Skip if you hate politics
Starting out on something non-poker, I’m experiencing a little bit of what I would call political tilt. I tend to disagree with Obama on a lot of idealogical issues, but i understand that there are people who, because of their personal values, agree with him on those issues. That’s perfectly fine, and that diversity of ideas is a big part of what makes the US great in my opinion. How people feel about idealogical topics is a function of their religion (or lack thereof), upbringing, and personal experiences.

What really does bug me though, is when people who have absolutely no sense of how the economy works say things like, “well Obama is clearly stronger on the economy, so he’ll do well in that area” or, “I can’t wait for Obama to get elected so our economy can get fixed.” A simple “why” or “how” asked after they make a statement like that seems to completely baffle them. Just because you like a candidate’s personality or some of his ideas does not make him strong on everything. Just because you hate George Bush, and Obama is the antithesis of George Bush, does not mean that everything Obama likes is necessarily good for you or the economy.

If we were to be completely honest, the President himself doesn’t even have an overwhelming effect on the economy in any immediate term. The economy has always, and will always, go in a cycle of boom/bust. The president can encourage congress to present him with legislation that can change the ways or rates by which people and entities are taxed. The president has influence into the budget and can pass legislation that has an effect on the way the capital markets function. All of this takes a long time (often years) to shake out, and expecting any candidate to have any sort of immediate effect on the economy is mind bogglingly ignorant. The thing that has one of the most immediate and transaparent effects on the economic status of the country are taxes, so…

A final thought before I move onto poker: jobs are created when and only when companies have the cash to expand. If companies don’t have enough cash, they usually cut the expense easiest to cut: people. Changing the tax rate increases or decreases the amount of cash companies people have. Your personal tax rate doesn’t matter much if you don’t have a job anymore. AMIRITE? (go here and please educate yourself if you actually care about any of this, because if you say “obama is better for the economy” in front of me and can’t explain why, i’m going to hit you as hard as I can).

So on to poker, let’s start with a graph.

horrifying isn’t it? Yeah, I agree. This is hold em only (LO8 not included), some hands are missing because of the difficulty in converting cake hands to a format that works with Pokertracker 3, and the hands are only loosely in chronological order because of the lack of timestamps. It’s safe to say that each 2k hands happenned before the previous 2k, but within that 2k, they could be nearly backwards. All that said, it does provide a lot to talk about.

1. The massive dropoff
A shot at $100NL HU. Started well with me stacking my first opponent, who then rebought and stacked me 3 times. Partially bad play, partially coolers. Not a lot can be done about flush over flush heads up 100BB deep. Positives: I set a 2.5 BI stop loss and stuck to it.

2. The slightly slower decline immediately afterwards (hand 7500ish)
A direct function of me trying to get money back at a rate faster than should be normal. Here my red line starts to decline. Basically, I was putting way too much money in pots I had a very low probability of winning. Most of this was calling WAY too many 3-bets against opponents who were far too tight. ie. I raise 67dd to 2 from LP, the button who i don’t recall even ever playing a hand repops to 9, and i call. What the hell is my plan there? It’s not playing intentionally and it’s a great way to lose money fast. Sure, if i hit a 66A flop and he has AK instead of AA or KK i stack him, but how often does that happen?

3. Around hand 12k or so I switched to full ring only. Apparently the players at full ring are way way more predictable. Obv some of this is positive variance, but here’s my full ring graph…

4. Playing more deliberately. Roughly around the same time as switching to full ring. For me this means blocking out as many distractions as possible. I’ll go over my ritual in another blog because this is so long already, but this has been very crucial and is something to always strive to do when you sit down. For me, the difference between my A and C game is so pronounced, that there’s almost no reason to play if I’m not going to sit down in a state of focus and do everything I need to in order to win. Why waste time playing poker not playing my best when there are a ton of things I could be doing that are way more productive, even within the realm of poker?

I’m reading Elements of Poker right now by Tommy Angelo and it’s really fantastic. It isn’t a strategy book for how to play hands, but more of a strategy book for how to approach poker.

Also, if I ever use a poker term that’s not clear (for those of you reading that aren’t super familiar with online poker terminology), this is a great place for terminology.