This seems to happen on a regular basis – I play well, then things seem to deteriorate, and finally I’m forced to take a good long look at how I’m playing.
The problem is that I know the basics, and when thinking straight can apply them well (including postflop). Once I start winning I start feeling bulletproof and play back at hands which I should just be folding. A few fancy plays go my way and I’m trying to win every pot going. Of course it doesn’t end well…
This month started with a few huge hands that went my way and gave me a 7 buy-in headstart. It took losing every penny of that plus a bit more before I realised I had to take a step back and see that I was being an idiot.
So today I folded when I was obviously beat, and didn’t float all those missed flops. It was a bit swingy, but came out up in the end;
Even nicer, this was on Ultimate Bet where my account had been seriously depleted. This put it back to a reasonable amount where I could multitable without worrying about the dreaded ‘you have insufficient funds’ popup when trying to reload. If my next post has a similar graph then it looks like I’m back on track.
As an aside, Yegor suggested playing limit hold’em. Such a weird game! While the blinds were $0.05/$0.10 the swings were tiny and similar to NL2 – no wonder bankroll management is much lower for limit compared to no limit. It was also a struggle against draws – getting AA preflop was always a minefield as you try to build a pot while watching each street conspire to give your opponent that straight with his 67o.
Compared to NLHE, limit hold’em is allegedly much lower in variance while the contribution from the player’s skill is less (pot odds become a bigger factor than bluffs). Possibly that might be a plus point at microstakes though. Also it may have less of the internet generation of players (ie more players coming from live games and less from 2p2), which might be useful too. I’m not sure how much effort I want to put into it though, but possibly more than PLO – I’m coming to hate variance…
