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PokerGuru Feature: Heads-up With S%%%%%% Se%
32 years old S^^^^^
is a Research and Development geophysicist by day in one of the biggest
energy companies in the world and an online HU cash game player most
nights. He has played HU No-limit and PLO almost exclusively since the
middle of 2010. In 2010 and 2011 he was one of the top 10 winners across
all table sizes for 100nl on PokerStars and in the top 15 for 200nl on Pokerstars in 2011, as per PokerTable Ratings. He has been coached at various times by Nick Frame (TcfromUB on PokerStars), but his basic game is modeled after a well-known HU nit Markuis on Full Tilt Poker.
First off the bat, you have had a
downswing recently and April was a negative sum month for you. This was
surprisingly your first such month. MTT-ers have downswings all the time
but they know a huge score maybe around the corner and they will
recover. As a HU cash regular, how are you dealing with it, considering
it will take some time and effort to replace the losses?
It is not that big of a deal really as long as you are properly rolled for most of your games.
I got crushed in a couple of 4
tabling grudge matches, dropping 20 buy-ins and 15 buy-ins in successive
sessions. But that’s poker, shit happens. You just need to man up and
play through it. Most important thing is not to lose confidence and
end up tweaking your game too much. When I do feel I am losing
confidence I stop sitting my higher limits and instead focus on small
goals like I’ll start adding the higher limits only after I have made 20
buy-ins at a lower limit. This works pretty well for me. Also having
played a boatload of HU hands, I know my limitations very well. For
example, I have a nasty mental block that I play extremely bad,
irrespective of the villain, if I don’t have 100buyins+ for any
particular limit. So I am quick to adjust and move down in limits when
needed.
There are a lot of upcoming poker
players in India and who are harboring thoughts of going professional.
You could have gone professional yourself but haven't done it yet. Your
thoughts on this and any tips to young players just starting out.
For those looking to be MTT pros, just the variance pretty much guarantees that unless you are Shaundeeb or Seabeast or Selbst
your life is going to be as shitty, unhealthy and depressing as
possible. Add to that being married to a computer for countless nights
and hours pretty much flipping a 65-35 biased coin at best for a living,
your potential lifestyle doesn’t look like a joyride. So before taking
the MTT plunge maybe one should consider how long one can sustain this
lifestyle. If somehow your answer is greater than five years then you
are pretty much kidding yourself. I can name hundreds of MTT Gods all
of whom have come and gone since I started following poker and only a
select few have had the stick-ability to last for more than 3-5 years
and still show decent earnings.
Now if you look at some of these
elite players who were able to stick around, and consider the players
right in the middle of this pack and then see their OPR and Hendonmob
then you’ll find that these guys, over a period of 8-9 years, have made
about a million in online profits and cashed around 1-1.5milly live.
Since most MTT guys are backed, that gives them 500k in online earnings
and giving them a super high 70% live ROI and generous 50-50 deals adds
another 500k in live winnings. Factor in costs of travelling the circuit
and the general “I am poker-player-balla” lifestyle and the very best
haven’t made more than 100-150k a year. Now I guarantee you that if you
are living in the US or Canada or the more affluent European countries a
100k gross income with no benefits and perks doesn’t go a huge
distance.
Online cash games are obviously
better than MTTs, but at this moment I don’t know of a single online
Indian cash player who has even a semi decent extensive database and
track record of any note, so I wont even talk about online cash. Now
the live circuit or home game circuit in India could be your thing. If
it is, then all the power to you. I don’t know how the Indian casinos
or the home games look like, but if someone asked to me go to Vegas and
make a living grinding 15h/hour playing with a group whose vocab is
dominated by “everything is sick” and that too for atleast a few years, I
might as well end the agony by slitting my wrists before I board that
Vegas flight.
Me, personally, I have never thought
of going pro. It is just too hard and stressful to make 150k+ for years
playing poker and without that money I wont be able to sustain my
lifestyle. I will say this though, that I’d quit my job and start
playing online cash as a pro the day I have a seven figure portfolio
invested in some other things I am interested in.
There has been a lot of debate in the
poker forums about Game Theory and playing Game Theory Optimal. Have you
studied this and tried to employ it or can you give your thoughts on
it?
What learning tool
(coaching/video series/books/forums etc) would you say has given the
sharpest jump in your learning curve and what is your current skill
improvement tool (going over HH in Pokertracker / coaching / watching
videos)?
Well right of the bat let it be
clear that NO-ONE knows what GTO (Game Theory Optimal) play for NLHE/PLO
is. Instead what the advanced “GTO players” tend to do is to
incorporate some approximate GTO based dominating strategies (nemesis
strategies in GTO terminology) into their standard exploitative strategy
and try and play a overall “balanced” strategy. When you are trying to
figure out your nemesis- strategy, you are trying to develop a set of
empirical +EV lines for a wide variety of situations that you frequently
run into. There are a few ways of doing that.
