In the week following my last post, I buckled down and spent a lot of time studying to improve my tournament game for the first time. I joined a training site and watched about a dozen videos from three players who have good results but noticeably different styles. One was on the aggro side, one was tight to the point where he missed some pretty easy +EV spots, and the third seemed to incorporate a nice balance between the two extremes. That style is how I feel most comfortable playing online, and I was hoping to pick up on a few things that I was flat out missing or going about the wrong way. As it turned out, it basically felt like I was watching a video of my own play.
The aggro player (achen) made a few plays that I can't disagree with, but certainly choose to avoid when I'm playing. Things like jamming J5 suited with eighteen blinds over a late position raise and call, flatting raises in early position with AJ and KQ type hands, and calling a button shove with Q4 suited with effective stacks of ten blinds. Are those plays correct and I'm missing out on equity by not making them? I don't really think you can definitively say so one way or the other. Those are the kinds of things that the more aggro players do that allow them to get more action when they have hands. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of pushing edges that might not even be there.
The tight player (SirWatts) made a few videos that surprised me. His game seemed like it was more suited for a few years ago before people knew about late position and blind vs. blind shoving ranges. He open folded some hands that were definitely correct to shove and generally played a much more conservative game than the vast majority of MTT pros. I can't say his style doesn't work, because he's made a ton of money using it and was actually the one person to have a better combined POY+OPOY ranking for '08 than myself. Still, it was weird seeing him fold hand after hand that I would consider to be pretty typical opens or shoves.
Charder30 was the person whose videos I was most looking forward to watch. He's been very successful both live and online, has consistent results, and plays a style similar to mine. He doesn't make a habit of spewing or making absurd plays like some of the other high profile winning MTT players, and I'd be surprised if he misses many correct shoves or resteal spots in any given session. In watching his videos, I was surprised to see how similar our approach was to almost every hand. His opening ranges in the various stages of a tournament were close to mine, and I can't recall a single hand that I would have played completely different. In short, there wasn't much I saw to suggest that his impressive results are the result of him doing things significantly different than myself.
Having spent a good amount of time watching videos last week, I'm pretty sure there isn't all that much for me to learn from them going forward. I still want to join a few other sites and get as much out of them as I can, but as far as tournament strategy goes, I can't identify any glaring things I've been doing wrong. I even spent a few hours going over my $55r hand history with someone who has a very good grasp of tournament poker and there were only a select few hands we disagreed on. None of those were of particular importance to overall MTT strategy.
With renewed confidence and actually looking forward to a Sunday for the first time in a while, I got ready to grind last weekend and hoped for good results. Things couldn't have gone worse. A few hands into the first two tourneys of the day, my internet connection went out. It took me a half hour of fiddling around to realize it wasn't going to fix itself, and I was stuck playing on my laptop for the entire day. Not getting to use my desktop isn't the end of the world, but it limits my ability to multitable and definitely causes me to enjoy playing a full schedule less. When the day had ended, I had two small cashes and an $8k loss in the books. I did manage a deep run in the $75k on Tilt, but made what turned out to be a terrible call based on a timing tell that I was almost certain meant my opponent had AK (he had KK).
Monday was the Venetian Deepstack $2,500 main event. I finished day one sixth in chips out of 82 remaining players. I was very happy with how I played on the first day. On day two, I returned with almost 170 blinds and a great table draw. That was the last good news of the day. 27 got paid and I finished 32nd. Apart from one pretty awesome bluff I pulled, the rest of the day consisted of me getting my money in ahead and losing. It was painful. Perhaps the most telling hand of the day was when a four was exposed before my action in the cutoff. I opened with A4o and the big blind defended. He check/called two streets on a 2353 board with A7 (no flush draws), and binked one of the two remaining fours on the river to chop the pot. On my final hand, the button open jammed over thirty blinds from the button with K8 to beat my AQ.
I haven't played since then but it seems Mark was able to fix my computer which means I'll be back on the grind Sunday. If I make it through the day without a bunch of soul crushing beats or my computer inexplicably losing internet multiple times I'll consider it a success.
After the Venetian tournament, I was in a pretty miserable mood. The structure for the tournament was great, which means I played about twenty hours just to bubble on multiple bad beats. Still, Thanksgiving was around the corner, and I didn't want to let poker ruin the holiday. Looking for some way to explain the past year given that I still can't identify what I'm doing wrong, I conducted a quick research experiment. I took the pocketfives.com rankings from just over a year ago and looked at all the players' ROIs for 2009 on both Stars and Tilt. Overall, I found numbers on 93 people (including myself), and was pretty surprised at the results.
Only eight players on the list had ROIs of 50% or better on both sites. Ten players had negative ROIs on both. Ten! Currently, I'm at 23% on Stars and -17% on Tilt for 2009. I assumed that would be near the bottom of the list, but there are a number of very good players with similar stats. I never thought it was possible for a good player with decent volume to break even for a full year let alone lose money, but it appears that online MTT variance is just that insane. If I told you my stats this year resembled those of eisenhower1, dipthrong, tomgus456, mendieta19, johnnybax, purplepils99, bkice, and anbessa9, you'd probably assume I was having a good year without checking anyone's stats. As it turns out, some of those guys aren't even breaking even. That seems crazy to me. Maybe it really is extreme variance that's causing me to be a few bad Sundays away from having a losing 2009.
I'm not willing to attribute all my struggles to running bad, but I've never been more confident that variance really is crazy enough to cause a good player to put up poor results for such a long period of time. As I said earlier, I still plan on watching videos and working to improve my game while I'm not playing. I'm also well aware that I play worse when I'm frustrated and lacking confidence, two things that can be tempered by reminding myself that I'm a better player now than I was when I was booking huge months regularly last year.
Tournament poker is not for the faint of heart. I'm lucky to have avoided this side of variance until after experiencing what it feels like to run better than just about everyone else for an extended period of time. I didn't realize how lucky I was last year, but I certainly won't take it for granted if I can catch another one of those year-long rushes again. Until then, it seems like all I can do is let variance kick me around and make sure that I'm plugging any leaks by reviewing hands and watching videos from time to time. Hopefully it ends up being that simple.
