Fantasy Basketball Season

OK, it's fantasy basketball season once again. This is one of my other hobbies besides poker. If you have zero to little interest in NBA basketball, then feel free to skip this post as it has nothing to do with poker.

This year, I joined 2 leagues with live drafts. Both are 14 team Head to Head leagues counting 9 categories under the normal yahoo system of having PG, SG, G, SF, PF, F, C, C, UTIL, UTIL and bench as positions.

The first league is a local money league. Everybody puts in a certain amount and cash prizes go to the one who finishes with the best regular season record as well as prizes for finishing in 1st, 2nd and 3rd after the playoffs. The 2 teams who finish in last place are also required to pay an additional amount that goes into the pot. (This was done to prevent last place teams from colluding and trading their stars for scrubs in exchange for some favor)

I drafted 7th in this money league and here are the players that I got in the order that I got them. The number inside the parenthesis is the overall draft position

1.(7)Kevin Durant SG,SF
2.(22)Joe Johnson PG,SG
3.(35)Brook Lopez PF,C
4.(50)Nene Hilario PF,C
5.(63) Mo Williams PG
6.(78) Charlie Villanueva SF,PF
7.(91) Eric Gordon SG
8.(106) Greg Oden C
9.(119) Louis Williams PG,SG
10.(134)Courtney Lee SG,SF
11.(147) Brandon Jennings PG
12.(162) Nenad Krstic PF,C
13.(175) Antonio McDyess PF,C

Overall, I was pretty satisfied with this draft. Durant as a 1st round pick is quite good as he will absolutely explode this year in Oklahoma. Some experts were picking him as high as no 4, so getting him at 7 is good value. Eric Gordon at the 7th round 91st overall is an absolute steal. I took a risk with Oden at the 8th round even though he's been injured every year, because he's tearing it up this pre season and I see a lot of upside as long as he stays healthy. Louis Williams inherits the starting point guard position in Philly with the departure of Andre Miller to Portland and he should be in for a big year. Courtney Lee takes the place of Vince Carter in New Jersey, so that's another pick with a lot of upside.

The 2nd league that I joined is a champions league. The managers are screened. If you don't have a fantasy gold trophy in your yahoo profile, then you cannot join. This assures everyone that it is a very competitive league even without money involved as there is some pride at stake of being the best among the best. It is composed of players around the world who love to trash talk and the live draft was one of the tightest ones with lots of nasty comments. Everybody knows their basketball and draft steals were harder to get.

I drafted 12th in this league and here are the players that I got

1. (12)Dirk Nowitzki PF
2. (17)Joe Johnson PG,SG
3. (40)David Lee PF,C
4. (45)Kevin Martin SG
5. (68)Russell Westbrook PG
6. (73) Jeff Green SF,PF
7. (96)Greg Oden C
8. (101)Mike Conley PG
9. (124)Thaddeus Young SF,PF
10.(129)Samuel Dalembert C
11.(152)Al Thornton SF,PF
12.(157)Drew Gooden PF,C
13.(180) Terrence Williams SG,SF,PF
14.(185) Steve Blake PG

This is just a fair draft for me. Good picks were Nowitzki in the 1st round and Kevin Martin in the 4th. Oden at 7th was too early but this was caused by a dropped connection. Conley at 8th was also a bit early as TJ Ford was still there and I missed drafting him. The only steal I think I got was Thaddeus Young at 124th overall. The rest were just average picks and not so much upside. Again, as I said, everybody knew their stuff and all the players I were targetting were coming off the boards before my turn.

Oh well, I've been playing long enough to know that fantasy leagues are won through free agent acquisitions, so I'm hoping for a good pick up during the course of the season to bolster the team.

For those poker players interested in fantasy basketball, comments about the teams above would be appreciated. Thanks for reading.

I made 2nd by folding AA

Just finished playing the above tournament. 271 players with 504 rebuys and 126 addons. Buy in of only $3.30. These are the kind of donkaments one tries to avoid playing for the sake of maintaining one's sanity. But sometimes when luck goes your way. It's still a good return on a $6 investment.

Played basically ABC poker. Doubled up on my KKs and AAs in the early part. Went into the money (50 players) with a short stack. Then proceeded to play aggressive short stack poker. Got lucky once when I pushed Q6s in the dealer position. SB called with JJ. The Q flopped and allowed me to survive.

Went into the final table with an average stack. Then went into a heater of AQs and AJs and eliminated a guy to bring my stack up to around 300k which was 2nd in chips at that point. Then this hand came up when there was 9 of us left.

