Wow I am beat...

This week in nyc was a blast. It was great hanging out with jay, chuck, ariel, emil, tubasteve, jsnipes and others throughout the week. We had a lot of fun, drank a lot of alcohol, played some poker, made some videos, and brainstormed for marketing ideas for the DeucesCracked at the WSOP. I think there are some pretty solid ideas, it will just be a matter of prioritizing and putting it into practice.

Last night was Jay's 24th birthday. He threw a birthday bash at Firefly somewhere in Soho I believe (forgive my nyc n00bness). It was roped off in the back, invite only, and open bar. The alcohol was flowing. I am typically not much of a drinker, but the last two nights here in NYC I got pretty torn up. It was pretty interesting/hilarious to meet all the different 2+2 / DC personalities when we all aren't behind the blue glow of our computer monitors. The party was pretty much a "who's who" of 2+2, including everyone's highlight when Cole South (CTS) walked in. It was pretty funny... I was standing near the bar talking to someone then the next thing I know I'm talking to myself as the whole area cleared. I turn around to see what happened and sure enough there's a flock of poker ballers turned-giddy-school-girls as they swarm Cole. It was quite a sight ahah.

Shawn (shawny_boy on 2+2/shawn on DC) was also there for Jay's party. I had met him the night before when we went out for drinks and talked to him for a while. He's a very fascinating guy who did well back in the dot-com boom, so that obviously piqued the interest of myself being a former software engineer. He brought his girlfriend who was very nice I had a good time talking to them. Unfortunately I got pulled away and by the time I was on my way back they were ready to leave.

It was also good to finally meet John, jsnipes28, after we had been talking on AIM for like 3 years now or something insane. He was very fun to talk to and we reminisced a lot about old hands and random posts on 2+2 as well as general poker bullshitting. We originally met online way back in the old party poker 2/4 days where he made a river blocking bet and i bluff jammed over him to get him to fold an overpair. He posted the hand on 2+2 and we talked via PM and AIM after that. Kind of weird how an internet post 3 years ago somehow leads to meeting up at a bar in NYC years later.

One of my students, Jason, made it over from pennsylvania and it was good to see him as well. There were tons of other great people there to talk to and meet, there's no way I could list them all.

Saturday was jay (KRANTZ's) birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAY! Snipes and I got him a pair of jumpsoles to help with his basketball dunking prop bet. I tihnk at least one other person had the same idea so with all those jumpsoles he should be a lock to win the bet.

One piece of good news is I didn't lose 22k or whatever it was I lost last september when I went out there. The bad news is I still ended up in the negative for the trip. ran pretty bad in all in equity where I ran 12k below expectation. So that sorta sucks. You can see the graph below with the dark green being actual results and the light green being theoretical results. This graph just reflects my results in NYC



We got a couple mini coaching sessions in playing some 10/20. It was overall pretty good/insightful. Jay made some sick reads as always. I also played Brad Booth at 10/20nl HU. That was a fun match as Brad plays a very unconventional style. He has 3 distinct "gears" that he appeard to switch between during our match. One gear was like a small ball, minraise or limp preflop, make small stabs, control pot size. The second gear was more of a normalish/standard style. Pot sized opens and 2/3-3/4 size postflop bets. The last gear was a aggro barreling overbet style where he would open raise to $123 and then overbet the flop. I ran well at the beginning of the match when I shot up a quick 5k but after the initial rush the match bounced around between even and +3500 or so until I made a hero call with A high in a $6000 pot that was no good and things sort of unravelled from there...including my QQ being destroyed by Brad's AA for an $8300 pot all in preflop not long after. Ouch.

My month was going quite well until that disaster at 25/50nl that I blogged about before. I'm not even sure where I'm at for the month now, but probably not up very much. I'm going to continue to stick with the heads up path because I really feel like I have a very solid edge at LEAST up to 5/10nl, and with Jay's coaching I'm confident I'll be able to soon be very competitive at 10/20nl and higher too.

