On a whim-- well, not quite a whim, but a moment of inspiration-- I decided to jet from Austin City Limits early on Day 3 and play the WCOOP event and the FTP $500. I thought I'd try to run up some chips early on, and if that failed, I'd go back to the festival.

I wouldn't have done it for an ordinary Sunday, and I wouldn't have done it for anything I'd never seen before. But something about how the day was going, and my mentality, said it was the right time. So I went with it.

Oddly enough, I did not run up a stack in the WCOOP; in fact, I donked off a bunch early, and I think actually dropped under 3k at one point. I fought back, though-- and even though I hit an occasional cooler, I fought back again.

Meanwhile, I caught a nice run early on Full Tilt, but all in all it was very wild and swingy, as I would win a big pot then lose some of it back on a cooler or other setup. Anyway, it's not important, because i bluffed off 20k at 170/340/25 with a straight draw vs. top set on the turn.

On Stars, however, I was winning all my races and major showdowns. I won some critical pots at the right time, and the structure afforded me the luxury of patience. With a couple of critical big pots where I eliminated people with AKo > A9s and QQ > AKs, I had jumped up to 625k at 3k/6k/600. I took a hit from there, but I was having a relatively easy time chipping it back with small pots. Then a couple of nice river value bets and I cleared 1 million for the first time, at 5k/10k/1k.

Then I started losing my focus. I made a call in a blind battle that in retrospect I think is poor (I had top pair, but my opponent was exhibiting extreme strength and was an unknown who'd shown nothing but straightforwardness). I chipped back up after losing something like 40% of my stack there. Then I hit a stretch of mediocre cards and my table started reraising me frequently. My spots weren't as good. I was getting my money in behind. Then I finally made a bad shove with AQ over a raise (a few hands after I'd doubled up) and lost to AA to bust in 57th.

I have a bad tendency to bust immediately after getting the double-up that puts me back in contention. It happened last Sunday, too.

Still, 57th is about $6,000, which will help. I'm gonna try to play more of the WCOOP events, but I'm not sure which ones. I need a good night's sleep before I make any decisions like that.

There were a lot of interesting hands and decisions from this one. I may post some of the hands here or on 2+2, or put up a hand history for viewing.

That last post was borne out of a bit of frustration. After venting, I approached my problem more rationally and decided the solution was to grind some cash- like I had planned originally. I have to wait on my desktop before I can do that, but I'm going to be breaking from poker until then.

The WCOOP is around the corner, but I'm going to miss the first few events anyway, because I'll be attending Austin City Limits music festival. Unfortunately, two of the three 6-max events are this weekend. So it goes- it's not as if I can say I have huge expectation in those lately, anyway.

I'll play in a few events, and maybe some lower-stakes cash to stay warm, but once my setup arrives, the grinding begins.

In the meantime, I'm doing some reading to get my mind in the right place. I'm rereading Ace on the River to relearn the attitude and mental makeup of a winning player (clearly my biggest leak, especially during a losing streak- the mind is a powerful and self-replicating thing). I'm also going to get another copy of Professional No Limit Hold 'Em, since I managed to lose mine about a week after I got it. I felt like I was learning from it, and I wasn't finished. Learning usually helps me break out of my funks.

Ok. Off to work on the mental game. Quiet, humble confidence. Faith in abilities as well as the way of things.

I was looking at desktops online and talking to Adanthar when he mentioned the $200 turbo at 5 PM and the $100 satellite to the $1k at 5:30 (both on Full Tilt). I entered them, won the seat into the 1k, so I decided to play poker tonight.

I busted that and the 100k in typical fashion (squeeze with a big pair, run into a bigger one-- yes, in both tournaments). I still had the urge to play, so I sat in at 3/6 NL HU on Cake and waited.

And then I dropped $1800 over the course of 80 minutes. At one table. Most of it to a guy who was cover-your-eyes awful but coolered me three different times. If I don't lose KQ to TT on a 77TKQ board in a reraised pot, or 88 to AA (vs. a guy who instacalled a 4 bet shove with A2o), or JT to K9 on a 99KQ board, then maybe things are different.

