Steady, but Tilted

I’ve been having a bit of a rough spot in my poker developement, lately. I really need to figure out what it is and start to work on it, but so far I’m clueless. I don’t feel like I know where to look. It’s starting to get stressful.

When I made the switch to 6Max, I started out at 2NL to get a feel for the game and work my way up feeling confident. Of course, I ran pretty well and beat 2NL for 93bb/100 over 3K hands. At 5NL my results were a bit more sane, and I spent 8K hands making 13bb/100. At 10NL I put in 14K hands at 15bb/100. It was running better than that until late February I started having trouble at the table. Tilt started creeping in and I started to feel less and less sure of myself. I dropped about 8BI in my downswing, and then started moving in the right direction again for the last thousand or so hands of the month.

I had hit the goal I set for myself, and so decided to make my planned move up to 25NL on time at the beginning of March. It was very swingy. I’m currently still a winner at that stake, but only by a very small amount over 8500 hands. This weekend I hit a spot where I lost 5BI in 700 hands. I set 5 BIs as a stop-loss where I will move back down until I’ve rebuilt my confidence and earned back what I lost. It’s a pretty cautious stop-loss, I know, but I’m really prone to tilt and if it’s such a small loss, it’s a small amount to earn back at the lower limit and I’ll be back soon anyway. Unfortunately, what happened when I moved back down is that I promptly lost 5 more buyins in the first 1000 hands back at 10NL.

When I look at it all together in a graph, it becomes clear that my bad streak from February hasn’t ever really ended. I’ve been oscillating around a fairly decent range, but I’m ultimately down a little over 10BI from my peak. I’m sure everybody knows exactly how frustrating this is. I just don’t know if it’s only that I’m running badly. Or did I make some change to my play that is killing me? Am I being cheated? Did I get some spyware that’s sharing my holecards to every random clown who sits down at my table? Are the sites rigged? Am I just terrible, but was running incredibly hot before? You’ve all felt something of those doubts, I’m sure. Or maybe you’ve been lucky enough or confident enough in yourselves not to. I hope so.

If I had to guess, I’d say the most likely case is that I’ve let too much passivity into my game lately and it’s showing. But even if that’s the case, running so badly at these micro limits seems like a pretty extreme result. It leaves me wondering if my previously “well-timed aggression” was just papering over a ton of other huge leaks in my game that are taking their toll now that it’s slipped a bit. But I feel like starting to tinker with my game while I’m losing and tilted is a pretty terrible idea. I’ve considered stripping everything down to a bare ABC TAG game and just rebuilding my game on top of that when I’m feeling better about things.

I think I’m just going to wait it out a bit. Not try anything drastic, yet. I’ll spend the next couple days watching a number of videos, and maybe read one of my favorite poker books. I’ll try to hit the weekend games refocused and refreshed. If that doesn’t work I’ll start to think about more drastic actions.

Thanks for taking the time to read. Advice and sympathy are greatly appreciated.

Good luck at the tables!

No, really. I’m just playing terribly since I moved up. I don’t know what it is. My main problem is just failing to give respect to aggression. It seems like every time I get three-bet, my first reaction is to 4-bet even if my hand is garbage. I stacked off twice with pocket tens, and once with jacks toady. Each time just hoping they didn’t have anything, despite not having any reason to think that. Just stubbornness.

At least in the JJ hand, I tried to put my opponent on a range. He was an unknown, but seemed pretty nitty. When he raised on the turn, all I could think was that the only hand he was representing was 66. I thought he shouldn’t really have any 7s in his range. Obviously that was just what I WANTED to believe, and I only had like 17 hands on the guy and no clue about his play. Plus, even if I knew the guy’s play better than my own and was certain he couldn’t have anything but 66 or a bluff here, I shouldn’t forget the cardinal rule that nits don’t bluff.

