JeffreyLipsey.com

I don’t know what was with me today, but I found myself making moves on Stars against regs when I should maybe avoid doing so at 100 NL. You don’t have to make aggressive moves there to be able to beat the games for a decent rate (as long as you use table selection), so frankly I don’t have an excuse. Maybe I’m trying to develop my reads? Go on what I think will work? For so long I avoided making spewy plays just to make the easy profit. But maybe making spewy plays improves me as a player and will make me a lot more money in the long run. There, that’s why I made the play today.


Okay, so lets get to the hand. My reads on my opponent was that he was fairly aggressive. This is the 2nd time he’s 3bet me but I’ve yet to see him show anything down. I was unaware of the fact that this table was pot limit; I might have changed the way I played it had I realized that. The raw hand history is here:


PokerStars Game #21787346347: Hold’em Pot Limit ($0.50/$1.00) - 2008/11/05 16:37:06 ET
Table ‘Moguntia’ 9-max Seat #5 is the button
Seat 2: Ferch18 ($60.50 in chips)
Seat 3: beginnerluck ($97.40 in chips)
Seat 4: sm0kelm ($97.50 in chips)
Seat 5: CodeRedRulez ($102 in chips)
Seat 6: PeterQuint ($66.45 in chips)
Seat 7: my zak44 ($131 in chips)
Seat 8: TBCrepNY ($104.10 in chips)
Seat 9: MikeMcD ($101.45 in chips)
PeterQuint: posts small blind $0.50
my zak44: posts big blind $1
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to CodeRedRulez [6d 7d]
TBCrepNY: folds
MikeMcD: folds
Ferch18: folds
beginnerluck: folds
sm0kelm: folds
CodeRedRulez: raises $2 to $3
PeterQuint: folds
my zak44: raises $6.50 to $9.50
CodeRedRulez: calls $6.50
*** FLOP *** [4h 8h 8d]
my zak44: bets $14
CodeRedRulez: raises $46.55 to $60.55


This is about as close to an ‘all in’ as I could have made it given it was a pot limit game. So for sake of calculation I’ll go ahead and treat my raise like it was all in, because I’d have to call it off anyway. We’ve got our EV calculation formula if you remember here:


EV = %Fold * Amount we Win + % Call * (Amount we lose)


We’ll make %Fold = X, %Call = (1-X), Amount we win when he folds= (9.5+9.5+.5+14 = $33.5).


That make’s the last one, Amount we lose, the hardest to figure out. The formula for that is:


(%Win*Amount we win + %Lose*Amount we lose)


So lets do some calculating:


The Amount we win in this case would be the amount in the pot plus the remaining money in our stack: $102+9.5+.5+14 = $126 (I find the easiest way to do this is put your effective stack first then add in the amount of money your opponent has already put in the pot).


The Amount we lose is our remaining stack, so in this case it would be $102-9.5, or $92.50.


The %Win and %Lose are off the same equity analysis, for which we will use Poker Stove with. The thing is, we have to find out what our opponent is going to stack off with on this flop after the action given. QQ-AA are the best things that come to mind, as well as any flush draw. The most obvious flush draws are AhKh, AhQh. Given that he was 20/15 through my very small sample I’ll throw in 1 suited connector there (even though it could be much more), say JhTh. Against that range my equity is 20.87%, not exactly something to brag about. Even if you throw in JJ our equity stays above 20% and for every flush draw you add in it increase our equity by about .5%. So, I think 20.87% equity is a good amount. Thus, we will win 20.87% and conversely we will lose 79.13% of the time. Now we have all the components of our formula:


EV = %Fold * Amount we Win + % Call * (Amount we lose)


EV = X * 33.5 + (1-X) *(.2087*$126 + .7913* (-92.50))
EV = 33.5x + (1-X)*(26.30 - 73.20)
EV = 33.5x + 46.9X - 46.9
EV = 80.4X - 46.9


Alright, so using this equation lets find out our break even fold equity. To find this out we must set our EV to 0:


0 = 80.4x - 46.9
46.9 = 80.4x
X = 46.9/80.4
X = 58.6 %


So, that means our opponent must fold nearly 59% of the time in order for our shove to be profitable. If he folds more than that then it is a +EV play, less than that and its spewy. How do we know how much fold equity we actually have? Well, lets put our opponent on a range, then find out his stacking off combinations.


