Poker, what's that?

Been taking a little break (kind of) from the tables, and poker stuff in general.  I've been getting too frustrated with the downswing I've been on, so I've just said screw it to playing for a bit.  I will not make Ironman this month, the first time that's happened in a year, at least.  I've played  a bit on Stars for a change of pace.  My role is smaller there, so I've been donking around at the 50NL tables.  I've got very few reads, but the play is really not very good.  In a small sample, I'm up a BI real money, and tons in Sklansky bucks (same story, different site).  Don't know if I've just gotten more used to FT, but I don't like the software nearly as much at Stars.  Some of it has to do with the awesome FullTiltShortcuts program I use on FT, but in general, I'm just more comfortable with the FT software.  However, if I'm going to drop down and get some confidence back, it might as well be on the site where my roll is smaller so I can build it up, and f*ck FT anyway for dealing me so many coolers (stupid, I know).  Still, I'm only probably going to play like 5k hands this month, so it doesn't matter much where I play.

My Deuces Cracked video got released Monday, and the feedback is generally very positive (directed at Joe Tall and Jared).  I agree.  Hopefully, they will continue that series.  I like the more in depth conversations.  Joe keeps the talk flowing, but also provides another point of view.  In general, the videos where they get two coaches going back and forth are good (see Coaching Tree, among others).

Other than that, it's been work work work, except today.  I played golf with my boss and a college buddy whom I hadn't seen since graduation (and for me, that means a lot longer time than it does for you guys).  Awesome to catch up.  He's done awesome for himself, and has had kind of a dream life in a lot of respects, but in spite of that, it was very cool to hang out with him and get caught up :).

Late Night Coaching with Joe Tall

I am the featured student for an upcoming LNC episode on Deuces Cracked.  I tried to find some interesting hands.  I thought at first that the hands were pretty uninteresting, but after going through the recording and seeing what sorts of things came up, I changed my mind.  I did OK with hand selection.  I picked some hands where I thought I did OK but wanted confirmation, and some hands where I knew I screwed up but I thought were still interesting. 

Jared, my coach, does a great job 1:1 with me instructing not only the "what" but the "why."  He did just as well for the video, with both Joe and me firing questions.  Like the rest of the series, we didn't go over a ton of hands, but got some interesting conversation on all of them.  If you like the series, you should like this episode.

I didn't ask a ton of questions (IMO), but I had a lot written down (surprise).  Joe asked the very questions I had on my mind a lot of the time, which I'll take as a good sign for me.  I'm at least thinking about the right sorts of things.  I won't give away the episode, but if you watch, you'll definitely get to see at least one total brain-dead play on my part.  No surprise there :P.  Obviously, anyone watches, I'd be interested to hear if you have any different opinions about the analysis.

Ugh, make it stop

Here's another one of the things that ticks me off about being a small-volume player...few hundred hands here, few hundred hands there, few thousand hands for a month:  downswings can go really long on the calendar.  My last 15k hands I've run way below expectations.  That in and of itself is frustrating just because I hate to lose.  My play has been pretty poor in spots, so I'm making it wore than it needs to be for sure.  But the biggest frustration is that for me, this represents almost 2 months worth of play.  Over the last couple months, it's been a steady stream (seemingly) of getting  all-in as a 3:1 or better favorite, and then they get there...and all the usual stuff that we whine about when running poorly.  Intellectually, I know it's going to happen.  Even emotionally, I'm OK with it.  I'm pretty sure I've gotten a little gunshy and too cautious, but the whackiness isn't majorly affecting my play or even steaming me too much.  I more laugh about it, to be honest, and I'm trying most of the time to not even look at how the hand plays out once the cards flip up, and I make whatever note on my opponent is appropriate.

The problem is that while I've gotten good at making my decisions relatively unaffected by results, I haven't yet conquered getting my enjoyment at all unaffected by results.  I played a really long session (for me -- it was 1200 hands) last night.  4 tables only, no distractions, and did a great job thinking through decisions and putting villains on ranges, and was pretty close, a lot of the time.  But after AKs < AQ, AK < AA, AA < runner-runner straight (he had 2 overs, backdoor flush and backdoor straight on the flop and bluff-shoved in a 3-bet pot, LOL), and assorted other shenanigans, I finished down a third of a stack. 

I reviewed all hands with any sort of money in because I actually had no question during game time.  I thought maybe I wasn't paying enough attention to the tables/hands to form questions in such a long session.  Gasp, that does happen sometimes!  But everything seemed standard even when I reviewed.

Discounting for the moment that I'm sure I'm missing my mistakes in review as well as at game time, I should be pretty happy that I got the money in good and that I feel I played really well and didn't make any (obvious) mistakes for this session.  But because I basically broke even, I just found that I didn't enjoy it.  These sorts of sessions have been enjoyable when I'm on a heater or even when I have a mix of good and bad results, but because it's been so long -- on the calendar -- since I've run well, I just feel disappointed.  For guys who play 15k hands in a week, they just have a bad week.  I know they don't enjoy it either, but at least for them, they're bound to play through it pretty quickly and at least get back to breaking even ;).  No guarantees, of course, but I'm still holding onto the conviction that I'm capable of beating the game at these stakes, regardless of the last few months :P.

Back from vacation

Been on a family vacation for about a week.  I peeked at my work email...245 unread...I do get a fair amount of quickly-deleted FYIs and also get copied on a lot of bug progress reports that I don't need to act on, so I hope to get caught back up on the email backlog quickly.  More time-consuming will be a couple big projects that were getting to critical points before I left.  It's that sort of stuff that pushes vacations into the distant past pretty quickly :(.

Nothing poker related until this morning when I tried to catch up on some blogs.  No hands, no videos, no forums, no even thinking about poker, except when we drove past Commerce :).  I hope that will give me a nice refreshed outlook when I finally do fire up the poker client...September was dismal, by far my worst month $$ wise.  My play didn't feel confident, but I think it was the results influencing my feelings more than playing significantly worse.  I was able to review a lot of hands before I left, and the number of known bad plays and questionable plays was pretty consistent with historical rates.

I did look back to the beginning of the year, and my results are pretty depressing, to be honest.  Over the last 100k hands, I'm a paltry .66 BB/100 winner, and a decent loser (like 4 BB/100) at 200NL, and an overall $$ loser over that time (rakeback and bonii make up for that so that I am barely positive).  I know there are a lot of spots I could do better, but still, I think of myself as a better than breakeven player.  Still, I'm ready to play again after some time off, so enjoying a hobby counts for something, I guess.

I'm not sure what I could realistically be doing differently in terms of learning, preparation, etc.  I talked about this for a bit with Jared, and he believes that what I'm doing...getting in the hands when I can and thoroughly reviewing my play as the top priority...then taking in videos and strategy forums as lower priority is the way to go.  I tend to agree, although I am going to drop some review in favor of videos and forums.  In other words, instead of all review and no videos, it will be a decent amount of review and a few videos.