Thanks for the hyping and the railing Myna. Super chuffed obviously .
Will do a proper update later but before I forget, in case anyone cares, with the AQ hand above I called (was always intending to check/call that spot) and villain showed up with J9o. I still don't like bounty hunters lol.
With my appetite for hardcore grinding still very much absent, the arrival of the latest round of Ukops has seen me spend the last few nights putting in some low volume on the MTT streets. I played 21 tourneys over 4 nights, including some non-Ukops ones too. As I'm a bankroll nit (and a tourney fish) this didn't include any of the big buy-in events (I don't yet play anything over £33), but it was still a bigger average buy-in per game than my usual MTT dabblings - it worked out as £16 per tourney on average over those nights.
I ran dreadfully and couldn't win a race to save my life - even when I had a more than healthy head start. I always have a little notes program open that I use to keep track of my results (I'm rather fastidious about that sort of thing) and after two quick suckouts early on, I decided to jot down the all-in preflop spots that didn't go my way. Bar the (very) occasional win, it wasn't long before I had this little lot staring back at me from my notes: JJ vs A9o, AKs vs KJo, A3s vs 87o, AJs vs A5s, AQs vs 77, AA vs 86s, A5s vs Q9o, KK vs JJ, JJ vs AKs, AA vs KJo, 88 vs A8s, JJ vs K5s, TT vs AQs, KK vs AJs, KK vs 66. Night three of Ukops did provide a tiny bit of respite to what was otherwise becoming a money haemorrhaging situation when I managed a 10th place in a £22bh, but I was well and truly gearing up to give @Jac35 a run for his money in the grumpy stakes. Night four was generally going the same way, but I was just about managing to survive in Ukops 24 - a £22 deep stack freezout. With great relief I found myself making it to the final table but, as the shortie with a mere 9bb stack, I wasn't expecting to be there long. To my astonishment, the gods of variance finally decided to smile on me and send some rungood my way. I'd held on and chipped up a little bit before getting all my money in with A7 in the big blind when facing a min open from Sir Stealsalot in the small blind. After fortuitously managing to outdraw AJ, I at last had a stack with some room for manoeuvre and from there was able to take down the whole thing. Total Tourney profits came to a much needed +£605.34
There was a tiny bit of cash game action too for a tiny bit of profit +£9.32.
Another very low volume week did at least see me break the 500 point barrier so there's a smidgen rakeback money to add with 863 points bringing in £8.63.
Having failed to do a proper tot up on Saturday, I'll consider today to be the start of my new month. I'm really not sure what I'm going to focus on for April so I won't be making a list of goals this time (I'll go through March's ones after this). With the micro madness promo starting today, the cash tables are going to be a pretty unappealing reg fest for then next few weeks and I've not exactly been in the hardcore grinding zone of late. Last nights Ukops bink has left me feeling slightly warmer towards MTT's, so I'll probably start by taking a stab at some of the mini Ukops events and maybe look to mix in some heads up cash too. I also still need to sort out my sock draw .
March's goals reviewed:
1) Make £1,500 in total profits. Total profit for the month came to £1,009.03. This would have been a far bigger fail if I hadn't decided that March 2018 was going to be 32 days long!
2) Make priority status. Being struck down with cantbebotheredtogrinditis resulted in this falling way short - 5,669 points in total for the month.
3) A top 10 finish in the Triple Takedown league (without resorting to uber nit tactics!). Yay - a goal I actually achieved! I finished in 5th place which wins me a £5 MTT ticket. The victory for my pride is worth that several times over though.
4) Keep fully focused whilst playing and less auto-piloting (web browsing and watching Netflix is not conducive to bringing my A-game to the tables!) Sort of. Unfortunately this was mostly achieved by upping the Netflix volume and lowering the the poker volume.
5) Go on some long walks - I'm surrounded by really beautiful countryside but have only seen a fraction of it. Nope. It's been cold this month and I've been feeling like too much of a precious diva for that sort of thing.
Excellent Binkage Dues. I sympathise with your list of AIP losses, although I think my current list may be longer, I hope my run ends in spectacular fashion like yours.
Keep it up and I'm sure a good percentage of your year's winnings will come from MTTs.
p.s. I check call the river with AQ too, villain shows a bluff too often to not call IMO.
Thanks @Enut. Fingers crossed for some excellent binkage heading your way soon too. Also good to hear my line with AQ gets the Enut seal of approval .
