Almost certainly going to go to the International tomorrow night to play in the £1-£2 PLO game. That may not sound too exciting but last week there was a £14,000 pot all-in pre-flop. That's 7,000 bbs! And no, neither of them had aces.

At one point there was over £35k on the table. I'm guessing it was actually playing as a 1-2-5-10 game for most of the evening.

Time for a spin up...

Kirsten had booked herself into an all-day seminar at the Tate gallery in London on Saturday so I decided to go up with her and play some live cash at the Vic on Edgeware road. I got there at around 10:45 in the morning which at first seemed to be completely the wrong time to start a cash session. Indeed when I got there there were only two tables running, a 1-1 and a 2-5 NLHE. There was an immediate seat in the 1-1 game so I sat in it an bought in for the maximum 200 pounds. The rest of the players at the table had obviously played through the night, but this was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they were all really tired and falling asleep, and were obviously complete degenerates. On the other hand these were the people left standing, so were either the better players or had got lucky. Despite the 200 max buy-in there were a couple of stacks over £1,000, with the largest being around £1,850.

The table seemed to be a mix of 3-4 pretty poor players, a couple of nits and a couple of pretty competent players (plus me, I'll reserve judgement on my game...).

So here I am, in a fairly soft game, with reasonable categorisations for my fellow players and what do I do? Yes, I proceed to play some of the worst poker ever. For example, there was an American guy who I'd found out is at a Casino playing poker for the first time, and who I've seen call 3-streets on a AT9J4 board with A3. I open MP with 87s and he calls, and we see a flop of 765r. I bet £15 and he raises me to £40, we have effective stacks of about £150 in total. At this point I shove - without really thinking beyond level 1 (I have top pair and an OESD). I know he's not thinking beyond level one, and it's no suprise when he insta-calls with A7. It's not so much that I hate my play (I'm a 45/55 dog and it's not bad to let the rest of the table know I'll play a draw strongly, but then again why not wait to see if I hit since I'm pretty sure he'll pay me off regardless) just that I didn't really give it much thought beforehand.

Another example: the most aggro player at the table is on the button and raised my UTG+1 open (I had 88) which I call. Mostly he has just been calling raises in position and playing well post-flop, so I know he has a real hand here 90% of the time. Flop is JJ5 and I lead, to which he raises leaving a PSB behind. I think he can be doing this with overcards, so I shove. He does have overcards, they just both happen to be kings.

There's then an hour where nothing much happens overtly, but I'm chasing my losses and entering too many opened pots in the wrong position and either folding on the flop or catching a piece of it but having to fold turn or river. Nothing spectacular but 10-15 pots losing 20 a go soon adds up to another buyin.

So I'm now 600 down when I raise UTG with 52o (see previous blogs...) and get 3 callers. Flop comes Ac4c3h and UTG leads. I make a small-ish raise and he tanks then 4-bets. I move all-in and he calls with Tc7c. Alas he hits his club draw and I'm now 800 down.

The game now gets changed to 1-2 so I buy in for the new max of 400. I take a couple more hits but at least have started to play "properly", and the low point is being 950 down with 2 hours to go before I'm due to leave. I take in a couple of small pots and get my stack up to 500 when the following occurs.

Fairly new player to the table is in the sb and he's a Vic regular, so will play mostly straight-forwardly. There are 6 limps and he then pops it up to 16 which I call with A9, and there are 2 other callers. The flop comes Ah9c2c and he leads for 25. My thinking at this point is (a) I'm ahead, (b) I want to charge anyone behind me who has a club draw and (c) if he has AK/AQ I'm getting paid off if I can make it look like I'm on a draw. With this in mind I raise him to 90 total, it's folded to him and he calls. The turn is another A and he checks. I fire out £110, leving me with £250 or so behind, which will make him feel he has fold equity, and will not be an overbet if we get to the river. He now goes into the tank, muttering "Boy you look strong, have you got a set of 9s there?" and so forth. Then he convinces himself that "you could have, but then you've been playing draws like that too" and declares all-in. He was a bit weaker than I thought (AJ) but I still managed to drag in a £900 pot and make a huge dent in the hole I'd spent the previous 5 hours digging.