Poker Stars $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold’em – 6 players
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

UTG: $11.70
MP: $37.40
CO: $20.55
BTN: $33.85
Hero (SB): $27.35
BB: $25.00

Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is SB with J J
4 folds, Hero raises to $1, BB calls $0.75

Flop: ($2.00) 7 7 6 (2 players)
Hero bets $1.30, BB calls $1.30

Turn: ($4.60) 4 (2 players)
Hero bets $2.75, BB raises to $7.25, Hero calls $4.50

River: ($19.10) Q (2 players)
Hero checks, BB bets $15.45 all in, Hero calls $15.45

Final Pot: $50.00
Hero shows J J (two pair, Jacks and Sevens)
BB shows 6 7 (a full house, Sevens full of Sixes)
BB wins $47.55
(Rake: $2.45)

If I continue to have so many problems, I’ll probably move down again for a while, but I’d really rather work through the issues and stay at 25NL. For my next few sessions, I’m just going to focus on making sure I’m feeling good, focused, and centered before I start. Without this kind of idiotic spew, I’ll be doing fine at the quarter. I just need to figure out why I’m constantly doing these sorts of things and put a stop to it.

Good luck at the tables!

I haven’t been doing very much poker-wise the last week or so. My computer started having a lot of trouble, so I formatted my drive to get a fresh windows install and see if that would help. In the process, I decided to update to Windows 7, and am quite pleased with the decision so far. Everything’s running a bit smoother, and the interface improvements are excellent. I would recommend it to anyone. That took a couple days off my poker time, of course, while I got my machine back up and running. I also was feeling a bit unmotivated. I had a bankroll goal to meet my March 1st, in order to move up to NL25. I met that goal quite a bit early, and for some reason didn’t want to start the new level until my scheduled time. Yes, I’m a bit neurotic like that. Also, I’ve been running quite badly. It’s hard to motivate yourself when you can’t seem to win any decent sized pots.

However, I did have my first day at 25NL today. It didn’t go well, as expected. I think my play was fine. I know I made a few moves at the wrong time, and was probably overcompensating somewhat for my fear of playing too passively after moving up. I four-bet someone early on at one of my tables with a pretty weak hand, since he seemed like a laggy tag up to that point, but of course he shoved and as the session went on his stats changed until he seemed like quite a nit. There seemed to be a lot of very soft players at my tables, I just never got any hands or good spots to take their money. In any case, I think I will find success at the new level.

I did finally make a play video at 10NL and posted it for review. Irtoast was good enough to watch it, and made several very helpful comments. Props to him. I’ve also been doing a decent job of watching videos. Not every day, but close. And I’ve posted some hands in the forum, and even more importantly have taken the chance of looking like an idiot and done my best to help others with the hands they’ve posted.

All in all, I feel I’m doing a pretty decent job of working on my goals. I don’t have any really specific plans for March, except to settle in to The Quarter and start running better. Wish me luck! And good luck to all of you at the tables.

Tilt… I thought I owned you. I thought I had destroyed you. I laughed at you as I took bad beats, smiled, and kept playing. I sneered at you when I made huge mistakes, and just looked at them as learning experiences. Oh, how arrogant I was.

How smugly I walked through the tilting masses of poker players, nose in the air, knowing that I was above such things. How foolishly sure of myself. How prideful in the knowledge that I had overcome these mundane concerns.

Oh, but tilt… How clearly you see into the hearts of men. You know us better than we know ourselves. Even when we have long forgotten you, you still remember. You remember and wait. Secure in the knowledge that some day there will come a time for you to strike again. And when that time comes, you move. Always pitiless. Always merciless. You take a man and reduce him to a quivering mass. You put him down, even if only long enough for him to feel the pain, and clearly see the folly of his past surety.

Tilt, my old friend. My old foe. I see you have come from the shadows to walk with me again. Oh, to regain the feeble illusions of yesterday.

I know, I know. Everyone likes to look at their EV adjusted graph when they’ve been running bad for a while to reassure themselves that it’s largely bad luck that’s been getting them. There’s something to say for that. And analyzing your data in as many ways as possible to find leaks and improve your game is always a good idea. That includes using your showdown/non-showdown winning numbers. But… I don’t think that’s how most of us are using them, and we’re not doing ourselves any favors.

This past week, I finally turned off my BB/100 and EV adjusted numbers on the main report in my HEM. I’ve also stopped looking at the red line in my graph. I feel I’m doing myself a favor by making these changes. At least for me, I think these displays were far more likely to cause tilt than to relieve it or provide usable information to me.

