Still on the schneid

Yet to book a winning session for 2008 :(. I had a couple that I should have won, but ran like crap, but I still feel I'm not playing my A game, either...although that was mainly the first two sessions...since then I think I have been playing pretty well. My hands are holding up well against the little stacks, not so hot against the full ones...and my draws are just not getting there.

I'm doing a better job of not getting into really big pots with my one-pair hands...as long as I'm not taking it too far and losing value, it's all good. Even if I am losing some value, learning how to find the fold button with an overpair is a good lesson. I can always begin to fold less as conditions warrant, but I want to convince myself first that I can regularly lay those hands down.

I did have a slightly abbreviated coaching session last Friday. There were a couple interesting spots with medium pots. The good news for me is that we were in agreement how to play what I thought were those trickiest spots with the big hands. There were a couple other times, in smaller pots, where I would have approached hands a little differently. Those are kind of the gold hands as things come up.

Our plan for the next couple weeks is for me to drop back to 50NL and play a few thousand hands...then kind of do a mini-checkup and review. Along the way, I'll document a couple interesting hands per session (day) and detail my thought processes. This will do a couple things:

• Help my coach learn my game a bit more quickly...specifically where I need to develop my understanding better.
• (Hopefully) reinforce some confidence, as I've been on a slide this month so far. My confidence is actually OK, I think, but it sure would be a nice psychological boost to have a session or two end in the green.

I think the next sweat session -- coaching or otherwise -- I'm going to drop a table or two so that I can really focus on articulating my thought processes...it may mean there is a little more dead time, but on the other hand when an interesting situation comes up, it will help whomever is watching provide better insight into my thoughts. I'm pretty comfortable 4-tabling normally now, even on my small monitor (1024 x 768....total ghetto!). I'm getting a fair number of notes and decent reads beyond just stats. But, I can think faster than I can talk, and more importantly converse/listen...so I'll see how it goes dropping to 3 tables.