Apparently, since Leo won his bracelet, there has been absolutely nothing of interest to report or write about minus a few celebrity deaths (RIP Billy Mays).  What better time to talk about some good old nachos24 poker?

Well, it has been going extremely well lately.  I still don’t play enough volume to earn some truly sick profit, but I am very happy with how I’ve been playing.  For reference, here is a graph of my last 187k HU hands ranging from 1/2 to 5/10.  You can see my 60whatever buyin downswing around hand 36k and the subsequent recovery.

When I think about how much money I used to make in the golden days of Cake, it’s scary to realize how bad I really was and how little I understood how to truly play good poker.  While there are a number of little things to attribute to my improvement, I am going to paraphrase a quote I read in one of the HSNL threads a while back which really sums it all up.  It went something like “estimating your own hand range is harder than estimating your opponent’s” and this is probably one of the more profound things I’ve read which really crystallized my own improvement.  Once I shifted my focus away from my opponent’s range and began to frame my thinking around what I represented and my opponent’s actions within that context, it just clicked.  That isn’t to say I never thought about it before, but now it dominates the way I think about hands and my overall strategy.

However, I am a little discouraged by the state of HU games nowadays.  PokerStars in particular seems to have gone to shit ever since FTP implemented their new open table policy.  I routinely sit at anywhere from 4-6 tables across 2/4 to 5/10 on Stars for an hour or longer without a single person sitting.  FTP is a little bit better and it seems the number of mediocre regs is much higher so spreading action across those two sites is working alright for now.  The dead time inbetween action really kills the hourly though, especially when compared with 6max.  It’s a shame too, because 6max is such a god damn boring game and it hurts me deep inside to even consider playing it for an extended period of time.  Whoever made 6max the standard anyway?  Maybe it’s time to roll out some 4max tables and break the stagnation that has become online poker.  I guess I could always take up PLO too, but that game has never excited me.

HOW IN THE FUCK DO I GET SO DEEP IN A FUCKING TOURNAMENT ONLY TO FUCKING BLIND OFF A THIRD OF MY FUCKING STACK AND GOD DAMN FUCKING LOSE 99 VS 87S WHAT THE FUCK FUCK POKER FUCK LIFE FUCK EVERYTHING I AM STUCK ON THE YEAR AND I AM NEVER GETTING UNSTUCK EAT A FUCKING DICK AND A HALF LIFE AND ESPECIALLY COMCAST FUCKING DIE IMMA GO TO ATLANTIC CITY AND IF I DON”T SHIP THAT 5K EVENT I AM GOING TO DRIVE MY GOD DAMN CAMRY OFF A GOD DAMN FUCKING BRIDGE EAT A FUCKING DICK WORLD

-young leo wolpert

Thanks to poker, I’ve spent over 3 years now constantly analyzing all kinds of statistics along with their varying levels of significance.  This has turned me into “that guy.”  I can no longer allow people to have fun anymore, because I have become so fucking anal about logical inconsistencies.  I have always been like that to some degree, but poker has taken it to another level, especially when it comes to sports.  I know I am not alone when I speak about how absurd sports reporting is and how unbelievably results-oriented it is.  For example, and this is only scratching the surface, your average NBA broadcast will constantly refer to two things which drive me insane, that being heart and clutch.

Apparently, teams don’t win because they are more talented, they just want it more.  Conversely, a lesser talented team doesn’t win due to outplaying the other opponent and exploiting mistakes, they just have more heart.  From announcers to analysts to players and even coaches, there is only one thing that matters: HEART.  I am not sure if this is purely an American phenomenon or what, but we are just obsessed with the idea of the hard working team that refuses to die and never gives up.  Nobody ever fucking remembers that if team A is supposed to beat team B 70% of the time (which is an absolutely huge edge), the other 30% is not due to laziness or lack of heart.  It is because they are not supposed to win every time!  Just because team A collectively had a shitty game does not mean that they have some sort of switch that they flip on or off.  They did not decide to be lazy this game.  They are humans and cannot operate at their physical and mental peak 100% of the time, and because of this are slaves to the percentages.

