Two pieces of software I've been fiddling with are StoxEV and Poker Razor. They're effective, but both have issues with interface design, especially StoxEV. (Which makes it doubly irritating for the author to advertise it as "intuitive and easy", but that's life I guess.)

They solve the most tedious part of EV calculations, which is when you click the hand ranges in Poker Stove in branches of the decision tree. (Say your opponent calls down with Ace high or better.) I recommend you to at least try these out.

This HUHU adventure has mostly been a smooth ride even though I didn't win at first and did have an almost 200BB drop somewhere there. The May, though, has just been constant "upswing" (whether or not and how much luck it has involved I don't know, but I don't much care either).

Here's the graph so far:

I know results are "noise" anyhow, but this has been really the first month in my poker career that I have won anything significant, so I'd like to feel proud for it for a brief moment.

This place seems somewhat abandoned. Though I'm not exactly sure if anyone reads this. I have a diary in a Finnish forum, but that doesn't feel like a real blog. I started one at StoxPoker, but I seriously don't feel that StoxPokey and I won't be updating that blog. So I guess I'm stuck with this.

Well, anyhoo.

HU it is, still. The rake isn't such a big concern anymore as I'm playing at Full Tilt, which caps the rake at 50c and is definitely beatable. Though I'm looking forward to taking shots at 5/10 at which it's actually cheaper to HU than to 6-max.

The only major concern I currently have is that I've been just mostly playing. I think it's good to get some pure playing experience, as this is really the first time I'm getting into some serious HU playing, but I can't be neglecting session reviews and other analytical stuff. I've been recording my sessions somewhat frequently which should provide interesting study material for the times I don't feel like playing.

I've taken up HU Limit Hold'em again. The rake is killing, of course. (Limit HU sit'n'gos are an option.) But it's fun and educating.

This venture was mostly inspired by the new Limit HU series by DeathDonkey at DeucesCracked.com.

The more I think of it the more the title "Humble Poker Player" sounds like the exact opposite of what it tries to be. But I'll leave it at that.

I'm saving this for future reference:

Thoughts about winrates and variance

I felt satisfied with the writing, although the math part is bit confusingly written.

I have no idea if it bears any relevance to anyone else but me and perhaps PygmyHero.

Fun thing about this weblog system is that I can write a plugin that converts those hand history tags into HTML tags that work here. It doesn't look beautiful yet, but it works. For some degree, at least.

Here's a test hand:

Limit: $3/$6
4 players

Pre-flop: (4 players) Hero is UTG with 7 A
Hero raises, Button calls, SB folds, BB calls.

Flop: 8 3 7 (6.5SB, 3 players)
BB checks, Hero bets, Button calls, BB calls.

Turn: K (4.75BB, 3 players)
BB checks, Hero bets, Button raises, BB folds, Hero calls.

River: Q (8.75BB, 2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets, Hero raises, Button 3-bets, Hero caps, Button calls all-in $3. Uncalled bets: 0.5BB returned to Hero.

(How's that for a title? Don't know if it's even close to correct English.)

Anyhoo. "Tilt blocker" is a simple software, which is used to cover your stack size while playing. The idea is that you shouldn't pay attention to your result, but concentrate on playing your best. It's useful, but I don't think that's quite enough. For me, at least.

So what I did was a setup in which I don't even know the size of my bankroll. With the poker client I use, it's doable. The main client shows the bankroll size (though it's not accurate as it's only the money in play), but I can cover that up with a tilt blocker. Also, when I sit down, the client asks how much do I want to sit in with from my X amount available. This I can't completely cover, but I can just not look at it, as it's in small print and I can enter some amount without actually looking at the text field.

During the play, I can just use tilt blocker normally. Not even allowing myself a peek at the final result. Finally, I've shrunk the result columns from the Poker Tracker as I do want to take a look at statistics from time to time. It's a little bit annoying that I can see a glimpse of green there:

Not that I mind it being green, but I don't want to see anything about the result.

I've now played three sessions in which I've not been aware of the results during the play or before or after and I can say that it's been wonderful. It might be just a result of Hawthorne effect, but I don't mind. Damn the results, which I shouldn't even know by know (though I accidentally had a peek during the preparation of this weblog entry), but it was fun playing this way.

Of course, one does have some idea of the results even with the tilt blockers on, because it's really easy to understand that one's losing if every big pot is going some other way. But it's also surprisingly hard to know the exact result after just half hour of play or so. And now that I don't know the result even afterwards, it's even harder to what's the overall result recently.

The idea, then, is to have a look at the results after a given amount of hands. I've set this to be 5000 hands right now, but I don't see why I couldn't go "blind" with even bigger stretches. One crucial requirement is of course to have big enough bankroll so that you don't go broke during this period (how's that for the definition of big enough bankroll?). Also, if I happen to run good, it might have been more profitable to move up limits, but this way, I don't come pre-occupied by the hope of moving up but concentrate on playing the best.

Worth trying, at least.

I've decided, tentatively, to resurrect this diary. For no special reason, though. I do like writing in English, even though it's hard for me at times, or maybe because of that. And I do like the idea of not restricting my weblog to a certain context, say, a poker forum.

It's strange that I have to figure out the "thing" of writing again and again. I've known this pretty much ever since I've started to write weblogs. That is, to write is to think. By writing, you gain insight of your own thoughts and come up with new ideas that you wouldn't have otherwise.

In other news, I got warm feelings of nostalgy reading the entry "stabs at short-handed fixed limit." I still vaguely remember the feeling when it was all new and fresh, and somewhat scary too.

Hmh, an idea perhaps worth trying: giving names for "subgames" in poker, say the "The Initiative" where in short handed fixed limit you open-raise and continue bet against big blind's defence both on the flop and the turn. Well, Eric Berne actually had one for poker especially: Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch.