Three weeks ago it was no surprise when chazcombes won the Party Hi Roller as he seems to final table it every other week, and actually similar can be said of both Mathclub and Merge37 who both have impressive resumes on Party, but when Poker-Allies players won the same event three times in a row we felt it was worth documenting!

We sat down with all three players and found out their individual strategies to winning on Party and in particular in their weekly hi roller event.

chaz

Chaz:

In my first 20 odd tournies on Party I didn’t even cash and I feel it was because I wasn’t thinking about adapting to the different structure. Then I realised that on Party you can afford to be more patient than other sites because antes don’t come into play until later than most sites, and generally when people 3 bet you they are very rarely light.

I’ve started to use this to my advantage against the non regs when deep by 3 betting a larger range, and they auto assume you have a monster.

mathclub

Mathclub:

I just played it pretty tight, as you have to do on party with the structure.  Once we got to the final table most of the other players were playing tight as well so I found some good spots to put pressure on people.  I find knowing the Sheets pushing ranges from pokerxfactor.com is key on Party because you often have that awkward 5M-8M kind of stack.

merge

Merge37:

One thing about Party is that Idefinitely play tighter preflop and then don’t look to fold if I can help it post flop because of the structure.

I’m less inclined to go for marginal steals, it just never seems as enticing due to the lack of large antes and awkward stacks. When I do open I make it ~2.2x, a lot of other people miniraise which may be optimal.

I played fairly nitty around the final table bubble and passed a couple of marginal hands where I could have shoved over Sirocko who was the huge chip leader and was opening every hand, but I didn’t feel under a ton of pressure to get it in and felt I could wait for a decent spot to double up – which I eventually did.

After that I won a few more hands at showdown including AA > 88, then four handed I picked up the pace a little and made some steals and won smallish pots to get to 200k. 3 handed lasted forever and it was pretty cagey for a while with scout314 and Sirocko.

Eventually I got heads up, but was faced with a 4:1 chip deficit. I doubled up with A4 > K8 then the final hand I won with a rivered flush after calling a raise pre and barrelling the flop and turn. He called it down with top pair no kicker.

So I guess it must be nice to be merge37 and make flushes when you need them!

So it seems in conclusion that the old adage: “Tight is right” is still the case on Party!

It’s been a bloody long time since I last updated my blog. How long exactly, I’m not sure and to be honest I can’t be bothered checking, but long enough to make it difficult to find something to write about. It’s like when you haven’t seen a good friend in a long time you should have a ton to talk about but for the first few minutes you struggle a little to find conversation points. That’s my excuse anyway for the abomination of this introduction, and presumably also my excuse for the rest of this entry. Bad-mouthing my own work before I’ve even put pen to paper, I’ve sunk to a new low.

Anyway…..

I took a trip across the ditch to Melbourne in January for the Aussie Millions and came back (rather predictably) empty handed. As with all of these trips I had a great time, but spent a lot of money in doing so. I also had the standard epiphany that I experience whenever I go away for any period of time and spend shed loads of money. This epiphany is basically always the same – I’m going to get back home and get my head down and work hard… I always have the best of intentions, but my work ethic usually doesn’t last that long. So 7 weeks on, how have I done? Let’s look at the numbers.

I’ve played poker on 22 days out of 47.

I’ve played 689 tournaments with an average buy in of $156.31.

I’ve run @ 5.44% roi making $5544.50.

Obviously I’d like to have been more successful over this period, but I really can’t complain about running badly, especially over this kind of sample.

I’ve just picked these stats from my google document. Poker-Allies sponsored players have been using google docs to track their tournament results since October. There’s been some teething problems but we’re almost there and I’d like to thank our head of IT Steven Hillson for putting up with our annoying requests over the past few months and creating connected documents that give us access to statistics on our players as a group. We’re now able to see Poker-Allies sponsored players’ ROI by site and of course across the board at a glance. Amongst other things, this allows us to estimate profitability of certain tournaments for certain players and to be able to gauge their expected ROI to a much more accurate range than ever possible before.

Away from Poker, another part of my epiphany was that I was going to get fit and try to play football to a decent level, although strictly speaking I had already decided this prior to the Aussie Millions.

I have much better things to report on this front, I’ve lost about 4kgs (8.8 pounds) and am feeling pretty fit. Unfortunately I’m still in the reserve squad, but I think I should be pushing for a place in the 1sts in the next couple of weeks, if not I think I’ll enjoy playing for the 2nds because I’ve managed to bullshit my way into play attacking centre midfield, whereas if I make my way to the 1sts it will likely be as a left back.

So that’s about it, been pretty short really. Having done this entry though I feel like I can follow it up quickly with an offering more focused on poker. I’ll be playing the next few days and I’m sure I’ll find a few concepts to blether about. Hopefully I’ll also be motivated to write a couple of articles as well. I’ve actually written one on combating good regs on Ongame and ipoker with an aggressive preflop strategy, I haven’t looked at it in a couple of months though, so probably needs some editing. On top of that I’ll discuss my (lack of) Vegas plans and probably just re-iterate my distaste for live tournaments in general.

Until then, good luck.

Obviously I was delighted to walk away with 3rd in what us one of the biggest online tournaments of the year. $269k is a huge score, and you have to be grateful if you ever get an online score like this. I was at the same time very disappointed to finish 3rd having had over 2/3 of the chips in play. At this point I maybe should have taken a deal, but I felt I would win and wound up getting unlucky three handed. I am generally happy with my performance, particularly the way I was able to adapt to the tournament conditions and the players I faced.

The WCOOP two day structure was very slow, allowing lots of play and the opportunity to see a lot of hands before I was under any pressure from the blinds and antes. It was very important to be patient and disciplined, and there was certainly no need to force the issue, as with a regular structure. I was gifted a great number of chips as people ran bluffs in an effort to accumulate chips too quickly. I was able to capitalise because I was still in the tournament having been extremely patient in waiting for the right spots. I also played for 16 hours straight on day one, so I was really pleased to have got through the day without surrendering to fatigue.

The structure also provided for essentially a post flop tournament. For the majority of the tournament I was over 100 bb’s deep rendering position even more important than usual. I successfully used peoples preflop aggression against them by calling in position and taking the pot on a later street.

Another key to this tournament was that I was able to single table Day Two, and also the latter stages of Day One. Over a long period of time I was able to observe patterns in my opponents, and to think about how I was going to exploit them. You need to have the flexibility in your game to out manoeuvre people in a variety of ways, and the confidence to execute a plan when you see an opportunity. However, to be able to do this, you need to be able to watch your table conditions and game-flow very closely in order to get your timing spot on. I believe observation, adaptability, and timing are 3 essential ingredients to defeating the stronger online fields. I would not have been able to do this if I were multi-tabling.

If you are backed by poker-allies, and would like to watch hand histories, please message me, and feel free to ask questions regarding any hand I played.

Neil