What a relief! It looks like the Double or Nothing Sit-n-Gos on PokerStars are profitable again!

For a while I was thinking it was going to be impossible to get anywhere with this challenge so I'm very happy that things have been going well for my last two updates.

Right after I last posted on my DoN Challenge progress I had a nice little run of almost 20 straight wins and I was feeling great (initial spike in Update 9 portion of graph). Unfortunately it was followed by a big downswing that had me tilting again. I tried to regain my composure and rode it out.

My Cash Game Bankroll Management Spreadsheet got some good feedback so I thought I'd start releasing some of the other spreadsheets I use. It takes some time to clean up and make them a little more user friendly.

Today I'm sharing my Double or Nothing SnG Bankroll Management Spreadsheet. It's the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my DoN SnG Challenge progress and it allows me to easily post charts on my site. This spreadsheet will work with both standard and turbo DoN

DoNs are a great way to build up a bankroll because they are relatively low variance games and pretty easy to beat. Using this spreadsheet can help you build a nice sized roll from a relatively small deposit on PokerStars. Just enter a few parameters and start playing. The spreadsheet will let suggest when you should move up (or down) in stakes. If you don't have PokerStars, you can download it and create an account free here.

I ran across a site recently that is willing to get you started playing poker on a number of different sites without having to deposit any of your own money.

All you need to do is verify your identity and phone number and that's it.

It seems too good to be true but apparently it's legit. I did some searching and the company has been around for a number of years and I haven't run across any complaints.

A while ago I analyzed a few different PokerStars table themes. It was my long drawn-out thought process figuring out what I liked about different themes and why. My goal was to try to come up with a table theme that I like as much as Hyper-Simple that was more visually appealing.

The result is my PokerStars Simple-Slick Theme. Instructions for downloading and installing it follow some of the reasons I made the decisions I did.

It's been a while since I've posted an update on my Double or Nothing Sit-n-Go Challenge.

I had a bit of a down turn. My last two updates were me reporting I was break even. It was a bit demoralizing and I wasn't putting in the volume I needed to meet my goal.

Instead I was taking a look at my stats and hand histories in working on figuring out what adjustments I need to make. It seems to have helped.

Since my last update my win rate has been ~ 58% and my ROI around 8% with a $120 profit bringing my challenge bankroll up to $627.

I noticed Daniel Negreanu tweeted that he was going to hit the 100/200 NLHE tables on Pokerstars after busting out of the EPT main event in Monte Carlo. I missed the live action so I turned to PokerTableRatings to check out the replay.

PokerTableRatings.com (PTR) is a site where you can check both your own and other players cash game stats (NLHE and Omaha only). You can even download hand histories to import into PokerTracker, PokerOffice or Holdem Manager to give your database a boost.

PTR provides a lot of information as well as the ability to replay hands and sessions. The PTR hand replayer was recently overhauled but I just noticed that there was another change that looks like it came online today.

PokerStars announced some upcoming changes to their NL/PL Cash Game tables.

Many USD currency Hold’em and Omaha games with No-Limit or Pot-Limit betting will be offered with new and different minimum, maximum, and default buy-in amounts. Most stakes of NL Hold’em and PL Omaha will be offered as follows:

20-50 bb, with default buy-in of 40bb
40-100 bb, with default buy-in of 80bb
100-250 bb, with default buy-in of 200bb and ante equal to 20% of the Big Blind

I'm not too sure this is the best way to deal with the problem. I'll go into details further down.

The reason for the change is to help deal with the large number of players that have been buying in at the minimum.

A lot of poker players have been complaining about short-stackers ruining the game. At first I didn't think it much of it. One or two at a table didn't seem like a big deal and they were pretty easy to beat but it's getting harder and harder to find a table that isn't just full of short stackers. So many of the tables look the like the one pictured.

Short stackers are a nuisance because there is very little post flop play when they're in the hand. They're either pushing all in pre-flop or on the flop. When you get involved in a pot with a short-stacker, you're flipping for 20BB in most cases.

PokerStars had previously set up 50BB min tables but the problem is that the competition at those tables seems to be tougher. The recreational players usually sit at the "normal" tables. You identify a weak player limping in, you raise to isolate them and short-stacker pushes all in. While you had a hand that you were comfortable playing on the flop, it's not a hand you want to put 20BBs in preflop.

There are strategies to deal with shortstackers but you're essentially adopting a short-stacking mentality yourself, which isn't a lot of fun and not very profitable. If players wanted to play a push/fold strategy they would just stick to sit-n-gos.