Closely related to this is the myth of clutch.  Some players are well-known for their supposed clutchness, but this entire idea breaks down right away with some simple logic.  For a person to be defined as clutch, it is assumed that they perform better during “crunch time” which means that they apparently have that mythical switch that allows them to perform better.  Now if you have that switch, why the fuck wouldn’t you leave it on all game? To be clutch essentially implies that a player can make a shot whenever the fuck he wants.  We can be more forgiving and say that the player can increase his percentage of making said clutch shot due to his innate clutchness.  Let’s look again at the NBA, using perimeter players as an example.  Almost every player that plays PG, SG, or SF is seemingly bound by the magical 50% when it comes to accuracy.  That is the gold standard when defining a good shooter.  An acceptable range for an efficient perimeter scorer will be anywhere between 45-50%, with 50% actually being an incredibly good number achieved by very few players.  Now if a clutch player truly existed, he would apparently have the power to will shots in whenever he deemed it convenient.  You would think that in the entire history of the NBA there would be some subset of perimeter players that would be able to break this 50% with some significant sample size of shot attempts in their career.  Now I don’t have time to look at every statistic, but I am fairly certain that there are very few perimeter players that shot over 50% for their careers.  I am even more certain that VERY FEW to NONE have shot between 55-60% for their career over a significant sample size.  I think it’s fair to assume that if the clutch ability really existed and people were able to control their shots as such, SOMEONE would have shot an amazingly abnormal percentage by now.

Now it follows that if clutchness is refuted, so is the entire idea of the choke.  The perception of clutchness and choking is based on one of the most common errors in human thinking, which is the tendency to remember rare events and forget common ones and then derive conclusions from that.  Who doesn’t forget the missed free throw at the end of the game to lose?  Who is going to bother remembering the other 9 times that same player hit that free throw, thus giving him a 90% success rate?  Or rather, who will forget when a player hits a 2 or 3 game winners within a few days or even weeks?  This is why we as poker players are all dumb motherfuckers and constantly complain about bad beats because as human beings we are apparently hardwired to be complete morons and it takes great effort to introduce even the most basic levels of logic into our thinking.  Ever notice why everyone in every sport in existence complains about the refs?  Well, the refs are working at game speed, while retards like us get the benefit of instant replay and are able to scrutinize every single call.  If said ref does miss a call, we will never ever forget it.  He could make 20 correct calls in a row, but the second he makes another bad call we will be all over him.  Now I am not saying that refs are perfect, because they obviously make mistakes, but if NBA players are applauded for an 80% free throw shooting rate, we can’t be hypocrites and expect refs to be right 100% of the time.

That’s right folks.  Chauncey Billups is not really “Mr. Big Shot.”  Kansas got incredibly lucky last year and essentially 2 outed Memphis in the final minute.  The 2000 Lakers got lucky against the Blazers in the 4th quarter.  The refs made some bad calls in game 6 of the 2002 WCF and in the 2006 NBA Finals, but neither series was rigged.  JR Smith, Ben Gordon, and Jamal Crawford are not streak shooters, I promise.  They just have the tendency to take very visible and memorable shots (awful shot selection) which have a lasting effect on us if they make 3 or 4 in a row.  Nobody thinks D-Wade, Rip Hamilton, or even David West is a streak shooter even though they routinely make 3 or 4 shots in a row.  It’s because those are usually going to be boring midrange shots that nobody cares about.  Stop trying to assign reasons for everything that happens.  Just accept the luck factor.

So has poker really ruined sports for me?  Not really, but I’ll be damned if I can’t write a disjointed and incoherent rant at 6 am about it.

I got the idea for this post while reading a book called Talent is Overrated.  It’s similar to Outliers in that it refutes the myth of innate talent and ability and instead favors the idea that 10,000 hours of practice will make you an expert at anything (an idea which I subscribe to, by the way).  Then it states that not just any practice will do, but 10,000 hours of DELIBERATE practice.  Deliberate practice means directly attacking your weakest skills.  Of course, I immediately got to thinking how this might relate to poker and some of the things I did over my brief career to get better.

The author breaks deliberate practice down into 3 general models:

1) The music model

This is essentially emulating an expert.  Amateur musicians practice by playing already-existing music from an established composer.  The benefit of this is pretty obvious as it allows you to ask a number of questions such as:

- how does an expert do it?
- why does he do it?
- why is it different from what I, the amateur, do?

As poker players I think we employ the music model of training whenever we participate in sweat sessions or watch a training video.  However, I think this is the weakest form of poker training and I will explain why in a moment.

