Lets Not Overreact

Pokerstars finally announced its much anticipated changes to their cash game buyin structure, and implemented said changes today. They are as follows:

Many USD currency Hold’em and Omaha games with No-Limit or Pot-Limit betting will be offered with new and different minimum, maximum, and default buy-in amounts. Most stakes of NL Hold’em and PL Omaha will be offered as follows:

20-50 bb, with default buy-in of 40bb
40-100 bb, with default buy-in of 80bb
100-250 bb, with default buy-in of 200bb and ante equal to 20% of the Big Blind

All games in Euro currency will still offer a buy-in range of 35 to 100 bb, but the default buy-in will be lowered from 100 bb to 70 bb. Euro games are now available at some new stakes.

Pokerstars is the last of the major poker networks to make changes to their structure, will Full Tilt being the first. Unfortunately for us Stars regs, Full Tilt did a much better job from the perspective of a full stack player, labelling their low BI tables as "shallow" and setting them to be 20-35bb buyins with their 35-100bbs tables labelled as "standard". Thus far on FTP, the fish have generally flocked to the "standard" tables and SSing has all but died.

On Stars however, there is no labelling of any kind, and at least thus far it seems the 20-50bb games will be just as prevalent as the 40-100bb. Short stackers will survive for the time being, but with their game selection reduced somewhat, their edged reduced in their games (50bb "fullstacks" should in theory play less speculative hands preflop and thus be at less of a natural disadvantage to SSers), and the rat-holing time doubled (from 30 min to 60 min), SSers should start to become significantly less profitable, and hopefully stop making any money at all even after rakeback. However, unlike on Full Tilt this happening will probably be a slow process as 50bb stacks adjust and SSers realize their winrates have dropped. Thus, Stars will still collect a ton of rake as the SSers start down the road to busto, this at the expense of those who want the best possible game selection playing 100bb full stack poker.

I wish Stars had simply copied FTP's model. They love money however, and these changes should in the long run be better than nothing, though they may actually be a negative for 24 tabling fullstacks in the short term. I suppose we'll all have a better idea of what results these changes are actually going to bring in a month or so.

How To Fade Two Outs

The damn Canadian Dollar just keeps on getting stronger versus its US counterpart. I yearn for the days when a Canadian Dollar was only worth 0.75-0.85 USD and every withdraw I made came with a nice bonus attached from the currency conversion.

Comical runbad continued Thursday. I was two outed countless times, and one outed once against a megadonk (got AI on the turn with KcKx on a 3 club low board vs JdJh). Right at the end of my session however I did manage to figure out how to fade a two outer when AIPF: simply have a short stack AI with the two outs! It also helps to have the same suits as the big stack to kill what would otherwise be a guaranteed four flush. See below:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (8 handed)
Button ($23)
SB ($105.70)
BB ($37)
UTG ($66.30)
UTG+1 ($48)
Hero (MP1) ($200)
MP2 ($37)
CO ($225.30)

Preflop: Hero is MP1 with A, A
2 folds, Hero bets $8, MP2 raises to $37 (All-In), CO calls $37, 3 folds, Hero raises to $200 (All-In), CO calls $163

Flop: ($440) 3, 6, 9 (3 players, 2 all-in)

Turn: ($440) 3 (3 players, 2 all-in)

River: ($440) 4 (3 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $440 | Rake: $3

Results:
Hero had A, A (two pair, Aces and threes).
MP2 mucked K, K (two pair, Kings and threes).
CO mucked K, K (two pair, Kings and threes).
Outcome: Hero won $437

Pandemic of Fail

Rather than spend three paragraphs ranting about how god awful I've run so far (particularly at 200-600NL) in April, I'd like to talk about something I've noticed lately with regards to the pool of regulars at small stakes full ring games on Pokerstars. For whatever reason, it seems like a surprisingly large number of regulars who were beating the games for meager yet somewhat respectable winrates (say something like ~1ptBB over 500k+ hands) during 2008 and the first half of 2009 simply aren't winning anymore.

I was intending to try and break down my thoughts as to why I think this phenomena exists in this post, but aside from the obvious points such as increases in game difficulty and more people chasing SNE, I keep failing to do so adequately. I'll leave you simply with this: I'm confident the vast majority of the regulars whom have seen their edge disappear in the last year do not understand how game theory applies at a very fundamental level to poker.

