10,000 hands!

I made it! After tonight I now have 10,016 hands of $25nl under my belt. In fact, here's all of my stats from all levels since I started rebuilding.

Most of these numbers probably don't mean anything to those who don't use the PokerTracker software, but some of them are obvious: I've won $416.15 over 10,016 hands at the $25nl (they call it $0.25; this is the size of the big blind, and $25 is the size of the buy-in which is what I have been referring to).

It's also of note that I spent the least amount of time at the $10nl level ($0.10) and also had the highest winrate then. This obviously could be due to running good over a small sample size (with poker, anything under 10,000 is considered "small" since the variance is so freaking high), but if I remember correctly, I think this did seem to be the easiest level to play at thus far.

Ok, now here's my graph of winnings thus far over all the levels.

Can't complain about that :) My PokerStars account sat at $602.01 after finishing that off.

Now, on the downside... tonight I also went ahead and played some at the $50nl level, after completing my 10,000 hands of $25nl. And this didn't go so well. I dropped about $60 there tonight.

So that's a bit of a setback. I'm going to keep at it though, and only playing 1-2 tables at a time for now (I've been playing 4-6 at $25nl).

The statistical analyses of the 10,000 hands at $25nl are still to come!

Approaching 10,000 hands

So like I said a while ago, my latest task was to play 10,000 hands at $25nl and then do some statistical analyses. Well, I'm getting close now, sitting at about 9600 hands after playing a little tonight. So I thought it might be nice to start thinking about what analyses I'd actually like to do.

First is the obvious: Statistically, am I a winning player at this level? This should be a fairly straightforward question to answer with the data at hand. I'll also have a point estimate and confidence interval on my winrate.

I'd also like to get winrates and confidence intervals for each position at the table (i.e. big blind, UTG, button, etc). My sample size is obviously going to be a lot smaller for this (should be roughly 1,000 hands per position) but we'll see how wide my confidence intervals are for that.

Finally, I think I'd like to do some analyses examining the pot sizes that I win. Previously (like a long time ago on another site) I used to think I won lots of small pots but then always got it in bad for the big pots. This would obviously be a problem. I haven't thought through exactly how I'll examine this yet, but it should be do-able.

That's about all I can think of for now. I'm sure I'll also just do some data exploration and see what's in there. It might be good to look at hand-specific statistics, i.e. am I losing with AQ, or KQ, or other medium-big hands that I should be winning with? And do I play too much of the junk hands?

After this though, I'm fairly sure I'm going to move up to $50nl. The PokerStars account sits at about $580 right now, so I'm well above Daniel's rules for the move-up. Incidentally, I haven't been able to find any updates lately on his progress.

Anyways, I'll probably start by playing just 1 table at a time for a bit, like 1,000 hands or so. Although that'll be a lot, so maybe a bit less. We'll see...

Vegas and other updates

So it turns out that Lish wasn't the biggest fan of Vegas. All the bright lights, masses of people, and billboards shouting "SEX SEX SEX!!" were a bit too much.

It wasn't *all* bad, though. We went hiking at Red Rock Canyon which was amazing. And she did enjoy playing Pai Gow at Bill's while we waited for breakfast (and she won $45!)

But by about the 3rd day, she was totally sick of the strip, and has said that she doesn't want to stay on the strip if she ever goes back there. Which is actually fine -- if I do make it back for the WSOP (which is the main thing for which I'd definitely WANT Lish to be in Vegas again), I'll probably want to rent a house or condo for the 2 weeks or whatever... because it was a little stressful hopping from hotel to hotel back in 2006. Also, I'd like to have a kitchen so that we don't have to spend so much on meals. So if we do that, then hopefully it'll be a little more peaceful and it will all work out.

Anyways. Right now I'm gonna call my shot and say that I'll be back in 2011. Because, I think I'm gonna need a full year of bankroll building before I'm in a good enough position to have a reasonable chance. And I need to stop doing stupid things with my bankroll, or else I'm not going anywhere. I basically haven't made anything since I got here... I mean it's been up and down, between $2000 and $3000 the entire time. The one productive thing I've done is resurrect my PokerStars account, and that's in large part because I've taken it so seriously and have refused to play drunk on that account.

Speaking of which, I'm now at 6225 hands of $25nl, and the PokerStars account sits at about $370.

