First things first - calling all bloggers:

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! The WBCOOP is a free online Poker tournament open to all Bloggers, so register on WBCOOP to play.

Registration code: 483336

Step1: Buy into 5 $10+1 single table tournaments

Step 2: Get lucky in some:



(yes, I was all in on the flop!)

Step 3: Ride your luck and win some of the tournaments:



Step 4: Check your winnings:



Step 5: Ship it to "TheXC" to help out relief efforts in Haiti:



EDIT: Save Verneer's typing finger - send direct to FTP/Stars appeal as follows

If you would still like to donate, Full Tilt and Stars is matching 100% of your donations! Simply do a money transfer to one of the two accounts they have set up:

Stars: "Haiti Fund"
Full Tilt: "Aid for Haiti"

Graph for year so far - consistency is sooooooooo overrated:

I was playing some of the deep NLHE tables the other day when I got an email from verneer:

Why are you buying in deep when you first sit down?

This struck me as a little odd. When I'd sat down there was a fish (63/3 type player) with 150bbs and I wanted to cover him. So I just bought in deep and had done so at all the tables I was at. After all, if you think you've got an edge surely you want to have the other players covered? So I dashed off a reply to that effect and thought no more of it (since I was multi-tabling at the time I didn't give it much thought initially). Then I got this:

I don't think you should play deep though. It's much, much more difficult.

Now that made me think a bit. This from someone whose game I respect enourmously, and who has coached me in the past. Of course he knew the "cover the fish" argument, but was still advising to buy in for 100bb. I don't think it was a "face it buddy, you're just not good enough to play 200bb deep" comment (but who knows - my favourite coaching line ever was once we were going through some hand histories and we can across some atrocious piece of play and he said "I don't want you to take this the wrong way...but do you play when you're drunk?") but rather just pointing out that 200bb poker is a very different game. In fact, on reflection, 200bb poker is as different from 100bb poker as 100bb poker is from short-stacking 20bbs. I think the real advice is, by all means play deep stacked, but realise that it's a very different game.

A typical example: you open with KK and get called by a loose player. The flop comes low, you bet and he calls. Has he got a speculative suited connector which now has one pair or a draw? Did he hit a flop? Does he have JJ? Normally you can make a read and if you get it wrong it's "only" 100bbs. But deep do you really want to loose 200bbs on a one-pair hand? So you lead the turn and he raises. Now what? You know you're going to face a big river bet and maybe he's just trying to take the hand away when you "obviously" have just a pair?

The following two hands were against the same villain with just that circumstance. Here's the first:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5069835

and here's the second:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5069837

ok, so this villain is overly trickly and, in fact, you can read him as playing big hands slow and air fast. But the point is it's still a guessing game. If circumstances were different and he did have a real hand the first time around, he'd have stacked me; and if he whiffed on the second hand I'd have made around $1 from him. The big delta in results from that scenario wasn't some super read by me, just the luck of the cards. Hmmm - food for thought.

I did make some pretty poor plays too:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5069829

when he wakes up on the turn what do I put him on? AJ, flush draw maybe? I guess it's not too unreasonable of me, but still it sucked.

An then a bit later, I managed to get a set all-in on the flop only having 32% equity. Still, his hand is fairly underrepped so "big pair plus a flush draw" must be a large part of his range, and I'm doing well against that.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5069840

Finally, I'll leave you with one of those hands that to review later and think "was I drunk when I played that?"

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5069848

Well, on the face of things it's going a lot better second time around. Sadly it may not be down to my play, rather being on the good end of variance since I'm running 11 buy-ins over expectation, helped by a couple of KK vs AA all-in preflop where I spiked king!

Still, I'll take it for now:



I must say however, the problem with variance is it's not symettrical - it feels much worse to be running 11 buy-ins below EV than it feels good to be 11 over. Must work on that since either way shouldn't affect how I play.

I'm not going to do a poker year in review since that's amply covered by my other blog entries. Anyway, 2009 was more interesting for a couple of other things I've been up to.

In September I took part in a public art work called "One and Other". There are four plinths in London's Trafalgar Square and 3 of them have statues on them, whilst the fourth plinth is empty (something about the funds running out before the statue that was meant to go there got built). Over the past few years there has been a new artwork put there every 6 months, and earlier this year Anthony Gormley was selected as the next artist. He decided to offer up 1-hour slots to the public to stand on the plinth, supposedly to capture a cross-section of contemporary British society. Seems more like pandering to the celeb/reality TV cult to me, however for whatever reason I put my name down in the draw and got the 6pm slot on Friday 4th September. Ok, the only problem was then I needed to decide what to do for the hour. Of course, you don't actually have to do anything, and indeed some people just took a comfy chair and read a book, but it seemed like I should at least give it some thought.

After discounting taking a laptop and playing poker for an hour(!) I decided on the following scheme. I got a whole bunch of t-shirts printed up with a mixture of pieces of information I thought should be more generally known (state of current educational system and all that) or were somewhat thought provoking, or were somehow "art" related. I then took those up with me and put a new one over the top every couple of minutes, so that I got fatter and fatter as the hour progressed.

Here are some pictures. Firstly, it was quite a way up:



Here's a comment on the surveillance society we live in in Britain (most CCTV cameras per head of population anywhere in the world!):



And here are a couple of quotes linking a famous Andy Warhol saying to the hour I was on the plinth:



The whole thing was streamed live over the internet and is archived at www.oneandother.co.uk and my stint can be found here http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Mat196

The other "different" thing I've done this year is partake in a trial of an electric car (see www.electricmini.co.uk). I haven't had it too long yet but it's great fun to drive (nice flat torque graph!), although we've had some cold weather recently and it doesn't like sub-zero temperatures (it wouldn't charge for a few days). Still, it has warmed up now so it's back to normal.

Finally, here's a seasonal picture of a snowman (well, snow Dalek really) we built over Christmas:

Well, it finally happened - I've lost the $100 I was using to "climb mount micro". Ooops.

Final hand a bit disappointing - I called a 22/18 player's UTG open with AJs on the button and hit top pair and called down - he had KK.

Final chart:



As you can see I ended up running over 13 buy-ins below expectation, which when you only start with 10 is a bit harsh!

So what now?

It's time to try the same thing but on full tilt - watch this space!

It's hard to keep off tilt when this sort of thing happens every session:

JantjeBoens wins $26.80

I'm now $60.75 down, and running over 10 buy-ins below expectation:




Ah well, maybe Santa will bring me some luck...

Analysing the first 10k hands by starting hand:

Suited Connectors
QJs-32s = -32.75
KQs = 12.10
AKs = 17.45

Unsuited Connectors
QJo-32o = -21.75
KQo = 0.65
AKo = 24.95

Pocket Pairs
AA-TT = 96.95
99-66 = 83.90
55-22 = -11.80

Suited Gappers
QTs-42s = 4.65
KJs = -16.90
AQs = 13.15

Unsuited Gappers
QTo - 42o = -37.85
KJo = -0.05
AQo = 15.95

Suited Aces
AJs-A9s = 17.35
A8s-A2s = -12.70

Unsuited Aces
AJo-A9o = -15.30
A8o-A2o = -19.00

Just taking the winning hands would give a starting range of A9s+, AQo+, 66+ which is 7.4% of hands. Add to this judicious stealing from the cutoff and button (say 40% and 60% of the time it's unopened which seems to be around 20% of the time) adds another 10% giving a VPIP of 17.5%, which isn't really that uber-nitty.

Of course, the sample size is too small to really draw firm conclusions (for example, A4s = +19.50 whereas A5s = -6.25) but it's food for thought.