Damn Ringer's Poker Blog

April has come to a close. I ran pretty good this month and really didn’t help my “play more hands” cause. It was nice to run above ev for a month. At EV, I ran about 4.5ptbb (in EV, the real number was more like 6.5 but that’s in outer space and just me being a luckbox) and felt like I was playing some of my best poker yet.

Here’s the graph…

Click to Enlarge

Graph is like 90% 200nl, 5% 400nl and 5% 100nl. Also about 1.5k in coaching which made for a nice 5 figure month, which was much needed after a very mediocre start to the year. I’ll go ahead and do a plug right now. I have room for a couple new students (3 or so) so if any of you guys are interested in my coaching services, please contact me. Enough plugging and awesome end of month bragging.

So I was looking through my 2p2 pms today, looking to see if I had spoken to a particular reg I ignorantly insulted in the forums. I was trying to confirm if I was as stupid as I thought I was. That’s a whole nother story. That being said, I came across a few PMs I swapped ages ago with a player named “LOLgingers” from cake. He was definitely one of the best cake regs and I played with him on a fairly regular basis last year. I laughed alot at the posts because essentially it was him asking me “how can you run 5ptbb while being so horrible postflop?”. At the time, I gave some ridiculous excuse about my style playing low variance and just being smart in tough spots. Obviously looking back, I realize just how much I sucked a year ago. That’s not really the point i’m getting at here.

So I look at his recent posts to see what the guy is up to now and if he was still crushing. The very first post I see is him posting in the high stakes regs swap thread asking for 40k swap to FTP. I’ve heard alot of things about cake dying out and one of my very good poker friends just moved from there to FTP himself. One of the last converts I suppose.

I remember leaving cake when the games turned to total crap and I couldn’t win. That was mostly due to the fact that I couldn’t beat regulars. I figured that that was likely the same kinda scenario as to why gingers wanted to leave Cake. I pulled open my cake client and after loading the countless updates I’ve missed, I realize that there’s 1 200nl game going. The time was 9:50pm EST. I pronounce this as the time of death of cake poker. I’ll personally remember the good times, Cake. Thanks for the 5ptbb winrate while I still wasn’t good.

I am looking forward to cake regulars on FTP though, and I hope gingers sn on FTP is easy to recognize cause the kid is solid. Also shoutout to mcbadass1 for hooking me up.

This post is going to be blasphemy against the gospel of Full Ring. For those uneducated readers, I play a very specific kind of poker. Basically I played the game of holdem with 9 people sitting therefore 9 hands dealt each pot (called “full ring”). There’s several other popular versions of holdem including short-handed (6 players) and heads-up (2 players). That being said, if you don’t know poker, you are screwed in this post. I guess I’ve reached the natural progression of skill where I am comfortable enough with marginal hands that I don’t find the need to play only with 8 other players.

This all started when I was starting tables and realized that I could shred fish one on one while the tables were starting. I began playing several regs as well to get tables started. I slowly started realizing I am actually unhappy when the table fills! It’s about that thought process, I say to myself, is my style actually leading me away from full ring?

I went ahead and pulled my graph from this month at short-handed play…

As you can see, its been pretty profitable this month playing with less than 7 players at the table. I am flirting with the idea of playing more 6max poker as a result. That being said, I realize that full ring players are much worse at short-handed play than seasoned 6max regulars, so i likely won’t have good results. I just have always restricted myself completely to full ring because it’s what I do and I’m a nit. That being said, I’m not a nit anymore. I have worked really hard since vegas and mr. fantasticcow telling me how nitty I am to break my mold of nit. I think I’ve done a really good job as well. Another payoff from vegas!!! Its the summer that keeps on giving.

I will keep you guys posted on my progress across the games, but I have to do alot of research on players before I just make a plunge into the 6max scene. I honestly don’t even know what a good 3bet % is at 6max. It will be nice to have the “if full ring sucks, go play something else” in my arsenal. I tried to make that “something else” pot-limit omaha but I suck ass at that game and just run hot.

I touched on the summer in vegas a paragraph ago. I sadly will not be going out to vegas for another summer this year. I had the time of my life out there this previous summer and learned more about poker than even I thought I could. I just don’t want to do the whole travelling across the country thing again, not to mention living in vegas is exhausting. I’ll be going out to vegas for a week this summer at some point and partying hard for that week. Who knows about next year though? Cause honestly who knows where I’ll be living then!

