of things to improve though, i'm still trying to tighten up and bring my vpip down but i have a feeling that this might come along better when i move up a limit, or maybe it won't, somebody in the micro stakes thread said something along the lines of whatever works for you is the way you should play, this makes a lot of sense to me, poker is a very individual game and even though there may be guidelines to try and stick to the fact is that everybody is going to develop their own style of game, i might be playing a few more hands than i should be but it's working for me at 5nl, obviously when i move up i might get a wake up call and have to concentrate on tightening up but right now i'm coming along quite steadily so i must be doing something right and as such my vpip isn't too much of a worry at the minute.

Just one quick hand replay this week, it's been a fairly standard week otherwise, i've had a nice run of sets being paid off which must have gone some way towards my good profits but otherwise it's been pretty standard, i also had one hand where i stacked 2 people when my tens ended up all in pf against 2 people holding AJ, i was in mp, folded to me, i raise, button calls, which i never noticed because i just raised then went straight on another table, a 69/5 short stack small blind comes all in for $2, i call because my huds blocking me from seeing that the button called my raise, the button then goes all in and i'm like, where did this guy come from, i call because at this point (at least i think) i'm pot-comitted, a ten flops and they both turn over AJo :D anyways back to the hand replay i was talking about. 

The villain here was a bit of a mix bag, he was good in terms of the starting hands he played but bad in that he was THE most passive calling stationy type player i've ever seen in my life, he had stats like 13/2 or something, he was giving me no respect whatsoever and was generally really annoying me, i should have moved really but i thought i had him when this hand came up, obviously i would have slowed down had the 9 not came on the turn but i knew his hand when he min raised me on the river, i just knew it, sucks to be me :( Serves me right for trying to mix it up, looks easy when negreanu does it lol

Anyways, bit longer than i had planned really, below are a few screenshots of myprogress over the whole month and a bankroll update for this week, i only noticed today that i haven't had a losing day since the start of the month, theres only 2 words that describe how my 5nl plays going at the moment, crushing it! 10nl here i come!!

GL everybody and as usual i always welcome comments or constructive crit, just be gentle :)

Progress this week:

Starting Bankroll: $150.05

Hands Played: 2067

Profit: $31.37 (a personal best)

Current Roll: $181.42

A good week, if a little pokerless

Hey, I haven't managed as much poker as i would have wanted this week due to me going back to work :( I'm in the army and when this blog started i was on my relocation leave after being posted from germany to my new unit in aldershot, subsequently the first few posts of this blog were written when i had literally all the time in the world to play, this week however real life has caught up with me and i've had to concentrate on something other than cards.

So... when i play i usually do sessions of 4-tabling for about 1.5 -  2 hours, after 2hours i tend to lose focus so i usually take a break and if i have the time i'll play maybe another similar session later on, unfortunately with me being back at work i only really have the time and energy to put in about 2 hours per night. This week i've only managed to play for 3 nights, and got about 1200 hands in, which as i said, is not nearly as much as i would have wanted.

I think i've really started to get used to cash games now and i might go as far as saying that the transition is now complete from my old SnG playing, i'm raising it up in position a lot more, noticing who i can steal from on the table, cbetting a lot more effectively and starting to use the HUD stats to better effect, generally i think my games quite good at the min and it seems like, as long as i can avoid any huge downswings, only a matter of time before i move up to 10nl, i'm really starting to enjoy playing as well which is a nice bonus lol

A few highlights from the past week then....

First hand i make a standard raise in lp with big sc's get a re-raise from the button and as we were both 100bb's deep i thought i'd see a flop, i love it when a flop hits you like this lol, i also love people who over play big slick...

One thing thats started to bug me a little bit is how my aces just haven't been making me any coin at all, i've had my fair share of rockets but i always seem to raise and steal the blinds and the odd limpers 5c which isn't good at all lol below is a hand where i actually got paid with them and i think i got max value out of this with my big bet on the river, i nearly timed out thinking about how much i could get out of him and decided that the big scary bet on the end might be seen as a bluff, it worked thank the lord 

The next hand i didnt play well, at all but luckily for me the villain played it far worse, far to much aggro from me but you don't get action without creating action, i'll just blame it on the meta-game or something hehe i was trying to build up a crazy image..... lol Really though, did he honestly think i was folding to a 40c raise, when he pushed i thought i was way beat but there was still no chance i was folding and i actually pmsl when my 6's held up against his ace high lol athough if an ace or an eight had hit the river my laptop would have surely exited stage left out of the window :) 

So, below is a quick summary of my 2nd week as a cash game player and my graph since i started. It's not been a week of huge pots so i'm thinking a lot of my profit this week came from really grinding it out with steals and cbets, which i'm really happy about because thats whats going to keep me building the roll when the cards dry up now and then. Only $100 to go and i'll be movin on up to 10nl :)

Good luck at the tables guys and as usual any comments are hugely appreciated.

