Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Does anyone win now?

All you guys seem to be in downswings to varying degrees.  I'm down a ton for the last several months and feel like no lead is safe.  I am (and it sounds like a lot of you are too) the guy on the table who supports the poor players who make bad decisions and get paid off (only to predictably dump their profits to someone else on the table). 

To be fair/honest, I am putting nowhere near as much effort into analyzing my game, reviewing my sessions, posting hands, watching vids, etc. as I used to.  Or what is needed.  So, I definitely don't feel I should be killing the games or anything.  But I've still managed to put myself in some great situations, to no avail.  Situations where I'm getting the money in against guys who routinely hit their outs, even when it looks like I'm coolering their made hands (or maybe their treating their underpairs as a draws?).

And I can tell from the reading that I've been doing that I'm not alone.  Granted, for a number of reasons, we don't spend as much time writing about the good luck we have, and it's not as cathartic to chat about our suckouts as to lament about theirs.  So, I don't think the sky is falling or the sites are rigged. But man, I wish it would turn around for us already.  Based on the play I see, the games are plenty good enough to beat.  Maybe not crush, but through 400NL there are still a good number of weak players.  And now that I've dropped down and have started to play some 100NL, I'm reminded how much worse the regs are there than at 400NL overall.

Bottom line, I'm not enjoying poker all that much these days.  That means I'm not as eager to work at it, and with a lot of other things clamoring for my attention, it means I don't work at it too much.  Which means I don't play as well.  Which means my results are relatively worse.  Which means I don't enjoy it as much.  And you can see where the cycle goes.  That said, I continue to play minimal volume, so that I don't go completely out of touch.  And I still do a minimal amount of work off the table, so that it doesn't disappear completely.  I've gotten over hating the game while running bad.  I just don't love it.  But I think that I will again at some point.  So for now, I'm playing at a stake and in a mode where I can kind of tread water until I'm ready to proceed with more enthusiasm and effort.  And that'll have to do for the time being.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Holy crap has it been that long

Wow, I knew it's been a while since I updated here, but I didn't think that almost two months had gotten by.  Well, this is the busiest time of the year for me...work usually has something going on the first half of the year, got a little league team to coach (more time spent on coaching baseball than coaching soccer and basketball combined!), kids birthdays are in the spring, and we usually go away over their school's spring break.

So, been doing all of that.  Vacation was to Palm Desert again this year, staying with the in-laws.  My sister-in-law and her whole family was down there (3 nieces, 1 of whom has a husband and a newborn baby, another 1 whose boyfriend came with her), so it was a packed house.  One of the ways I'm lucky is that I really like my wife's family, so other than the family gatherings getting in the way of something important like golf or poker (lol), they're fun.  Played 4 rounds of golf that week, only shot well one of them.  Golf is as temperamental as poker.  Went from mid 80's to mid 70's to low 90's in 3 days.  Low 90's twice, actually.  FML.

Actually, my golf game has pretty much sucked for about a year. Not playing, not practicing, not producing.  Sounds like another pastime I know.  With my little league team, I'm very encouraging to the kids when they make a mistake or strike out, as long as they're paying attention and trying.  The message all of us coaches give them is that if they're trying their best, it should all be good, win or lose. It's not like they're getting paid.  Wish I could follow my own damn advice on the golf course!  I still do a crap job letting myself enjoy playing when I don't play as well as I would like, and there's no reason for it.

That's it for right now.  Have to come back later to poker (meh) and some other stuff (good).  I'll try to do that within the next couple months.