Thanks also @waller02 - good to see you back at the tables.
Finally, thanks of course to the very excellent @Tikay10. As it happens, you went the wrong way with the origin of my alias - I am the proud owner of one of these beauties...
4) Keep fully focused whilst playing and less auto-piloting (web browsing and watching Netflix is not conducive to bringing my A-game to the tables!) Sort of. Unfortunately this was mostly achieved by upping the Netflix volume and lowering the the poker volume.
Moving house to somewhere with like 5mb/s download speed might be the most +EV thing that ever happened to me. Means I can't have tables on one monitor and Skygo/Netflix/YouTube/Facebook on the other.
(the linky thing has changed, and naturally I'm confused. Close in the gaps and paste into browser)
Unfortunately, much of the replay is muted, however the majority of the final table isn't, it begins around 1h 50mins in, if you'd like to re-live the glory.
4) Keep fully focused whilst playing and less auto-piloting (web browsing and watching Netflix is not conducive to bringing my A-game to the tables!) Sort of. Unfortunately this was mostly achieved by upping the Netflix volume and lowering the the poker volume.
Moving house to somewhere with like 5mb/s download speed might be the most +EV thing that ever happened to me. Means I can't have tables on one monitor and Skygo/Netflix/YouTube/Facebook on the other.
Tough call this one as such a move would probably involve my streaming-loving missus not joining me. I guess if I started taking down the Sunday Million on a regular basis I may just be able to sell her the idea!
April has begun in the same uninspired fashion as had become the theme for march - my points total of 360 for last week bears pretty much all the testament needed to confirm that (so no rakeback again for this update). All I'd mostly been doing was jumping into the odd MTT here and there with the occasional bit of bad (and losing) cash play thrown in too. The one small highlight came on Saturday when I was runner-up in my personal favourite, the trusty old Mega Stack. Hopes were high of taking down my first one of these until I ran into @tomgoodun heads-up for the title. He most certainly lived up to his 'thug' reputation and promptly sent me packing with just the silver medal to my name (well played Tom!).
Having found the cash games about as appealing as a dose of the clap and drier than the Sahara Desert (boo for rake races), I did something most unlike me - I decided to spend an evening in the life of @MattBates. Tuesday night saw me play an unprecedented (by my standards anyway!) 27 MTT's. Much to my surprise, I really quite enjoyed myself. Unfortunately the results weren't quite so enjoyable - after laying out £240 in buy-ins I found myself looking at a deficit of £82 (a couple of 2nd places in some of the smaller events were my best showings). Still, I have been round the poker block enough times to know that the teeth of variance can be at their sharpest in the MTT arena. What I did find encouraging was that the inevitable suckouts and bad beats were much more easily glossed over by always having so many tourneys on the go - there's very little time to dwell when 9-tabling. Also, whilst I would have expected such a frenetic session to have a detrimental effect on the quality of my play, I actually think I played better for it too. If I'm just playing four or five tournaments of an evening, each individual event takes on a greater level of significance to the session as a whole. When that is the case, I think I can find myself subconsciously looking to take a lower variance approach (not shoving in certain +ev spots, not 3betting enough etc.), which will ultimately be to the detriment of my longer-term results. It was certainly an interesting experiment and, with the cash games likely to remain rather cack until the end of the month, it may well be something I repeat in the very near future. Total MTT results since the last update come to a loss of -£45.32.
As mentioned above, there has been a bit of cash play too, and it hasn't been good. Whilst the games have been far from great (and I'm sure I've had a bit of the rough end of the variance stick as well), I really haven't played anything remotely approaching my A-game. Lots of bad calls just to prove to myself that they really did have what I thought they had has been the main culprit. It's been a truly inspired week for my hand reading skills, but an abysmal one in terms of then acting accordingly. I also spaffed away about £40-£50 on the spin up tables. They're really not my game of choice at all but I'll forgive myself that as it was kind of done as a bit of a training exercise for shoving spots in MTT's. Total cash loses came to -£138.36.
After my first real full-on MTT grind on Tuesday, Thursday night saw me take another bash at it. Due to making a later start it was a little lighter than Tuesday's session, but I still ended up playing 22 events plus a couple of freerolls.
