Okay day at the tables. First session was up and down but finished with a small win. Same story in the second session, eeking out another win. Better than losing, of course. Mentally, I'm getting back in there with my concentration. My reads are still not quite where they normally are. For that reason, I've been following some of them but not others. I had AQ and had one caller. Flop came with an A and two diamond rags. Turn was a diamond Q and the guy pushed in. I decided he didn't have the flush and called. He didn't have it, but he did have a set of fives. Followed another read bluffing $20 into a $40 pot on the river. Guy folded as I thought he would. I represented a str8 and the river card made four to a str8, so pretty difficult call. That pot is basically why I managed a win in the second session. Didn't follow a number of reads in smaller pots when I thought players were bluffing. I didn't have anything, but when I feel good about my reads, I will resteal those pots.

I had a lot of fun today even with the bad beats and such. Felt good to get back into that mindset where I enjoy playing. I enjoy running a bluff or making a call down, but particularly I enjoy that feeling I get when I correctly peg someone's hand and play them like a fiddle. I wonder if that's the reason why most of us play this game. Just for that rush. I suppose it might evolve into money concerns and the ability to set one's own schedule, but that rush just might be the start of seriously playing.

Though I didn't do any playing over my trip, I did reread the Theory of Poker (Cheers Xas!). Good read for me, as I reminded myself of the basics. The chapter on semi-bluffing was a good second read. I think Sklansky is correct in saying that you must either fold or raise the semi-bluff. I think I was calling to much previously. I also think I was refusing to give up some pots and raising too often to a possible semi-bluff. I worked on that tonight and made some folds. All part of me controlling my competitive drive and releasing some hands that I really don't want to but really need to.

Stats for 50NL
524 hands
$19.75

I'll post full stats for 50NL tomorrow, if I win the first session and move back to 100NL. I"m over 10K hands at that level now, so sample size will be somewhat reliable. If I'm a loser, then I'll just wait to post them until I do move back up. More hands won't hurt.

Current Bankroll: $2106

Good luck when you move up ! Im sure you`ll beat it as well !

So I think I've figured out why people have a rough time after a layoff. It isn't the rust on one's game as that clears off fairly quickly. No, its the recovery time between getting kicked in the nuts. Just brutal today and I caught myself tilting, so closed down the tables and walked away to do some chores and work on my dissertation. I forgot how bad it hurts to get thumped repeatedly in a bad session. Man that frustration came on really quickly, but I caught myself before raising that 86o.

First hand of the session I flop tp/mk and check; shorty bets the minimum on a flush draw board other limper calls and I raise the pot. Shorty pushes in for a couple more bucks, 1 fold, I call and he has a better kicker. 2 hands later. Two limpers, I raise OTB w/ AQs and both blinds and the limpers call. I miss the flop but shorty from the previous hand bets the pot into me from the BB and we all fold. Same orbit, I'm now UTG w/ JJ and raise. Two callers, one the BB, I flop a set of Jacks, lead for 3/4 the pot, first guy calls, BB pushes in. I call; he rivers his str8. Tremendous start; just tremendous.

I managed to lose another $60 on a failed bluff and on two defenses of a semi-bluff situation. I know I said I was going to work on folding in those spots, which I feel slightly ashamed of for not following my own plan. Probably tilt was already setting in....I reraised or raised their bets and they both pushed in or put in another raise, so time to fold. Raising wasn't a bad play for the spots, but I had made something like a resolution to just fold those spots for a bit and see how it goes; failing to do that is what is more frustrating, I think.

I think I'm just gonna watch the game tonight and call it a day pokerwise. If the Gators get blown out in the first half, then I may play a bit, but otherwise I'll just sleep on this one and try again tomorrow.

So I leave on a bad run and come back to it. This sucks. Damnit I hate running like this. I keep turning hands over and over in my head, making sure I played it correctly. Wondering how much trust I should put in my reads. Can't stop thinking about it. I want to say that I don't deserve this shit. That's what a break is for, right? You take a break and then the run is over. Well, I guess I'm right to say that I don't deserve to run like this, but we all know when someone says that, what they really mean is I deserve to run good as a reward for my break, or maybe just not bad. And that subtext is what is wrong. I must stop thinking that. Hell, I started off my journal harping on this exact thing, not thinking that poker owes me a damn thing. How did I end up back here? I don't know.

As all shitastic runs do, this one has brought a lot of doubt into my thinking, moreso beacuse of the layoff. I think I'm playing my normal game, but maybe I"m not. I'm not getting crushed out there, just not winning much when I have a winning session, and treading a bunch of water going nowhere for hundreds of hands. I'm not sure what to do at this point. I may drop down to the 25s until I regain my confidence. Okay, that's what I will do if I lose money tomorrow.

