The Small Margins

Most poker players, professional or amateur, are aware of the small margins that exist in the game.  The nights when an entire session ends up revolving around the outcome of one hand.  When the cracking of pocket aces deep in a tournament stop you from getting a top three finish.  When you end up in coin flip spots where you know the pocket pair almost always has a fractionally slight edge.  Most of the tilt inducing frustrations in the game come out of the small margins. 

There are times when I have felt this awareness before but rarely as keenly as today.  If a pair of pocket sixes had held up against Jack Ten off-suit I would today be playing in a 2,500 euro event at the PKR sponsored WPT Ireland.  The hand didn't hold and I went on to lose the Heads Up so I am instead grinding six tables of $0.25/0.50 cash games and listening to the wind howl past my window.

Poker, especially tournament poker, is full of these turning points, it is what has turned what seems like a very un-televisual game into a major TV money spinner.  This was something that the World Poker Tour went a long way towards developing.  This years WSOP Main Event was full of them and thanks to the live broadcasting we got to see everyone of them in real time agony.  Ben Lamb was very much the favourite to win it going into the final table but ended up finishing 3rd, though I'm pretty sure the $4,000,000 helped to ease his pain.  Imagine though if the best player at the table had won the following pot.  How much extra leverage would he have been able to bring to bear on the table and to what extent would he have controlled it?  In the end Collins went out 5th so this beat wasn't the end of the story but it was certainly one of a number of turning points that day.

This hand from the 2003 WSOP Main Event is another great example of a turning point, though not in the sense of a bad beat.

Sam Farha believes he has the best hand and even names Moneymaker's hand out loud.  He cannot make the call though.  Going against your gut instinct is often the worst mistake a poker player can make as your instincts are built from a lot of subliminal information you cannot always process rationally.  'The Moneymaker effect' is often cited as the biggest reason for the poker boom with the amateur accountant going from a $40 satellite to a $2,500,000 pay day.  If Sam Farha makes the call would online poker have blown up quite so big? Would it have taken another year or two years to get there?  This is a wonderful turning point on so many levels.  Farha is likely sick of hearing about the 'bluff of the century' or being the comedy value on High Stakes Poker.. if he had made this call he would not have had to, he would have been the 2003 Main Event Champion.

Chris Moneymaker went through two satellites on Pokerstars to win his Main Event seat with what was the last of his online bankroll.  His story is full of dramatic turning points. One should never get hung up on the element of luck involved in the game, though you should be aware of it.  Moneymaker takes the pot down here with the worst hand, a lot of players would have been unable to do the same in this position.  This is why a poker player should never rest on their laurels but strive to improve.  Moneymaker had heart and guts to counterbalance his lack of skill.  In the 8 years since then the game has altered beyond recognition.  The best are better and the mediocre are average to decent.  To get a big break you need a bit of luck but ultimately the more skillful and experienced you are the easier it will be to find yourself in spots where you can catch that lucky break.  This is why you should never stop learning and looking to learn.  I could get hung up on my lost flip but I won't.  Instead I will question why my bankroll is not big enough for me to have played this WPT event anyway.  The simple answer is that I am not yet where I should be, I still have a lot of room to improve.  If I keep working though maybe next time the small margin spot will go in my favour and I will be even better placed to exploit it than I am now.  All I can do is wish all my friends out in Dublin the best of luck and hope that the small margin situations go in their favour.

November Review

Everyone loves payday, I mean why would you not?  It is the day that rewards all that time you spend doing something that, however much you love it, you would probably like to spend at least a little less time doing.  Poker is not like a job in some ways and exactly like one in others.  Unless you are one of a handful of uber geniuses then you will be putting in as many hours as a full time job, maybe more.  Sometimes you can earn very consistently, other times you will have big rushes or long droughts.  I say all this because my November threatened to be rubbish, turned back to being okay, then threatened to fall apart again, and was salvaged by a decent tournament win in the last week.

