....On 2+2's Heads Up (NL) forum.
Cwar IMed me last week talking about the forum traffic going up since the HU forum moved under the NL title. He mentioned that if it got any busier he'd put in a request for another mod and asked me if I'd be interested.
Basically I just tag posts that aren't tagged and lock/delete really off topic-vague/general stuff and send a PM to the people that did this. Nothing sexy, nothing tough.
The end of week/weekend went pretty well. I got 12 bottles of the infamous Dark Lord.
I haven't had one yet, I'm going to wait until I finish this month (motivation lol).
I heard that in mid May Stars is doing a double VPP promotion. As far as I know this is not official or announced, so I wouldn't mark your calenders or anything (Hokie actually told me, so he can take the credit for it being right/wrong).
In other news, I have a few other stakes/investments in the poker world that are going so so right now. One is going pretty well and the other is kind of just going average. Neither are going bad or terrible or stressing me out, so that is key.
This week looks to be very shitty weather, haven't started working for my business yet (though I've set up some work) and probably won't til at least this weekend now. You'd think by early May the overnight low would stay to over 50 F.
Not much other news, I still want to get a strat post up and if by some miracle I finish my monthly games early I'll definitely post one.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Links Update
I updated my links list.
I prefer to have players that primarily play husngs on the list (as of now Andrew Ferguson is the only non husng-majority player on the list, though I met him in a 55 husng and he is the founder of PS money).
I've added some notable higher stakes husng players, people like Croixdawg, NoFear, PrimordialAA and MaxV2. Primo is really the only one updating his blog (though it's new), but hopefully some of these other guys will start doing it.
And maybe Bcm can open a new blog (cough cough).
May you suck out on many rivers until my next post.
I prefer to have players that primarily play husngs on the list (as of now Andrew Ferguson is the only non husng-majority player on the list, though I met him in a 55 husng and he is the founder of PS money).
I've added some notable higher stakes husng players, people like Croixdawg, NoFear, PrimordialAA and MaxV2. Primo is really the only one updating his blog (though it's new), but hopefully some of these other guys will start doing it.
And maybe Bcm can open a new blog (cough cough).
May you suck out on many rivers until my next post.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
April Hate
I've only played 33 games in the last 7, compared to like 200 in the first 14 days of April.
I'm still down in April, but only because of my bad 50 game run at the 220s.
Stress level has been up this month as I'm prepping my business for the season (probably start first job Sunday). There has also been a lot of beer events and band events going on (Two different bands I know are made up of friends of mine that took a hiatus for the last 6 months decided to start playing again this month). So yea, pretty busy and I haven't handled my 220 downswing coupled with a standard 110 downswing very well. Thus, I've limited my playing time which has kind of frustrated me more, but I can't really force myself to play b/c I know it's a bad decision.
I'll have to figure out how I'm going to get to 10k vpps again this month, I had over 6k at the halfway point of the month despite some bad variance and now I only have 7k.
My upcoming schedule looks something like this:
Wednesday: Ready some equipment for the business, prepare business flyers, finalize opening month budget.
Thursday: Pass out flyers, attend tapping of new beer at brewery for mug club.
Friday: More flyers, attend pre DLD festivities later at night at the brewery.
Saturday: AM: Attend Dark Lord Day at Three Floyd's Brewery. It's a once a year festivity where the brewery sells (6 per person) 22oz bottles of their famous "Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout." It's generally rated as one of the top 1-3 beers in the world (I think it was 1-2 on most big lists this year).
Not sure how long this will last, but if I'm out of there at a reasonable time I'd imagine I'll be doing job estimates Saturday evening.
Sunday: At a minimum do 2 jobs, training my little brother b/c he wants to be my main worker this summer (he's 17 going to be a SR. in HS next year). Attempt to schedule them so we can make a late afternoon round of golf with my father and grandpa.
There's also some sort of 7 course dinner with 7 beers at the brewery later next week. I forget when.
So yes, busy schedule, kind of a stressful and frustrating month, hopefully I can just focus and have good results and go on some sort of a grinding tear in my downtime.
I'll try to get another big strat post done before May but no promises.
I'm still down in April, but only because of my bad 50 game run at the 220s.
