<< Blog Home
Archive for the ‘Bad Days’ Category
Deja Vu
Friday, September 3rd, 2010Misled!
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010Dammit! I thought I was doing really well at the $5 4man shootouts – $100 up after 20 odd games.
Turns out HEM has a bug – any time that I went out in the first round it was recording the match as a regular 2man HU match. So when I filtered my results on just 4mans those games weren’t included.
No wonder I was doing so well, but it explains I was getting frustrated that I couldn’t continue my 4man success when trying $10 single 2man HU matches. How depressing, it seems that I’m still crap at poker.
Update: It gets worse. I figured I’d experiment and see how far just value betting would take me. I’d still throw a few bluffs in, but just in obviously high FE spots.
Didn’t make any difference at all. It seemed to be an endless series of missed flops and villains with constant made hands.
In my last game the only hand I got that I’d consider ‘big’ was a straight, plus trips once was nice. The rest were weak pairs. My opponent got 2 flushes, 2 straights and also hit trips. It just felt like he never missed.
It’s felt that way all evening – I’ve played 11 games and only won 3. So I pushed all my opponents from today into one alias in HEM, and compared showdowns;
| me | them | |
| Boats | 4 | 3 |
| Flushes | 1 | 5 |
| Straights | 2 | 8 |
| Sets | 1 | 1 |
| Trips | 3 | 2 |
| 2pair | 5 | 6 |
| 2pair (pair on board) | 18 | 21 |
| TP | 9 | 7 |
if straights+ are monsters, then they had 16, and I had 7. Obviously value betting isn’t enough, I’m going to need some kind of hole card spyware…
or, maybe I’m going to showdown too light? More to think about.
FFS
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010Watched a PrimordialAA vid the other day and tried to think what I’d do before he made his move. Almost everything matched, with a couple of exceptions where he shoved over a few things that I would have been nittier about (although one push was just crazy – he just took a big pot of someone and figured they’d be tilted enough to call with anything, so he shoved pre with Q7o. Fair enough having the read that they’d call with anything, but Q7o is a 50% flip against ATC, let alone a shove calling range, so didn’t quite get that one).
Anyway, that fired me up again to try regular husngs to see if I ought to be winning. My BR is pretty bad right now, so this is just $5s, and it went like this;
Game 1: First hand dealt KK – money goes in, villain has TT & my hand holds. Nice start!
Game 2: Straightforward, picked up several 200 chip pots, then on 20th hand hit trips on turn & finish him off.
Game 3: V passive opponent, hard to get value out hands. However on 106th hand get QQ and manage to get him all-in with his FD + gutshot. He hits the gutshot. First game lost.
Game 4: 38th hand my AA’s are cracked. Second game lost.
Game 5: Hand 6 my 88 go in against villain’s 99. Third game lost.
Game 6: 3rd hand, my TPTK (AJ) goes all the way against his TPWK and I’m back up to breakeven.
Game 7: AA cracked again. Another loss.
Game 8: Tried to push villain off a hand but he clings on with his 74o & hits his OSED which gets paid off since I hit my K on the river. Perhaps this was my fault.
Game 9: My 44′s go in against 88′s with expected results.
And then I run out of steam. The HEM chart has only 9 games on it, but it makes me feel that if I carry on it’ll just keep plummeting. Why is it all so different to the start of this year?
July
Saturday, July 31st, 2010Hmph, not great.
$140 lost, third month in a row of losses 
I’m tired now of saying that it’s this leak or that leak or it’s all tilt etc. What it’s really feeling like is that it’s all just luck. Some days I get cards, other days I don’t. It’s not suck-outs, bad beats, or river rats – it’s more like sometimes you hit your set when they hit TP, and sometimes you don’t.
My records go back exactly two years now (I’ve probably been playing for three years, but it was a while before I discovered pokertracker & hold’em manager). So I decided to do a lifetime audit;
I’ve played 180k hands (48k in tournaments).
The total winnings (tourney + cash) is -$152.
rackback + bonuses have come to $534.
Final total $381.
However my accounts are a lot less than that, as I had to cash out my entire roll last summer, plus I’ve just taken a share backing BWOP for some live tournaments (Newff had to pull out of his unfortunately). Not sure what to make of it really, other than it’s good to be +ve but somehow still depressing it’s not come from being any good at poker.
Still A Feeder
Thursday, July 22nd, 20106max sessions not going so well. Lost a couple of buy-ins, and then tonight I was just bored and messing around (opened about 40% of my hands).