I've also been playing a bit more PLO on Full Tilt, just at the $25 level as well. Not doing so hot there though... I'm down about $100, after about 1000 hands so far. This game is sick but I also know I'm just not very good at it yet. I haven't put in that much effort into actually getting better at it, i.e. analyzing hands and such. I'm gonna just keep playing it for a bit though, and then maybe will do some of that later on...

Looking ahead

I've played about 4600 hands at $25nl now, so I'm almost halfway to my target of 10,000 hands. The PokerStars roll currently sits at like $302. I had gotten it up to about $355, but then started not running as good over the past thousand hands or so.

I'm getting pretty eager to move up to $50nl though. By traditional bankroll management rules I think I'm not really supposed to go there until my roll is at like $1k-$2k (20-30 buy-ins), but whatev. As long as I just use my head, I think I can avoid going busto...

I'm also looking at what I can buy with my Frequent Player Points (FPPs). I currently have just under 1,000. lol, that's not very much. But apprently you can buy seats into tournaments with these things! Right now, for example, they have a $8,500 Asia Pacific Poker Tour event (in Macau), for 500,000 FPPs, and also a $15,875 tournement Europeant Poker Tour event (in Barcelona) for 940,000 FPPs. I imagine the WSOP will be somewhere in that ballpark as well...

Might take me a while to get that many points, haha. I also have to be at the Platinum Star VIP level in order to be eligible to purchase these things. And to be Platinum requires a certain amount of play per month, which I'm certainly not anywhere near right now.

To figure out just what it would take, I just went on Poker Stars' VIP points calculator, and after playing with it for a bit, it says that I should be able to attain Platinum status if I play $600NL for 10 hours per week. So... not *entirely* out of reach, within maybe the next year or two...

3k hands and counting...

The journey to 10,000 hands at 25nl has been a slow one. I haven't been playing too much, and whatever time I *have* been playing, I've mostly been on Full Tilt playing tournaments. With basically breakeven results over the past month or so, and nothing very notable to speak of.

But I just crossed 3,000 hands of 25nl tonight, and my PokerStars account now sits at about $335 and change. The updates from DN's side have basically stopped due to the WSOP and such, so that is understandable. That's kind of why I had been playing tournaments lately anyways. I think I'm going to bring my focus back to this challenge though... I'd like to say that I'll get my 10,000 hands by the end of the summer, but not at the expense of study time for my theory exam... so it's probably not going to happen. In fact, it's probably better if it doesn't.

This past Friday night I went to a homegame at a classmate's house, Eric. It was a pretty fun game and I'd definitely be up for playing with them some more. They also have a regular game that is a mix of lowball games with like $100 buy-in, so that might be fun to try too... although... I should probably try and LEARN those games before I step in there, haha...

150 Seat Guarantee

Well, I said it:

"Meanwhile, WSOP satellites have started. I'm not going to make a real push at it this year since I'm pretty sure it would be a bad idea to try and actually go play it -- I still have my theory qual on August 26th. But, Full Tilt is as usual running their massive 150 seat guarantee satellite, this year on June 21st for a $535 buy-in. I intend to win a seat into THIS tournament, and it'll be my one shot at the WSOP this year."

and I just did it:



Unfortunately, I don't think I can play in this, because it starts at 3pm tomorrow and I'm playing at church this week, and have to be at practice at 4:30pm.

However, there's another $535 tournament, also a Main Event Qualifier, that starts at 1:30pm and should be much smaller. I might just do that instead... or I might just unregister and keep the tournament credits for later use. We'll see...

my gchat buddy list...

...now contains a WSOP bracelet winner!

Congratulations to Leo Wolpert who won the $10k Heads Up NL Hold'em Event which ended on Tuesday night.

Leo was involved in the Michigan-Ohio State last-longer bet that I organized for the Main Event back in 2006 (which I talk about back in
this post). I can't remember if I actually met him then, but we e-mailed back and forth a bit, and hence he's been on my gchat list since then.

I thought about shooting him a "congrats" on gchat but it would've been totally random to him and I didn't want to seem stalker-ish. Of course, you might say I abandonded that by making this post, but whatever.

The Main Event starts on July 3rd. Doesn't look like I'm playing this year... sigh...

