I think the watershed moment in my poker journey over the last five years was my discovery of the Onehunga Workingmen's Club Friday night tournament. I stumbled across this game in June of 2013 and have been playing in it pretty much every week since. Previously I'd been playing only in online games and it was great to get back into the live poker scene. This is a $20 to $25 'freeze-out' tournament and it has been pretty profitable for me over the years (although things have slowed down a bit in recent months). Not only does this give me a regular weekly tournament to play in, but it has opened up a variety of other club games to me. So I now play in the monthly 'Interclub' Tournament and have also attended the annual Clubs Championship for the last three years. In addition, I am now aware of a number of other regular club games and play in some of these from time to time.
As for other live games, the only others available five years ago were the National Pub Poker League (NPPL) games held in various bars around Auckland. For reasons detailed in previous posts, I just don't play in these. However, about a year ago some ex NPPL players started up the Avengers Poker League. They started running games in a number of venues and these games are pretty good. I've played in a couple of them and would make them regular games if they were played at a convenient time and location for me. Unfortunately most of them fall outside of my 'optimal range' so I'm not playing in them, but it's nice to know that there are some alternatives to the NPPL available.
A couple of years ago I discovered another pub game, not affiliated to any league, that is played just down the road from where I live. This Wednesday night game at the Landmark Bar has become my second weekly live poker game, and this game has also been pretty consistently profitable for me. However, at the end of last year the organizer decided he didn't want to run it anymore. Then at the start of this year I found that none of the people who'd volunteered to take over had done anything, so in the end I took it over myself. I'd much rather just be a player than a Tournament Director/player but this game was just to good for me to let it fade away. So now I'm back to playing in this game as well as running it. The downside is that it's harder to concentrate on my hands when I'm also running the game (especially in the first hour when late entries are available). The upside is that I've been able to make a few changes that make it an even more attractive game for me to play in.
The Landmark game is not the only one that I've ended up running this year. Last year the Onehunga Workies was running a monthly $50 deep stack tournament that I really enjoyed playing. However, the organizer decided not to run it anymore, so I stepped up and volunteered. So once again I've ended up being a TD when I'd much rather just play, but when a game is good you've got to do whatever it takes to make sure it keeps running. Fortunately this game is not a rebuy and has a slow structure, so it's less distracting being the TD as well as a player. This tournament started out fairly slowly, with only a handful of players turning up, but it seems to be gaining momentum and I'm pretty happy with the way it's going now.
During the last five years I've played a handful of games at Auckland's Sky City Casino, but mainly just casual 'non-bankroll' games.
When I first played in ring games at the casino the blinds were $1/$2, making for a maximum buy-in of $200. Since then they have steadily increased and are now at $2/$5. This is way beyond my bankroll's buy-in range. However, I did manage to win a Satellite that got me into a big buy-in tournament a couple of years ago. I only managed to get halfway through the field but I've always wanted to play in a big buy-in tournament and it was a great experience.As for online games, I've spent the last five years playing in a variety of different poker games on both 888poker and Pokerstars. The online games I've played include pot limit Omaha ring games, both fixed limit and no-limit Texas Holdem ring games, 9 player Sit N Gos, 27 player Sit N Gos, freeze-out Tournaments and seven card stud ring games. This was all part of my mission to try every possible poker game type. Fortunately I came to my senses and abandoned this project a couple of years ago. It turned out that trying a new form of poker is actually pretty hard and all I was doing was throwing money away. That's one thing that I've learned the hard way: stick to what you know.
These days I play almost exclusively on 888poker. Some of the other game types I tried were on Pokerstars because they were more readily available on that site. But since returning to my core games I've found that I prefer 888. Pokerstars has a lot more ring games available, but there are a lot of 'grinders' on this site, leaving very little room for an amateur player like me to move. The Sit and Go games on both sites are okay, but I prefer the blind structure that's used on 888. My other core game is freeze-out tournaments; I've tried these on both sites but I think that the play is generally looser and more passive on 888 so that's where I'm playing my tournaments.
I've played a lot of Sit and Go tournaments (SNGs) over the last few years. Sometimes I've played these as my main game and at other times they've been 'fillers' that I've played when I only had an hour or two to spare. Playing in SNGs has been a real rollercoaster ride. For a few years my results were pretty good and I was slowly moving up the buy-in levels. Then it all turned around and I had a year when I just didn't seem to be able to do anything right in this game type. I now play SNGs only occasionally, at a very low buy-in, and I'm struggling to find a strategy that works. This is perplexing to me. I do reasonably well in multi-table tournaments and can't understand why my results are so bad in single table tournaments. At the moment it's a work in progress.
