The Weekly Journals of DavidRoss

Week 40

Well, with the volatilility of the last several weeks this week was surprising in just how unspectacular it was. Continued frustration to be sure, but at least I’m moving in the right direction. Started Sunday night with a decent win of $244. Then Monday another couple of unspectacular sessions netted me another $233. Both days were 6 to 8 hours of break even poker with a small rush just before quitting time. Much better than last weeks losing, but a mental drain to keep playing hour after hour and getting seemingly nowhere. On Tuesday I spent most of the day in the hole, but again had a rush at the end of the night to get just above break even and post a $27 win. Wednesday I had two solid sessions and managed to win another $350. It has now been 13 days though since I had a win bigger than $500. The games have been unusual this week. There have been numerous hands where I raise and get 4 callers. Although this is great when you make a monster, having 4 people chase you in a big pot usually means top pair doesn’t win. You get a sinking feeling when you raise with JJ, get 4 callers, then see a flop of T 9 2 and have everyone call again. Except for a J or maybe another 2, there aren’t many cards you want to see come off the deck now. Inevitably the overcard seems to river and now you’re out of position and completely unsure of where you are. Finally on Thursday, I had a bigger day. My 5th straight winning day where I won $400 in the afternoon and almost $400 more at night for a $791 win. The average week had now turned into a good week. Friday turned that around though. A frustrating loss of $150 in the afternoon, then an evening where I lost $200 almost right away, then bounced back and forth for most of the night before a real bad run at quitting time pushed me down to a $643 loss for the day. Suddenly I was back in the position of a sub-par week. Then Saturday was another about face and after 4 days of no variance poker, I had my 3rd straight wild day and life had returned to normal. I won $1,386 in less than 5 hours of play to give me a very respectable $2,388 week.

It’s been a weird week. The first half there were no big runs either up or down, but I was still losing almost every big pot I participate in. Disregarding Saturday, most of the time I was ahead until the river, which usually means you’ll win more than your fair share, but it just didn’t happen this week. It is a test of your patience to keep winning small pots and building your stack, then seeing it all go away to a rivered flush, or 2 pair, or trips. And although averaging $200 a day will give me a nice week, when you get to Friday and haven’t had a losing day yet, you know it might still be a struggle. Then you have a day like Saturday where everything goes right and you wonder why you were so frustrated just 24 hours earlier. I’m a pretty patient person, and I find myself getting frustrated during the bad runs, I can’t imagine how someone who is short on patience could manage the swings.

I’ve got a week of Pokertracker data now which is around 17,000 hands. I think I’ll wait one more week, then I’m going to post all my questions. I need to combine my 2 usernames so I can see all my hands in one place. Then I need to figure out how to use it while I’m playing. Any wizards with the software that could help me out would be greatly appreciated.

I’m thinking about taking some lessons. I don’t know if any of you out there have done this before, but I know my game could use some work. Even just to have an expert confirm that some of my play is solid would be welcome. No to choose someone will be the next step. David, Mason or Bob Ciaffone are the big names that come to my mind. Any suggestions?

I had two interesting work related calls this week that might lead to another contract. After the last few weeks of poor poker results I’m much more receptive to potential employment than I was before. The first call was from the company that I worked for last January through April. They ended the contract when a full time person became available after a layoff at their head office. He didn’t work out and now they need help again. The catch is that they want to dole it out on a project by project basis. They will call me for instance with 3 programs they want written and ask me to bid on the work. Then payment will only be made upon completion and sign off. In some ways this would be perfect for me. 2 or 3 days work every couple of weeks would be a nice guaranteed income to go with the poker earnings, but I’m skeptical about the feasibility of such a set up. First of all, I’ve worked with these people before, and getting them to give me detailed enough specifications to bid properly will be difficult. And even worse getting them to test and sign off could be very difficult, meaning I might wait forever to get paid. Plus it would put me in the position of telling people who stop by my desk to ask for help, that I can’t help them because I’m not getting paid for it. I would really hate that. The second call came in on Friday. There is a company changing their software from JDE to SAP, and all their staff is now working on the SAP side. They need someone to keep JDE running until the conversion is complete. They have tried two intermediate people who didn’t work out so now they are willing to pay a senior person just to get the job done. In all honesty, it sounds perfect for me. But…… it’s in Scarborough which is on the other side of Toronto from me. I think its around 80 km from me (50 miles for you Yanks) which would take me nearly and hour with no traffic. For those of you not familiar with Toronto, that means at 3:00 AM I could make it in 50 minutes, but any time between sun up and sun down it’ll be 90 minutes. Put a little snow on the ground and we’re talking 2 to 3 hours. That means 3 hours minimum a day commuting in the car. Yuck. I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I guess I’ll see if they actually make an offer.

