Poker wisdom and bonuses

In live (or so called Brick & Mortar) poker, the money isn't yours until you've left the table.

In online poker, it isn't yours until you've cashed out.

The other week, on Wednesday, I "found" an unclaimed bonus of $25 at one place I frequent. By Thursday I had doubled that to $50 after being In The Money at Sit&Go's and winning a $10 heads-up game. By Friday, well, I was back at $25... But if I hadn't lost the $20 5-seater tournament and/or a $5 ten-seater tournament I would or could have doubled it yet again to $100. Could'a, would'a, should'a. But I don't think I have to point out the Rounders quote. Yes, of course I have it on DVD.

And for no particular reason (or so it seems) I got a $15 bonus at Partypoker (use registration code MARTYPARTY for a $25 sign-up bonus at your first deposit). Great! Because my account there had $4.75 on it which I could use for absolutely nothing. Smallest Sit&Go entry fee was $5, minimum buy-in at cashgames, yes, $5. Now I have a bankroll I can use again. I hope I'll use it wisely.

Com-pyou-tar

Do you want to do cardgame related stuff on your computer? Some tips and hints for using it in writing:

• In HTML, you can use ♠, ♥, ♦ and ♣ to get the suits. If your browser supports it, you shold see it here: ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣. However, they are all in black, so do a little more HTML and CSS voodoo-fu to get ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ (Doesn't the Diamonds look a bit off center?)
  
• In LaTeX, you get the suits with $\spadesuit$, $\heartsuit$, $\diamondsuit$ and $\clubsuit$. There you would have to do a little voodoo-fu with \usepackage[dvips]{color} and \textcolor{red}{$\heartsuit$} to get it red.
  
• In SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics, there's SVG-cards.
  
• For Perl, look at CPAN for the module Games::Cards, Games::Cards::Poker and Games::Poker.
  
• TrueType Font, the Playing Cards free font cardplay.zip can be used (but JQK faces don't look so hot). The Bermuda Card & Bridge Fonts look better, but cost money.
  
• Windows Programming, cards.dll. This contains all of the playing card bitmapped images that games such as Windows Solitare use to display their graphics. N.b., this is (merely) card graphics, not functions to randomize and deal a deck of cards or such. A tutorial for using it in C# can be found here.
  

Live poker closer to realization

I'm quite an active participant in a swedish website and discussion forum about poker, spelapoker.se, and the guys behind it now say that they're thinking about starting semi-organized tournaments. This is good because? Well, they're based in the neighbouring city, otherwise there's not much live poker around here close by. And I sorta kinda know (of) those guys, having attended the same university about the same time.

And the other day I found green felt, so I can build a poker/card/gaming table. I've also submitted a pre-order for cheap (2 gram) poker chips and for some reason I happen to have a lot of decks (picked one up here and there because they were cheap and suddenly you have one or two decks at work, some at home, one in the bag). One never knows when a challenge might come.
- "I hear yer mighty slick with them cards, mister. Draw!"
-"Uhm, no? But maybe a stud game or Hold'Em?"

And I've bought more tools. A stapling gun (for putting that felt in place) and a jigsaw. But must. Get. Powertools.

On the bubble in a subsatellite

Silly editing frame managed to wipe out my eloquent writing about my NL Hold'Em tournament play. Writing it again, shorter.

$1 sub-satellite at Expekt, one for each ten players can win seat at $10 satellite, where one out of ten can win seat at $100 final, where one out of ten wins seat at $700 live tournament.

Sixty players, of which I'm one, enter (meaning the six top places go on to the satellite on Sunday), and after an hour, I'm in 3rd place of 26 remaining.

After nearly two hours, I'm at the final table! Shortstacked though, and with only 680 in my stack when the blinds are 300/600, I go all-in with those and my JKo. They don't hold up and I'm out at 8th place. Eighth effing frigging bleeping place when six "get paid". That is called being "on the bubble".

I hung around and chatted a little making a little smiley :-) comment about 8th place and suggesting that two of those remaining could forfeit. Please? One player said that 8th is not as bad as 7th, but... It's still the second most painful place.

What do you Expekt for free?

About two weeks ago, I installed the client and created an account for playing poker at Expekt. Why, since I already have two other poker accounts elsewhere? Well, they have several freerolls every day. A $200 at 1pm, a $1000 at 5pm and some others you have to have played raked hands to be eligible for.

The 5pm suits me perfectly for taking a shot at immediately after work. And this last week I've been "in the money" a few times. But... It's "600 places paid", if the 3000 players maximum is hit. That means $0.20 (yes, twenty cents) to places 301-600 and increasing very very little.

My winnings this week, if you can call them that:

• $0.60 for 283rd
• $1.20 for 167th
• $1.40 for 110th
• $1.50 for 82nd

with 3000 players in each. Played in seven freerolls, one was a $200. I haven't, and will probably not, put any of my own money into Expekt.com, freerolls only. I took some of those few dollars and sat at a $1 sit&go twice. One loss and one third place. The 82nd place is probably my best tournament placing with this many entrants. Not very good hourly wages (took a little more than two hours to play) but in the top ten or 1st place, that's where the real free money is. And I enjoy playing poker.

