My downswing continued painfully, moving past the -$300 point. That’s a third of my bankroll in just under two weeks, so it was starting to look desperate.
I know what my problem is, and have really known it all along TBH. I run good, get confident, and then start to embrace the fun side of poker – the gambling!
So I chase draws, make big cock swinging hero calls, thin value bets when I have no value, and generally discard the fold button. All with the obvious consequences.
At the weekend I buckled down and started to squash these urges, and I managed to stall the downswing. It’s not turned round, but the latter half of this month has been breakeven which is better than before.
I’ve been reading 2p2 intensely, going over my HH, having other people go over my HHs, talking strat on AIM, and generally becoming an obsessive poker bore. It’s feeling good too.
After a long discussion last night with Yegor (ok, most of it was laughing about roseeker’s downfall) I decided to drop right down to $10 games and set a strong volume goal. I’ve currently 240 games at $10 with a ROI of 13%. I’m going to play another 260 to bring it to 500 games and see if I can nail my game down to a cold impassionate cyborg crushing of these $10 morons. No more hero calls 
So far so good, although I’d forgotten how bizarre $10 games can be. For $20 and $30 games the players have become far more rational about their lines, and betsizing is at least in relation to the pot size. $10s it’s still kinda crazy. For example I had 72o in a limped pot. The flop had been checked back so it was a $40 pot on a TJQK board. Villain fires out a bet of $200. Somewhat obvious what to do.
I’m still squishing some gambool tendencies though – same villain 3bet me pre while I had KJo. Against him I felt a call would be ok, but something in me said that he was just going to jam the flop with his A rags if I did. So I 4bet, which KJo isn’t really good enough for, and he shoved. So I thought ‘whatever’ and called to see that he did indeed have A6o. Here was the difficulty of $10 – he had no idea that a 4bet looks really strong and he was supposed to fold A6o. But that’s what we all say in these positions – ‘how could he shove with that!’. Ultimately these are mistakes which make us money. Anyway, neither of us improved, I went down to $900 and then had to fight another 10 minutes in order to finally win.
Fantastic blog – I couldn’t agree more. It’s that feeling of being an old-fashioned wild-west gun-slinging cowboy that the game’s all about. Problem is precisely as you said – that’s when the gambling starts!!
5bet-jamming with Ax is soo standard(as a bluff, due to card-removal effect). but i assume he had 1050 chips so 4,5-bet size must’ve been ridiculous
Cliffs on roseeker story? Used to play with him all the time….
The 2p2 thread is 4k posts long, so def tl;dr!
Basically a friend of his did a prop bet that he could play 30k hands in one day at NL200 and come out with a profit (he was a breakeven player, so not so easy for him). Ro took a piece of the action, and then when they realised he was going to miss the target Ro used multiaccounts to chip dump to his friend – he also used some of his student’s accounts as well, without the student’s knowledge!
The epic 2p2 thread shows huge denials from Ro as they discovered what had happened, followed finally by confessions from both Ro and his mate. Ro was kicked off his coaching site too.
Here’s a good link – has cliffs plus how 2p2 pieced together the chipdumping plus Ro’s multiaccounting…
Oh, dear. lolprobbetaments!
I seem to recall soul-crushing Ro back in the day, though, so yet another player who has lapped me on the course….
3bet me pre while I had KJo. Against him I felt a call would be ok, but something in me said that he was just going to jam the flop with his A rags if I did. So I 4bet, which KJo isn’t really good enough for, and he shoved. So I thought ‘whatever’ and called to see that he did indeed have A6o. Here was the difficulty of $10 – he had no idea that a 4bet looks really strong and he was supposed to fold A6o
Dumping off too many chips? A6 beats KJ?? I do the same call to see what people have. Really shouldn’t do that