The Well: 2461 Badugi

[2461Badugi]

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what do you do with the hand i posted here:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showth...e=0#Post8120542

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I just read this in the blog, so I know the results, which probably taint things. But I would certainly fold to the threebet, if not before. This is an ugly spot, because you can't just check-call and let John draw for free, but four-betting would be huge spew.

You say CO is pretty tight, if that means he's unlikely to be pat on a worse hand I just check-fold third. If he has a good chance of being pat on a worse hand I think betting out has better potential than either check-raise or check-call.

[2461Badugi]

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lie to me about the ownership of the forum, I'd had enough.

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???? thats surprising. There is no secret who owns the forum, and there is also no secret who has the management rights. Its split between 2+2 and Chuck.

TT [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

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Who owns 2+2? Where does the buck stop on forum policy decisions?

[*TT*]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
lie to me about the ownership of the forum, I'd had enough.

[/ QUOTE ]

???? thats surprising. There is no secret who owns the forum, and there is also no secret who has the management rights. Its split between 2+2 and Chuck.

TT [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

Who owns 2+2? Where does the buck stop on forum policy decisions?

[/ QUOTE ] 2+2 online and 2+2 are technically separate entities. For many things the buck stops with Chuck, its a complicated business deal. Thats probably all I should say, its not my place to discuss Mason's business deals.

TT [img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]

[2461Badugi]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
what do you do with the hand i posted here:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showth...e=0#Post8120542

[/ QUOTE ]

I just read this in the blog, so I know the results, which probably taint things.

[/ QUOTE ]

Never mind this part, it's not the same hand.

[2461Badugi]

TT wanted to hear about B2B, so I'm going to tie that in with some other stuff and wrap this up.

I first learned about B2B in the summer of 2005, I think from Tom who had been playing the PL Draw tournaments there. They had 2-7 TD tournaments, and while they were micros, hey, they were TD. I put a little money on 24h Poker, played a few of the tournaments, won a couple, but didn't think about it much. I glanced at the cash games, but there was never one going.

In November, the B2B network started skinning off like mad, and offering great bonuses to attract US players. Martin's Poker with €600 at 5x raked hands was way too good to pass up, so I decided to take B2B a little more seriously. I played a little LHE, but that game rarely ran. Eventually I discovered that if I sat down at €2/€4 triple draw, people would drop in and play with me. Pretty soon I wasn't doing much else.

The great thing with B2B is that everything in the client simply listed the game as "2-7 triple draw." The word "lowball" never appeared. This led to the four stages of B2B TD:

1) Player buys in for 10BB. Loses it playing for high.
2) Player rebuys for 10BB. Loses it playing A-5 style.
3) Player rebuys for 20BB. Plays 2-7 extrememly badly.
4) Player keeps coming back, thinking "now that I know how to play it won't be so bad."

A significant number of players dropped off at each stage, but it was surprising how many of them made it all the way to stage four. Even given the legendary Scandinavian stubbornness, only one player ever managed to get past stage four into a state where he could hold his own against me, and take money from the rest of the fish; I've recently seen him playing 3/6 on UB as lullos.

In general, I sat around watching DVDs in the afternoons and every once in a while someone would come along and drop $50 or $100 in my lap. B2B was adding skins like mad, and all of them were throwing out big 5x bonuses trying to get traffic, so I skipped from skin to skin earning bonus and taking money from extremely bad Swedes. I may be the only person ever to make $50+/hr over the course of months just from playing one table of 2/4. I occasionally got higher games going, but not more than a couple of times a month.

Which isn't to say there was no challenge to it. B2B had the big blind as the button headsup, and naturally most of my play was headsup, so that took some adjusting to and a fair amount of theory work. And beating bad players is its own level of skill, at least once they know the rules.

Eventually after about four months of this, I'd taken so much money out of the game that the supply of fish dried up and I had to find something else to do. Killing a game pretty much all by yourself is an interesting experience. It's something I've been kind of wary of since, especially when I came back to UB this fall and my winrate stayed pretty much the same. I needed some time to get back used to full ring, but it's probably not a good idea for me to be playing 3/6 very much.

It was easy to get complacent in this game, which was really a problem. It didn't help that it coincided with the worst of my health problems as well; I spent several weeks in January convinced -- or perhaps hoping -- I was dying, and when I finally got dragged into the hospital and they couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, that didn't make it any better. But just as they were about to give up and send me home, they did one last hail mary sort of test, and, oddly enough, while the test results came back negative, the spinal tap itself provided a great deal of relief. That eventually led us to a diagnosis and (after recently switching neurologists) I'm cautiously optimistic for 2007. While I made pretty good money for the hours I was able to play in 2006, and I've made strong theoretical progress, I feel like I've really lost the year in terms of advancing the games I'm playing in. So that's my big thing going forward from here.

Anyway, that's my day in the well. People can post more questions if they like, but I'm not going to guarantee answers.