Thoughts on 18% W$SD

I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to stop this cycle. I get on these really decent runs where I play awesome and feel confident and motivated and hands hold up for a couple of weeks as I steadily grind up a good nanonoko-style-graph profit thinking I've finally gotten out of this shit hole of the longest breakeven stretch ever.

Then I hit the odd day here and there every couple of weeks where I play a session or two and the RNG decides it wants to skydive off my graph at 15% to 30% W$SD with normal W$WSF and WtSD for 2k or 3k hands. I  feel like a massive underdog every hand unless I have 80%+ equity when all-in -- past 80% I assume I am ahead which is worth a little prayer to hold -- and completely destroy 2/3 of my monthly profits in a very short time frame. This results in me feeling dejected and unmotivated to play at all for at least the next week and is the main reason for my laughable volume over the past year.

I know that I could try to avoid playing when things are going this terrible but it's kind of hard to catch in a couple of thousand hands which is literally a few hours when you can brush off the first few coolers and suckouts and say "ok you're playing fine, nh" only to be smacked a few more times in a row before realizing it's going to be one of those -8 buyin sessions.

I'm just spinning my wheels in a rut trying to gain some momentum only to slide right back down every time.
Definition of insanity...

Example from today. I just start to feel like there's zero chance river is ever a brick here when I get into these shitty high variance spots during these sessions.

My thought process goes something like this:
I'm ahead of his stack off range. Quick estimation is 60-75%.
Drag the slider all-in.
FML here goes another buyin but it's the "correct" play.
Just fold just fold just fold just fold.
Click. Shove.
Villain snapcalls. Bink. Sometimes the nice ones at least say "ty."
Story of my life.

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players - View hand 1315999
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

CO: $17.25
Hero (BTN): $50.00
SB: $48.75
BB: $25.00
UTG: $71.70
UTG+1: $25.10
UTG+2: $75.10
MP1: $50.30
MP2: $23.50

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BTN with Q K
1 fold, UTG+1 raises to $1.50, 1 fold, MP1 calls $1.50, 2 folds, Hero calls $1.50, SB calls $1.25, BB calls $1

Flop: ($7.50) K J 7 (5 players)
SB checks, BB checks, UTG+1 checks, MP1 bets $5, Hero calls $5, SB folds, BB folds, UTG+1 folds

Turn: ($17.50) Q (2 players)
MP1 bets $10, Hero raises to $43.50 all in, MP1 calls $33.50

River: ($104.50) 9 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $104.50
Hero shows Q K (two pair, Kings and Queens)
MP1 shows T 8 (a straight, Nine to King)
MP1 wins $101.50
(Rake: $3.00)

/whine

Hand of the Day

This hand made my day.

This is against a sweatshop reg who thinks every CO, BTN, SB or BB seat is a 3bet seat when the PFRer is in one of those but still manages to somehow run TAG stats. I'm sure you all know who I'm talking about. He also seems to apply this logic to every time I open from anywhere regardless where he is sitting and has taken a liking to flatting my 4bets as folding to a 4bet is out of the question. He generally seems to be FOS as his default line -- hence my CRAI for value -- but has the largest luckbox I've ever seen. I'm obviously a bit peeved on the turn thinking "You have got to be kidding me (again)" before the river hits.

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 8 players - View hand 1304496

BTN: $49.15
SB: $68.30
BB: $112.05
UTG: $21.20
Hero (UTG+1): $68.80
MP1: $50.00
MP2: $49.50
CO: $51.75

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is UTG+1 with K A
1 fold, Hero raises to $1.50, 2 folds, CO raises to $4.50, 3 folds, Hero raises to $12, CO calls $7.50

Flop: ($24.75) 5 6 3 (2 players)
Hero checks, CO bets $12, Hero raises to $56.80 all in, CO calls $27.75 all in

Turn: ($104.25) 9 (2 players - 2 are all in)

River: ($104.25) 3 (2 players - 2 are all in)

Final Pot: $104.25
Hero shows K A (a flush, Ace high)
CO shows 7 8 (a straight, Five to Nine)
Hero wins $101.25
(Rake: $3.00)

Promo Tilt and Mass Donkaments

So Stars is coming up to their 50 billionth hand which I estimate should hit sometime after 11am EST on the 22nd. I'm a little tilted that they continue to run these silly milestone hand promos. So far I've played about 20-30k hands 24 tabling each time that they've run them and I'm still batting .000. Considering that they have a massive lobby banner, the play is stopped for 1 to 2 minutes, and the host mod chats it up explaining what's going on and people are still folding pre to the shovefest left and right, it seems like it's not really catching on with either the mass tabling grinders who've stacked their tables and AHK fold as soon as it pops up nor the random recreational who has no clue that there's about 5 buyins worth of overlay on their shove.

