Nevertheless, I seem to be doing ok despite what this chart looks like;

The dive downwards was the spewy aggrotard mood that I mentioned in the last post. Autostealing every blind and easily knocking everyone off their hand had made me a bit slaphappy, plus I really saw the $10 stacks as more or less worthless and so stacked off too light too many times.

So yesterday I returned to taking things a bit more seriously and thought that I needed to force myself to just ignore the 4 buy-in spew since it was going to take quite a few hands to climb back up. Somehow though I hit hand after hand and everyone seemed happy to throw their stacks at me. So I managed to win it back in less hands than I lost it, an incredible swing really.

Single tabling is still enjoyable (well obv when stacks are flying like this), being able to chat while playing is fun and action hasn’t been so slow as get boring. No desire to add a second table yet, and even if I did I think even one more table would negate the whole reason I decided to single table. I just imagine myself playing live and it all seems reasonable.

Less said about the cash games the better. As I said before, not going back there ever again (well, apart from the inevitable HU cash games I guess);

Feel free to shoot the ducks…

After 600 hands I was down $27 (NL10). I stopped playing and thought how familiar this was. Every 6max session lately has been a losing one. Not suckouts or bad beats either, just me being spewy.

So I went back to husngs ($10 ones – Monday’s always a bad day, so wanted to play for fun rather than pushing myself into $20s). Six games later I was still unbeaten. $57 from an hour’s play.

What’s the point in playing 6max? Obviously none at all. I’m down $180 this year playing that stupid game, while I’m up $460 playing husngs.

So, time to give up playing anything else other than heads up (well, apart from some MTTs just for the big event of it).

The bad was my cash games – I started out the month after some in depth revision of my play, and came to the conclusion I was pushing too hard with paired hands (not PP) – overvaluing them and trying to get too much value. I was doing well at all-in play, and making good value out of 2pair+ hands, but the weaker made hands were wiping out those gains.

So I trimmed down my game and initially it seemed to be working – a nice 12 buy-in climb. It then collapsed dramatically, and to be honest I’m still not sure why;

At the bottom of that dive Full Tilt bought out Rush Poker, and I instantly switched, lured in by the appeal of big rakeback and racking up a large volume of hands. I’m not a big volume player, and the idea of boosting the number of hands was to reduce variance, but somehow I became swingier then ever. I possibly could have worked my way back to zero, but I was dispirited with the whole thing. My new year’s resolution was to not care about the limits I play, and just go with my bankroll, which is still fine, but it hurt to be within $8 of moving down to NL5

However  at that point I switched to HUSNGs. Which was the good half of the month

For some reason I’ve been unstoppable – $5 buy-in games went fine, enough to give me confidence with the $10s. I then won 75% of $10 games – 17/23! Yesterday I tried some $20 games (not january I know), and won 2/3, so early days there – however the cash profit from these is astounding. Furthermore I’m not feeling bad (much) when I lose a match, not like when I’ve just spewed 4 buy-ins at NL10 – however that could be because I’m on a winning streak, sooo I’m not going to make too much of that right now.

Final gains: $120 including rakeback. $70 without rb – have to admit, rush poker did win in that respect!

February I’m concentrating on HU. Maybe this is a turning point in what kind of game I play, we’ll have to see…

ps. forgot to mention 21st in the WBCOOP main event as well

Also got two weeks of stox from trulyfree, better get watching some vids I guess!

This is the graph to date of playing RP;

Mostly in the black I guess, so I shouldn’t be too harsh on it. However the last session (last 600 hands) was a really depressing pit of despair. One of those times you hit nothing while all around you do, bullets and cowboys get no action and the hands that do get all-in action find themselves outgunned

The thing I hate the most though is my redline – I’ll admit I’m not one of those players who have a solid upwardly mobile graph, but when I am doing ok it’s usually red and blue in reasonable tandem. A few bad showdown failures are compensated by the non-showdown and it all looks nice and symmetrical. Today I realised constantly playing against unknowns on Rush Poker meant you couldn’t profitably punish the bluffers or extract from the calling stations. You either get good cards or you don’t.

