In the last post I mentioned I was playing a bit of 6max for a change. At that point it was going well, mainly because I was two tabling, taking it slowly and concentrating on reads on opponents. Cake doesn’t allow a HUD, so it was interesting to see how much I could keep track of. Two tables was definitely the limit – I tried three and any attempts to make reads on the 15 opponents went completely out of the window.

My winrate also nose-dived, which was then further compounded by a quick go on Rush which of course also crashed. I returned to two tables on Cake, and then had one of my worst sessions ever (in bb, had worse in $$$). I spewed a bunch of stacks, and then ran some more stacks into better hands, and it just kept going. In the end I’d lost 7 buy-ins in just over an hour. To make it extra humiliating, the results charts was a straight diagonal line from top left to bottom right – this wasn’t a winning session ruined by some lost stacks, this was pure fishbowl territory

My game is clearly a disaster. I might have learnt a lot about poker, and played a lot of hands, but I’m doing it wrong. Very wrong.

Yegor suggested LeakBuster (is he the only one who suggests anything to me around here?), and we had a play with the trial version and it looked useful. It analyses your stats from HEM, and points out areas where you’re deviating from what’s commonly held to be sensible. The trial version pointed out a few things, but I needed to buy it ($50) to get the full functionality. Since I’d just spewed more than that in an hour, the price didn’t look too bad.

I’m aware these are just stats though – I saw a quote on 2p2 that was made the point perfectly; ‘Solid poker makes good stats, solid stats doesn’t make good poker’

If I’m going to make this program work for me, I’ll need to be careful to understand how to change my game in response to what it’s telling me. I need to change my strategy, which will change the stats, not play to change the stats directly.

Unfortunately it was telling me a lot! Everything was out of whack one way or another. It was almost overwhelming and not clear what to tackle first. The big leak that seemed to be costing me money was W$SD & WTSD% – I was seeing showdowns too often, and usually with not the best hand. I watched their video on calling light, but it didn’t really help (combinatrics!).

Then I realised that it was also telling me these things;

a) My opening range was poor – too loose and too many problem hands.
b) I wasn’t cbetting enough
c) I wasn’t folding after being raised on the flop
d) I wasn’t folding to flop cbets enough
e) I was calling 3bets too light.

If I corrected all these actions, then that would mean more folding during the hand, and would reduce my WTSD%. Which would then make my showdowns a bit more ‘quality’, and improve the W$SD.

So I’ve gone right back to basics, and created (shock horror) a starting hand chart! I then dived into some nl5 Rush and held myself to that chart, cbet loads more, folded loads more, and generally concentrated like mad on those 5 points above.

It was tricky to remember other elements of the game while concentrating on those key points – my defending of the blinds virtually disappeared (not a big problem in the short term though), and I found myself only open-raising or folding pre (PP’s being the only hand I called to earlier bet). I managed 500 hands (didn’t start until late), and it was reasonably succesful. Perhaps two hands I should really have let go (JJ overpair calling down to see QQ was one), plus a couple of bad beats (QJ 2pair seeing AA all-in on flop, turn & river were both 5). My WTSD% stat improved, but sample size is way too small. I’m going to play sets of 10k hands and then re-analyse with leakbuster. Might even blog my progress if it’s not too dull