Etcetera

Excuse me for what I anticipate will be a ramble. I have a bunch of little things I want to cover.

First off, my personal longest SNG win streak finally came to an end after my 8th consecutive ITM finish. It was obviously bound to happen, and I'm just as prepared to hit the possible 8 finishes out-of-the-money streak if the poker gods deem it necessary. However, I did learn and confirm something which I really already knew: when I've been winning, I play better. It's the obvious opposite of tilt, but there's more to it than that. When I've hit a good run of online play, or am sitting "up" for the night in a home game, I'm mentally confident in my moves, yet cautious to protect recent winnings. And that is perhaps just about the perfect way to play profitable poker. Confident and protective.

As a side note, I'm 12 ITM for the last 20 $10 SNGs with 5 first place finishes, for a total of +$180. Jinx be damned, I'm feeling very confident about finishing the year in the black... only ~$130 to go. On top of that, I've scored a (yet to be delivered) "hamper" bonus, consisting of 2 shirts and a hat, from Partypoker for playing 1000 raked hands in a week back in August. I've also scored a 500 piece set of the typical ABS/"clay" chips for making a deposit on Pacificpoker... also yet to be delivered, but supposedly arriving this week. More on this later.

Another interesting thing happened to me the other night on Party, when I actually was up against a guy from my town. We chatted a bit during the game, and it appears that poker is alive and doing very well with the college kids at nearby PSU. Just last week I learned of a nightly! game on campus, and this guy tipped me off to a few possible weeklies elsewhere and we traded email addresses for future invites or whatever.

I'm looking forward to hosting a homegame this coming weekend, although I fear we'll be shorthanded as usual, and I'm not particularly interested in inviting strangers or people from work. It's tough bringing new people into an established core of 5 or so players. This group typically plays quarter/half dealer's choice, and part of me really wants to play that kind of poker again, not only because it's just a fun/friendly game, but also to test myself and see how all my recent online hold em improvements transfer over to those waters. Then again, we're all pretty into NLHE SNG style tournaments, and I feel very confident against the group right now. Truthfully, my wife worries me the most, not only because she's listened to 3 months of strategy and hand analysis from me, but also because she knows how to use that all against me. Ideally we'll have enough people to do a winner-take-all tourney or two, with the losers playing some shorthanded dealer's choice on the side.

As I said earlier, I've been playing some on Pacificpoker, and although there are a few things I don't like about the interface (the way bets are shown, lack of a 4 color deck, etc), there are some interesting game choices available. Firstly, they offer some lower stakes limit games as low as .05/.10, which would be better for a beginner or someone on a limited roll, as opposed to Party's .50/1 tables. On top of that, they have SNGs with a standard 10% rake/entry fee (i.e. $5+.50, $2.50+.25, as opposed to Party's awful $5+1), and some enticing 5-player SNGs where the top 3 get money.

These 5-player SNGs are appealing to me somewhat, because the odds of winning are essentially twice as good as in a 10 player tourney, and the odds of making the money are 3 in 5. Now, in a $10 5-player SNG like this, the third place finisher only get's back $10, thus actually losing $1 to the rake/entry, but that sure beats getting a 4th on Party and losing the whole $11. The blind structure seems a little slower as well, which typically means that luck has less of a chance of beating good play. Overall, the reward is less, but so is the variance... it seems to me that you could become a very consistent winner at these 5 player tourneys, but I'm still sticking with Party's $10 10-player affairs for the time being.

Which brings me to what I think is my last thought, which is that I've been thinking about a formula to calculate "profitability" of SNGs, based on buy-in, entry fee, number of players, prize distribution, and possibly blind structure. I'm obviously making this way more complex than necessary, but it would be kinda neat (and quite ubergeek) to have a formula to plug the particulars into, and calculate some kind of "score" which would theoretically indicate how good or bad a given tourney is to play. I guess the score would end up being a way to express risk vs reward basically: a higher score indicates less risk for better rewards, and vice versa. I'm still playing with possible formulas. Anyone have any thoughts or ideas on this?