Poker Stats - April 2013 on May 5, 2013
By Stevie
Posted in Poker
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My first year of university at game development and entrepreneurship is finally done and now I have around 4 months off to make The World's Hardest Game #3! I'm hoping to spend most of my time working on TWHG3 but I'm also going to be playing poker on the side. Download Pokerstars and you can find me (Cooozy) at the 9max hyper-turbo SNGs (I'm blocked from the search feature because I don't want people to know that I'm mass-multitabling).

That being said, I'm no longer playing 6max cash; I'm indeed back focussing on 9max ht SNGs. I played 6max cash at the lowest stakes for a while and did okay, but got bored and decided to experiment again with 9max ht SNGs, and did so well that I decided to switch back to specializing in that format. Here's my stats for April 2013 (click images to enlarge)...



I maintained a solid 8.12% ROI over 1163 games while sometimes playing up to 12 tables at once, so I'd say I did pretty damn well this month. With hyper-turbo SNGs, there is less skill involved but the games are quicker, so it's a trade-off between ROI and volume, but even so I still managed to maintain a high ROI (8% is really good). Here's my graph...



And here's the detailed overall stats. Note that I made $4.32/hr over 72 hours. Keep in mind, I played some tournaments in-between which messed up the Avg Finish stat. Also, my computer crashed during a 12-table session and I had to finish playing on a different computer and ended up winning around $20, but that computer wasn't set up to save hands so those games aren't included. It sucks because up until then everything was 100% accurate, and now I show less profit than I actually made.



And here it is by day. As you can see, I played 18 days with 10 winning days, 4 breakeven days (profit or loss less than $5) and 4 losing days.



I only made $4.32/hr and my goal is to make $10.25/hr (minimum wage in Ontario, Canada) in order to be semi-pro. The exciting part is, most of that was played on way less tables than I'm capable of playing at once. The thing standing in my way of becoming semi-pro is not my ROI/winrate, it's my multitable-ratio and session length (unfortunately both of these stats aren't available in Poker Tracker for SNGs, though they are for cash). My goal is to motivate myself to play 8-12 tables nonstop for several hours straight for each session. I want to start with 12 tables and let it drop down to 8, and then maintain 8 while sometimes bringing it back up to 12. The main reason for this is I can manage 12 tables only when most games are near the start where there are more players and less decisions. I think I can pretty much always manage 8 tables at a 8% ROI or greater.

So now I have a very good shot at becoming semi-pro! Again, all I have to do to increase my hourly profit is to play more tables at once and for longer sessions (while maintaining a high ROI), which I'm pretty sure I can do. Now that I'm focussing on TWHG3, I'm hoping to spend 75% of my time on that and 25% of my time grinding like a bastard, so I should be able to reach my goal in a couple months at most. I'm sure it's going to take a lot of practice though just to motivate myself.

Here are my stats by stake:



I only play these games so that I can get up to 12 tables without having to wait too long. In theory, my ROI should be higher at $1.50 than it is at $3.50, although that hasn't been the case. Probably just due to run-bad, but also the rake is a couple percent higher at $1.50 (I don't remember the exact number but I think it's around 6.5% as opposed to 5%).




I play most of my games at the $3.50 stake. As you can see, I had a long breakeven run and then a downswing, but that was all a long time ago. The games I've played this month (especially near the end) yielded a higher ROI because I was actually playing a lot better than I used to. This is mostly due to finding out some tricks to help (which I won't reveal), but also due to many hours of practice. I actually expect to make over 10% ROI (including downswings obviously) in the future, up to 12-13%. It may be hard to maintain >10% while mass-multitabling, but I really think it's doable at my current skill level. Also, even though HT SNGs involve less skill, there's still a lot of leaks in my game that I plan to plug, which could mean an even higher ROI. I just need more practice and more time to think about how to fix my game.