The way most shortstackers make money is through volume and rakeback/bonuses. PokerStars doesn't offer rakeback. Rewards and bonuses are awarded based on VPPs which are accumulated based on rake. All players that are dealt into the hand get a share of the VPP regardless if they put any money into the pot or not.

Not only are short stackers taking the play out of the game, when they sit at 24 tables with single digit VPIPs they are earning as many VPPs as the players that are putting their money on the line. This seems to be an abuse of the PokerStars VIP Reward Program and unfair to other players.

A Better Way To Deal With Short Stackers

My initial reaction to PokerStars' changes isn't enthusiastic. I like the additon of the 100BB-2500BB tables. Deep stacked poker is a much different game but I don't like the change of the 40BB-100BB and additionof the 20BB-50BB tables.

The 50BB-100BB tables should have been left as is in my opinion. I don't see any reason to lower the min buy-in at that level. The 20-40BB tables might have been better off being just a straight 20BB table.

I don't think the changes will really have much of an effect. Good short stackers will move up to the 40BB-100BB tables and just do the same thing there. Players that like to play very deep can play at the 100-250BB tables.

Players getting screwed are ones that like to play 50-100BB deep. We're either going to have to get better at playing deeper or deal with the new generation of 40BB short stackers.

A better solution in my opinion would be to put limitations on short-stacking. Since most short stackers play very tight and don't contribute much in terms of rake, especially when compared to the amount of VPPs they receive, PokerStars could limit players to a maximum of 2 tables where they bought in for less than 50BBs and no more than 1 or 2 short stackers per table. They can play as many of the special 20BB tables as they want though.

This would really make a difference in terms of short stacking. Without being able to put in the volume, they wouldn't have incentive to play that way. If they were gone from the site I don't think it would have much of an impact for PokerStars' revenue, in fact it might increase it.

It seems that much of the money short-stackers win is by stealing pots pre-flop with their shoves. Pots won before a flop do not generate rake. The ratio of VPPs earned to actual rake paid is probably very high for short stackers. PokerStars is paying out a lot in bonuses and getting little in return on top of making the site unpleasant for many.

PokerStars made the announcement in a thread on twoplustwo.

When I first started this blog it was to document some of my progress as a poker player and some of my micro stakes bankroll building challenges. Some big names in poker have also done bankroll challenges and I've wound up writing articles about their strategies and progress.

I figured it might be a good idea to take this journalistic approach even further by creating WSJesque hedcut portraits of them. Pretty slick huh?

I messed up and didn't make the hedcut big enough so needing to fill up space I emailed a few questions to Chris Ferguson and Daniel Negreanu hoping one of them would reply. Much to my surprise, they both did!!

Every once in a while I get someone new following me on Twitter. A lot of times it's some person that just signed up with Twitter and joins hundreds of people trying to spam links or promote something.

The other day the author of No Limit Hold'em - Beating the Micro Stakes: Crushing Micro Stakes & Small Stakes Poker started following me. I didn't really look into it much but I thought it was pretty cool. So far I have 2 poker authors following me and a poker pro Scotty Nguyen. (That's right baby!)

This morning I got a pretty interesting email about the author.  I wasn't going to say anything but with the recent controversies related to poker instruction (Jason Ho, Nick Grudzien aka StoxTrader, Cardrunners vs Isuldur1) I'm getting sick of people trying to take advantage of people trying to learn the game.

So let's see what type of poker player Thomas Mitchell really is. Lucky for us, PokerTableRatings exists and we can lookup player's cash game stats to see just how good they are.

Mitchell doesn't reveal his screen name. He even blocks it out on the videos he posts of his sessions but he did leave enough information to figure it out. So without further ado, here's his PTR Graph.


He's only been playing a short while and it's only the last few months that he's been winning. A 1.74 BB/100 winrate over 140,000 hands isn't exactly what I would consider crushing.

Below are his results broken down by stake:


Again, nothing to write home about. These aren't horrible stats, if you're playing much higher stakes that is. For these small stake NLHE games they should be much higher, especially from someone that you're going to pay money to learn from.

So you can verify it's him, these are some hands from one of his videos. here, here, here, here and here.

In my opinion he clearly doesn't have the experience or the results to be receiving money for his knowledge. I was wondering how he even managed to get published but then realized it's done through Amazon's self publishing system.

While I haven't read the book, I did check out a couple of the sample pages. It's probably not bad advice but it's not anything you can't get free from reading the internet and poker forums. Probably where he got that knowledge from himself.