2) The chess model

The chess model involves studying concrete situations over and over.  I would compare this to breaking down a situation that you may face, such as x stacks, y players, z actions and then comparing and contrasting all the different actions you can take.  The benefits of this should be pretty obvious, as poker almost always boils down into a game of situations.  As such, I think this is the most effective form of practice.  However, do people really do this as diligently as they should?  When was the last time you took 3 or 4 hands that genuinely confused you, sat down for an hour, and worked out every solution with all the accompanying math?  If you havent, have you been stuck at a certain limit for a while?

3) The sports model

This involves two aspects of training, conditioning the muscles that you will most often use and specific critical skills such as shooting a free throw.  Now I don’t think specific critical skills have much application in poker (trash talking maybe?), but conditioning is a subtle and often ignored method of practice.

Of course, you probably figured out by now that we are talking about conditioning your brain.  In my opinion, this involves mainly teaching it how to focus for extended periods of time.  I have told my students that all tilt is a form of losing focus.  Instead of thinking about the situation at hand, you start thinking about other hands that you won or lost, your girlfriend being a bitch on the phone(does not apply to Xyven), your current downswing or how far off you are from your peak, how much money you have made or lost in this session, how terrible your opponent is, etc.  This is all due to a lack of mental discipline.  It would be interesting to see if good tournament players have an advantage over cash game players since they are forced to stay focused for a long period of time.  Maybe JCarver can comment on this since he has extended experience with both cash and tournaments.  Anyway, how do we learn to focus?  I am admittedly not an expert and the only thing that comes to mind would be meditating.  I’m sure a google search would turn up some decent results.

Aside from focus, there is an even more subtle and even more ignored form of practice called staying in shape.  It should make perfect sense, the better shape we are in, the better our minds work and the longer we can focus.  Obviously though, most poker players are total slobs (myself included) when it comes to eating habits and discipline in general.  Luckily poker gives you the option of quitting whenever you want (except for tournaments) so this does not hurt us too much.

Looking back, the methods I employed (and continue to employ) the most were the chess model followed by the music model.  You may be wondering why I said earlier the music model was the weakest form of training.  Well, in my personal experience, watching videos and having a coach sweat me only gave me one real benefit.  It sparked ideas in my head about new ways to play a hand, which I then had to practice via the chess model to flesh out the ideas.  Besides that, there is too much dead time during a sweat session/video to really be of any use to us.  Remember, its 10k hours of DELIBERATE practice, so what good is watching an hour long video with only 7 minutes of useful information?  We are trying to fix our specific weaknesses, and frankly most videos will not address this which turns them into a general waste of time.  Videos do have other benefits such as helping us get into a good frame of mind by watching solid poker, but this isn’t a make or break type of thing that catapults videos/sweats into the best form of training.  Again, all in my opinion and personal experience.

There is one very important form of practice that has been left out of all of this, actually PLAYING poker!  We will not be able to hone our instincts if we don’t play.  However, how many of you load up as many tables as you can and simply grind your life away?  I’m not saying that 12 tabling cash games is bad, but I think that a lot of players fall into a rut when they simply load up as many tables as they can handle, open a HUD, grind out some hands, and call it a day.  By “handling a table” I mean, can you give me a decent read on any given player at one of your tables?  Can you tell me how much he or she might have lost within the last few hands?  Can you tell me if 2 players seem to be getting into it 3 and 4betting each other a little too frequently?  Most of the time the answers to these questions will be some collection of statistics, no, and no.  In addition, what style do we ourselves play when we are clicking buttons on the internet?  Where did you learn how to play, how much work did you put into it, and how much work are you putting into it TODAY?  When is the last time you revisited your basic approach to the game?  When is the last time you thought about your specific weaknesses and how you can improve them?

I have to give a shout out to Derk here.  I am not that familiar with his system, but I do know that he spends a ton of time off the table studying, takes a shitload of notes on the table, and as a result has turned himself into the allah of superturbos.  We should all strive to be more like derb, except for buying 240 granola bars off amazon.

In the annals of history there are epic matchups that need no description such as Ali – Frazier, Ali – Foreman, Ali – Spinks, and Ali – Norton.  To this list, the Bad Beats Crew is proud to add nachos – nacho.  An epic 200bb deep heads up match where the loser would agree to change his name on the SA forums.  We present the entire video of the match here, unedited and in all its brutal glory.