Hello from Michigan

The spring quarter has come to an end, and you know what that means... more time for poker!!

Maybe. I still have to study for the big qualifying exam on August 26th. But I barely played ANY poker at all during the spring quarter, so almost anything would be "more" at this point.

Lish and I are at the tail end of our vacation in Michigan, centered around Emily's wedding on Mackinac Island, and followed by time in Ann Arbor and Detroit. We're not gonna hit the Detroit casinos though since Lish wants to save that for when we actually go to Vegas, but I did get to introduce her to a little Chinese Poker while we were out for breakfast the other morning :)

Tonight I crossed the $300 mark on PokerStars, woooo! No idea how DN is doing there since I can't find any updates, but under his scheme I'd be at $50NL now (actually, I would have been since crossing $250). But I'm at about 2200 hands of $25NL right now, so still chugging along to 10k on that. It's gonna be kind of funny if/when my Stars account surpasses my Full Tilt account, which may happen since I've been taking my Stars account so seriously, but just been monkeying around on my Full Tilt account. hah.

Oops, I did it again

On Saturday evening, we had a Memorial Day Weekend BBQ/Party. There was beer involved. Well, before going to bed, I decided that it would be a good idea to sit at 5/10 (limit) heads-up. Long story short, my Full Tilt account now sits at about $705, a good drop down from about $1000.

On the other front, I played enough hands to clear my bonus at PokerStars! So that account now sits at about $260. I've played 1,632 hands at $25NL (I'm gonna start calling it that now instead of 10c/25c; they're the same thing), so I still have a ways to go before reaching my target of 10,000 hands and then doing some analyses.

I've barely been playing at all this quarter because school has been pretty rough... I think I've played MAYBE once every two weeks or so, and only for like an hour at most.

school woes

Haven't been playing as much lately due to school kicking my ass. However, I did cross the $200 mark today on Stars (now at $226.46). woo. :) My immediate goal now is to just play 10,000 hands at the 10c/25c level, because *NERD ALERT* I want to build up a sufficient sample size to do some statistical analyses of my play. I'm just curious to see what I might find if I take a close look at it.

Meanwhile, WSOP satellites have started. I'm not going to make a real push at it this year since I'm pretty sure it would be a bad idea to try and actually go play it -- I still have my theory qual on August 26th. But, Full Tilt is as usual running their massive 150 seat guarantee satellite, this year on June 21st for a $535 buy-in. I intend to win a seat into THIS tournament, and it'll be my one shot at the WSOP this year.

Lish and I opened the discussion for me taking her on her first Vegas trip, in early September after my qual. We're both excited about that :)

PLO: such a sick, sick, sick, sick...

...sick, sick game. I'm just playing 5c/10c and 10c/25c right now to learn this damn game, but man it's crazy tilting. That's all I'm gonna say, because anyone who has played much PLO is probably laughing and saying no duh.

In other news, I crossed $100 at PokerStars. This means I'm within grasping range of DN, because based on his last update he must still be somewhere below $125 as he has yet to reach the 10c/25c level under his 500BB rule.

Postponing the move up

I hit $50 last night on PokerStars, which is when I would move up to 5c/10c under the rules of Daniel Negreanu's challenge. However, 500 big blinds is a bit on the small side as far as conventional bankroll management wisdom goes.

Therefore, I've decided to delay the jump up to 5c/10c until I hit $100 so that I start it with 1000 big blinds. I may take the occasional shot at it before then though just depending on how I feel on any given night.

It took me about 1400 hands to get from $25 to $50, and it took DN only 252 hands which is just sick. However, it looks like his next step is taking him quite a bit longer because he's been at 5c/10c since then, and in a recent update that I just found he says that he has crossed the $100 mark but has yet to move up to the next level, 10c/25c. So now is my chance to catch up!!

On a slight side-note, there's been some comments from various writers online about this that are just flat out wrong and sometimes stupid. Let me point a couple of them out now.

Exhibit A: Here the author states, "At a certain point he will reach a level he can no longer beat. Judging by his inability to laydown top pair on High Stakes Poker, it is likely that level will be about $1/$2 or $2/$4 in todays games." There's so many reasons why this is a stupid comment. The guy is making this assessment based on a bunch of hands he saw on TV. He has little if any idea about the context of those hands, and I can guarantee you that Daniel was thinking about so many things in each of those hands that this guy would never have thought of nor perhaps even understand.

ok. next one.