I am wondering why my swings are so huge though. They’re all about 6 or 7 buy-ins – that’s not normal surely? People get worried when they have a 3 or 4 buy-in dive, over 8 is a downswing of death. Run of the mill for me it seems.

Unfortunately that last downswing has really taken it out of my bankroll – it now stands at a crappy $208. That’s less than a buy-in to the NL5 move down point! Rakeback ought to be about $50 from this rushing around though, but it won’t be in my account for another three weeks.

Oh well.

OTOH my blog’s doing well   The big jump in the last week was because I broke the news about rush poker so quickly – Google sent me loads of people who were searching about the game. Wore off pretty quickly though…

My biggest mistakes were unfortunately while I was deep – I hit trips on a 727 board, both of us with 200bb stacks – the money went all in and he had 22   It’s kinda difficult since clearly his shove screamed that he had a major hand, certainly better than my sevens, but the NL10 game at rush poker is full of crazy people – shoves like that are happening all the time. This is perhaps partly because NL10 is the lowest stakes so we have all the NL2 & NL5 people there, plus the speed induces people to play a bluffy reckless game.

So I took a step back and had a breather – during this time I figured out how to export my HEM stats into my Full Tilt player notes (since the HUD’s useless with rush). It didn’t help that much though as I don’t seem to have any history with the people I’m seeing on the rush tables. I guess that’s a consequence of NL10 being the lowest limits again.

So I restarted, and this time added another piece to my Rush strategy – ratholing! I switched down to 2 tables and whenever a stack gained more than 20bb I closed it and then joined another. Obviously not an optimal strategy for a strong player, but I lack the experience and self-discipline at playing deep, and if I don’t cap my game like that I stand to lose some big hands.

Anyway, it went better;

The improvement is mainly from going down to 2 tables, but I think the ratholing is probably a good thing for me to do, at least for now…

Update: It’s a good feeling when you lose an absolute bucketload of money, and then have the ability to win it back

I almost posted this chart at the 1.6k hands mark but thought I’ll just make it a real profit – duh, that of course made everything spin out of control. Made it on the second attempt though

For the prop bet I’d be negative still if it wasn’t for rakeback – I’d be at -$6 but with rakeback I’m +$38! That’s a lot of rakeback…

Glad I scraped it back, although I was a bit bad letting it go that far down. Bluffs are failing completely and utterly on rush poker – there just seems to be too many calling stations. Of course that’s fine when you’re hitting hands, which is probably why yesterday’s graphs were so sweet – I was hitting a ton of stuff then. Today I had loads of small and medium pockets pairs, and loads of AKo hands, but almost none of them seemed to hit at all. On top of that everyone was mashing the pot button on the flop – it was hard folding so often, plus feeling nervous to cbet with the CS’s made it not the most pleasant of sessions.

During the return to zero part I modified my game so that my opening raises were completely ridiculous – all button steals were $0.20 minbets, speculative SC’s were minbets, broadways and big pairs were 3 to 5 big blinds. It seemed to be paying off as well – with minbet raises you don’t need that many to be successful to make a profit, and yet perversley *more* people seemed to fold to the minbet than to the 3bb button raises.

For the propbet, I’m still behind the starting line

but the fact that I was able to do 2k hands just today is amazing! Rakeback is just going to rocket up now, plus I might get some of the variance out of my game. Just got to avoid the tilt induced crashes that tend to come my way every now and again

One thing that’s funny is that on these Rush tables I’m now getting the redline of a multitable grinder;

I’ve *never* had a graph like that before, but is my game better or worse for it? A positive redline might be seen as a good thing, but then my game was always so swingy?! Maybe this is an indication of stability perhaps…

It might also be worth looking into the ironman promotion now as well.