Aaron

p.s. Here is a funny chat snippet from when I was playing Brad Booth. There were DC railbird supporters who really had my back:

Dewey Finn (Observer): playing Wilt hu is only
slightly better game selection than playing cts hu
Dealer: Brad Booth wins the pot ($40)
Dealer: Hand #6172675899
WiltOnTilt: thats a bit of an exaggeration :-)
Dealer: WiltOnTilt wins the pot ($40)
Dealer: Hand #6172677728
Dewey Finn (Observer): i idd the math
Dewey Finn (Observer): did
Dealer: WiltOnTilt wins the pot ($80)
Dealer: Hand #6172680019

Look at all the sick math he learned from my Mathematics of NL Hold'em series :-)

It's thursday, got in monday night to NYC. We've been working pretty hard on DeucesCracked.com concepts for future seasons, WSOP stuff, and videos too. It's been fun to hang out with everyone and sweat some serious high stakes action.

I got to watch FWF take on URINDANGER at 100/200nl heads up. That was definitely interesting.

I also got to watch emil win a massive pot that was bigger than my entire bankroll haha...

We ate some sick good food last night that we ordered in. We all got ribeye steaks and these shrimp skewers that were INCREDIBLE. Probably the best meal i've ordered in a verrryyyyy long time. I dont know what sort of spices they put on the shrimp but it was insanely good. Being delivered right to the door was also nice too.

Checked out the DC headquarters/office. Very hip and trendy.

Played a little poker myself, but not a lot. Made a few videos. Mostly break even. Haven't had the time to get in a ton of 10/20nl hu hands like I thought I might... but there's still today and tomorrow afternoon.

Tonight we're going out in NYC to meet a bunch of DC members for drinks. Tomorrow night is Jay's birthday party which will be an epic night i'm sure.

Had a quick coaching session at 10/20 hu today w/ jay. got 2 outed twice but i think we still managed barely in the green.

Oh yea hilarious story from last night, we go see "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" at the union square theatre in nyc. It was a pretty good movie, although they kept showing the main character's cock wtf ??? anyway after it's over DeucesCracked member hm0ney (i think that's it) went up to jay and asked if he was krantz from DC. ahahah, celebrity status! Anyway me, emil, and jay introduced ourselves and talked to him for a bit. Hopefully he'll come out tonight and have a few drinks.

Alright i guess that's it for now...

Aaron
p.s. the apple really is big.

I'm sitting on the airplane on the way to NYC to meet up with KRANTZ, Whitelime, FWF, and the rest of the crew to do a lot of DeucesCracked.com work. We'll hopefully be getting a lot accomplished this week by creating lots of videos and exploring where we're going next in the DC journey.

I'm excited to get out there and hang out with those guys again as well as hopefully getting some good sweat time in playing and watching some of the biggest HU ballers on the planet. I feel like my heads up game has been progressing nicely but I still have quite a few leaks I'm trying to work out as well as overall gameplan/adjusting goes. I've been fortunate to run fairly well overall in terms of all-in EV in terms of big blinds won and lost, however my timing for hitting big downswings has been less than.... ideal.

I played some 25/50 HU the other night on PokerStars, which is a monumental pain since we had to sit on a 9 man table and beg people to not sit in so we could play heads up. I was playing against a fairly accomplished online tournament player who played a super aggressive game. There was tons of 3 betting preflop and overall aggression postflop. I managed to run terribly card dead the entire match, only managing to hit a flop when the guy would flop a set...heh. So after a few fairly positive blog posts in a row, I'm unhappy to report that I pretty much wrecked my month and posted my worst day ever as I lost 22k at 25/50, another 4k at 10/20, and overall on the night I finished -$17,500 or so for my biggest single day loss ever. It wasn't much fun, but i'm fairly confident I can make it back by grinding 5/10 HU and 10/20 HU for the forseeable future.

Ideally, once I get to NYC and being in the midst of the great heads up minds, I'll be able to crush by osmosis and make back some of the disaster that was 25/50nl. I plan on trying to play a fair amount of 10/20nl while in new york, so we'll see how it ends up.

Here was a graph of the other night at 25/50nl. As you can see -$22,000 in about 400 hands lol...