So when you factor in the $7 stake you can see an epic downswing/meltdown in the middle. That was a long time ago, but check out my explanation of what happened (it's half-way down the article). I have been testing the waters at the $7s again and this month I'm up 1 BI over 6 games, but I've decided to focus on the $3.50 stake for a while longer before I get serious about moving up. From what I've seen, the players actually are a lot better at the $7s, so there may very well be more equity at the $3.50s, but it should still be worth moving up eventually. Keep in mind, a 4% ROI at the $7s is the same amount of equity as an 8% ROI at the $3.50s, so the players would have to be a lot better for me to actually make less money there. Anyway, my plan is to eventually play half $7s and half $3.50s, and if I can successfully grind that for a couple thousand games then I may start mixing in the $15s, $30s, $60s, etc. I just need to be confident enough to handle the variance without getting too frustrated, which right now I am not.



So that's all my stats for 9max ht SNGs and April 2013. I should be posting monthly poker updates from now on. Like I said, unfortunately I should be playing less in order to make TWHG3.



Below are my stats at 5NL 6max cash in case you were wondering why I quit playing that. I did very well at 2NL but ran bad at 5NL, probably got tilted at the end, and then just kinda gave up. Had I not ran mega-bad (like 11 BIs below AIEV), I would have moved up to 10NL. Oh well, I'm happy I switched back to 9max ht SNGs.



Wish me luckz!

TWHG v2.1 Released! on Apr 6, 2013
By Stevie
Posted in Releases
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NOTE: I announced a couple days ago that I'm working on The World's Hardest Game 3 (which is going to be amazing)! I'm hoping to have that done between August and September (in 4-5 months). TWHG2.1 is a completely different, older game.


I just released The World's Hardest Game v2.1 (which is currently only on Snubby Land)! This new version has a save/load function and 10 new levels (making 60 total)! I was asked a loooong time ago by Addicting Games to make TWHG2.1 in order to promote the TWHG2 iPhone App, but unfortunately it hasn't been released until now for reasons I can't discuss. Sorry about that; it's mostly not my fault. Anyway, if you just want to see the new levels (which are spread throughout the game) check out the TWHG2.1 walkthrough below...




I added smilies ( ) and playing cards ( ) to help spice up my posts. In case you didn't know, apart from developing games I also like to play and blog about poker. The playing cards will help a lot when I post hand histories. I also added a bunch of stuff I found on Scratch to the fan art section. I've spent all the time I'm willing to spend searching through Scratch to find fan art, so email me if you there's fan art that you want added. Thanks!

And here's a pixel portrait that I made in 1.5 hours for graphic design class at first year university (game development and entrepreneurship).



In light of all the discussion of gay marriage lately (which I support), here's a poll. There's a pretty good chance the results will be skewed by people lying for fun, so don't take the results too seriously.

Working on World's Hardest Game 3! on Apr 2, 2013
By Stevie
Posted in Projects
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I've started working on the third installment of the World's Hardest Game series! So far I've put 33 hours in and I'm almost to the point where everything is done except for the mountains of level design. I'm rebuilding it from scratch in Flash ActionScript 3; this'll be my first AS3 game. It's the same general game but there's one major difference (which I'll reveal later), and also some new elements that make the graphics better. I'll definitely have it done before the start of the next school year in September (which is 5 months away), but I'm hoping to have it done in August. I've only got a little over a month left of my first year of university and I've stopped playing poker in my free time until TWHG3 is done, so that leaves me with 1 month of part-time work and 3 months of full-time work to have it done in August.



I was supposed to get a job in the summer since my dad doesn't want to pay my bills and my site only generates a bit of revenue, but I think once I get the game sponsored it'll be obvious that it's a good thing to be working on. Especially since I'm almost guaranteed a sponsorship from a certain company and I'm also guaranteed at least 10 million hits in the first year from them. When I say guaranteed that's just my estimate based on TWHG1 and TWHG2. And I'm studying game development so doing this obviously better for me than working retail or something (the only problem is I need the money soon, otherwise working retail wouldn't even cross my mind). I also have a lot of good ideas for TWHG3 and want to work on it. So the choice is obvious, even though I can't really afford it. I might be able to get paid upfront, but I don't want to ask for that unless I'm sure I need it.



