2nd cash of the series

This series is off to a good start.  I made the money in event 9 1500NL 6max.  I'm starting the 2nd day with around an average chip stack of 56,000.  There are 105 players remaining out of 1450 who started yesterday, play will resume at 2pm pacific today and continue until there are 6 players left.

twitter

I set up a twitter feed named khpoker so I can easily send people who are interested updates on my progress in tournaments throughout the day.  If you are interested, you can follow my name on twitter.  You can also sign up to "follow" me on twitter, this will send you a text message on your phone whenever I submit an update from the tournament.  If you use this , be sure to disable the updates late at night if you are on the east coast, these tournaments can run as late as 2am pacific. 

First cash of this years wsop

I finished 511th in event 4 for $2056, hopefully the first of several cashes in this years WSOP.  Today I played in the $1500NL event and only lasted a couple hours.  After that, I headed over to the venetian and played a 5/10 NL game for a few hours.  I bought in for $600 and ran it up to 3370 before quitting.  After that, Tom came over to the venetian and we went to Wolfgang's bistro in the venetian for dinner.  It's quite nice this year to be living so close to the strip.  We are within walking distance of so many high quality restraunts and other forms of entertainment.  Last year, I only went to the strip about 3 times the whole summer, the rest of the time was spent at the rio or playing online poker at our house. 

World Series of Poker

The world series of poker has begun. I'm in Vegas for 6 weeks to play a lot of the tournaments and cash games. Saturday I played in Event 4 1k NL and made it through the end of the day. Play resumes Monday at 2pm pacific time. There will probably be about 800 players left and I will have 34,500 chips which is a little above average.

The downside of being a poker professional

I've been working fairly hard since early this summer on learning to play pot limit omaha. The games are good and there is a lot of action most times of the day. I started out playing 1/2 PLO which has a 200 dollar buyin and things seemed to go really well.




That is my lifetime graph at 1/2 PLO. I figured I was ready to up the stakes and moved on up to 2/4 PLO, and that is where I ran into some problems. As you can see, my graph for 2/4 PLO looks much different.




When learning a new game it takes a long time to "know" if you are a winner due to short term variance. Despite there being a significant skill component to playing, there is also a lot of luck that influences results over small samples - and 15-25k hands is a small statistical sample. There is a program available online that can measure your luck in "allin" situations, which is one form of luck. PLO is an action packed game that involves a lot of allins, so how you run in these spots will heavily influence your results.

This graph shows my allin luck at 1/2 PLO. The blue line graphs how much I actually won, the red how much I should have won if I had average luck.





So,I should have won about 10k but I have actually won over 12k. Over 28k hands I'm running good to the tune of over 10 buyins in allin situations. Not bad.

Now lets look at the same graph for 2/4 PLO where I'm losing a considerable number of buyins.




In this case, over 17k hands I have lost 3k when I should have won over 4k, nearly 20 buyins. This is pretty unlucky.


Short term variance like this makes it hard for me to determine whether I'm actually a winner in the 2/4 games. Constantly getting unlucky can also introduce "tilt" in even the best players, where I am not mentally playing my best game because I am too focused on the losses. Obviously I have no control over what happens after I am allin and results in these situations should not affect my play.

I'm playing more 1/2 recently to continue to work on learning the game and rebuilding my confidence. I feel like I am a long term winner at 2/4 and I continue to play in the games on occasion.

Out of the Main Event

I ended up losing fairly early in Day 2. i had chipped down to 7.5k and it folded to me in the small blind at 300/600 with a 75 ante. I look down at KQ and move allin. MattG is in the BB and has pocket queens. I did manage to make a king high straight, but there were four diamonds on board and he held the queen of diamonds.

That wraps up the world series for me this year, I may play one more event at the venetian before heading back home.

short day

The bellagio 5k went really quick for me. Its the 2nd level and I still have the 15k starting stack as I only played 2 hands level 1. Online player mig.com makes it 300 in early position, I call with black queens and the guy on my left also calls. A guy who is steaming because he just lost almost all his chips in a previous hand is on the button, he makes it 1500 of his 3000 chips. Mig.com thinks for a minute and makes it 4100. I move allin because Mig.com will make this play with a lot of worse hands to isolate the button. Now the guy on my left thinks for a bit and he moves allin. This was a completely unexpected turn of events. Mig.com thinks for a bit and folds. Button has 89 of clubs, but the other guy has AA. The tilter obviously makes a club flush and quadruples up and I'm out of the tournament.