Pleasingly, the observations I made in my last update still seemed to ring true - I very much enjoyed myself and feel that my game benefited from the higher volume. I also got to experience winning 2 MTT's in one night for the first time, which was nice! The only negative was that my two victories came in what were probably my two smallest paying events - a £2.20 deepstack and and a £250 gtd bounty hunter. Still, it was good to feel that mixing in some of the cheapies was worthwhile, beyond that of a training exercise at least. I wasn't only playing the small buy-in stuff of course - a final table (6th) in one of the £22 bounty hunter jobbies plus a few more bounties collected along the way meant I managed to finish the night with a small, but very welcome, profit. I'm still far from being a full MTT convert, but a couple of decent scores in the not too distant future may just convince me! Total tourney profits came to +£78.69 (with not a single hand of cash played ).
I've been continuing my adventures in tourneyland over the last couple of evenings, which has left me with a little food for thought. Friday night was relatively quiet with just 7 events entered. There were no great moments of glory, but I did manage to reach a pleasingly decent 3 final tables and so book a modest profit for the night.
Saturday night was the more thought provoking evening as I was back hard at it with 22 entries. When I've previously put in a 20+ MTT session, everything has gone fairly smoothly in terms of the number of tables running at any one time - there'll usually be some early to mid-stage exits which will make space (both on screen and in my brain) for the later starting events to slot into. Saturday was a little different though as I ran relatively deep in almost everything I entered (although sadly not deep enough in most cases!). This meant that for a significant portion of the time I had up to 13 tables on the go (I felt like the Donttelmum of the MTT world), which was a little too much for me to manage in all honesty. I'm comfortable with up to 9 tables, but 6 is probably my sweet spot (I'm so keeping my fingers crossed that the new software includes a timebank when it's released!). This leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. For a start, I'm currently pretty keen to get a decent level of MTT volume under my belt to see if I'm profitable over a more significant sample size, and so would like to build up that sample asap. Whilst I could always forgo some of the smaller buy-in games to prevent overload in the future, the softer fields in these games mean that they are going to be the most profitable, relative to the buy-in cost - my successes at the £2.20 level over the course of this week are probably the difference between me having had a winning or losing week frankly. The £22-£33 level is the area I'm most keen to get some decent volume in but, given how few games run at this level of an evening, the softer, cheaper games are providing a nice buffer to the variance of getting in lower volume in tougher fields. I could always mix in some MTT's at other sites of course but, coming from a cash game background, I can't stand playing full ring and love the fact that all the tourneys on Sky are 6max. I guess I'm ultimately being a little too results orientated in the short-term, with a generous splash of impatience thrown in to boot. Anyway, despite several deep runs, Saturdays manic session ended with a small loss. Combined with Fridays results, total tourney profits came to +£111.04.
I also played a little bit of uneventful cash too which involved me losing a few buy-ins, winning them back, and then quitting. +£0.83.
A few days ago I started a thread on the forum asking if anyone had noticed improved stability when using the download client as things had seemed far better to me on that front of late. It appears that I was well and truly tempting fate and things have turned round to bite me on the behind since then. On Wednesday I was all set up for another big MTT grind but just after my first two events had started I was hit by a series of crashes which caused me to de-register everything else and abandon the session. I have dabbled since then but, despite completely reinstalling the client, there is still no sign of improvement - I was single-tabling 10nl this morning and still experienced two crashes in the space of an hour. As it stands, Sky is simply unplayable for me at the moment .
Being unable to play on Sky in any meaningful way has at least freed up a bit of time for some other things. Previously in this diary (and sometimes at excessive length!) I have expressed a general dislike for bounty hunter tournaments. Having played very few MTT's in total up to that point though, it was an opinion based purely on some general feelings and assumptions. With a little bit more tourney mileage under belt (albeit still a tiny sample size in the whole scheme of things), I decided to delve into my Sharkscope results and see how things were shaping up. Excluding freerolls, I have now played 228 bounty hunters and 178 'regular' MTT's. With the bounty hunters, I'm showing a loss of £301 and an average roi of 7.8%. With all other non-bounty hunter tournaments, I'm £1,294 in profit and have an average roi of 128%. Beyond the almost insignificant sample size, there are several other factors which mean I can't draw too many conclusions just yet. For one, my average buy-in in bh's is more than double that of the other events, so I'm likely facing much tougher fields overall in the bounty hunters I've played. Also, the average field size is significantly larger in the bh's. Finally of course, my results in the regular MTT's include my Ukops bink from earlier this month (although they're still very healthy indeed even when that is discounted). An interesting similarity across the two formats is that the average percentage of the field I'm beating in either type is identical (62%), so it's possible I'm running well in the key spots in the freezeouts but poorly in those similar spots in bh's. It's still early days but if this trend continues I guess I'll have to take a look at fundamentally changing my approach in bounty hunter tourneys (or abandon them altogether!).
