WSOP-2013: Week #24

It's Sunday, so time for a recap of this past week's progress for the 2013 WSOP:

• Strategy Books Read:
• Wining Poker Tournament: One Hand at a Time, Vol 1: Got through a dozen or so hands this week in volume 1. A lot of good information buried within each hand, but perhaps the biggest repeating lesson I keep reading is the one about paying close attention to the size of your opponents chip stacks. Over and over again, the authors are remarking on the number of big blinds their opps have, how likely they are to re-shove, how desperate they are, whether they have enough left behind to fold to a 3bet, and so on.  This ties in strongly with Snyder's admonition in PTF1 that unless you're constantly putting yourself in the head of your opponents vis-a-vis their stack size, you don't have a prayer of winning a big poker tournament. A poker tournament is a continual rock-paper-scissors affair, but substitute chips-cards-position for the traditional Roshambo items. 
• Videos Watched:
• Watched 4-5 TPE videos, including some hand histories by Big Dog Pocket Fives. His main lesson he imparts for deepstack MTT poker is that you can't go wrong folding too much in the early stages of an MTT. When in doubt, fold. Build an image and conserve your stack, yada yada... alas, this runs counter to Snyder's advice that you have to accumulate chips, especially in the early stages of an MTT, or you're doomed to lose too much chip utility as the blinds progress. As usual, this bug is more than a little confused...
• Fitness:
• Diet: Basically lots of broths and liquids this week, as I was (and still am) under the weather with a nasty bronchial infection that won't die.
• Exercise: Unless you count restless sleep and fitful naps as exercise, I scored an "F" this week on the exercise front.
• Tournament/SnG Results:
• Online: Only played a couple of MTTs and three SnGs, and of these I only took second in one of the SnGs. Not a great week, but being sick like I am, I really can't expect much better.
• Live: None played.
• Other: 
• Blog Posts. Blogged about c-betting vs. giving your opponent a chance to bluff here. Also blogged about not playing when sick here. Otherwise, it was a slow week.
• RSS Feed. I've been told that my RSS feed isn't working properly on this blog by one reader. Has anyone else had this issue? Are you getting notices that I've posted? And, perhaps more importantly, have you had a similar issue with your own blog and/or know how to fix a faulty RSS feed? Google's help forums are remarkably, well, un-helpful on this subject. Drop me a line at bugeyebug@gmail.com if you can help. I'd really appreciate it.

Summary: Being sick sucks. As my mother-in-law likes to say, "When your health is suffering, little else in your life matters." That's how I've felt all week long, and frankly I don't feel much better this bright Sunday morning. Ugh. Need to get better soon.

On to the next entry in this WSOP journey journal...

All-in for now...
-Bug

WSOP-2013: Week #22

It's Sunday, so time for a recap of this past week's progress for the 2013 WSOP:

[Note: this is the new format for my weekly recaps. Hopefully, it will be more useful to me than the old format, which was slowly but surely turning into a lot of cash game stuff and little actual MTT prep. The idea is to simplify, prioritize, and focus the remaining few months leading up to the WSOP specifically on MTT play...]

• Strategy Books Read: 
• Poker Tournament Formula, V2. Bought the Kindle version, and then (re)started back in on this book, which focuses on higher patience factor events, like the WSOP MTTs. So far in the early chapters, the book focuses on something called the Chip Utility Factor of a tournament, which is related to, but not quite the same thing, as a PF. As I mentioned before in an earlier blog post, Snyder takes conventional wisdoms about poker tournaments, and turns them on their head. Take for example his Fundamental Law of Chip Utility, which states, "The more chips you have, the more each of your chips are worth" and "A chip you win is worth more than a chip you lose." Argh. This is so contrary to what I've always been taught and understand, I'm not sure if I fully buy it yet. Some deep thinking on this subject is in my future.
• Winning Poker Tournaments, V3. Reviewed one hand (#7) from the book. The set up is that you're deep in an online event, with a healthy 40 big blinds. Action folds to you in the CO, and the remaining three players to act after you (button and two blinds) each have around 10-12 big blinds (read: unhealthy). You're dealt 66. Unaminous decision by all four authors that a shove is in order, primarily because you do not want to face a reraise if you open smaller, and you want maximize fold equity by putting your opponents to a decision for their tournament lives. Just take it down now with an open shove. Another key point mentioned in PearlJammer's analysis of the hand was about range balancing, in which he wrote, "...because of the limited number of hands you play against other opponents in tournament poker, it is often not necessary or optimal to balance your range..." For this reason, he says that he'd probably min-raise with AA in this same situation and try to induce a reshove. Interesting.
• Videos Watched: 
• Brokos' Hand Reading. Watched another thirty minutes of a Brokos hand reading video. Same story with this one: excellent underlying material, horrible presentation that is almost physically painful to watch/listen to. The guy is brilliant, but damn is he boring to listen to. 
• Hagbard's $1K WSOP HH. I only got 15 minutes into this video, which was a hand history review of a live WSOP event. Again, great and useful material, but incredibly hard to watch, especially when on my elliptical exercise machine. Tiny little fonts for the written out hand histories, stuffed onto one page, droning presentation, etc.. I mean come on, how hard would it be to spend five minutes and put these hands into replayers and actually make it interesting to watch?
• Fitness Progress: 
• Exercise. Mixed results this week on the get-my-fat-ass-in-shape front. Been walking most days, plus the wife and I did a couple of mornings of free weight exercises. 
• Diet. My diet has also been a mixed bag. Did very well yesterday for breakfast and lunch, for example, but then slipped a bit when I came home to find big bowls of chili freshly made, hot tortillas, etc. Biggest issue I've got facing me is that I'm leaving on a jet plane tomorrow morning for a week-long business sojourn to Pacific isle. Diet and exercise both will be in mortal danger. Sigh.
• Tourney Recap/Results: 
• Online. Played just one $11 ST SnG and busted mid-pack. Was disappointed in my play, as I focused very well for the first half, built a nice stack, and then started doing other things on the computer and got blinded down. Grrrr.
• Live. Played in the $160 buy-in Talking Stick event on Saturday. Played very well, but got coolered and sent home with zero dollars to show for the effort. Good time with good company, though. Recap can be found by clicking here.