I got AA in early position. Raised 3xBB. Got called by chip leader at BB. Flop is K J 9. Chip leader checked. I made a 1/2 Pot bet. Villain called quickly. Turn is another J. Vilain bets pot at this point which was ringing alarm bells but I made the call. River is a harmless looking 5. Villain puts me all in and he's got me covered. I had about 140k left behind. Blinds were still at 4k-8k. So still a lot of poker left with my stack. I tanked then decided to fold.

I actually think it was a wrong read on my part as succeeding plays with the guy showed me that he was actually a fish overplaying top and middle pairs. But I made the fold and it allowed me to finish in 2nd place. The villain chipleader busted out in 5th if I'm not mistaken.

So all's well that ends well. =)

Fast Withdrawals Make My Day

As I've previously mentioned in this blog, Cake Poker has one of the most convenient and fastest withdrawal methods available. I am not pimping Cake because I play there. I am just stating a fact. I know a lot of Pinoy players have a difficult time withdrawing online funds because of various requirements that are in place. But seriously, the way Cake does it is just ridiculously easy and you wonder how come the bigger sites cannot do it the same way.

Once a month, the site allows you to make a withdrawal request (minimum $500) by cheque and they will send this to you by courier free of charge. Any additional withdrawals for the month will get charged the normal courier fee of about $30. For recreational players who don't really withdraw that much, once a month is just perfect.

The other great thing is that the cheque that they send is a local cheque. It is not a US Dollar or Euro check which takes ages to clear in our banks. It is a local cheque for pesos that is addressed to your name that clears in 2 days. Seriously cool.

I made a withdrawal request last September 25, 2009 right before Ondoy hit. The Fedex envelope containing the cheque was in my office on October 1. Not counting Saturday and Sunday. That's just 3 freaking days. I'm sure there was even some delay caused by logistical problems due to the typhoon.

In terms of exchange rate, its not too bad. Right now, the official rate is about 47 pesos to US$1. The rate that they gave me in their conversion less whatever bank fees is about 44. So about a 6.5% deduction to cover bank fees and exchange rate spreads. I think that's quite acceptable.

So from your online poker account to your bank account in about 5 working days and in pesos to boot, ready to be used. No hassles. Just a simple, fast and efficient procedure.

This really leaves you wondering about the procedures of other sites. If a small site like Cake can do it, I'm sure the bigger sites can do it better. It just adds to the conspiracy theory that they are deliberately adding layers of red tape to delay your withdrawal. I think this is primarily being done for 2 reasons : (1) It conditions your mind about the negativity of doing withdrawals. This obviously works to their advantage as you would just tend to play with the money and delay your withdrawals or do it less often. The more money you have in your account, the more playing time you spend and in the higher limits which earns them bigger rake. (2) Any delay that they cause means more interest earnings. Let's just say average withdrawal requests for a day sum up to about US$100K. Just delaying its transfer by 3 days earns them a few hundred dollars in interest earnings alone. Multiply this by the number of days in a year and you can imagine the thousands of extra dollars they earn by simply delaying your withdrawal. Quite unethical but financial institutions have been doing this for ages and poker sites are no different.

Again, since online poker is pretty much unregulated. We just accept and make do with whatever crappy procedure is currently in place. The only protest we can do is to take our business elsewhere. But then, other sites are even worse. So wala ka ring choice. Heheh....

The Great Flood

I'm sure each of us has our own unique story of where we were during the great flood. As for me, I was pretty much stranded in my office since we have work on Saturdays. I tried to get home but had to turn back because traffic was at a standstill.

Good thing our office had electricity, internet, food, water, TV and clean toilets. So I pretty much spent a relaxing evening just doing some extra work, playing online poker and chatting with officemates who decided to also stay put instead of stupidly braving the flood.

A lot of my officemates did try to make a go of it, but ended back in our office a few hours later, describing horror stories of how high the floods were.

I ended up sleeping in a conference table with my jacket as a pillow and eventually managing to get back home in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

All in all I believe I was one of the lucky ones. A lot of my friends got stranded in the middle of flooded streets where water was slowly seeping its way inside their vehicles. My cousin's wedding which was scheduled Saturday had to be cancelled because both groom and bride were stuck in their respective areas and couldn't get to the church on time.

A common theme in the stories that I've heard were sob stories of people's home who never flooded before, but was now suddenly experiencing heavy flooding. These are homes that were not in low lying areas like Marikina or Valenzuela. But parts of the Metro where there was never any flooding before.

This is kind of scary. I know that the meteorologists are saying that what happened was a once in a lifetime thing where the amount of rainfall for that day was equivalent to the supposed amount for a month. But still, you cannot help but wonder if global warming and the higher water levels had anything to do with it. Not to mention the antique drain system of Metro Manila which are clogged with garbage. Just imagine how much worse it could be in the future if we don't clean up our act with regards to the environment. Brr....