I also feel like a bit of a whiner here. I read Kenny's journal and he's on a serious bad run. Much worse than my petty one. I'm not losing a ton of cash here either. I'm just losing. I hate losing. I FUKING HATE IT! I feel slightly better now.

Everyone's doing this new year's resolution thing, and what better time to outline some goals than when things are going badly?

Immediate goal:
Finish the week in the black.
Remind myself daily, nay prior to every session, that I am simply playing a game of cards that fall randomly owing me nothing. All I can do is play the best that I can given the cards.

Other Goals:
Beat 100NL for 5ptbb/100 over 25K hands by end of May. This is doable for me if I can just concentrate and not run like shit. This goal seems a bit ridiculous at the moment since I cant even beat the freaking 50s but there it is.

Become a successful player in 6 max NL, 5ptbb/100 over 25K hands at 100NL by end of the year. I have played very little SH games so there will be a lot of adjustment. I am generally happier playing a little looser and more aggressive, which I do in my home game. I think 6 max will be more conducive to that. I'm not going to worry about this one until I take care of FR. Once I do that, then I'll start out at the smallest stakes I can playing 6 max and work my way up as I did in FR.

Become a successful PL OH8 player. I guess 5ptbb/100 will work here as well. I've played some and enjoy the action of this game. Bonuses clear at a much higher rate. The swings are far more brutal, so right now this is the furthest goal from my mind as I'm in no state to run bad in that game. I'll set a deadline of December for this one as well.

Non-poker goals:
Finish my dissertation by the end of the semester. I'm tired of grad school and I'm ready to go. Finishing this albatross by May will remove all the pressure and dread I'm under right now and have been for a couple years now. Job search is so far unsuccessful, but still a ways to go for this year, so who knows, maybe I will really need to get this thing finished. I was thinking about my whole philosophy career yesterday. It might just end in failure. The job market is pretty crappy. This leads to some other goals. I have a few papers I'm working on here and there for publication. I'm going to finish these up and get them out. It's good stuff, but I know if I leave the professional philosophy world, I won't finish them, so might as well make my small contributions to the discipline I love while I can. I'm not sure what I will do instead of philosophy, but I guess there's always law school.

I'm terribly out of shape. I started some cardio today. I did some weight training last year, but no cardio, which essentially means that for a few weeks last year, I looked like I was in shape. In High School I weighed ten pounds more than I do now and it was all lean muscle mass. I'm now wafishly thin and family members worry about my health. I'm also going skiing next month and will just die up on the slopes from lung failure or heart failure if I don't get in shape. I love skiing, and if I can't ski from the moment the lifts open to the moment they close every day I will sink into a depression. Thus this goal is extremely important as my entire psychological well-being depends upon it.

So I was walking to the office today thinking about what's been happening to me at the tables and how I'd lost that nice mental energy I had when I started the journal. I remembered that I started off with the goal of just playing tilt-free poker and thinking positively. I tried that today. The cards fell against me in rather horrendous fashion, but mentally I was ready for it. I didn't get frustrated; I stayed positive. Positive thinking only goes so far, however, and I just didn't get it turned around. I haven't posted a hand for a few days, so here's one of my fav's from today:
UTG limps in (I recently busted his QQ w/ my AA), folds around to me OTB. I have [T-T] and pop to $2.50; UTG calls. Flop is [3-3-3], he checks, I bet, he pushes a shortstack in and I call. He has . No yelling on my part, just a laugh at how freaking terrible I'm running.

So anyway I dropped $115 today over 721 hands. That's just too much hurt for me. I was going to drop to 25, but decided I would just go ahead and drop to 10 so I could demo the Bodog hand grabber program, which will allow me to use PT again. Particularly now, I would like to have PT so I could look over my sessions and check my play. I decided demoing the program would be a waste of time. Judging from the forums there, this thing is full of bugs and crashes all the time. To make matter worse, the guys charge a fairly steep price for a handgrabbing program and it appears to be complete shit. No thank you. I went ahead and played 10NL thinking the beats would cost me less. Amazingly I got quite a few hands to play and they actually held up on occasion. The horrendous play of the players also helped me out and I won a little over 2.5 buyins playing 194 hands. Maybe the positive thinking just needed some time to warm up before affecting the card distribution.

I'm going to play 10NL tomorrow as well and move up to the 25s if tomorrow goes well. Mentally, I feel like I'm back in the right frame of mind. Confidence level is still not quite where I want it, but it felt really good to win again.

