Week in Review #5 April 20th-April 26th
Glitter, glisten, gloss, floss I catch a beat runnin' like Randy Moss
It’s come to the attention of Punt of the Day that Substack an excellent newsletter publisher with easy to use software has had trouble formatting Sam Greenwood’s Pokerstars hand histories due to the screen name “Str8$Homey”occasionallybelievingthe“$” is some sort of syntax leading to illegible hand histories. We at Punt of the Day have corrected the mistakes and apologize for the errors.
I first started playing online poker when I was 15 years old, which meant I had more than two years to think about what my screen names would be when I started playing under my own name. Randy Moss is the reason I became a Minnesota Vikings fan, so when it was time to create a PokerStars screenname I wanted to honour his most famous line "Straight cash, homey.”.1 There was a problem, PokerStars only allowed a maximum of 12 characters. I needed to eliminate 5 characters. Turning Straight into “Str8” eliminated 4 characters. I couldn’t knock off a character from homey and thought long and hard about “Str8CshHomey”, but that didn’t look right. I replaced cash with $$$ and 17 years later my Substack is struggling to format hand histories. This is the one time this screen name has disappointed me.
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Testimonials
This week I did real journalism of sorts. I needed to fact check that Triton London was the first Triton stop that used Fast Action. I went straight to the source and asked Luca Vivaldi he replied “Yassir— wow good good memory. I had to go back and check.”
This week’s testimonials include:
And of course “wow good good memory” - Luca Vivaldi
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
A three way Rocket Solver sim and two PIO river sims using Rocket turn ranges
A PIO sim using alternate preflop ranges
A node locked PIO sim to see if I could make my river shove +EV
POTD #24 there was no sim that I felt was appropriate so premium subscribers earned IOU that they have not cashed in yet
Two PIO ICMs and one CEV sim
I know what you’re thinking, but Sam, you can’t possibly have run all those sims and uploaded them into a Google Drive folder. Here is photographic evidence.
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Here is part of what I shared with premium subscribers about POTD #23
POTD #23 onemorething today I wanted to expand on the following "I might play a little more aggressive from the SB into his BB, but I am not doing anything too crazy."
A mistake I often see at lower stakes is too much front door aggression into weaker players without a good reason. Do I think my EV raising first in will be higher vs Samuel Ju than it will be vs the solver? Yes. But that's also true of playing limp-check nodes and limp-raise-call nodes. Oftentimes people are too aggressive because they either want to end the hand or to play a big pot vs weaker players. Most of the time you play a big pot, you want to have a good hand, if you're always trying to play a big pot with a mediocre or bad hand versus a weaker player, you better have a good reason beyond “I’m better at poker than they are”.
Media
No media appearances this week, so I will share the pop culture that inspired many of my online poker screen names. These SNs honour silly ephemera (Alfred Delia), my all time favourite season of TV (Twin Peaks: The Return), and everything in between.
As judged by how many people told me they liked my screen name, my most popular online poker screen name was my FullTiltPoker one: IfHeDiesHeDies, taken from Rocky IV
My UltimateBet screenname FrankWrench was named after a minor Arrested Development character played by Rob Corddry
On GGPoker/N8 I was Alfred Delia and Mr. Jackpots
My ACR name is AaronSanchize, which means I created my ACR account in 2016 Aaron Sanchez’s one good year
My white whale SN, which I created on an OnGame skin, I think. It was a long time ago. Comes from the Clipse song Keys Open Doors “But I don't mind spending, all it is, is paper”. I tried to make an AllItIsIsPaper screen name, but OnGame had lowercase l’s that looked exactly like uppercase I’s so it looked like AllltlslsPaper and was totally illegible. Also it prominently has Isis in the middle, which isn’t great. A good idea for a SN that I never got off the ground.
Substack
Instagram
Twitter
Bluesky
"When you're rich, you don't write cheques.” is not as iconic as “Straight cash, homey”, but very funny
Even if you suggest, I add more content like “THREE WAYS TO CRUSH LIVE POKER” or “HOW THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK MADE ME A MILLION DOLLARS” I will listen