Ugignadl

Greetings netizens.

So, there is this new (to me) site which a few of my poker buddies have been ranting about: Cake Poker. Dumb name, eh? Anywho, it disallows the use of PokerTracker. This has several interesting corollaries. One of these is that it tends to drive off ardent users of PokerTracker; in the past, I would have fit snugly into this crowd. But with my wholesale move to live play, I have fallen out of love with my old companion, and would not mind donking around without the help of PokerTracker.

Regardless, they said the play was mental. And, there is a great signup+rakeback bonus going on. So, let’s get a max deposit and start donking! My bank (Aussieland) only allows $1k in transactions per day, Aussie dollars. That used to be (before our currency went mental) about $700 USD. To be safe, I went for $500 USD. That was a week or so ago.

I played a bit of 20NL, since a few mates were having a laugh there and we were chatting away. Now, not to offend anyone who plays at Cake, but the people there are some of the donkiest donks to ever escape the port security act. It’s like a Garden of Eden of poker. My eyes lit up. We spent a couple of hours there, and in the end I donated my small monies to one of my overaggro buddies; damn him ;). Balance: $475.

Well, I was not to be deterred… so after work the next day I jumped on and played some NL100. Up a bit, down a bit, and then we are heads up. The guy is a massive fish — loose passive passive. For those out of the lingo, that means the player will call a lot, hardly ever raise and hardly ever fold. They are an excellent opponent. This particular example had busted the last guy to leave, and was sporting a $400 stack. I myself had not had too much luck but still had $200 on the table. This hand comes around:

Fishboy $400 Button/SB

Ugig $200 BB

Ugig is dealt .

Sweet.

Ugig raises to $7.

Fishboy calls $7.

Flop comes

Ok. Action on me, pot $14, let’s bet.

Ugig bets $13.

Fishboy thinks. Fishboy timer runs low. Fishboy calls.

Turn

OK well fishy mc fish, do you have anything after all? Your turn aggression would be just about zero, and I don’t put you on a K, even you would raise the flop. Will you bet here? Nah, it’s up to me. Pot is ~$40.

Ugig bets $35.

Fishboy miniraises to $70.

Well now that is interesting fishy mcfish fish. I would say that my flush draw is good against you and apart from that the range of hands that you would miniraise on the turn here do not all crush the best overpair. I refuse to put you on a full house, or quads. Further, I think I have pretty sweet implied odds aagainst your ass. Easy call!

Ugig calls.

River .

Awesome, I hit my draw. (Not that I needed it.) Now to extract mucho value. The pot is ~$110. I have about that left in my stack. Will he call a push? Well, that isn’t the right question… the right question is, if I bet smaller, will he raise me… ever? Probably not, so let’s POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

Ugig bets $145 (All in).

Fishboy calls $145.

Pot: $400.

Ok fishboy what you got?? Huh?

Fishboy flips for the flopped FH.

BURN!

Ouch so that session didn’t go so good. Day 2 Cake balance: $300.

Day 3… well now that would have been yesterday. I decided that I was going to get that money back. Waited for the g/f to go to bed and jumped on the good old lappy. I had just played 6 hours live cash (500NL at the local) so didn’t really feel like cash game play. I fired up our 6+0.5 SNGs.

They rocked! I won 2 and came second in 2. That worked well, I thought. Fire two 5+0.5 and two 6+0.5 (they take a while to fill up). I cashed in all of those as well. Hmmmmm.

So I played SNGs and a few low buyin tournaments for about five hours. I must have played about 25 or 30 of the buggers. But, the play was just amazingly bad. Extremely bad. People pushing second pair on blind level 2. It reminded me of a few years ago, on PP. Man, it was sweet. I finished the night very pleased with myself. Day 3 Cake balance: $608.

So, there you go. Perhaps I will write about my live play next time. There is just so much poker, and so little time to write ;).

Until next time…

Hey everyone, thanks for reading my blog. For the first post I guess it’s a good idea to say a little about myself. Professionally, I’m a young academic. I live in the inner west of Sydney, Newtown, and commute to Wollongong to work at the University. I have many interests… an incurable nerd, and geek, so anything you can think of there I have most likely more than dabbled in. I’ve done more than my fair share of fantasy role playing, strategy trading card games, miniature battling, chess, and a huge number of video games.
Work has been great recently. I have funding to do some research into higher order geometric heat flows, which belong to the field of differential geometry. Geometric heat flows are the mathematical animals used to describe the complete behaviour of any geometric object evolving over time; under any force, any law. It’s quite difficult because it is so general. One of the key determining attributes on how we analyse these wacky critter is the `order’ of the flow. It is hard to explain, but first and second order geometric heat type flows are, for the most part, well understood (some people would vehemently disagree, that’s ok). There is still a rich area of research there for second order flows, and it could be argued that there are more natural phenomena that are explained by second order flows. But, going as far back as 1957, physicists have proposed fourth and sometimes even higher than fourth order flows to explain natural phenomena. So there is plenty of motivation. In the last few years there has been some research into the particular fourth order flow called the Willmore flow, which pushes objects into being locally spherical. There are other infamous fourth order flows like the surface diffusion flow, which I am working with right now. But I hope to be more general than that and apply our arguments to all kinds of higher order flows. Here’s hoping! Cheers.

OK if you skipped all that mathy crap above and went straight for the beer I don’t blame you. I also love beer. And all kinds of other beverages, alcoholic or not (most notable in the not category is coffee, which I am most cerainly addicted to). If I keep posting in this blog, then you will see that I enjoy these things a little too much sometimes ;).

Finally, I love poker. All kinds of poker. I spend a lot of time on the forum, and we can get some good discussions going there. I’m there a lot of the time… as are a lot of the other forum regulars ;). My poker playing has really taken off in the last two years. Of course, we played before then, but never competitively. My bread and butter game is 500NL (those are Aussie dollars ) live. The biggest buyin in 200 however so the play can be packed with variance. I tend to take a lot of small edges, although that can backfire at times. As with most people I started playing competitively online, all kinds of poker. I still enjoy playing online, but live is much more profitable, so I do prefer to play there. My approach to poker is a combination of practical experience and hard mathematical analysis. Of course, you can approach the game in a completely mathematical manner. (I am probably thinking of a different kind of maths to you though.) However I do not think carrying out this kind of detailed analysis in fifteen seconds is possible, so you must do both to build up your so-called `instincts’.

Oh man, this is easily long enough. Until next time….