Empire has launched a VIP program where you earn points for playing. Some of the announced rewards are a year end tournament with a Porsche as the first prize, and entry into satellites for the $25,000 entry WPT tournament. They also say you can redeem the points for cash, which would be like a rake rebate program I guess. I have to believe that with my volume of play I will be in their top 100 which seems to be the number for some of these rewards. Could be an opportunity to either make a little more money or take a chance at a big prize.

I posted this hand in the shorthanded section earlier this week but thought I’d post it here too. This was the biggest 5/10 pot I’ve ever been a part of.

Regular line up. EP limp and I'm on the button with 9s 9h. I raise and the SB 3 bets and the BB caps it. EP calls 3 cold, and I call 2 cold. 4 to the flop.

Flop Td 9h 8s.

BB bets and EP calls. I raise. SB 3 bets, BB calls, EP calls and I cap it. At this point SB is the only one I consider I could be behind.

Turn (Td 9h 8s) Th

SB bets out. I'm not ready to consider quads yet so I think I'm looking real good. BB calls, EP folds and I raise. Moment of truth now. SB 3 bets. Hmm. Still could be a T or a straight. EP calls again. I don't know what he has but it looks like an overpair. I cap it and they both call.

River (Td 9h 8s Th) Kc

SB checks and now BB comes to life and bets. Oh No!!. I just call. Now the idiot in the SB raises and BB 3 bets. There is $338 in the pot right now and it's 2 bets to me. Is there a 1 in 17 or 18 chance I'm good here?

I called and so did SB. SB had the horribly overplayed AT, and BB had KK of course.

In contrast this hand is from Saturday when everything I touched turned to gold.

I have Js Ts in the cutoff. UTG raises and UTG + 1 cold calls. I call too and now the button 3 bets. The button and I have hooked up twice in the blinds lately with me winning both times when he horribly overplayed his hands. One time he played 99 like AA on a board with a couple of overcards, when I had TT, and the other when he had A7 and I had AK when an A flopped. So I wasn’t necessarily convinced his 3 bet meant a big pair. Of course with his recent history nothing short of showing them down was going to convince me. Anyway, the blinds folded and 4 of us saw the flop.

Flop Th 7d 6s. Checked to me and I bet, pretty sure the raise was coming, and hoping to get heads up. Sure enough he raised, but the two others called 2 cold and I just called.

Turn (Th 7d 6s) 4s. Again checked to me, and I decided to bet it again. Sometimes when I pick up a draw I like to check here, but I still thought I might be best. Again he raised me, and this time, the other 2 guys folded. Despite his history I’m now wondering if I’m behind. The big unknown in online poker is emotion. How pissed was this guy that he had lost 2 big pots to me in the last few hands? Was he tilting? I called.

River (Th 7d 6s 4s) 3s. Of course. When you’re running well you know it’s coming. I briefly thought about trying for the check raise, but there is a 1 card straight, and a flush on board, plus someone who has bet into him twice and I really wanted one more bet so I didn’t mess around, I bet into him hoping he might raise me again. He just called. Then he left the table.

Have a good week everyone.

