$50 entry fee, so that makes the most expensive tournament I’ve ever paid for. I considered some of the satellites, but I’d probably take several attempts and be wasting the money and time anyway. If I can pay S1ndr0me $50 in a stupid prop bet, then I can pay it for a tournament where I might do ok. The main downside is that it’s another Sunday late nighter, but what can you do. This time I won’t down a bottle of wine before starting though, so that might help.

Which reminds me – the $215 SCOOP ticket I won on that WBCOOP tourney is getting closer to being spent. Pokerstars has released the schedule for it now, although the heads up tournaments don’t have any $215 buy-ins -the closest are $162 and $270 entries. Can I split my ticket? I need to write to support to find out (now that I’m thinking about it I’ll do it now!). If I can’t split it I’ll have to use it on a regular FR tournament which I suck at. Stupid non-transferrable, non-cashable tickets…

Sooo, what can I post about? Not much I guess. Full Tilt is still proving to be the best site to play husngs – plenty of players and not much waiting for a game. Tonight I’ve been playing on Cake (under the alias ‘Rolf Lmao’ – geddit? ), but it takes too long to sit and wait for someone to join you, so I’ve been joining anyone waiting on a game $25 or less (not many $25s, although the one I played I won – whoohoo!). So far been doing ok, but not getting many games over $10.

Here’s a great hand though – I love bluffing, but when someone showed me that they folded top pair it makes it well worth the many, many times that I get called down;

There is some history on that hand – I’d played the same line of cbet, check turn, fold river about 3 times, with him making a PSB on the river each time. So I was actually waiting for a hand to have some value to take this line anyway, but I figured he’d also give the click-it-back action some credit on the river anyway, and a bluff would work just fine too (which it did lol!). However I had been putting that PSB of his as a stone cold bluff to simply buy the pot, and to see him fold away a hand with decent value really surprised me. I guess those other PSBs weren’t bluffs at all (maybe).

Oh, and here’s another one (different opponent);

Possibly a bet for value more than a bluff, but very thin really…

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…

So all in all a $90 knock back. Pretty shitty, but nothing my bankroll can’t handle – if I don’t take these shots I’ll only progress very slowly, and that’s not good for my game or bankroll.

I mentioned the hit to S1ndr0me, and how when you lose it’s a much bigger hurt than the joy you get from winning – the two things don’t really balance. It’s not just my opinion it feels like this, I’ve seen plenty of other players (at all stakes) express a similar thing.

S1ndr0me then mentioned something that lit a lightbulb up over why it’s like this – he said that when he looks at his bankroll he’s very aware of the hours and thousands of hands it’s taken to build that roll.

I realised then that the reason why hurts > joy is that with our BR we’re continually climbing a mountain. We know it’s easier to slide down than climb up, and when we do slide down we have to reclimb the bit we just lost.

So effectively the $$$ we lose are twice the ‘value’ of $$$ we win, because we have to re-win that amount just to get back to where we were. When we see the number $90 lost, we compare it to where we should have been if we’d won that $90, and so relatively speaking we have lost $180 worth of value. Although we’re disciplined enough not to see it as cash, it’s still $180 worth of hard effort and risk. It’s $180 of blood, sweat and tears.

So what mental games can we play to get over this, and how do we reduce our ’scared money’ tentativeness when taking shots (now that we realise it’s not scared money, but scared ‘effort potentially wasted’)?

Well, I’ve no idea. I’ll think about it, and perhaps Google around a bit. I’ve seen United113’s approach which is to give a set value to a match regardless of win or lose (based on your ROI), but I don’t think this works for me – firstly I don’t really grind enough games to get a valid ROI to see where I’m going, but also I think it would diminish my desire to win. I’m actually very aware that losing a match is putting my BR 2 steps back (just hadn’t articulated it before I guess), and I need that tension to make sure I fight for every game. If I take a bad hit and I’m down to $200 chips to my opponent’s $2800 I’m usually still very confident that I can swing it back (I’ve done it enough times to know I can, even though I probably lose from this point more often than I win). If I gave a value to each game win or lose then I would probably let those games go and my ROI would slip downwards. I have no intentions of becoming the Tim Henman of poker…

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).

Previously I’ve mentioned that I was holding off on new accounts until I was at NL50 or NL100 so I could clear sign-up bonuses effectively, but now I can’t be bothered. I’m not rising up the ranks quickly enough in cash games to get to that point any time soon, while at the same time husng’s are mostly pulling in more cash than these bonuses offer anyway (well mostly, that $150 crash in my last post was pretty painful).

So far this morning I’m $100 up playing $10 games. The lobby’s not packed, but I rarely have to wait more than a minute for a game. Level of play has been pretty bad too, although not any more than Full Tilt or Pokerstars.

Interface is really clean and easy – I haven’t had a single misclick yet which is a good sign. Deposit and creating the account was all straightforward too.

The main reason I wanted a cake account was for their hand tracking policy – no HUD allowed, plus you’re allowed to change your screen name once a week. HEM imports the hand histories fine though (almost – it made a mistake on the prize for a 4man shootout, although it made the same mistake for a Full Tilt shootout as well once) – the strange thing though is that it doesn’t record your opponent’s names. Everyone is called CakeSeat8 etc. Makes it hard to go back and analyse a particular tournament when you can’t remember which one it was, which I guess is the point. Notes you make on players in the Cake interface do stay with that player even if they change their name, so that’s useful – essential even.

I’m happy so far (certainly while the new signup boomswitch is on!). Apart from I think I’ve put the tv remote into the washing machine with the bedding…

Update: The remote comes out of the washing machine looking incredibly clean. And it still works! (once it had dried out). I’d recommend it to anyone with grubby remotes…