Amazingly I kept in fairly good spirits after the loss. It helped to know that my money was in a good spot... not that I necessarily got drawn out a lot (i was mostly just getting outflopped) but that I would happily play again if I could. That's not to say he was a bad player, in fact just his pure aggression was fairly difficult to deal with, it's just that I really couldn't ever seem to achieve the momentum and I was always trying to play catch-up. I plan on writing a big long post about how important momentum is (more of a psychological thing...has little/nothing to do with acutal EV). Anyway, I hope we'll be able to form a rematch in the near future, and this time hopefully it will be hosted on FTP where they actually have heads up tables instead of this converted full table nonsense with idiots always sitting in ruining the game.

Captain turned on the fasten seat belt sign so I'm almost ready to land. I plan on trying to make at least one other blog entry while here in NYC to report how things are going.

Good luck and play well

Aaron

...it's how drunk and high your teenager gets while playing!

Something got jacked up with pokerhand.org, so if my links in the previous entries weren't working for you, try them now I went through and re-uploaded the hands.

This month is going very well so far, I'm happy to report. I'm still playing mostly heads up, where the bulk of my hands are falling at 5/10nl. The games have been good and I think I'm improving my skills, not tilting THATTTT much, and overall running pretty well. If I can manage to not go on any major downswings I should hopefully have a very solid monthly result.

Tonight I organized an online "home game" with my dedicated students. We 2 tabled small stakes (25c/50c) on pokerstars and all got on Skype and discussed the hands. I think everyone had a good time and there was definitely a some good discussion going on. I think doing some of these "extras" for my dedicated students (like having the personal forum, occasional student-only videos, and occasional homework assignments) helps keep everyone happy and learning. I'm not aware of too many coaches that do these types of things, but I'm all about trying to offer people a good return on their investment (as coaching can get quite expensive).

I'm headed to NYC on Monday night to meet up with KRANTZ, whitelime, FWF, and the New York based DC crew. We're going to try to get a lot of stuff done and hopefully get a fair number of hands in sweating each other. Should be a good time, I'm looking forward to it. The last time I went to NYC I dropped like 22k or so (lol... you can search back last sept/oct for the blog entry) so hopefully I can avoid that this go around. If I recall, I was also having a good month back then before I went. I hope history does not repeat itself hahaha....

A little further down the horizon, I was looking at dates to go to vegas for the wsop this year. I think I'll end up being out there between roughly June 16th and July 4th or so. It will depend if I qualify for the main event or not. If I can somehow luckbox my way into a seat (ugh, was within 20 people on sunday of winning a 12k package... 5 hours for nothing puke on tournaments) I may try to go after winning a second seat, as on June 13th there's the WSOP Heads-Up Event which I think would be a lot of fun to take a run at. It's a $10k entry so I'd probably want to try to satellite in as opposed to plopping down 10 buyins of my normal game.

If any of you guys are going to be out there for the wsop and you want to meet up, let me know.

I haven't played much 10/20nl HU so far this month, I'm hoping to get some of that in while in NYC and during this week's coaching session with Jay. I'm somewhat irrationally worried about hitting a huge downswing at the higher stakes and it's kind of pussing me out a bit. It's like there's this weird mental block that is keeping me from going no higher than 5/10nl for my "main" game. I dunno what it is, just need to get more experience, run decently, and play well and I'll be fine.

I made a "good quit" yesterday. I was playing a regular on PokerStars heads up (which I typically don't do) and on like the 3rd hand of the match I lost with 99 to AKo all in preflop. On all acounts a totally standard hand by both of us. After another 15 minutes of playing I was bleeding chips a bit having c-bets failed and with no momentum I just decided it's not worth it and quit down 1.5 buyins to him. I'm starting to turn over a new leaf in this regard I think. Momentum is just so huge in a heads up match that unless you think you just have a monster edge over someone it is often the best move to just swallow the loss and leave to find greener pastures. I'm going to try to do continue to do this, but the more money I'm down the harder it becomes to quit, for me at least.

Alright gonna see if there are any donkeys out there to play.

Aaron

This is part 2 of writing about my two craziest days of heads up NL Hold'em to date. If you haven't read part 1 yet, you may want to scroll down and read that first.