Week 41

This week was a return to the big swings I’ve come to expect from the shorthanded games. There were over 35,000 players at Party/Empire every night this week. These games continue to draw new players. I’m not sure if all the sites are experiencing the same thing, but of course there are certainly some bad players included in the new players. I saw some of the worst poker I’ve ever seen this week, and plenty of people willing to tell them how bad they were. I still can’t believe how many people are willing to insult and bad mouth the truly horrible players. I can’t help but wonder how many of them never come back after being verbally abused by the self proclaimed experts.

After my big night to finish last week, I continued to run well this week with nice wins on Sunday and Monday, $509 and $657. Monday hasn’t been so terrible for me since Christmas, although I did have a huge Monday loss two weeks ago. Tuesday was a bad day for me this week, with a small afternoon loss followed by a real bad evening leaving me down $752. Two more good days on Wednesday and Thursday with wins of $611 and $599 put me back on track for another good week. Then came Friday. Friday has become my new, least favorite day. There is no explicable reason for tough Fridays, all the maniacs seem to come out on Friday, and as near as I can tell they’ve been drinking. Some truly horrible poker getting lucky, as well as a heavy dose of cold deckitis saw me drop $1,144. For the last 3 Fridays, all losses I’m down over $2K. Doubly frustrating because of all the loose players present on Friday nights. But if Friday has become my least favorite day, Saturday must be my new favorite. For the 2nd week in a row I pulled out a big win on Saturday, up $1,187, to finish the week up $1,667.

The Saturday games and the Friday night games seem to belong in a class by themselves. They resemble the 3/6 games much more than a normal weeknight, and certainly very different from the weekday games. People cold calling raises with J9o or Q5s. 3 betting legitimate raises with A5o. I guess this is the main explanation for the big swings I have in these games. It just seems so odd to me that playing 4 tables, I either win on all of them or lose on all of them. On Friday I didn’t have a single win on any of 7 different tables, rebuying 5 or 6 times, and on Saturday I won on every table, never rebuying at all. I don’t see many of the regulars in these weekend games either, I guess there are just so many games running that there is less chance of playing at the same time with them.

My Pokertracker database is now over 30,000 hands. I’m winning at a rate of just over 1 BB per 100 hands. Since these last 3 weeks have been fairly typical I think that is probably an accurate win rate for me. Translate that to a live game where you see 33 hands an hour, and I’m winning at an unspectacular 1/3 BB per hour. Thank god for volume. I have already made some adjustments to my game based on the data. My biggest losers dollar wise are A8o and under, hands I played in LP and the blinds if there is no raise. I have pretty much dropped them except when I’m first in. And although every pocket pair has shown a profit, even 22, 77 and 88 were losing money first in (3 off the button shorthanded) and 2 off the button. For now I’ll play them like 66 and under, limping from the cut off or later if there is a limper already in, or open raise with them first in. I intend to make a post specifically for Pokertracker in the next couple of days. I have a ton of questions.

We now enter the worst time of the year for me as a sportsfan. Now that football is over, there are no meaningful hockey or basketball games for a couple of months. Fortunately for us Canadians, curling will be on TV every night for the next couple of months. As far the Superbowl, all I can say is Wow. What a way to finish the best playoff season I can ever remember, with probably the best Superbowl ever. Although I had no real favorite team, I got real caught up in the game. I missed the whole halftime fiasco because I was putting my daughter to bed, I only read about it the next morning. I can’t help getting on my soapbox for a minute here though in the aftermath of all the criticism of the show. First of all, I think it was totally inappropriate for that performance to be part of the halftime show. But I’m appalled that the media seems so fixated on the exposure of a breast. As a father of 4 children, I couldn’t care less if the show included topless showgirls, seeing a few nipples isn’t going to scar my children or offend me in any way. But to show a supposed role model (Timberlake) violently ripping open the top of a female companion sickens me. How many other young men are going to think that’s pretty cool and emulate that. I’m even more disgusted that all the major complaints don’t seem to be talking about that at all, they just want to protect us from seeing a breast. Maybe this can be the sidetrack topic of the week.

