Reticent Man

Well I guess you could call what I've been doing a dedicated grind. I put in about 90 hours in both July and August, which averages to about 20 hours a week, not 25. On the other hand I made about $70/hr during that time so my overall profit was more than acceptable.

September has started out slowly. My mood was soured by some hockey related incidents and I had a few losing days in a row. But starting today I plan to be back on track. I also plan to really get into the Crossfit thing.

Today I have a fantasy football draft at 11:00am, and I'm going to be prepared to go directly after that to PG (my gym) and do yesterday's WOD, and from there to Bay 101 for a solid 5 or 6 hour session.

My overall grind status is pretty good, despite the expected and experienced laziness. My list of things to do is shorter than usual. I've been proactive and not procrastinative about chores for the first time ever in my life, which is weird and unexplained. I've also had more energy which is unexplained. My apartment could be cleaner but it's not cluttered. My roll has risen from it's starting balance due to my above expected winrate, despite some large disbursements for car repairs.

The plan remains to increase the roll from 10k to 20k before ever stepping into a 40-80 game. I've made it about half way there in 2 months.

However I've been reading Jesse's blog http://jessetakesashot.blogspot.com/. Although right now my winrate is a little higher than his, my monthly winrate is lower because he is putting in far more hours. I really need to put in a consistent 30 hours a week at this thing so that I can get up to the 40/80 level. At that point I'll be able to evaluate the real long term viability of what I'm doing.

On the subject of Jesse, it's really amazing to me how much I disagree with him about almost everything. I definitely believe he wins at the rate he says he does, which is a good winrate. But almost every time he posts about a hand of poker I disagree with the way he played his hand. Of course this is helped by the fact that he only posts interesting hands.... he doesn't post about the time he had aces, raised it, and bet/bet/bet. But even still a lot of the actions he takes for granted I think are ridiculous. For example, he's playing in a loose passive game holding KTs in the big blind, 5 people limp including the small blind, and he raises it up! His theory is that he has a straight equity advantage over the limping ranges of the other 5 players. I still think the play is bad. I'll concede his hand has an equity advantage over those ranges, but it's really really small. Any postflop equity advantage we have by being a better player can be realized just as easily by checking and seeing a flop than by raising, and in fact I'd argue my general opponents playing style becomes more correct the larger the pot so we may be reducing our postflop advantage. We're also giving ourselves a postflop disadvantage by tying ourselves to a bigger pot when we're playing out of position. Having checked I can check fold some thin draws giving up a small pot whereas you might have to check/call or bet at the bigger pot and you're still playing the turn OOP.

The value of deception is very small since the odds of winning this 5 way pot without showdown are incredibly small. The metagame of being able to raise a lot more preflop without premium hands I guess has some small value but it can't really be that large. People dont think I'm a maniac and I still get paid off. And finally even if after all this there's the tiniest of tiny +EV for making this raise, the variance we have added to our game is much much higher. And that makes it clearly not worth it in my opinion.

Almost everything I've said about raising KTs from the BB can be said also about limping 97s or even 98s under the gun just because we expect a large multiway pot. That kind of thing also bring to mind another disagreement I have with Jesse and the 2+2 limit crowd in general. They seem to view a lot of the situations in a best case scenario, without taking into account possibly rare but disastrous contingencies. Yes it may be true that 80% of the hands go off 5 way or more at your table, and you can then calculate that 97s will be very marginally +EV in a 5 way pot OOP. But that ignores the times when the tight passive player right to your left wakes up with QQ and the lag to his left 3 bets him with AJ or 88 and now you've lit your entire limp on fire because most of the time you really should fold here even though you won't.

Another example of wishful thinking is a post that Jesse made recently where it was one bet to him on the flop with an enormous pot and some very thin backdoor draws (I think Q9s on a T42 1 of his suit board). If you went and calculated all of his draws as good, against the price of one bet and the price of calling on the turn, he had odds to peel on the flop. The problem was that the one player behind him on the flop who hadn't acted yet, was the pre-flop raiser on the button. They were totally dismissing the possibility of the button raising here, which imo is at least 20-30%. Almost all players are going to raise any overpair or T, and a lot of them will raise with a lot more. Having to pay another bet on the flop even 25% of the time kills your odds for the peel right off, and that's nevermind if it gets 3 bet. There's also the huge addition to your variance yet again. Jesse in particular seems overly obsessed with being involved in huge pots.

I prefer a much simpler, tighter, smaller variance approach. I'm happy to only get my money in when it's solidly +EV. I may be passing up some small +EV, but I'm probably also avoiding some -EV that he doesnt realize. And it makes the limit rollercoaster more like Scooby-Doo than the corkscrew of death. In all honestly though, I think I play more +EV poker, at least at 20-40 than Jesse does.