If I have a losing day, and look at my EV adjusted graph and see that it was all because of all-in variance, is that going to make me forget that I lost? No. It might make me whine about how unlucky I am and feel sorry for myself. It’s also a lot more likely to let me write off my losing sessions, and fail to put the work I need to into my game to improve the areas that I AM weak in. What if I have a good day, and when I look I see that I was way above EV and if I had run even I may have even been a loser. Is this going to motivate me? No. It’s more likely to make me feel like I had a losing session, even though I just won! All-in EV isn’t even a particularly useful measure of ‘luck’ because there are just a ton of other factors that affect how you run on a much more frequent basis than what cards happen to fall after you’ve gotten all-in. In theory you could be running way below your all-in EV for an extended period of time, and still, on net, have had extremely good luck during that time.

The red line is a little simpler to criticize. Poker is about making the right decisions. If I’m constantly looking at my red line, trying to make it conform to some idea I have of how it should look, that’s a lot more likely to cause poorer decision making than better. In some games, you just can’t expect to have a positive red line. If everyone at your table is a calling station and you try to force your red line up, that is going to cause you some real trouble.

That said, I think people should be aware of how all their stats generally look, including non-showdown vs. showdown winnings. And I do know of some people who’ve only emotionally survived through extended downswings due to the comfort of their EV numbers. But as poker players, I think a lot of us spend an inordinate amount of time looking at these numbers. I’m sure turning them off will return dividends in my focus and emotional wellness.

Good luck at the tables!

I’m feeling a bit better the last couple days than I have been for a while. It’s pretty nice, actually. My back is starting to feel much better from my slip and fall last week, I’ve lost a bit more weight, and I’ve been somewhat more productive in everything.

I’ve been getting in more hands the last couple days, and am coming significantly closer to the goals I’ve set for myself. Especially today, I’m feeling much more focused when I’m playing. It’s easy when you’re running hot, but even so there’s a real difference. I’ve made some bad plays, and some good plays, but I’ve seen the spots and thought about the best play quite often. If I can train myself to always be that alert, I imagine the technical knowledge of which are good plays will just come with time and practice. (And plenty of DC videos)

In my last post, I posted a Royal Flush that happened at my table, and now:

Poker Stars $0.05/$0.10 No Limit Hold’em – 3 players
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

SB: $3.20
Hero (BB): $11.65
BTN: $9.30

Pre Flop: ($0.15) Hero is BB with A Q
1 fold, SB calls $0.05, Hero raises to $0.50, SB calls $0.40

Flop: ($1.00) T 4 K (2 players)
SB bets $0.10, Hero calls $0.10

Turn: ($1.20) J (2 players)
SB bets $0.20, Hero raises to $0.90, SB calls $0.70

River: ($3.00) T (2 players)
SB bets $0.20, Hero raises to $1.90, SB folds

Final Pot: $3.40
Hero mucks A Q
Hero wins $3.25
(Rake: $0.15)

That’s my fourth, I think. Maybe fifth. I don’t want to load my big db just to find out. I should really turn off auto-muck. Meh… I won’t, though.

I didn’t watch any videos today, but I really didn’t have a chance to. I did a lot of digging through my database and thinking about poker, though, so I’ll give myself a freebie on that one. I still haven’t posted any more hands, though. That, I do need to fix. Tomorrow I will get some hands up. I promise. Even if they’re just AA hands that make me look like a gomer. Actually, I may have a couple interesting AA spots… I’ll find ’em.

Other things in my life are doing alright, too. I’ve been trying a lot harder to help my wife work through her own issues, and I think she’s starting to make some progress with them. I’ve also been able to find a little bit more time to spend actively with my kids, and that really means a lot to me. I gave my 4-year old the idea yesterday of making a card for his mom and drawing some hearts and stuff on it. He did. Then he made a bunch more. A couple with hearts. Then stars. Then he started drawing police cars on them. What can I say? The kid loves cars. He impressed me a lot by suddenly saying, “I gave you seven cards! I’ll make three more, then you can have ten cards!” So now my bedroom does indeed have ten folded paper valentines hung on the wall. It really is great to have kids. Don’t let anyone try telling you otherwise.

Well, I do tend toward being long-winded, and so are these guys . I wish there was a decent version of that song on YouTube. Best poker song ever, though.

Good luck at the tables!

