First analysis

Yesterday I realized one problem in my game. I seem to have some weird habit to valuebet too thin and too much while not pot controlling enough. This is something I need to improve in. This will either increase the variance unneccessary and it will make my game more easily exploitable. If I suddenly stop barreling it will make it easy for my opponents to force me out of the pot since they know I usually dont have anything. So they can basically always bet out when I check (a bit of an exaggeration but you get my point). I used to think that pot controlling too much will make my game easier to read. Well, obviously if I pot control too much my range for multibarrels will be very polarized which makes it easier for my opponents to play against me. However I can easily start balancing my range if I think my opponents have picked up on this tendency. I can always change my range from polarized to balanced depending on dynamics and that way keep my opponents always guessing. It's not more complicated than that really! Now I just need to find out natural way to start using this strategy and plug that leak finally.

In 6max it seems to be especially important that my basic strategy is robust. Understanding fine dynamics is not as important as in heads up. When I'm multitabling its extremely difficult to understand all the fine dynamics of the game unlike in heads up where im only concentrating on one or two opponents at time. On 6max hand analysis im trying to get into basic strategy more, finding out unexploitable plays and ranges.

I will try to use a relatively unknown but cool program called StoxEV as much as possible to make my analysis as accurate as possible.

Hand no. 1:

No-Limit Hold'em, $10.00 BB (4 handed) - Hold'em Manager Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com



SB ($1120)

Hero (BB) ($1000)

UTG ($1015)

Button ($1337.75)



Preflop: Hero is BB with J, Q

2 folds, SB bets $25, Hero calls $20



Flop: ($60) 4, 9, 10 (2 players)

SB bets $45, Hero raises $140, SB raises $305, Hero calls $210



Turn: ($760) Q (2 players)

SB bets $740 (All-In), Hero calls $620 (All-In)



River: ($2000) 5 (2 players, 2 all-in)



Total pot: $2000



Results:

SB had K, K (one pair, Kings).

Hero had J, Q (one pair, Queens).

Outcome: SB won $2118

Very bad start for year 2010

Hello,

I'm Finnish poker player that has been playing "professionally" for since beginning of 2008. I was playing NL200 back then and at the end of 2009 I was playing NL1k-NL5k and making a killing. 2010 started out very, very poorly and I decided I will start a blog to help me through these "rigged" times. I will concentrate on analyzing hands and different thoroughly here and writing down my toughts about the games and things i need to get better at.

Year 2008 I played almost exclusively 6max NLHE. 2009 June I decided to give heads up a try and started grinding it exclusively. I kept doing that until February 2010 and I did very well during 2009. 2010 I dropped 50k quickly and decided that heads up has too big variance if I wanted to play regulars (and I wanted to play obviously, bumhunting is too boring). I decided to shift back to 6max at the middle of February and I've been playing 6max with mild success since now. I got very bad start for this month, dropped 30k on the first 10k hands and decided that i need to increase my winrate by mixing in some headsup bumhunting. Now I'm trying to find the golden balance mixing 6max and HU games to my repertoire.

Here is my 2010 so far:



This is my 6max since mid-february (no table selection, started from NL200 and raised the stakes every time I won 10 buy ins EV wise to make sure my game would be good before I get to NL1k games):



This is the end of 2009:



Looking at the graph above it seems amazing how can things turn around so badly and so quickly!