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!

One of the main concepts to take away from this book is Magriel’s M and how to apply it.

“The most important single number that governs your play towards the end of tournaments is M, which is simply the ratio of your stack to the current total of blinds and antes”.

The vast majority of poker players will have heard of “M” and most will be able to tell you what it is and how to calculate it. However, it seems to be increasingly common for tournament players to be discussing hands in terms of “bbs”. If there was an industry standard for structures this would be fine, but there are even subtle differences in the size of antes on Full Tilt and Poker Stars.

If we delve deeper and look at the structures on the European friendly sites the differences are staggering; Party Poker’s antes are almost negligible and appear almost as an afterthought whereas ipoker’s antes can add up to 50% more than the bb. The size of antes in live play also differs dramatically from casino to casino, some still not using antes at all but others having enormous antes, often due to the size of chips available and dealers’ eagerness to colour up the chips at the earliest point they can.

The standard size of an ante is around 10% of the big blind. Therefore an M of 5 for example usually = 12-13bbs. But as discussed, there is actually no industry standard.

To use an extreme example let’s compare ipoker and Party, and look at a specific situation where using the number of bbs you have to determine your play can be disastrous.

At the 300/600 level in the ipoker daily rebuys the ante is 100. Therefore at a 10 handed table there’s 1900 in the pot before any action takes place.

If you had an M of 5 this would be 9500 chips = 15.83 bbs

At the 800/1600 level on Party the ante is 50. Therefore at a 10 handed table there’s 2900 in the pot before any action takes place.

If you had an M of 5 this would be 14500 chips = 9.06 bbs.

The difference is clearly huge. Shoving the button with 9bbs on Party nets you the same gain as shoving the button with 16bbs on ipoker at this level.

If we were using 12bbs as being an M of 5, we’d actually be shoving an M of 6.6 on Party and an M of 3.8 on ipoker.

On Pokerxfactor.com Sheets has put up a very handy tool for calculating what hands you need to have for shoving particular M’s from particular positions based on the Nash Equilibrium¹

It’s great as a guideline, but be aware that just because something is +ev it may not be optimal. Ie shoving with an M of 10 on Party could be shoving 32bbs so a plethora of other options are available.

Also calling ranges will differ from site to site, it’s easy to see why the bb’s calling range of a 9bb shove on Party will be different from the bb’s calling range of a 16bb shove on ipoker.

Using the number of big blinds you have to determine your shoving range can be a massive leak, taking a second or two to calculate your M will benefit your game greatly.

That Harrington fella knew what he was talking about.

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.