Bad news is that it cost my the last half of my bankroll and I had to redeposit. What’s even more stupid is that it was still my showdown hands that cost me most of the money!

It seems to me I’m minimising my wins while maximising my losses. Playing the TAG style seems to be exacerbating that too, probably because my non-showdown hands are no longer contributing to my winrate.

Back to LAG? I don’t know, and TBH right now I don’t care. I was having an extremely stable session this morning, and had carved out 2 buy-ins in small-moderate pots, and then got kicked back to square one against a set magnet.

Small wins, big losses – I’m pretty sure this is the key though, I need to flip this around somehow. 7k hands on Carbon now at -18bb/100. Still within the realms of variance though I suppose.

Update:

It was raining today, so played quite a lot of poker. It was frustrating, very swingy stuff, but after a while it seemed to look like it was forming a general upwards line. Roughly it was climbing at 10bb/100, so that’s good.

However it didn’t end well;

Villain on that last hand is a 27/12 who frequently shoves the river, although I’m not sure whether it’s a bluff or not – by the frequency alone I’m assuming it can’t be fat value very often. Somehow he’s built up this massive 500bb stack, and I wasn’t far behind with 300bb (at least 100bb of that was his). I was wondering if we’d end up in a pot where he did his shove the river trick and not realise the consequences of being so deep;

So it was me that got stung. I’m not sure what I expected, AA,KK or AQ maybe (he never 3bets either – ever! Not preflop or postflop – got caught out by a flatted AK a little earlier before noticing that).

I also decided that I want to play more hands in position, and not just against the blinds. If someone has opened before me, my strategy for a long time now has been either 3bet big hands, call pocket pairs, or fold. I guess this is fine (or normal even), but surely it means that when I open, the chances are I’ll be OOP unless it folds to the blinds? Sure my late position ranges are wider than my early position ranges, but while that means I do play more hands IP, they’re weaker hands too.

So I thought what kind of hands can I play if someone has opened before me (other than the PP’s and big Ax’s). I guess it has to be a less dominated range than the opener. So I figured if I call with the range of the position earlier than the opener, then I should be IP with a stronger range? Probably not the most intellectual of strategies, I suppose I should really be considering hand strengths in a different light, ie suited connectors and ranges that don’t overlap theirs (that has a name I expect – merged, balanced, aga range?).

As it happened the situation almost never came up – not enough seats at 6max really. If on the button and the MP opened I never had a hand in my UTG range, CO opening I didn’t have a hand from my MP range etc. I think it happened three or four times at most. And I think those hands went 50/50 anyway (mostly missing & folding to the cbet, or betting when unraised and getting a fold), so no great insights there anyway. I probably should put more thought into it and consider a better calling range that’s based on something more intelligent really.

On another plus note Carbon have sorted out my bonus code, so now I’ve 3 months to clear the 150% deposit bonus. I reckon that’s plenty of time as long as I move up before the end. We’ll see.

but infuriatingly it’s already showing my terrible non-showdown +ve, showdown -ve trend. Terrible because overall it never shows a profit – I’ve seen very few people with this kind of graph, and even less who are profitable (Giev Money being one of the few).

Taking my hands from the last 20k or so, my non-showdown is winning at 10bb/100, which is quite a rate considering that’s virtually most people’s overall winning rate (at nanostakes), yet that is blown totally out of the water with showdown losing at -530bb/100 (wtf!).

I’m not sure which way I’m getting this wrong – am I calling down light, or am I being too strong on my value hands (turning what should be +ve showdown hands into smaller but +ve nonshowdown hands)?

Looking at my Carbon hands, the bulk of mistakes seems to be hands that end up all-in (both pre and postflop). In particular I’m being very light with short stacks, and looking back at it this is adding up to a lot of moronicness.

Nevertheless, the frustration is really about the lack of ability to change – I’m constantly pushing myself to be nittier and nittier, yet the carbon graph is a scaled down version of the 20k graph. Nothing is changing. I’m chipping away at something that is fundamentally flawed, and I’ve yet to see what it is…

Re Phil Ivey, yeah I saw that -was chatting with Yegor as the story was emerging. Initially it looked pretty good that he was speaking up, but then after Full Tilt’s response came out, and we had a closer look at the filed whatsitsname (case?), it was clear that Ivey’s out for himself and this is massively bad for the US players. He may have ruined any short-term chance of them getting their money back, and possibly even long term if FT can’t recover. One part of FT’s response was interesting – they say he owes them a large sum of money. Not many people seemed to have picked up on this, and I’m wondering what ‘large’ means to them, not to mention why he would owe them…

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.

I feel pretty good as well – obviously nl5 is not the most challenging of levels, but I actually believe that I properly outplayed them and deserved every penny. The last 1k of that is nl10, and that’s going nicely too (a lot less passive, but they’re still moronic).

All I need to do now is not drift and put some volume in. Stick to the plan, keep a level head etc. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do since everyone else I know is splashing around nl25 – nl100 now, but it’s not a big deal. I’m still learning the game…

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.