Chemical Imbalance

I have been playing PCA steps over the past few weeks. I start and step 3 and try to win the seat. However, I have been running terribly the whole time, losing most flips and dominating situations I enter. Henceforth, I shall add a lamb sacrifice before each PCA SNG I enter and hope that gets me a heater.

On the bright side, my ring downstreak seems over. I'm up about 8.5 buyins at NL100 over yesterday and today and am firmly in the green for this month in ring games.

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October went well for me...kind of.

I made just over $3,500 on from MTTs. I was playing mostly the daily 50k, $22+1R+1A that starts at 2:15 EST every day, and some other random MTTs. One thing that I found to be quite profitable is playing Sunday million Sats. The compeition is very soft and it is quite easy to win. Even if you do not, there are usually a couple of places that give you your buyin back, so it's a pretty safe investment if you are even semi-competent. I am busy Sundays so I cannot play in the million, so I just use the T$ to buyin into the tourneys I do play.

Ring game, on the other hand was quite dreadful. I started of the month with 20 buyin downswing at NL100, and had a few more bad runs along the way. I finished up $100 (lol?) for the month over about 40k hands. Basically every setup and bad beat that could happen did happen, and every flip went the other way...and it's actually still continuing in November. With FPPs, bonus, and rakeback though, I am about $1,000 up in the ring, so it's not as bad as it sounds.

My plan for November is to get my ring games back into gear. Once I feel the downstreak is over and am up about 20 buyings for the month, I will move up to NL200. I easily have the bankroll for it now, but I think it's a bad idea to move up when you have been on a bad run for a while.

Right now, I am playing PCA steps, starting with step 3 ($82.00 buyin). I am playing well, but some key bad beats and lost flips have kept me from moving past step 5 so far. I think I can reasonably expect to win a seat at the cost of about $800-$1,500 but we all know what those estimates are worth ahead of time.

Overall, October was about a $4,000 and another $500 or so worth in FPP on Stars. I am now Platinum VIP, so I get a quite decent return when I play there. I plan on maintaining that and making Supernova next year. I plan on spending FPPs on tourney buyins. I emailed Stars support about allowing to use FPPs to buyin into other tourneys (such as the daily 50k). Hopefully they listen.

My goal for November is to top October winnings, but for that I need to first get my ring games under control. Good luck to me.

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Since my last post, I worked on some technical aspects of tournament play, focusing mainly on conducting the right type of analysis during the hand. If my results are to be believed, I am doing something right.

This month I got 5th in one of the daily $55 50k Gtd., got 37th in the next one I played, made it into the money in Sunday Million (I went up to 50k chips pretty quickly and promptly went card dead. I maintained the stack for a while, but eventually the blinds were starting to catch up with me. I made my move and busted). I used FPP to buy in, so it was actually a decent cash since I did not pay the buyin fee. Was doing well in the Absolute 75k gtd until I made a dumb move and busted just under 30 short of making money. A few other minor cashes that aren't really worth mentioning. All in all, I am up about 3.5k in tourneys since the beginning of the month.

Now, while the tournaments went well, Stars clearly decided that owning tourneys meant I did not need good cards in ring. So far in October I'm down about 13 buyins over 17k hands at NL100. Not a big deal since that's a small portion of my roll, and my tournaments mean I am well up overall, buy fuckin' eh! Every single setup/bad beat that can happen, did happen. My personal favorite was flopping full house and getting owned by runner-runner royal.

I made a few mistakes in the process that I would not have made if I had been running better, but I would estimate they were responsible for 3 BIs at most. Generally I feel I am not tilting so there is no reason to take a break from ring.

My goal for the rest of the month is get my ring results back in the green for the month while playing some regular tournaments a few days a week. I just need to make sure that I keep up the logical analysis of my plays as I play ring. I have been working on my value bets and getting the most value out of my good hands. The testament to that is that I am 5 for 5 at tricking the pocket Aces to go all-in versus my Kings.