And I was in one $1 multitable just for the heck of it. It was a satellite to Baltic Challenge. One out of ten from that satellite would go on to a feeder, one out of ten from that feeder would go to a final and one out of ten (I think) from the final would go on to a live tournament in Tallinn in Estonia, with boat from Stockholm, hotel and $770 buy-in paid. It would've been cool if I had won a seat in the satellite, but everybody was supertight. 55 entrants, yes fiftyfive, and after an hour 24 were left. I'm out at 21st place after two all-in calls from me didn't hold up.

I knew it!

A week of Freeroll Festival poker

Almost a week of poker.

OK, the Ladbrokes Freeroll Festival. 6-seat multitable NL Texas Hold'Em tournaments. Four $1000, 1500 players max, tournaments a day for six days in a row, where the three first in each went to a $26000 final on Sunday. First prize there: Entry into Poker Million 2005 (worth $13000) and $13000 divided between 2nd to 7th place.

Day 1

Tournament	Place	out of
1:	291	1484
2:	DNE
3:	381	1500
4:	668	1500

The Freeroll Festival was supposed to be 6-seated multitable, but the first tournament was ten-seated. I had registered to the second tournament just when registration started, and possibly they reset the registrations to fix that error (6 vs 10), so I wasn't in the second tournament.

Day 2

Tournament	Place	out of
1:	185	1464
2:	1297	1500
3:	358	1500
4:	DNE

Cant play all day.

Day 3

Tournament	Place	out of
1:	1094	1423
2:	1189	1500
3:	517	1500
4:	DNE

I decided to play more wildly (since it's a freeroll anyway) today but that shows in the results. In the second tournament, I bet heavy, but not all-in, with KA hearts in the pocket and was eventually all-in with those, who had become two pair aces and kings. Good, huh? But it was beat by a straight, ace high and I was outta here.

Out during the first hour or so in all tournaments today.

Day 4

Tournament	Place	out of
1:	784	1372
2:	1215	1500
3:	1033	1500
4:	DNE

Today, they had cut down the registration time to just one hour before tournament start instead of as the previous days, two hours before.

As yesterday, play fast. Up and down, maybe too fast sometimes.

In the second game, it was only ten minutes into the tournament and the pot was big.The turn had given me trips seven. I went all-in to scare the remaining player off and WHAMMO, he calls. And he has 57 on hand and the board gives him full house, fives full of sevens. I didn't see those fives, but one has to take one's chances.

Third game, laggy connection and I didn't get on a roll or hit a streak. When the poker client was chugging, staggering and stammering, it was hard to get at "flow" in the play.

Day 5

Tournament	Place	out of
1:	286	1500
2:	354	1500
3:	493	1500
4:	DNE

Back to careful rock play. Survived for an hour and a quarter in the first.

In the second one, there was a bit of network hiccup just before the hone hour mark, interrupting my play, but I was short-stacked anyway and my last straw didn't come.

Day 6

Tournament	Place	out of
1:	921	1500
2:	165	1500
3:	156	1500
4:	1129	1500

Methodical play in the second tournament led to the best placements so far, 165th and 156th, both after an hour and 45 minutes. Getting low on chips compared to the others, I went all-in with AK diamonds. Called by one other with T8 hearts, and he draws a full house! Bwaaah, not fair!

Two high placements today. Maybe because I was a bit hung over and tired, so I wasn't susceptible to FPS (Fancy Play Syndrome), more of a grinder.

---

Well, that was a lot of poker. 156th was my best placement. What worked best was to play carefully, not wildly, but it all ended in the same way in those tournaments where I wasn't knocked out early; an average bankroll eaten up by the blinds and the blinds have reached the level where you have to win if you've followed a hand past the flop. But, if you have chips left and enough players have put chips in and you win the next hand you enter, you could bounce back up.

I think what made me lose was that I was too impatient. Getting into a hand just because it was so-so OK and I hadn't played for a while. Also, I was a bit greedy and didn't back off even though the betting indicated that the opposing player(s) had the nuts. The bad thinking of "Since I've already put chips in, I might as well put in some more." I don't think there's much bluffing past the flop. I never had a large stack, I don't think I ever were above 10000 (started with 1500), at least not for very long, while the big boys had 50000 after an hour. So I could never outmuscle players by betting high with a medium strength hand. Sort of only being able to play the cards, not play the pot or players.

The sweetest, neatest, coolest thing was to outplay people, to be the one making someone run out of chips and leave the tournament. Especially if you trapped someone with ye olde check-raising.