With Sky's software misbehaving and facing the fact that I might just be rubbish at bounty hunters, I've started playing a bit on another site, and I'm already feeling this will do me some good. Over recent months I'd begun to feel that the quality of my cash game play had been deteriorating, which I think is a consequence of how many of the tables at Sky end up playing. One of the real pluses of Sky is that there are a good number of poor recreational players in the games, which can make for some juicy sessions. The way to beat the passive/limping calling-station types is by patiently waiting to make a half decent hand and then value bet the cr@p out of it once you've hit something, all whilst keeping bluffing to a minimum. This highly unbalanced and often passive approach had begun to leak across into situations against some of the better players too (against which you actually have some fold equity!), which is a pretty terrible game plan to have versus thinking opponents. Facing far tougher average fields at comparable stakes on one of the international sites has already jolted me back into shape and I'm feeling good about my game as a result. I'd only left a small-ish bankroll on this site so the plan is to run it up a little bit in the cash games and use some of the profits to continue my MTT training - there are so few bounty hunters here by comparison! I won't be including any of these results in the £10k challenge but will be keeping my fingers crossed that I can soon start putting in some decent volume on Sky again. There are some tourneys running over the weekend on Sky that I'd love to jump into but I don't currently have enough faith in the software holding up enough for me to register.
Moving onto results, it's been fairly unspectacular stuff really. 20 MTT's have been played since the last update with the only real highlight coming from taking down a £5.50 freezeout (it's starting to seem I might be half-decent at these ones!). Other than that it was pretty pants and so finished with a small loss overall from tourneys of -£24.41.
Only a small amount of cash play once again but at least there was a small amount of profit +£13.54.
Finally, there was a little bit of rakeback made for the first time in few weeks. 1,010 points brought in £12.62. Somewhat remarkably, I also managed to creep onto the micro madness leaderboard last week which netted another £7.50.
Comments
Will do a proper update later but before I forget, in case anyone cares, with the AQ hand above I called (was always intending to check/call that spot) and villain showed up with J9o. I still don't like bounty hunters lol.
congratulations deus on your first major tournament win. excellent.
With my appetite for hardcore grinding still very much absent, the arrival of the latest round of Ukops has seen me spend the last few nights putting in some low volume on the MTT streets. I played 21 tourneys over 4 nights, including some non-Ukops ones too. As I'm a bankroll nit (and a tourney fish) this didn't include any of the big buy-in events (I don't yet play anything over £33), but it was still a bigger average buy-in per game than my usual MTT dabblings - it worked out as £16 per tourney on average over those nights.
I ran dreadfully and couldn't win a race to save my life - even when I had a more than healthy head start. I always have a little notes program open that I use to keep track of my results (I'm rather fastidious about that sort of thing) and after two quick suckouts early on, I decided to jot down the all-in preflop spots that didn't go my way. Bar the (very) occasional win, it wasn't long before I had this little lot staring back at me from my notes: JJ vs A9o, AKs vs KJo, A3s vs 87o, AJs vs A5s, AQs vs 77, AA vs 86s, A5s vs Q9o, KK vs JJ, JJ vs AKs, AA vs KJo, 88 vs A8s, JJ vs K5s, TT vs AQs, KK vs AJs, KK vs 66. Night three of Ukops did provide a tiny bit of respite to what was otherwise becoming a money haemorrhaging situation when I managed a 10th place in a £22bh, but I was well and truly gearing up to give @Jac35 a run for his money in the grumpy stakes. Night four was generally going the same way, but I was just about managing to survive in Ukops 24 - a £22 deep stack freezout. With great relief I found myself making it to the final table but, as the shortie with a mere 9bb stack, I wasn't expecting to be there long. To my astonishment, the gods of variance finally decided to smile on me and send some rungood my way. I'd held on and chipped up a little bit before getting all my money in with A7 in the big blind when facing a min open from Sir Stealsalot in the small blind. After fortuitously managing to outdraw AJ, I at last had a stack with some room for manoeuvre and from there was able to take down the whole thing. Total Tourney profits came to a much needed +£605.34
There was a tiny bit of cash game action too for a tiny bit of profit +£9.32.
