Poker

Slept like shit last night. Tired. Tried to play a few games just now and they went horribly and now I am massively tilted. Regret playing. If I can help it, I’m never gonna play tired ever again. It’s not worth it.

Today I played 141 games which seems a bit low for 6.5 hours, but action was quite slow. Volume has been pretty similar to this for most of the month and I’m hoping it picks up soon, but I’m not really confident it will.

I didn’t feel really tilted at any point during my session today, which probably just means I ran good. I started losing a few in a row towards the end of my session when I couldn’t beat a fish running hot, so I just stopped playing and now I’m gonna look for food 🙂

/boring post, maybe tomorrow will be more exciting

Not looking at results is pretty funny! I finally checked my results for the week yesterday after I wrote my post, and it was very surprising. I ended up with an EV ROI of only 1.5%, but I actually ran at a 10% ROI. That’s some pretty sweet run hot.

This is really funny to me because a lot of the days I played, I felt like I ran really badly. On Feb 9th I wrote that the day was “frustrating” and that I felt like I ran badly all day, but that day I actually ran massively above EV. I ended up +14 ABI that day, which makes me feel pretty stupid for complaining about variance. I really did prove to myself that I have no clue how I’m doing if I don’t look at my results.

This past week has definitely given me more reason to avoid looking at my results on a daily basis and instead do it on a weekly basis. Now when I am having a frustrating day and I feel like I’m running bad, I can just say to myself that maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about and I’m actually up a bunch 😛

Well I think I’m done playing for the day, even though I only played 2.5 hours. I ended my first session after playing a huge fish for multiple games and losing 7 buy-ins. At one point in the middle of our games (when I was down 8 or 9 BI), the fish actually said to me in chat, “YOU LOST SO MUCH” … I’ve never had a fish needle me in chat for being up a ton.

I was pretty tilted during the string of rematches because I’ve never run so poorly against someone I had such a huge edge on. He was insanely awful and I got coolered at every second. I knew it was a problem when I had multiple tables and didn’t care about the other ones, though. I wanted to win my money back so badly that I auto piloted the other tables so that I could focus on the fish table. This is obviously incredibly stupid. I did this even when the other tables were higher stakes which is even more stupid.

Alright I’m done berating myself. Prob gonna eat some food and just play again tomorrow.

Played a long day of poker. Went for 7 hours somehow, which is pretty rare for me since I never start early enough and games always die. Games were pretty good until pretty late tonight, though, which is probably why I didn’t stop playing. Yay Saturdays.

The day was very frustrating. I felt like I ran badly all day. The most frustrating parts of the day was when I was rematching regs, though, and just could not win vs them no matter what I did.

This seems to always happen to me: I rematch a reg for 20-30 games and either break-even or lose a ton of buy-ins. I can think of at least 5 times in the past couple months when I’ve played a number of games vs a reg and lost 6-15 buy-ins, but never the other way around. A lot of the times I doubt myself while this is happening because it seems to happen so often. Every time I rematch a reg, I just lose and lose and lose.

Of course I couldn’t keep my complaints to myself, and my friend told me that I was just running bad. He offered to look at my hand histories during a break today to make sure that it really was just variance, which was nice. He confirmed that I played fine, so oh well. I guess I just run bad when I play regs. Small sample, etc.

I haven’t checked my poker results since last Saturday, so I have no idea how I’m doing this week. Very occasionally it’s really annoying not being able to look at my results at the end of the day, but mostly it’s been awesome.

The reason it’s so great is because it’s really hard to stay tilted at something you actually don’t know. Sure it feels bad to lose and I might feel annoyed if I run bad at the end of a session, but I never feel tilted for long because I simply don’t know for sure that I’ve lost for the day.

You might go, “wtf, how can you not know if you lost?” but trust me, sometimes you just don’t know. I’ve had times in the past where I was sure I was down tons of money only to look and see that I actually made a couple bucks. Then there were other times when I felt like I was running really hot when I was actually just break-even.

Do you tilt easily or do poker results weigh on your mind once you’ve left the tables? I highly recommend not looking at results and/or your cashier for as long as you can.

Finally back to poker today, and it went pretty terribly. I ran badly against everyone, but it was most annoying during rematches with a few regs. I ran massively below EV versus all of them and ended the day down a lot. Bad start to the month.

January ended up great, however. I played just 1200 games at an average buy-in of $150, and I ended up with an EV ROI of 3.5% which I’m happy with. Hopefully February can turn around quickly and start to look more like January soon.

My friend and I made a prop bet that we wouldn’t check our poker results for a week, so I feel like I have nothing to write here. I guess that shows that I focus too much on results?

We made the agreement to not look at our results for a week both as a challenge but also because I really do believe it’s a good thing to do for all poker players. Never knowing results is probably the best thing you can do for your mental state, in my opinion. Checking results never benefits anyone but it always has the potential to damage the mental state in some way (whether you’re up or down).

The punishment is pretty funny for checking results too: we both picked a HU player that we really dislike and agreed that we would send that player $200 if we broke our promise. The awesome thing about this is that its barely any money, but the pain of giving cash to someone we dislike is enough to prevent us from doing almost anything. If you are a poker player, I recommend this for a prop bet punishment any day of the week 😛

I guess that means if you are the lucky recipient of a random $200 any day this week, you know I hate you. But who plays HU poker and doesn’t hate at least one player? No one, that’s who.

This has been a pretty crazy month, I must say. I’ve had some days where I have run hotter than I ever have playing hyper heads-up, and now I’ve had one of my worst days. My graph from today looks like a cliff dive, mostly because I played a 35 game stretch of $200s where I lost 25 of them. I ended up losing 20 ABI overall, and I ran 20 ABI below EV.

I didn’t feel as tilted as I might expect while the games were happening, but I did feel pretty annoyed once the losing stretch was over. This was probably in part because I couldn’t resist taking a look at my graph to see how badly I’d gotten crushed, and even though it was no surprise, it was still tilting to see it.

I decided to stop shortly after the losses because I was pretty irritable at that point and I don’t think it was going to get worse. Overall I can’t complain much, given how the month has gone. Back at it either tomorrow or Monday.