Epiphany

I had an epiphany last night. Briefly stated, it's that I really don't like playing cash games. I've had this epiphany before, but every time I have it makes it that much harder to return to playing them. At some point in the future, I'll probably swear off them completely. The ironic thing is that I've made more play money playing cash games than I have playing any other poker style. If I stop playing them, my yearly profits will drop, and dramatically. However, there's more to life than play money :-)

Let me try to explain what I don't like about cash games. Actually, it'll be easier to explain what I love about MTTs, and how cash games don't measure up in comparison. MTTs are highly structured. They're designed to end within a limited amount of time. The escalating antes and blinds guarantee this. Everyone has to deal with them. In that sense MTTs are much more egalitarian than cash games. When you're playing an MTT, you're essentially a rat in a maze; however, you know you're a rat, and you know you're in a maze. Moreover, you know all the other players are also rats, and that they're in the same maze. When you're playing a cash game, it's hard to know who you are, who your opponents are, and where you or anyone else is. It's a bit of a stretch, but I can liken the difference between MTTs and cash games to the difference between rhymed poetry and free verse. Rhymed poetry has rules you must follow, and enforces a structure; surprisingly, though, there's a lot of freedom in the confinement. Free verse has no rules or structure to speak of; it's amorphous, and the amount of open space you have is so vast it can paralyze you.

Last night, I got under the lights again in MTT 8-game; that is, I made the final table. I ended up in third, but made the egregious mistake of sitting out my final twelve hands. Had I played those hands, I might have come in second, or even first. How could I make such a mistake? All unaware, as you might have guessed. I was watching a movie on Amazon while playing poker, and there was a hiccup when the PokerStars software failed to thrust its window to the foreground when it was my turn to act. I was engrossed by the end of the movie, and plain forgot I was playing poker. Pretty stupid, huh? :-)

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT   8-Game   4350   650       6   207      85   18     3    48060

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 71 hands and saw flop:
 - 5 out of 9 times while in big blind (55%)
 - 3 out of 9 times while in small blind (33%)
 - 31 out of 53 times in other positions (58%)
 - a total of 39 out of 71 (54%)
 Pots won at showdown - 3 of 8 (37%)
 Pots won without showdown - 3

delta: $-28,646
MTT 8-game balance: $276,610
balance: $10,067,356

First ever same-session combo

Last night, I did something I'd never done before in 1,884 previous sessions - I played both cash game no limit hold'em and MTT 8-game poker in the same session. Not only that, I played them simultaneously. It made for an interesting combination. I've really been missing the variety of 8-game lately, so I'm going to remedy that by continuing to play this way for the foreseeable future. I'll report separately on each style.

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT   8-Game   4350   650       6    23      91   18    58        0

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 133 hands and saw flop:
 - 25 out of 33 times while in big blind (75%)
 - 25 out of 32 times while in small blind (78%)
 - 35 out of 68 times in other positions (51%)
 - a total of 85 out of 133 (63%)
 Pots won at showdown - 19 of 30 (63%)
 Pots won without showdown - 13

delta: $43,731
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $5,855,860
balance: $10,096,002

Top 30 rebound

Last night, I had a top 30 rebound. At $109,622, it clocked in at number 25 on my career list of cash game no limit hold'em rebounds. All of the top 30 are of at least $100,000. It's good and bad to have rebounds of that magnitude. The good part is that I was able to have such a great rebound session; the bad part is that the session before it was necessarily horrendous :-)

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 53 hands and saw flop:
 - 5 out of 8 times while in big blind (62%)
 - 7 out of 8 times while in small blind (87%)
 - 14 out of 37 times in other positions (37%)
 - a total of 26 out of 53 (49%)
 Pots won at showdown - 6 of 8 (75%)
 Pots won without showdown - 1

delta: $109,622
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $5,807,129
balance: $10,052,271

Mariana Trench hand

Looking at the bar chart of my stack size over the course of last night's session, I can see that I was swimming in the shallows until the final hand, when the bottom dropped out and I fell into the Mariana Trench. It was the third costliest hand of my cash game no limit hold'em career. Here are the top 5:

$-116,250 Kc 9h 2014-11-06 hand   9
$-112,124 Ks Ac 2015-07-14 hand  63
$-102,590 Qh Jh 2016-06-06 hand  81
$-102,200 Ah Jd 2012-06-02 hand 121
 $-97,932 Qd Ad 2013-06-13 hand  53