So after feeling pretty good from the previous night's coaching session and results, I decided I would try to put my teachings in practice and head for the tables. Historically, I typically play really well right after I receive a coaching session, whether it be later the same day or the next day. It's just something that gets you in the right frame of mind I think. Like a confidence boost or something. Anyway, I was feeling good and ready to get into the action.

So I sit on all the 3/6 through 10/20 HU tables on all the sites I play regularly: FTP, Stars, UB, Absolute and wait for some action. It doesn't take long for an unknown to sit with my on Stars. I do a quick check to see how many tables he's on -- only mine so that's good news. I'd usually go ahead and google the screen name too to see what extra info I can glean (you can often get some good stuff by doing this, such as pokerhand.org hands or see poker forum posts if they use the same name, or even their myspace page so you can creep them out by making fun of some aspect about them which they will wonder how you know -- which is highly entertaining). Anyway, it didn't take long to figure out this guy was going to be one of the biggest fish ever, it was just a matter of correctly adjusting to him.

Unfortunately, I was hugely card dead. And when I get card dead I start doing really dumb stuff, like trying to bluff the unbluffable. It's a mental block I must get over but against some people you simply just have to wait for a hand. The shitty thing is that with heads up you're constantly in a pot and if you're on an extended cold streak money can drain quickly. Well instead of sitting back and giving up some small pots waiting the guy out, I start trying to fight fire with fire and manage to tilt myself pretty well in the process.

Honestly, this guy was a mega fish but I will give him his due, he completely wrecked me in this hand: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1768300. Here's the thing about this hand. Against anyone decent I never make that river bet that size with the intention of folding. This guy was playing so loose/passive/donkish that I felt like he'd certainly pay off with any 1pair he has called down until this point but he would never raise w/o something better with TPTK. Unfortunately for me, this guy made a very advanced play by turning a made hand into a bluff on this river sensing weakness in my bet. This bet is a good one against unaware, non-thinking opponents. Based on how the guy was playing, I very much put him in this category. As I timed down I just didn't see a hand that could make it to the river w/o having a pair, and I felt like he wasn't capable of bluffing with a pair, so i mucked, and I will admit when he showed it rattled me a bit.

Just for reference, this guy was playing 78/12, Fold to cbet of 36, Fold to 2barrel of 88. He was a huge station and was winning 61% of the time we saw a flop. So basically he was always catching a piece and never folding. So I'm burning money and then manage to freaking misclick the river on this hand: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1768313. The whole hand is just foul and butchered really. I mean yea it's not terrible considering how often he is folding to a 2barrel, and on the river I'm thinking there's no way the K can possibly improve his hand. Based on how he was playing he would have checkraised the turn with a 9, so i put him pretty squarely on a hand like 77 that I could have a decent shot at him folding. As you can see somehow he just flat calls my river misclick 3bet and it costs me some extra $. More tilt inducement.

Long story short I end up getting cooled for another stack and sucked out for another so I ended up down 4k to start off the day and I was definitely tilting. So yea bad play + running cold + tilting myself = not good.

Jay and I were supposed to film a video for the pr1nnyraiding series but I told him there's no way I could do it as I was too steamed and needed to get some $ back. I found a guy on FTP and he manages to suck out on me for a stack then quit. I see the same name on absolute so I go play him there (he doesn't know it's me), and I get cooled with a worse two pair here: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1768297 and then this hand happens: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1768293 so needless to say I'm on huge monkey tilt. Real nice buddy. Now he won't play me anymore at 10/20 so he says at least 15/30nl, so I get on and ask Jay to sweat and chop action since we aren't doing the video anyway. We manage to be completely card dead and the idiot quits us after 5 minutes. BLECK. F U buddy, seriously.

So I get on some other tables and get some action against Danny Ashman aka theBruiser500 on 2+2. He's actually got a short handed NLHE book coming out soon. So not the bet spot for me to play, considering he's a very good thinking player, but he's sitting at 10/25nl on UB and I'm stuck like 9k at this point and ready break something. Since I got Jay in my corner I know things will work out in the end. So we play him. He plays very well against us but we manage to not run terrible and Jay makes some good reads and we take down about $4200, which we split 50/50 (along with the 15/30 action).