Summary: Life and work continue to get in the way of serious progress, but my freshened-up reorganization/prep plan that I laid out here seems to have reinvigorated my focus. With the biz trip coming up this week, however, it will be interesting to see how focused I can/will remain.

On to the next installment in this WSOP journey...

All-in for now...
-Bug

Hand Reading Olio

To kick start this last six-month run-up to the WSOP, I signed up for a month of training videos from TournamentPokerEdge.com yesterday and watched my first one while working out on the elliptical machine. Cardio/Card-io; Win/Win...

Anway, this first vid I watched was by Andrew "Foucault" Brokos, who is an informative Card Player writer, prolific blogger, and entertaining podcaster that I follow (ThinkingPoker.net). (As an aside, I just noticed that Brokos is now seated at my table in the WRGPT/Glaciers poker-by-email tournament. Sigh. He of course has a big stack, while meanwhile I'm dribbling away to nothing... but I digress.) Anyway, here's a quick recap of the video, which was on simplified MTT opponent hand reading.

First, the bad news. The video is really, really, really dry, and almost painful to watch. Brokos makes the classic beginning presenter's mistake of creating just a handful of text-only slides (only six actual content slides in the entire presentation!) and packs them full of dense bulleted lists. He then drones/reads each bullet point, and talks for many, many minutes on each slide. Despite the fact that the material itself was excellent, the presentation and deadly dull graphics caused my mind to wander repeatedly, and I found myself impatient for him to move from slide to slide*. Fewer words, less dense slides, more graphics, faster movement between slides, and some examples would have greatly improved the experience...

...and that is the extent of the bad news. The rest is good news. The material was really thought-provoking and useful. In this first video, Brokos categorizes your opponent's hands into one of three main types:

1. Monsters. Very good hands that can expect substantial action from worse; worth multiple bets and often entire stack.
2. Marginals. Good hands that can win at showdown in small pots, but can only beat bluffs in big pots.
3. Draws/Air. Weak hands unlikely to win at showdown unimproved.

He then discusses typical actions that many players exhibit when holding each of these types of hands. This is  all useful stuff, but the real "a-ha!" moment I had was when Brokos said, almost in passing, that even if you can't categorize your opponent's range directly, you can likely remove one of these subcategories by process of elimination. In other words, you can effectively narrow an opponent's range, not by asking yourself what their actions indicate they hold, but rather by ruling out a category of hands. This is obvious in hindsight, but sometimes you need to hear the obvious from an external source to recognize/internalize it yourself.

The other interesting thing that occurred to me after watching the vid is that these opponent range categorizations Brokos advocates are essentially a simplified version the same ones that I recommend using when making the D-is-for-Deciding line decision in REDi (See this old blog post on equity, for example):

Anyway, I'm looking forward to Part 2 of this video series, but I'm REALLY hoping Brokos makes it a little less painful to watch.

All-in for now...
-Bug

*In contrast, check out how poker coach James "splitsuit" Sweeney can convey similarly useful information in a MUCH more entertaining, visually stimulating, and engaging fashion; watch some of his vids here to see what I mean.
PS. In other news, I got a nice little shout-out in Memphis Mojo's blog, which is a site I visit regularly. When he writes about bridge, I'm almost always confused (probably because I haven't a clue how to play that game ;-) ), but I really enjoy his poker ramblings. Anyway, I wondered this morning why my visitor stats counter spiked overnight! Thanks for the bump, Memphis.

If it flies like a duck...

...we now interrupt your regularly scheduled blog for some miscellaneous quacking...

Blog posts may (or may not) be slow coming in the next few days, as I'm flying west over the Pacific tomorrow for another week-long business trip. Just checked-in online to print out my boarding passes, only to realize I've been booked on the early bird flight. How early is the bird? Try 5am, that's how early. Seriously, the plane is wheels-up at 5am. This means I have to get up at something like 2:45am tomorrow morning to make the flight. Quack....

....which means I arrive at noon at the other end, local time. So I have a half-day in that office still left for work on Monday. It's gonna be a looong work day manana. Double-quack...

...and I'm going to try avoiding playing any poker in the evenings on this particular trip, as the last time I was on the island I lost a sizable chunk of my bankroll due to jet lag, fatigue and non-A-game play. This is pretty typical of me on business trips lately, so I'm going to actively not play poker for the next five days. Quack quack quack...

...which is probably a good thing, as I lost a bundle yesterday and am still a little tilty about it this morning. I'm up a smidge for the week overall, but yesterday's debacle on the felt returned way too much of my profit from the past seven days to the fish pool. Combination of running bad and playing bad. Quackeroo....

...and to make things worse, I got enticed into playing Words With Friends yesterday, which is essentially just Scrabble played online via the Internet. Talk about addictive. I wasted nearly three hours yesterday playing the damn thing. Talk about a waste of valuable bandwidth. Talk about quack-quack....

...In other poker news, I stumbled upon this interesting little website that shows various TV-aired poker hands for each possible starting poker hand. Check it out by clicking here. The only quacking associated with this site worth mentioning is its affinity for Phil Helmuth videos. I repeat my usual mantra here: is there anyone in the poker world more annoying to watch play than Phil the Duck?

All-in quacking for now...
-Bug