The level design process for this game series has been pretty brutal. The main reason is that it involves hours of playing TWHG and adjusting the levels to make them harder until they are just barely beatable, which can be boring, frustrating and very difficult. It's also draining to try to think of different level designs when all of the ideas have been used up and all you have to work with is small blue balls, coins, keys, doors and walls. However, there's a twist in TWHG3 that allows me to add a bunch of new types of levels. I'm also going to change the general flow of the game to more of an adventure game. I'm really going to give it my all and use 100% of my creativity and effort to make this game as fun and challenging as possible. I've also got some new tricks up my sleeve to help tremendously; the main one is that I realized I can reduce the framerate to test difficult parts which makes the game significantly easier. Then once I can beat it at a low framerate like 10 or 15 FPS, I try to beat it a couple of times at the full 30 and decide if it's too hard or not. I'll probably go into more level design methods and some of the actual work in a work video/blog entry soon once I finish building the engine/shell of the game and get into the actual level design.

Hopefully school doesn't slow me down too much in the next month, but I have to try to make it my top priority, even though I have a lot more motivation to work on TWHG3. I'm not doing so well this semester (I did well first semester though), but since it's only first year I can still redeem myself.

6max Cash, More Stats on Feb 14, 2013
By Stevie
Posted in Poker
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In my last post I was talking about trying to activate beast-mode and become super productive in order to do well in school and at the same time develop a new large-scale Flash game. Well, I've been sick since writing that post so I haven't been able to attempt that yet. I'll let you know how it's going in another week or two. I also mentioned that I'm going to try to play (on average) an hour of online poker each day. Even though that will cut into my school/Flash time, I still want to get good at poker. Not for the money, just because it would make me feel good.




FYI: This is another one of those huge posts where I have to get a bunch of old stuff out of the way so that I can make smaller posts in the future.

I mentioned in my last poker post that I was still searching for a format to specialize in. Well, I'm pretty sure the search is over! I've decided to play 6max cash games. Here are the reasons I like this format:

• It involves lots of skill. This is because you are sitting with at least 100bbs at all times and there's lots of action. Deeper stacks create more post-flop action, which involves more skill compared to pre-flop action because there's more information to deal with.
• Since there's a lot of skill, there's less variance (especially at $0.25/$0.50 when you can run it twice, which cuts showdown variance in half if the villain agrees to do it). It is still poker so there's going to be a fair amount of variance, but compared to hyper SNGs (what I played before), there's less. The only downside (or upside) compared to SNGs is you can win/lose a lot more in one hand. That's only an upside if you are playing for fun, in my opinion.
• Since 6max cash has a lot of action, it attracts fish. This is why I can see myself beating even stakes up to $1/$2 or higher. In NLH, all you need is one bad player at the table for everyone else to profit (in the long-run). It's usually easy to find a table with at least 2 bad players sitting. It's also easier to spot fish in cash games because right away you can see who's not buying in for the maximum, whereas in SNGs everyone starts with the same amount.
• Since there's a maximum of 6 people per table, there's plenty of room for HUDs (a HUD is a Heads-Up Display; shows stats such as VPIP/PFR/AFq). I've spent a lot of time perfecting my HUD for each format, and I like to have pretty much as big of a HUD as I can fit. 6max cash allows me to have a very big HUD. Also, the fact that my HUD is better than that of most players, and that I think I'm much better than most players at these stakes at reading a HUD; this gives me a sizable advantage (especially since some people don't even use HUDs).
• It doesn't interfere with my schedule (I can play very close to an hour each day). In cash games, you can join or leave whenever you want (there's only a small amount of time that I'll wait to be the next big blind in order to leave).
• There's lots of different stakes. This allows me to start at the very lowest stakes and slowly work my way up. In SNGs, at just the third level ($7.00) you are sometimes playing against professionals, especially at the hypers. SNGs at $7.00 and above are really hard to beat for the same amount of money you'd be making at cash games of lower stakes. In fact, the money in cash games is just way easier to make all-around. You'd think that SNGs would attract more fish than cash games, and you'd probably be right, but the ratio of good to bad players per dollar in play isn't even close to that of cash games. For example, I've had a fair amount of success at $0.10/$0.25 cash games in the past; yet I've done terribly at $7.00 SNGs.
• The rake seems to be less than in SNGs. You are paying 4.50% at $0.05/$0.10 and above, compared to around 9% in SNGs. To put that into perspective, in December 2012 I made $187 profit (over 1500 SNGs) and payed $288 in rake; so the rake is 150% of what I'm earning (at that win-rate), which is totally unreasonable. I don't have a lot of volume yet in cash games, but it seems like I'm paying closer to 100% of my earnings in rake (at a seemingly similar win-rate), which is a big difference. I'll let you know about the rake percentage way more accurately once I get more volume in. All in all, the rake definitely seems beatable in cash games, even though I wish it was lower. It's pretty insulting that they charge the same amount of rake as a live casino when they can't possibly have even half of the costs.
• Finally, I just like the idea of playing real poker, and not just jamming or folding 90% of my hands like I do in 9max hypers. Even though I'm just trying to make money however I can, being good at real poker opens more doors, such as live cash games (there are no live SNGs where I live, especially not hypers).

