It’s not really a social game

“Boredom is a sign of satisfied ignorance, blunted apprehension, crass sympathies, dull understanding, feeble powers of attention, and irreclaimable weakness of character.”
–James Bridie
Nothing too exciting to report, after a ho-hum weekend of “social” poker. It’s tough to bring intensity to the table when you’re playing among friends, but I did enjoy the social aspect of the game this weekend. So here’s the run through of the weekend’s happenings…
1. I got some great comments about the upcoming magazine article I wrote for All In Magazine— thanks to everybody for all the positive feedback. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but I think it serves as a good introduction to the poker blog scene for people who’ve never heard of a blog. The article explains a little bit of my story, and how I started writing about poker, as well as a tour through the “best of” the poker blogs, with some of my favorite quotes from each one. I believe the first issue of All in comes out next week, just in time for the WSOP, but I’ll write more when I find out the details.
2. Spent Thursday night at a home game playing against my boss and a few co-workers. The buy-in was only $25, so I tried to use the night to develop my reading skills and just to have some fun. I mostly treaded water in the limit portion of the night, as the newbies would play any pair to the river, and I did my best to see every flop. But the night ended with an alcohol fueled heads-up no limit showdown with the boss, who turned up the aggression and came over the top of my raises several times. I resolved to wait until I was sure I had the best hand, and then turn her aggression against her. Of course, I get Q9 in the Big Blind and see the flop come 6 6 Q. She puts out a medium size raise, and I sense weakness, so I push all in, only for her to turn over 65. Ah well, I’m sure we’ll square off again…
3. Spent most of last night playing with the fish at Hollywood Park. I staked my buddy M in the $3-6 game, an up and coming player that I’ve been friends with forever (he’s Monk’s younger brother, for my faithful readers). The place was packed– Friday and Saturday nights are always an adventure at the old HP, full of drunk fish and people giving away their money. While we waited for our names to be called, I found an open seat in the $100 buy in NL game. Pretty loose, so I limp in on the button for $3 with QTo. 5 players in, and the flop comes QT rag. Checked around to me, I check, and the turn is the Q, giving me the boat. Checked around to me again, I throw out a $5 chip and everybody folds. Horrible play by me, but I was busy getting a drink and trying to lock up my seat at the $3-6 game with M, so I was a little distracted. Probably wouldn’t have made any money on it anyway, but why not wait to the river? Oh well, a great start to the night.
I reluctantly gave up my seat to join M– I came to play with him, so I put away my fishing gear, sadly giving up the soft NL games and action-packed $6-12 game with mountains of chips on the felt. I hadn’t played $3-6 in a long time, and I planned to play as many hands as I could– go home a big winner or a big loser, ramblin and gamblin and rammin and jammin all the way until the wee hours of the night.
The table was perfect- the most loose-passive players I could remember, and every other hand was a family pot. This made for plenty of bad beats, and M quickly dropped $100 in the first hour and a half after getting sucked out on a few times. Meanwhile, I doubled my stack after catching a few ridiculous flops. True to my strategy, I played any two suited and any one gapper, and the implied odds justified playing these hands. The night wore on, and my loose play caught up with me, and I had a number of bad beats put on me, knocking me back to half my buy-in after 5 boring hours of play.
Luckily for me, M kept played a lot tighter and smarter than I did, and I was happy to pocket half of his $140 profit after his cards warmed up towards the end of the night. I ended up breaking even for the night… I definitely am not made for seeing 50% of the flops, but it was fun to try to outplay people after the flop. Who knows, maybe I would have dropped a couple racks in the $6-12 game…
4. Wanting to take my game to the Ted “The Freak” Forrest level, I ran my first set of simulations using Turbo Texas Hold ‘Em. The TTH interface isn’t the best, and it took around 30 minutes at full CPU usage to finish each sim. KQo is a trouble hand for me, so I set up some simple sims to determine under what table conditions open raising with KQo is profitable. I set up a trivial 2 million hand simulation that compared always open raising with KQo on a loose-aggressive table vs. always limping with KQo. Somewhat surprisinlgy, the limping strategy showed a slightly higher win rate, averaging a net of $6.71 per hand ($20-40 structure), compared to $6.25 when always open raising. The open raise strategy had a slightly higher win rate (28.4% vs. 27.7%), but made less money. I believe this reflects the idea that limping with dominating hands in loose games is often more profitable– you want to be called down or raised by loose aggressive players when you have them outkicked.
These results were pretty trivial, but the experiment showed me that it’s not as easy as I thought to set up these simulations. And this is as it should be– poker greatness shouldn’t be easy to come by, and if you’re trying to squeeze that expert knowledge out of a simulation, you’re going to have to work to get there. I picture Ted Forrest madly collecting printouts of simulation results, putting in months of research to reach that next level of poker knowledge. Picture Izmet and Abdul pounding away on a laptop in Slovenia, cackling at the discovery that you can limp reraise with small suited aces. Just as in any field, the money and glory goes to those who are willing to push past common knowledge through research and study. Hopefully I’ll get there one day…
5. The Blogfather is running the next blogger tourney, which will take place at Pacific Poker. Unlike previous tourneys, this one has been opened up to the readers, so come on in and square off against your favorite (or least favorite) bloggers. The tourney will take place next Sunday, May 16th at 6pm Pacific– $20 entry, and with that buy in you get plenty of smack talk. I’ve had fun losing my money to superior No-Limit players in the previous tourneys, and I’m sure Iggy’s tourney will be a blast.
That’s what’s happening in my neck of the woods, hopefully I’ll be back to my usual focused grinding this week, as well as digging in deeper to the simulations. Good luck to everybody out there– be patient and the chips will come…