30DaysofPoker.com

An Experiment in Excessive Poker Play

Bah! Sometimes I really Love/*Hate* poker. So, over the course of 12 hours I managed to play 24 $2+0.16 double up sit-n-gos. Ten wins and fourteen losses. *Sigh* My starting stack of $110.19 has shrunk to $98.35. While this wasn’t a very productive session, I did win about $35 over the previous three weeks at this game, and about $15 since the blitz day, so I am not giving up on this format yet.

I performed a Key Pot analysis for this session of games. Key pots are pots where 50% or more of my stack is being committed to the hand. An analysis of these should give me an idea of how I am performing “when it counts”. This doesn’t really tell me if I am stealing enough, but I would hope I am “getting it in there” with better hands than my opponents.

Averaging the wins-vs-losses for all of the Key Pots gives me a win rate of 42.55%, however based upon the strength of the hands that I played I should have won 51.81% of the time. That is a variance of 9.26%. Seems a little unlucky to me.

I also noted a few hands that I believe were errors (8 actually). If we remove the errors from the analysis my statistical win rate should have been 59.28%. This is a nice improvement, (roughly 3:2 over my opponents) and reinforces the fact that you have to play excellent, error-free poker to be profitable.

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It has been quite a while since I have posted, but I have found an online game that I have really been enjoying. Sportsbook.com has a “double up” six handed game, $2+0.16 buy-in that seems to work well for me. Starting chips 1,500 - blinds 10/20. Top three players win $4.00, so the rake is 7.4%. Games take about 20-30 min. to play. Since it is short handed and turbo-ish (7 min. blinds) there is plenty of loose, aggressive action for me to take advantage of. Most players seem relatively new to the game and make fundamental errors.

So, I am going to play a full day blitz of this game and see where that takes me. My beginning bank roll is $110.19 which gives me 51 buy-ins. This should be playing plenty deep for this game. There are other buy-ins for this game format at $3.24 and $5.40 but that would leave me with 34 or 20 buy-ins. 20 buy-ins is pretty borderline, so I think I will try this price out for now, and maybe play another level up next time.

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