Just wrapped up an early morning cash session in what was likely an end to the week for me. The last 3 days totaled to a loss of ¾ of a buy in. My week ending cash total was + 5 ½ buy ins which is just fine considering the small volume I put in.

On the tournament front just as I had done on Wednesday, I took Friday afternoon off and began loading up tournaments on both Stars and Tilt. I played 7 events in all and somehow managed to whiff despite having a chip lead or top 2-3 stack in 3 of the 7 tournaments, including the Stars 50K and the Stars $50 Rebuy. Everything felt great while I was playing. I’ve been experimenting with some new tournament ideas and I’m pleased with the early results.

Over time I’ve become much better, albeit not perfect at ignoring the day to day results in MTT’s. I’m of the belief that if I play well and make good decisions the good results I’m looking for will eventually follow. However there’s just no getting around the fact that I am much more emotionally in tuned to my MTT’s than to my cash games. When I wrap up a session of cash I normally record my results and if necessary look over some of my hand histories. When I close the books on a cash session I don’t think about it ever again, literally. The next time I think about cash is when I begin my next session the following day.

MTT’s are a completely different story. The tournaments I last played don’t seem to leave my brain until I begin another tournament session. There’s a lot of good that comes from this as I’m constantly evaluating my game but past experience has taught me that the negative impact it has is that it often wears me down mentally over time. As I wrote early on, a major reason for writing this blog is to hold myself accountable when I identify problems where it concerns poker. This is one that I know I have to improve upon. I’m going to try to work on limiting the amount of space I allow MTT’s to rent in my head while I’m away from the tables. Wish me luck, this has always proved difficult for me.

Continuing on the tournament theme, I'm enjoying playing in the afternoons/early evenings. The mix of games are nice. The Rebuys I'm playing range from $20 to $50 & the freezeouts range from $50 to $120 acrosss both Stars and Full Tilt. There's a constant flow of them so I'm never withouut a full screen of events. I'm going to try to adjust my work schedule to allow me a couple or three afternoons a week off when possible. I already know that next week is an extremely busy one at work so I may not be able to play at all.

Lastly, the Borgata Deep Stack 5K event is getting underway tomorrow and as I thought I'm definitely going to miss it. A couple of my friends are playing it so I'll be rooting hard for them to do well.

One final thought, Go Big Blue! The Giants host the Cowboys tomorrow for 1st place in the NFC East. I'm a lifelong Giants fan so you know I'll be glued to my set.

I got what I wanted in more ways than one………

Last I wrote I had identified a couple of “leaks” in my game for lack of a better term, when looking back at my 3 months of data while playing 6-Max cash. One of the problems I identified had to do with variance, or so I still believe. Most of my sessions are typically an hour or less due to time constraints, there is nothing I can do about those and for the most part they have been pretty consistent with either a small win or a small loss as would be expected. The sessions where I was able to extend beyond that in length had a similar disturbing pattern. Either they would go bad early on and a big loss would ensue, or, I would be ahead a couple or three buy ins and would wind up giving much of it back instead of compounding a win. After careful analysis of my hand histories I had determined that my game play was fine (I can assure you that I wasn’t playing scared) and I had just been running badly when I would get ahead some decent money.

I wrote that I needed to have some faith and patience in the hopes that this would correct itself, believing fully that it was a variance issue. I didn’t have to wait long. The very next day I played a lengthy session and booked a nice win. Here are my results thus far this week.

Sunday + 4 ½ buy ins
Monday even
Tuesday + 2 ½ buy ins
Wednesday – ¾ buy in

At the end of October I wrote about how I missed the pain. This referred to my desire to get back to tournaments and the strong emotions (both good and bad) that result from playing them. On Tuesday I found time to squeeze 1 event in which I wasn’t long for. On Wednesday I took the afternoon off and loaded up 4 tournaments. I felt ALIVE!

3 of the 4 ended with me approaching the bubble. I got my money in good to really good 7 different times over the course of those 3 events and won only twice, LOL. I was also pretty bad at racing, not a formula for success. Despite all of the bad luck I was still in contention which is a sign that I was playing well.