At the end of the session I’d lost 3 buy-ins due to 3 big hands going against me (one was a bad bluff, the other two were preflops flips that didn’t go my way). Without those 3 hands I still would have only broke even, despite my redline taking a full buy-in. I have a knack for being able to fold opponents out (I’m not just talking about that flop cbet obvious stuff, but manipulating them on turn & river), but I can’t make my value hands pay off (plus I occasionally get it in too light and can’t win a flip). I dunno, guess I still can’t play poker.
As it is, the BR is looking really bad now. Going busto is starting to look on the cards unless I have an epiphany soon…
Having a Heater is Bad for your Health
Sunday, July 11th, 2010A couple of posts ago I said I wasn’t losing too badly, just losing out to rake since I couldn’t get past 50% ITM. Well I checked my stats a bit closer and turns out I am losing so far this month;
Most of it is shitty win one, lose one zigzagginess. None of it seems to bear any relation to whether my opponents were any good or not, even the fools who check every button won their fair share. One of them today made an awesome laydown though;
No Limit Holdem Tournament
2 Players
2 Players
Stacks:
SB (1,640)
Hero (1,360)
Blinds: 10/20
Pre-Flop: (30, 2 players) Hero is BB A
6
SB raises to 60, Hero calls 40
Flop: 5 10
J
(120, 2 players)
Hero bets 80, SB calls 80
Turn: K (280, 2 players)
Hero checks, SB bets 20, Hero calls 20
River: 9 (320, 2 players)
Hero goes all-in 1,200, SB folds
Final Pot: 1,520
SB shows
A
Q
Hero wins 1,520 (net +160)
SB lost 160
Admittedly shoving that river seems remarkably spewy since there aren’t many hands that would call, and he was also extremely passive – but that passivity was so extreme that I was convinced he really really liked his hand (I know turn bet was small, but *any* turn bet after he called was big strength from this guy). He tanked for quite a while before folding. I dunno if I would have had that strength…
That game was annoying in the end because I had him pinned down to < 500 chips for ages and he kept on clinging on, winning some flips back to equal stacks and then my 66 lost to his AK.
Here's another hand that shocked me. Different player, this time someone who raised their buttons and you'd expect more regular lines. Maybe flat calling a 3bet pre with aces is a much better move that 4betting or shoving?
No Limit Holdem Tournament
2 Players
2 Players
$10.00+$0.50
Stacks:
SB (1,150)
Hero (1,850)
Blinds: 10/20
Pre-Flop: (30, 2 players) Hero is BB 10 10
SB raises to 60, Hero raises to 180, SB calls 120
Flop: 4 8 9 (360, 2 players)
Hero bets 180, SB calls 180
Turn: 9 (720, 2 players)
Hero checks, SB bets 340, Hero calls 340
River: 6 (1,400, 2 players)
Hero bets 200, SB raises to 440, Hero calls 240
Final Pot: 2,280
SB shows two pair, Aces and Nines
A A
Hero shows
10 10
SB wins 2,280 (net +1,140)
Hero lost 1,140
Anyway, to the point of the title of this post – essentially I had two heaters this year, one at $10 games and the other at $30. The money from the $30s is blown away now, and my wins show I’m back to the point after the 4man $10s heater. It’s a pretty solid decline for the last 3 months. Those heaters raised my expectations, and it’s painful facing the reality that I’m not really winning at heads up.
I wish I knew where the holes are in my game. It was a lot more fun when I was winning…
Jaded June
Sunday, June 27th, 2010Poker has become frustrating again. Early victory in HU cash was fun, but as we come to the end of this month it still shows a loss – I’ll spend an hour against a weak opponent and win a nice variance-free buy-in (or two), and then go up against an aggressive player and lose the lot (plus I was pushing the limits each time, so the losses were v painful). 50/50 whether it’s been bad beats or my fault – I recently was against someone who was clearly overreaching with their bets, and got it all in on a 4bet with J3 as top pair. They called with an OESD that hit – even though I was a 60% favourite and had made a good read, the wisdom of pushing with J3 is hardly defending my case much.
Consequently I’m not playing much as the moment, it just seems a bit futile – in the early days a session was fun (or not), but the more I play the more I see poker as a long term game with all the sessions merged into a single win-rate, and it’s not that great.
Results for June:
HU Cash:
HUSNGs:
For a whole month that’s an amazingly low hand count. Bear in mind it’s single tabling on the cash games, plus I’ve been away 3/4 weekends this month, so not been playing much anyway.