I tried Googling his screen name, wolfmmiii, and found some interesting post of his on blackhatworld.com. With such a unique name, I can only assume it's the same person. BlackHatWorld is a forum where "internet marketers" share information on how to make money online by scamming people and finding holes in systems to make money. Trying to find some crafty way to get visitors to websites and click ad links or buy some garbage e-book.

One of the claims from that poster were that they managed to make a few grand a month by creating bogus eBay auctions, including a link to a webpage that contained eBay affiliate links and when users would click back on to eBay he would earn referral fees. Basically making money off of eBay's existing traffic. They have since closed this loophole.

This doesn't seem to be much different. With so many good books out there, and free resources available online, why put money in the hands of this scammer?

A good place to start learning how to beat micro stakes full ring no limit holdem games online is by reading this thread on twoplustwo forums A Complete Guide to Beating The Micros and kee up with the Concept of the Week threads there. They are very informative and best of all FREE!

It's been fun following Negreanu's microstakes bankroll challenge but he's really stepped it up, playing high limit NLHE on PokerStars.com.

This month, Negreanu's put in over 3,000 hands at $100/$200 NLH 6-max. He started off really strong, KidPoker's first $100/$200 session after his renewed interest in online cash games netted him almost $60k. By his 6th session he was up almost $200k after a huge $100k win (replay session).

After that, he suffered some losses but overall he's still up over $40k at $100/$200 NLH 6-max.

He's also put in some time in $25/$50 heads up and $25/$50 PLO Full Ring.

The chart to the left shows his recent performance on PokerStars.com cash tables. I'll try to keep it updated but I can't claim it's 100% accurate.

Does Daniel Negreanu Multi-Table?

Mostly, no. For someone that's played one table live most of his life, learning to focus on 4 tables online can be a difficult adjustment but he seems to really have been working hard at improving his online game. He's even using Holdem Manager now.

This morning Daniel Negreanu tried multitabling. He played 4 tables of $5/$10 NLH (6-max). After about an hour (369 hands), he was up almost $3k (1.5BB/100). Not bad. As he gets more comfortable online and makes further adjustments to his game I think he'll start multi-tabling more at lower limits.

If you missed the action, you can replay Negreanu's Multi-Tabling Session.

Update: Today 3/29/2010, Negreanu is playing two $100/$200 6-max NLHE tables! These are the new $100/$200 tables with a 100BB min/200BB max buy-in.

Micro Stakes Challenge Not Over

Negreanu has been working on a bankroll challenge, trying to run $10 into $100k. He started at $0.01/$0.02 NLH Full Ring and has worked his way up to $0.25/$0.50 NLH. He managed to get up his challenge bankroll up to $272.18 but he hit a rough spot at $0.25/$0.50 NLH and dropped down to $80.38. He played a couple of more sessions recently and Negreanu's microstakes bankroll challenge is now up to $113.23.

Even though he's been having fun at higher limits, he's stated on a the twoplustwo.com forums that he's still committed to this challenge.

I have been doing the micro limit challenge grind for a while and I still plan on continuing with it, but I'm not really going to learn much playing at those levels and I wanted to expedite the process.

Whether he keeps it up remains to be seen. Now that he's playing higher limits it may be hard to start grinding for pocket change. I know I'd have a hard time doing it. Lucky for me I don't have to roll to play much higher :) If he does I'd be very impressed with his determination.

He's commented on his online cash game play on his latest blog entry. One thing that still leaves me feeling doubtful about his commitment to the micros is this statement.

People always have an opinion, and may believe I'm going about this the wrong way and should instead be multi-tabling the $5-$10 games. While they are entitled to their opinion, I couldn't disagree more. If you can afford to play against the best players on the site, then you can learn the fundamentals from them. I want to play against the best and while there are certainly great lower limit players online, I'm not interested in beating those games. My goal is to compete at the higher levels. I don't think playing smaller would hurt, but I just don't think it's necessary at all since the stakes I'm currently playing at are very comfortable for me.

The only thing that might keep him building his micro stakes bankroll is his commitment to challenge himself. I don't disagree with he's saying at all but it would suck. It's not often people with small bankrolls get to play with such big names. Every once in a while Humberto Brenes jumps into small stakes cash games while he's waiting for the big Sunday tournaments on PokerStars.com to start and attracts a lot of railers.

Negreanu Seeking Advice From Online Regs

KidPoker acknowledges there are leaks in his NLH cash games but he seems to be seeking help to try and plug them.