I had a pair of queens, and lost to a pair of queens with a better kicker (an ace). I'm not sorry I went all in; I went with my read, and that's what you must do as a poker player. Better luck next time :-)

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 81 hands and saw flop:
 - 11 out of 15 times while in big blind (73%)
 - 10 out of 15 times while in small blind (66%)
 - 15 out of 51 times in other positions (29%)
 - a total of 36 out of 81 (44%)
 Pots won at showdown - 6 of 13 (46%)
 Pots won without showdown - 7

delta: $-139,053
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $5,697,507
balance: $9,942,649

Silver lining

Whether I win or lose a session, I'm contracted to write about what happened before being allowed to play another. Who drafted such a nefarious contract? Me :-) It's typically easier to write about winning sessions than losing ones. After losing, I often struggle to find the session's silver lining, but that's what I want to write about. I lost last night's session, but found a silver lining fairly quickly. It was this - that I had a nonzero high chaparral count. In other words, when I put the absolute values of my hand deltas in descending order, the greatest absolute value came from a hand I won.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 108 hands and saw flop:
 - 11 out of 18 times while in big blind (61%)
 - 10 out of 18 times while in small blind (55%)
 - 42 out of 72 times in other positions (58%)
 - a total of 63 out of 108 (58%)
 Pots won at showdown - 5 of 12 (41%)
 Pots won without showdown - 8

delta: $-50,762
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $5,836,560
balance: $10,081,702

The great eight

Since October 12th, 2011, when I turned on the PokerStars feature to auto-save the full hand histories, I've played 62,173 cash game no limit hold'em hands. There's a wealth of data to explore in those hand histories. Last night, I won the biggest cash game pot of my cash game no limit hold'em career - over a quarter of a million play dollars. Not surprisingly, the hand delta, over 175,000 play dollars, was also a career best. This set me to wondering how many times I've had a hand delta which was a career best at the time the hand was played. You'd think, with that many hands, the number would have to be over 100, right? You'd be wrong. Next, you'd think it would have to be over 10, right? You'd be wrong again. The number is astonishingly low - just 8. I hereby dub them the great eight! Here they are:

  $8,200 2011-10-12   5 (5)
 $31,200 2011-10-13  47 (114)
 $44,750 2011-10-14  70 (185)
 $79,100 2011-10-22  66 (588)
$120,250 2011-11-05  71 (1431)
$141,500 2012-06-30  32 (15053)
$145,680 2014-04-11  26 (44890)
$176,647 2016-06-04   7 (62122)

The third column contains the session hand numbers; the final column contains the career hand numbers. As you can see, these career best hands tend to get further and further apart. I can expect the next one any time within the next five to ten years :-)

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 58 hands and saw flop:
 - 3 out of 8 times while in big blind (37%)
 - 1 out of 5 times while in small blind (20%)
 - 19 out of 45 times in other positions (42%)
 - a total of 23 out of 58 (39%)
 Pots won at showdown - 6 of 10 (60%)
 Pots won without showdown - 0

delta: $116,916
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $5,887,462
balance: $10,132,604

That time of year

Friends and neighbors, it's that time of year again. The earth's revolution around the sun has brought us to the World Series of Poker once again :-) This is a bittersweet time for me, more bitter and more sweet every year. I have it on my bucket list one day to go to Vegas and play in the World Series of Poker Main Event. It's not my birthright, but it something I damn well intend to do, whenever that might be. I owe it to myself. I love poker so much!

Where have I been, you might be asking. A combination of things. One is that I watched a fair amount of the Super High Roller Bowl on television. Highly entertaining! I was pulling for Fedor Holz, but he ended up in second. Another factor is that I was really super busy at work this week. That's certainly better than the alternative :-)

On Thursday night, I started play late and didn't play very long, but was able to achieve a tidy profit.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 35 hands and saw flop:
 - 5 out of 5 times while in big blind (100%)
 - 3 out of 6 times while in small blind (50%)
 - 10 out of 24 times in other positions (41%)
 - a total of 18 out of 35 (51%)
 Pots won at showdown - 3 of 5 (60%)
 Pots won without showdown - 1

delta: $11,319
cash game no limit hold'em balance: $5,770,546
balance: $10,015,688