Starting Roll - $130.85

Hands Played - 1248

Profit - $19.20

Current roll - $150.05

Finally in profitz and fpp sattelites, a good week

Hey, well i've decided to do a weekly update from now on, this will happen generally every saturday morning i'm thinking, but any time over the weekend is more likely.

So... after my disaster start to 5nl where i dropped to $81 i have finally righted the good ship peel and am now sailing off into the sunset towards 10nl haha :) Seriously though over the last few days my cash game has seen some big improvements, i've increased to 4 tables for a start which has definetly tightened me up, where last sunday i played my first session at 29/9 on 1 table i put in a session yesterday where i played at 14/9 over 4 tables, which may even be a bit too tight now lol 

Below are some highlights and low points of the week since tuesday for your viewing pleasure

If you read my first post after my first session you might remember a hand where i was dealt AK in the blinds, played it quite passively and ended up losing a big pot, well with that still fresh in my mind and thanks to some good advice in the comments i am now playing AK a lot more aggresively when i am out of position and i think this hand proves that

This hand was the first hand that i had played at a table, now normally i will wait for the big blind before playing but if i sit in and the button passes me straight away i will sometimes post the blind in the CO because at least i'm in a good position, thank god i did here anyways, seeing as the guy that had put in the raise had a fair sized stack i figured that i might be getting some good implied odds for my 65 suited so just flat called to see what the flop brought, it couldnt have hit me harder if it tried and was a VERY good start to a new table lol what followed was a whole load of donk, idiot etc comments but i dont care i dont think its that bad a call given the guy had a huge stack.

I havent seemed to be hitting very many sets this week, been calling peoples raises when they have a big enough stack, just havent been hitting any, except here where a queen thankfully came on the river and my set mining paid off for once.

Now the low part, In the past tilt had been a bit of a problem for me, especially playin cash games, mainly because i was no-where near rolled for the ones i was playing in and i was playing for money that actually meant something to me, below are 2 hands of tilty peel in action, i think it was caused by my aces losing to Q9 or something like that, luckily though i am a bit better at recognising tilt now and nipped it in the butt quite quickly.

Something else i discovered last night was the 210fpp sattelites to the sunday 200k on stars, since i've had an acount on stars for a while i'd managed to build myself up to 920fpps without even realising, my original plans were to save for a porsche but with that being a bit too much of a long term goal i thought i'd save for a hoodie instead, until i found these little beauties :D 

They were brought to my attention through the micro stakes thread on cardschat and after watching icemonkey's video on them i thought i'd give them a try, the basic strategy is just to play incredibly tight and when you get a decent hand, and i mean 1010+ or AQ+, just push... and thats it, you'll generally be called down with some shocking hands and hopefully double or triple up, at which point you could, if your lucky, fold to the money. 

The first one i played i got pocket tens in mp, pushed, was called by QQ and KJ, the queens held up and i was out :( i played 3 more last night and out of the 4 i played in i placed (6/20 get paid) twice which is a good ROI for these, hopefully i can keep that up lol basically the top 6 get a seat in the 200k worth 11 tournament $ if you unregister, you then google for a site that will trade you T$ for cash and voila your BR just went up $10.27. Some of the play in these is comical to say the least, people with huge stacks pushing it in the middle with ace rag or something on the bubble when they are easily in a position to get paid if they could just fold their hands, obviously on the bubble if your on a healthy sized stack and theres say 3 or 4 people that are a few thou below you , you fold aces if it comes to it (unless of course a shortie pushes, then you can be the hero and pop the bubble) because your pretty much gaurenteed a seat anyways. It's a really fun way to up the roll and requires very little skill, except in the last one i played in where i had to fire up the hud and find who i could steal from as i was getting a bit short myself!

Sorry for the long post, a bit of an up n down week really, i think because i have only really ever played sng's and tournaments regularly its been a bit hard to move over to cash games, theres obviously still leaks in my game but i'm a lot more focused and determined to improve on them now i have an aim (to get to 10nl and beyond) so a brief summary of the week so far....