I said I would post some 50NL stats, and I will do so tomorrow morning. If I can figure out how to do it from my excel spreadsheet, I'll post a graph of the sessions. I'm interested to see how far my ptbb/100 has plummeted within the last couple days. It was over 6 before the layoff.

Okay, here are the stats I have:
11,831 hands
$431.04
Win rate: 3.64 ptbb/100

So, running over 6 and now down under 4 for win rate. This leads me to conclude that 10K is probably not a sufficient sample size with that much movement. 20K should be more significant. I really can't see myself as an under 5 ptbb/100 player at Bodog. I am in the midst of some bad cards, but that's still a big drop.

I have some other stats, which are from a smaller sample, but perhaps indicate variance rather than poor play. I didn't keep these from the start, so only for the last few thousand hands. I've extrapolated a bit from what my stats were like at UB and Pokerroom to compare. I started keeping these when I moved up to 100NL the second go round. The last 200 hands here include a loss of a buyin, which was when my losing streak started.
2186 hands
Flops Seen % 16
Win money at shodown (W$SD%) 60
Win money when seeing flop (W$WSF%) 35

Looking over my PT stats from UB and PR shows that I saw 17-18% of flops. My W$WSF% was 34.5% at UB and 30% at PR (only couple K hands here). W$SD% was 50% at UB and 60% at PR. I have a Mac Poker Pro data base, which I cannot access atm, and I recall the W$SD% being in the mid 50's, but that is the only stat I can remember.

This was followed by 829 hands where I lost every session
Flops 16%
W$WSF 28%
W$SD 38%

I then dropped down to 50NL where I won a buy in before leaving town and then the recent debacle, 2188 hands
Flops 17%
W$WSF 28%
W$SD 47%

From this data my judgment is that I haven't been playing differently in terms of hand selection, as that has remained pretty normal. The win %s are down significantly from the norm, and that leads me to believe that this is the result of variance. I felt very good about my play at 100NL, so I'm more confident about those numbers being the result of variance than I am about 50NL, even though I think this is just a bad run as well.

Okay, I have created a chart in Excel and will attempt to post it below, fingers are crossed. Hmm, can't cut and paste. I'll do some research and try to get it up at some point today.[/img]

Okay, now let's see if I can get this to work.



Sweet. I'm so proud of myself. For getting the chart up, not for losing $200 in the last few days. Chart starts from the happy mental place I was in when starting the journal.

I played two sessions today, one at 10NL and the other at 2/4 limit. Quite a change to go from winning and losing in one hand what one tends to walk away with in a session for the other. NL session went well. I played my loose passive-aggressive strategy and knocked 'em down. Bad beats still there, some of them horrifiic (I wonder when I will see a non horrific-bad-beat session), but still big win overall. 196 hands for $43.63, courtesy of two set over sets, so not feeling all that great, as luck played a big roll. Tonight, per the plan, I played limit. 2/4 games about at juicy as 1/2 so played the higher game. I'm wondering about moving to 3/6 but less tables at that level. 2/4 actually offers some selection, whereas 1/2 and 3/6 you basically take what you get, though it isn't bad at either level. 494 hands at 2/4 for $38.35. The last few times I have played I've had one table I crushed, one table where I got crushed, and one table with a small win or loss. Thoughts on that dynamic?

I had a 15 minute window in which I felt great. I wasn't winning at every table, but I was playing perfect poker. I only made 2 or 3 small mistakes in the session. All those mistakes were failing to value bet the river. I think only one was a big mistake, as I should have figured out his hand and bet, but the other two, pretty close decisions. I then ran bad for a half hour or so, but still played excellent poker. Then finally got back to some good cards and finished it out on a good note. Nothing out of the ordinary, so I don't have anytihng to post, though, having played at 10NL I realize that posting some of them may be useful for some people. I have no way of knowing which one's though, so sorry.

I used to think that play was slow at 10NL because people were busy doing other things, but now I think it is because the typical player knows less about the game and so more decisions are perplexing, requiring more thought on their part. Tommy Angelo has a relevant article on this. He's one of my favorite poker personalities, btw. If you are familiar with him, then you know why. Anyway, he has an article on decision making. A lot of decision making appears easy (black or white: raise/call or fold) but some of it is in the gray area. The better you get at poker, the less gray there is. So, the more inexperienced you are, i.e. the 10NL player, the more gray, and so the more time that players need to make a decision. I see this sort of thing on the forums frequently. There will be a lot of debate about a hand, then a more experienced player will say, "This is a standard x." If you're lucky, that player will elaborate on why it is standard. At any rate, that's why I think it takes so long to play a damn hand at 10NL.

