Poker

Off to Peru for the LAPT Grand Final! Hopefully I have a sweet tournament trip report when I’m back.

Well my last online session was a bad one as I had my worst day ever at hyper HU. Volume was extremely slow tonight, so I only played 67 games but I unfortunately lost 20 average buy-ins overall.

I hear that negative 20 BI is a pretty typical bad day, and I am sure that I’ve just gotten lucky to not have had a day like it before today. It sucks that it had to happen on a day when I played a third of my volume at $300s, though.

Since I only played 67 games and managed to lose over 60% of them, it’s not surprising that I felt fairly annoyed for a good part of the session. Most of my losses came in a 20 game stretch mid-session where I won one game the entire time, with half my money going to some random at $300s that couldn’t lose versus me.

Evaluating how I played in the middle of the losing stretch, I’d say it was definitely not perfect but not awful either. I remember making a couple mistakes that I might not have made if I hadn’t been tilted, but I don’t think it wasn’t anything extremely bad. It might be worth going over this stretch of hand histories to make sure, though.

Now that the session is over and I’m writing this blog, I feel okay about my losses. Compare this with how I felt on November 6th, when I lost a mere quarter of what I lost today, and it just shows that the level of tilt after a bad day isn’t 100% dependent on the $ value of losses.

Comparing the two days, I can’t really figure out exactly what the difference is yet. Hopefully by continuing to update this blog after each session, I’ll eventually figure out exactly what causes me to tilt the most.

I started a bit later today than I would have liked, but luckily games were decent throughout the night. I got sat by a couple mediocre regs here and there, but I got to play mostly randoms aside from that. My average buy-in today was around $200, which is great.

I had a tilting last 30 min at the end of my session when I lost 5 straight ABIs, but overall it wasn’t a big deal. I ended up winning 5 ABIs which is a nice chance of pace from the breakeven I’ve been experiencing so far in November.

I’m playing one more session tomorrow before I take a two week vacation from online poker.

I still can’t win money playing HU, but at least today was way less tilting than yesterday 🙂 I was okay for most of the day today.

The most tilting moment was when I rematched a pretty poor reg around 15 times and lost 6 buy-ins at $300s. It was pretty discouraging because I felt like he could do no wrong and that I ran bad, but the other side is that I wasn’t positive it WAS run bad and I was worried I was playing terribly. Luckily my good friend took the time to look over all of my hand histories, and while he pointed out a few minor mistakes, he confirmed that I did run badly.

Even though I had the rematch tilt, today was still infinitely better than yesterday was. Yesterday I was way more tilted than I should have been, and I really can’t explain why. It was just one of those days, I suppose.

I get “one of those days” probably every couple of months where I tilt an unreasonable amount over simple things, and I just feel really down about poker. These kind of days I usually just need to go to bed and end the day, and then I feel perfectly fine in the morning. It sounds sad that poker would do this to me, but I think it’s pretty common among poker players. Apparently these days get less frequent as time goes on (or so I am told).

Full Tilt Poker re-opened for business today, so I put a bit of money on there and sat some $200 lobbies. I only ended up playing a handful of games there and lost a few buy-ins.

Games were awful as usual on PokerStars. If it’s like this from now til the end of the year, I’m not sure how much poker I’ll be playing for the rest of 2012. It’s just ridiculous how little volume I was able to get.

I really don’t want to play lower than $100s, but I also don’t want to play regs all day or sit around waiting for lobbies all day. Not sure what I’m going to do.

Obviously losing a bunch makes a slow day of poker extra tilting. I feel like I lost and lost all day and in ridiculous ways. I haven’t felt this tilted at poker after a session in a very long time. I only lost 6 ABIs but it was just a horrible and tilting day.

Part of the reason I’m so tilted is probably because I feel like I haven’t won at poker for a really long time. October was a break even month and November has started off the same way. I suppose I should just be glad that I am running bad and I’m break even rather than running bad and down a ton.

I busted the WSOPC right before dinner break, so sadly no liveament success story for me this time around. While I had a good time sitting with people and interacting, it was still quite boring since 10-handed live poker means sooo much folding compared to hyper HU.

I was back to the online poker tonight, but the games were quite bad today. I played half my volume at 200s and then most of the rest at 100s. The handful of 300s I played were all against regs and mostly the result of regs sitting me.

I hovered mostly around break even today until losing a bunch in a row near the end of the night. I felt fairly tilted after the consecutive losses, but feel okay about losing just 6 buy-ins overall.

I would be surprised if games didn’t get worse from now til the end of the year since people will be trying to get SNE, so I expect poker to be fairly tough for the rest of 2012.

I played a late session tonight, and games were INCREDIBLE for around 2 hours. I didn’t have to play a single reg the entire time until the very end of the night, and I got to play over 2/3 of my volume at $200s and $300s.

I also ran great, which is obviously nice. Ended up +10 ABIs, so it’s a decent start to the month.

Tomorrow I’ll be playing earlier than usual because of the Quarterly Million on PokerStars. I suspect that the HU will be insanely reggy, and I hope that there are lots of fish online so that I don’t have to play $100s all day.

Well October is over and I suppose that I am fairly happy about it. The month was great in terms of getting better at poker and moving up in stakes. It wasn’t good where profit is concerned though, since I was only around +3 buy-ins over 1330 HU games before rakeback. AND HEM says I ran like 12 buy-ins over EV. Hmm. At least I ran good, I suppose.

I’m looking forward to November. I’ll be playing two liveaments: the $1.6k WSOPC event in Vancouver on November 4th, and the $2.5k LAPT Peru event on November 16th. I haven’t played live poker for a pretty long time, so hopefully I’m not too rusty. Aside from the two live MTTs, I’ll just be playing as many HU games as possible. I hope November goes a lot better than October.

Attempted to play a short session during the day just now and I can’t say it went well. There were a million regs online for most of it and I felt like I lost some ridiculous games. I also played 6 total $300s and lost all of them, which didn’t do much to help my bottom line.

Ended up losing 10 ABIs and ran 5 of them below EV, which feels moderately tilting. It hasn’t been a very profitable month where HU is concerned. One more chance to make October decent tomorrow.

Here’s my latest blog post on PokerListings: Explaining Heads-Up Hyper Turbo SNGs by Stakes