Poker

I finally know what it’s like to run bad at HU hypers. I played the same player 18 times and lost 14 of them. I actually didn’t even win one until the 12th try, so that was interesting.

He ran $900 over EV, so I know I just got unlucky. Thinking about how tilted I got, it wasn’t TOO bad. I think I was most tilted after I lost the first five, and then it slowly got better from there mostly because of the absurd ways I was losing.

I’m learning that I get most tilted when I lose and then think I might have played (or did play) badly. Getting 2-outered repeatedly is infinitely easier to deal with than playing terribly. Out of the 10 matches that I lost, I think I made just one big mistake and the rest couldn’t be helped. There is a chance I made several smaller mistakes, but I think I overall played fine.

I don’t like how I felt annoyed after losing the first handful of games, though. This is something I need to work on.

Something else I also have to work on is eliminating the urge to berate people in chat when they play terribly but still win. I swear that I will one day realize that this happens ALL THE TIME in poker, which is why the game is profitable. I rarely act on the urge to berate, but even just feeling the temptation to do so is unacceptable.

Played only a couple hours and 47 games. Lobbies were hard to get today for some reason, which means that I had to play a lot more $60s than I wanted to. I ended up breaking even.

Tilt report: I felt some twinges of annoyance when I lost a bunch of consecutive all-in pots vs one opponent. I got him down to less than a big blind and then, before I knew it, we were back at even stacks. I think I was mostly annoyed because I had expected to win once his stack got so low, and then I felt like something was taken from me when I didn’t win.

To solve this, I think I have to not expect to win despite his stack. In fact, it might even help me to expect to lose sometimes. Next time I’ll try to tell myself “I could still lose” and see if that prevents me from getting annoyed when he doubles a million times.

It was a short session, so there’s not much to report other than that. Back at it tomorrow.

I played 60 SnGs today and lost a few buy-ins. It was strange to play and not win every all-in pot! Since I was in the process of coming back down to reality, it felt like I was losing a lot more than I actually was. Then again, it’s usually my tendency to think I’m losing a lot more than I actually I am.

Aside from mentally exaggerating my losses, I didn’t feel too tilted today.  I think I got the most annoyed when I had to play this one reg multiple times. I declined to rematch him every time we played, so he just hunted my lobbies down and manually sat me. We played 9 times until he finally declined me.

I’m not too sure why he insisted on sitting me since I am sure he could find much easier games. He won a bit off me, but overall he just wasted our time. I just wanted to beat him a bunch of times so that he would leave me alone, but that didn’t happen, so I was annoyed 😛

I know 9 games isn’t that many games, but I could do without playing regs. Hopefully he doesn’t sit me anymore from now on, but we’ll see.

I played 100 HU SnGs today: 84 $100s and 16 $60s. I ran ridiculously hot by a tune of 12 buy-ins over EV. That’s a lot! Overall I profited ~15 buy-ins. I didn’t even know it was possible to run this good over a 100 game sample. I am not looking forward to the day where I run 12 buy-ins below EV 😛

I haven’t been playing much poker the last couple months, so today’s session was tiring. I only played around 3.5 hours total, but I feel really wiped out. Although it was all heads-up, which is definitely more intense than full ring or 6-max.

Tomorrow’s Sunday, but the only MTTs I plan on playing are the $55 Women’s freeze-out (aka the best tournament EVER) and the Battle of the Planets triple shootout. Then hopefully I’ll play another 100 SnGs.

I ran pretty hot playing 60s the last couple times I played. Even though I had an extremely small sample size at both $30s and $60s, I felt that I was competent enough to move up to $100s since I have the bankroll to do so.

I played my first session with $100s today. There were fewer people playing $100s, and there were more regs. This meant it was MUCH harder to open sit lobbies than at $60s. I ended playing 49 $100s and losing ~8 buy-ins. I ran around 3 buy-ins below EV. I also played 28 $60s and won a buy-in.

I felt like I was running bad, losing a lot of flips, and always running into the nuts, but I’m sure I could have avoided plenty of my losses. It was definitely frustrating because I felt like I was losing over and over again. I’m not sure if the frustration was amplified because I knew I was losing more $100s than $60s.

Another problem I likely had was that since $100s were so slow to register, I was frequently in two lobbies and having to 2-table. I had previously only 1-tabled, so I’m sure this didn’t really help my cause.

Will review tomorrow and hopefully plug some leaks that undoubtedly came to be during my foray into $100s.

Yesterday I ended up losing around 5 buy-ins. I definitely made plenty of mistakes and have a lot to work on. I did run almost 5 buy-ins below EV, so if I look at it from the point of view that I broke even, it’s not too discouraging.

I learned a bit about the perils of ego and how heads-up can get personal. I played one guy around 20 times via rematches simply because I felt he was bad and it annoyed me that he kept winning against me. While I am pretty certain I had an edge on him, it likely wasn’t big enough to justify rematching him that many times. Plus I was hungry and tired. So I should have just stopped playing way before it got to 20 games.

The good news is that I think I figured out how to beat him (at a decent clip) towards the last half of our games. The bad news is that it took me quite a few games to figure it out. I hope that playing more and getting more experience will help me figure these things out faster in the future.

I didn’t play poker today. Probably back at it tomorrow.

Played 82 HU hypers yesterday and things went pretty well. I profited 12 buy-ins while running 2 buy-ins better than EV. I think it’s safe to say I ran pretty hot.

82 games is a sample size that shows nothing. I reviewed with someone today, though, and things seem to be okay. Instead of folding too much I am now calling too much, but hopefully I can fix that today.

I’m not punting too much, so I’m gonna play $60s today. I’m gonna try to play another 60-80 games. Since I’m only 1 tabling at the moment, it should take me a good 3-4 hours to do it.

I did some HU review with a friend just now. Things to work on today include betting according to stack sizes and folding less.

I’m playing $30s right now while I plug my most massive leaks. I’m hoping to move up to $60s later this week, maybe in the next couple of days. Today I’m planning on playing 80 games, which should hopefully give me plenty to review tomorrow.

So I like PLO, but I was recently made to realize that I almost certainly shouldn’t count on it to make a steady income. I’m sure you already know that there’s tons of variance in PLO, and I just don’t play enough hands to overcome it. Running bad and losing for an entire year doesn’t really sound appealing to me.

Time to switch games again? Next on the list is hyper heads-up SnGs. I’ve never played heads-up seriously before, so it will probably be kinda fun at first. It will also almost certainly be super tilting. I’m gonna have to really work on that tilt control if I wanna play these games.

I still intend on playing PLO from time to time. It’s really fun and I’ve really learned a lot over the past few weeks. I would be good to at least become competent at it, so I will be trying to play it a few hours every week.

Real life has prevented me from playing poker this past week. There hasn’t been a lot of free time to sit and review the way I have to if I’m going to play a proper session. When there has been free time, I’ve been tired thanks to waking up early and not sleeping properly.

I’m feeling some slight financial pressure recently, which is kind of stressful considering I am learning a new game. I didn’t think that money would matter much when I made the decision to play PLO, but maybe I was wrong.

If I really need money, I could easily go back to sit-and-go’s and grind out a decent hourly, but I don’t want to do that. I think that PLO is a much better long term decision for me.

To make PLO work, I am going to need to get out of the micro stakes as soon as possible so that I can stop getting crushed by the rake. At least I can count on some rakeback while I learn to play profitably.

Gonna do some review and play a few hands. I hope I didn’t forget everything I learned during my week of no playing.