Based on his forum posts, it looks like he's getting advice from some of his poker buddies that have more experience in online cash games and he's even posting on twoplustwo.com asking for advice on specific hands. You can check them out here and here.

Even the posters that are knocking him are inadvertently helping him by giving him very detailed reasons why he "sucks".

Can Negreanu Become a Top Online Pro?

Lots of forum posters have been criticizing his cash game based on his recent sessions and his performance on televised cash games. They don't have much hope for him improving.

I disagree. Negreanu is one of the top live tournament players who also knows his way around cash games. He's been playing poker for many years and has been very successful. He's even had a chance to play with some of the top cash game players. He obviously understands the game.

More importantly he's acknowledged he needs to improve his cash game skills and now he's working on doing just that. You can't solve a problem without first recognizing there is one, and identifying what the problem is. He's done that and is working on fixing it. Even though people are ragging on him, he's not letting that stop him.

I still have doubts about his micro-stakes bankroll challenge (Analysis of Daniel Negreanu's Bankroll Challenge) but that's mostly due to the bankroll management strategy he's using. I think he'll be a winning player at high stakes online games.

The key differences are he's playing 6-max and he's reloading when he drops below the max buy-in so he's always playing deep stacked. He's even gotten PokerStars to create some deepstack $100/$200 NLHE tables that have a min buy-in of $20,000 and a max buyin of $40,000.

His looser style of play is more suited to 6-Max than Full Ring and his small ball poker strategy does better when deep stacked.

Success is never guaranteed, but he's doing everything right to be successful.

There are a lot of poker bloggers out there using Google AdSense. There's a problem with using AdSense on poker sites and I wanted to create this post to point it out and present an alternative.

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. If you run PPC ads on your site and someone clicks on one of the ads, you earn some money. Your site's visitor doesn't have to buy or sign up for anything. It's a great form of advertising and one of the best for smaller sites that don't get thousands of visitors a day.

I've been using AdSense successfully on a number of sites for a few of years and have a good understanding of the program as well as issues people have had.

Google AdSense is the leader in the PPC advertising sector and if you host your poker blog on Blogger.com, adding AdSense ads couldn't be simpler. You just click a few checkboxes and you're done.

Google's policies for AdSense however prohibit AdSense ads running on sites that include or link to "Gambling or casino-related content".

That's a pretty vague statement and how Google chooses to interpret that policy can vary. In the past poker related sites could run AdSense as long as they didn't link to any poker sites and focused primarily on poker strategy. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

Google adds a ton new AdSense publishers every day and they can't have a real life person inspect each site for compliance. At first it may seem like everything is going fine, ads are running, you're making a few cents here and there so you think nothing of it.

Then one day you notice the ads on your site are different. They're all for charities or Google's services. These ads are known as Public Service Ads (PSAs). You don't get paid when a PSA is clicked.

Google has crawlers that inspect pages where AdSense ads run. They also seem to inspect sites when it's time to issue the first payment. Google doesn't pay publishers until they've earned at least $100. For small blogs that could take months or even years to earn. In the Google AdSense Help Forum, many posts about being dropped by AdSense start out with "I was just about to get my first check and then..."

Once you get an email from Google that your site is in violation, it may tell you the pages you need to correct or it may just tell you not to use AdSense on your site. Depending on the violation Google may even refund the advertisers all the money earned from clicks on your site and you get nothing. I don't know if this is the case with gambling/casino content.

Sometimes a violation may get your whole AdSense account dropped. If you have other websites that run AdSense, this could be a big problem. An AdSense account is great to have if you publish online. It's easy to get, but once it's gone, it's almost impossible to get back.

There are some big poker sites and poker blogs displaying AdSense ads as well as linking to poker sites. Publishers that generate a large amount of traffic have the ability to become premier members and negotiate different deals. I'm guessing that's the case. Most poker bloggers don't fall into that category.

Alternatives to AdSense for Poker Bloggers

BidVertiser

BidVertiser's Program is the one most similar to AdSense. The allow sites with gambling content. You can even categorize your site as a poker site so advertisers with relevant ads can target your site.

Once you start up your BidVertiser, create your ads and publish the ad code on your site. Ads will start appearing. A cool feature of BidVertiser is that you can view the ads that will display on your page and the max bid they are willing to pay. You can even approve and decline ads that are listed to show on your site.

I'm testing it out here for a while and the ads appear to be relevant and the max bid prices look favorable.

