October 08 Goals

So I finally took the plunge and purchased Pokertracker 3. The program is pretty sick, offers a lot of good data analysis and the HUD overlay is much better than PT2 + PAHUD. I'm hoping it will help me improve my cash game. Over the last couple months I've been break even or less at various cash games. I'm beginning to think that my late 2007 success at 9 way 1/2nl was a product of the stats I was recieving from pokertracker. I'm going to commit a lot of time to reviewing my hands more dilligently and trying to find leaks, so hopefully we turn the cash problems around.

On a high note, I've been doing pretty well at SNG's since I committed myself to playing them more regularly. On Stars, I've been playing the PCA steps. I've invested $100 at step 1, and though I've technically got nothing to show for it yet, I've played 5 step 4s and 2 Step 5s so far. Its only a matter of time before I break through one of my step 5s and get to the big step 6 sng.

I've also been playing a lot of SNG's on Full Tilt. I'm really digging the 24+2 DS KO Turbo 90 man sng's (that's a mouthful). I played 4 of them yesterday, and won two. In my first of the day, I finished 12th after Flopping a boat on a K5k board with 55, and getting it in vs 99. He found one of his 4 outs on the turn and the 9 sent me to the rail. Not sure on my knockout stats in this one, I think it was 3 or 4 KO's. In the second of these tourneys, I had 8 KO's in addition to the $576 for first, for a grand total of $608. Not bad. After this I fired up the next two that filled. In the third one, I had 4 KO's but finished in the mid 30's. The nice thing about KO's is it offsets the cost of these tourneys. In the 4th one of these of the night, I shortstacked most of the way until Full Tilt flipped the God switch for me. After winning a shove with k4 v a9, I successfully stole some blinds then won a flip with AQ v 33, then found KK on the big blind and had a 10k stack open shove. Now chiplead with 4ok, I never relented. I opened every pot to 5k on the bubble, with blinds at 1k 2k. All good, entered final table with 50k. There I dominated the fishies who are obviously sng players not mtt players. 4 way I had 180k or the 270k in play. I steamrolled to HU, where I briefly lost the CL after making a marginal reshove with Q6ss and getting caught by A8o. I fought back to even, then found AA at 2.5k/5k. Awful opponent limps, I make it 16500, he calls. Flop is J82, I lead 16.5k, villain waits and ships it in. Snap call, K2o is no good. GG second win of the day. I had 11 ko's in this tourney, $620 total for first. One problem with PT3 and these sng's is that PT3 doesn't record ko's. This is kind of annoying, because the summary.txt file for each ko tournament says how many ko's you had at the top. It doesn't seem like a huge script change would be needed to include this in PT3. Maybe it will be a later update though, we'll see.

Conceptually I think that these 24+2 90's are extremely +EV for me. They play similar to a mtt to start, where you're deep and people call raises very light. The turbo structure causes people to have very low m's as we get to 45-50 ppl left. I'll see spots where there is 800 in the pot at 200/400, most of the table has 4-8k, and this is when ppl start tightening up. WTF? This is when I'm getting aggressive and chipping up. Also, I'm amazed at the amount of ppl who flat call off all their cips. If someone shoves from middle position and I'm the button with KQ, A10, 44 and an average stack, I'm looking for a better spot. Not these idiots. So many all ins are called and we see races of A8ss vs KJ vs 66. Such a joke! I think that because of the ko value, people are more apt to call all ins. I understand the value of the ko, but it only marginally makes me more likely to call an all in. I'm playing to win the tournament, not pick up an additional 4 bucks.

When I get home tonight I will post my pt3 tournament graph from oct1 to today. I'll post a new graph every monday, as a way to keep me on my game and track my progress.