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I was very pleased with my online results this year, until this past week, when a downswing took a big bite out of my numbers.
4.1bb/100 hands is okay, not great. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, at only 32,000 hands played, this number is so affected by short term variance that it is really no reliable indicator of my skill level at this point. I don't think I'll ever put in enough volume to get rid of that variance monkey.
My chart below show results by stakes. I'm getting smoked since moving up to .10/.20 on Full Tilt before Black Friday, with good results. I'm going to keep hammering at this level until my (meager) online bankroll forces me to move down.
Self-analysis. I'm a decent, not great Holdem Player. I will continue to work on my game and improve.
My live results from 2012 will come in a future post. I have one more session coming tomorrow...
99, Standard raise, 3 callers. Check/fold flop.
Next hand, same table, AA. Standard raise. 0 callers.
Edit: Started a new table, got AA while 3 handed. Got stacked by 23o. TWO-THREE OFFSUIT! He played it very well, he made a pot sized semibluff on the turn because 45 was on the board, and I thought he had 2 pair or something. This froze me and I ended up just calling. The ace on the river, giving me trips, doomed me. No way I was folding, and no way I should have folded.
Played break even besides that hand, meaning I lost another buy-in today. Time to call it an official downswing - down 6 buy-ins this week.
Experienced a year-ruining, confidence shaking session tonight. 3.5 buy-ins lost. Not that I feel like I played poorly - just stupid coolers getting aces and kings and sets cracked every time. But when your bb/100 for the year goes down a full point in one session, it might be the most disheartening thing to happen in my poker life.
I thought perhaps I was really playing well this year, but maybe I just haven't had my share of variance yet, and I'm still just another guy when my true skill level is shaken out.
Of course, I don't play enough hands online anymore to ever know anyway. I could be anywhere between God's gift to poker or completely mediocre. There's no way to know. 30,000 hands isn't even enough to do a solid database analysis, and that's all I'm going to play this year.
I would have preferred just continuing to run hot and booking a good year.
Poker gave me a reminder of what's really important in this world, by having me flop 2 sets vs. fish and losing both hands online tonight, within the span of 12 minutes. 2 buy-ins, gone.
So ridiculous. And meaningless. Because I get to shut it off and wake up to celebrate Christmas with my family tomorrow. Which puts a suckout or two in the proper perspective.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
I am a voracious consumer of all forms of poker training. Books, videos, forums, pamphlets - you name it, I'm reading/watching it. I'm always trying to learn.
In my quest to find quality poker training material, I happened upon *Splitsuit*'s videos. Split is a moderator on one of the Two Plus Two forums, and he has been in the poker video business for years. He has also written an excellent book, called "Dynamic Full Ring Poker".
Split has now made most of his training materials available online, as well as some other authors' stuff as well. I am very pleased to direct my (small) army of readers to his site now, and to go spend gobs of money there.
I wouldn't recommend this stuff unless it helped me. An example: for awhile I decided to try and become a 3bet monkey, and of course I did it all wrong and spewed off several buy-ins overplaying hands. The big culprit was Big Slick - I got absolutely crushed using AK as my big semibluffing hand. This is a good idea on the surface, but I was often employing the strategy at all the wrong times, like when my opponent was likely to have a big hand, for example. Fortunately, Split has a video dedicated to playing Ace King. I watched the video a couple times and was soon back on track.
There's a ton of material over there, and much of it is currently on sale. I'm sure you'll find something that can help your game. His store can be found at the link at the bottom of this post.
Make sure you use the special checkout code NOTEBOOK if you decide to purchase - which will give you 10% off your purchase price!
http://www.splitsuit.com/shop
An interesting session at the Cleveland Horseshoe last Friday night, netting $505 profit in 6 hours. And that was with getting pocket aces cracked twice for a total $200 loss.
The most interesting hand was a little King-Jack that I raised in middle position. My image was fairly wild by this time (at least for me), I've had some success recently opening up my game preflop and avoiding trouble spots better.
Both of the blinds called my $10 raise. The small blind was a bad player who kept losing the kicker battle with things like king-six. He had about $100. The big blind was my friend Tony, a player in my home game.
The flop brought me an 8 out straight draw - Queen-Ten-Four. All different suits. I had been playing the flop fast due to having solid values like top pairs and overpairs, and I was going to play this flop fast also, both against the bad player or against Tony. But the action unfolded in front of me in an interesting way - the bad player lead out for $10, and Tony raised pretty quickly to $30.
My initial guess was that Tony had pocket fours or tens and flopped a set. I ruled out pocket queens because I was sure he would squeeze preflop with a hand that strong. Queen-Ten wasn't something he would play from the blinds.
I didn't think I could play fast anymore. Getting all in with a draw against a set is a bad way to try and make money. His raise was offering me over 2:1 odds, I had to hit about 30%, which I would if I got to see both cards. If Tony did have a set, I probably wouldn't get to see both cards, though - he would bomb the turn and I would have to fold. However, I countered this thought with the thought that it would be awfully hard for him to fold if I did hit. Finally, the donk might call in between us, padding up the pot some more. (though I admit I would be in big trouble if he decided to re-raise). A somewhat sticky spot, but I made the call. In doing so, I took a few extra seconds and stared at the pot (I was counting it and figuring pot odds, which takes me longer than most). The bad player ended up folding
I was thinking how unfortunately obvious it must have been to Tony or anyone else paying attention what my hand was, after sitting there figuring out pot odds. I was thinking that I may have cost myself those extra implied dollars with my obvious action and imagined Tony snap-folding to a nine or ace on the turn. I got to test my theory out immediately when a black ace did in fact hit the turn. The ace also brought the fourth suit, so no flush would be possible on this hand.
Tony lead out for $50, which cemented my theory that he was holding tens or fours. Since I had the lead-pipe nuts and wanted to win his stack, a raise was in order. I made it $125.
Tony's demeanor changed from confident to that "you've got to be fucking kidding me" look that many of us get with a strong hand that faces bad news. He looked upward at the sky, shuffled his chips a couple times, then announced "all in" and slid them into the middle. I called.
I wasn't quite correct on my read - Tony held ace-queen. A weaker hand than I thought, but in one way even harder to fold because it started off pretty strong on the flop (top pair, top kicker), and then improved to top two pair on the turn. In my experience, it gets awfully hard to think about folding when your hand improves.
Two pair is one of the hardest hands to play in hold-em. Against a decent TAG opponent that isn't shoveling chips into the pot at every opportunity, two pair is often no good. Tony was mad at himself for being unable to get away from ace-queen here - I wonder how I would have fared in a reversed situation.
