into a pulp

really horrible, awful stuff happened to me tonight at the online poker table, but my mood stayed decent. Played in 5 tourneys, only managed one second place finish. I tried a 45 man but that was a disaster - I had QQ early but ran into AA - luckily folded with only one third of my stack gone.

So then, as a short stack, I decided I was going to loosen up and play "crazy" - I had almost nothing to lose with less than 1000 chips, about 15 hands into the tourney. I tried to steal a blind with Q2 off and got called. The flop was all diamonds and I had the Qd. The big blind that defended let out with a min bet, and my "crazy" mood said I needed to shove my flush draw, so in it went. He did think for a bit, but he made the correct call with a set of sixes and my flush didn't come. So much for crazy-town, that style didn't work out so well (of course, no style works well when people flop sets on you).

I ran into aces again in one of the SNGs (vs. my tens that needed a doubleup), and then I got into a tourney where everyone was calling preflop raises - a 3x bet would have 3 callers. I played a couple of mediocre hands in late position, but only limped because I thought my raises were going to get called anyway. This backfired as well. I limped on the button with A7s and hit my ace, but the free-playing big blind flopped an open-ended straight draw and hit his straight on the turn, and I was dead. Bad play equals bad result, of course - he probably folds 56o if I raise, but then again, maybe not.

As I said, I managed to avoid tilt all evening, despite some idiot taunting some of the other players, and running into monster hands over and over. So we'll take the little victories amid defeats and run with them.

Looking at the big picture, I am still running even over the last 4 months - 185 tourneys now. Not so hot, although they say you're doing pretty good if you go on a bad run and end up even.

I did a quick check on some of my starting hands in this 4 month period to see if I could find anything - one thing that sticks out is AKs winning only 0.01 BB/hand, while AKo is winning .54 BB/hand. Small sample sizes are always in play here - but that's an awfully bad performance for AKs.

Then I checked out the other "trouble" hands, and lookee here, they're giving me trouble:

AJs/AJo: negative 0.02 BB/hand
KQs/KQo: plus 0.01 BB/hand
KJs/KJo: negative .21 BB/hand
QJs/QJo: negative 0.03 BB/hand.

Not sure I can read too much into this - AT (which is worse than AJ, of course), is a plus .18 BB/hand. I'm sure it's significant, though, that KJs is my single worst performing hand in this time period - losing a whopping -0.66 BB/hand (44 hand sample). When you look at my entire hand history DB, KJ is a decent 0.09 winner (both suited and offsuit), and no hand in my database is worse than 0.34BB/hand. So the short term performance of this hand is way, way below normal.

Either I'm getting unlucky, or I'm overplaying this hand (and AKs) very badly. (perhaps both). We'll need to study the details a bit more to see if the latter, and see if we can fix it.