The fourth event was the $20 Rebuy on Full Tilt. I was able to build a decent stack in the rebuy period and then continued to chip up for the next couple of hours. I was pretty consistently a top 10 stack and I flirted with the chip lead a couple of times. I lost a momentum killing race with QQ to AK around the bubble and things really never got back on track for me. Circumstances went awry as we got into the money, my raises and c-bets just weren’t working, it was one of those days. I battled to just hang onto my 7th to 10th place chip stack while I waited for a good spot to double up.

We were on the final table bubble playing 5 handed when the good spot appeared:

Full Tilt Poker
No Limit Holdem Tournament
Blinds: t1200/t2400
(Ante: t300)
5 players
Converter

Stack sizes:
Doylestown: t30000
CO: t32077
Button: t134036
SB: t52626
BB: t101312

Pre-flop: (5 players) Doylestown is UTG with Q Q
Doylestown raises to t5400, 2 folds, SB calls t4200 (pot was t10500), BB calls t3000 (pot was t14700).

Flop: 5 8 4 (t17700, 3 players)
SB checks, BB checks, Doylestown is all-in t24300, SB folds, BB calls t24300 (pot was t42000).

Turn: 8 (t66300, 1 player + 1 all-in - Main pot: t66300)


River: 5 (t66300, 1 player + 1 all-in - Main pot: t66300)


Results:
Final pot: t66300
BB showed 5d 3d
Doylestown showed Qd Qc


This flop over bet is something I rarely do. I believed in this situation that the timing was perfect for it. I represented a whiff with a big Ace and I was rewarded ( I got what I wanted) with the villain making a call as a big underdog. The turn card left him drawing to 2 outs and then boom the river punch to the gut came out of nowhere and just like that my afternoon was concluded.

Yesterday I didn’t have to miss the pain. I finally got to live it again. As I recently wrote, one of my poker goals was to find time to squeeze tournaments back into my life. It felt great to be playing them again, results be damned.

After this weeks horrific start I strung together 4 moderate winning days which somewhat lessened the damage.

Wednesday + 1 ½ buy ins
Thursday + 1 buy in
Friday + 1 buy in
Saturday + ¾ buy in

I spent very little time playing this week but am pleased I was able to get back on track in such a limited amount of hands. While cash games aren’t a major part of my long term poker goals, I would still prefer being more successful at them than I presently am.

One major “leak” over my first 3 months at the 6-max tables is easily identifiable. This isn’t a leak in how I play a certain hand but rather an overview of my results after what I consider a fairly reasonable time frame. After looking at my daily results I see that my biggest winning day has been for ~ 4 buy ins. I already have 4 losing days that equal or exceed that with my worst coming a week ago of ~ 10 buy ins.

From August thru October I played a total of 77 days. I had 53 winning days and 24 losing days for a 69% winning clip. What isn’t impressive about these statistics is that I essentially broke even during this time.

What all of this means is that my losing days have been on average far worse than my winning days. I believe this is due to a couple of factors; I have booked many winning days where I won a single buy in give or take. Upon reviewing those days there were 2 commonalities to them. One was I was short on time and had to wrap up my session. Unfortunately at times I only have an hour or even less to play. The other may be due to sheer variance. On the days where I had more time to play I often found myself ahead 2 or more buy ins. What rarely if ever happened on those days was the positive rush. When sitting with a good sized stack I’ve rarely won a really good sized pot. Mind you I’ve lost quite a few. I’ve reviewed my play and believe that I’m playing OK. A lot of those 2 and 3 buy in positive sessions turned into a 1 buy in win as opposed to wins of 4 or more buy ins. Variance?

What does all of this mean and what can I do about it? For one thing I believe I need to be more cognizant of my losing days and try to walk away from them before they get too far out of hand. There are just some days where things are going poorly and they just stay that way no matter what you do. Last Sunday is a prime example of that. The other concerns being ahead in a session and giving it back. On this one I’m going to just have to have some faith and patience on. I have to hope that when things are going well in a session that I’ll have some days where my wins compound instead of reversing course on me. It’s surprising that it hasn’t really happened yet and therefore I believe I need to give it some more time before I reassess this again.