First is to study solvable toy games
that one can map into actual poker situations that can be used to
provide some empirical framework and understanding of how GTO is
applicable to poker. For example one of the simplest toy game is the
Limit AKQ high-card-wins game where I hold a K (bluff-catcher), villain
holds a Q (bluff-hand) or A (value-hand) with equal probability and
there is an initial $1 ante ($2 in the pot). Villain can either bet $1
or check and I can call or fold. If I don’t fold there is a showdown.
GTO play for villain here is to bet all his As and bet his Qs one-third
of the time while my corresponding GTO strategy pair is to call
one-third of the time. Mapping of this strategy gives you a basic
insight into the world of “frequencies”.
There are many advanced versions of
the AKQ game where in betting amount, pot-size, hand distributions are
all variables (moving from the limit realm to NL realm) and this further
gives you an insight on how or if your bluff-catching or bluffing
frequency distributions depend on things like the pot size, bet size,
card-removal, villain’s perceived hand distribution etc. One of the
important results worth mentioning is that in a variable stack size and
pot size AKQ game if villain’s hand distribution is skewed (divergence
from a polarized range). i.e he has a 60-40 or better nut-air
distribution then the correct GTO play for us is to fold 100%
irrespective of villain’s bet sizing.
The second step is to start getting your hands dirty. Start fiddling with software like Cardrunners-EV (CRev) and Flopzilla
to run rough simplified GTO simulations of game situations and develop
the so called approximate “nemesis strategy”. I myself have been using
these a lot recently and found them extremely enlightening. For example,
say we hold backdoors facing a c-r on a K82r board (something like
67s), and villain has a high c-r frequency on dry boards. If we go
through a CRev poker game tree or just plain flopzilla then we will see
the most plus EV play in the entire game tree is to float flop and jam
any turn card where we pick up equity, when villain’s c-r percentage is
around a certain thresh-hold. You can play around with this and tweak
your hand slightly and make it 9Ts giving us backdoors plus two overs to
second pair or change the board to something like K84r and give
ourselves some weak bottom pair and then try and figure out if you are
looking to fight in this spot what line is most +EV.in the game tree.
So you can use these tools to
develop your fallback strategies for a variety of tough spots. The goal
is to have a solid preparation for a lot of spots that you are likely to
encounter and thus have a lot of the in-game decisions be automatic.
As the online games get tougher by the day tools like CRev and
Flopzilla will become a must-know, must-have to maintain/improve your
win rate. Of course if you are playing primarily whale-infested games
then you shouldn’t really care.
As for videos I haven’t seen one HU
video, which is of any worth released in the past 2 years. I don’t know
about MTTs, but people I know who are advanced 6-max players feel the
same for 6-max videos. For those who are maybe looking to get a start
into HU cash, before they play a single hand they must rote to memory
everything from the DogisHeadsUp series on DeucesCracked.
You have funds stuck in Lock Poker?
What is the latest on that? Has that caused you to play lower limits
than you would have played?
Its kind of a bummer as Lock is almost surely insolvent. They have given a June 1st
informal deadline when they will supposedly give clarifications on
steps they have taken to improve cashouts. But I aint holding my breath.
Right now ROW (rest of the world) players are pretty much in the same
boat as US players as cashouts requested from even December of 2012 have
not cleared for a majority of us. Plus I have the added issue that the
initial amount was deposited as a player transfer, which creates a
boatload of hassles at the moment. I have mentally parted with the Lock
money and whatever I get is a bonus at this point. It’s a double bummer
for me actually as I lost decent 5 figures last year when an Entraction
skin Purple Lounge went under water.
You have played HU cash on almost on
all poker networks. Which network has given you the most joy -
considering everything rakeback, reg to fish ratio, cashouts?
Ipoker is pretty much the nut worst
site at the moment as nobody will play anybody with even quarter of a
brain or a Pokertable rating that is even $10 in the positive. Plus
their software is a compete joke and second only to Partypoker in terms
of being as user unfriendly and buggy as possible. Pretty much the same
deal with 888. I get tilted just looking at 888’s table layouts. I have
been playing exclusively on Pokerstars and Full Tilt most of this year
and with Full Tilt coming up with their Black Card program; I am trying
to rake up as many points as possible.
PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker came
out with a lot of new games. Any game you see has the potential to
becoming more than just a passing fad?
All the games they introduced are
fads. Traffic for Irish NL on FTP has dropped drastically after the
first few weeks and I haven’t seen more than 1 table running at 100 or
200 over the last month. Over on PokerStars, none of the PLO regs are
interested in the 5-card PLO and Crouchevel and without a reg-pool
supporting those games they are pretty much dead as a dodo.
Any set goals for 2013? If yes, how far are you from them?
I had plans to work on my 6-max
game, but that needs to take the backseat for now, as a ton of work
needs to be done on my HU game, most of it involves CRev and Flopzilla.
Also I don’t really have monetary goals, but have some volume goals.
Getting Black card on FTP and 300k VPPs on PokerStars again would be
nice. A lot of this will depend on my work schedule and since I am
travelling a fair bit this year, both goals would be hard to achieve.
Thank you S^^^^^^ for taking the time to answer our questions and we wish you all the best for all your poker endeavours.
Compiled By: Vinay Suchede
