Little Richard won the Sunday Million

The Richard in question is my own brother. He won the Sunday Million! I'm very proud of him.

That said, I should qualify this and mention that he didn't win the Sunday Million as such, he chopped it 4-way for $128,000 each.

When I say he chopped it 4-way, what I mean is that his horse Marcin chopped it 4-way. Rich merely provided the buy-in and gathered the spoils.

That said, having your horse chopping the Sunday Million is almost on par with winning it yourself.

So well done to you little brother. Big rewards for little effort. What more could anyone want from life?

October results

I set myself a few modest goals for October, which I have achieved partially. The goals were:

[x] 700 games

[ ] $15 and $30 turbos only - didn't play any $30s this month, and played most of my final session today 6-tabling the $7s just because I was knackered and couldn't be arsed to engage the brain at all.

[ ] $1.5k profit - $1325, so nearly there. 

A plus point is that I'm making nearly $30/hr, which is close to my average poker wage for the year. I can state with a high degree of confidence that nobody else in these games makes anything like $30/hr except moi, mainly because I can multitable the hell outta those motherfuckers. I have to be the best at the $15s, because playing 4 tables lowers my ROI and thus I need to be good enough to sustain a winning ROI that gives me a decent hourly. A few regs moan when I play them, but they don't realise that because I'm on four tables and they're usually on one, they're not going to hurt my ROI enough to significantly affect my bottom line so I really don't care if I play them. In fact I enjoy it because a weak, exploitable $15 reg (i.e. most of them) is often just as easy to play as a fish who only wants to flip.

A negative point is that I ran well over EV to achieve my results this month, which is why I'm far too embarrassed to show the EV line. It's just storing up bad karma beat by beat to be unleashed like an avalanche the moment I step out of my comfort zone. I know how these things work. 

[x] Buy a house

Several years of rungood and a girlfriend with a 9-5 has meant we can afford a nice house. Nay, a family home. Downside is that I'm now completely busto except for my Stars roll. Upside is that handing over £20k means I might care more about grinding. Downside is that over the next few months I'm going to have almost no time to do it.

[x] Try a 'Jagerbomb'

You know successful poker players. They're a bit like Harry Enfield's "Loadsamoney" character but without the irony. I don't know what they like to drink but I imagine a 'Jagerbomb' is the sort of thing they might. Anyway I tried one and liked it. I'm not a big fan of drinking, or drugs, or fun things in general. My favourite program is Newsnight. Anyway there's me, drinking Jagerbombs. Fancy that.

Bye for now!

A 'giraffe'

So what do you do for a living?

“I’m a housewife.”

“I’m a full-time dad.”

“I’m unemployed.”

“Technically I’m a professional online poker player but not for high stakes or anything like that, just a grinder really. And only in my spare time because most days I’m looking after my one-year old son. I’m happy if I pull in $1.5k a month, which is better than McDonalds but nothing special. No, it’s not gambling and yes, I am playing against other people. No, I don’t pay tax or contribute anything useful to society. Yeah, basically I guess I’m an unemployed parasite.”

“No, it’s not rigged. Well, sometimes it is but on most sites it’s not. No, I’m pretty certain that the sites I play on aren’t rigged. And they can’t just run off with my money or see my cards. Well, sometimes they can. But other than that, it’s completely legit.”

“I don’t need to make ‘reads’ when playing online. Reads are actually overrated in poker, at least as they are commonly understood. The best reads you can make are betsizing reads and reading ranges based on betting frequencies, you don’t need to see somebody put their hand in front of their mouth or tap their foot or whatever to know their cards. I know you have no idea what I’m talking about but that’s because you have no idea what you’re talking about. Stop asking me about poker!”

“No, it’s not just about getting lucky! Sheesh. Allow me to refer you to the literature on the quantum behaviour of quarks and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to illustrate how luck is factored into the cosmos at the subatomic level and cannot be avoided. Now let me explain that Einstein himself argued against this theory of quantum mechanics, believing that the universe is essentially deterministic as demonstrated by his famous dictum, ‘God does not play dice.’ The unification of these opposing theories is the great task of modern physics. Now, you ask about poker. Well, poker is very similar...”

“Yes, I do wear sunglasses when I play online. And I also have a piss bottle. Do you want me to tell you about that?”

Do you like Shania?

