Langerz Grinds

Before I get into the update for the week I wanted to clarify from the last post. The 10 buy in bankroll management deal on full tilt is just temporary. The basic thought is I don’t really want to transfer money into my FTP poker account. At the same time I don’t want to spend a ton of time playing 2NL and 5NL when I have enough on Stars to play higher. So I’m going to be aggressive with the money I have on FTP until I get it up to at least where my Stars roll is (between 25 and 50 NL at the moment). After that I’ll be a little more conservative and if I bust no biggie I just go back to Stars.

Now for the update. Over the last week I’ve been rocking the 5NL tables at a rate of 22 bb/100 over ~5000 hands. Probably not sustainable, but the players at these levels are really weak. It’s been kind of fun playing here and very good for confidence. At my last entry I was just barely at my 5NL BRM requirement and I pretty quickly ran that up to 10 buy ins at 10NL.

Then I played a really crappy session at 10NL. I was back to my old auto pilot ways and not really paying attention and dropped about 5 buyins and was back to where I started. In the past that probably would have led to some tilt, but I handled it well and am already more than half the way back to 10NL. So I learned another solid lesson about making sure I’m always playing my A game (I’ve probably learned that lesson about 1000 times in my poker career, but another good example).

I also made an interesting observation about A game and my red line. I’m not one to obsess about my red line, but I thought this was interesting. Lately now that I’ve been concentrating more and playing my A game more often I have a good feel at the end of the session whether or not I was focused and playing my A game or distracted and playing my C/D game. This is independent of results and more based on the number of hands I remember when reviewing the session and the number of notes etc I have. I’ve also been looking at my graph and it is pretty clear from my red line when I’m on my A game and when I’m not. If I finish a session that I feel I was focused on my red line is flat to slightly negative (I think that is likely optimal at 5 and 10 NL), during the few distracted C games sessions I have had over the last week you see a sharp downturn in the red line. It’s a small sample, but I think this makes a lot of sense since things like thin value bets and spots to pick up pots are the first things we start to miss when we go into auto-pilot mode.

Anyway hopefully by the next update I’ll be solidly into the 10 NL games and more focused then I am now.