Sure it's just sour grapes that I can't for the life of me get in on this awesome payout, but I honestly think that it would be better to take the thousands and thousands given away every hour and run a promo that everyone can be part of. For instance, a decent reload bonus in the 50% $300-$600 range once a year when we hit the next 10 billionth hand would be so much better ainec.

Poker Update:

Still grinding out 50nl 20-50bb tables which have been amazingly good so far. I had been running at 7.5bb/100 until I slashed that in half today with a 5k hand breakeven marathon. Just one of those can't win a coinflip and every overpair runs into perfect perfect c/c c/c. I do think I've got nearly everything back under control and am feeling a ton more confident than the past few months. I'm at 17k hands of 50nl right now and I'm considering moving up again at 20k-25k hands if my next few sessions produce good results. Still sticking to the plan.

180 man turbo mass table attempt TR (somehow tournaments seem worthy of reporting on, don't ask me why):

I tried out the MTT/SnG grind yesterday. Haven't done that in a few years and I was probably 2 tabling them back then. I managed to get Table Ninja set up to continually register me and managed to get twenty $2.20 180 mans going. The play in these is obviously atrocious but I ran fairly bad against dominated top pairs turning 2 pairs a lot. I was actually planning on loading more to see how many I could play before attempting this at higher stakes but decided to cut it short due to the run bad. I think I might be capable of 30 at a time at this point.

I finished about 6 or 7 of them on the bubble with 19-23 players left and 18 cash while getting premiums in and whiffing a lot of AK. Most of those would have put me in top 5 and contention to win so that's a decent amount of confidence boost considering I haven't really played anything resembling these in nearly 2 years. I haven't even read HoH because it felt a little dated on my skim through and a ton of it seemed ldo.I am going to be reading Kill Everyone shortly so I'm excited about that.

Thankfully on the very last 180 I had open I hung on into the money with about 4bb left and decided it was time to take some chips. I doubled up 4x by winning 60/40s and 40/60s to make it to the final table in 8/9. At this point I really got into it considering ranges vs equity vs payout which is weird for me considering it's a $2 donkament and while the pay jumps are large, the actual $ amount isn't. I pretty much sat around taking a few blinds to maintain my stack at 20bb while 4 players knocked each other out. Once we got down to 5 handed I started to cardrack a ton and took down some decent 10-20bb pots to get into 2nd and 3rd place range.

No one adjusted at all throughout the final table and I was just waiting for opportunities to exploit. I was nearly out several times but managed to fight back and win some coinflips to end up 2/3. The guy in 3rd place didn't stand a chance against myself and the overagressive chip leader as he was running about 8/8 over the 50 or so hands that I had seen him and blinded out fairly quickly and eventually getting his 88 in against my KK.

Going into heads up I had about 90k of the 270k chips in play. A couple hands in I managed to pull ahead after getting AK aipf against AJ. At this point I don't think he really adjusted from his 26/20 style except that he now played every hand exactly like how he had been playing the button throughout. His basic strat was to float a ton with any piece (his stack had been extremely volatile the entire FT) and fire at scare cards. He had a standard open at this point of 2.5bb but he was open shoving every 5th hand which makes me think he was shoving any pair, any ace and a couple KQ type broadways.

After a bit of this I offered up a chop with even stacks because I felt that this was going to become a coinflip with no edge pretty fast and it was an 18 buyin difference between 1st and 2nd. I wasn't even sure if it was possible in that format, but he didn't respond anyways. Shortly after, I finally caught him calling my KK in against A6 and holding to put him down to 30k chips.

I thought now I just have to win 1 of 2 all ins to take this down. That didn't happen when AK whiffed against JJ and lost to AT to put us back to even. He really just continued this open shoving concept for a while and I finally called with 44 not wanting to get down past 100k chips with blinds getting up to 5k/10k soon since his style and the blinds were reducing the skill edge pretty fast. He flipped over KJs and spiked a K on the turn to end it and take the $108 while I was left with the $72 consolation. In retrospect I don't really like my call since I'm flipping at best with everything and taking whatever tiny edge I had with 8bb left would have been better than this gamble. Overall I was pretty happy that I ended the day with an 83% ROI, probably not sustainable but I'll take it =)

I don't know if I'll get back into SnGs since they're overrun with DoNs unless you're playing turbos and I'm really not a fan of the DoN. The 50/50 payout is just too flat for my liking since better players should want top heavy structures since they'll win more than their fare share of matches, while imo it keeps the money circulating longer thus being raked off more resulting in lower RIOs for everyone (I haven't done the math on this, just seems logical to me). Regardless, the strategy is more similar to satellites than to real tournaments and it invites too much collusion in being able to chip dump while using the excuse of weird survival techniques wrt the large ITM satellite style structure.