Given our read, our opponent is always reraising AK here, as well as AQ. He’ll probably reraise QQ+ for value (while only cold call pairs less than that). He’s probably also got a couple suited connectors in his bluff range, but we dont really know which ones or how many, so lets just use our previous example of JTs. The number of combinations for each of these hands:


AK: 16
AQ: 16
QQ-AA = 18 (6 each)
JTs = 4


Total = 16+16+18+4 = 54 total reraising combinations


And the hands he’s going all in with: AhKh, AhQh, JhTh, QQ-AA, or 18 + 3 = 21 stacking off combinations. Thus, the number of folding combinations is 33 (54-21). Our folding equity then is 33/54 = 61.11%!!!!!


Wait, what? That means my play wasn’t spewy at all! In fact, its slightly +EV. We can find this out by putting our actual fold equity in place of X:


EV = 80.4X - 46.9
X = 61.11%
EV = 80.4*.6111 - 46.99
EV = $2.14


It isn’t exactly the most +EV of plays, but it isn’t -EV either. We get most of our equity when he folds his overcard-type hands, plus if we had a flush draw/open ended straight draw it would be a lot more profitable. I prefer to not risk a stack to win 2BB in EV, as that is something that will increase your variance. Granted, if he ever reraises me with more than he does then its even more profitable.


What happens when he never has JTs here and only does it for value? Then his total reraising combinations is 50 (AQ, Ak, QQ+), and calling reraise range with 20 (QQ+, AhKh, AhQh). And (50-20)/50 = 60% Fold Equity, or exactly 0 EV, which puts it at the same level as folding (ignoring metagame effects).


Wow, this was fun. It wasn’t as spewy as I thought. Yay!

I know… right? Me? Playing poker? WTF? Did I finally get my act together or what the heck is going on?


I dunno, lately I’ve just been a little motivated to get some hours in and make some money. Although I’m not 12 tabling like I was and I’m barely even 9 tabling. My play is still split between 100-200 NL although I’m diversified across many sites in an attempt to find the best games.


Where I’m playing at these days:


Player’s Only: I’ve had my worst luck/play here the past couple days. I’m just not ‘in the zone’ when I’m playing here without the stats just yet. I’m doing my best in table selection and I am able to get some reads but it is pretty difficult at times. It is challenging and I’m still playing here for two reasons: 1) deposit bonus and 2) the average player there is still not as good as everywhere else. I’m down about a buy in at 200 NL but up 1 at 100 NL so technically breakeven, but down some because of the buy in difference.


Doyle’s Room: I liked what I saw here, even though they had VERY little action here at the full ring games. The play was pretty bad, I’m down about 1/2 a buy in here.


Absolute: This has been what is keeping me treading water the past couple days. I’m up 2 buy ins at 100 and 1/2 a buy in at 200 NL, even though they only have 1-2 full ring tables going at a time. I don’t have rakeback/bonus to clear here but the tables are good enough I don’t need them.


Full Tilt: I’ve done a little datamining here for 200 NL but I have a hard time justifying sitting down when I have no rakeback here. Especially when Stars is just a click away.


Stars: I’ve been playing some 100 NL here but not any 200 NL, although I didn’t look over my play last month. I use Stars to fill up any table slots I have open, although other than Player’s Only its my best site where the FPP gives me good rakeback.


So, that’s that. I’ve been doing OK at Stars, although I’m having a hard time finding tables with decent donks on them. I’m going to post a spewy hand here and see if I can work the math out and see how spewy it really was.