You can discuss the video here.

My thoughts on this movie might have to be taken with a grain of salt.  I had NO idea who or what the watchmen were, never read any of the comics in my life, did not read a single review or preview, and my only exposure to it was the trailer which looked “cool” but made no sense to me.  I just happened to stumble upon some tickets and went with a few friends yesterday.

Anyway, from my noob perspective I thought the movie was very cool and definitely entertaining.  The 2 hour and 43 minute runtime FLEW by, and besides The Dark Knight, I can’t remember a long movie that didn’t have me check my watch at least once.  That said, this is obviously nowhere near the level of Dark Knight.  There were a few funny parts like Dr. Manhattan’s dick in every scene and the random sex which, whether placed intentionally for some effect or not, definitely detracted from the somewhat more serious underlying themes of the story.

I wasn’t really surprised to see some bad reviews floating around on the internet.  Fanboys will probably get upset over the little nuances of the comic which were obviously lost on someone like me.  Also, with a story like this that seems to have many layers, it’s inevitable that nearly 165 minutes of runtime still wont be enough to pack everything in there.  All in all, they did a good job catering to a non-fanboy like me who is still going to be the majority of the audience.

January was a pretty strange and somewhat disappointing month.  I decided to switch to playing 6max for the last three weeks of the month, after previously being quite opposed to it.  My edge heads up is still greater, but I figured it was time to stop being stubborn and realize some very important advantages.

• The hourly is higher, thanks to double the tables and rakeback/vpps
• Its easier to get sessions going.  I don’t have to wait for action and share fish with other idiots sitting on 35 empty tables.
• Less stressful in general.

with that said, I think I mainly just needed a break from HU and some sort of change.  I have issues with doing the same thing for an extended period of time as can be seen from my civ 4 games.  I usually just play the first 1/3 of the game up until rifling and then quit and start a new game because I can tell if I’ve already won or if I’m in for a long dogfight.  Speaking of which, I can’t believe how addictive and how big of a timesink this stupid game is.  Now I know why I uninstalled it during my last couple semesters of school.

Anyway, my 6m game is a work in progress with my postflop play oscillating between overaggressive HU-style and super nitty queer.  Eventually I’ll find the right balance.  Also after three solid months to end the year, I obviously start off with a slightly losing January.  This affected me more than it should have, simply because I really wanted to erase 2008 from my memory and stop being able to say “I’m stuck for the year”.  But, alas, such is life.  Time to work hard and have a better February.

What a terrible 12 months!  The funny thing is I am actually somehow up 8 buyins on this graph.

The last 70k or so hands represents a +74 buyin stretch so hopefully I’m well on my way to actually making money this year at poker.  What a novel thought.  Anyway, this seems like a good time to link to this post on two plus two about variance. Basically, you could be murdering your stakes for a 100k hand sample and still be something like 4-6PTBB off your true winrate.  That doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t a winner, but maybe not at the clip you would hope to be.  This is pretty much the type of stuff I read to help sleep at night, because it sure isn’t confidence inspiring to look at 234,376 hands of losing poker!

My advice?  Don’t make the same mistake I did and obsess over winrate just because other people seem to be doing well.  Winrate is pretty stupid in theory anyway because it assumes you will have to stop growing as a player at some point and fulfill some sort of destiny for yourself as an x bb/100 player.

This leads to my singular 2009 goal of playing well.  I guess you can throw in the goal of “play a lot” too, but honestly I have no idea where this year will lead me and maybe I will just quit poker altogether.  Intellectually the game is getting a bit stale and I have a lot of trouble getting motivated to play now, even with the meager amount of volume I put in.  Perhaps it is the amount of time I’ve spent in the slums combined with the memories of playing (and winning) at higher stakes.  Any good poker therapists out there?

The past few days I’ve been getting hardcore into sports betting, trying my hand at analyzing props and handicapping games with mixed success.  My record since I started keeping track is 27-26-2 including bets against the spread, totals, and player/team props.  Obviously with such a small sample size any type of conclusion derived from this is worthless, but I’m satisfied with my progress so far considering I have made 55 NBA bets in 3 days using mostly math and a little judgment.  That’s a lot of volume for a noob attempting to beat one of the tougher sports.

Now I only have about 3 days of experience sports betting, as opposed to 3+ years with poker, but I already have some observations that I thought made for an interesting comparison between the two.