Starting roll - $100

Played hands - 2345

Profit at the 5nl tables - $9.15 ($29 if you consider i dropped to $81 after the first session lol)

Profit from 210fpp sat's  - $20.60 approx

Current Roll - $130.85

So a good week in the end, i've increased my tables to 4 and this has helped me tighten up, i'm stealing more, isolating fish more, and c-betting with a lot more effectiveness, i think my games improved so much from just this week, and a lot of its down to cardschat, all the guys at the microstakes thread and the guys who've replied on the hands i've put up for analysis, so thank you all, good luck at the tables and i'll post again this time next week, where hopefully my roll will have carried on movin on up towards $250

A few graphs and stats

Dragging myself out of the hole

Hey, seems weird saying hey when i don't even know if this is being read lol, might just start with dear diary from now on, it's probably not all that interesting to the guys that are playing the higher levels though so i don't really mind, its serving its purpose as a self analysis tool anyways and if anybodys actually reading, well thats just a bonus. Plus when i'm up there playing 100nl it'll be good for someone just starting out to be able to read this and know that everybody starts somewhere, like a lot of the blogs from the other cc guys have done for me.

On to the poker, with the snow leaving me house bound, whilst on leave from the army (i'm not a bum on the dole lol) pokers taken up a lot of my attention, i know, its a hard life! Not as much playing as i could have done but ive mixed in a bit of reading Harrington on Cash Vol1 as well.

Anyways, up until today i was down $18 and already getting a bit disheartened with my cash game venture, now i know it is going to be a long road and variance is a bitch but it wasn't exactly the best of starts to something that i had been excited and focused about doing, i'd even thought up plans in my head of when to drop down to 2nl if my roll carried on nose diving, add in that i had made 1 or 2 big errors and things were not looking rosy at all........

Until today!! Overlooking a session last night were i finished a whole 90c up today has been the first time that i have actually shown a profit at the .02/.05 tables. I couldnt be happier really, sure i got lucky once or twice in particular but i also got unlucky a few times too so cut me some slack! 

I'll post a few of the highlights of the day below

Tried to isolate the short stack that'd pushed here, really didnt want a call from the other guy but was glad when a king hit the flop, caught a bit of luck there

This hand i got very lucky with but the villain had been playing at like 80/6 and making little re-raises all over the place, I never seen pocket kings coming, i figured he might have put me on a button raise with 2 pictures n decided to put the pressure on, i call, oops, ran it through poker stove and i was like 25% here against his kings, he lost another big pot later when he limped with QQ as well, a very loose passive player indeed. 

After those 2 strokes of luck heres a few hands where the poker gods werent on my side, as if to even the score a little, man i hate those gods! Is this the mystical variance in action?? or i have got the complete wrong end of the stick in terms of that concept? 

On that last one with the kings the guy who called my UTG raise with Q3d!!! had seen his monster hand and obviously clicked the "call any" box because he called it faster than a horde of housewives heading for primark on the opening day of the january sales, the chances of him having a queen were slim so i just put him all in and low n behold he had it, grr, that was my last hand that i was going to play as well, i'd clicked the sit out next blind button and was ready to go when i get dealt cowboys, those gods can be a funny bunch sometimes.

There was a few other choice hands but i won't bore you with them, not going to play anymore today so todays stats have ended up at, over 246 hands and 2.10 hours, i'm up $11.88 and i've managed to tighten myself up to 22/10 which is an improvement over my first few sessions, still could be a tad tighter and more aggressive i think but i'm happy that i'm making progress, still down $6.15 since i started out on sunday but i'm slowly climbing out of the hole and hopefully i'll be back in the black in no time, and working my way up to 10nl.

Peace out and gl at the tables

Well, just finished my 2nd session on stars, once again 2tabling .02/.05 FR, was a kinda mix bag really, flashes of good play mixed in with 1 dumb ass mistake in particular and one bad beat.

As i said yesterday my first session didnt exactly get me off to the best start, this time i went back focused and (at least thinking that i was) ready to not make any more stupid mistakes. Below are the highlights and some thoughts...

I'll get this one out of the way first, if it wasn't for this hand i would have finished the session up instead of down so i'm really annoyed with myself for playing like a moron

I hardly fit the name of 'hero' there lol Tbh i havent got a clue what i was thinking with this call, i'm not too bothered about the re-raise semi bluff but the call when he pushes, seriously..... what a dumb ass.

Next hand was a bit of a cooler i guess.

Was unlucky that he flopped the house but his stats for the session were vp-16 pfr-7 so because of his flat call pf i put him on maybe a medium pair like 8's or 9's, most probably a hand like AK, AQ (is this thinking ok??) when he raised me i thought he was making a move and pushed, unfortunately for me i ran into a flopped boat, typical lol

This hand is one that i didnt lose any money from but at the same time i don't know if i played the hand well??? i think i need to do a search on cc for "how to play an over pair on the flop" because straight away i've noticed that whenever i seem to stack off its when my over pair to the board is miles behind a better made hand, definetly an aspect i need to improve on.

On the bright side i did make at least one good play, these 2 hands pretty much followed each other and i was quite pleased with myself for taking the second pot down on the turn.