I play fairly steadily for another 45 minutes or so and then think to myself "ok, one more orbit then I'm leaving" as I had to meet Kirsten at the station. I think the next two hands raise some interesting points about how to play them in a vacuum, and how to play them given the state of my session and my decision to leave.

Remember I was in a huge hole, and now I'm just sitting in a divot, so I'm actually fairly happy. If I win another £400 I'll be in a small profit, but the extra happiness compared to the sadness of losing £400 and being back in a deep hole doesn't compare. Put it this way, if someone offered me a 51:49 flip I don't think I would have taken it.

So the first question is, if that's my state of mind, shouldn't I have just got up and left when I decided I was going to leave in an orbit's time, since clearly I'm not planning on playing optimally during that orbit?

Anyway back to the hands. I'm in the BB and, for the first time in the session, I get dealt AA. There's an open to £16 from seat 4 and the SB flats. At this point I put in an overraise to £91 (i.e. £75 more). Several reasons for this. Firstly this looks like a good squeeze spot, and secondly I've got a nice stack of £25 chips at the front of my stack so it looks kinda like I just grabbed some without really planning the raise size. Now this raise gets everyone at the table talking and they split into two camps (a) "he must have aces or kings" and (b) "he doesn't want a call, he has 88 or AK". Seat 4 clearly doesn't have much of a hand and folds whilst the SB dwells up. Sadly he eventually falls into camp (a) and open folds QQ!

Never one to be results oriented if I think a play is correct I'll stick with it, and so to the very next hand. Seat 4 again opens for £16, and the button (who had just folded QQ) again flat calls. I'm now in the SB and look down to find...AA again! Well, surely they can't keep folding I think so I make the exact same raise...and get the same result.

I'm still not sure about these plays. I think I get someone going crazy with QJs/99 type hands often enough that it's worth the loss of not getting a call of a smaller raise and just taking it on the flop. Also, given the history of the session I'd have been gutted to make a small raise, c-bet the flop and then be facing a big raise. Yes, I know you shouldn't really worry about those things until they happen but still...

Anyway, that was pretty much the end of the session for me, and I eventually cashed out for £1,027 which meant I was £250 down for the day.

The last couple of blog posts, you may notice, have images missing. Does anyone know why this is? It all looks fine when I upload the images when creating a blog entry and they seem to stay on the server for a few hours but then disappear!

So I've just discovered the joys of capped PLO, which plays even crazier than normal PLO. The average pot size isn't as large as some uncapped tables of the same blind size, but the median pot is larger. For someone like me who likes to go with pretty much any piece of the board it's a good way to indulge the gambling whilst limiting the damage. That said it's easy enough to get 10+ capped pot swings in a few hundred hands.

First off, some results:



So not too spectacular, but it's a tale of two halves:



Two things happened after about 500 hands:

1) I stopped playing as I would a normal PLO game (duh!) since it's much harder to blow people off hands. Also, there are some people playing a VPIP of 80+ and a PFR of 50+ so if you open to $3.50, get popped to $11 and then whiff the flop what to do when they c-bet (as they do 100% of the time). Clearly, patience is key and you'll get paid off, but it seems that people will still reach the cap from a limp+single raise pre-flop as often as they will in a 3-bet pot.
2) I ran quite well ;-)

As for point 1, anyone out there with some tips for playing capped PLO (as opposed to normal PLO)?

Results from last couple of days...

• 1/2 has been Full Ring, one or two tables at a time
• 0.25/0.5 was HU NLHE one or two tables at a time
• 0.05/0.1 was 6-max 6-tabling

Conversation with my (11 year old) son this weekend:

Tom: Dad, how much have you won or lost playing poker this year?
Dad: I've lost around a thousand.
Tom: So why don't you give up?

Live cash this year has been going really well - actually since my last trip to Vegas (September last year) I have pretty much been bailed out overall by my live results, whilst continuing to spew of money playing on-line. I think the root cause of this is I get bored easily, so the thought of playing one table of full-ring on-line is pretty uninspiring. Therefore if I'm playing on-line I look for higher action, either by playing multiple tables (where I just don't have time to think things through properly and aren't good enough to know what to do 'on instinct') or by playing short handed (e.g. HU PLO where I really suck). When I play live though there's the interaction with the other players, which if you get the right table can be pretty entertaining. Therefore I don't get bored, but I do get time to analyse other players, their plays, the table dynamics, my image etc. etc. and seem to be able to do ok.

