Prose from a Poshboy

[celtic]

Gazza on my right! He’s already doubled up to 5m in the £200 AK > KK of Tim Chung and is now focussing on the £1k.

With the way he’s playing, I can’t quite work out whether I want him here or not!

Think we want him to start updating in his diary too!

Good luck for Day 2.

[redsimon]

I think theres a stream of High Roller today?

Good Luck Ali G!

[cambridgealex]

I think theres a stream of High Roller today?

Good Luck Ali G!

I think the FT yes

22 left 17 paid. 15bbs for me. Gazza got the lot

[cambridgealex]

Ian and I both getting it in bad multiple times and winning.

Itm with average. Mitch also hanging around like a bad smell.

[cambridgealex]

Just made the final table of 7! The blog run good is real! Short tho.

Ian is fully focused on the £200 now…

[JK]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1H0Crz7LYg - Live stream

Our hero just doubled through for 14BBs with  vs  All-in pre SB vs BB

[cambridgealex]

4th! Decent start to the year

[cambridgealex]

I have been attempting to dust off my £11k 4th place cash by busting 5 tournaments since then - 2700*2 + 560*3. Got really close in the main event last night - after a lightning start, all my moves stopped working and then I fell card dead at the wrong time and succumbed once again to the unstopabble force that is Waheed Ashraf, 8 off the money.

I've been sitting down on a 2/5 game after each day to wind down a bit - and even though I know I can't play my A game at those stakes, especially after 6-10 hours of tournament play (especially especially directly after a near bubble) - I enjoy playing so much in that moment. I'm thriving playing 300-500bb poker vs people typically shot-taking. Obviously I play way too many hands and too aggressive but it seems to be working, and I've got a good sense of when to apply the brakes.

It helps when you hit miracle gutshots, also.

So tournament buyins all reclaimed now - we have one more event the £1k 6max today, but we've locked in a £10k minimum winning trip - which is a nice start to the year.

[RED-DOG]

Well played Alex, keep it up.

I have a question if I may, you said you've never been a winner online, why do you think that is.

[OverTheBorder]

Good to play with you Alex, glad to see the diary back.

[cambridgealex]

Well played Alex, keep it up.

I have a question if I may, you said you've never been a winner online, why do you think that is.

So the answer could plausibly be simply variance.

Click to see full-size image.

Excluding the HU sng stretch at the beginning, I've played around 2500 tournaments lifetime on stars which is the volume a fulltime player might put in in a year. Top players have downswings way bigger and longer than this. I actually won on other sites like winamax and stars.es but lost on partypoker, GG, stars.fr - all quite small volume back in the day. I've never played any serious volume at cash. If I had a 10% ROI, my chance of losing over a 2500 sample of tournaments is 31%.

However, I won't cop out of the question like that...

I basically have never focussed on playing online. It was a side hustle alongside my live volume playing sundays, scoop, wcoop etc from 2011 to 2015 - and then literally 6 years off until May 2022 I played scoop again. So when I did play, I was likely not a winning player in the fields. Looking back, it was complacent to just think I could show up and apply my live game to online, go on autopilot, think that my exploits that I'd learned playing live were appropriate and my fundamentals sufficient for online. They almost definitely weren't. I never properly studied, I never got coaching - I just hoped that I was good enough and the sample size and variance masked the fact that I wasn't.

It was a reality check coming back from covid and playing EPT Prague in March of last year - boy did I feel out of my depth. Everyone had gotten way better, having already been better than me to begin with...Now I feel competitive in $100-$200 online fields, and €5k european fields, $10k US fields.

I still don't have any interest in battling the variance of online tournaments, for <10% ROIs, with possibilities of ghosting, RTA, stable collusion etc. I will probably dabble in scoop and wcoop again this year though depending on my schedule

[cambridgealex]

Actually I may have understated things, I forgot that I actually did pretty well on winamax back when Brits were allowed to feast on the froggies

Click to see full-size image.

If it turns out that I am in fact a winning player, then disregard everything I said about variance and I'll put online crusher in my twitter bio.

[RED-DOG]

Haha, that's terrific Alex. Thanks for the comprehensive reply.

[mondatoo]

Nice to see you back on the diary Alex, enjoying the read.

In my post-bitB days, one of the things I've been doing is providing results and schedule analysis for people from Sharkscope data and regards results analysis I won't do the analysis for someone when they have played less than 5,000 games... in the last two years

Of course, we never want to just blame downswings on variance, it rarely ever is just that, but the sample here is certainly too small to make any kind of accurate conclusions.

Recently I was doing some group data research a few months ago and even though I've looked at an infinite amount of graphs this one shocked me

Click to see full-size image.

Cliffs for those not so familiar with Sharkscope this is filtered for PKO's on Stars for the last 365 days with over 300 runners using a "playergroup" of 108 players who are mainly top Mid & High Stakes players.

This graph is insane!

Basically, as a group, they went from crushing at 20%+ total ROI to losing over more than 20,000 games.

I think pretty much nobody has a true grasp of how ludicrous variance is in poker, and I certainly include myself in that statement. Using results as a metric of ability is truly flawed, but there are not many better options.

One conclusion that we shouldn't take from this though is that "online poker is dead", it's definitely not, and 20%+ total ROI's are still very much achievable with good game selection.

Best of luck with everything Alex, keep crushing life mate.

[cambridgealex]

Thanks Ray, great to hear from you. I remember good times together in Marbella 2011! Do you still play yourself?

I'm not sure whether it's soothing to know it may all be variance, or frightening to know it could go on for a good while yet!

Hence my plan to balance out tournaments this year with as much cash as I can during the tournament stops, and play less side events.