My cash game play was dominated for the third month in a row by running extremely badly at all in situations.  I only played two sessions at $2/4 and both times I lost a massive pot with the best of it.  I did though also play my single worst hand of the month here. I only step up to this level when I spot extremely soft tables.  One afternoon the stars had aligned and I was playing two $2/4 tables and two $1/2 tables without a cash reg in sight.  I made $600 in an hour and was thinking about leaving as the regs started piling in.  Of course I stayed ten minutes too long and stacked off $400 of my profit to Wongaman playing Jacks extremely badly.  I really should have got away with just a $100 hit but bet too big on the flop and made my decision on a low board ten times more difficult.

It might surprise you to see that I put in volume as low as $0.10/0.25.  There are a number of reasons for this.  Firstly after a prolonged period of run bad it is nice to put in a number of sessions where you see the green line on your graph moving in the right direction.  Secondly the standard is so soft you can hit a pretty huge win rate compared to higher levels.  Thirdly I have centred all my cash game play back onto PKR for the moment and often during the times I play there are no games running higher than $0.5/1 and these tend to be nitty reg-fests.  Of late I have got much better at table selecting and swallowing my pride and feel that my cash play is benefiting because of it.  So taking cake into account it wasn't a terrible month with a $1,000 profit but it would be lovely to just crush cash for a month to prove that I actually can and that the Poker Gods do not hate me.

Tournaments started terribly, I couldn't hit a barn door and nothing was going right.  The one moment that threatened to get interesting was a deep run in the Sunday Million on Pokerstars.  My radar was on song and I had a well above average stack going through the money bubble.  Sadly I lost a massive 70/30 for 150,000 chips when the average stack was 75,000 after beautifully trapping an aggressive player who had position on me.  I bounced back but then found myself on the wrong end of another 70/30 for 150,000 chips with the average stack at 150,000.  I was extremely short after this and lost a flip several hands later exiting 449th out of 6,967 players.

Things turned around in amusing fashion when I beat an 800+ field to win the $5 Friday night Mini-Primetime Deep Stack on PKR.  On many levels I don't know why I play it as you have to finish top three to make it worthwhile but the structure is good and the players are bad.  This is the second time in a few months I have won it and for an investment of about $25 have seen a return of just under $2,000.  Sadly as the winning hand was completed the game crashed so I missed out on the money falling from from the sky and it has not been recorded either on my Sharkscope, probably about $5k lifetime PKR profit not showing on there now, or on my all time PKR tournament earnings.

Having taken down the Mini-Primetime on the 25th I then had a Monday the 28th that threatened to get epic.  You can never tell when a good poker day is coming, generally you grind along and small cash loads of tourrnaments and don't kick on.  On this day I found myself heads up for a $5,000 WPT Ireland package and won the Monday night Primetime for $2,052.

The WPT satellite was extremely frustrating.  This was only either my first or second attempt at qualifying and with a one in twenty people qualifying structure this could well end up being my only shot at the package.  I was playing really well up until the tickets bubble but then made one large error.  I kept calm though and bounced back and kept picking on the right people.  Once Barkieboy was eliminated I really fancied my chances of winning.  I got into the heads up with a player who had been running hot and he had a two to one chip lead on me.  I quickly got on top of him and ground out a two to one chip lead.  We got all in on a flip where he decided to call my 3 bet jam with Jack ten suited and sadly my pocket sixes failed to hold.  I was back to being a two to one underdog.  The match then lasted for about another forty minutes, a huge length of time for a PKR tournament.  I kept grinding back to level but then dropping back as he hit flop after flop.  I wasn't catching much and he wasn't folding second pair to great lines.  I only really needed one hand to value town him and it just never came up.  He didn't fold his small blind much but managed to twice when I held pocket Kings!  It just was not my night, I am proud of the way I stuck at it and as usual it will make the next package win taste all that sweeter.

Below is my Sharkscope for November, though less the $1,000 for the Mini-Primetime.