Welcome

Hello all, welcome to my online poker blog.

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.





Thursday 5 May 2016

SNGs

Just a short post as had an hour of spare time tonight, played a couple of nine player turbo SNGs. Just at the $7 level as I'm very rusty.

Any of you know what win rates are possible in these? Play seemed weak (though I got knocked out early in both).

Summary of my play, lots of folding followed by two unsuccessful reshoves.

I had 99 in the SB and shoved my stack in the face of a button raiser who snapped with KJo and I lost the race; and I had 66 in the BB and shoved over a small blind raise and was called by KK. Standard tournament fare.


The 99 hand might be worth looking at as I need the practise and we were 6-handed so a small amount of bubble factor/ICM tax should come into play.

For simplicity I'll assume this is a call decision and that the BB folds, and given the horrendous hand he called with let's assign a range of {22+, any suited broadway, ATo+ and KTo+; 15%}. With 99 I have 54.7% equity against that range.

Using this ICM calculator my bubble factor against the villain in question is roughly:
9.86/(18.03-9.86) = 1.21.

The pot odds I would have received facing a shove would have been 1345/1125 = 1.2/1, and dividing by 1.21 we want roughly even equity or better which we have with 99 as disclosed above.

In the real hand I had fold equity on top of this, though that's offset by the small chance of the BB waking up with a good hand but even so I think it's a no-brainer, as I had suspected at the time.
The more I work through examples like this the more intuitive the decisions will become.


Why have I turned to tournaments given I've played a million micro cash game hands as a small winner? Not entirely sure, I go through phases and at the moment it's tournaments. I definitely feel that I'm a fish in tournaments and it's a bit of motivation for me to get better - much as I used to strive to improve my cash game skills back in the day.

I suppose really I just want to sit in whichever games I fancy playing and be somewhat competent, as I no longer harbour any dreams of making serious money from the game.

Right ramble over, good luck at the tables.

Simon.

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