So far, I found one line that I liked and its for this Thursday’s game between Denver and the Browns. I was able to get Denver +3 vs the struggling browns at a breakeven price. This is a bit surprising to me and I expect the line to move as more digest the news that Brady Quinn is starting at quarterback.


I don’t think the line moved at all since the news came out last night that the starting quarterback got canned, although I disagree with that move. Right now they have Cleveland as the favorite by 3 points, but because they’re playing at home its practically break even as 3 points usually goes to the home team regardless.


Other bets I might place this week will include teasers against the Raiders, Rams and Lions and for the Jets, Giants and maybe colts/pats/bills but I haven’t decided yet. I probably wont place any bets until after Thursday, I want to keep some money on Player’s Only so that I can play some poker there this week.

So this post is going to make me sound like a degenerate gambler, so. . . yay!


A couple years ago I had a lot of success betting football and I stopped after legislation curbed how to get money on and off the sports betting sites. But I was able to get money on Player’s Only so I’m using their sports book and poker room for the rest of the season and we’ll see how it goes after that.


My bets this last Sunday were all teasers and although I had some good lines it didn’t work out. The one that I won was I had the Giants -2 AND the Over 34 vs the Cowboys, which was just destroyed. But I lost two others. The first being the Bears -5.5 AND the over 36.5 vs the Lions. The original line had the bears -12.5 but I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell they’d cover that spread, even though I figured they would win the game. I was right, but they only won by 3 points and not 5.5 so I lost that bet, even though the over was covered. My final bet was on the Sunday night game with the Colts +1 AND Over 37 vs the Patriots. I again guess it right that the Colts were going to win but they only scored 34 points combined. I was close. . . again.


Sunday didn’t turn out too well, my teaser on Monday Night’s game was just as much a loser. I had the Redskins +5 AND Over 29.5 vs the Steelers. For some reason the Redskins were the favorite by 2 points, I figured they would score more but I didn’t expect the ass whooping. Luckily for me I received a free $50 bet on my deposit so I put that on the Steelers Moneyline for +120, which was by far an excellent price, so that hedged my loss from the teaser. I actually had a chance to win both bets: if the Steelers won by 4 or less and they scored 30 points or more, but that didn’t happen.


Overall I finished down 1.5 bets, but I could have saved 4/5 of a bet had I chosen better lines. My teasers were the 7 point variety, which cost a full $20 more/$100 bet than the 6 point variety. The % chance of success doesn’t change that much off that one point to account for an additional 20% risk per bet, and that was a mistake I wont be making again.

Reviewing a day later, I’d say I had a pretty decent Sunday. A day that I should be proud of but yet, in the end, still comes up short.


I came the closest to a Final Table as I’ve had since my Sunday Million final table, when I busted 11th in $109 50k on Poker Stars. The prize pool was a cool $130k and its the deepest I’ve gone in that tournament, but at the end I couldn’t win the key all-ins.


It feels like I’m not making enough ‘plays’ when late like that, in that I mean I don’t 3bet bluff enough. I see people 3 bet around me a lot and I just don’t have a feel for it as a bluff in the tournament scenario. It is either that or I just run real bad with horrible timing; either way though I need to work on this as it again hurt me. However, it still wouldn’t have mattered as I lost an AI with KJo vs A8 5 handed when I had 14 BB and open shoved. I thought his call was a little too ‘fast’ although it was correct in the end. I felt like I lost a lot of all ins in this tournament where I had good equity but I really don’t know. I worked my way up though from 600 chips at 50/100 to get that far so I do feel good about my play.


I also busted around 230ish in the Sunday Warmup. I short-stacked my way up from 1st level cash to double that after I suffered a bad beat, although I don’t remember what it was. It was still a decent cash and combined with the $109 cash I knocked a good chunk of make-up off the stake.


Finally, I cashed in the top 40 of the Cake $162 with my friend Adil. We played pretty well but I lost 33 to 53 AI preflop to knock me down low when it really mattered. Adil lost a big hand for the chip lead well out of the money when he lost 99 to 55 AI preflop and that was a pretty gross hand but he played it well, as usual.