Freerolls are a bit special. In the first hands there are many all-ins, sometimes (most often?) with more than two players. If you stay out, you're safe. If you enter, you could be out or you could double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, sextuple, septuple or octuple your bankroll. From looking at the leaderboard at some tournaments, that has happened. And then you can just sit back for an hour and just wait for aces and/or kings in the hole. But people wouldn't play like that if their own real money was at stake. It's not fun to see someone else early in the tournament with 10-15000 in chips when you're around the 1500 you started with.

Another thing about freerolls and not risking any of their own real money. Some register, and then don't play. Several times there were dead hands (automatically place blind and fold) and if you were lucky, you were in the position to scrape up their money.

Cost: Nothing more than time, and the weather was bad, had nothing better to do, et cetera...

Earnings: Experience, something to blog about.

The party was over early

Curses, foiled again!

The online Partypoker No Limit Texas Hold'Em poker freeroll (multitable tournament) I wrote about in the previous post, well, it didn't go so well.

I had checked in from time to time during the registration period the previous days, and there was about a thousand already registered. All will probably not turn up. Yes, that was true, at my first table, there was about five dead hands, they showed [disconnected] and just automatically posted blinds and folded. My stack grows a little but then I hit the first obstacle on my road to success. I had AK off-suit and play it fairly aggressively but maybe not aggressively enough. When it's time for the river, I have a flush draw and have already committed a lot. It doesn't come and I just have a pair of kings against opponent's, uhm, can't remember. I lost anyway, and my stack is down to 440 of the 1000 I started with. The play was OK, the river was not. But the number of players has dropped too, after ten minutes, a hundred are gone, and after another ten minutes, another hundred.

I'm moved to a new table, some small ups and downs, and then I'm committed to the pot. Don't remember the exact cards, but I had TK hearts in the pocket, and when the river comes a heart, I have flush, king high. I put in the last of my chips (200?), the only hand that can beat it with this board is a flush, ace high. It's called by the remaining player. He has the ace of hearts... I'm out at 1720nd place. But I think I played correctly in those two hands, didn't go past the flop with nothing and made the gambles when the pot was big. My losing hands were very good second best hands, but second best is not good enough in No Limit Texas Hold'em, the Cadillac of poker.

Now, on to the four freerolls at Ladbrokes today and every day this week!

Backpack and table

Big night, or indeed week ahead of me.

First, there's the Partypoker $2500 New Player Freeroll in a few hours, then Ladbrokes Poker has four freerolls a day this whole week, leading up to a final where one can win entry to Poker Million in July 2005. I hope you can be in more than one freeroll, because then I know what I'll be doing the whole week if the weather isn't too good since I'm off from work.

Shuffle up and deal.

In other news, (can't just write about poker, although it's the main theme) I visited the local flea market as I usually do on Sundays. It was extra easy today since it was on the town square just outside my house, usually it's in the park but there's a car show there this weekend. I have made great finds there and today I hit the jackpot. I already have a Boblbee backpack (follow that link, they're really cool). It's the model "People's Delite". They're quite expensive put I got mine used from an online auction site for about a third of the retail price, which is in the range $150-$200. Anyhoo, I saw a Boblbee backpack at the flea market and disinterestedly picked it up and asked what the seller wanted for it, thinking I might see what they go for second hand nowadays. "Femtio kronor", she said. That is Swedish, and means "Fifty crowns" (Swedish crowns, SEK). "Say what!?!?!111?!1 Are you crazy, lady? You could ask for much much much more, like TEN times that", my brain shouted, but my mouth said (after I had swallowed back the "fnrrfppt! gngllgnh!") "Oh, OK, I'll take it".

You see, 50 SEK is like NOTHING. It's six or seven US dollars. Two or three Big Macs. So I gave her the money and took the backpack home extra double quickly. I look closer at it. I think it's the model "Megalopolis". Holy designer backpack, Batman, the accessories aren't even unwrapped! By the look of it, it has never been used. This is my flea market find of the year, decade, century and millennium so far, by far.

Goshdarnit, I look for it on teh Intarweb, I can't even find this color scheme (two-tone blue and green). A rare item?

Oh, another find: Ten issues of a Swedish print of Popular Mechanics from 1969 and 1970 for 20 SEK (that's one or two Big Macs. Why did I buy those, when I work with hi-tech and modern computer science? Because one of them had instructions and drawings for building your own poker table. So there!

A sip and a cheat

In poker, you just need a chip and a seat to have a chance.

I played some cheap real money tournaments online at Partypoker. In the first one, I was down at rock bottom twice, no chips left and the cards held up. I outplayed two other players, meaning I was the one that won when they went all-in. Then I was even chip leader for a while before busting out at fourth place, and that was close. I had pocket threes and went all-in with the 700 I had left and had one caller. The board comes up Txxxx and unfortunately the caller had TK on hand and so I'm out at 4th, but had survived for a long time.

Then another table where I'm out at 8th, my draws didn't come.

After that, two more consecutive tournament tables where I end up in third place on both. The last one was nice when all the maniacs (pre-flop all-ins with almost anything goodlooking) were gone, we were chatting, enjoying ourselves and also really playing poker, not just depending on random chance hoping to get good flops.