How to Fix a Losing Month

It's pretty easy. Just hit the nuts and win $40 in two hands. :D

Enough of the big boring informative posts! Days like today are why I enjoy playing poker and it's more fun to talk about them.

It's been kind of a lame month (poker wise) up until today. I was busy with travel and social life which was awesome but I had to scramble a bit at the end of the month to make anywhere near my goal for hands. To add to that, I have made second best hands a hell of a lot this month and was down over about 2000 hands.

I have AQ? Opponent has KK.
I have KK? Opponent has AA.

Sometimes you make the correct play and you lose in the short term. No biggie, but it definitely didn't spark my interest to try to play more in my already hectic schedule.

Then I played today....

And stuff like this happened....



KAPOW!

I love it. The money went all in AFTER the turn card so no I didn't suck out thank you very much. Notice the sidepot for a whopping grand total $24 pot pre-rake.

Then later ( I didn't screencap this one because I was too busy screaming with joy like a Southern Baptist) I managed to hit 4 of a kind aces when my opponent hit his full house. He kindly opened up his e-wallet and dumped the contents into my lap. Huzzah!

The reason those hands are so beautiful is because my opponent had an awesome hand worth going all-in with but I still have him beat. It doesn't matter if you have a royal flush unless your opponent has something good enough to call bets with. I could do no wrong tonight in that respect. All my big hands got paid off!

What an odd exciting night. It had been a crappy grind for the majority of this month but I'm back into the green! That makes 5 months straight where I've turned a profit.

Now it's off to the cabin this weekend for some R&R, but I'll hopefully have a proper monthly report up some time next week.

Until then, enjoy this video that sums up my night...on a much grander scale of course :)

My Bud the HUD

Well after several trips up north and a few Harry Potter screenings I finally have some time to write up another update! And considering I've had my new HUD program up and running for about a month now it's about time I show it off and explain how I use it.

So what is a HUD?

In general, HUD stands for Heads Up Display and in poker it refers to a program that overlays information about your opponents onto the tables you are playing at so you can make more informed decisions. It's kind of like a transparancy being plopped down over your computer monitor.

Support for different poker sites varies as certain sites openly allow HUDs (Full Tilt, Pokerstars) while others ban them from being used (Cake). As you play more and more hands with people, the stats will update automatically giving you a more accurate definition about your opponent's play.

Poker HUDs are extremely customizable allowing you to view whatever stats you want about your opponents. Here's what my current HUD configuration looks like.



You can see I have a small box of stats for each player sitting near their name on the table. I got this fantastic layout from a friend online. My stats for each player are as follows

NAME / A / B / C / D
E / F / G / H
I / J / K / L

A: VPIP - The % of hands where my opponent Voluntarily Puts money Into the Pot. Higher means a looser player who I will call with worse hands, lower means a player who only plays the cream of the crop so I should be careful.

B: PFR - The % of hands my opponent plays pre flop with a raise. This gives me an idea about how good of a hand my opponent needs to raise. So even if they play 100% of their hands preflop, if I know they only raise with aces and kings I can get out of the way.

C: Aggression factor - Basically it just tells me how often my opponent will bet or raise compared to how often they will just call. Good for sniffing out big hands from passive players.

D: Showdown % - When my opponent sees the flop, how often does he take the hand to showdown? Can tell me when an opponent is incapable of laying down a hand that they raises preflop with or let me know that I'm beat when someone calls a bet who usually never makes it to showdown.

E: Flop Cbet % - If my opponent raises preflop, how often will he bet the flop? Lot's of people (including me) will bet most flops if they were the original raiser preflop. This gives me an idea of how serious someone's flop bet is.

F: Fold to Cbet % - Related to E, how often will someone fold to another player's cbet. If this is high, I will bet the flop with almost any two cards because of the number of times I will win the pot from my opponent folding.

G: Steal attempts - Stealing the blinds is when you raise as the first person in at the cutoff or button position, often with less than desireable cards. Thus the name. How often does my opponent attempt this given the chance?

H: Fold to steal % - Similar to G. How often does this person give up their blinds to a steal attempt? I love when this is high. I'll raise any two cards and eat those blinds up.