Another very low volume week did at least see me break the 500 point barrier so there's a smidgen rakeback money to add with 863 points bringing in £8.63.
Having failed to do a proper tot up on Saturday, I'll consider today to be the start of my new month. I'm really not sure what I'm going to focus on for April so I won't be making a list of goals this time (I'll go through March's ones after this). With the micro madness promo starting today, the cash tables are going to be a pretty unappealing reg fest for then next few weeks and I've not exactly been in the hardcore grinding zone of late. Last nights Ukops bink has left me feeling slightly warmer towards MTT's, so I'll probably start by taking a stab at some of the mini Ukops events and maybe look to mix in some heads up cash too. I also still need to sort out my sock draw
March's goals reviewed:
1) Make £1,500 in total profits.
Total profit for the month came to £1,009.03. This would have been a far bigger fail if I hadn't decided that March 2018 was going to be 32 days long!
2) Make priority status.
Being struck down with cantbebotheredtogrinditis resulted in this falling way short - 5,669 points in total for the month.
3) A top 10 finish in the Triple Takedown league (without resorting to uber nit tactics!).
Yay - a goal I actually achieved! I finished in 5th place which wins me a £5 MTT ticket. The victory for my pride is worth that several times over though.
4) Keep fully focused whilst playing and less auto-piloting (web browsing and watching Netflix is not conducive to bringing my A-game to the tables!)
Sort of. Unfortunately this was mostly achieved by upping the Netflix volume and lowering the the poker volume.
5) Go on some long walks - I'm surrounded by really beautiful countryside but have only seen a fraction of it.
Nope. It's been cold this month and I've been feeling like too much of a precious diva for that sort of thing.
Progress so far:
Cash: +£1,412.97
MTT's: +£909.97
Rakeback: +£335.46
Total: +£2,658.40
Keep it up and I'm sure a good percentage of your year's winnings will come from MTTs.
p.s. I check call the river with AQ too, villain shows a bluff too often to not call IMO.
Many congrats on last night's result Dues, delighted for you.
And because of that, I now know what your alias represents.
Thanks also @waller02 - good to see you back at the tables.
Finally, thanks of course to the very excellent @Tikay10. As it happens, you went the wrong way with the origin of my alias - I am the proud owner of one of these beauties...
^^^^
Ugh, it was a flip and I chose the wrong one.
I watched your win live on my TV.
Well, almost live.
https://www. twitch.tv/ super_oli/c/ 5284670
(the linky thing has changed, and naturally I'm confused. Close in the gaps and paste into browser)
Unfortunately, much of the replay is muted, however the majority of the final table isn't, it begins around 1h 50mins in, if you'd like to re-live the glory.
Thanks to super Oli for the super stream
April has begun in the same uninspired fashion as had become the theme for march - my points total of 360 for last week bears pretty much all the testament needed to confirm that (so no rakeback again for this update). All I'd mostly been doing was jumping into the odd MTT here and there with the occasional bit of bad (and losing) cash play thrown in too. The one small highlight came on Saturday when I was runner-up in my personal favourite, the trusty old Mega Stack. Hopes were high of taking down my first one of these until I ran into @tomgoodun heads-up for the title. He most certainly lived up to his 'thug' reputation and promptly sent me packing with just the silver medal to my name (well played Tom!).
Having found the cash games about as appealing as a dose of the clap and drier than the Sahara Desert (boo for rake races), I did something most unlike me - I decided to spend an evening in the life of @MattBates. Tuesday night saw me play an unprecedented (by my standards anyway!) 27 MTT's. Much to my surprise, I really quite enjoyed myself. Unfortunately the results weren't quite so enjoyable - after laying out £240 in buy-ins I found myself looking at a deficit of £82 (a couple of 2nd places in some of the smaller events were my best showings). Still, I have been round the poker block enough times to know that the teeth of variance can be at their sharpest in the MTT arena. What I did find encouraging was that the inevitable suckouts and bad beats were much more easily glossed over by always having so many tourneys on the go - there's very little time to dwell when 9-tabling. Also, whilst I would have expected such a frenetic session to have a detrimental effect on the quality of my play, I actually think I played better for it too. If I'm just playing four or five tournaments of an evening, each individual event takes on a greater level of significance to the session as a whole. When that is the case, I think I can find myself subconsciously looking to take a lower variance approach (not shoving in certain +ev spots, not 3betting enough etc.), which will ultimately be to the detriment of my longer-term results. It was certainly an interesting experiment and, with the cash games likely to remain rather cack until the end of the month, it may well be something I repeat in the very near future. Total MTT results since the last update come to a loss of -£45.32.