Stress level has been up this month as I'm prepping my business for the season (probably start first job Sunday). There has also been a lot of beer events and band events going on (Two different bands I know are made up of friends of mine that took a hiatus for the last 6 months decided to start playing again this month). So yea, pretty busy and I haven't handled my 220 downswing coupled with a standard 110 downswing very well. Thus, I've limited my playing time which has kind of frustrated me more, but I can't really force myself to play b/c I know it's a bad decision.
I'll have to figure out how I'm going to get to 10k vpps again this month, I had over 6k at the halfway point of the month despite some bad variance and now I only have 7k.
My upcoming schedule looks something like this:
Wednesday: Ready some equipment for the business, prepare business flyers, finalize opening month budget.
Thursday: Pass out flyers, attend tapping of new beer at brewery for mug club.
Friday: More flyers, attend pre DLD festivities later at night at the brewery.
Saturday: AM: Attend Dark Lord Day at Three Floyd's Brewery. It's a once a year festivity where the brewery sells (6 per person) 22oz bottles of their famous "Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout." It's generally rated as one of the top 1-3 beers in the world (I think it was 1-2 on most big lists this year).
Not sure how long this will last, but if I'm out of there at a reasonable time I'd imagine I'll be doing job estimates Saturday evening.
Sunday: At a minimum do 2 jobs, training my little brother b/c he wants to be my main worker this summer (he's 17 going to be a SR. in HS next year). Attempt to schedule them so we can make a late afternoon round of golf with my father and grandpa.
There's also some sort of 7 course dinner with 7 beers at the brewery later next week. I forget when.
So yes, busy schedule, kind of a stressful and frustrating month, hopefully I can just focus and have good results and go on some sort of a grinding tear in my downtime.
I'll try to get another big strat post done before May but no promises.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Facing a limp
(Or why you should resist the temptation of raising limps over and over and over again)
You probably get what I'm going to advocate in this post.
First, the following is a response to another question from Spacko about "when you should raise limpers." It's a very general question but I notice that even good players often have a general problem with how they approach this area of the game.
Lets begin by looking at reasons why people raise limps.
**We'll assume that effective stacks are a relatively deep 40-75bb, unless otherwise noted.
1. Our hand is better than the range of hands villain will call with.
2. We think villain will fold a tremendous amount of time and we will raise for the fold equity. You could call this a bluff-raise.
3. We have a great read on villain and have found an exploit in their game (fairly rare early on). For example, a player that calls almost ATC preflop but is very weak/tight postflop. You would want to get chips in the pot preflop to steal postflop.
There are no doubt other reasons you can raise a limp, but the most common will be similar to the 3 above.
We'll start with raising for pure hand value. A common reply to "why did you raise his limp with that hand (we'll say a hand like QTo)?" is "he'll call with worse hands." That is probably true, a lot of villains will limp and then call a 3-5x raise with a lot of worse hands. But unfortunately, many people don't consider other factors of the hand besides the hand values.
The first factor of the hand that a lot of people ignore is position. You're out of position, so you're at a disadvantage (the deeper you are the more this is true). This will weaken your holding/value somewhat.
Another factor is postflop play. How does your opponent play postflop? What is his calling range? What is his limping range? If you're having trouble answering any of those questions, raising a medium-strong hand like QTo OOP for around 4x the bb is probably not going to put you in good spots postflop.
As an example of how crucial it is to know most if not all of these things about your opponent, I'll point you to a recent thread in 2+2: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=177357
In this thread, Skates (a 220-550 regular) raised Heir Apparent's (a very solid 200/220 regular) limp with what you could call a "medium-strong" hand. He assumed that Heir would raise any ace preflop, so therefore an ace could not be in his calling range. Based on that assumption, it would be a pretty easy call based on Heir's line (call, c/c, c/bet). However, Skates even admitted that he was pretty confused about the hand/line and it turns out Heir had a weak ace. Throw aces into Heir's range and it would be a pretty clear fold on this river.
Moving on, the other big reason people will give when raising a limp is "he's only limping weak hands, he'll probably fold."
