Bobbster, thanks for the welcome back! I was never really gone, I just entered a bit on an antisocial lurker mode for about a week there. Women are definitely -EV...and I'm starting to wonder a bit about alcohol! Not enough to make me stop drinkin, of course
After reading yours and others posts and accepting that almost everyone appears to be leaving me in the dust with AK, I decided to check my old 2-4 numbers from when I first went pro. My overall winrate at 2-4 is lower, so thankfully I do appear to have improved since then...BUT, my AK numbers are better!
AKo is 0.77 as opposed to 0.52 at 3-6
AKs is 1.07 as opposed to 0.58 at 3-6
So it would seem that while many aspects of my game have improved over the past 6 months, I've completely forgotten how to play AK
But then again, this sorta makes sense. When I first went pro, I was still relatively inexperienced at limit (having squandered most of the previous two years playing NL cash games and SNGs). I had played limit before, but that was almost 3 years ago when I first started. So being still sort of a rookie, I played my AK in a rather textbook fashion. Sure, I'd toss out continuation bets, but I was mainly playing to hit TPTK. Of course, if I did hit TPTK, there was pretty much no way in hell I was letting it go!
Now, I'm a bit more experienced so I can OCCASIONALLY bring myself to fold my hand to one of those devious turn raises...BUT, as our resident goat-fucker Mecos pointed out, I seem to have lost the ability to fold it unimproved.
I suppose every once in a while, it'd do all of us good to take a step back and evaluate how far our game has come...and I'm pretty sure I can't be the only one that, in doing so, is faced with the sad reality that while many bad things have improved upon, some good things have been lost or forgotten. I'm gonna make it my personal goal to drag this biotch of a hand back into more respectable winning territory! Maybe I'll do pushups, or run laps, or drink a shot of whiskey every time I make a stupid calldown with it. Yeah, I'm likin the sound of that!
EDIT: One more thing I want to mention on the AK front. While I think some players rely too much on statistics, I think this is a good example of how seeing cold hard numbers can force me to objectively analyze my game. At the times that I make bad call downs with TPTK or ace-high, I can rationalize and play the ol' "Well I only had to be right x% of the time game"...while there's sometimes merit to that, PT forces me to accept that I most definitely am calling down far too much and that something has to be done about it. I wasn't initially sure how productive this thread would be, but now I can see that it has the potential to really help me fix some serious leaks in my game. Thanks, guys!
-TW