I obviously overestimated the importance of that first winning day; as it turns out, that's been my only winning day in the past month. Now, I haven't been playing much at all, but stuff like this is discouraging. I'm trying to rebuild my bankroll, and become a consistent winner, and all the progress I had made on that front has been erased, and then some, in the last month.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'm not even sure what games I can beat at this point, since everything I've done up until now can more or less be chalked up to variance.

I think I'm still capable of winning-- and I need to be, what with no other employable skills-- but something has been missing lately.

From yesterday's PokerStars Sunday Million. Villain is unknown.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t600 (9 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: 2+2 Forums)

saw flop|saw showdown

SB (t31052)
BB (t35813)
UTG (t29700)
UTG+1 (t19400)
MP1 (t28360)
Hero (t27246)
MP3 (t12775)
CO (t7727)
Button (t11100)

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with 9, 9.
UTG raises to t1200, 2 folds, Hero calls t1200, 4 folds, BB calls t600.

Flop: (t3900) 5, 4, 2 (3 players)
BB checks, UTG bets t3600, Hero calls t3600, BB folds.

Turn: (t11100) 2 (2 players)
UTG bets t4800, Hero calls t4800.

River: (t20700) A (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets t17646 (All-In), UTG folds.

Final Pot: t20700

OK... now you're probably wondering why I took a line that seems really weird and determined to get as much of my money in the pot as possible while behind. And I'm going to show you why it works here. Let's look street by street.

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with 9, 9.
UTG raises to t1200, 2 folds, Hero calls t1200, 4 folds, BB calls t600.

So this is the most straightforward street in the whole hand. A minraise is indicative of everything and nothing; mostly, it tells me my opponent is probably a clown. It doesn't do a whole lot to define his hand, though. Some players love to minraise their big hands to try to induce action on them. Some like to minraise hands they want to see cheap flops with, in hopes the minraise discourages a reraise. FWIW, I think both are pretty terrible, and if you consistently do one or the other you have a huge hole in your game. I try to blend my raise sizes so as to make my hand difficult to read.

Anyway, having said all that, I elect to just call with 99 because I have no idea what my opponent has; if I reraise and he folds, I win a relatively small pot, but if he 4-bets me, I have to fold, and I've wasted a chance to win a big pot. So I decide to call and proceed postflop. The BB comes along because he's getting 5.5:1 and closing the action, not because he necessarily has much.

Flop: (t3900) 5, 4, 2 (3 players)
BB checks, UTG bets t3600, Hero calls t3600, BB folds.

Here's where it starts to get interesting. Making a pot size bet here is often indicative of an overpair. Here's the catch: I still beat a few of the overpairs. In addition, some people panic with their AK/AQ hands when they miss here and just start firing big bets in hopes of scaring away an opponent. On this board, AK/AQ has an additional four outs against underpairs. This increased equity makes betting and getting it in with AK here really not that bad a play.

It's also the big reason I don't make a move at the pot now. Some people see "overpair" and think "I have to protect my hand". Having seen him make a big bet at the pot now, I know my opponent likes his hand, but I don't know exactly what he has. It's too likely my hand is good to fold here, but he also has an overpair far too often to make raising and getting the money in profitable. I feel as if I get it in, it's going to be as a 60-40 favorite or a 90-10 dog. I don't mind getting it in as a 60-40 favorite, especially in a tournament like the Million, whose field size I feel dictates a faster style of play, a more "race to the finish line" approach-- but I get it in drawing to the two nines way too often to want to push now. So I call and decide to reevaluate based on the turn. The BB folds, and I never considered him to be much of a factor anyway.

Turn: (t11100) 2 (2 players)
UTG bets t4800, Hero calls t4800.

The deuce doesn't change anything. Neither of us has a deuce and we both know that. Now, his turn bet is interesting-- he bets just under 1/2 pot, which seems weak, but which also sets him up for a pot-sized river shove if I call. (By the way, if you aren't thinking about manipulating pot and stack sizes like this when you size your bets, you are making a mistake.) For my part, the price is too good to fold an overpair-- but still, my hand is not good enough to raise. I suspect some time he has an overpair to mine, some time he still has AK/AQ (the bet size is actually an effective size to block-bet a draw and see if he hits it), and rarely, he has a worse overpair than mine. So considering most of his range as TT-KK and the other major part of it as AK/AQ*, I call again.