Something I’ve noticed about myself is that I love excuses. If I can find what seems like a really good reason to slide on my responsibilities, I jump all over it. So when I slipped on my icy front steps while carrying out the garbage earlier this week, I took full advantage. It’s true that I hurt my back pretty badly. For a couple minutes there I was concerned that I might really be seriously injured. Any sort of movement is still pretty painful. But while I really haven’t been able to do some things, exercise for instance, I’ve been milking it a bit too much. Sure, my tailbone hurts, but I’m sitting anyway. So why not play some poker? The truth is, I wasted a lot of time and effort on inconsequential things during a time when I know I need to be refocusing and improving myself so I can improve my life. Real men don’t need excuses, ’cause they get shit done.

I’ve gotten in only about 3,000 hands so far this month. I’ll need to pick up the pace a bit if I want to hit the targets I’ve set for myself. Worse is that I really haven’t played well. I’ve made a lot of calls in spots where I knew I shouldn’t. There’s been a good deal of auto-piloting, as well. I’m sure I’ve missed a ton of great spots. I did make some breakthroughs in table-selection, though.

Other poker related stuff… I have only posted one hand on the forum. I’m just terrible at figuring out which hands are good ones to post. Perhaps I should spend some time developing that skill, or maybe just find someone to exchange some reviews with so I can see some of my blunders through their eyes. I did make a video, but nothing really happened and I don’t think I’ll post it. I’ve watched a good number of videos, but I have gone some days without watching any, which I want to avoid. I want to keep the poker ideas going through my mind all the time.

I did see a royal flush this week:

Poker Stars $0.05/$0.10 No Limit Hold’em – 6 players
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

UTG: $17.10
MP: $5.75
CO: $10.60
BTN: $1.40
Hero (SB): $16.10
BB: $8.80

Pre Flop: ($0.15) Hero is SB with Q K
2 folds, CO raises to $0.40, BTN raises to $1.40 all in, 2 folds, CO calls $1

Flop: ($2.95) T 6 Q (2 players – 1 is all in)

Turn: ($2.95) K (2 players – 1 is all in)

River: ($2.95) 8 (2 players – 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $2.95
CO shows A J (a Royal Flush)
BTN shows T A (a pair of Tens)
CO wins $2.85
(Rake: $0.10)

Meh… Just not as exciting as they used to be.

Another project I have going on right now, that’s actually probably the most important thing I’m up to these days, is teaching my 4-year old son to read. He’s doing a great job, but I’m afraid I’ve been slacking at that, too. I only put in a couple days this week, and he deserves better. He’s getting really close to the point where things should really click for him, and I don’t want him to slip back because I’m not keeping it fresh in his mind.

Of course, I managed to find plenty of time for unimportant, yet fun, things. I turned an old PC I had into a Linux workstation. I just hooked it up to the network and control it through VNC. I’m just trying to offload as many tasks as I can from my PC for performance improvements. Bittorrent, my FTP server, and some similar stuff. It’s been nice getting back into that, as I haven’t really done anything with *nix in about 15-20 years. And logging in to it from my Droid is another cool thing I can do do show up iPhone users. Sure, they could do it too, but they don’t know that. Shhh… Don’t tell.

That’s probably about enough for tonight. I’ll hit you with a song I’ve just been loving to death lately. Melissa

Good luck at the tables

Hey, I just want to briefly detail my goals, as well as where I’m at and where I’m coming from.

Currently I’m playing 6max 10nl online. My goal is to make it to 100nl by September. This seems to me like an ambitious goal given the valume I’m able to get in, but I’m willing to adjust if variance and/or my game development do not cooperate. In considering my history of playing poker, I started to think that perhaps I’ve let a fear of moving up to meaningful stakes hold me back from advancing as I could have, and I want to break through that.

I started playing poker in 2006. I’d caught some re-runs of the US Poker Championships on ESPN while visiting the in-laws and was completely floored by the (actually rather unimpressive) play that I saw, particularly one player calling out the other’s exact two cards. So I got some books, studied up, and went down to the casino to play some $3-6 limit hold’em. I lost in my first session, but I still believe I was a favorite even then. My play was very weak-tight, but that was enough to beat those games. In my future sessions, I started a clear trend of winning.