As mentioned above, there has been a bit of cash play too, and it hasn't been good. Whilst the games have been far from great (and I'm sure I've had a bit of the rough end of the variance stick as well), I really haven't played anything remotely approaching my A-game. Lots of bad calls just to prove to myself that they really did have what I thought they had has been the main culprit. It's been a truly inspired week for my hand reading skills, but an abysmal one in terms of then acting accordingly. I also spaffed away about £40-£50 on the spin up tables. They're really not my game of choice at all but I'll forgive myself that as it was kind of done as a bit of a training exercise for shoving spots in MTT's. Total cash loses came to -£138.36.
Lol donkaments
Progress so far:
Cash: +£1,274.61
MTT's: +£864.65
Rakeback: +£335.46
Total: +£2,474.72
After my first real full-on MTT grind on Tuesday, Thursday night saw me take another bash at it. Due to making a later start it was a little lighter than Tuesday's session, but I still ended up playing 22 events plus a couple of freerolls.
Pleasingly, the observations I made in my last update still seemed to ring true - I very much enjoyed myself and feel that my game benefited from the higher volume. I also got to experience winning 2 MTT's in one night for the first time, which was nice! The only negative was that my two victories came in what were probably my two smallest paying events - a £2.20 deepstack and and a £250 gtd bounty hunter. Still, it was good to feel that mixing in some of the cheapies was worthwhile, beyond that of a training exercise at least. I wasn't only playing the small buy-in stuff of course - a final table (6th) in one of the £22 bounty hunter jobbies plus a few more bounties collected along the way meant I managed to finish the night with a small, but very welcome, profit. I'm still far from being a full MTT convert, but a couple of decent scores in the not too distant future may just convince me! Total tourney profits came to +£78.69 (with not a single hand of cash played
Progress so far:
Cash: +£1,274.61
MTT's: +£943.34
Rakeback: +£335.46
Total: +£2,553.41
^^^^
Good work, watch out @MattBates, @loololollo & Co, Guitar Bloke is on your case.
I've been continuing my adventures in tourneyland over the last couple of evenings, which has left me with a little food for thought. Friday night was relatively quiet with just 7 events entered. There were no great moments of glory, but I did manage to reach a pleasingly decent 3 final tables and so book a modest profit for the night.
Saturday night was the more thought provoking evening as I was back hard at it with 22 entries. When I've previously put in a 20+ MTT session, everything has gone fairly smoothly in terms of the number of tables running at any one time - there'll usually be some early to mid-stage exits which will make space (both on screen and in my brain) for the later starting events to slot into. Saturday was a little different though as I ran relatively deep in almost everything I entered (although sadly not deep enough in most cases!). This meant that for a significant portion of the time I had up to 13 tables on the go (I felt like the Donttelmum of the MTT world), which was a little too much for me to manage in all honesty. I'm comfortable with up to 9 tables, but 6 is probably my sweet spot (I'm so keeping my fingers crossed that the new software includes a timebank when it's released!). This leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. For a start, I'm currently pretty keen to get a decent level of MTT volume under my belt to see if I'm profitable over a more significant sample size, and so would like to build up that sample asap. Whilst I could always forgo some of the smaller buy-in games to prevent overload in the future, the softer fields in these games mean that they are going to be the most profitable, relative to the buy-in cost - my successes at the £2.20 level over the course of this week are probably the difference between me having had a winning or losing week frankly. The £22-£33 level is the area I'm most keen to get some decent volume in but, given how few games run at this level of an evening, the softer, cheaper games are providing a nice buffer to the variance of getting in lower volume in tougher fields. I could always mix in some MTT's at other sites of course but, coming from a cash game background, I can't stand playing full ring and love the fact that all the tourneys on Sky are 6max. I guess I'm ultimately being a little too results orientated in the short-term, with a generous splash of impatience thrown in to boot. Anyway, despite several deep runs, Saturdays manic session ended with a small loss. Combined with Fridays results, total tourney profits came to +£111.04.