The Angel of History

Before I started this blog I wrote about seven or eight entries in advance in a fit of creativity last Monday afternoon. I wasn't sure in which order to publish them as they flit between biography (done), theory (about to do), and practical discussions on actually playing cards (might do). I wrote them very quickly and hadn't really thought about whether they would make sense to people without explaining all the assumptions and axioms that I carry around without even realising it. With that in mind I'm afraid I have to get the following post out of the way as I think it reveals partly how I think about the game, and that's what I'm interested in trying to explain in this blog. Not for you, for me. Since my audience is mostly me anyway, that shouldn't be a problem! So, let's get started...

There is a contradiction in poker. A contradiction that threatens a conceptual crisis the likes of which the world has never known.

Once upon a time, people talked about ‘Shania,’ who is also known as balance. Shania is the reason that we don’t only open AA under the gun, but sometimes open 67s as well. Shania is supposed to be our guardian angel, protecting us from exploitation. But Shania is misunderstood, and misunderstanding Shania welcomes in the demons of self-levelling and spew. We check-raise a ridiculous flop in a clearly –EV situation because ‘it’s good for our range.’ We want to protect our ranges so we balance them. We argue that a specific situation doesn’t matter because in the long-term we need certain hands in our range in a variety of situations. Hence we checkraise 9T on a 7JA board against a very tight aggressive opponent because we need gutshot semi-bluffs on a dry A high board long-term, otherwise what does our checkraising range look like? It is often hard for neophyte players to get their heads around this view, for Man cannot hope to understand the ways of the Goddess. Shania demands a long-termist perspective. Even if we do usually fold that 9T, we have to checkraise it sometimes because ranges are sacrosanct.

Hmmmm. The opposing school of thought is that balance doesn’t matter. Every situation in poker is unique and the goal of the poker player is to maximise EV by playing each hand as optimally as we can given the information available, in each specific situation. If it’s –EV to checkraise with a gutshot on that board, don’t do it! If we check-called for a flush and it arrived, then we can donk bet because we expect our tight opponent to check back so often. Yes it fucks up our ranges but it’s far more +EV than checking to him in the knowledge that he’s almost certainly not betting. This perspective is fundamentally short-termist.

I would say that these conceptual models – how one thinks about the game – are not necessarily contradictory. They are, in fact, mutually constitutive. Our ranges and how we balance them should flow from all the individual decisions we make along the way. In other words, we should not decide in advance how to balance our range in the long-term. Our range will take care of itself if we know how to balance it in the short-term. When playing a fish we might know exactly what to checkraise on what boards, and we might play similar fish thousands of times. When playing a particular reg we might know never to checkraise bluff a dry A high board when he opens from early position, but we can do it from time to time against the same reg opening on the button. We know how to play specific spots as per the second perspective.

If we work primarily with the second model, the first model will ultimately reveal itself as a function of the latter. Crucially, though, without balance in the short-term, we may not be able to realise the goal of maximising EV in individual situations. To illustrate, if I pot bet every flop where I flop two pair or better, half pot every top pair and check-back everything else, such an unbalanced style might maximise EV for a small number of individual hands but it loses value on all the air and draws I could be half potting in between these hands that would make him fold. So I start half potting those hands too. Then I notice villain is folding to all my full pot bets, so I start half potting them as well. In the short-term, I am becoming balanced, and given time I will eventually gain Shania’s blessing.

So balance doesn’t matter. But it does. I hope you understand.

And there is more. This is, hopefully, going somewhere.

The key to winning at poker is identifying and exploiting unbalanced situations.

This isn’t the most graceful theorem ever proposed but it’ll do. What I have discussed so far revolves around exploitation and exploitability. The more we balance, the less exploitable we become. A perfectly balanced player plays Game Theory Optimal and cannot be exploited no matter what you do (some limit AI systems have come close to GTO). But playing GTO in no way maximises your EV against specific opponents because you do not adjust. You become optimally non-exploitable whilst at the same time being unable to optimally exploit. Thus, the more you wish to exploit an opponent the more exploitable you yourself must become.

This is where the theorem comes in. Nobody plays GTO, and in NL in practice it is likely impossible. The average player plays far closer to the second model than the first, and only in the very high stakes games can you witness more advanced GTO concepts used effectively in practice (Isildur’s overbetting and the fabled ‘triple-range-merge’ being fine examples, and this is probably instinctual more than anything else). In other words, because your opponent is trying to exploit you, he is unbalanced.