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So far I have not spoken at all about tournaments, even though I have been playing quite a few of them recently. The tournaments I play most often are $22.00 180-man SNGs on Stars, the daily $50,0000 ($55 buyin), $3.30+R $25,000 Gtd. on Stars, and random other tournaments that I are there at the right time for me.

Generally, I have done well, though my sample size is very small at the moment (only 95 MTTs in my recent database). I cash in roughly 20% of large field MTTs and over the 95 MTTs I have played, I am up about $1100 at an ROI of 56%. The reason for this post, however, is that I should have done a lot better. Today's incident at $11+R $45,000 Gtd. on Stars is what prompted me to make this post.

I picked up a few good hands during the rebuy round and managed to take down 2 big pots early on, shooting me up to 20,000 chips by the end of the first hour. I added another 2,000 chips during the addon break and entered the freeze-out stage with a stack of 22,000, ranked in the top 30 of the remaining 1000 players. Over the course of the next two hours, I greadually built up my stack by being selectively aggressive and getting my good hands paid off. At 3rd break, I was sitting on 96,000 chips, and with about 150 people left (top 225 paid), I was 18th in chip position. Easy coasting to the top, right?

After the break the blinds were 800/1600/150. With over 50 big blinds, I had plenty of time to continue being selectively aggressive while waiting to catch good hands. Instead the following takes place:

1. A player at my table whose stack was about same size as mine and who has been playing 22/20 and getting more and more aggressive as his stack grew, raised from UTG+1. I found myself holding TT in the blind. Now, when you are a big stack this deep and facing an opponent whose stack is big enough to bust you, TT is NOT a PF hand. The correct move, and one that I will make 4 times out of 5 is to call and continue playing post-flop. Instead, I 3bet, making it 25,000. The villain immediately pushes all-in, leaving me no choice but to fold, as his range there means I would either be flipping against 2 overcards or be dominated by a bigger pair. I fold. 25,000 down the drain, without even getting a chance at the flop.

2. I am down to 65,000 after the TT hand. Blinds have gone up and are now 1000/2000/200. I still I have over 30 big blinds and have plenty of time to play selectively. the villain from the TT hand, thanks to my 25k is sitting comfortably on 125k chips 2 seats to my left and keep turning up the aggression when I pick up QTo 2 off the button, with said villain on the button. I raise to 5,000, the villain 3 bets me to 15,000. Easy fold, no problem. BUT, just as I am thinking that, the warrior in me wakes up and pushes all-in. The villain calls with AK, my QT does not catch the 1-in-3 chance to beat the AK and I bust around 100th place, with about $100 to show for my troubles.

This has happened to me several times in the past. I am doing well and can take my time and play my own game. Instead, I make a rash decision or two that go against my typical selective style and bust out way before I should. So my goal for the next few weeks is to control this emotional rush I get and keep playing my game throughout the tournament. Every time I feel this emotional rush hit (I have learned to recognize it) I will make a conscious choice to slow down and rethink my play before acting.

This weekend I will be playing several tournaments where I put this idea to the test:

1. The monthly 100k freeroll for Gold Star+ VIP
2. The weekly 20k 100FPP freeroll
3. The daily 50k $55
4. $3.30+R
5. $11+R
6. $22.00 - 180 Man SNGs maybe

I will make a post detailing how these go. I do well in tournaments right now, but I need to eliminate a few leaks to take it to the next level.

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In my last post I spoke about having problems paying off sets. I made some post on this site's and other forums and talked to a few people along with reviewing my hand histories. I came up with a simple set of rules to avoid paying off sets. Obviously, you can never avoid them all, no matter how good you are, but these few guidelines have worked well for me. Please note, that I play NL100 6-max at the moment, so my observations are based on that game.

1. LOOK FOR ABNORMAL BEHAVIOR
Sets do not come along often, but when they do people try to make as much money as possible off of them. This means that your average player has to alter his or her typical behavior when playing a made set. Look for these changes.

A. The villain is a solid player who you can generally trust to play his hand for what it is. If he called PF and now he is starting to play his hand in a manner that suggest he has a monster (either reraising or calling where he should not be), he probably has made his set and thus has you beat.