That was my day and I’m fairly happy, although I would have preferred a Final Table finish or more. There’s always next week.

The backer for my tournaments has had to tone down my stakings this month, but it isn’t to any fault of my own. In fact, I believe it was quite the contrary. Either way, I’m not able to play the $150k Guaranteed on Absolute this month.


Don’t get me wrong, I love that tournament. But I just can’t defend playing it when it will equate to roughly 1/2 of my risk this month. I’m only able to risk less than 1/2 the same amount per week as I was last month (although it still is a lot) and thus I really have to make sure the tournaments I’m playing I have the highest edge in.


So this month, I’m playing in the following tournaments:

I might throw in the $109 on Bodog when I feel like depositing there, but like I posted last week I’m still pretty pissed with them right now (they did reject our application but I don’t want to talk about it). Otherwise that’s my Sunday, hopefully I’ll be able to get some cash games in on Player’s Only/Cake.

I’m a little late in writing this, but who knows where the time goes. On Saturday, Marlyn and I went out to eat lunch at Cafe Salsa, a Cuban-style restaurant in downtown Alexandria.


I’d say it was pretty authentic feeling inside. You don’t get chips and salsa but instead fried-banana slices with a hearty olive-based dip. I liked it.


As an appetizer, Marlyn and I ordered some Seafood Ceviche, which was served without tostadas and made it quite awkward to eat. As usual, the Ceviche was served cold but they had to use a lot of lemon juice to hide the seafood flavor from the shrimp, scallops, fish and squid. The lemon juice made it taste odd and without a necessary crunch I didn’t care for this dish (although it was OK when I started to eat it with the banana chips).


As a main course, I ordered the Nueva Ropa Vieja, which was basically a barbacoa-style beef stewed with bell peppers served on rice with cooked bananas. Marlyn liked the bananas the best, but I really like the way the beef tasted. I would order it again.


Marlyn ordered something not on the online menu, it had grilled cornmeal on the outside and its a famous dish, although I can’t remember it now. It was pretty good, probably better than my dish.


We split a desert, which was the first time I’ve ever had Flan. I have to say, it was pretty good and I was very surprised. I think the Flan was the best thing on the menu, if that says anything.


The atmosphere in the place was only OK. I felt that the dishes might have been dirty and there was a guy on a date wearing a bluetooth headset that was annoying the crap out of me (although it had nothing to do with the restaurant itself). I would like to go back to Cafe Salsa to try out some other dishes, but truthfully that wont happen for a while given we have higher priority restaurants.

The question mark is there because I am still confused at what this play was about. Here’s an email Marlyn received about The Race:

As the 2008 Presidential election reaches a fever pitch, Georgetown University’s Theater and Performance Studies Program charts ever more daring artistic territory with the world premiere production of The Race, an interactive, wildly unpredictable and entertaining civic theater project that is unlike any theatrical production you have ever experienced.


Conceived and directed by Visiting Professor Michael Rohd, The Race breaks down the traditional walls by incorporating a cross-section of voices into an on-stage conversation about some of the most important issues raised by the upcoming election: Who will vote for whom? Who won’t? Why? And most specifically, what does leadership mean today?


The show itself is a three-part event. Part One is a performance that sets up the rules and questions for what follows. Part Two asks the questions- and uses interactive media and deceptively simple structures to involve the audience, and participants around the country, in the conversation. And Part Three mines completely different territory by marrying elements of a town hall meeting and a karaoke bar.

We were expecting a history of the 2008 election as it happened so far, but with actors and actresses and hopefully some funny dialogue. You know, the actors would mimic the candidates from the start of the primaries through the end of the election. Sure, we know what happens in the end but that doesn’t mean the play can’t be good.


Given that they started work on this project 18 months prior, this sounded like a reasonable assumption. What also fed this assumption was that as you walk in, they’re showing video clips and audio tracks from all the candidate’s primary runs. Remember those old Huckabee and Ron Paul commercials? This play could actually be good.


