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…

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…

Especially as this is NL5! Nevertheless compared to my previous Rush outings this is incredibly good believe it or not. Apart from today – if something could go wrong, then today it did. Nobody folded to a cbet, villain’s draws always got there, Aces cracked, and I’ve never seen so many monsters end up as split pots! AA vs AA and then stuff like this;

I’m not saying I didn’t make some mistakes today, but I’ve been making fewer and that’s made me notice that sometimes things just go downwards no matter what you do. The cards just don’t come, they always have it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Weird how it happens in streaks, although I guess it’s because it’s a streak that it’s noticeable.

So dunno if leakbuster is helping yet. I suspect it has, but there’s still a long way to go yet. Certainly playing 10k hands before doing an analysis again is stretching my patience (that’s a week & I’m only a third of the way through).

I played a few husngs instead, which were admittedly really really easy – the only losses were from legitimate bad beats (high 2pair vs low 2pair ends with the villain somehow getting a backdoor flush of all things!). However the traffic was dismal, and the only reason why I got any action at all was because there was one other player who was determined to play.

I then switched to 6max for a bit. Just for fun, no real intentions of taking it too seriously. Amazingly it was actually enjoyable, and I turned a proft that felt well earned rather than luckboxed (srsly). It was also remarkable that the past year of concentrating solely on husngs had also taught me a few things that helped as well.

In particular were the moments that the table broke up leaving you heads up against the other remaining player. They were incredibly bad at heads up play – generally too tight more than anything. You could run over them by just continually betting, and I think in these spots I was winning at a massively faster rate than when the table was full.

I also was less of a calling station, although I’m not sure if heads-up had taught me that. Maybe it did, because things were definitely improved.

However Cake still remained unappealing. I have never before seen my winnings+rakeback line diverge from my winnings line so quickly. The amount of rake I was paying seemed to be horrendous – the Rakeback deal I have is pretty good, so perhaps not so painful, but it just didn’t seem right. On the other hand rakeback is a variance free payment, but that’s kind of stupid – it’s not as if it’s paying bills.

So the plan is to take the money back out of Cake and return to Full Tilt (well, maybe with a detour to BetRaiser and see if a rake-free (no rake!!!) game of microstakes 6max is doable when there’s only 20 people ever on the site). What I am changing though is opening my game up more – I’ll still play husngs, but not exclusively. I’m going to play 6max again, with some MTTs thrown in, and also dabble with some other games like Omahaha (Omalol?). Focussing on one game for the last year was good for my poker skills, but I think it’s not really benefitting me as much as it did. Time to take a sabbatical…

Really surprised at this, since FT previously got caught snooping on where people were web browsing and 2p2 kicked up a fuss about lack of privacy (or was it PS? Hmm, can’t remember now), so I didn’t think they actively checked for SS anymore. I’m not using it much anyway these days – figure it was more bad than good for me as the sharks & fishbowls were making me overcompensate even before the match had started.

So, a day of absolutely nothing! Obvious there was some pokerage, although getting a lie-in was a godsend too (didn’t manage to sleep at the w/e, and yesterday was a horrendous 5:45am start!).

Full Tilt had no SNGs this morning, something to do with an update I think. 2p2 said it would be over at 7am, but I’ve no idea what timezone that was, so just switched to Pokerstars.

As usual at PS (or at least so far today), I’ve run under EV. Also it’s been really slow going – there’s been a bunch of Russians who must be playing on dial-up since they take an age for each click, which with the slow blind structure of PS means you can actually feel yourself ageing during a match.

Most of that under EV stuff has been fairly bad beats too (not the usual 33 vs AQ type flip), such as AQ vs QT which hits JK9, AQ vs 92s running to a flush, and a few 2pair shoves where the villains TP finds a paired board (not the one that fills my boat obv). Actually it’s been a bit of a struggle, with at least one hand like this in each match, but I’m really proud of my non-tiltage, plus how I’ve stayed in the game to win most of them. I reckon I’m playing really strongly today

At least I’m not -ve $$$ yet, but there’s still the rest of the day to go. Just have to keep in mind this years resolution of VOLUME!