I: 3bet % - When someone before them raises preflop, how often will this player re-raise? Not HUGELY important, but good to know whether the person is serious or not with their reraise.

J: Fold to 3bet % - Related to I, how often will they fold their original raise when you reraise them. Great for slamming the hammer down on loose annoying aggressive players. I prefer to just call preflop and let them bluff again on the flop before crushing them but hey it's still a good stat to have.

K: BB/100 - Big Blinds per 100 hands won (or lost). This is the yardstick of the poker world. You are striving to win about 10 BB per 100 hands in a cash game. So at my levels, that's about $1.00 per 100 hands. While 4 tabling at 60 hands per table per hour, that's about $2.40 an hour. Yay for half of minimum wage! Anyways, this stat lets me know who the fish are and who the sharks are. But there really aren't sharks where I play yet. Just fish and mentally incapacitated fish.

L: # of hands vs opponent - The higher this is, the more reliable my stats become.

So there you have it. Obviously I never want this to become a crutch that I rely on but it's great information to have when used properly. Also, it's not an automatic way to win. Hell, my winnings on Full Tilt have been crap compared to what I was doing on Cake which doesn't allow a HUD. The HUD can't protect you from constantly having the second best hand. :)

As for my play in general lately, this month has been pretty crap so far. I've lost most of my big pots and only won the small ones so I'm not experiencing quite the same success I had been in previous months but all is not lost! I still have half the month to play and hopefully I'll turn things around to show a respectable gain at the end of July.

Monthly Report - June 2009

I've been setting goals each month since I started so hopefully I'll stay diligent enough to post my progress up here on how each month went. Here are the goals I set at the beginning of the month.

June goals

1. Try to play 3k hands.
2. If HEM actually releases the next beta, buy the small stakes version.
3. Try to play a few tournaments on some of the older sites I have money on just to break up the cash grind.
4. Mix in some NL10 tables. Mandatory this month.
   

Results!
1. Over 4k this month. :)
2. Yep! The HUD is awesome for FT which again I need to write up a post about because it's so cool. Definitely worth the price.
3. Yep! I mincashed a Cellsino rebuy with huge layover. I lost a coinflip for either being chipleader or busto right after the bubble so I had a good shot at going really deep. I have to keep an eye out on Cellsino and Bodog and poach those tourneys.
4. Yep! I will admit I got hung up on building a roll on FullTilt trying out my new HUD playing NL5 but I did play NL10 for a good chunk of my hands this month and turned a small profit.

Summary - For the fourth month straight now I slowly won some more money with low volume. It's frustrating to not be able to put in 10-20k hands like some of the other guys I talk to online but I'm trying to stay patient. I was surprised at the difference between NL4 at Cake and NL5 at FT though. It really seems like the folks at FT are more willing to toss their stacks in. I'm fine with that and I was still playing well but the variance made my end of my month SO swingy. I had my biggest winning session and biggest losing session back to back to end the month so it's been a little crazy with ups and downs.

Regardless, I'll hopefully have bankrolls sufficient for NL10 on both Cake (already do) and FT (halfway there) soon and can stick to NL10 permanently after that. I was happy with myself that I hit all my goals again. I've been successful with that for the most part each month and I'd like to keep it that way.

July Goals

1. Tough with a few vacations this month but try to hit 3k hands again.
2. Try to get back to basics. I think I FPS'd* myself a bit this month.
3. Find out what the hell I'm doing wrong with suited connectors. I
   think I fear higher flushes WAY too much.

*FPS means "fancy play syndrome" where you out-think yourself against a really bad player when you don't need to.

On an odd note - I think Kristen may be some sort of lucky charm....or curse....not sure which yet. She sat and watched me for about 10 minutes last night. During the first 20 hands she saw, I had pocket aces 3 times, pocket queens once, AK once and I hit a set with a small pocket pair.

I've never gone on a heater of that magnitude before. All those things point to her being a lucky charm.....

.....but I didn't win anything more that a few small pots with those hands and when she left, I went completely card dead and ended up punting off two buyins with a bad string of luck.

Charm or curse? Maybe figuring that out should be another goal for me this month. :)