Proving that the ability is definetly in my head somewhere and using my amazing memory, i remembered that the villain had bet pot the last hand and figured my tens were good, my plan was to fire again on the turn if it came a brick and evaluate it from there... it paid off but i'm still unsure lol ....... Maybe i'm just lacking confidence in myself.

All in all the session ended as follows. Stats : VP-25.17 PFR -8.5 W$WSF - 39.71 WTSD - 23 W$SD - 43.75 Net Won (lol) : -$6.63 Which is an improvement results wise over my first session but still leaves me down $18 since i deposited $100, not trying to make excuses but if it wasn't for 2 of the hands above that would have changed to a profit of around $8 and only about $4 in the red so there is a glimmer of hope. Just got a few little niggling leaks to iron out and my transition from SnG's will hopefully be complete. To prove this (to myself as well as you) i have annotated a small graph for the session and in it you can clearly see that if it wasn't for 2 painful hands in particular this post could have been a lot cheerier

Thanks for the comments by the way guys, glad to know some people out there actually read this and i'm open to linking peoples blogs so just ask nicely :)

About me, and my first (bad) session

Hi, i've been playing poker for about 2 years now, mostly small stakes SnG's and MTT's online, mainly due to boredom but with a bit of success, i started taking the game a bit more seriously when i started playing a regular live game at venlo casino in holland, near where i was based in the army, for larger stakes, and i cashed for 4 figures there a few times. Eventually i want to be playing poker for a nice side income, possibly even full time, and i know that to do this as a SnG player you really need to be doing some crazy multi-tabling and it seems like a quite robotic way to make a living, and a boring way really. So...... it is with great apprehension that i am going to stop playing the SnG's and start on what i imagine is going to be a very long and painful road in cash games. 

I've decided to start a blog for 2 reasons really, to try and focus my game a bit more and to improve my after session personal analysis, something i probably don't do a lot of at all. Hopefully as well i'll get a few regular readers from the CardsChat forum, and the Micro stakes grinding focus group on there, and they can pass on their advice about hands i put up on here, instead of me filling, and probably boring, that particular thread with my long lists of hand histories.

Anyways, thats the intro done, now onto my first session as a micro stakes grinder.

I've deposited $100 (hopefully my last deposit) into my stars account and i'm going to start playing the .02/.05 Full Ring NL, playing 2 tables initially and buying in for $5 a time, this isn't the max for the table but it seems like the average buyin for this level is around the $5 mark anyways so i don't see it as a short stack, also this means i have a nice cushion of 20 buyin's which i think will be enough, but only time will tell lol

So.... the first session is done with, i 2-tabled for just over an hour and finished off..... $12 down :( apparently i have a lot of work to do!

I think this was a mixture of, bad luck, bad cards and a few hands of bad play on my part, below arethe hands that i think i could have played better.

The first one is a classic example of how not to play tptk

Preflop i flat called in the bb, and this was probably my first mistake, maybe i could've raised there, i just don't like putting a raise in with AK when i'm going to be oop for the rest of the hand,at the end of the day though AK is a good hand and i can't be scared to bet it incase it misses the flop, later on though when villain re-raises to 2.30 i should know i'm beat and it was a stupid push, very embarresing.

The next one came near the end of the session and i think i just got a bit too excited at having a good hand in a good position.

This was a fault of not paying attention to the stats i had on him, its worth noting that the villian was on both of my tables for the whole session and played at vp-12 pfr-6, when he re-raises me i should have been able to put him on a range of about 2 hands, namely aces and kings lol this is a hand that i'm quite dissapointed with on my part because i went crazy preflop when a tight player was showing a lot of strength, i suppose i was unlucky to run into aces but it could just as easily been kings and i stilled stacked off.

I think i just generally played badly tonight, my stats for the session were vp-29 pfr-9.92, which isn't good, i think because i've came from playing 6max sng's it might take me a bit of effort to tighten up for FR, i'm dissapointed with myself for dropping 2.5BI's in the first session, especially when the 2 big hands i lost were ones i really could have gotten away from.

So quite a bad first night, i've obviously got a LOT of work to do as i move over from my regular 6 max SnG's, mainly not getting too excited about tptk, which everyone says is a big difference from tournament play but something i always seem to forget or not pay attention to at all the wrong times. I think stacking off tonight might have finally drilled that lesson into my thick skull, and it's one of the reasons i started this blog, now if i make stupid mistakes like these again they're out in public and everyone can get to see how much i suck, nothing like a bit of humiliation to hammer a message home.

Tomorrows another day though, just gotta remember the mistakes i made and remedy them, its gonna be a loooooooong road me thinks :(