Poker Shark

No I am really not that impressive in churning out two blogs on the same day, but to follow up on what I had previously posted I am going to go all techy on your arses.

There is a rather wonderful website called Sharkscope that can tell you how various people perform in SNGs. Now I know its really to find out how other people are playing, but I find it a very good tool for tracking my own results. So from now on, I will going to include my player graph at the end of each blog so you can see that I truly am playing games and not just randomly making crap up (okay to be fair most of the stuff I write is crap, but you get the point).

So here is my current one.

What does it show. Well, it shows that since playing poker on Pacific poker (and hence not taking into account my results when I was playing on Poker Stars) in the last 18 months or so I have played 833 games (which probably proves I need to get out more). Having started out with a pot of around 200 dollars (which the graph shows as 0 profit) I had a severe hit when I first started playing (the graph dropping well below 0) before then making a gentle climb upwards. I now stand on the graph as having a profit of around $300 which would tie up with my current poker pot. As you can see at its height, the best the pot has stood at was with a profit of $375, before hitting a few slumps and then weaving back and forth around the $300 profit mark. At least I can argue I have had a lot of fun in the past few months without it costing me anything :-)

So there ya go - technology and everything, no way to lie about results now. Bugger!

A Not So Lucky Monkey

Luck.

Well lets face it, most people would prefer to be lucky than good at poker (mainly because it takes less effort and reading to be lucky), and in poker no matter what anyone says, luck features heavily - whether good or bad.

Probabilities.

Lets face it, most people are not going to be able to play poker unless they either have a lot of the luck mentioned above, or they have a good enough grasp of maths to be able to calculate probabilities.

So my question is, can you calculate the probability of good or bad luck? Why am I asking such a weird question. Well to be fair, dear readers, its because I have had a pretty weird couple of weeks on the luck front.

Last week I was working from home one day. During my lunch break, I decided to mow my front lawn. Happily mowing away a piece of gravel got caught in my lawn mower, flew out of the lawn mower and hit the dead centre of my neighbours double glazed lounge window - shattering it completely. So what are the odds of being able to send a piece of gravel in so specific an area of toughened glass that it shatters? Lets be honest, it has to be very high odds of bad luck.

How much higher is the likelihood that on exactly the same day, exactly the same thing happens when a guy is mowing his lawn in a neigbouring road to my house. Those odds go even higher... but apparently, in the road next to mine, on the same day, the same thing had happened!

I just wished that there had been a derby winner named "Breaking Glass" running on the following Saturday.

So besides the £350 hit to my wallet and a neigbours house now boarded up and looking like it will be occupied by squaters, what on earth does any of this have to do with poker.

Well since my last post, I have played a lot more SNGs than I have recently. I would estimate around 25 games in the last three weeks.

So if I have played 25 SNGs, what would be the odds of going out of a game being beaten by a straight? If it happened once, the odds aren`t going to be that high?

How about going out beaten by a straight 5 times of the 25 - okay lets face it those odds are going to be higher.

What if I told you that of the 25 SNGs I played in 22 I went out on being beaten by a straight!

Anyone who has the time and inclination please feel free to tell me which of the two had the lower bad luck odds.

Anyway I tell this more as an anecdote. On with the more serious stuff....

I have realised re reading some of these blog posts that although there is a fair amount of waffle, and a fair amount of talk about money management, there is very little being said about actual poker tactics or hands - so I will attempt to make more of this in coming blogs

I am finding that the style of poker I have been playing up until now is not as affective as it was 6 months ago. Lets face it, poker moves on. My money has floated around the $500 mark for a couple of months now, and no real impression is being made on my mortgage because of it!

So from today I am going to start experimenting with differing styles of play and will report on how these fair, whether different styles are more favourable at different money levels, and different amounts of players. I shall report on how terribly or well these go.

Bye for now people.

Pot Total: $509.23 ($5.75 down from last month)