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…

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;

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?

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…

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.

Despite stopping the hemorrhaging I haven’t been able to turn it around yet – my decision to grind out 500 $10 games is taking longer than I’d hoped, and being a grind is definitely the right way of describing it. Since it’s not turned into a winning run means it’s not time yet to move back – my BR is still ok for $20 games (or $30s really), but there’s no point burning more money than I need to. The grind has also slowed in the last week or so because of the frustration and having a few camping weekends, so it’s not been easy lately.

Showing how it stands for 2010 as a whole puts it into perspective – how to have a heater and then give it back;

Since the 27th of last month I have done nothing but lose;

Only 29 games in 8 days, so you might say that’s not enough games to be a real downswing. However, it’s crushing my confidence – I now start a game thinking I’m going to lose which is really bad.

I think I might drop right down to $10s to reassure myself that I’m capable of a +ve ROI again…

Finish: 5889th. Sigh… Can’t seem to win a husng at the moment either

I did manage to sort out some problems with my game though (around tournament 15), but as you can see from the red ‘luck adjusted’ line I ran into enough ‘bad luck’ to not make any difference (tbh I don’t put any credence into these EV adjusted values at all, but like any good statistics; when they prove your point they must be right). It was pretty bad though, and one game I was up $2550 vs $450 when I disconnected – by the time I rebooted my shitty modem and reconnected I was the one with $300 left

Nevertheless, the problem I sorted out was my starting range. When I started out on husngs I was playing by instinct, taking my 6max range and widening it out to what felt right, and all was good with big rocketing graphs every day. I then found a starting range on husng.com and started implementing that.

Since that day I’ve broken even. Small sample, but it wasn’t right at all – I was getting into too many marginal spots, ending up overcommitting and spending most of my time fighting to come back from behind. So today I took a step back and thought what a heads-up range for SNGs ought to be. Basically since in a husng we’re playing shortstack poker most of the time, it makes sense that the Nash table is giving us the right distribution- after all, it’s calculated from the all-in preflop equity you have in a hand based on two players under shortstacked conditions.

So I twiddled around with the ratios until it presented 70% and 30% of the hands (so 70% is my opening range on the button and 30% is my calling range on BB). In this table the 70% is everything except the light grey, and the 30% is in bold;

The husng.com table varied in that it had the entire suited side for opening under the button with the junk as mainly the bottom section of the unsuited corner. TBH the husng.com table was for a cash player, and so that’s a very different dynamic, so I’m not saying it was wrong. But for husngs, it was totally unsuitable. My games instantly improved, with the number of awkward decisions vastly reduced. Shame the number of idiot calls that sucked out on the river didn’t.

Also I don’t care what anyone says about not needing hand charts. They’ll tell you that heads up is fluid and your range depends entirely on what’s best to beat your opponent. That’s true, but without having a solid and appropriate foundation from which to add or remove hands you’re just building castles in the air…