I got interviewed this week. Randy Burgess, who has a new book out called ‘Stepping Up’, geared towards recreational and new Poker players, had contacted me a while ago about coming to visit me. He is hoping to write a magazine piece about the phenomena of Internet poker and had been directed to me by a friend who had read the posts. He lives in Woodstock New York, about 6 hours away and he drove up on Wednesday morning. He set up 2 tape recorders and watched me play for about 90 minutes. We talked while I played, then sat with my wife for another hour afterwards. It was an interesting and totally painless process. At least until I read the article. He had been here for all of 30 seconds when my dog threw up on his shoes, so I hope he doesn’t hold that against me. I’m the first person he interviewed so I don’t expect it will be anytime soon that I see it in print. He did leave me a copy of his book that I’ve started reading. Seems like solid advice for players new to the casino/internet scene.

I limp first in with Aces and Kings almost all the time. Most of the time you get a chance to 3-bet pre-flop, and if not you have a well disguised hand post-flop. Some times it backfires and you put in a number of bets and get beat by someone who would have folded to a pre-flop raise. I can accept that. And nothing makes someone happier than cracking slowplayed Aces. So it is with great glee that I present the following hand to you in what might be the worst timed slowplay ever.

I’m in the BB with 42 offsuit. Folded all the way around to the SB who limps, giving me the free play. Flop is J 6 3 rainbow. SB checks and I check too. To be honest I just wanted to fold and get back to my other tables, but he wouldn’t bet. Now the turn brings a 5. DING!! And now the SB bets out. I raise and he 3 bets. I cap it. River is another 5. He bets again. Now I’m worried that he flopped a set and I just call. He turns over AA, and I’m good. I know just how he feels.

Finally we have a Canadian Network pick up the World Poker tour, so here in Toronto we are getting the WPT every Sunday at 4:00 PM. In addition to that one of our National Sports Networks is now running the Showdown at the Sands so I’m getting poker on TV all over the place. This can’t help but help keep the internet games good. And hopefully they will all keep pushing 97 like they saw Daniel Negreanu do on tv.

I got a package in the mail this week that had a Partypoker.com golf shirt in it. My wife is horrified, she’s afraid I might wear it in public, so I’ll hold that over her head for a while. It seems like a nice gesture, then I realized that shirt cost me about $30,000 in rake, and maybe it’s not as generous as it seems.

Hope you all have a good week.

Week 42

It was an eventful week in the davidross household, poker and otherwise. I’m not even sure where to start this week. Between my wife’s graduation ceremony and semi-formal dinner/dance, my renewed commitment to improving my game, and a loss-free week of poker that included some days off, and some tournament play.

I had a great week at the tables. Interesting that it would happen just when I’ve stated my goal to play more aggressively, and I have been receiving some very valuable feedback from some fellow posters in the shorthanded section. I can’t help but wonder if some of the good results are an example of better play, but clearly most of it was due to incredible cards. Just as an example, a week ago I had a win rate of 1.01 bb’s per 100 hands, and today that win rate is now 1.66, with only around 9,000 extra hands. I started the week winning $591 on Sunday night. I had an up and down day on Monday, but managed to finish ahead $284, and then had a huge day on Tuesday, winning $1,271, most of it in the evening. Wednesday I finally hit a bad run and lost $650 in just 2 hours of play in the afternoon, but made it all back in the first 90 minutes of my evening session, and then managed to win $168 for the day. On Thursday I had another real good day, winning $905. My mother in law arrived on Friday morning for my wife’s graduation. She doesn’t know that I’m playing poker for a living right now, and for some reasons I’d rather not go into, but rest assured they are very valid reasons, we don’t want her to know. SO I only played fro an hour on Friday, and managed to win another $236. And that was it for my ring game play this week. So I end the week up $3,455, and with 7 consecutive winning days. I facetiously told someone that after a bad January I decided to have a good February, and it seems to be happening.