Quick april update, poker is still going well. I’m running about 5ptbb this month and above EV which is a fantastic thing! That being said, my EV says my ptbb should be at 4 which is my goal at 1/2nl. Now to see if I can string together a few months of 4ptbb play.

I’m off to blacksburg this weekend for the Spring game (which is a football game that actually mean anything). It’s basically just an excuse to go to a game in fantastic weather and see tons of alumni I haven’t seen in awhile. Sadly, my girlfriend won’t be in town for the weekend as she’s running a half-marathon! Good luck, Al-igator!

Oh me and my roommate also booked a tee time tomorrow at a really nice course in the area so I’m pretty excited about golfing while I’m down there. I just got my new set of woods. I needed new woods like it was going out of style. Here’s to hitting them long and straight!

It would appear I wasn’t as tired as I thought I was when I hopped in bed about an hour ago. So you guys get another case of blogging before I go to bed.

I have found my new config pretty awesome but I didn’t realize quite how many hands I’d really need for “fold to 3b” to converge. I basically can only use the stat on like 2 regs and they are so bad I don’t even need it.

April has been going pretty well. I’ve been playing a pretty high volume this month trying to get to 60k hands by the end of the month. We’ll see if that actually ends up happening. I have been running pretty good this month and above EV again. April looks like it is going to be the highest profit month of this year so far (which honestly wouldn’t be hard since I have put up VERY modest results so far in 2010). I have decided however that I’m no longer going to be posting graphs with dollar amounts on them.

My blog use to be simply read by poker players but I added the feed to my facebook so all my friends in real life are basically able to read the blog if they want. I just don’t like the idea of completely airing out my income. So I will still posts graphs but it will be basically only poker jargon on the graph.

As many of you know April 15th was tax day in the US and I got pretty torn up this year. I won’t go into exactly how much I ended up owing this year but I’ll go ahead and say that I wrote the biggest check I’ve ever written and it was well into the 5 figures category. That was on top of the quarterlies I was paying all year. It’s a complete pain to pay like 35% of your winnings to the gov’t but I guess its what is necessary to live like we do in the US. It was painful, but this year I will be paying bigger quarterlies so hopefully I don’t end up getting torn up as hard in 2011. Oh well, its just money after all.

I’ve starting getting back into golf with the weather getting nice again. I am finally shooting decent score too. I took use to play all the time in high school but in college I pretty much fell off the wagon of golf. As a product, I stopped shooting anything good at all. I use to shoot in the 80’s all the time and now I’m struggling to break 100. It’s slowly coming back though.

I just bought 3 new woods for my bag which was REALLY overdue. I have been playing with the same driver and fairway woods for 10 years. Time to retire the great big bertha. I am really enjoying getting out of the house and playing and found a course around here that I like. I am planning to play alot this summer and spring and hopefully get back to shooting in the 80’s in the process.

Golf will be my escape from poker I think. Its perfect. Gets me outta the house, and gets me outside and slightly active. Its a little expensive to golf as a grown up and pay full greens fees but when I think about it $60 for 5 hours of entertainment really isn’t that bad.

Anyways, I’m gonna try to pass out now as I have illusions of possibly waking up early tomorrow morning refreshed and wanting to drive to tech. Good night ya’ll.

I solved the problem. Thanks to everyone that helped specifically Fozzy and Skelm.

Disclaimer: If you don’t play online poker… this post ain’t for you.

I am usually incredibly good with HEM, but for some reason I can’t seem to figure this one out. I want to slightly adjust my current hud popup to add one line of data. I want add a “fold to 3b” line but instead just the total number, I want it to show me the positional “fold to 3b” stats. Very similar to how there are positional “raise 1st” stats. Here’s the current popup I am using:

I think this is the standard popup, but I’ve seen some people who have standard popups that look a little different.