With that out of the way, here are my stats. I haven't played in the last 1.5 months, though.



Like I said, this is the format I'm trying to specialize in. Even though a lot of players have too much pride to play $0.01/$0.02, I figured I'd start out there (the lowest stakes in all of online poker) and work my way up. Even though playing at such low stakes isn't really real poker (people don't treat it like real money, thus making it much harder to bluff), I still figured I should be able to beat it in order to gain confidence for higher stakes. My plan is to make 1000 bbs at each stake before moving up. That means I want to make $20 at $0.01/$0.02, $50 at $0.02/$0.05, $100 at $0.10/$0.20, etc. I'm skipping over some stakes like $0.03/$0.06 because that would take too long.

I managed to beat $0.01/$0.02 at a rate of 23.23 BB/100 (over 4641 hands), so it was a complete success! To a lot of people, spending 15 hours making $1.42/hour is pathetic, but I think most players assume they can do it when really they can't. I wanted to prove to myself that I could. And like I said before, I'm content making any profit at all at online poker, as long as I'm working toward getting better. You'd expect to start out losing, then making a small profit, then eventually making a bigger profit. So I feel I'm right on track.

FYI: The green line is how much I made, the yellow line is how much I'd make if there was no variance at showdowns, and the red/blue lines just indicate how effective my strategy is (the fact that the red line is negative indicates I have a non-showdown leak).



Having made over $20 at $0.01/$0.02, I moved up to $0.02/$0.05 to try to make $50. Unfortunately, after 4k hands I have broken even (although I was up $19 at one point). I'm going to continue to try to beat these stakes until I eventually do. If I feel I just can't do it, I'll reevaluate my options for formats to specialize in. I'm guessing in another 5k-20k hands I'll make it. Wish me luck!




Here are my older stats from SNGs...



This is pretty embarrassing, but all too common in the poker world. I was trying to specialize in 9max hyper SNGs, and grinded up $320 in profit playing at the $3.50 over 1650 SNGs (105 hours; ~3.8h/day; I was on Christmas break so I was playing a lot), only to throw it all away at the $7.00 stake. The only reason I moved up was because I was trying to clear a $50 Stellar Rewards bonus, so I figured the $50 of free equity would make it doable, but unfortunately I bombed. Looking at the graph, it's easy to assume that I moved up and got scared, which caused me to play bad (especially since the same thing happened to me at 6max hypers), but believe me, a lot of bad luck was involved. That's the problem with hyper SNGs (especially 9max); there's so much variance involved, that unless you have a huge sample, few conclusions can me made. As I recall, the players at the $7 stake were almost equally as bad as at the $3.50's, yet I just ran terribly. The terrible run tilted me and made things worse. Anyway, I'm done with hyper SNGs.

I included the adjusted winnings (orange line) to help back up my claim that I was running bad. This is not a reliable stat, but it's supposed to be an indicator of how much you should have made. The fact that I'm running WAY below my adjusted earnings indicates at the very least that I sure as hell wasn't getting lucky. Also, if you discount the $7.00 stake, I was still up $180.



 


After starting out strong, throwing away a bunch of money at $7.00 (due to runbad and tilt), I tried to see if I could beat this format again and failed. The thing is, hyper SNGs have a ton of variance, so a 850 game sample doesn't mean much. I can almost guarantee that if I played another 10k games I'd be a fair amount in the green. Also, this sample is from a long time ago, so I've gotten better now (especially after 1650 9max hyper SNGs).





