I had some things that I wanted to blog about, but for some reason they have now slipped my mind. Hopefully I’ll remember before I finish typing.
I have played a bit in the last few days. I’ll just start out with a graph of the month and my stats:
Not too shabby. I’ll take 18ptbb/100 any day (or month of that matter). I had a couple long frustrating matches with lots of WTF hands, but instead of posting with a dozen hands, I am just gonna pick out a couple of the really interesting ones.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?3315044 – Tough spot. Early in the match, so no real reads but pretty sure villain is a donk. Ok, so I am pretty sure check/call here is really bad, because the villains range is pretty polarized here with either a strong made hand like set/two pair/or at least AJ that is never turning their hand into a bluff, but can’t bet the river for value OR he has the flush draw, which is always betting. So the question is should I shove for value assuming he can’t fold 2 pair/AJ or should I just check/fold. Kinda leaning towards c/f, but that might be results oriented. I donno.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?3323840 – This one is more interesting because of the opponent. We had been playing a long match where he has been running quite good. He was SUPER passive, and I don’t think ever bluffed in about 300 hands and just about never put in a raise. We are also almost 200bb’s deep. I was really surprised by his raise on the turn, and just felt like it had to be the flush. I honestly considered folding the river. That said… should I be putting in a raise somewhere here? Or just gotta go with reads? I was pretty surprised when he flipped up only Q9o.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?3320952 – Lastly just a hand for fun. God this was so great, if you look at stack sizes, the villain only had $11 behind on the flop. But I guess 25-1 is no good against my range. Loooooooooool. Tyty.
Hmmm, can’t remember what I wanted to say, so I guess it’ll have to wait till next time.
New Full Tilt Poker update today. This site does such a good job of giving players exactly what players want, and force every other site to play catch up. Good for poker. If only they could get their support up to par (a very low standard), it would be difficult for anyone to ever say a negative thing about them.
Among the updates, including a new bet slider bar option (something I haven’t really figured out how to utilize best so far) and new avatars! While gimmicky, I love these things. I decided to be the goofy looking cop, I doubt we’ll him around much otherwise.
There was also a thread on 2+2 where FTPDoug (a Full Tilt employee) mentioned they are working on an easier way to add notes for players who just left a table, probably adding it to an improved hand history window. I am quite excited about this, seems like a great feature.
Oh, another real big plus about the FTP update is I think they forgot to add the patch for my doomswitch! I ran pretty well today, both hitting draws and fading draws. Weeeeeeeeeeee. Only $600 more skalasky bucks to get even in EV for the month and $10,000 life time (not joking). Here’s what August looks like so far:
On a different note, I’m listening to the new Conor Olberst CD right now that came out yesterday, I am a big Bright Eyes fan and am digging this. Nothing makes me happier then adding new music to my iTunes, because I am basically listening to music 80% of my awake hours. If anyone wants to ever recommend any stuff in the Raidohead/Modost Mouse/Wilco kinda vien, I’m open ears.
I thought I’d write out an idea where my current state of poker is.
I switched to Head Up NLHE at the end of March. I won about $2,500 starting in the last week or two of the month. Then had a $5k April, $10k May, and a $7.3k June. Life was good. But then went on a really bad run and actually managed a losing July, -$2.5k. With my recent success, it didn’t financially cripple me, but in no means was fun. Here’s a graph of my over all play of HU:
Some interesting dips in there; the sheer cliff around hand 20k was the craziest session of my life, where I lost 27.5 buyins to the worst player ever (maybe a slight overstatement, but he was awful) who just ran super hot in some VERY big pots. Then there is that big dip after 80k hands. Here I ran about -7.5k under EV in July, which is just absurd for the stakes I play, but that’s poker! Here’s a PokerEV graph for the last month:
Two things in the graph concern me, while obviously the big down swing hurts, the thing that bothers me more is the next 10,000 hands where I break even. The thing I love about pokerEV so much, is when I go on bad runs I can turn to it to remind myself I was just running poorly. However, in this case my equity seems to be holding even, yet I am still not winning. I guess it could be just a bad run of cards, but even so I have been working pretty hard to retool my approach over the past couple weeks. Nothing like a good downswing to make you reevaluate your game.
Coincidentally, right before I went on my downswing, I pulled out $10k from my FTP account to pay for our wedding (getting married next week, congratulations to me!). Because of these two factors it has left my poker roll a bit shallower then I would have liked, and I think I am going to mainly focus on 1/2nl for a bit until I grind it back up, even though my 2/4 win rate is actually higher. Bankroll management has always been of huge importance to me, and plays a large role in me overcoming these bad runs.
So with the wedding and the circius it will bring, I am not quite sure how many hands I am going to be able to get in this month, but my goal is about 25k and $7.5 in cash. $0.28 a hand? Should be quite do-able.