Yo, been some time since my last blog. I had a great time at Bali and managed to keep away from poker for the entire trip! 11 days which I think was the longest break from poker I've had in at least 3 years and probably did good for my game. I'm happy with the way things have started this year, I've decided to focus more on live tournaments and already watched some MTT videos and thought more about stuff and how it really differs from cash games with weaker opposition in general, shorter stacks and antes, imo there can be way bigger winrate differences with sick good and normal regs in MTTs compared to cash games. MTT more about exploiting the weak players to the max instead of levelling and outplaying tough regs in cash games (highstakes that is, when you are lucky to have 1 weak player at a table). Last week was the first test, the Helsinki Freezeout where I played a 2000€ PLO event and 3000€ ME. I was fairly close to the FT in the main event, busted out flipping with 66 against AK in a standard resteal spot. I reached the final table of the 6max PLO event but managed to bust first where I got almost a 1/3rd of my stack in pre with AAKQds but got outflopped. Unfortunately because of sidebets I actually was down after the tournament.

Someone asked me about my last years winrates on different sites and checked my 25/50 PLO results on fulltilt which surprised me a bit so gotta put a brag ss here

which was a solid 15bb/100 over a 100k sample! I played a few sessions after my last years final blog and my complete results from all sites were 48,6k big blinds over 398k hands for 12.2bb/100 so don't believe those nits at 2+2 claiming you can't beat the games for more than 5bb/100, keep working on your game and don't stay content with any winrate!

 

This years games online have started well winning 70k over 20k hands but running 30 of it over EV. Nice to have it this way and hopefully it will continue. Played a fun hand yesterday at a fulltilt shallow table. On these tables even with shorter stacks some postflop spots get really interesting as people usually have wide but yet very small open-sizes meaning you have to play(call) way more hands out of the big blind with really marginal holdings especially with shortstacks as the positional advantage won't be as big.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5920287 Very marginal pf hand but I'm calling 50 to see a hu flop against a 65% btn range with 225 in the pot with just 2k behind so I think it's justified. Against people that don't cbet enough I'm gonna have a leading range here, both strong hands and semibluffs with some sort of blocker value (this being one of the weakest hands of that second category) hoping he immediately folds more than 40% of the time or atleast enough including the few times I improve/catch good barreling cards for my 77xx/win the hand at SD unimproved. You could argue a turn barrel to be profitable but I decide to check. River is kind of interesting. If I check the river he will probably bluff with anything I've got beat, but yet have wayy enough vbetting combos that I can't consider calling. So I can pretty much directly consider my pot-odds on a bluff with my bet compared to the pot as it's safe to say I will never win when I check. A small bet might be ok but I think he is gonna fold way more bluffcatchers to a big bet. Firstly he will be getting way worse odds, I can still vbet thinly as his turn checkback caps his range badly, the only clearly strong hand being 75xx. So I bet big and he raises, Good thing about this spot is that he only represents the nuts, 75. He wouldn't check the turn with 35 and even with a hand as strong as A8 he can't really expect to be bet/called enough by worse to make it raising better than calling. But he can very easily take a line like this with 75xx, making things tough on me even if I'm valuebetting wihtout blockers. Here tho my blockers come into play, making it wayy more likely he is bluffing, and with the fact that he either has the nuts or is bluffing, the only thing I need to consider is how often I think he is bluffing. So after my bet of 450 and his raise, the pot will have 2007$ and with my raise I'll be risking 1614 minus my original bet(cause I'm losing it anyway if im folding) = 1164 meaning  if he is bluffing the river more than 36.7% of the time my rebluff will show profit.

Wow what a wall of text I came up with about that one hand didn't think it was possible.. kudos to you who read it!

Next up in my live poker calendar will be the 5000€ WPT in Paris the 9th february. Also planning to play some other events there including the 10k€ highroller if everything goes as planned. GL at the tables!

 

Time for a little older classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xvcXkKzd7Y&ob=av2nm