I put in a fair amount of volume in this format as well (relative to my other games), although you still can't draw any conclusions from this sample size because hyper SNGs have a ton of variance. At around the 515 game mark I had a huge losing streak. This was due to the fact that I lost a bunch of games to a very inferior player, which tilted me and caused me to lose even more. You never want to combine bad luck and tilt. And then I experimented at the $7.00 stake mainly to chase my losses (which I'll never do again), but also to see how soft it was. I figured if the 7s were soft then I could just move up now. The 7s turned out to be pretty soft, but I would need confidence in order to play those games, which I had very little of. Anyway, these are lessons you will most likely have to learn first-hand in the poker world.




Okay now this is a very small sample size. Even a professional player logs a loss after 250 games on occasion. That being said, this format sucks because even at a 10% ROI, if you 4-tabled you could maybe play 7 games per hour, thus at the $3.50 stake you'd be making $2.50/hour. So you'd need a 10% ROI at much higher stakes just to make minimum wage. So yeah, not going to be trying to beat these games again.




These are 9max 20-table SNGs, which are essentially tournaments (but technically they are SNGs because the prizes are predetermined). Most people are aware that these are soft, and I can attest to that. After only 7 games at the $4.50 stake, I came third and won $87.82. It could just be luck, but if you saw how bad the players were I'm sure you'd agree that it wasn't. I could probably grind these and turn a decent profit, but the problem is they take too long, so there's no way I could schedule them in with school and Flash. The 3rd place cash took me 4.5 hours. I also think I could eventually move up in stakes over time, but this format is just not viable to play.




So that's all my stats as of now. My next poker post will most likely be strictly regarding 6max cash, so it'll be a lot smaller.

Getting my Act Together on Feb 11, 2013
By Stevie
Posted in Other
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Edit: Went to the physics exam with 1 hour of sleep, did pretty well! I think I got anywhere from 50%-70%, which was what I was hoping for. That's pretty good considering I learned pretty much everything in 2 days after slacking all semester, and had to skip learning about 20% of the hardest stuff because I didn't have time. I could have easily gotten another 15% if I left myself another day to study. Anyway, I'm pretty happy about my current status now. I'm content to just scrape by in physics/math because most of it's just in the first year, and also I'm trying to become a programmer, not a math guy.

I talked a bit earlier about falling behind in my first year of university (for game development and entrepreneurship), though I did well in the first semester (without really trying). Well, after a bunch of cramming for midterms, I've almost caught up. The real indicator of how I'm doing will be my Linear Algebra and Physics midterm, which is in a couple hours (I sure wish I could sleep right now). If I pass that, my grades for rest of the semester should fall into place. Well, except for the fact that I've already failed Entrepreneurship class and will have to retake it next year. Long story short, I've fallen too much behind so I'm just going to focus on my other classes and fail that. No biggy.

In the last week or so I've been VERY motivated to work on a new Flash game (and Snubby Land). I've been spending very long hours knocking stuff off my to-do list, and thinking about the logistics of another large-scale Flash game, even though I promised myself a break after the 3+ years on Straight Bullyism... Ya gotta do what ya gotta do. This new project should be done 6-12 months from now if I decide to do it. I don't want to reveal what it is yet, but let's just say I've been asked to make it more times than I can count. And let's just say it's going to be hard. And have a #3 in the title.

Even though I'm really swamped with school, I figure it's now or never if I want to make this game. I'm going to be even more swamped with school next year, and the years after that, so if I can find the time to do it, now is the only time that I can make a large game. I'm planning on getting my act together more than I ever have before, in every area of my life. I've made some pie graphs to help motivate me. It's very unlikely that I'll actually exercise and play poker everyday while still doing tons of school and Flash, but that's the god damn plan. Motivation should make it possible. Also, I've got kind of an "all or nothing" personality flaw, which I think allows me to do crazy stuff like this. Follow my blog and see how it goes, also vote now as to whether or not you think I'll be able do it!



...And no, that last graph is not a joke.