So after getting me back on the right track Jay has to go do some stuff so I'm back on my own and playing. At times I think I had 5 tables going, 4 HU and 1 6max game trying to grind grind grind it back. I decided after seeing that I was down 9k I'd no longer look at Hold'em Manager to see where I was at until I was completely done playing (knowing if I'm + or - only makes me play worse, never better). It felt like I was losing every single pot for the next several thousand hands but somehow I was winning. It still felt like I was in a huge hole though, but since I didn't look at my results I was still motivated to keep going to try to dig myself out. Somehow I manage to go on a +10k tear on my own from about -5k where Jay quit to about +5k (about +14k counting action share).


So there's the graph of the whole ordeal. It was quite a rollercoaster and made me realize how I need to work on my tilt control. I definitely made some bad plays, and as you can see I ran really cold in terms of my all-in expectation, but still it's not an excuse for making bad plays and getting steamed over it. When you step back and think about how dumb it is to get upset at inanimate objects (or in this case 1's and 0's in a computer) it's really pretty silly... but just because one can have that realization doesn't mean it's trivial to stop tilting.

Anyway I'm pretty much convinced you have to be batshit crazy to play HU NLHE for a living but here I am doing it. By the end of the night I really felt like I was still down at least a few thousand, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the green number in Hold'em Manager. It just shows how losing and playing bad and running bad can fuck with your head. In any case, it was one of the sickest days of poker I've ever had!

Aaron

Man it's 5am on Saturday and I'm finally getting off my tables. The last 48 hours have been the freaking nastiest days of HU unlimited hold them evarrrr. And I mean nastiest in the full dual online-meaning of the word. I think I'm going to break this blog entry into 2 parts because there's a lot to tell. So part 1, right now, actually relates to "last" night, Thursday night:

Krantz and I finalllllyyyy got around to doing my first HU NLHE coaching session that we have been planning for quite some time (which kept getting postponed for various hang ups), but it was worth the wait. We talked about some general HU theory stuff about where I felt like my biggest HU leaks are (and there are definitely several of them). We talked about a hand that I pretty much butchered a while back while I was playing in the mountains of NC... I knew I screwed it up but he shed some light on the hand in a way that I had not considered, so that was helpful. After that we pretty much went into the action and played 10/20nl HU where I quickly got sucked out on and the guy bolted. haha... the hit and runners apparently don't care if I'm trying to learn something, so there went $2k quick. Anyhoo, we find a 25/50nl regular who jay feels he has a pretty strong edge on and we decide to do the coaching session by 2 tabling him and chopping the action.


So with the Master of HU himself in my corner I prepare to go to war playing the highest stakes I've ever played heads up (side note, I've played 25/50nl 6max before, just not very much and only with a huge fish at the table, and never heads up).

I proceed to run pretty well and play well too under Krantz's guidance. I learned several things through the lesson that mostly revolved around adjusting to who I'm playing against. I think I have a very fundamentally sound game, but the biggest part I need to work on is adjusting more quickly to people and realizing what it is I'm seeing. It's sort of tough to explain... it's like I feel like I'm pretty good right now at situational adjustments -- "he played his hand this way last time, I need to do X this time" -- however the part I'm not so good at is seeing their overall gameplan as a whole and making the global changes to my game based on that. So for instance, it takes me a while to realize "hey this guy isn't c-betting that much, it's much easier for me to call with offsuit aces from the blinds that I'd normally fold" whereas for Jay it's second nature. I'm much better at the "he bet X last time in this situation with hand Y therefore I proceed by doing Z". I dunno if that makes sense but it does in my head. I guess I need to make better macro adjustments as I'm pretty OK at the micro adjustments already. Yea, that makes better sense and sounds really smart too! vocabulary words ftw

Ok so after the 25/50nl session we basically wrecked the guy for 31k. I had less than half the action but it still made for a pretty damn nice day, especially considering the point of the evening was to get better at poker, not necessarily to make money.

This was the biggest pot of the night, I had been 3betting a ton... he was starting to get a bit more out of line preflop and put me on a re-steal apparently:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?1768324

In this hand I got insannnnely lucky but there's nothing much else either of us can do: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1768327 Ship the 19% equity boooyah!