Edit: I forgot to say, there is a thread in the limit forum on variance that I've made a few posts in. I think there's a lot of good stuff in that thread. BTP has some great minds. I"ve learned a lot from that discussion as I've tried to determine the answer.

So-so day. Played some 2/4 this afternoon and had a decent session going until a couple 2 outers on the river. My reads were on, and I made some good plays. The money, however, isn't so impressive 209 hands for $8.90. I checked my email and discovered that UB had a reload bonus going this weekend. I suddenly had to play some Omaha hi/low, so I deposited $300 over there and started playing some 10max PL. Had a good session going before a disaster hand came along, but guy was shortstacked so it didn't hurt too bad. 10max dried up and I decided to play some 25max. I was up a bit then along came some river beats to put me down. Near the end of the session I pick up [Ks in the SB. LP raises the pot, I reraise pot, he calls. All the money in on the river. He also has A-A with a suited . The flop came T high. River also a T so I lost to trips.

Feeling real sick, very next hand after rebuying a full stack, I pick up and raise OTB, same guy calls me w/ 2348. Had one other caller. Flop . All the money in. Turns a 6 and I fail to catch a diamond. I was not in my happy place and I shut down the tables. So, dumped ~$50 in two hands. Now why is it that people think limit has more variance?

LOL, so Omaha venture a complete disaster. 321 total hands for a loss of $48.26
Tomorrow's a new day. I plan to play some 25NL. I may get back on the O8 horse, but perhaps w/ a stop loss plan.

Played kind of late last night so just went to bed. Okay day at the tables. Won some money, but not really sure how. I accomplished the immediate goal of getting back in the black for the week, courtesy of bonus money. I'm going to make a change in the reporting here. I usually post my bankroll on Sunday evening, with my poker week running from Monday-Sunday. I'm now going to switch to Sunday-Saturday, since I play NL from Sunday-Friday afternoon and limit hold'em Friday evening and Saturday. Since I've been playing O8, this as fouled up things a bit, and I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this. I kind of like hitting a groove in one game and focusing on it for a day or two. It probably is not a good thing to switch back and forth between hold'em and O8, as evidenced by today I think.

I played 339 hands of PL O8 at 10 max and made just over a buy in. I think that just happened gradually with me picking up some small and medium pots here and there. I also played one table of limit O8 at .25/.5 and made $1.15. River cards were generally horrid today. But here's a hand in which the river didn't matter. I raise in EP w/ and get one caller.
Flop:
I bet the pot, he smooth calls
Turn: something
He bets pot into me, I put the rest of my money in and he calls with (you already know 2 of them) J-J-A-x. Yeah, the odds of that flop are pretty damn small.

Then I played some 25NL hold'em and did not play too well. Cards fell badly for me and I compounded that by failing to make proper value bets on the river. For example, I had queens full of 3's holding Q3 in the BB. The flop came QT3, so given the way things had been going yesterday, I feared a QT. I didn't play this hand as I normally would have, so I missed out on a chance to double off a bigger stack who had trip queens on the turn. That was my biggest mistake. You know, I just have to pay off the better hand there, cause I leave a ton of value on the table to hand like his. One other hand like that when I had a flush w/ 89 and didn't push it hard. Throw some river suckouts in there and it was 365 hands for a $4.37 loss, so not terrible, but not great.

I plan to play some more O8 today. I'm closing in on the hole I dug for myself. I'm playing a home game tonight with friends. Everyone is a decent player, so the game has gotten difficult, but I play more for fun with them. Small $10 buy-in so nothing too serious.

Current Bankroll: $2160

Made it to class okay and the meeting was pretty good (for meetings). Boosted exponentially by the presence of free pizza. This should be a nice wing-it job from me this semester as this is the first time I've been involved in this class; my students are sooooo lucky!

Not a bad day at the tables. I started out dry as a....(I was going to say whistle, but that doesn't seem right)...desert (that sounds lame)...just fill in the blank with whatever you like. I'm slightly intoxicated. So anyway, started off cold. Then I decided I would just go ahead and play super tight and see how that worked out. 186 hands later I was up 40c on one table, down 35c on another and down $3 on the third. Low variance I guess. As you might have guessed I didn't get much in the way of action. I limped AK and AQ each time I had them. Saw 8 flops with them and hit none, so cheapest 8 hands of AK and AQ I've ever had missing flops. I did limp push from utg at one point. 4 people limped in behind me and one of the blinds put in the mini raise. Thank you sir! Stole that pot. Second and third sessions, I actually had some decent hands and picked up a little over 2 buy-ins. I'm still not sure I'm playing that well. My reads have gotten closer to where they were, so that is encouraging, but still a ways to go.