I don't mind the turbos but it would be nice if more stakes were running consistently. It would be extremely difficult for someone to move from the bottom up, for example there's a ton of $2.20s and typically only a handful of $7.70s running, with a huge jump in player pool size again in the $12s forcing people to play 6x higher instead of the normal 2x to 3x stakes.

In other news, I finally met an irl poker player. There are basically zero within a hundred mile radius of my house so this is kind of an anomaly. Hoping to head out to play some live $1/$2 and from stories I've heard, it's definitely beatable =)

Back in the black!

Quick update:

Caught up on a ton of sleep
Feeling really good
Trying out a session journal to record goals and results (not $)
Got out of my poker funk.
Huge day at 50nl 6max: 10 buyins in 6k hands by 4pm
Maintained A game state of mind for 4 one hour sessions
Going to have 5 days off of work per week until November as opposed to 2 with full salary (bink!)

Had a big opportunity for tilt and ended up joking about it with the other player in chat instead. Hand History:

Stars 50nl 6max

Preflop: Hero has JTs as PFRer, c/r happy Villain calls in SB

Flop: Tc5d4s, checks through
Turn: 5s with the flushdraw out now, Hero bets 2/3 pot, villain c/r almost pot, Hero soul-reads that Villain has squadoosh and calls to induce river bluffs
River: 2c and Villain leads for 3/4 pot, Hero snapcalls and gets shown 22

Hero says: "nh"
Villain says: "that's generally my strategy, make stupid plays and then get there"
...

So hopefully you guys won't have to listen to me whine for a while :)

Best day everER

A while ago (my last post lol - I did not actually fall down a well), I posted that I had my best day ever.

That is no longer true. Today is my new best day ever! And oddly enough it came at 50nl. Yes, I broke my resolution. The first half of the month got off to a rough start at 100nl, mostly 5 buyin swongs every day. I got sick of that and said ok lets make some money for once and dropped to 50nl to work on some things.

So I played 50nl for a few days and got my confidence back and moved back up quickly to 100nl and some 200nl and haven't looked back for the rest of the month. My graph is basically a 60 degree ruler starting on the 17th and oddly enough it's going to be my best month ever even though I was breakeven the first 2 weeks. The implications for this are obviously exciting!

Last night I couldn't sleep so I fired up some tables. 100nl was pretty dead so 24 tabling 50nl looked appetizing enough. Ran insanely hot and played my best game ever. Seriously. EVER. I then decided it would be fun to top the PTR winner's list for 50nl for today and continued to play that. 3 sessions later and 7500 hands and I'm +20 buyins. That's about 12 ptBB/100 -- while 24 tabling. I'm about 3 buyins ahead of EV too and didn't actually get into a lot of set vs. overpair or any set vs. set situations so I'm going to take the credit and say that I maxed the shit out of value with mid strength hands and picked some sick spots to shove people off their hands in big pots.

Cliffnotes:
Feeling good
Running good
Playing A+ game that makes my old A game look like a C game

Today's 50nl graph:

50nl 6max regs wars (lol)

I haven't posted in a while. This month has felt pretty rough so far even though it shouldn't. I went on one of the biggest heaters of my life in the first 3 days winning something like 30 buyins spread across 50nl, 100nl and 200nl. I can actually say that most of this was due to good play. I was the most on top of my game that I've ever been and it felt like face up poker even at 200nl. Then I proceeded to dump half of it back. Poker feels so easy when you're playing well and then you wonder what happened to that mindset when it disappears for a while.


I'm also having an odd reoccurance at 50nl 6max. I keep running in to the same 2 regs who play every 50BB min table there is. They both play insanely long sessions during peak hours and it's pretty tough to avoid them. Luckily one is extremely exploitable despite going to showdown an oddly high % of the time and winning at showdown a rediculous % of the time over a large sample.

The other reg is where most of my problem at that level is lately. We are both very good at putting each other in tough spots using position so part of the solution is to make sure I have good seat location relative to him. If I don't, I rarely profit on that table since he totally wrecks the flow I'm trying to create. It's a lot tougher if he starts a session before I do since most seats opening up are on his right. I'm going to have to do an in depth analysis of his play if I want to keep winning at the same rates I have been there and hopefully figure out his ranges a little better. He's really well balanced vs regs.