Essentially my perfect scenario is for someone to do it for me, and me to pay them $20. But I’d settle for someone telling me how I find this popup’s code and I could probably figure out how to add the code myself. I currently only see a “sample” in my available popups as well as all the smaller popups in the “HUD popup configurations”. As seen here:

However, when I go to my appearance settings under “player preferences” I have an option to choose the “DEFAULT Main Popup”. This is what I’ve set my HUD popup to for as long as I’ve used HEM. I’m comfortable with where everything is and all the information provided so I want to simply adjust this popup slightly. Here’s what I see in my players preference popup choices:

As you can see, I can’t seem to find the “DEFAULT Main Popup” in my popup designer window. The option for “sample” is different and quite frankly missing some very important information the popup I use contains. Can you even import a popup as easy as you can do a hud configuration? Is the DEFAULT Main Popup locked for some reason so that players can’t edit it or copy it? All of these questions and more need answering.

Leave a comment if you have the answer and want the $20. I would love to talk to someone who is REALLY good with hem. Thanks ahead of time.

This blog is gonna be kind of a different variety but I figured I always get the question of how the heck do you play 16 tables at once and still know what you are doing? It’s a rare blog that I’m going to target at people who aren’t professional poker players. I’m gonna take this post to show you guys how I personally do it. I think its a little different than what alot of online pros do but this works for me.

First thing to address is how the heck do you put 16 windows on your screen? This is actually the thing in which I do most different from other poker professionals. I use an overlapping window method. I stack the windows in such a way that I can always see my cards on any given table if they are there. I may not be able to see the whole table or the actions occuring while i’m not in the hand, but that’s not really necessary since I can always go back and look at hands I missed in the full tilt replayer. If you are going to use the overlap method, you are going to need to a pretty nice display setup on your desktop. I personally use two 24″ monitors for my setup. Here’s what that looks like:

As you can its alot of screen but pretty much completely necessary if you use 2 of the 4 possible methods of playing mass-tables. The other methods pros use are tiling, stacking or cascading. Really quickly here’s the definitions of how those work:

Tiling: No tables overlap, and the action on each table is displayed at all times. Basically this looks like a set of tiles on your bathroom floor but instead of stones its tables. This is usually used if the professional has a 30″ monitor or two 30″ monitors. That usually supplies ample room for tables to spread out. The only reason I don’t personally use this method is because I don’t have the monitor space and don’t like my tables to be super small.

Stacking: Stacking is gaining in popularity recently as the software used with poker programs upgrades. More specifically a program called TableNinja. Stacking is the most difficult of the options for mass tabling in my opinion and it takes a truly genius mind to remember all the actions and play and history each table presents since you aren’t seeing them really ever. The way this method works is you just take 16 windows and place them totally on top of one another. When a table requires you to make an action it pops to the front of the pile so you can address it. After you make that action, another table pops up over that one. Its a great way to play completely independent of results because usually you have no idea how the hand turned out unless it comes back to the top of the pile. TableNinja allows the player to size bets with his mouse so basically he never has to move his hands from the mouse which is key due to the speed of play using this method. The best part about stacking is that you don’t need monitor space to do it. This is the go to method of players using laptops usually. Either this or the next method I’ll talk about.

Cascading: This one is alot like the stacking method but instead of placing them exactly on top of one another they stagger the windows slightly off one another. This allows you to easily select a particular table you wish to look at at any time. It’s useful if you want to see what a players is doing on a particular table, but even this after awhile is VERY similar to stacking.

Here’s a look at what 16-tabling actually looks like!

As you can see there’s little slivers of the 4 underneath tables where when I have cards (or am actually sitting) I can see those cards. TableNinja (the program mentioned earlier) allows me to simply hover my mouse over a table to select it, and I can make my action from there. Its really not as daunting as it may seem as even the most aggressive players in no limit holdem are folding 75% of the time before the flop. This means I only have 4 tables at a time with a hand I’m even interested in.

The next part is obviously acquiring enough skill to beat the game and not just play aces and kings and fold everything else. I always get the statement (not even a question)…. “oh you 16 table so there’s no way you can keep up with your actions on every table.” This is completely false as well. A good 16 tabling poker professional isn’t that robot you are picturing who is just playing the same way on every table. Good 16 tabling professionals know how to use their software and just the overall actions at the table to get the temperature of just about every hand. How can that be you might ask? Using a databasing program is a must.

Let me add this little disclaimer to some who might think perhaps this all seems shady. This is 100% legal and approved on all poker sites except for one. The way this is legal is because its databasing only hands I’ve played, so therefore I’m not gaining information I haven’t “seen”.