If however this pattern doesn’t change I know it will be nearly impossible for me to be a winning cash game player, despite booking winning days at a clip of better than 2 to 1.

-Doyle-

Last week came to an end on a positive note with Saturday netting me + 2 ½ buy ins for a total of + 7 for the week. Unfortunately that’s where the good news comes crashing to a halt.

This week is off to a poor start as I’m down ~ 12 buy ins. Sunday was a horrific day in which I dropped a total of 10 buy ins over 3 different sessions throughout the day. To make matters worse I was railing BadgerPro on Sunday night who was poised to do some serious damage in a couple of donkaments only to have things go horribly wrong right in front of my eyes. It was just a bad Poker day all around.

Reflecting back on my Sunday sessions I didn’t tilt and my game was solid start to finish. It was just one of those days where everything went wrong. Here’s a hand from Sunday which should better illustrate my point:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, $2 BB (6 handed) Poker Stars Converter Tool from http://www.flopturnriver.comFlopTurnRiver.com (Format: Plain Text)

Button ($199.80)
SB ($83.80)
Hero ($122.40)
UTG ($160.30)
MP ($200)
CO ($35.45)

Preflop: Hero is BB with Qs, Ah.
3 folds, Button raises to $8, 1 fold, Hero raises to $26, Button calls $18.

Flop: ($53) Ad, 9h, 3d (2 players)
Hero bets $30, Button calls $30.

Turn: ($113) 2h (2 players)
Hero bets $66.4 (All-In), Button calls $66.40.

River: ($0) 3h (2 players, 1 all-in)

Final Pot: $245.80

Results below:
Hero has Qs Ah (two pair, aces and threes).
Button has Jh Th (flush, jack high).
Outcome: Button wins $245.80.


Can anybody explain villain’s call on the flop? It’s almost as if he knew he’d hit runner runner on me. He had no hand and no draw, just Jack high. I’ll never understand how these guys keep getting rewarded.

The last couple of days have netted me a loss of 1 ½ buy ins which brings this blog up to date on my cash game. Blah!

Thus far after 3 months of 6-max cash my results are meandering around break even. That’s pretty brutal.

I just have to find a way to carve out some time in my life to get back to the MTT’s. That is going to be my next poker goal to work towards, finding some meaningful time to devote to tourneys again. Afterall, you just aren’t living if you aren’t taking devastating gut punches like those that were dealt to BadgerPro on Sunday night. Oh how I miss the pain………………..

Still no tourneys for me this week though I’ve been reading and thinking plenty about them. I've been continuing to play cash on a daily basis. I've continued to build on what was already a solid week. Last I left off I was ahead slightly more than 3 buy ins for the week.

Thursday + 1 buy in
Friday + 1/3 buy in

With Thursday and Friday in the books I'm ahead 4 ½ buy ins heading into today, the final day of the week.

I’ve been very happy with my game lately. I feel I’m concentrating better and making proper decisions more often than I’m not which is all that I can ask of myself.

The reality for those of us who don’t put in major volume each week is that our short term results are more highly influenced by the fate of the cards as we don’t have the benefit of speeding up the big ‘V’ (variance). This may be one of the most important things for me to keep up front as a poker player. In the past I’ve fallen victim on many occasions when a handful of negative days and bad rivers creep into my head and affect how I play. I believe that this was my recipe for failure thru September and the 1st half of October. The difference between succcess and failure for a lower volume cash game player can be as little as one decision per day which is why it's so important to play 'well' at all times.

Just think about how many times you've made a river call knowing your were very likely beat or you fired that 3rd barrell just knowing that the calling station you're up against can't fold mid pair and your A high just isn't any good. Eliminate 1 bad decision a day and add all of that up over the course of a week and think about how much $ that can amount to over time.


-Doyle-