They say that in order to beat fish at poker, you play a standard game, don’t bluff much, and value bet them to hell. You don’t need to be balanced because they don’t adjust and are completely exploitable. We don’t even need to state explicitly what it is about fish that makes them so easy to beat, but if we did, we could say that their exploitability stems from their lack of balance. They aren’t necessarily unbalanced because they are trying to exploit you, they are unbalanced because they are bad and mindlessly click buttons. As an illustration, we know that when they check-raise a K43 board they could have K5, and we know that when they check-call two streets they have a draw or weak pair. We know that when they 3bet shove preflop 25bb deep they could have K8, A3 or QT but never AA or 67s.

We know their ranges because we know they are unbalanced. This is closer now to Sklansky’s fundamental theorem of poker, because the more unbalanced a fish is the closer they get to playing their cards face-up. And the same applies to regs. Every reg is still a fish to someone because every reg is unbalanced in certain situations, because they are actively trying to exploit your own lack of balance. Identifying and exploiting the unbalanced situation that regs put themselves in is one of the most profitable things you can do in poker. Here is an interesting post from a high-stakes player to illustrate, one plucked from many potential candidates:

“I used to lol hard when luckygump the best 6max PLO Player on earth 3bet me with AsKs2s3 which is prob a little much no matter what; what I didn't realize was he was doing it to exploit a far bigger leak I had, and he was probably just experimenting with how bad a hand he could use to exploit that leak.”

I have attempted in this blog entry to get to grips with something at the heart of poker that seems to confuse most people, including me. How and why we balance, and how and why we don't balance. With my theorem, I tried to conceptualise poker in such a way that puts balance at its very heart, in a way that you cannot ignore. So you see. Even if Shania don't impress you much, she’s still the one you run to. Still the one you belong to. Woah, oh!

The secret history

Hello. This is my seven hundredth attempt at writing a poker journal. I started the others on various blogging sites, but now they all lie abandoned like forgotten children, consigned to the abortion-bin of internet history. I start this one with the best intentions, however I reserve the right to be as apathetic and lazy about it as you might expect from a typical poker player.

Tradition dictates that these things should begin with a chronology of one’s beats, brags and variance, the opening gambit typically recounting the tale of how one gambled for penny stakes with friends before depositing $50 on Party Poker.

At school I played 5-card draw for penny stakes with friends, and one day I deposited $50 on Party Poker. Hang on, freeze-frame that, rewind a little. Inbetween these two life-changing events, I took very little interest in cards. I have memories of my dad, uncle and grandparents playing an arcane card game called ‘Taxi’ for money in the obligatory smoky back room but I was neither allowed nor interested in joining in. My plan was to become a lecturer or teacher or something pedagogic. Maybe a researcher. Academia seemed like a nice vehicle in which to coast through life. I took computing and economics as an undergraduate degree, got a job as a web designer, and later took a Masters in critical theory (a sort of Marxist philosophy, pretentiously enough), and I was offered a PhD. But then, I discovered poker. Or rather, my younger brother discovered poker. I forget what year it was, but it was Christmas and I was watching him play limit hold’em on Party. Something clicked. And clicked again, obviously.

I deposited $50 on Party Poker. Somehow, I was a winning player from the start. I don’t think in the last five or six years I’ve ever had to redeposit money that I hadn’t already won. I had jumped into the $1/2 limit games with literally no clue on a tiny roll and somehow worked it up to a decent wedge, and before long I was playing $2/4 and $3/$6. One day I entered a $25 stud game and won $1k which is not only still my biggest MTT score to date, but in a game I still have no idea how to play! Not that I wouldn’t like to win more, but you can count the number of MTTs I’ve played my entire career on two hands. For me, they are the most boring form of poker.

Unlike limit! Yes, before long I had accounts at Party, UltimateBet, Absolute, Vegas247, Carnaval, PokerRoom and about four other OnGame skins, three or four iPoker accounts, Stars, FTP, Victor Chandler, 888, Pacific, Paradise and several others I can’t even remember. I got very good at limit poker. At one point I learnt to 20-table on Stars and made Supernova. I went to Vegas twice and played… limit!