While this is fine reasoning, this is generally not worth doing until effective stacks (in bbs) are pretty small (think like < 30bbs deep). Most players will adjust after you raise their limps a few times, so you're not going to want to pick up their 20 or 30 chips once or twice when you have 1500 chips and then have to figure out how they are adjusting later on. Knowing they are limping weak and/or folding often is going to be much more valuable when you can pick up 50-100 chips each time or more appropriately, 5-15% of their stack a pop.
I'll touch on one other point about limp raising before I conclude, and that would be to think about what it means to face a limp. Are you really worried about a player limping his button when stacks are deep? You shouldn't be. Most players are losing value by constantly limping their button when stacks are deep, so why should you abuse that leak early on and force them to raise more often in position and generally play more aggressively throughout the game? It is my belief that you should not.
Now lets quickly touch on when you should raise limps.
-The blinds are a big % of the effective stacks. 5-15% is probably a good rule of thumb for when you really want to be paying attention and looking for spot to raise limps for fold equity.
-You really have a good grasp on this villain and his calling range as well as his postflop play.
-Your hand is very strong. I would never suggest checking a hand like 99 or AK in the big blind when a player limps. With a hand like this, your hand is just too strong to not want to build a pot, position or not, good reads or not.
Building off of that, my default raising range for low-mid stakes husngs would be 55+, A9s, ATo+, KJs+, KQo+.
That range would change as effective stacks, game flow and reads developed and changed, but on the first hand of a 22 dollar husng that would be my suggest raising range facing a limp from a random player.
To conclude, in general I would suggest letting players limp early but especially paying attention to limp ranges, reactions to aggression and postflop play of villains so that you can take advantage of poor play as effective big blinds get shallow and leaks grow tremendously. A good way to gain this information is to mainly only raise strong hands early on when facing a limp, and to deviate from that strategy as the conditions above warrant.
I hope you enjoyed this post, if you have any questions or comments about this post or about anything having to do with husngs in general you can leave them here or email me (ryan.ryryp13(insert the @ symbol bc of spammers) gmail.com).
You probably get what I'm going to advocate in this post.
First, the following is a response to another question from Spacko about "when you should raise limpers." It's a very general question but I notice that even good players often have a general problem with how they approach this area of the game.
Lets begin by looking at reasons why people raise limps.
**We'll assume that effective stacks are a relatively deep 40-75bb, unless otherwise noted.
1. Our hand is better than the range of hands villain will call with.
2. We think villain will fold a tremendous amount of time and we will raise for the fold equity. You could call this a bluff-raise.
3. We have a great read on villain and have found an exploit in their game (fairly rare early on). For example, a player that calls almost ATC preflop but is very weak/tight postflop. You would want to get chips in the pot preflop to steal postflop.
There are no doubt other reasons you can raise a limp, but the most common will be similar to the 3 above.
We'll start with raising for pure hand value. A common reply to "why did you raise his limp with that hand (we'll say a hand like QTo)?" is "he'll call with worse hands." That is probably true, a lot of villains will limp and then call a 3-5x raise with a lot of worse hands. But unfortunately, many people don't consider other factors of the hand besides the hand values.
The first factor of the hand that a lot of people ignore is position. You're out of position, so you're at a disadvantage (the deeper you are the more this is true). This will weaken your holding/value somewhat.
Another factor is postflop play. How does your opponent play postflop? What is his calling range? What is his limping range? If you're having trouble answering any of those questions, raising a medium-strong hand like QTo OOP for around 4x the bb is probably not going to put you in good spots postflop.
As an example of how crucial it is to know most if not all of these things about your opponent, I'll point you to a recent thread in 2+2: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=177357
In this thread, Skates (a 220-550 regular) raised Heir Apparent's (a very solid 200/220 regular) limp with what you could call a "medium-strong" hand. He assumed that Heir would raise any ace preflop, so therefore an ace could not be in his calling range. Based on that assumption, it would be a pretty easy call based on Heir's line (call, c/c, c/bet). However, Skates even admitted that he was pretty confused about the hand/line and it turns out Heir had a weak ace. Throw aces into Heir's range and it would be a pretty clear fold on this river.
Moving on, the other big reason people will give when raising a limp is "he's only limping weak hands, he'll probably fold."
