This is not a Blog.

http://www.liquidpoker.net/h/411769
http://www.liquidpoker.net/h/411770
http://www.liquidpoker.net/h/411771
http://www.liquidpoker.net/h/411773

Sigh.

0 votes

Comments (28)

3/6 6-max tables at Stars were very soft tonight.

First hour was hell, dropping $3,000 on hands like this:

http://www.liquidpoker.net/h/404877

Next two hours I managed to make it all back, plus an additional 5 buy-ins, in large part due to these two hands:

http://www.liquidpoker.net/h/404865
http://www.liquidpoker.net/h/404857

The night in its totality:



Also, since you guys seem to like pictures of cute girls:

0 votes

Comments (5)

0 votes

Comments (5)

0 votes

Comments (7)

I know there are mixed opinions about the usefulness / veracity of PokerEV graphs, but the 'all-in' graph seems relatively reliable as it's doing pretty simple calculations.

Here's my month so far, first in 'all-in luck' then in 'showdown winnings'





I've played about 30k hands of 3/6 6-max, 10k hands of 2/4 6-max, and 10k hands of 1/2 and 2/4 HU combined.

Based on that, let's call $500 the average buy-in for the stakes I've been playing this month.

I'm down $11,000 in all-in equity, which equates to running 22 buy-ins below expectation in all-in pots.

I'm down $16,000 in 'Sklanksky bucks', which equates to running 32 buy-ins below expectation overall.

This is over 50,000 hands.

0 votes

Comments (18)

http://www.liquidpoker.net/mytlnet/myhand.php?view=item&id=386087

Despite this hand, and the the incredible softness of the games last night, I ran 3.5k(!) below expectation and booked a $1,000 loss...

Hooray!

0 votes

Comments (0)

My impression is that the 3/6 6-max games on Pokerstars have gotten much tougher over the past few months. I began to notice this at the tail end of 2007, and feel even more strongly that this is the case halfway through February. The overall skill level of the poker community continues to rise. This not only means that more and more skilled 2/4 players are moving up, it also means that some of the very skilled high-stakes players are moving *down* to 3/6 since the toughness of 5/10 and 10/20 has probably increased as well. Seeing people like DerekJC9954, RaSZi, gp333, and B Buddy regularly multi-tabling 3/6 is pretty depressing.

It also doesn't help that I seem to continue to lose my stomach for the game. I just don't enjoy the game much anymore, which means I'm much less observant at the table, which means I'm learning at a slower rate than I should be [and in some sense, not really 'learning' much at all at this point, which is awful.]

An unwillingness to learn will just increase my frustration with the game since it'll mean my edge will become less and less pronounced. Being a competitive person, it's also difficult to stomach some of the regulars outplaying me on a consistent basis. This isn't something I'm accustomed to when playing games. Then again, most of the time I'd stop *playing* a game when I got to the point where I no longer enjoyed it. This is a pretty unique situation in that regard, as there are motivations outside the context of the game itself [read: $$$] that keep me playing.

Most of my long-term thinking has taken for granted the income I'll be able to generate through poker. Perhaps I should start constructing some alternative scenarios...

0 votes

Comments (13)

Think it might be fun / useful to focus on HU for awhile. It's a format which I've basically never explored...undoubtedly to the detriment of my ability to play the game of poker in general.

Fired up some tables of NL200 and NL400 and played for about an hour earlier this evening [and ran incredibly well]. I'm undoubtedly playing too tight at this point, though I think my post-flop aggression is in a nice place. After playing 5-6 different players over the course of the hour, it seems like people are folding way too often at this level.





Anyone out there play NL400+ HU as their primary game?
I'd be curious to see the PT stats of someone with more experience who's solidly beating the mid-stakes HU games.

0 votes

Comments (6)

This is, by far, the most hands I've ever played in a month. 95 hours of poker, at around 950 hands / hour. Given that I played so much, my results leave a lot to be desired. My overall BB/100 was about half of what I averaged last year.

The graph is pretty humorous, I think. The first half of the month involved going on 2k hand heaters, and then slowly dribbling away a good portion of the profits over the next 4k-6k hands. This happened on five separate occasions, with the last being a much more dramatic $9,000 downswing. The second half of the month involved an unusually variance-heavy ride upwards.

Looking back at other months where I ended up with similar overall BB/100s, this is the 'choppiest' graph of the bunch. Choppy = excessive variance = emotional turmoil.

(Some of you guys might counter that this really isn't that bad over a 90k sample of hands. All I can tell you is that it felt awful.)

0 votes

Comments (3)

An important strength of mine, something I've always managed to hold as an advantage over opponents in games, is my ability to detach myself emotionally during high-stress situations and continue to gather and analyze information and then execute at a high level of efficiency. This is a skill I've developed over the course of my life through playing games like Chess and Starcraft. It's obviously a huge boon when playing poker as well. My ability to mitigate the impact of tilt on my game is a huge reason for the success I've been able to achieve up to this point.

This month, however, has tested my limits. I've had a few nights where I could literally "feel" anger seething through my bloodstream; a kind of hot, violent pulsing. This is not good. While it's easy to quantify the monetary benefits poker can provide, the costs of playing the game are much harder to pin down. Months like this make me question my choice to continue pursuing this game as my primary source of income. If the game is capable of destroying my quality of life to this degree, the monetary gains become somewhat irrelevant.

I've dropped down to 2/4 for the time being, both to reduce stress, and to re-tool some portions of my game. The competition is noticeably softer, which in some ways makes it *more* frustrating when I'm able to outplay people but the cards don't fall my way and I continue to lose or break even.

My last 10k hands, at both 2/4 and 3/6:



I'm not at all doubting my ability to beat either 2/4 or 3/6. I've never posted a losing month playing NLHE since I started playing 1.5 years ago, my results from last year were very good at both limits, and I'm still confident enough in my ability to judge objectively whether or not I have an edge in a given game.

But the swings...

....are....

....brutal.

0 votes

Comments (17)