Good multi-tabling online professionals use huds (headsup display). This puts numbers on top of the poker tables. These numbers correspond with different things players do. For example here’s the hud I use (or what a hud might look like):

This isn’t a live game shot, but it will do for all purposes and I blocked out my stats simply because I don’t wish for my opponents to get all my information for just reading this blog. As you can see there’s numbers under each player. These are a series of numbers that tell me things about them. They are all basically percentages except for one number which is a ratio telling how aggressive a player is. The first number is what percentage of the time I can expect them to be in a pot. The second number is what percentage of the time I can expect them to raise before the flop. It continues through like that with each number giving me a different piece of information. These number are not necessarily correct but they are correct for the hands I’ve seen with that player in the past. This allows me to make decisions about what their likely hands are based on past information. And ladies and gentleman, that’s what poker really is.

Hopefully that gives you a pretty good look into what guys who play mass tables are doing to allow themselves to do so profitably. That being said, I think I would be perfectly capable of 16 tabling without the HUD (but since everyone uses a HUD, i would be at a mass disadvantage if i didn’t use one). I hope all you people who read this blog about poker and are like “WTF is he talking about” get a little closer to understanding what we are doing here and that we really aren’t just betting on black or red.

I added a few new blogs on my blogroll on right of the page. Doublefly is taking the cake for the best blog by a poker player in 2010. He is putting me to such shame I feel like I should just quit blogging. The other new names are two six max guys who I feel have rather interesting blogs. Definitely check them out. They all pretty much crush harder than me, and its not close.

He updated his blog so I suppose I need to update mine as to not be the last blog on people’s lists.

March was a pretty decent month but once again I manage to play absolutely no volume. I put in 40k hands. Here’s the graph:

Ran at about 4ptbb, which was good. I just need to play more often now. I have been trying to focus on beating regs since it looks like that is going to be the new standard. I have been breaking down alot of hands and actually going through hands ranges that regs play, 3b, call 3b, and 4b with in HEM. There’s only a few regs I can do that with since it requires ALOT of hands to break down that kind of analysis.

I ran over EV finally this month too! I ran about 5 bi’s above EV which was great. I finally didn’t feel like I was getting sucked out on every hand I got it in with. My ptbb/100 w/ EV included was 3.4ptbb which is pretty much my winrate across all of my 1/2 play.

I had a pretty exciting March on the life front. I went to vegas which was a blast. I played a bit of poker but mostly just drank and did bachelor party activities. We stayed at TI and actually liked their poker room. They spread a 1/3nl game which seems to attract alot of drunk pool “fish”. It’s right on the walk back from the pool which is pretty nice. I also saw how miserable my life could be as a real life grinder. There were a few live pros who grinded that game and the 2/5 game that sometimes runs in the evenings. The grinders were pretty nice in general except for one guy who was a pretty big dick. That being said, he was a pretty big dick after I showed him a big bluff. I have a pretty big issue with going into a 1/3nl game and getting bombed drunk and then spouting off about poker knowledge while breaking essentially even due to running obnoxious plays. I can’t just sit there quietly and pretend like I don’t understand why 5 people are calling $10 preflop. I guess its just to boring for me to stay in good poker form. The not caring about actual profit probably doesn’t help either. I managed to break about even on the trip gambling wise but spent an ass-load on plane tickets.

I’m planning another vegas trip with my GF and best friend in july. That will be my attempt to sub for my trip to vegas for the summer last year. I know as soon as I start seeing pictures from my poker friends on FB, I’m gonna be ridiculously jealous. I hope everyone has a great trip this year out there as probably by the next blog post, everyone will be there haha.

On a sidenote, Taxes suck ass. I submitted my tax stuff to my CPA again this year, and I already know I’m gonna have to pay a likely unheard of amount of money even with paying quarterlies all year. I am hoping the amount comes out lower than I think it will. Got my fingers crossed that the bill doesn’t come back massive. That being said, I wish I didn’t have to pay taxes on “gambling winnings”! Damn you, Al Capone.

April is off to a good start but the games are starting to look even more reggy. My goals for April will be to run at +4ptbb, take some shots at 2/4nl when the games are good, and post more strategy questions on 2p2. I think that’s about all I got.