Anyway, here's a hand from today versus (surprise!) a regular whom used to win money but hasn't been beating the rake since July of '09. He's very TAG preflop, running around 13/10 over 4k hands. His raise cbet is 12% over this sample, a pretty reasonable number.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, $1.00 BB (9 handed)
BB ($152.45)
UTG ($101.50)
UTG+1 ($49.50)
MP1 ($100)
Hero (MP2) ($118.45)
MP3 ($117.65)
CO ($118)
Button ($40.05)
SB ($137.05)

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with 2, 2
3 folds, Hero bets $4, MP3 calls $4, 4 folds

Flop: ($9.50) 2, J, Q (2 players)
Hero bets $6.50, MP3 raises to $13, Hero calls $6.50

After being minraised on the flop, I have what is probably the most interesting decision point in the hand. As noted above villain's raise cbet stat is pretty much middle of the road. However, his sizing is completely retarded and what makes things interesting. Minraising JJ, QQ, or QJ here would be awful under nearly all circumstances. He'd want to raise a big draw (say T9dd or AKdd) larger as well to benefit from FE. Basically, no good player should have a minraising range at all on this flop. I decide to flat to keep bluffs in his range and because if I 3b the flop I don't see him getting it in without a big draw, KdQd or an overset which has me crushed.

Turn: ($35.50) 7 (2 players)
Hero checks, MP3 bets $13.90, Hero calls $13.90

The turn card sucks and I call to control the pot size, allow him to continue bluffing if that's his plan, and if he somehow does have a flush hopefully boat up the river. His sizing on this street is also ridiculous and makes the decision a bit more interesting. A made flush would want to price a set out of odds to boat up. Based on my flop line, he should fear I have a flush a decent amount of the time and he's going to get c/red. I can also very easily have a hand like AdAx here that if he had a set/non nut flush he'd want to price out with a bigger bet. Just like the flop, villain is once again repping nothing.

River: ($63.30) Q (2 players)
Hero checks, MP3 bets $86.75 (All-In), Hero calls $86.75

I really dislike calling overshoves as they're so often the nuts, but villain has repped nothing every postflop street and I have a boat. Snappity snap.

Total pot: $236.80 | Rake: $3

Results:
Hero had 2, 2 (full house, twos over Queens).
MP3 had 6, 7 (two pair, Queens and sevens).
Outcome: Hero won $233.80

I guess this might be why he doesn't win money anymore.

Final Fantasy XIII

I promised to provide my thoughts on FF13 once I had completed it, so here we go. If you're looking for poker content you'll want to skip this entry entirely. I'm really only going to provide cliff notes rather than a full review as the latter would likely only interest the extremely hardcore.

Being that I had fairly high hopes for the game, I would say that it ended up being a marginal disappointment for me personally. Unsurprisingly, FF13 is most probably the best looking video game made to date. The plot and cast of characters were fairly engaging, though certainly not nearly as strong as the better entries in the series. No individual character jumped out as being exceptionally interesting or cool and I think this hurt my enjoyment of the game somewhat. That being said, all six characters did develop significantly and their coming together as a group was believable from a human interaction standpoint.

The soundtrack was far too ambient for my taste. High quality music, but not a single truly memorable track. I'm certain not having Uematsu around was part of the cause.

In terms of gameplay, FF13 did a lot of truly innovative and damn near revolutionary things for the genre. The game is most definitely the most linear Final Fantasy made, and while this isn't inherently a bad thing I believe it contributed to my feeling like a part of the game was missing. The battle system relies very heavily on macro management of your three person party, with very little to no micro management necessary. Because said battle system was entirely new and innovative I found it to be quite enjoyable at first, but as battles began to drag on the lack of micromanagement left me wishing I had more to do. Character advancement was handled by moving through class oriented grids somewhat similar to FFX - no complaints in this regard.

While I accept that no future entry in the series is likely to give me the enjoyability of 6 (my favorite FF), I was truly hoping that 13 would end up somewhere in league of 4, 7, and 10 on my favorites list. Despite being an enjoyable game, it seems that is not to be however. At least I'll always remember the baby Chocobo that lives in Sazh's afro.