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.

No sign of my game improving, apart from now I run under ev rather than over it (hard to tell on graph above, but gap between the red & green are narrowing). At this rate I’ll be ev-neutral as I hit the 500 game mark. Possibly that’s a sign I’m getting it right though – if you were to go all-in ahead of your opponent every time, then you could only ever be under EV (and vice versa). Which means players who are over-EV (as I was) are probably getting it in bad more often than not, while players under-EV are getting it in good more often than not.

So it’s good to be under-EV?

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;

Despite the lack of play though I’ve been really piling on the learning & evaluation side of things though – that downswing might have been the best thing to happen to me as I’d stopped learning and assumed I’d got the ABC side of poker down pat and was either winning or losing (50/50!). Since I was previously winning it all seemed great, but now I think it was just lucky really (as I’m not a complete idiot it was luck biased towards winning, but obviously that’s very precarious still).

Moving back down to $10s to concentrate on how I was playing (rather than printing money) was feeling a bit pathetic, but then Yegor reminded me I was still learning, and wasn’t going to be rich tomorrow. So very true, I need to keep telling myself this until I’m ready to return. This was reinforced today when I found a three year old post on 2p2 saying exactly the same thing. Cwar was saying when 20 buy-ins isn’t enough – most of the reasons were to do with tilt & poor mental state, but the final one was;

-You are learning, no need to move up faster than your knowledge will allow you, going from the $10s to $220s quickly is not going to happen without you needing to learn and adjust. If you breeze through a couple limits fast I would recommend slowing down a bit just to see how you adjust to the better play at higher limits.

The same point twice really, but it rams it home nicely. Adding on top of that the fact that the learning I’m currently doing is really opening my eyes to a lot of new things means it all feels constructive, and I’m not wasting my time, even if I’m not moving up (despite the BR telling me to).

42o? Well, every fish has his day

ffs

finally!

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…

Start of the month moved up to $30′s, and by the end I’d moved up to $50s!   It’s borderline on the $50s really – I think I’ve even dropped back under the threshold already, but it’s all very close. The only thing I’m disappointed about is volume, even though it’s only a few games short of previous months – it is my biggest weakness, and no matter how much I moan about it I still struggle to improve.

The tiny bit of cash I played was just for the Full Tilt  Take 2 promotion, and TBH it was a mistake and I’m thinking that I’ll not take up a promotion that requires cash play again;

Notice the blue line taking a jump at the end – that’s the $25 bonus. The whole reason for playing cash in the first place!  Admittedly the biggest loss in that graph was not while I was trying to clear the bonus (which only took 5 minutes of play each morning) – it was just one  stupid night where I decided to have a quick spin at nl25 and it went really bad! Clearly not my game though.

Final total with rakeback & bonuses = $482, although I also cashed out $120 to pay for some bits & pieces, including husng coaching. So far I’ve only had 2 HH’s reviewed and not a sweat session yet. Taking it fairly slowly as I want to digest properly what I get back before paying out for more. So far so good though, and I’m very pleased with what I’ve got so far.

On Sunday I’ve the SCOOP tournament paid for by the $215 ticket I won at the blogger’s championship. Really really hoping I don’t crash out before cashing, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Nevertheless if I do cash it’ll put a nice margin to play those $50′s with, so I’ve got my fingers crossed.