It’s a GRIND
I’ve definitely gotten a new appreciation for grinding out small edges, which is all you do betting sports.  Your typical “lock” bet (these do not come up very often at all) will only have a winrate of somewhere in the 60-65% range which is laughable when looking at it from a poker player’s perspective.  There is also a ton of work involved, at least initially.  I figure I’ve spent roughly 3 hours a day the past 3 days handicapping games, running the math on prop bets, compiling data, and working on my handicapping model.  It could easily be more than 3 hours a day, but I’ve been slacking a bit on the last two items.  In addition, you have to adjust your life a bit to be prepared to jump on opening lines in the morning.  Sometimes you might spot a line that you know is going to move in a certain way and will be a better bet later on, which means you have to frequently monitor the lines.

Hard to quantify your edge
All the mathematics in the world are worthless if your initial models are inaccurate, because you are simply plugging in estimates of win percentages which are derived from your model.  This seems like it will come with experience, but its always going to be very delicate due to the fact that the biggest winners pick at something like a 55% success rate leaving very little room for error.  Hopefully within the next couple weeks I’ll have 300 or so bets under my belt and some idea of how good/bad I am.  For what it’s worth, I am usually pretty accurate within a point or two in eyeballing games and forecasting the next day’s lines.  If a line is way off my prediction, there is probably an opportunity there.  All of this is the complete opposite with poker, where it is very easy to spot a bad player and devise a strategy to exploit their weakness.

Fewer mental swings
Poker frequently makes you question your abilities and occasionally even your existence.  There is nothing quite like the feeling of being in a long downswing, repeatedly getting destroyed no matter what you do, and “playing through it”.  Of course, betting sports is extremely high variance and will have its share of downswings as well.  It’s never as personal as it is in poker though.  Analyzing sports games requires very little, if any, emotion since all you do is sit there and crunch numbers looking for +ev bets.  Then you place the bets and the process is over.  You don’t have to sweat them out if you don’t want to.  I’m sure being in a sports downswing will make one question their handicapping abilities, but I doubt it ever gets to the suicidal levels of an egotistical game like poker.

All things considered, sportsbetting is certainly not for everyone.  There is a lot of “boring” work involved that only results in repeatedly grinding out a small edge.  It certainly helps to enjoy the sport you are betting on.  Lucky for me, I love watching basketball and it is very appealing to me to sit down and play around with numbers in an attempt to model something and profit off its inconsistencies.  Perhaps I should get into Wall Street.

I have a habit of ending my sessions on a bad note, usually after a couple of mistakes or a string of medium/big pots that I lose for whatever reason. Like last night I was 2 tabling some guy at 5/10 and instaquit after I got owned for 3 streets including an overbet that I really should not have called. Here is the hand in question:

PokerStars Game #22934335745: Hold’em No Limit ($5/$10) – 2008/12/15 5:07:36 ET
Table ‘Colocolo’ 2-max Seat #2 is the button
Seat 1: nachos24 ($1762 in chips)
Seat 2: StitzDogg ($6286.75 in chips)
StitzDogg: posts small blind $5
nachos24: posts big blind $10
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to nachos24

StitzDogg: raises $30 to $40
nachos24: calls $30
*** FLOP ***

nachos24: checks
StitzDogg: bets $78
nachos24: calls $78
*** TURN ***

nachos24: checks
StitzDogg: bets $225
nachos24: calls $225
*** RIVER ***

[Jc]

nachos24: checks
StitzDogg: bets $1050
nachos24: calls $1050
*** SHOW DOWN ***
StitzDogg: shows (three of a kind, Jacks)
nachos24: mucks hand
StitzDogg collected $2785.50 from pot

He did not mess around enough to really make this a good call. Not to mention the speed of his river bet was way too “in flow” to be a bluff. Regardless, it was like 5 am, I was getting tired, and my judgment was off. I closed out all my tables instantly and proceeded to feel like shit and it really bothered me that I could lose focus like that and make a silly play. I feel like this is really detrimental to my game and is a habit I picked up over the course of a year of running like ass. I felt like I had a significant edge on this guy and should have been able to stay and keep playing, but was unable to deal with getting owned in a big pot and had to stop. Maybe it’s a good thing that I can cut sessions off abruptly as soon as I’m not confident in my play, but it really kills the hourly when I can’t play through adversity.