By default BidVertiser ads have pop-unders enabled. While I'm not against advertising on websites, I think pop-ups and pop-unders are a little too much. I chose to disable them, you might want to do the same.

I'll follow up this post after I've run their ads here for a while but I'm not expecting much since this site is still fairly new.

AdBrite

Another alternative to AdSense for poker blogs is AdBrite. AdBrite allows ads on gambling related sites and accepts gambling related advertisers. You can safeily run AdBrite ads and know you'll have advertisers supplying ads that should appeal to your readers. Which means they might be more inclined to click. They also have some other options besides just text link ads such as keyword ads which will link words within the content of your posts. When a visitor hovers their mouse over one of the links they'll get an ad.

AdBrite has been in business for a long time and are known to pay their publishers on time. With AdBrite advertisers. The one drawback is that advertisers need to specifically target your site, unlike AdSense and Bidvertiser.

There are many things you can do to influence your success at the poker table before you even sit down. One of these is choosing the right table.

Unlike most live casinos you can choose which table to sit at when playing online poker. You can try and find soft tables with lots of fish and avoid tables full of good regulars.

But how important is table selection at low and micro stakes games? That's one thing I'm still trying to figure out but I've tried a few different things and have some opinions.

I recently decided it was time to take some of my poker winings and invest in a poker software package that would allow me to review my sessions, analyze my game and provide me with more information on my opponents.

There are three software options that can do all that. Holdem Manager, PokerOffice and PokerTracker. I had played around with PokerOffice and PokerTracker in the past. Of the two I preferred PokerOffice. Searching through forums I saw a lot of people raving about Holdem Manager so I decided to try and find out more about each.

I Googled around for "Holdem Manager vs PokerOffice" and ready many forum posts and blogs. Unfortunately there wasn't much useful information. It felt like 90% of what I read was of the "ABC is the suxxor! Use XYZ!" type.

I knew exactly what I needed poker analytic software to do for me but I was having a hard time finding out if PokerOffice or Holdem Manager could do those things. So I decided to use both and take notes of my experience.

Figured others might be having as hard a time as I was deciding so I put my notes and a whole bunch of screen shots together to make a review of Holdem Manager and PokerOffice.


I bought one and wind up getting and enhanced trial version of the other so I could really look at both in depth. This is a long post with a lot of details to try and help you make the right purchase decision but I still recommend you also download and try each one at a time. Reading these posts will give you a head start so you can make the most of the limited trials

PokerOffice Free Trial - Exclusive 2 Week Free Trial for my readers! Must use this link.
Holdem Manager - Free Trial

In the first part of this review I'm going to cover importing hand histories, heads up displays, other live action windows and the replayers of both programs.

If you use poker tracking software such as Holdem Manager, PokerTracker or PokerOffice, you might have noticed that some features, such as reports run slower as you accumulate more hands.

The computations they perform aren't all that difficult. The issue comes down to the sheer amount of data they need read and write from the disk. If you ever run a program that monitors your CPU usage, you might have noticed that even though the program is running slow, the CPU is barely being used, but the hard drive is trashing around like crazy.

The best way to increase performance for these programs is to use a faster hard drive. The fastest drives by far on the market now are Solid State Drives (SSD). Newegg is currently running some sales with some SSD manufacturers offering big mail-in rebates. If you're not familiar with Newegg (you must live under a rock) they are one of the largest and best online computer retailers. I've purchased a ton of items from them for desktops and servers. They also make it very easy for you to claim your rebates.

The OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX30GXXX 2.5" MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) normally sells for $164.00.

Newegg is currently has it on sale for $119.99 and on top of that there is a $30 mail-in rebate and free shipping bringing the price down to $89.99 after rebate.



The OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX60G 2.5" MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) normally sells for $259.00.

It's on sale for $60 off, free shipping, free 4GB flash memory card and a $30 mail-in rebate.

Final price after rebate is only $169.00

If you need a little more disk space, (but chances are you don't unless you're buying a ton of hand histories from places like PokerTableRatings) there's a 120GB Model.

The OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX120G 2.5" MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) normally sells for $499.00.

Current promotion is $170 off, free 4GB flash card, free shipping and a $40 mail-in rebate.

Final price comes down to $289.00 after rebate.

If you're using Holdem Manager or PokerTracker, both of them use the PostgreSQL database and it's pretty easy to setup PostgreSQL to look for the data in a different location.

PokerOffice uses an embeded database so you'll need to reinstall it on the new SSD as far as I can tell. But check with the support people at PokerOffice to confirm.