Exhibit B: This one basically has the opposite problem, with the idea that Daniel's road will get easier as he moves up in stakes because of the "ridiculous" play at micro stakes, where players "are almost always going to call you down to the river, and pushing opponents out of pots is practically impossible." yeah, you sir just described the easiest games in the world to beat, and you're also speaking as if Daniel would not know how to adapt to these conditions even if he is too used to playing at high stakes where his full arsenal of weapons should be used.

Let me finish this off by saying that I don't want to glorify DN as some sort of poker deity or anything like that at all. I do think he is one of the best in the world today, and this is based on his record and some of his thoughts that I have read or listened too. Even his record is a dangerous metric to judge him on because anything can happen in the short run, but he has put up great numbers year after year that it would be hard to argue against this. But the way that he thinks about the game (as evident in his writings) is what impresses me more.

All that being said... Negreanu, I'm gonna whup your butt to $10,000. After that is unknown territory for me and I'll make no claims about that, but we will see.

Peter Chi vs. Daniel Negreanu

Ok Negreanu, you don't know this, but I'm racing you in your challenge.

I just reached the 2c/5c level yesterday, I'm at $25.03 now. It took me just under 2,200 hands, which is about 3 times the amount it took you (786 hands). So this means that you're 3 times the player that I am. haha.

Just kidding (at least, in the sense that you could make any judgment of that based on this). But according to his latest update, he's now at 5c/10c. I should point out, though, that he has had a 2-month head-start on me, plus I started with almost 3 bucks less haha. But on the other hand, I have a $25 bonus coming from PokerStars once I play enough hands... so between all these things I think I'll just call it even :)

I think I'm going to do things a little bit differently from him though, in that at some point I'd like to get off of cash games and switch over to SNGs and MTTs. I'm not set on that for sure though; we'll see how I feel down the road. But right now I'm thinking that at $100 I'll switch to the $5 tournaments and go from there.

The funny thing is how much I'm getting into this though. I was worried when I started that I wouldn't be able to take these micro-stakes games seriously, but... that's not true at all. Twice within these 2,200 hands I had come within $1 of the $25 mark, only to have it come crashing down. And I got just as excited and then subsequently demoralized as I would when I was playing for hundreds of dollars. That kind of makes me feel good though -- it's testimony that I play this game because I love it, and the stakes don't even matter per se. I mean they do matter in the sense that I'm eager to move up because each step up represents accomplishment. but. I dunno, I've always told myself that the day when playing poker becomes all about the money for me is the day I'll quit, if that ever happens.

Meanwhile I'm still hovering around $1k on Full Tilt... been up and down around it for the past month and can't break much higher than that yet. I'm staying at the $10s even though when I first started rebuilding that roll I was moving up at 50 buy-ins for each level, but the $20s just seem too high psychologically for me right now; if I whiff on just 5 in a row that's minus $100 right there, and that's far from unlikely on any given session.

Atlantic City in two days!!

shaniac vs. Shannon Shorr

There's been some drama between two semi-name players in the past couple of days.

First, who are these guys? The first thing that might not be too obvious is that these are both dudes. When I first started reading shaniac's posts on 2+2, I thought his screenname stood for Shania C. But it's actually Shane Schleger, a very active 2+2 poster and blogger with a ton of readers.

On the other side, Shannon Shorr is actually the reason this feud caught my eye -- he's a guy I played with for the 2nd half of Day 1 at the WSOP back in 2006. At that point, he was coming off of his first big score of his career: a 4th place finish at the Aussie Millions for about $200k. He has since become a very accomplished tournament pro, periodically being near the top of CardPlayer's Player of the Year standings and was as high as #2 this year.

Now, what happened? Well, NBC's National Heads-Up Championship is coming up. It's an invite-only tournament with a $20k buy-in. The criteria for selection is not clear-cut, and that is exactly the reason for this fiasco... the stink of it is that Shannon feels snubbed for not having been invited.

But here, let me just lead you to the post: Snubbed.

And here is shaniac's: Delusional.

And just for good measure, here is the list of people who WERE invited.

