Many moons ago some of you may recall that when I made the first tentative steps from play chips to cash I played enough hands on Pacific Poker to get a year’s worth of Texas
Calculatem. This is one of many gadgets which theoretically advise you on what cards to play, the odds, outs percentages etc. As with any prescriptive aid it was a blunt tool but at the time it helped me get a feel for the tables and drew my attention to silly things like double
gapped straights/draws (where the board is, say,
TK8 and villain holds 9J for example). Although it may not seem much now the transfer from play chips to cash meant that instead of Stars telling you what hand you held you had to work it out for yourself. Yeah, I know, daft, but it was very real then.
As time went by I realised that
Calculatem was only really as good as the settings that you provided the programme with. Did I ever monkey around with those settings? Of course I
didn’t because if I had been good enough to know what to do then I
wouldn’t have needed the damned thing in the first place.
As time went by I would forget to switch it on, and then one day I did fire it up and it told me that it had expired. No surprises, I think, that I did not renew my subscription. If anything it dumbed me down once I had learnt to watch player behaviour, appreciate position etc.
I flew free and still won. A few months later I hit my downswing of course, but it was nothing to do with a lack of mechanical aids. It was just me and variance squaring up to each other. Variance inevitably won (it had nothing to do with my play you understand, oh no…).
When I was doing some challenges on Titan I cleared enough loyalty points to get a year’s subscription to Poker Office. But for whatever reason it never seemed to work. Strange messages came up on screen and it seemed it was all related to Vista. So I closed it down and never thought about it again, as the information that I could gather from it for my (then) preferred S&Gs was really limited.
For the past two weeks I’
ve played just about exclusively cash on Party. I’
ve cleared a re-load bonus in 24 hours, and played 3,300 hands at
NL25 6max. Not a lot for many players, but a real concerted effort on my part given the time available. As you know, I was winning, but I wondered how this would translate into statistics. It’s easy to fool yourself when you win a few big pots but bleed chips at all other times. So I tried Poker Office again and BINGO! It worked, live tracker and all. All that remained was to download all my hand histories since I started playing cash (thankfully only a fifteen minute job) and there I had all my statistics to peruse at my pleasure. Excuse me for being like a kid in a sweetshop, but I LOVE statistics (although am never a slave to them). Those of you that already use it, or PT, will be rolling their eyes at this point…of course it’s good – you already know it.
I haven’t even begun to exploit the data available, but I do know that over a very small range of hands, I’m profitable from ever position except the Big Blind. The small blind figure surprised me, although I know I’
ve hit two sets from that position and won big style, so further analysis will probably show the usual leakage.
My most successful hands? 66 followed by 33 (sets again).
AJ is a big loser for me, even though I THOUGHT that I was playing the hand with caution. My current BB/hand is just under 8. I have no idea whether that’s any good, but even if it is time will ensure that it heads south unless I can get more fish to overvalue their top pair shit kicker. I’
ve been dealt AA 12 times, T3 just three times, but the might that is T6 a massive 48 times. You just have to look at the difference to realise what a long term game poker is.
I’
ve won a bit of late, though nothing spectacular. Taking away the amount I re-loaded with and adding my $14 bonus my roll is $200. It’s five times higher than it was a fortnight ago and is now bigger than my Stars roll (I’
ve only played
Bloggerment there in the last seven days). All in all I have around $500 spread around various sites. I deposited, in total around $200, perhaps $225 – can’t remember precisely.
On Thursday evening I came across my first seriously losing session. Ironically I got married to top two pair and arrogantly called before studying the board and crediting my opponent for...a gapped straight! Perhaps I should get re-invest in Calculatem lol.
Two other hands saw an ultra aggressive opponent mega raise me when the board was paired. On one occasion he had the set, I'm sure, and on the other despite once again having top two pair the flush and set draws on the board alongside an all in bet made me muck with quite a bit invested. I reckon I saved money rather than lost it overall by folding. That's life.
I decided to end the night with a quick sit and go on Stars and of course I was welcomed back with a bang. Good old Stars eh? Strange how often when there are so many high cards out the software seems to lose the bottom half of the deck. It's happened so many times :))
http://www.pokerhand.org/?2415281I’
ve managed to update my blogs list on the right, correct some links and delete those which appear to be inactive. I’
ve also managed to look at a number of the links and spread words of love and happiness ;). As ever any comments you leave are most appreciated.
Good luck at the felt – I’ll see many of you on Sunday, 9pm sharp. See Little Acorn’s blog for details.
Labels: Calculatem, mind over matter, poker office