Here's the biggest pot I lost... the overbet fucked with our head badly. He made a nice play: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1768329

This hand was sick nasty, not because of the result, but because Jay even said on the flop "watch this he is going to value bet super thin here." My opponent was getting frustrated for sure... I think this is a pretty good example of Jay's sick game flow reads that I simply am not in tune with. Hopefully someday. I think the call is totally standard, but the impressive part IMO is that my coach knew he was capable of value betting something like this given the current game dynamic. For me to call here I expect to be shown mostly bluffs, JJ or AA or mayyyybe AT, I didn't expect him to value bet a hand as weak as JT here, but Jay was ready for it before it even happened: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1768331

Here's the graph of the session. I forgot to include the "all in ev" line but suffice to say just by looking at the KhTh hand we ran well above expectation during all-in situations. shipppp



Part 2 coming sometime this weekend. Let's just say it was the Yang to this entry's Ying. Or something like that.

Aaron

It's a little more anticlimactic than one might think, really. The site has been up there for quite some time as we've been putting in about 10 hours a week since sometime in the fall of 07 working, reworking, and rewriting a lot of it. Right now it's at a point where we're pretty happy with what we have, and we're moving into the advertising phase.

As a sort of spare time project, I think it has come along nicely. Since my uncle has a real job and I spend quite a bit of time playing, coaching, analyzing hand histories, and making videos surrounding poker, it's nice to have something non-poker related to work on. That said, because of our busy lives we don't get a lot of time to work on Preemas.com, but thankfully we've made it this far at least.

Mostly during this phase we're focusing on Google AdWords, which are to a certain degree, an enigma. So much of how Google calculates these subjective things like "quality score" is completely hidden from the advertiser as it's all based on some in-house google algorithm that calculates how good the information is on your site compared to the keywords you're advertising on.

So let's say you're a girlfriend of a poker baller and you decide you're going to shell out a buyin or two of your boyfriend's bankroll to get yourself a new Louis Vuitton purse. So you go to google and type in "Louis Vuitton purse" and on the right you see all these enticing Adwords to click on. Hmm which one. All of those advertisements have been "bid" on by the advertisers, with the highest bids being more likely to show up towards more often as well as some other criteria. One of those "other criterion" is the aforementioned quality score. If the site you're linking to from your advertisement doesn't seem to be highly correlated (according to the google bots) with what you're saying in the advertisement, you'll have a low quality score. With a low quality score, you're going to have to bid more money per click to get pushed towards the top and have your advertisement shown.

Well long story short, one of my first advertisements was for a particular brand of handbag. The page that got linked from my Google Adword advertisement went to our search results page that basically showed 150 handbags of this particular type/brand, detailing the hand bag name, price, picture, etc all the things you would expect. When we first placed the ad, google said our quality score was "Great." Sweet, only cost us 6c per click. Later in the day I check our progress, now it says our quality score is "OK" -- and bam, now it's going to cost 30c per click because our quality score has slipped. WTF! Damn google bots... BAN!

Needless to say we still have a lot of advertising related problems to figure out, but we're making progress...reading up as much as we can and tweaking things in the Ad and on the site. After we get the advertising figured out and we start getting a decent number of daily hits, we'll be hosting a blog there to basically pimp our own products and relate them to what celebrities are wearing (thankfully we both have wives who are into this stuff... we know nothing about fashion or celebs).

The site isn't anywhere close to perfect and i'm sure there are still bugs somewhere. I haven't tested the site on any browser except IE7 and Firefox 2, so if you're using something else and it is bombing out, my apologies. If you have any comments or suggestions for things we should do, feel free to drop me an email (link on the left navigation at the top of the page).

So these are all hurdles we are jumping over now to get traffic to our site and hopefully have motivated buyers land at Preemas.com. I fully realize the audience I'm writing to here has very little interest in high end women's hand bags... but we do have some good stuff for you guys.

How about:

Preemas.com Baller Watches

or

Preemas.com Poker Shades

Ship the shameless plugs!

Aaron

P.S. Free shipping on all items, btw. grab your shades in time for the WSOP ;-)