Soo... who is right? The thing is, I think shaniac makes really good points, but I don't think it was right for him to call out Shannon like that. Shannon was just ranting on his own blog, which, yes, is out in the open for people to see and therefore is open game for people to rip on and whatever. But... I mean, he really takes a number of shots at Shannon that I think are quite unnecessary and not only are hurtful, but detract from his point as well.

Discussion/debate/flaming continues here in this 2+2 thread.

February Graph

Well, here's the latest graph with February play included:



The line represents the beginning of February. So yeah, it's been up and down as usual, but according to this graph I'm up a couple hundred in the past month. Also this doesn't include that $200 bounty that I won in FTOPS.

Last night I decided to play limit cash games for some reason though. I have no idea why I thought that would be a good idea. And yeah it was not fun at all, and I dropped $160. I actually still feel pretty bummed about it. What's funny is that back in the old days I wouldn't even blink at a loss this size... but now that I've been rebuilding from almost nothing, it hurts to see so much hard work go away in one bad session. oh well, whatever.

One more thing -- at the beginning of the year I deposited $100 into PokerStars. Well, by March 1st I ran that all the way down to $7.59. Sweet. And unfortunately, I tried to re-deposit but for some reason it wouldn't let me. Sooo... being stubborn, instead of just letting it go, I've decided to drop all the way down to 1c/2c NL games to try and work it back up. So yeah money-wise it's totally a waste of time, but I'm looking at this as a project. In fact, Daniel Negreanu is in the middle of doing the same thing -- from $10 to $100,000. Race to the finish imo... haha.

and also it'll make a good story once I win the WSOP.

Another 2nd place

I seem to be pretty decent at getting 2nd place in these medium-field tournaments (this time was 90 players). And when the jump in prize money from 2nd to 1st is by more than 60% (here, from roughly $160 to $260), that's sort of an unfortunate thing to be good at. Could be bad luck, or maybe I need to practice my heads-up game and learn how to close...

Although in all honesty, I can't complain. I went into the final table like 4th in chips, and was doing fine but not awesome... figured I'd likely get like 3rd-6th or so... and then when we got down to 3-way, I was the short stack by like 20k to like 100k and 100k. Getting JJ paid off helped the come-back a bit, and I did actually gain the chiplead for a few hands, but it didn't last.

When we got to heads-up, it was against a guy whose screenname is "sleep w fishes." Now I didn't know who he was, but I looked up his stats... and they're pretty impressive. He's got a few big cashes in these $10-$20 tournaments, including two that are in the $4k-$5k range, and several 1st places in the 45-player $26 tournaments (for $410 each). I actually find it sort of incredible that with all these wins, he's still playing at the $20 level.

Anyways, my reaction while playing him was that he was making some mistakes -- I thought he was a bit TOO aggro, and also calling things a little light. But in retrospect, he may have been playing pretty solid... I may have to go back and look at the hands again to see what I can learn. With how much that he's winning, he must be doing something right...

528th for $363.95 + $200 bounty

Well I just busted out. My last hand I had 99 in CO, opened to 3x, the BB shoved (had me covered), and I actually thought about folding because I figured it was probably a race at best, even if he was screwing around and re-stealing. But I figured I'd go with it, gotta win races to win the tournament. So I called and yeah he had AK, and flopped the A.

But at least I didn't go away empty-handed, got $363.95 for the 528th place finish, out of a final total of 6275 (they were still doing late registration for a bit). ALSO, they had bounties on all the FTP pros, so you got $200 if you knocked one out. I knocked out Gabriela Hill on this hand. And... for the little bit that I was sitting with her, she really looked like she was playing rather poorly, so I was hoping to get the chance to bust her. And yeah this call by her in her final hand is definitely questionable (although, in all honesty so is my shove, but we won't talk about that, lol).

Come to think of it, I actually don't even really know who she is. So I'm not sure how she got to become an FTP pro. But hey, thanks for the extra $200, Full Tilt :)

(edit: I looked up who Gabriela Hill is. Makes sense now since she's really an announcer, not a professional player).

And now back to my regularly scheduled $10 tournaments... actually, I think I might be ready to move up to the $20s with this $563.95 score, haha. And of course I will have my constant eye on satellites into more of these big events.

FTOPS 2nd break

Well I'm still alive. I'm sitting at 7460 chips, and the average is 8159.