I also played a little bit of uneventful cash too which involved me losing a few buy-ins, winning them back, and then quitting. +£0.83.
Witter over
Progress so far:
Cash: +£1,275.44
MTT's: +£1,054.38
Rakeback: +£335.46
Total: +£2,665.28
A few days ago I started a thread on the forum asking if anyone had noticed improved stability when using the download client as things had seemed far better to me on that front of late. It appears that I was well and truly tempting fate and things have turned round to bite me on the behind since then. On Wednesday I was all set up for another big MTT grind but just after my first two events had started I was hit by a series of crashes which caused me to de-register everything else and abandon the session. I have dabbled since then but, despite completely reinstalling the client, there is still no sign of improvement - I was single-tabling 10nl this morning and still experienced two crashes in the space of an hour. As it stands, Sky is simply unplayable for me at the moment
Being unable to play on Sky in any meaningful way has at least freed up a bit of time for some other things. Previously in this diary (and sometimes at excessive length!) I have expressed a general dislike for bounty hunter tournaments. Having played very few MTT's in total up to that point though, it was an opinion based purely on some general feelings and assumptions. With a little bit more tourney mileage under belt (albeit still a tiny sample size in the whole scheme of things), I decided to delve into my Sharkscope results and see how things were shaping up. Excluding freerolls, I have now played 228 bounty hunters and 178 'regular' MTT's. With the bounty hunters, I'm showing a loss of £301 and an average roi of 7.8%. With all other non-bounty hunter tournaments, I'm £1,294 in profit and have an average roi of 128%. Beyond the almost insignificant sample size, there are several other factors which mean I can't draw too many conclusions just yet. For one, my average buy-in in bh's is more than double that of the other events, so I'm likely facing much tougher fields overall in the bounty hunters I've played. Also, the average field size is significantly larger in the bh's. Finally of course, my results in the regular MTT's include my Ukops bink from earlier this month (although they're still very healthy indeed even when that is discounted). An interesting similarity across the two formats is that the average percentage of the field I'm beating in either type is identical (62%), so it's possible I'm running well in the key spots in the freezeouts but poorly in those similar spots in bh's. It's still early days but if this trend continues I guess I'll have to take a look at fundamentally changing my approach in bounty hunter tourneys (or abandon them altogether!).
With Sky's software misbehaving and facing the fact that I might just be rubbish at bounty hunters, I've started playing a bit on another site, and I'm already feeling this will do me some good. Over recent months I'd begun to feel that the quality of my cash game play had been deteriorating, which I think is a consequence of how many of the tables at Sky end up playing. One of the real pluses of Sky is that there are a good number of poor recreational players in the games, which can make for some juicy sessions. The way to beat the passive/limping calling-station types is by patiently waiting to make a half decent hand and then value bet the cr@p out of it once you've hit something, all whilst keeping bluffing to a minimum. This highly unbalanced and often passive approach had begun to leak across into situations against some of the better players too (against which you actually have some fold equity!), which is a pretty terrible game plan to have versus thinking opponents. Facing far tougher average fields at comparable stakes on one of the international sites has already jolted me back into shape and I'm feeling good about my game as a result. I'd only left a small-ish bankroll on this site so the plan is to run it up a little bit in the cash games and use some of the profits to continue my MTT training - there are so few bounty hunters here by comparison! I won't be including any of these results in the £10k challenge but will be keeping my fingers crossed that I can soon start putting in some decent volume on Sky again. There are some tourneys running over the weekend on Sky that I'd love to jump into but I don't currently have enough faith in the software holding up enough for me to register.
Moving onto results, it's been fairly unspectacular stuff really. 20 MTT's have been played since the last update with the only real highlight coming from taking down a £5.50 freezeout (it's starting to seem I might be half-decent at these ones!). Other than that it was pretty pants and so finished with a small loss overall from tourneys of -£24.41.
Only a small amount of cash play once again but at least there was a small amount of profit +£13.54.
Finally, there was a little bit of rakeback made for the first time in few weeks. 1,010 points brought in £12.62. Somewhat remarkably, I also managed to creep onto the micro madness leaderboard last week which netted another £7.50.
Progress so far:
Cash: +£1,288.98
MTT's: +£1,029.97
Rakeback: +£355.58
Total: +£2,674.53