Last night was a good example - I played in a £1/£2 NLHE game at the Vic for a couple of hours, and booked a £388 win. I had watched Vital Myth's vids on live play and put a couple of things he mentioned to work. For example, I played fairly tight for the first 20 minutes or so and then raised UTG with 74o, c-bet a Q22 flop and checked a 4 turn and 7 river and won vs. AK. The point of this of course is to get that loose image so big hands get paid off later on, and sure enough after this people were calling my river bets with A-high.

One hand I probably misplayed was near the end of the session - I opened J9s UTG for £7 and got re-popped by the button to £31 (he had been raising limpers on the button, but not often 3-betting). Since we were both around 300bb deep I made the call and saw a lovely flop of 994 with 2 diamonds. I had been leading out with the NFD before, and I really thought the best line was to lead to induce a big raise from an overpair. Sadly he dwelled up and then folded AK with no diamonds. That made me wonder whether just check-calling would be better against his overall range. For some reason I just thought he was very strong (which I guess AK is pre-flop) and I could get action on a flop which is going to miss me a lot.

Someone mentioned that I hadn't updated my blog for a while so I thought it time for a quick entry.

Firstly, I've been on holiday quite a bit (camping with the kids in soggy Devon, week in sunny Mallorca with the missus). Then I've been travelling with work (Cologne, Toronto, Stockholm).

I also took part in an art work(!) in central london which involved standing on top of a plinth in Trafalgar Square for an hour, which is probably one of the odder things I have done recently. For better or worse the whole thing is streamed live over the web and there is an archive here.

On the poker front I haven't played that much. I came 4th in a $20 MTT for $800 on FTP, and then lost $400 playing $0.50HUPLO! I then had my first live MTT win at the International Club last Friday for £350. This was their first anniversary and they held a tag-team event with a twist - the twist being that all the entrants were put into a hat and pairs drawn at random! The format was a double-chance freezeout and I was drawn with someone called Colin who I hadn't met before, although when speaking to him he had apparently final tabled a couple of live events so knew what he was doing. My table was ok-ish. Most of the people seemed weak-tight except for the guy two to my left who was super-loose aggressive, so clearly stealing his blind was going to be troublesome. The biggest two pots at our table in the first three levels were him 3-betting with T4o and making trips on the turn, and me turing a straight with 52o against a big ace. Standard play really. We made steady but unspectacular progress and by the time the final table came around we were in 4th place with 21k at 600/1200 blinds, but the chip leaders had 90k and a big lead (240k chips in play total). We basically just sat tight and chose some good spots to steal/re-steal whilst everyone else went crazy. Best hand for us was chip leader with AQ getting it all-in pre-flop vs. AT vs. TT and rivering a Q to send two other teams out.

One almost pivotal hand was when we were 4 handed, we had 45k and got into a tangle with the chip leaders who had around 110k. I limped the sb with 76s and called the expected raise from the bb. Flop came 643r and I check-raised all-in, which was called by 74o. The turn was a 7, but unfortunately a 5 on the river gave us a chop instead of taking the chip lead! The end was fairly uneventful, with the final hand being our A3s holding vs. their T3o.

I managed to win another £200 playing the cash games (a swingy 2/5 NLHE and an even more swingy 1/2 PLO) before calling it a night (ok, morning as it was 6am).

Won £478 playing £1/2 NLHE live last night in 2 hours. Pretty lively game at the International in London. Well worth a visit if you're in town - 53 East Road (just north of Old Street underground).

Regarding my previous post, here are the hands in question. Yes, some dubious play all round!

First there was this one where, rightly or wrongly I am repping AAxx and trying to take a flop bet off an aggressive player who would bet this flop with any holding when checked to. Clearly I get my hand caught in the cookie jar but get a lucky river:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4531522

Next he obv. doesn't believe me any more:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4531525

The flop call here is fine, but the turn call is very suspect. Nice river sizing though!

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4531531

Finally, my image is obviously such that noone ever thinks I have anything. Sadly I get a taste of my own medicine and loose a 550bb pot with 80% equity ;-)

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4531535

Strangely after this last hand there was no chat going on...