I do often ask myself what the fuck I was thinking in those salad days when everyone else was learning NL and how to make their fortunes. But there was no moment of revelation, no shining light, God himself didn’t command me to start playing NL. One day I just did. I started low at 25nl and 50nl 6max on Stars and became one of the biggest winning 50nl regs. Over one two-month period I even won over $3k. Woo! And then, the climb to superstardom and the nosebleeds began as I grinded day-in, day-out, taking on allcomers and crush, crush, crushing.

No, wait. I didn’t. I didn’t move up. This is a recurrent theme in my poker career, and my perennial problem. I have done very well for the stakes that I play, sometimes becoming one of the best at those stakes. But then I festered, a fat and bloated shark clicking lazily about in a small pond. They say you shouldn’t be scared to move up. They would have shot me in the army.

Boredom was a big problem. I have the attention span of a goldfish, one of the reasons I can’t stand MTTs. Playing poker bores me, 90% of poker players bore me, folding is boring. I solved this to some extent by increasing the number of tables I played, 20-tabling limit and SNGs, and 12-tabling 6max but whilst superficially that helps the boredom, what actually happens is you become a robot, a base decision-engine interfaced to a mouse. So I started playing heads-up.

The thing is, poker isn't boring, something about it is thrilling intellectually. In a way it is similar to some of the more dizzying philosophy I have read and studied on the event horizon between art and science; there is something cosmic about it when the veil is lifted briefly and you glimpse the true nature of the game, perhaps because that nature is at least partly your own. “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes one.” But what if you are already the monster? I had long ago ditched my aspirations for the Academy, poker was now my conceptual art, my vehicle with which to think. It was also my battleground, since theory is nothing without praxis. The mountain cannot defeat you, you can only defeat yourself. So I had new, non-academic aspirations. Poker aspirations. That, and getting into Pseud's Corner of course.

Anyway, as I was saying. I started playing heads-up. And that went well. At least it’s not boring. Have you tried playing 6max after playing heads-up? Snooze-fest. Full-ring? Oh, pass the suicide. Heads-up is where it’s at. 50nl, 100nl, yeah! I bumhunted, I didn’t bumhunt, I sat for hours waiting for fish, I pummelled them. I think I ran at about 11bb/100 for 100k hands on four different sites and that is respectable by any count. Yep, this time I was gonna move up, I’d found my game, man on man, poker player on poker player, all the homoerotic tension implicit in a group of men sat around a table for hours soaking in each others’ sweat and pheromones exploding in its purest form, bareback action baby! Is there anything more satisfying in poker than the S&M thrill of dominating another player, of owning them psychologically?

Yeah, probably. Winning lots of money for one thing. But that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, because my girlfriend gave birth to our son in January 2010. Suddenly the time I had available to play was cut tenfold (did I mention I quit my job?). I had over £20k in my bankroll, most of which I had been quietly accumulating over the past few years thanks to my status as king of the micros, but this was draining rapidly. Since my partner earns a very good salary, we took the decision that I would be the primary carer, which meant poker was going to have to take a back seat and just as I was getting into the business of being a ‘poker pro’ I would instead once again become a recreational donk. I looked forward to my new start in life as a housewife.

I cashed out most of my money for living expenses and left a couple thousand on Stars and a few small bankrolls on various other sites. I kept no money on FTP but I did used to rail my friend there and discovered that you cannot chat without any money in your account. So another friend shipped me $5 when I mentioned this on Facebook, and I could chat once more. To cut a long story short, in 2010 I span that $5 into nearly $10k on FTP, but that’s a whole other blog entry. You see, babies take lots of naps and turbo HUSNGs are over quickly. They were to be my new game, dipping in and out of them whenever I had a spare hour or two, smash n’ grab.

Which brings me rapidly to the present day. According to Sharkscope I’m currently ranked top 15 in the whole entire world for the $15 HUSNG games. I came 13^th and 3^rd in the two iPoker HUSNG leaderboards earlier this year. Once again I have cashed out nearly all my earnings and left myself $3.5k to work with because my girlfriend and I are in the process of buying a house. $3.5k is overrolled for the $15 games, overrolled even for the $30 games according to any sort of sensible Kelly criterion.

Do you see what I’m saying? All these brags are but the visible tip of a massive beat that lurks cold and serious beneath the water’s surface. It’s time to move up.

But maybe not just yet.