I couldn’t make it to the casino as much as I wanted, though, so I deposited a bit of money on Full Tilt and Pokerstars. I started reading 2+2 and built on my $50 stars deposit to move up several levels of full-ring limit hold’em fairly quickly.

At this point, I had better access to live poker, and started playing mostly B&M poker again. I was winning, but started to find that limit hold’em wasn’t keeping my attention very well anymore. Around the same time, I noticed some people I knew to be pretty loose, recreational players from the limit games walking away from the no-limit games with racks and racks. So…

I started to learn no-limit. I went back to Stars, and started rebuilding the roll I had mostly cashed out by playing 2nl. I worked up to 50nl and was shot taking, but…

Then I decided that I didn’t want to deal with the tilt issues and isolation that online poker causes me. I took a bit of a break and then started playing 200nl in the casinos. I found that I could easily beat the games at a steady clip, and did so for a time. I was going to move up to the 500nl games, then…

I came to think that my poker development would be served pretty well by learning 6-max. So, I’ve come back to Stars, and have been rebuilding my (again, mostly cashed out) bankroll. I started at 2nl and now feel quite confident at 10nl.

Looking over the times I’ve switched which type of game I’m playing, I’ve found they all coincide with a bit of a downswing, or some life-variance. Switching has been my way of avoiding working through the difficulties and hiding from them instead, as I so often do. So, I’m committed to sticking with 6-max for a considerable amount of time. At least until I’ve successfully cracked 200nl.

Specific goals:

- I’m a bankroll nit, so build up a bit more @ 10nl and move to 25nl by March 1st
- 50NL by June 1st
- 100NL by September 1st
- Blog at least once a week, use this to hold myself accountable
- Try to get in a lot of strategy posts in the forums. Get over fear of being wrong
- Watch at least 1 video per day, actively thinking about it and taking notes
- Make a few play videos
- Do session reviews and focus on finding and fixing leaks
- Participate to the fullest in Mt. Robust, and try to make some friends within the DC community in the process
- Get coaching when I can afford to pay for it out of my bankroll
- ?
- Profit

I’m sure I’ve left something out, but I’ve rambled on long enough and it’ll just have to wait for another time.

“We’ve got to start spending more meaningful time together,” my wife said a few nights ago.

“I know. I know. I know!”

Life has left me feeling rather dissatisfied of late, and I know for her it’s even more so. A series of poor decisions since our marriage in 2003, combined with more than a little bit of life-variance, has left us in arguably a worse place than where we started out together.

Back then, as poor college students (some of the time), shacked up in a too-expensive apartment and living off our crappy “convenience dining” wages, we at least didn’t feel like everything we did moved us in a direction we didn’t want to be headed. We were justifiably confident that we had a lot of good things in store for us. We were going to get married, have some great kids, my wife (then my girlfriend) was going to be the best mother ever, and we were going to rely on my hard work to bring me success in whatever vocation I chose.

However, it’s felt like everything we’ve done since our wedding has moved us further and further from true happiness and satisfaction. I tried to write out some of what we’ve been through and done, but it’s too embarrassing and painful for me to do so as honestly as I would want. The attempt, however, further reminded me of how stupid and lazy I’ve been, and how angry I really am at myself, and at my wife, for how things have come to be.

Anyway, back to my recent conversation with my wife. I paced around our bedroom for a moment, trying to fight down a familiar feeling of soul-devouring stress. We’d had a fight earlier that day, about something stupid. She was going to bed now, and we’d just been spending a few minutes making sure everything was alright between us when her comment came up. For some reason, right then it came to me that there’s something seriously wrong with the way I’ve been approaching life. There’ve been so many trade-offs, sacrifices and settling. Finding happiness can’t involve doing things that make you miserable. That’s the kind of contradiction our sensible universe doesn’t allow.

The obvious answer is that I’m doing it wrong. I’m thinking about it wrong. I’m going to find a better way. I’m going to try to consider these concerns philosophically and to find the greater solution. In the mean time, though, I’m going to make myself put a lot of hard work into life. But I’m going to focus my energy entirely into areas that bring me direct satisfaction as well as moving me toward the larger goals. Should I find some of the answers along the way, I hope to share them here with you.

And thus, I will renew my interest in poker. In this great game I hope to find immediate challenges and income, as well as move myself toward larger life goals.

James