dwarfman's boring SnG blog

Hello,

Susprisingly, I'm back on FTR - hello. Inspired somewhat by OngaBonga's blog, which is really ambitious and potentially very interesting, I've decided to document here what I'm up to in the poker world. It will be somewhat of an antidote to OngaBonga's blog - in that it's not going to be tremendously interesting. But I think it's good practice to have somewhere to write down how things are going every so often, so that's the plan here.

Who am I?

I'm dwarfman - in the mid 2000's I was one of the bigger contributors to FTR. Back then I was young and an asshole, and I ended up leaving in 2009 ish after pissing off the entire community. I am now old and, I like to think, less of an asshole.

Much of my poker play back then centered around trying to make a quick buck. I practiced terrible bankroll management, was extremely liable to tilt and didn't pay nearly enough attention to studying and improving. The studying part I could get away with given how soft the games used to be, the bad bankroll management and tilt however made me effectively a losing player.

What am I doing now?

My interest in poker waned in 2010, and between 2010-2016 ish played very infrequently. An MTT here and there really on a quiet evening. The last couple of years, I have started taking an interest again. I'm perversely drawn to the more challenging games of the present day, and have got into studying and strategising methods to beat them.

My motivation is, currently, not about money. I am lucky enough to have a job I enjoy that affords me a good lifestyle. My motivation is to beat the games I am playing, and to become a good poker player who is capable of consistently winning.

Back in the day, everything was about money in poker, to the point that I sacrificed my enjoyment of the game to do so - this I think was why I lost interest. I used to 24-table cash games to maximise my winrate, I used to play 7-8 hours a day to maximise my winrate. Whilst these were not necessarily bad decisions, they were things that ultimately I didn't really want to do, but felt I had to in order to succeed. I don't subscribe to that philosophy anymore - I don't try to maximise my hourly rate with volume now. I play a type of and amount of poker that I am comfortable with, that keeps me interested in and enjoying the game.

Onto the specifics, for the last couple of months I've decided to make a go of single table 9-man turbo SnGs - I really enjoy the format and don't find it so much of a grind as I have done with cash games. I popped $75 in my account back in early November (50 buyins for $1.50 SnGs), and started out playing 2 tables at a time to see if I would enjoy it. I did and still am enjoying it, eventually moving up to 4-tabling which is what I am comfortable with now, so I now think it's worth starting a blog to document process.

What are my goals?

Beyond improving and enjoying myself, I do of course have some monetary targets. I will be moving up when I have 50 buyins for the next level, and (if I need to) moving back down if I lose 20 buyins after moving up.

So my path is like this:

3.50 SnGs: $175
7.00 SnGs: $350
15.00 SnGs: $750
30.00 SnGs: $1,500
60.00 SnGs: $3,000
100.00 SnGs: $5,000

Playing $100 SnGs is probably a bit pie in the sky, so realistically if I can get to beating $30 SnGs with regularity, I'll be a happy man.

I want to be beating these games long term at 5% ROI. So I expect to play on average circa 1,000 tournaments per level before being able to move up.

Given the time I am investing in the project and my progress so far, I expect to play an average of 8 tournaments per day (on a day by day basis this ranges from zero to 20), so that's about 240 tournaments per month. I did warn you it will be boring, slow progress in this blog!

How's it going so far?

Not bad! Here's my graph to date: https://i.imgur.com/aruKV19.png

I'm up 56 buyins thru 241 SnGs at the $1.50 level, which is a ROI of 23%. A small sample size, but I'm pleased with the progress to date. Aided by rakeback, I'm just 5 buyins short of being able to move up to $3.50.

January goal

Quite simply, I want to be able to start playing the $3.50 level this month. Needing 5 buyins and playing 240 tournaments, I only need to run at a ROI of around 2% to get there by month end. So that's the aim.

6 days and 44 SnGs into January and I've hit my target to move up to $3.50. Was a nothingy month up to yesterday, but since then I had 9 consecutive cashes which has pushed me over the line - https://i.imgur.com/zCASCQD.png

I think something I really need to think about is my heads up play - to date I've had more 2nd place finishes (17%) than 1st place finishes (15%), which I don't think is a very good stat at all. My numbers are still low enough to be variance, but a lot of the time I don't feel comfortable with my heads up play. I need to get used to the idea that stacks are never really more than 10BB when heads up, so I think I need to be making much more thin values calls preflop - at the moment I feel like I'm folding to too many 3 bets / not 3 betting enough. Particularly with low AX hands which I guess should be considered quite dominant PF in these situations. I'm going to try being much more aggressive with my heads up play for a while to see where that lands me.

You should be folding rarely to 3 bets at 10BB

Quote:

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Originally Posted by aka_red

You should be folding rarely to 3 bets at 10BB

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Agreed - to be honest I don't think I should be giving opponents anywhere near as many opportunities to 3 bet at all as I do now.

Haven't played for the last 2 days. Looking forward to making a start on 3.50 this evening.

Haven't updated in ages! A short summary:

- I played roughly 100 SnGs at 3.50 at breakeven (1.5 buyins down overall). Was struggling with confidence in bubble play IMO, and found the 3.50s on Stars to be absolutely saturated with badregs, so....

- After 15 glorious years, I moved away from Stars! The site I'm on now has a slightly different buyin structure, so I moved somewhat down to play 2.20 SnGs, in exactly the same format.

- New site does seem to have a larger pool of fish, not massively, but noticeable. I played about 300 SnGs at the 2.20 level at a ROI of 14% or so before achieving the 50 buyins required ($275) to move up to 5.50.

- After my first 50 tournaments at 5.50, my roll is currently around $350 - been running quite good at 23% ROI for the month. Next step is to move up to 11.00 SnGs which will require $550. If I can do that by end of April, that will be a real win.

Will post graph etc later if I remember.

So what happened?

jyms happened

Something along the lines of jyms not posting in years, dwarfman starts posting again, jyms comes out of nowhere to hit the banhammer, jyms disappears into obscurity again.

I just saw him lurking, now he's offline again. I swear he checks in every now and then just to see if dwarfman is active.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OngBonga

Something along the lines of jyms not posting in years, dwarfman starts posting again, jyms comes out of nowhere to hit the banhammer, jyms disappears into obscurity again.

I just saw him lurking, now he's offline again. I swear he checks in every now and then just to see if dwarfman is active.

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This

*like*

keith lurks and never talks, too. He comes in to clean up any spam me and mojo have been too lazy to notice, ie most of it.

Can you get an email notification if there's a post in a certain thread? I can actually imagine jyms' phone beeping every time I post, as this is a thread started by the swarf.

beep motherfucker