This year’s Rush 5nl looks like;

Somehow my losses are exactly equal to the rake I’ve paid. So it really has been 50/50 all the way, with Full Tilt being the only winner thanks to Rake.

Which brings me to my other frustration – Leak Buster has my leaks as pretty much just W$SD (won $ at showdown) being too low. Every other stat is smack on target, even WTSD% (percentage went to showdown). Basically I’m showing down the same amount of hands as a winning player, except my hands are losing more than theirs.

So Leak Buster’s final analysis – I need to run better? Who knows…

Anyway, with the redeposit I’m going to switch games (again). I’m going to drop Rush and go back to regular table games, with the aim to work on my player reading skills. So basically trying to understand player types and how to exploit them, which isn’t really possible on nl5 Rush (too many players, not enough time to build proper stats on them, with position on you constantly changing). It’ll have that double edged benefit of reduced volume though (slower to throw money away, but less visibility of progress through variance).

I’m going to try and deposit on Carbon (Merge network), but they’re having issues with so many players moving to their site and attempts so far have failed. So back to Full Tilt possibly if it fails again.

Didn’t go so well;

I did clear $5 of the bonus during that disaster though!

Everything I did seemed to meet some kind of resistance – flop cbet success only 45%, 3bets all over the place, and generally everything was awful.

I looked back over the hands, and of course there were some terrible ones – usually 3 barrel bluffs, but not too much that I should be ashamed of.

So I dropped down in stakes just to stop the bleed, and gave up on the bonus.

Instantly there was a difference – my cbets were working! They folded to my steals, they folded to my 3bet defending in the blinds, they even started paying off the odd hand or two;

Flop cbet success now at a reasonable 60%.

Small sample size (in both cases really), but I can’t believe nl5 should be so different to nl10. Surely they should be more or less the same?

Either there IS a difference, and everyone’s solid at nl10 (!?!), or I experienced a bad downswing – my opponents really did just ‘have it’ each and every time.

I also can’t believe I’m still writing about these nanostakes, but maybe understanding these swings is part of the learning process. I’ve never put in large amounts of volume, and over-reacting to swings in the BR like this has probably not been too healthy. Never mind, I’ll just enjoy the game for being a game for now…

I figured out that all the fees for selling and buying shares had come to about £120 in the last month, which was a bit of a shock. Share dealing rake obviously. I need to calm it down a bit and just sit on the shares I have now. That was the original intention, but I got caught out in a bit of rollercoasting…

For poker I’ve been playing on Cake – 6max, ultra low stakes. More for relaxation rather than anything intense since I’m still very busy on that web contract. I logged in and found $60 just sitting there, so decided to see if I could build it up a bit. Reckon I’ll try a 10 buy-in BRM which is edgy, but I can’t face nl4 for too long. Setting that limit means at least I’ll have to put some effort into nl4 before spazzing it away at nl10. Plus Cake is kinda interesting with no HUD allowed – I’m making a lot more efforts with the notes (like ‘spazz bastard owes me $8′, ‘called me fish – DIAGF’ etc).

For returning to Rush I’d need to redeposit, but I want to see how Full Tilt copes over the next couple of months first. I expect them to be ok, but who knows what damage has been really done under the covers. That may change next week since I have the whole week off, and once the Cake money is spewed out, I’ll need to go somewhere obv.

Admittedly those hands look a bit shakey with top pair shoves Still, they called!

Feeling a bit rattled now, so might just hammer a load of $5s just to get some confidence back. BR is still twice what it was before the December heater, so no point throwing it away too quickly…

So no poker for a week (or two if it’s really bad), which is a shame since I was picking up a bit of steam volume wise. Volume doesn’t equal winnings though, as I’m still rattling around the $100 BR mark. How long has this blog been around, and I’m still moaning about $10 losses? Oh well, whatever.

Today has been particularly irritating since I just know my play has been good, yet as you can see at the 120 game mark it’s clearly been going the drooler’s way. I even ended up playing some more $5s today, which while being ridiculously easy are also very unrewarding. Maybe it’s time to put the second $100 deposit in so that I can play the $10s with some comfort.

Unfortunately it didn’t start out too grandly, and I lost the first three $10s. I switched down to $5s and lost them too I’m totally aware that’s not many games and I should just play through it, but it was dismal seeing my redeposit rapidly dwindle.

Fortunately Yegor stepped in and said he’d review the HHs of those crappy games. He quickly spotted some bad 3betting habits, plus a bad check-raise move. I returned to the tables playing just $5s and everything turned around;

There’s a couple of $10s at the end there, and also a lot of the opponents today have been complete droolers, so leakpatching can’t take the credit entirely. Nevertheless, feeling a lot better today

$2 husngs are pissing me off a bit, and while I’m showing a 5% ROI it’s not amassed much of a bankroll. The games are ridiculously transparent, but obviously you suffer from the usual badbeats and stupidity that is poker. The obviousness of it all also makes it too easy to dive into FPS, and last night I was muwahahaha’ing my way through a bunch of games, believing that I was crushing them left right and centre, and yet when I looked at the final score I hadn’t done that well. Too many of my cleverly contrived plans had gone awry at the last minute – basically I started playing for stacks too readily when a more modest approach would have had much better results.

So plan is to give up on the $million BR from $10, and just deposit a decent amount so I can play $10s at least. So I guess that’s about $200. Depositing $400 for $20s is a bit too much money really, better that I build my way there. All I need now is my next paycheck…