Back in business

I had to get a new hard drive, which was a mixed blessing.  It was a royal pain in the ass to get everything set up again, even with access to my old files.  There are so many different settings to get in again, and that was even being clever in a lot of cases...I found where a lot of different configuration files were stored.  The good part is that I had accumulated a ton of junk on my hard drive, and try as I might to clean it out, nothing beats starting from scratch.  My computer seems a lot more responsive.  I now have a 120GB drive.  Although that is smaller than most drives that come with new computers, it should give me a decent amount of space to play with...bring on the datamines and the video downloads :).

I spent Friday and the weekend, when I had time, re-installing everything.  I haven't checked Google Reader in a few days, but I just looked and have 1000+ unread posts.  Surely I'll never read most of those, but for you guys whose blogs I keep up with, I will catch up soon.  Not today because I also have a couple work deadlines...but certainly by the end of the week.

Home life has been a bummer...my wife injured her back and has been pretty much out of commission.  Of all the stuff to go wrong with your back, hers was the least bad...some sort of muscle pull/spasm/strain that the killer muscle relaxers the doctor prescribed are helping with.   No herniated discs or other nightmare back issues...this is bad enough!  I'm getting a chance to pile up massive husband points, as well, but no time for much else.

I listened to Leatherass on the 2p2 podcast last week and heard the coolest golf bet in quite a while.  Evidently, when he was a hotshot junior golfer, he bet his club pro he could beat the pro using only one club.  Using a 4-iron, he shot 76 or something like that and beat the pro.  I'm sure that he was a better than scratch golfer at the time to be able to do that, but even so it's pretty amazing, IMO.  Let's say that he was a +2 (extremely good golfer at any level, but got to believe that's among the best in the country for 15 year olds).  That equates to about shooting 70.  So, he goes up 6 strokes only using one club.  I'm a pretty good golfer -- not awesome, but a single digit handicapper -- and if I could only use one club the whole round, I'd be shocked to shoot within 18 shots of my handicap.  I might try it for 9 holes with a 7-iron one day, just to see.

Where the hell did this week go?

Seems like Monday was just yesterday and now the week is just about over and I did nothing.  Actually, worked a ton so far (same projects, lots of issues to resolve, going well), but did have a lesson on the company's time this morning to make up for it a little bit.  And I'm following up with that by writing up this post, too.  Yay, me. 

For the first time in a long while, I did a PT review rather than a sweat or video, and I forgot how helpful those are.  I know that I've been mixing in playing bad with running bad, and as we looked through some individual hands, that was borne out.  If I had to say what the bigger influence is, it would be running bad, but far from 100%.  I wonder how much cause and effect there is between playing bad and running bad. 

Certainly my motivation to grind has dropped off due to this downswing, even though a lot of the DS is my fault in the first place. It's human nature to avoid unpleasant things in favor of pleasant things.  With so many other things going pretty well and poker not so much, I guess it's not surprising that it's dropped off.  Jared was able to extract a few things in general that confirmed some of my own thoughts, but he did pick up one thing that was new for me.  I've been playing my big draws very fast, but not optimally.  Getting in with a massive draw will not likely be a big EV mistake in a vacuum, but it doesn't mean that indiscriminately betting and raising is the most EV way to go about it, either.  Also, I had miscalculated my likely equity in a couple big draw situations...mostly stemming from a poor job on my part assigning hand ranges.

One point that Jared makes over and over -- which I do OK internalizing to various degrees -- is that while "advanced" plays are all well and good, they are not at all necessary at small stakes.  Things like 4-bet bluffs preflop, floating, etc.  He doesn't object to working them into my game because there are spots even at these stakes where they work.  And I certainly don't go way overboard with that sort of stuff.  His point is more that they are higher variance and I should think about the balance between trying to use those plays and just playing "boring, straightforward" poker.

Finally, @ Brian and Willie:  thanks a ton for your comments on my last post.  Brian, I will try to take you up on your offer, although my window for playing my be outside of your window for sweats, due to time zones.  If nothing else, after I get done posting this, I'll look you up on AIM so that you know who's pinging you :).

