First the bad news: I played a couple of 90-man $2 SnGs this morning, and got knocked out of both within a matter of minutes. In one game, I had a flopped set cracked by a runner-runner flush, and in the other I had aces cracked by eights. Not to be deterred, I immediately jumped in an 1800-pt single table (top 3 finishers get $26 tokens). The tourney started out great, with me doubling up on the second hand when I picked up 99 on the button, raised, got called by A3, and the flop came A-3-9. Unfortunately, about a dozen hands later, I picked up AA and 3-bet shoved against a medium stack who had QQ. The flop came A-Q-Rag. Woo hoo..... huh? Why's the money going to him and not me? I wondered. 'Cuz the turn was the case Queen, you sap, was the reply. My very next hand was AA and the friggin' same scenario happened to me against a different player. We got all the money in and turned up our cards preflop. Me: AA; him: KK. I ended up shouting, "NO! YES!!! NOOOOO!!!!!!" as the board came K-8-2-A-K. How unlikely is that, getting a set of aces beat by quads on two successive hands in a row? Yikes.
Okay, now for the good news. The wife went out of the house for a few hours in the afternoon, so I figured I get in some NL cash, with a focus on emphasizing late position steals and AGGRESSION, AGGRESSION, AGGRESSION. I started the session by trying out FullTilt's new lobby interface, where I sorted by Ring/Hold'em/NoLimit/Custom, with the Custom settings tuned to $10NL 9-handed, with a min average pot size of $1 and at least 8 people at the table. (As an aside, I've recently discovered this is a really cool feature that can help immensely with table selection; highly recommended). Once I had the tables listed, I then sorted them by Plr/Flp and got on to all the waiting lists that had table VPIPs of 29% or greater. Then it was off to the races as the tables started popping up.
Per advice I received at the last poker lunch meeting, I worked hard on tightening up my game in the first three seats. For some reason, I was playing a little too loosely in seats 1-3 lately, limping with hands like KQo and AJs. This time, however, I tossed those hands without any second thoughts.
In late position, however, I really opened up my game. If it was folded to me in the last three seats, I raised with just about any two cards. I also raised a lot in LP even if there were limpers in front me. This was especially true when I had the button, and a hand like K9s, any two face cards, any two suited cards that were either above a 7, or were 3 gappers or less. I also raised any two-gap offsuits and similar semi-coordinately cards. I also 3bet about twice as often as I have been in recent weeks preflop. If I was playing (and I was playing a lot in late position), I was raising. In addition, I c-bet like a fool on flops (depending on flop texture, of course), and really tried to pay attention to the opp's numbers, deciding whether to chase draws almost entirely on the villain's AF stats.
I have to admit I was a bit stressed out playing this way. It's actually hard for me to play poker at this hyper-aggressive rate. It's even harder for me to loosen up my game as much as I did. Whereas I've been averaging 16/11 in 9-handed tables, for this 1000-hand session I was up to a positively sloppy 22/16. This means that I was 37% looser overall (but tighter in the first three seats by a few percent). My PFR:VPIP ratio also went up, as did my 3bet percentage and my cbet numbers. My cold call preflop number has always been nice and low, but it was even lower than normal for this session.
So did this LAG-style actually work? In a word, Yes. The graph of the session is shown below. Note the $3.20/100 hand number, which is over twice what I normally run. I'm now cautiously optimistic that I'm on to something; i.e., I believeI've not been aggressive enough, and that I really need to step up my inner aggro-demon. Like the realtors say about location, beating poker is all about aggression, aggression, aggression (and position, position, position; and math, math, math, and paying attention, paying attention, paying attention; and… well, never mind.) Anyway, I'm going to experiment a bit more with this approach in the coming weeks, and see if I can (a) maintain this success; and (b) further fine-tune my numbers to maximize my win rate. Sounds good, right? Now, if I can just figure out a way not to get beat by quads in SnGs…
All-in for now…
-Bug
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