B. The villain is a loose-passive calling station. By his nature, all this person ever does is call. If he starts betting or, worse, 3-betting you post-flop, you should get out of the way. You can count on him having at least a 2-pair.

C. A player who is OOP and has been check-calling you all hand suddenly bets out on the river. Chances are, your top pair is no good. This person does not want to rely on trying to get you to bet into him/her and is taking the matter into their own hands.


These guidelines are what I have been using and they have been working for me, though I still need to get better at not paying off hands that turn a better hand than me. For example, I raise PF with AK and the flop comes 28K. I bet, a loose player calls. Turn comes an 8, I bet, and this player starts playing back at me. Since he is a calling station, 8x is a large part of his range, and I need to take steps to cut my losses if that is indeed what he was holding.

For next time, I will work on the issue of bankroll oscillation. When I look at my graph of profits versus hands played, while there is an overall large positive trend, there are a lot of oscillations that come from situations where I make big mistakes with big hands. My goal for next time is to come up with a strategy to minimize the value of my mistakes when playing big hands. When playing, I have a high steady win rate that is only brought down by big hands where I make large mistakes. I will work on decreasing the downswings in my play by focusing on trying to reduce the cost of these mistakes.

Please feel free to comment. I look for both feedback on my findings as well as suggestions for the problem I am working on now.

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Greetings everyone, welcome to Chemical Imbalance blog! Thank you for coming. I am glad you are here, and I hope you will become a regular visitor and tell others to swing by so that I can achieve my quest for world domination.

First, a few words about the blog name. Chemical Imbalance started as joke among my family members and close friends. You see, I am a very happy person. I am happy most of the time and content the rest. Things that bother other people do not bother me. Obstacles that upset people just get me thinking about how to overcome them. I can see a positive in basically any situation. Losing a job just means you get a few weeks vacation, and what's bad about that? While most people spend their life wondering whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, my range is closer to half-full to overflowing.

This optimistic outlook on life caused those close to me to say that I have a chemical imbalance, just while for most people it means depression, for me it means an unnatural state of constant happiness. If they turn out to be right, I'll be pretty happy.

Now that the title is out of the way, it's time to talk about why I started the blog. Most blogs on this site seem to be just statements of fact--descriptions of what happened in the past few days/weeks/months. Each post gets a few comments, and that's that. The reason I am starting this blog is that I want it to become a learning tool for me and for those that read it.

I will talk about my game and what I am working on as well as how I plan on overcoming whatever leaks I am working on at the time. I invite everyone that reads the blog to comment and relate their own experiences as well as their take on the problem. I am a winning player now, and I plan on excelling at this game. I hope, my gentle reader, that this is a goal I share with you.

So, for the topic of my first post ever, I have picked the biggest leak I have at the moment: losing large pots on a good hand that gets outflopped. For contextual information, I play NL100 and often play on Absolute, where the max buying is 200bb.

Let me draw up a scenario. You hold AK in early position. You raise and get a caller. On the flop you make top pair. You get and get reraised. If the person is a nit or a tight regular, you know you are beat. They just hit their set. Fine. They can have this hand. But what if the person isn't? He can be an average player. Maybe even a regular who plays somewhat loose. How do you balance out between getting not losing value versus a weak hand (say AQ) and not sliding your entire stack across the table to an AT that just hit 2-pair?

This issue truly messes with my game right now. I have had great session ruined by 2-3 hands where I lost my entire stack paying off a flopped 2-pair or a set.

My immediate take on the issue is that, unless you have a very good read, you should not push over the raiser. That would just be dumb (and unfortunately I have done this on many occasions). Call and re-evaluate on later streets. But on later streets, they will bet TP2K probably just as aggressively as 2-pair. So what do you do? Please feel free to post your take on the situation in the comments.

In my next entry I will post my experience since this point, things I have found in other sources, as well as a summary of your responses.

I hope this blog turns into the learning tool I envisage it as, so I ask you to help me get it there.

Thanks for reading.

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