* - I don't include AA here, not because it's impossible, but because it's a special case. He has the best of both worlds, and I'm screwed; the river is basically irrelevant because he's shoving all of them. I also considered 66-88 unlikely, though not impossible.

River: (t20700) A (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets t17646 (All-In), UTG folds.

Wow. This is such an interesting card. All his ace hands got there, and all his overpair hands just got scared shitless. This is the beauty of position-- I can use his action to judge what he has. Since he has a pot-sized bet left, he's going to have to shove for value if he hit his ace (or his 33, or if he was already full, or what have you).

He checks.

Now, many, many players' immediate reaction would be to check, thinking that "Oh, either he had me already, or he hit that ace. And he's not calling with a worse hand, and we have a pair, so let's check and hope we win the showdown."

They're wrong.

When he checks, he's completely vulnerable. We each have less than the size of the pot left (he has me barely covered), and if we have anything reasonable, we're pot committed. The only reason not to put in the rest of the money here is if we think, for some specific reason, that a scare card has helped so much of our opponents' range, that we should give up. Trapping would be absurd at this point for villain, given that I should be calling his push with anything reasonable, having gotten this far.

So when he checks, it's not to trap, it's because that ace scares the crap out of him and he will fold to a shove.

And-- this is important-- we should realize that this swings all the Ax hands and 33/44/55 out of his range, and makes his range overwhelmingly overpairs. So his range consists primarily of hands that will beat ours at showdown, but cannot call all-in.

Knowing this, we should move in as a bluff. The fact that he didn't move in already gives us all the reason in the world to. He's announced to us that he is scared of the ace, and he is hoping we will let him show down his hand. So we have to disappoint him.

On a side note, the stack sizes are really excellent for this move. We each have slightly less than the pot left (I have 17.5k and he has 20k in a 20k pot). Which means that an all-in bet can be interpreted as a "normal" bet size. (Moving all-in here for, say, four times the pot would be considered "abnormal".) Because of that, it makes our opponent less likely to suspect that we are bluffing; we could simply be trying to get every dollar possible out of our hand. It puts him in a pretty terrible spot, since from his perspective we could easily have the AK/AQ/33. We certainly wouldn't check those behind on the river. So it's very unlikely that villain is good one time in three, and he folds.

Now, at the table, this process is much quicker, and is occasionally guided by intuition-- you don't always have the time to think out, in words, why a move will work; you "know" it. While it's good to have sound, logical reasons for your moves, it's more important to trust your intuition-- it's a part of you, and it works on what you have learned, too. In the heat of the moment, it's taking all your experience and skill and training and leading you to the right decision. If you have prepared it for the moments you need it, it will not let you down. Work on your logic away from the tables, and study and review and prepare your theory, so that your instincts have the background they need to make the right decision. Trust yourself to learn the game.

I will say that bluff-shoving the river hadn't entered my thought process until the river hit, and the villain thought for a bit and checked. Then it occurred to me that he couldn't call a push, so I pushed-- it wouldn't have really mattered what I had, but I was definitely swayed by the relative weakness of my hand. (If I had, say, KK, I might have checked behind-- or pushed for value.)

But that's another point of this hand-- you have to be able to adapt your decision-making process each time new information comes to light. Even though you have a plan for a hand, something may change which will cause you to abandon that, because you realize an alternate line is more profitable. Online, the pace is fast, so you need to be quick mentally. Live, you always have an opportunity to think through a hand. Online, you have much shorter time limits and may be multitabling as well, so being quick on your feet is just as important as being sound on your feet.

So to recap today's lesson:

a)Be alert to your hand strength relative to your opponent's range, not just to the board, or in the absolute sense
b)Don't be afraid to turn a made hand into a bluff
c)Don't be afraid to change plans in the middle of the hand, as you gather information
d)Be a quick thinker
e)Trust yourself

Was a success! I turned a nice day's profit, mixing in some 2/4 and 3/6 NL with some 30/60 limit. I think the lion's share of the money was made at limit, but I turned a tidy profit at NL as well.

I didn't play too many tables, so I don't feel like I'm in "grinding" mode yet. When I move in for good, I'll finally get a desktop setup, which should allow me to settle into multitabling nicely.

Just nice to come back with a win. Probably only going to play sporadically for the next week or so.