My preferred online games now are multi-table freeze-out tournaments (no rebuys or add-ons). There's one on 888poker during the middle of the day that I sometimes play on the weekend. I did well enough last year that I thought I could move up a level and have been playing at this new level for the last few months. However, because of the number of live games I'm now playing, I only play in this online tournament a couple of times a month. I try to play in at least 3 poker session a week. I already play in two weekly pub/club games. Then I also have two monthly live games I play; the Interclub game and the $50 Deep Stack Tournament. So I usually end up playing online on the weekends when I don't have a live game. But that's fine with me. It's nice to have so many live tournaments available.
For most of the last five years I've been maintaining a graph of my total profit/loss from playing poker, which I update every second month. It was around the time I first starting writing this blog that my bankroll started taking its first stuttering steps over the break-even line. All through 2012 my graph flirted with the base line but then in 2013 it started to move up and it's been trending upwards ever since. Of course there have been periods when the line has dipped down but it always recovers eventually and starts to climb again. The worst of these dips lasted almost a year; I started losing money in late 2014, hitting a low point about four months later, climbed a little, then levelled out for nearly six months before returning to a positive trend late in 2015. I am currently in another levelled out phase but I'm confident that the upwards trend will return in time. Being able to look at a graphic depiction of my poker results is a very useful thing and shows me that I'm on the right track regarding my poker play and game selection.
I've also been doing a fair bit of study of poker theory in an effort to improve my game over the last few years. I've read a few poker books, including a couple of classics and found them reasonably helpful. But most of my information has come from websites and video clips. I found Poker School Online to be particularly useful and also School of Cards on YouTube. There is a huge amount of information on poker available online but not all of it is worthwhile. Googling a particular topic brings up a huge variety of links and the trick is to sort through it all and find the good stuff.
I think my game has developed pretty well over the last five years. Some of this is due to the study I've been doing but I think a lot of it is due to just putting in the game time. There's really no substitute for experience. I've worked out a basic game plan for poker tournaments based on my stack size compared to the blinds; ie, the number of big blinds I have.. As my stack size changes, my playing style changes. I go from the green zone where I basically play it like a cashie, to the much tighter yellow zone, to the 'push the action and steal the blinds' orange zone and then finally the red zone; the all-in or fold level. This basic plan seems to work pretty well for me for most games. However, the one exception is the Friday night tournament.
The Workies tournament has always been a very loose game but lately it seems to have become ridiculously loose. I'm not sure why this is, but it has become a major preoccupation of mine over the last year or so to find a way of beating this game. Raising with decent starting hands pre-flop becomes completely pointless because massive raises will still get called by at least half the table, significantly reducing the chance of your one pair hand being the winner after the flop. And then the pot odds are so huge that it's impossible to bet enough to stop the chasers from drawing to the next card. I'm still trying to work this one out. I'm sure there's an answer somewhere, but I'm yet to find it.
So five years on, that's where I'm at now; playing three poker sessions a week, most of them live games, building my bankroll and constantly looking for an edge. As for the next five years, who knows, but I did at least set myself some goals to achieve for this year. I've already achieved a couple of these, having revived the Landmark game and also got the $50 game moving in the right direction. But I've had to rethink a couple of the other goals that I set for myself in February. I no longer think that it's practical to play 4 poker sessions per week. I do have a life beyond poker and I just don't think I have the spare time available for that 4th session. So I no longer need to try all the other available games in order to find the right one to play. I'm just sticking to my current regular tourneys for now. Even though the Friday-nighter is no longer an optimal game for me there are other factors that come into play. Most importantly, this is the weekly night out for my wife and I, so it's not just about the poker any more.
That leaves two more goals for me to achieve this year. One is to read 'Harrington on Holdem, Volume Two' which I haven't done yet but will be doing soon. The other is to play in the Sky City Casino $1/$3 ring game (a new turbo-style cashie that started recently). I'm actually getting very close to having enough in my bankroll to be able to afford to play in this game. Another couple of hundred dollars in the kitty and I'll be off to try my luck in the 'Poker Zone'. Once that happens, well I'll just have to set some more goals won't I? Maybe I'll try to figure out how to win at Omaha. No, just kidding.
No comments:
Post a Comment