While this is fine reasoning, this is generally not worth doing until effective stacks (in bbs) are pretty small (think like < 30bbs deep). Most players will adjust after you raise their limps a few times, so you're not going to want to pick up their 20 or 30 chips once or twice when you have 1500 chips and then have to figure out how they are adjusting later on. Knowing they are limping weak and/or folding often is going to be much more valuable when you can pick up 50-100 chips each time or more appropriately, 5-15% of their stack a pop.
I'll touch on one other point about limp raising before I conclude, and that would be to think about what it means to face a limp. Are you really worried about a player limping his button when stacks are deep? You shouldn't be. Most players are losing value by constantly limping their button when stacks are deep, so why should you abuse that leak early on and force them to raise more often in position and generally play more aggressively throughout the game? It is my belief that you should not.
Now lets quickly touch on when you should raise limps.
-The blinds are a big % of the effective stacks. 5-15% is probably a good rule of thumb for when you really want to be paying attention and looking for spot to raise limps for fold equity.
-You really have a good grasp on this villain and his calling range as well as his postflop play.
-Your hand is very strong. I would never suggest checking a hand like 99 or AK in the big blind when a player limps. With a hand like this, your hand is just too strong to not want to build a pot, position or not, good reads or not.
Building off of that, my default raising range for low-mid stakes husngs would be 55+, A9s, ATo+, KJs+, KQo+.
That range would change as effective stacks, game flow and reads developed and changed, but on the first hand of a 22 dollar husng that would be my suggest raising range facing a limp from a random player.
To conclude, in general I would suggest letting players limp early but especially paying attention to limp ranges, reactions to aggression and postflop play of villains so that you can take advantage of poor play as effective big blinds get shallow and leaks grow tremendously. A good way to gain this information is to mainly only raise strong hands early on when facing a limp, and to deviate from that strategy as the conditions above warrant.
I hope you enjoyed this post, if you have any questions or comments about this post or about anything having to do with husngs in general you can leave them here or email me (ryan.ryryp13(insert the @ symbol bc of spammers) gmail.com).
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Quick Update
Sorry for the lack of updates, I'll have a full update with a new question answered in the next few days.
Been playing 220s and the 110 4 mans w Hokie, that's about it for April so far. Off to a decent start.
March ended like +3500, I think I made like 4k in the last week or 2. I SHOULD have no trouble surpassing that in April, provided I keep playing well. I also should surpass that if I put in like 15 hrs a week (I finished just below that for March), as I'm in the 220s for good now.
I'm going golfing tomorrow, but other than that am busy as hell in the next week setting up my business for the spring-fall season and doing taxes for last year.
I'm also looking for a new place. The investment stuff with my buddy has kind of hit the skids as tax season rolls around, so who knows what's going on with that in the short term.
My brother decided he doesn't want to play football for his senior year. He would be the starting qb, so I'm kind of not happy about his decision but not nearly as upset as my dad and especially grandpa will be (maybe he'll tell them while we're golfing tomorrow?).
I'll probably make a post this month to wrap up personal stuff in the blog for good and only give personal updates for major events in my life and/or little tid bits of something I'm doing that might interest some readers. I'll start to attempt to post MORE STRATEGY since people seem to enjoy poker stuff on a poker blog (orly?).
Until then, make money.
Been playing 220s and the 110 4 mans w Hokie, that's about it for April so far. Off to a decent start.
March ended like +3500, I think I made like 4k in the last week or 2. I SHOULD have no trouble surpassing that in April, provided I keep playing well. I also should surpass that if I put in like 15 hrs a week (I finished just below that for March), as I'm in the 220s for good now.
I'm going golfing tomorrow, but other than that am busy as hell in the next week setting up my business for the spring-fall season and doing taxes for last year.
I'm also looking for a new place. The investment stuff with my buddy has kind of hit the skids as tax season rolls around, so who knows what's going on with that in the short term.
My brother decided he doesn't want to play football for his senior year. He would be the starting qb, so I'm kind of not happy about his decision but not nearly as upset as my dad and especially grandpa will be (maybe he'll tell them while we're golfing tomorrow?).
I'll probably make a post this month to wrap up personal stuff in the blog for good and only give personal updates for major events in my life and/or little tid bits of something I'm doing that might interest some readers. I'll start to attempt to post MORE STRATEGY since people seem to enjoy poker stuff on a poker blog (orly?).
Until then, make money.
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