Wrong! And on so many levels. Maybe it was the theatre that the play was held in, but the technical aspects of the play were horrible. They only had two microphones (yes, handheld mics) that they had to pass around to the 12 cast members so they could talk. Wait, this isn’t a 4th grade play is it?


In the middle of the play they tried doing some web conferencing with other students from all over the globe (I still have no idea what the point of that was). Apparently, Apple computers DONT handle video conference that well. Because we couldnt hear any of the people they were talking to as they had audio problems. So what did they do? They translated what the people said to us. Wow, you know you could have saved 10 minutes (literally) of play time? If you had just read the questions and answers aloud in the first place.


Questions and answers–Keep that thought in your head because I think a good 1/2 the play was just the actors asking questions to each other then they respond unrehearsed. We paid $15 in tickets for this! There was no acting. This wasn’t a play. This wasn’t a performance. It was like we had to pay $15 to hear what other people think about the election and the world today. And by other people I mean college students; more specifically: college students at GEORGETOWN. Almost as much as I hate conservatives for their ignorance and moron-ism, I dislike liberals for their narrow views and right-bashing.


That’s right, I hate everybody (except for independants). I personally don’t care what college students think about what makes a good ‘leader’ but frankly, I bet they could have Googled “college student,” “blog,” and “leadership” and saved everyone hours of their time. This isn’t even including the poor actors who followed that director for 18 months.


18 months!!! WTF? I’ve seen better productions put on by my high school ‘Winter One Acts’ that took only a few months to put together. What a waste of time and resources (and the liberals blame the republicans for the recession…zing!)


Maybe it was our fault for interpreting this play wrong, but this thing was absolutely dreadful. If it was a movie we would have walked out 30 minutes in. But, we already took the metro ride into the city to watch a play we might as well finish it.


There was one bright spot to the play (other than when it ended). It happened when they had everyone in their chairs get up and fill some bleachers they brought in to make a mock ‘town hall’ type feeling. Trust me, we weren’t the only ones who didn’t want to get up (especially the guy surfing the internet ON HIS LAPTOP); but since it improved the performance I’m guessing it was a good thing.


The ‘karaoke’ mentioned in the email came from this: people were asked to get up and give campaign speeches, taken from the candidates themselves. Yes, the Giulani speech referenced 9/11 3 times in 60 seconds; no, Huckabee didn’t mention Chuck Norris in his speech. People that gave boring speeches (like McCain) were pretty lame. I would have much rather chosen to listen to a Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich speech, if not purely for entertainment value.


Outside of this 10 minute session, the rest of the performance was pretty bad. I still don’t understand what it was about and frankly I don’t think I want to. I feel bad for one person though: Marlyn. She tried hard to find an entertaining play and, if our assumption was correct, then I think that it would have been much more entertaining.


Oh well, at least it got me out of the apartment for one night. I’ll end this post with the funniest lines of last night. It happened from a guy sitting behind me about 20 minutes into the performance:


God, this is awful.


This is Jeffrey Lipsey, and I support this message.

Well, the week has gone by so fast I don’t even know where it went. Today is Friday and I haven’t played poker since Sunday. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been working though…


As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent most of Monday dealing with the video intros and outros with my brother, but since then my PC has been going non stop for 60 hours… converting ONLY 13 videos from wmv to flash. Given that Grinderschool has over 200 videos and if I split the work evenly with JGB, then I’m still looking at running that PC for a month straight to finish all the conversions. This is rather disappointing news.


From Tuesday through Thursday I’ve been dealing with Poker Affiliates for the upcoming Grinderschool redesign. Apparently when you sign up for an affiliate they don’t give you the ‘best’ deal, for us or our subscribers. I had to email all 25 of the separate poker accounts that we will have affiliate relationships with in order to confirm that they did, in fact, give us the rakeback account. It is true, of the majority of the sites that offer rakeback, they did not give us the rakeback affiliate account (I’d say 90% were like this).


