Frustrations Mount Up

Terrible run continues, and also struggling to control tilt. This is the problem from having a stretch of a few tens of thousands of hands running so far under EV, it's much more difficult to cope with the downswings since I have nothing to fall back on. At 10NL when things went more smoothly, I was at least able to say... Well, I've already won 25 buy-ins, should easily ride this out. Well, since I've only won 15 buy-ins (and should be 30) I could easily go on a downswing and wipe all of that profit out - my biggest downswing across limits being 15 BIs so far. So my decisions are currently being driven by fear and frustration which is bringing the quality of my play down.

Today I started the session in good spirits and feeling and playing pretty well. But as the onslaught of negative equity situations continued I just lost control. One pot I massively overplayed 99 on a low board against a terrible opponent and another I hero called a river line that made no sense when I should have held my discipline and folded (since villain was very straight forward). At this point emotion completely took over. Luckily for me I understood what was happening and I decided to stop playing and vent on here. I think that I prob tilt spewed two buy-ins in total including those hands just discussed so I guess I should be happy that I was able to stop it so soon.

The question becomes, how can I keep up the volume and my control while the poor run continues?
- I'll play shorter sessions and have more breaks
- At the mere hint of tilt I'll need to sit out for 20 mins or so
- Play some sessions back at $10NL
It really is a horrible feeling, I'm so glad I don't play professionally right now as it would be having a massive effect on me away from the tables. I hope that my blogs over the next few weeks will give some idea about what it's like to go through a poker recession the way I am.

Of course it could be that I'm just not a winning player. The evidence I have though - my success at 10NL and the positive upwards EV line in my database - is that I should be beating this limit comfortably. After another 100K hands (or ten weeks play) I will know one way or the other.

One more thing, earlier today the software froze again. All week it had been playing fine so I decided to try Meteoric's suggestion about switching router channels. Well I did, and it seemed to improve the FT response - so thank you sir. I would never have thought of that other wise. GL

Welcome Back Mr. Debanks

Let us remind you what the DOOMSWITCH does.


:( Need I say more?

Quick shout out to Meteoric for helping with internetz, check out his blog by following the link.

GL

Everything seems to be working again.

So I uninstalled Full Tilt and then downloaded it again because I had performed a disk defrag when I bought the new router. Doing this seems to have got things working again; I just played a 1k hand session without a hitch. So thankfully after a couple of weeks of very short frustrating sessions I finally seem to have Rush poker back. So I will restart my 10k hands per week target as of Sunday and until then get back into the groove. It's amazing how a little time off can make you feel very rusty.

The session didn't go great, two big set under set pots where to be fair I could prob have got away from one of the hands saving myself a $14 river bet and I lost a race blind versus blind AKs vs. QQ. Never mind, I don't really care because at least the software problem seems to have been solved. So hopefully more frequent updates and I'd really like to up the quality of my posts as well. More frequent hand analysis and stuff like that. Anyway, GL

Full Tilt problems and other distractions

... mean that I have not put in hardly any volume over the past week. The Full Tilt client is lagging really badly during play to the point that it's unplayable. Not just because I keep timing out of hands but also that I'm rushing my decisions while I am actually connected. So I need to quickly find a solution to this and get my volume going again - this will be critical in my desire to have reached $0.50/$1.00 by the turn of the year. I believe the problems lie with the modem/router upgrade I have recently acquired and the need to set some firewall rules. So far any that I have tried have not worked so I may end up using my PC as a DMZ during poker play only. This is a far from ideal and potentially risky work around though, and for that reason I have moved $2k from FTP into a bank account and will only keep a maximum ~$1k in the client for now until (or if) I get to higher limits.
So a distinct lack of posts for a long time, and I have hardly played either. But the ability to earn money at poker, even small amounts is a huge bonus for someone who is low paid like I am in the difficult financial climate we are in so I owe it to myself to put in that volume. This week will see my return to the v-felt. GL

Hand Reading

An area of the game where I believe I am getting better. I think I played the following hand pretty well, if you disagree please comment as I'm not an expert.



Quickly about the hand, opponent was a very loose aggressive player. Given that I'd expect him to reraise QQ preflop every single time and sometimes the lower pockets as well, I figured that unless he was making a very thin value check raise with a queen (that I considered unlikely) then he was bluffing almost all of the time. I was planning to shove on ANY SINGLE TURN CARD. The queen was the dream card for me really, as my play looked exactly like queen x kicker. I may have got a hero call on a few other turns, but despite this I think shoving our entire range on the turn versus this type of villain is going to show higher expectation than folding to the second barrel.

Quick note... I was trying to find two other check raise pots that I thought were interesting, one I played well and one I totally butchered but I can't find them. I'll search them out tomorrow and finish this post then; my eyes are heavy and I need sleep!

To Be Continued...........

Quick Update

Things going OK. Overall win rate is now 1.2 BB/100 and according to the EV line should be around 2, which is pretty good for an amateur player in today's games. I have been introducing a little bit more flexibility back into my play; for a while I was being very specific with picking out hands to raise or check raise or double barrel. Instead I'm focussing on villain's range more, and using a wider array of hands to bluff with. Not overdoing it, but injecting a few more percent of aggression into my style. I'll dig out some examples from recent play in a future post but I'm very happy with my game at the moment. I have got the red line shrinking just a little less as a result of the added aggression and this should help my winrate to stay at a good clip. I haven't played as many hands as I wanted this week, which is a shame. But I'll try and at least do a minimum of 10k hands per week - a target that I have maintained since the start of the year. GL

A Road to Higher Limits

So things seem to have picked up the last few sessions, people have decided to start giving me money when I have the nuts which is quite nice. Example earlier... Some lovely chap decided to check raise me and 5 bet all-in with KK when I have T8 on 976. SWEET!

Right, I'm convinced that I am beating this limit pretty comfortably now. Taking my expected winnings as a guideline (noob mistake I know) I should be 24 buy-ins to the good. So what I'm going to do is up my minimum hands per week to 15k from now on and then I'll move to $0.25/$0.50 (providing I'm still doing well) at 200k hands. I'm currently at 65000 so that means I have 9 weeks to go until I can say hi to a new limit and some better players. I'm also going to start protecting my bankroll somewhat and I'll cash out some of the money I have in Full Tilt at the moment and keep it in a fast access savings account so that I can redeposit quickly if needed. I do not take money out of my bankroll currently (I'll be unable to use the savings money for personal use, only poker). This is a deliberate policy to enable my 'roll to grow as quickly as possible.