Tilt King

Psychologically I’ve improved leaps and bounds. A good example of this is the heads up match I played today: 100NL on Stars.

I haven’t played heads up for sometime, but after watching some recent Cardrunners videos, it got me motivated again. Anyway, less than 30 minutes in and I’m down 4-buy-ins. Nevertheless, I felt I was playing great poker and had lots of reads on my opponent.

He was quite bad and one of his biggest leaks was that he’d over bet the pot on the turn – by 2 or 3 times – with top pair and a weak kicker! I lost one buy-in with 4-6 on a 2-4-6 board to his 77 – he rivered a set. Then I lost another with AQ on an ace-rag-rag board; only this time he hit the rag on the turn. Anyway, you get the idea: Bad player, high variance. On top of all this, he’s talking trash saying how bad my calls are to his massive over bets, to which I politely reply, “yeah, keep playing like that and you’ll win lots more money.” He replied: “Well I got all night if you have the bankroll before I bust you.”

I know it’s not a bad idea to quit a game like this – especially when your opponent has the momentum – but this player was just too bad and psychologically I was in complete control…not an ounce of tilt.

Anyway, 1 hour later and I’m sitting with $600 and him with $15. No reload this time and he quits. I was only up $100, but it was incredibly satisfying.

Add that to the fact I made $1,700 at 1-2 and 2-4 and it was a pretty good day!

I haven’t really played much this last week actually. I’ve just been really busy with other things outside of poker… oh and playing A LOT of live poker at the weekends.

4-betting essay coming soon…

TB

A look back at November

I was meant to post this Friday… better late than never though!

My basic goal was to play 80 hours online and 40 hours live; I managed 69 hours online and about 45 hours live.

My online play took a bit of a kicking 10 days into the month, causing me to take a very long weekend. Also since changing to crypto I can only average ~350 hands/hr compared to ~500/hr on Stars.

I changed over the database on poker tracker to PostgreSQL so I can no longer make those nice pokergrpaher graphs. Instead, here’s the one from PokerEV:

Yeah, the first 9K hands were sweet, and then it just went to shit for the rest of the month! Most of it is bad ‘all-in’ luck…down about 10 buy-ins from that! Then maybe a little bit of tilt and playing at bad times (tired, not focused, etc). Also I lost about 2,000 hands so the graph is not a true representation really – add another $500 spike during that break even stretch.

I did get some bonuses too, and I’m using some my Stars points to buy all my Christmas presents from Amazon!

Live was pretty much ‘meh’ too. I think I’ve ran pretty bad in the tournaments lately…keep getting deep or making the final table and then missing out on the good money! It’s been a while since I’ve had a good live tournament result, but then again I’ve only played about twenty these last four months.

I’ve been reviewing my game and working hard to plug leaks. Sometimes when you don’t run that well, one of the hardest things is to stay positive and patient. Personally what works well for me a simple little reminder: “Keep making the correct decisions and you bankroll will take care of itself.”

I’ve already played over 1,000 hands today so I might go play the £50 rebuy tonight. I don’t normally play live on Tuesdays, but I really feel like I’m playing well in live tournaments lately (despite the results). After all, I know the results are coming sooner or later!