Self-satisfying smug brag, but I’m going to have to show my graph for the *whole* weekend (so far!);

I’m going to carry on playing, but I’ve noticed a trend that’s holding me back a bit. My sessions start ok (sometimes a little flat period as I warm up) and rise fast, and then after a while they plateau off and then even start dropping;

I thought it might be that once the fish at the table have been repeatedly been bashed about (not just by me) they leave, and maybe I should be moving tables more frequently. I’ve tried that and it doesn’t seem to make a difference though. Maybe more likely is that 60 minutes of poker is as much as I can handle, and after that I get a bit spewy. I’m not totally sure though since even when I leave and come back later it still seems to follow that pattern (like yesterday – I blamed it on the good people waking up. Could still be that today as well though, although it’s still quite early in the morning, especially for a Sunday).

I guess I should do a bit of hand analysis and see why it’s going flat. I’m not good at looking back at hands though – they always seem so obvious in hindsight, especially knowing the outcome. Also I’m not keen on posting to 2p2 any more as well – their forum still has some excellent general posts, but I find the hand posting stuff a bit crap. Too many people want to give their unqualified opinions and especially in the micro forums it’s all so pathetically weak-tight. Fine for the mass tabling bots I guess. I was hoping that the Stox forums would be the answer since you can tell if it’s a coach answering, but their forums are deader than a goth party…

Here’s another lifetime graph – I’m now within $30 of breakeven, so obviously looking forward to that milestone;

Since April my showdown line has been matching non-showdown – ok, here’s a chart (can’t help it, gotta show these things);

So it looks like it’s never going to catch up, and so until the scale of the chart makes $600 looks small (ie after I’ve reached $1NL) then that lifetime redline is always going to look huge. Whatever that means.

Update: Played a bit more but didn’t make a lot more (final total $68). For the last two hours though had a sweat session with S1ndr0me which was really good – really helps to talk about ideas while playing. I think I played as I would normally, but the chart looks kinda spiky which might mean I took more risks than usual. Hard to say but there was only one hand played for kicks since we were online together (uh, that would be the huge drop in the middle villain suddenly shoved on the flop while I had top pair no kicker (I had A4o) and we called just to see. Villain had A6o, but had flopped two pair…).

Update II: Bit of a poker day today, I really must get out and get a life! After wimbledon was over I thought I’d try a stab at 25NL giving myself a stop loss of $15. I opened three tables and bought in at $15 – scared money really, but couldn’t avoid that, one big loss would make a huge dent in my account.

It went ok, although it was odd because by the end of the session (1 hour, 255 hands) I had two stacks of $20 and one at $40 while final winnings was only $11 – a bit daunting knowing that getting stacked would cost me dear! Overall it was a useful experiment since it didn’t seem that different to 10NL, with the exception that the money was a lot more. There were still a bunch of 3 or 4 way pots where everyone limped, and there were some bizarre hero calls. I’m just going to have to build my BR quite a lot before I play there though (um at least $250 I think) as I was playing way too scared…

Oh, and that leaves $12 to breakeven!