I played a few tournaments this week. I’m harboring (My American spell checker makes me spell it this way, I apologize to my Canadian and British friends for selling out) Moneymaker dreams, so I’ve entered 2 Empire satellites to try and qualify for the WSOP semi-final. In addition, I had qualified for Party’s $30,000 freeroll so I entered that too on Friday night. I’m going to try as many satellites as I can without upsetting my normal playing schedule. Empire runs 2 multi-table satellites daily for $9, and for every 24 players one spot in the semi-final is awarded. They also have single table tourneys running all the time, but the tables don’t fill up very fast. I did play one no-limit single table early in the week, but lost pretty early on two hands where I got run down. The first hand happened when I had more than average chips, around 1200, flopped a set and had a player from the blinds go all in for around 600. I called and his top pair turned into a runner runner straight to beat me. Just a few hands later I made a raise with QQ, and got called by A4. On a flop of J94 I went all in and he called me. River brought his A and I was gone. ON Friday night after my wife’s convocation I entered the Party Freeroll and decided to enter the Empire multi table at the same time. The Empire tourney was limit, and the Party tourney was no-limit. I went 45 hands in the Empire tourney without winning a pot. That stretch included a flopped set (lost to a bigger set) and a flopped straight (lost to another set that filled on the river). I then won 1 small pot before going out without winning another hand. The Party tournament went pretty well for me. There were 1700 entrants and a first prize of $6,000. I went from 1500 at the start to around 2500 at the first break without making any risky moves. Then the system froze. We waited for around another 90 minutes, playing 1 more hand and numerous false starts. Finally we got a message saying everyone left in the tourney was guaranteed $50.

Empire/Party have had a lot of technical problems lately. It’s been pretty frustrating. I’ve quit early several times lately out of frustration. I sure hope they get this worked out soon.

I would sure love to get lucky in one of these satellites and win a trip to the WSOP. What a great way that would be to wrap up a year of posts. I’d certainly have enough material for a book then.

Now on to my quest for self improvement. When I first started playing I worked very hard to improve my game. I read books, discovered this website, and played a lot. And it worked. I got better fairly quickly. And after running badly for a while I made a renewed dedication to improvement about a year later, and that was when I truly became a winning player. But since starting to play full time, I think it’s fair to say that I haven’t focused on improving my game. I do believe the sheer volume of hands I have played has helped me improve from the experience alone, but I haven’t really worked on my game. Getting the stats from pokertracker really drove home the fact that there is plenty of room for improvement. ZeeJustin made me an offer last weekend that was simply fantastic. He asked me to play 2 tables for 100 hands at the same time and send him the hand histories. He has reviewed them and extracted hands where there could be some debate on the play of the hands, and he posted them in the shorthanded section. We have been reviewing them all week. The results have been eye-opening for me. There is clearly a general consensus that is different from the way I played most of them. Almost all of the time I have limped when most would have raised, or checked post flop when they would have bet. I need to find a way to make this an automatic part of my routine.

I have played many fewer hours this week for several reasons. My mother in law’s visit being the primary one, and Conan O’Brien’s Canadian themed shows this week, had me taking a 1 hour break each night to watch as well (they were hilarious, and a big event here in Toronto). But in addition, I found it much more mentally draining playing outside of my normal comfort zone, and needed to take more breaks. It’s obvious to me know that I had gotten into a set routine that was easy to play, but far from optimal. My task now is to improve my game to where these plays become as automatic as my old routine, so that I can play that style as comfortably as I played my old way. Again it was very fortunate that I ran so well this week. The reduced hours didn’t hurt me in the pocketbook. I really feel like I made some progress this week and I thank everyone who has helped pick apart my game.

I have been overwhelmed by the responses I have received since starting these posts. I get the nicest PM’s every week, ranging from poker advice, to tournament invitations, to people sending me links to topics I’ve discussed here, like gifted children. There are truly some very fine people using this web site.

I had a great weekend watching my wife receive her diploma. She has set a wonderful example for her children and I’m so proud of her. Then we went to a nice dinner/dance last night where I was the designated driver for a group of new nurses. They let their hair down a bit after 3 years of study and we all had a good time. Quite a mixture of graduates, from the young 20 year olds, to the surprising number of 40 somethings who are returning to the work force.

Now it’s back to the grind. I hope to get a full complement of hours in this week, but still try and qualify for next weekends WSOP semi-final. Have a good week everyone.