10 days until Christmas holidays!

Feeling pretty good right now

Thought I'd do a quick update. Played a few amazing sessions today and playing my A+++ game. Getting a lot of max value in some thin spots (ty Joop) and playing way more effectively aggressive than I normally do.

I skipped a few days worth of playing already this month because I just didn't feel like playing. But the past few days, and especially today, I feel like I've had some aha moments wrt manipulating people's ranges and stuff recently and am now super motivated again. Playing face-up poker is just so much fun.

Obligatory brag graph:

I obviously enjoy photoshopping and was a little bored so.... yeah.

Continuing to put some big scores together more frequently. Hopefully I can keep this up. I'm also extremely excited about playing some tournaments in December as part of a potential uFR team. Someone has to hit it big.

Other than that, the first video of my series "25nl: Crushing the Quarter" is due out on Friday the 13th on Best Free Poker Coaching

Tired... but I just have to post this hand

Trapaments gone wrong.

I'm super tired right now, it's 3:30am here but I feel the need to brag a little after I loled really hard on the turn and into the next orbit. 50nl 6max deep effective stacks. This guy is running 58/40 with 15% 3bet and I've just been waiting to pounce (again). I'm obviously going for a flop c/r with the intention of getting it in on the flop. He decides to get trappy instead.

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 5 players - View hand 317903
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

CO: $62.75
BTN: $74.95
Hero (SB): $85.75
BB: $98.85
UTG: $51.90

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is SB with T K
3 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, BB raises to $3.50, Hero calls $2

Flop: ($7.00) J 2 Q (2 players)
Hero checks, BB checks

Turn: ($7.00) A (2 players)
Hero bets $6, BB raises to $95.35 all in, Hero lols $76.25 all in

River: ($171.50) K (2 players - 2 are all in)

Final Pot: $171.50
Hero shows T K (a straight, Ten to Ace)
BB shows J J (three of a kind, Jacks)
Hero wins $169.50
(Rake: $2.00)

September

September turned out to be my best month ever after bonuses. I'm starting to consistently put together some big sessions day after which is nice compared to putting in only a couple of nice heaters a month. Getting more and more of a handle on my preflop and postflop game and working hard on merging them into a cohesive overall strategy.

I'm looking to start beating 100nl+ 6max in October. I've had an incredibly rough time there so far both running way below expectation and getting outplayed badly by a lot of people. I'm thinking that's going to change shortly and my work should start paying off. Hopefully after this month I won't be looking back.

I'm up to 80k hands of 6max so far and still loving it. I'm mixing in some FR here and there but I'm using those sessions more as experimental sessions to try out some lines since I can sit around and wait for hands and pick my spots more judiciously without having to worry about spending much on blinds.

So yeah, learning lots of new stuff like always. Feels like trying to get over that hill of skill and understanding table dynamic for small stakes right now - a lot like how it took me a lot of shots to beat 50nl last year. I don't think it'll take me nearly as long to figure it out this time, skill sets tend to grow at an exponential rate ime.


Favorite hand of the day: I'm trying out some SLOB (steal limps out of the blinds). Hand has almost no postflop value most of the time OOP but I can win weak limps and can take down pots with cbets if I steal. Flop looks about as good as it gets for me with small top pair and back door flush draw so I cbet enough intending to call the shortstack if he shoves (he has $12 left) and not wanting to freeze up the betting if he does. The turn onwards was supposed to be a give-up but then I said, "Well, I do have some showdown value and 'lol-pot-odds' on a wet board..."

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 6 players - View hand 308544
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

Hero (BB): $50.00
UTG: $15.75
MP: $16.15
CO: $87.95
BTN: $48.50
SB: $50.00

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BB with K 6
UTG calls $0.50, 3 folds, SB calls $0.25, Hero raises to $3, UTG calls $2.50, SB calls $2.50

Flop: ($9.00) 3 4 6 (3 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $6, UTG calls $6, SB calls $6

Turn: ($27.00) 9 (3 players)
SB checks, Hero checks, UTG bets $2.50, SB calls $2.50, Hero calls $2.50

River: ($34.50) 3 (3 players)
SB checks, Hero checks, UTG bets $4.25 all in, SB calls $4.25, Hero calls $4.25

Final Pot: $47.25
Hero shows K 6 (two pair, Sixes and Threes)
UTG shows 7 J (a pair of Threes)
SB shows 5 5 (two pair, Fives and Threes)
Hero wins $45.00
(Rake: $2.25)

And October's off to a decent start (understatement):