Online Weekend
Had a very successful weekend online, to get the year off to a winning start.
Decided to brave the Omaha cash tables for the first time and was pleasantly surprised at my standard compared to the rest of the table. Bear in mind I’ve only ever played a handful of times live and never online, so my only real knowledge came from holdem and the three Omaha books I have read so far.
I sat down with 200 USD and turned this into 600 USD within an hour, just by playing the big starting hands, as well as take off hands such at 9-8-7-6. Hit some nice draws but mainly just called with big wraps or the nut flush draw, when given the price, and this seemed to work well. It was only a 1/2 table, so you only needed 200 USD to sit down, but some people didn’t seem to understand the difference between a strong holdem hand and a strong Omaha hand. Numerous times I was paid off by people holding 2 pair to my straight/nut flush. One session of hands is clearly too small a sample to conclude anything, but I’ll be looking to play this again in the near future as it could be an additional money-spinner.
I also had a very strong MTT showing. Don’t think many people are interested in hand histories, but I placed 3rd in a Full Tilt $75 for nearly $5k and bagged 4th in the Crypto 8pm $100 for about $1.5k. I had 2 other minor cashes and as I only played 8 or 9 tournies in total I was very pleased.
I think the success was due to a refinement of my online strategy. I have always been very strong in the first 90 minutes of tournaments, ending this period with 3 times the starting stack approximately 65% of the time. My conversion of top 10 positions early on into cashes, is disappointing however.
I analysed my play and realised I was probably being far too aggressive in the middle part of tournaments and becoming preoccupied with maintaining my chip supremacy, which of course is not necessary.
This weekend I played like a rock during the middle portion of the tournaments and it worked well. I had the chip stack to be patient and I only got into really big pots when heavy favourite. In fact if it wasn’t for a couple of beats I may have gone deep in a couple of other tournies. I’ll keep using this strategy in the future, and see how it goes.
A couple of people have asked how I play the early stages of online tournaments, so I’ll post on this later in the week. It is likely to be highly criticised in that it goes against many text books and does NOT work in the live arena. However my chip accumulation is prolific in the early stages of the tournaments, and I get paid off in ways that the Harrington method, for example, will not. In fact I believe that conventional wisdom actually creates reverse implied odds situations for players in the early stages of online tournaments. I will go into this in more detail later in the week.
Whilst I don’t want to post any hand history, one hand was particularly horrific for someone on the final full tilt table. It went as follows:
Big stack with 500k raises with 84o in the small blind
Small blind (playing 200k) calls with K6 cc. Flop bring . Big stack bets, small blind re-raises. Big stack tries to represent the nuts and pushes. Small blind of course calls with the true nuts. Turn 8, river 4.
Ouch…cost him at least 1k in prize money.
Next live game will be the Thursday League game at the LC. I’ve now posted a link to the Loose Cannon website, if anyone is in the London area. Also, I’ve put a table together to analyse my annual performance so far.