I just hope that everyone's OK. Material things are just things. So what if your Civic turned into a submarine. As long as you're alive and kicking, we should already consider ourselves lucky and be thankful.

Downswing Buster

After a good August where I managed to increase my online bankroll significantly, September is starting out sluggish.

Probably because after I cleared out my bonus in Full Tilt. I now shifted to playing in Pokerstars to clear out my other bonus there. Unfortunately, the SNG turbo blind structures are different between the 2 sites and it takes me some time to get used to the slower speed of play required. After playing for 1 whole month in FTP, I find myself going to push fold mode too early in the Pokerstars SNGs.

Or I could just be rationalizing and I'm just into one of those downswings that happen every once in a while to every player. Oh well, I'm thinking that I can break the curse by writing about it in my blog. Heheh

I did manage to play in the $200+15 PS Sunday Warm Up the other week when there was a long weekend. I played pretty well I think but was really not catching anything. About 2 hours into the tourney, I had to go into one of those 50-50 showdowns between my AK and another player's pocket pair. Unfortunately, was not lucky enough to catch my cards and busted out.

Hoping the cards turn my way soon. Looking to earn some extra moolah these next few months. Trying to save up for an extended vacation and hoping to use 100% poker funds. =)

14,832 Players

I qualified for a $50,000 freeroll at Full Tilt due to a recent Sit and Go Madness promotion. But there were also 14,831 other players who qualified. What the Fuck ?

Tournament starts in those wee early morning hours, 3,600 players get paid. First place is $4,750. Quite a good chunk of moolah. But still, slogging your way through 14k players is kind of numbing to think about. 1801 to 3600 gets a measly $3.

I am seriously thinking of just skipping the whole deal. If only poker sites allowed you to transfer freeroll tickets to other players. =)

Newbie Blues

I have been encouraging some of my friends to try online poker. I really believe in the fact that if you follow certain basic concepts and practice good bankroll management, it is actually an enjoyable way to earn some extra money. I have given them some basic guidelines to follow, asked them to read some books and basically given them a sort of starting map.

For some of them, it has been like a thrilling roller coaster ride. They would sometimes text me with stories of how they spiked the Ace in the river to beat out a donkey. Or tell me bad beat stories of 2 outers. But generally, they feel that it is something that they want to continue because they do see some positive results.

For some, it has been a frustrating experience. Even following sound poker techniques, they seem to be losing more than winning. When I ask them about certain hands, they seemed to have made their decisions based on correct math. But I look at their ROIs and it is in the negative.

I don't really have the time to give them actual coaching. What with my full time job, my family and my own playing. I have no spare time as it is. I definitely do not see any free time to squeeze in some coaching lessons.

I was kind of pondering this playing correctly but still losing phenomenon. And then I went back and looked at some of my graphs when I first started playing online poker and realized that I was actually also a losing player in the beginning.

I decided to attach these initial graphs in this blog just to assuage newbies that in some cases, you just need more experience. Knowing the correct move is easy when you're reading a book. But in actual play, there are so many scenarios that happen, that it actually takes real hand experience to know how to react and play appropriately.

The 2 graphs shown above are from playing SNGs. So it is games played against total profit earned. I have circled in yellow the relevant part. These are basically graphs from the first poker sites that I played in when I was a fishy beginner. You can see in the first graph that it took me almost 500 games before I started earning something. In the second graph, even though I was winning at first, I eventually lost everything and it took 200 games for the graph to trend continously upwards.

When I started playing online poker, I also read a lot of books. And I followed some of the advice given religiously and played correct poker. But I still lost. It took a certain amount of experience (in this case around 700 SNG games in total) before I could play well enough to make consistent money.

I'm not saying that the books are wrong. Because they are obviously giving correct advice. Proof of this is that even though I was losing, I wasn't losing much. You can see from the above graphs that my losses never exceeded 100 dollars. Parang slightly negative but still kind of breaking even.

So the point I am trying to make is that Nothing Beats Experience. After I gained enough online experience, there was no looking back. All my remaining graphs trended upwards immediately. Again, I would like to point out that I am not a pro or any kind of expert player. I am just like you. I work a full time job and play a couple of hours at night and some on weekends. That's it. No special coaching or lessons. Just reading some and playing some.

So my advice to newbies who seem to be having a hard time getting over the hump. Don't get discouraged. If you are playing correctly and following good BR management, it just takes time but eventually good things will happen. As Kevin Costner put it in Field of Dreams "If you build it, they will come". Heheh