In the first few levels I was pretty active, putting in a lot of bluffs and getting called, so my table might think I'm a total monkey. I had one bluff that I DID get away with though: this REALLY shouldn't have worked.

I think my turn check-raise was fine... but after he calls that, he's saying he doesn't buy what I'm selling. So he's almost certainly calling the river, too. Well, I got really lucky on this one.

On the other hand, here's one I'm really proud of: you don't have an ace.

I was surprised that his pre-flop raise got us heads up. But then again, I think it was pretty apparent from his raise that he was really strong. Now, once that Ace came down on the flop, I felt that it wasn't too likely that he had an Ace. And so I decided to take this pot from him, but to wait until the turn to do so. And yeah, success!

Oh, in another hand, I raised to 4510 by accident... I meant to raise to 450 :-P The keys are too close together on my number pad. Fortunately no one called, haha. Although, I had AQ so I might not have been in too bad of shape if someone did, but still.

okay, back to it.

FTOPS XI here we goooo

Event #1 of FTOPS XI has begun! We've got a total of 6,108 players and a 1st prize of $210,750.43.

Things have just begun and I'm already in a bit of a hole. Ran into aces, had some other things go wrong, and I'm already down almost 1,000 chips after 7 hands (we started with 5,000).

Projections on 2+2 have been saying that this thing is gonna go until 10:30am EST. Time to get comfortable... hopefully...

SharkScope, Vegas Summary, FTOPS, etc.

Tonight I found a website that is basically a public online database of everyone's tournament results at pretty much all of the poker sites. Pretty sick, huh? You can search for anyone based on their screenname. So of course, I searched for myself! So it returned a bunch of data on me, including this graph of my results:



Pretty cool, huh? I'm not entirely sure how far back it goes, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of this graph is within the last two months or so because I didn't play that many tournaments on Full Tilt before that. Notice the bit of a downswing I'm having right now, though. yeah, it's been pretty sucky. But, I think what I might do is check this website periodically, and post a new graph each month to see how I'm doing.

Anyways, I've been meaning to write a recap of Vegas, which I still plan to. But for now, I'll just give a brief summary of the gambling results: I played in a couple of tournaments, didn't cash in either (3rd in one that paid top 2, 13th in another that paid top 6). Lost a bunch on craps and blackjack, too. But managed to come out ahead in non-tournament poker. The totals were something like:

Blackjack: -$155
Craps: -$100
Poker Tournaments: -$140
Poker cash games: +$220

total: -$175


The FTOPS tournament that I won a seat into is in less than a week, on Wednesday at 6pm. First place is still listed at $172,960... gonna have to have a lot of things go right to even get anywhere close to that. But here we goooo...

Heading to Vegas tomorrow

Going to Las Vegas for MLK weekend. Can't wait... Michael Sachs is already there, and has been for like 3 hours now. Rahul and I are the next ones to arrive, and we don't get in until like 7pm tomorrow. I'm eager to see what Mike can do in the 34 hours that he is there alone.

The others coming are Wendy, Brownpa, Steve, and Jon (first Vegas endeavour with him but I'm looking forward to great things).

I've been looking up the current tournament schedules to try and figure out which ones I want to play in. I think my cap for tournament buy-ins on this trip is going to be like $100 per tournament, although I also might want to try and satellite into bigger ones if those opportunities are there.

Trip report to follow.

FTOPS Seat

Tonight I won a seat into FTOPS Event #1, which
is a $200 buy-in tournament with a guaranteed prize pool of $1,000,000. 1st place prize money is currently listed at $172,960 although this could go up as more entrants register.

I had to mount a massive comeback to win this seat, because I was in a winner-take-all satellite, and when we were down to 3 players, I was out-chipped like 8-1 by the chip leader. But somehow I battled back to take it down... in one hand he made a huge overbet for all my chips and I made the call with top pair, which held against his flush draw, and in the final hand he called off all his chips on another flush draw after I check-shoved with middle pair. Fortunately for me, this one didn't hit either and I won the seat.

In another tournament tonight, I had a shot at 1st place prize money of about $1,200 but sadly, I busted in 13th.

Lish and I had a good conversation tonight about the role of poker in my life and the world. My thoughts on that are all kind of whirling around right now though so I'll save that for another post.