Letter from Doke (21st Feb 2012)

Hi all

My UKIPT Galway campaign can best be described as pure misery. I did build a bit of a stack on day one to have about 35k (comfortably above average) with about an hour to go on day 1 and could have been up to over 50k after calling a shove with tens. Instead I lost a chunk to jt and after another reverse found myself bagging up with less than starting stack. That meant having to get busy early and either double up or bust on day 2. Unfortunately it was the latter. I could describe the side event misery in detail but let's just say I ran bad, and also made a mistake in the 300 side event (more on that hand later).

The event was at least very well organised and good craic with all the familiar faces and characters. When the dust had cleared it was a very high quality final table that included online beast Emmet "mully85" Mullin, defending champ Nick Abou Risk, and one of the most promising newcomers on the Irish scene John "jwillo" Willoughby. Mully is one of Allinstevie's Omagh crew and a great guy: when I switched from playing stts to mtts online he popped up a few times on the rail on some of my early Stars final tables to give me some advice on the regs which I greatly appreciated. So I was really thrilled to see him win.

This week it's back to the online grind for me. I'm hoping to fit in the nightly SharkRankings game on Irish Eyes at 8.15 most evenings. I'm currently languishing in mid table obscurity in the 10K league so it's time to do something about that.

Next weekend sees Stephen Mclean's Super Poker event in Citywest. While I'm feeling a bit live pokered out, this should be a pretty cool tourney with a very big prize pool. It would be a good time for me to start running well again live.

This week's strategy is a look at some of the maths of 3, 4 and 5 betting wars. In the 300 side event, I had 9K at 100/200 when I found jacks in the small blind. The cutoff opened to 450, I quickly threebet to 1150, he made it 3200 and I shoved. He had aces and held. At the time I didn't think too deeply about the hand as on the face of it it doesn't seem like that big a mistake to get 45 bbs in with a hand as strong as jacks against a player in late position. However, after analysing the hand, I think the villain here is opening top 20% of hands. That means the hands I can legitimately threebet for value are top 10% (hands that are stronger than the top half of his range).

Similarly, he can four bet top 5% of hands for value, and I can then 5 bet shove top 2.5%. Jacks falls just outside this range. Threebet folding a hand that strong seems a bit wonky, so on reflection I think the best play is to just flat the open and play the hand cautiously. Note that the maths here depends heavily on the opener's range. If he's a very loose player opening, say 80%, then the 3 bet range becomes 40%, and the 5 bet shove range 10% so I'd be perfectly happy to get it in with jacks.

Finally, today the new Preferred Seat option was launched on Irish Eyes Poker. For anyone wanting to multi-table and sit at the same postion on all tables just click on the 'Options' tab in the poker client lobby and choose your preferred seat position. This position will be applied to all tables you play at regardless of game or table size.

Good luck at the tables - unless I'm at the same table :)

Doke