Thursday, September 22, 2005

Liking PokerAce more and more

Online $5/$10 games have been good this week. I've had a decent win rate for the last 3000 hands (3BB/100h), and I have taken a whole lotta bad beats over the last 1000 hands (and missed an above average number of chances to make 2, 3, 4 or 5 outers on the river when making good folds on the turn.... waah waah). No need to whine too much on the specifics by providing humorous bad beat examples, but anyways, it seems like any time I don't take any bad beats for a ~half hour period of time, my collective stack will grow 20-30BB without even winning any monster pots or having monster hands. The loose gamblers are really chasing and the maniacs and calling stations are doing their thing.

Although it is still a little early to tell, I actually think that part of it is related to better game selection made possible by using PokerAce HUD. Basically, I've been quad tabling Eurobet at $5/$10 limit, 10 handed. I'm probably playing at a given table on average for ~25 minutes. I use my Party account to continually scout for good tables. How is this different from when I was using GameTime+? Well, when using GameTime+, I'm not fast enough to be frequently checking for good tables. The few extra clicks to add and remove tables in GameTime+ (and do timely force imports in PokerTracker to get that first hand history in) is just a bit more time than I can spare when quad tabling (even when it is 10 handed).

I can't quantify it, but I strongly suspect this has significant value. There are so many pro and semi pro players at $3/$6 and $5/$10 that if you are 3-4 minutes slower in discovering a good table, you'll be 15-20th in the waiting list instead of 4-5th. That really cuts down on the number of hands you play at really good tables because if you have to wait in line behind a dozen decent tight agg/agg players, the table is far less profitable by the time you take a seat.

I'd guesstimate that I can poll the status of 2-3 times as many tables using PokerAce than using GameTime+.

Now, these factors are naturally just about maximizing $ results from low limit multitabling. Again, I'm in this phase of learning next to nothing from playing poker. To keep my sanity, I'll continue to play in the weekly live NL tournament on Saturdays and the occasional live $20/$40. As I've said before, I hope to progress beyond this stage in about a month. (Even at that point, I think it will be more of the same monkey business at $10/$20, but I will probably increase the live/online playing time ratio slightly.)

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I decided to make more poker trips later this year. I've already made travel plans to go to Foxwoods in early November (to play in side game action during the World Poker Finals; thanks to UA for having a great seat sale rate) and Vegas again in early December for the next WPBT Winter Classic (which also corresponds to the same time as the championship event at the Bellagio World Poker Classic, so the side game action should be great that weekend).

Additionally, I will most likely make a weekend trip to LA to play some mid stakes limit games at Commerce.

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