Willie, I actually have been playing on a different site...Stars.   I've got a smaller roll there, enough for 50NL, so I've been building up my roll and confidence in that game.  My WR @ 50NL is about the same as my lose-rate @ 100NL...so I just need to play twice as many 50NL hands to break even :).  Absolute isn't for me.  It's fine for whoever wants to play there, but I'm so disgusted at what happened there and their reaction that I just don't want to support them.  I will say that if I made my living playing, I might not be so righteous about it...if I thought my edge there was big enough...so I certainly don't fault anyone if they want to play there...just not for me.  As far as different games, I have actually thought about that, and talked about it with a couple folks.  For a number of reasons, I want to stick with 6m NL for now, but I do think that before all that long, I will incorporate some HU NL and/or PLO.  I've thought about trying limit because I was quite successful with it (by my standards) back in the day...but with tougher games now plus having to re-learn parts, let's just say I'd rather leave that legacy of success intact :).

October = Bleah

October was the worst month ever, winrate-wise.  Sample size is really small, though, as life outside poker has gotten busier again.  Just about all good, but busy.  I did log some hands over the last week, trying to get back into the flow.  I've been watching videos, did my own video on Deuces Cracked, listened to some strategy via podcast, and read a fair amount as well.  So, when I played, I didn't really feel too rusty (kept it at 4 tables max).

But the results still blew chunks as far as I'm concerned.  I played 100NL on FT and 50NL on Stars to build up my roll there.  Each 100NL session was a big loss, and the 50NL sessions were mostly wins.  The games didn't play that different, I didn't play that different.  The play at my 100NL tables was worse than the play on my 50NL tables a lot of the time.  In most ways I feel very in control of my game, and the ways that I am not in control I know right away I'm making mistakes, like before villain even does anything.  My playing discipline in a lot of ways is really strong, but let's just say I really need to make myself pause before acting.  I'm doing things I know I should not (and not doing some things I know I should), and it's because even with only a couple tables open, I'm not thinking things through enough.

I continue to at least in some part take a running-bad stretch and augment it with playing-bad.  Not a ton, but still way more than I should.

Something else happened to me over the last week that always scares me...I couldn't find any hands where I was really torn about how to play...outside of the mistakes I knew right away I made, everything else seemed either standard or even that I played it well.  The reason this scares me is that I don't think I'm good enough to play 3,000 hands and not be torn.  Again, I don't think I played perfect, just that I'm looking back on it and not questioning.

So, my plan is to get a session going with Jared this week and have him just watch me play and see if anything jumps out at him.  I'm a bit at sea right now with my game...feeling in control of it and losing at an alarming rate (over 10k hands, now, and more importantly to me, like 2 months long).  It's difficult to maintain confidence because I don't have a long-term track record yet.  Honestly I don't think I ever will have a long term track record...the game conditions and my condition changes more quickly than I can log say 100k hands.  Anyway, I think that I can substitute some of the confidence/game assessment with a coach.  That leads to a different problem:  if my current winrate (lose-rate, really) continues too much longer, I won't really have the bankroll to happily get coaching, at least from Jared.  Oh, woe is me :P.

Hmm, this is coming off pretty whiny to me.  Bottom line, I think, is that I'm suffering a crisis of confidence which is sapping my enthusiasm to play.  And I'm starting to wonder if I'm wired to play poker well.  I mean, I've now been at 100NL for a year.  I've been able to push into 200NL, but those shots have failed.  And now, I'm in sight of having to drop back down below 100NL again.  I'm smart and all that, but if I haven't been able to move past what I consider to be a pretty basic level yet, I'm not sure I'll ever do well in the game.  I'll still play, study, etc., because I still find it interesting.  But with all the coaching, videos, study work, software, datamining, etc., I really think I should be able to crush at these stakes if I were any good.  And not only am I not crushing, I'm barely treading water over 100k+ hands, and have been sinking like a stone over the last 25k or so.