Summer of Love (and beyond?)

As you can see by my last few entries I have been going through some struggles lately.  I won't go into too much detail about them here because they have already been explained.  Anyway, after I had limited myself to a few short 30-minute burst sessions of 4-tabling 6 max games with reviews in between, watching some related poker vids, and then making some goals based off of it all, I got ready to sit down and play.  

It was a pretty enlightening experience.  

My goals were very simply to play my game and stick to my guns.  That meant stealing liberally, c-betting aggressively in spots where it looked profitable (dry flops, opponents w/ high F2CB stats, etc.), 3-betting both in position and from the blinds, isolating fish (and cbetting fit and folders while valueowning  stations), obviously betting for value, and most importantly listening to those warning bells going off in my brain when facing a big raise or 3bet on the flop but most importantly the turn -- in my review I took a good hard look at my winnings when calling all-in bets and these types of raises.

I sat down to play determined to ignore the results and play my damn game.  Things had been going pretty bad lately so it wasn't the easiest of tasks, then something just kind of clicked.  There was a hand at some point where I got the money in good and lost, but it didn't shake me.  There were scary turn raises that I let go, but it didn't effect me.  I could hear baluga's words from one of the Coaching Kristy videos "eventually, the cards will turn and we'll go on a huge heater."

There were more hands, some wins, many losses, and after about 5000 hands (don't make fun of the sample size, this is a lot for me in one day) of breakeven poker I realized that I was in a groove.  The results weren't there, but everything had seemed to slow down for me.  My reads felt crisp. My game was comfortable, and then it happened.

I started picking up hands.

I'm not going to post a bunch of hand histories (I might later), but boy-oh-boy was I picking up hands.  High pockets were coming in droves, I was setting up left and right.  Peeling to get those low-outers from a small flop raise found me hitting and dragging large pots.  What a feeling, it is magical, really.  Hell, I even lost a huge 350 bb pot on a turn all in after my pocket aces spiked a set on the flop, (I'm happy calling this turn raise every time), but it didn't shake me one bit.  

It feels good to snap out of a slump.  It feels even better when it comes after taking the necessary steps to do so.  

I'm out.