I wont say any names, but even when confronted and asked directly: does my affiliate account offer rakeback they either tried to walk around the question or just said no. My point to this that of the 10 or so sites that offer rakeback, only one came out and said we had the best deal and another 1 came out and offered us the best deal when asked.


That leaves a remarkable 8/10 (I’m exaggerating a little because I don’t have the exact number, but its around there) that, even when asked, still didn’t offer us the best deal. Here’s the typical email chain for each site:


Me: Hey, does my affiliate account allow rakeback? (obviously more polite and formal)
Them: No
Me: Is that because your site does not allow it or because you haven’t authorized our account?
Them: Because you haven’t been authorized.
Me: Could you please authorize our account?
Them: Ok, we’ll have to negotiate rates. Please sign up again.


Each of the above conversations were separate emails back and forth, and although my replies were instantaneous it wasn’t always the case with them. A lot of the times they would take 30 minutes or more to respond, which wasn’t exactly all that bad given the fact I had to do this OVER AND OVER for all the poker sites. There were about 20 separate email chains to different affiliates going over such simple and mundane questions; it was quite frustrating.


That was pretty much my schedule from Tuesday-Thursday, but I’m happy to say I’ve finally gotten that taken care of. We’re still in talks with Bodog, which happens to be the only poker site who seemingly HATES traffic because they are such a b**ch to deal with. They are vetting our site and intentions more than McCain did Palin (too easy of a zing, that I won’t mention it); at some point you have to hold your ground and say:


Fuck you! How about YOU give me your best rates and we can talk about a deal?


I knew they are hard to deal with because I’ve tried to work with them in the past with no success. It seems like they don’t like free advertising; what morons. Also, they’re support team is so informal it feels like I’m talking to a group of Frat jag-offs. I’ve had affiliates literally call me from AUSTRALIA so they can give us the best deal; and they’re part of networks much more trustworthy and larger than that of Bodog. I’ve also talked with a couple reps via instant messenger (apparently MSN is the medium of choice in the poker industry) and these people have given me their real names and personal email address. Those are people that care.


Not Bodog. My response email from them came from “Bodog Affiliate Team.” Not an individual person. No Mark, Steve, Neri, Bob, or Dorothy (actual affiliate support names). Its like I’m emailing the entire department, not an individual person. Fuck that, I’ve got 25 other sites I can send players and frankly, we don’t need Bodog that bad anyway.


That was yesterday; I’ve yet to receive a response after I sent them an email back (obv I was a little more courteous and cordial). I have no idea if they’re actually going to approve us but after a while I just don’t care.


And now we’re on Friday, Halloween. What am I going to do? I have no idea.

Sure, I lost some, but no where near as much as I could have or as much as my other investing account (which I haven’t updated the post on here because of how bad it got). However, I guess I can feel proud from my IRA when it only dropped 16.67% through the entire fall of the market, compared to the drop of 11,400 to 8400 in the Dow (26.4%).


Part of this came from the fact that I don’t actually have much in my IRA, given I’m only like 25 and I’ve just started to fund it for year 2008 (although I still plan to max it out by April, 2009). The other part came from a lack of diversification, which is due to the lack of funds. Through the majority of this downturn I had my money in 2 funds:


-IShares 7-10 Year Treasury Bond, currently yielding 4.01% (Symbol: IEF)
-IShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond Fun, currently yielding 11.0% (Symbol: HYG)


I figured the best way to get through the market was to just buy bonds right now, as they do go up in value as the interest rate falls. Granted, “High Yield” is just another term for Junk Bond, and having the ETFs are another way for diversification.


Of these two, the only one that went down was HYG, and that lost about 1/3 of the value, but the treasury stock went up. And this was before the .5% in dividend payments I receive per month. So, in actuality, I’m down ~10% in this dowturn, a full 15% less than the Dow.


I recently purchased the Gold ETF (GLD) which i talk about trades a lot in my normal portfolio but at $70/share that is an easy long term investment surrounded by several near term trades (since there is no yield).