Poker Analytics Blog

I’ve completed my first session last night. The first half was pretty tough, for an hour the guys played pretty nit, I was down a little, already asking myself how I was gonna beat the limit. I lost the biggest pot at that moment, with a hand I am not really proud of:

Stacks:
UTG – UTG (€2,00)
CO – CO (€6,10)
BTN – BTN (€6,61)
SB – SB (€5,00)
BB – Hero (€5,32)

Preflop: (€0,07, 5 players) Hero is BB with 5♠9♠
UTG calls €0,05, CO calls €0,05, BTN calls €0,05, SB calls €0,03, Hero checks

Flop: K♠5♥6♠ (€0,25, 5 players – BTN: €6,56, SB: €4,95, Hero: €5,27, UTG: €1,95, CO: €6,05)
SB checks, Hero bets €0,20, 1 fold, CO raises to €0,40, 2 folds, Hero raises to €1,20, CO calls €0,80

Turn: 8♥ (€2,65, 2 players – Hero: €4,07, CO: €4,85)
Hero bets €1,75, CO raises to €3,50, Hero raises to €4,07 (all-in), CO calls €0,57

River: A♦ (€10,79, 2 players, 1 all-in – Hero: €0,00, CO: €0,78)

Total Pot: €10,79
Hero shows 5♠9♠ (One pair : 5)
CO shows 6♦6♣ (Trips of 6)

CO wins €10,09

Here we can see that I am forced to play at the big blinds a suited 3-gapper, and I am offered a nice flop with a pair and a flush draw. I have really played the hand knowing that if the villain had just a pair, I could go allin on the flop with a coin flip, so I tried to make him fold with little success. Two factors showed that he was way ahead: he just limped preflop, and even if a lot of players are limping at these limits, people tend to do it with small pairs. Then on the flop he just min-raised, and that’s a good indicator that he had a monster. So considering that he had a huge hand, I should have just called his raise, and then check/fold on the turn if I had not hit the flush. A big mistake here because I didn’t really pay attention to some big tells.

But the second half of the session has been much better, being more often payed with my hands and also hitting well: I won 220BB in a 3-way 3-betted hand where I hit a set on flop. The session finally ended really well with a net result of +36.51€ which is really nice at those limits.

Overall my strategy is to play aggressively most of the time as the players aren’t really sticky and it is easy to win hands with one or two barrels. Players rarely 3-bet so I tend to fold when they do, and I’m going to call in the few spots that can be really profitable.

Back into Poker Analytics, in the Coaching section, I have decided to add some custom fields to track my shape and my appreciation of my game. I have 3 levels to indicate my shape: Top, OK and tired. I have 3 more for my game, simply A, B and C-game. That will help me play in the best conditions and try to stay focused during the games. I chose to rate this session with a B-game because I am not too fond of a few spots that I played.

You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Thanks for reading.

 

We are about to start the challenge I was talking about earlier. Why do we want to start a bankroll challenge? For my part because I had a lousy end of 2012. I stopped playing for two months and just started again, but I need a good context to start from the low stakes again, and having to post my results publicly should help me staying disciplined.

Razmig and I are doing this challenge, we are going to start with 100€ on Winamax, which is the coolest french room. The challenge is going to last one month. I’ll do mostly cash games as I just don’t know how to win tournaments. I’ll post feedback on my performance regularly, and some interesting hands I’ll encounter. So that will make me start with twenty buy-ins at NL5, and I’ll try to have more as I get in higher stakes (if I do…). My objective is to reach NL100 again, but one month seems a bit short to reach that point.

Many asked what are the stakes of that challenge. Well, after many debates, we’ve decided that the loser would have to resign from the company. That should give us plenty of motivation…

Anyway, I’ll post some feedback after my first session, so see you at the tables!

Hello,

this is the first post of the new Poker Analytics blog! We are opening this blog to talk about Poker Analytics of course, but also because we are going to have a poker bankroll challenge with Razmig in the coming days.

The layout of the blog isn’t exactly in tune with the site because we are working on a new version of the site, and also because we really wanted to be able to post about the challenge quickly.

We will soon write on the details of the challenge.

That’s it for the first post, see you later!