nice blog..i read some posts and i like it...i'll try to read it all when i have the time :f_biggrin:gl
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Monday, April 11
Berz here, contemplating on writing a comprehensive guide to wasting one's time and money playing poker. Just finished a horrible all-night session that cost me 5BI, a good night's rest and a whole lot of nerves. I'm hungry as hell and only now enjoying some hot macaroni as I'm typing this. First meal in 12 hours. Apart from the fact that I ran into pretty much every cooler in the book, I also played worse than last time since I actually ran above EV. So fuck me unconscious.
Current BR rests at around 875 euro, which means I released some 45 euro of the bonus to help cover the losses. I really, really need a decent rakeback deal because William Hill's bonus and VIP program just don't cut it. Need to switch rooms urgently. I've had my eye on 24hPoker for quite some time now, and since my Stars and FTP accounts can't be retracked I'll try it out next.
The good thing is now that I have money I'm playing way more frequently, and therefore have more reason to report my progress. The posts will probably be shorter from henceforth, but more numerous. Blogging keeps me motivated for some reason, and it's fun to moan about stuff every now and then.
I'm on Easter break, two weeks without school will allow me to focus more on poker. I hope to actually accomplish something with this little gambling addiction of mine, a year ago I was sure that I was well on my way of becoming a well established poker pro. Until the whole BR crash thing, of course. And before last session I was getting that feeling back, only to have variance stomp it into the ground again. Why so gloomy over just 5BI? The fact that I spent ten full hours playing, that's why.
So here's the plan for today: play some chess to feel like a winner again, maybe watch something funny on the web and hit the felt. I hate seeing it as regaining last session's losses, but that's essentially what I'll be doing. Will report back after the next disaster.
Tuesday, April 19
They say lady luck is a bitch with a strap-on, but in light of what this metaphor would mean for my cavities I'll refrain from further using it. Suffice to say that since my last post I ran so cold I might as well have been playing in Antarctica. At some point I was all the way down to 200 euro and came damn near close smashing my mouse against the wall, but ended up just closing the client instead to exercise a tiny bit of self-control. Which lasted for about a minute because I immediately went outside to proceed beating the crap out of a concrete wall. And people keep wondering why my knuckles are always bruised. But that was a little while ago, I already managed to move down to NL10 and back to NL20 again. Today's session made that dive of the green line seem like an unpleasant dream I'm moments away from forgetting.
Now, after over two hours of play and some mad swings I managed to own a reg for over 300bb in two hands, one of which was a failed bluff on his part and one was a suckout on mine. That made him sit out and verbally abuse me for a while, which gave me a good chuckle. Normally I don't keep the chat box open, and lately I even disabled the chat bubbles to not get distracted by random mumblings. This time, however, I probably took the entire session's profits away from someone in two hands, so I decided to check the chat for angry messages and sure enough, he was calling me a fooking idioot (avoiding the chat filter). I replied with something less condescending, telling him not to worry and that he'd get it back eventually. This pissed him off even worse as he proceeded dropping names on me and some other solid reg, and almost exploded after my "please stop, you're hurting my feelings lol". Among his exclamations were such remarkable things as "I hope you fooking die tonight" and "you might win a couple of hands but you're still a loser, always will be". I sat out on other tables just to have the time to chat with him some more as the tables started breaking down anyway. It really made my day!
Here's the first hand:
Grabbed by Holdem Manager
NL Holdem $0.20(BB) Replayer
SB ($35.32)
Hero ($33.34)
UTG ($36.09)
CO ($67.98)
BTN ($20)
Dealt to Hero A♣ Q♦
fold, CO raises to $0.70, fold, SB calls $0.60, Hero raises to $2.80, CO calls $2.10, fold
FLOP ($6.30) 5♦ Q♥ 2♥
Hero bets $4, CO calls $4
TURN ($14.30) 5♦ Q♥ 2♥ 5♥
Hero checks, CO bets $6, Hero calls $6
RIVER ($26.30) 5♦ Q♥ 2♥ 5♥ 7♣
Hero checks, CO bets $55.18 (AI), Hero calls $20.54 (AI)
Hero shows A♣ Q♦
(Pre 61%, Flop 77.0%, Turn 90.9%)
CO shows 4♦ 6♦
(Pre 39%, Flop 23.0%, Turn 9.1%)
Hero wins $64.38
Pre-flop is pretty standard, especially against this guy as the hand he had is not even the worst part of his opening range there. My notes on him state that he absolutely hates folding, doesn't know when to give up his bluffs and most importantly floats with pretty much any two in position. He once called two of my barrels with 77 on an A824 rainbow board. So his call on the flop didn't necessarily mean much to me, except that he didn't have 22/55 or he'd have raised to get it in against overpairs and to protect against flush draws. Now the turn. That was a tough one. I pretty much expected this guy to float in 3bet pots, but his bet size wasn't convincing at all. If he hit a 5, he would bet bigger because of the flush draw, QQ was fairly improbable because I had a Q myself, and he'd definitely 4bet AA/KK pre-flop. Eventually I came to the conclusion that either he had a flush or absolutely nothing, but I didn't believe. River blanked, so if I had him on the turn I still had him beat now. His push had me tank until the timer nearly ran out. Eventually I decided to call because the only thing he was representing was a flush, and the way he almost set up an all-in for the river with his turn bet, he'd only bet that little if he wasn't worried about another heart so he was only representing the nut flush. His river AF was 4.5, and I didn't believe.
Now here's the second, happened just one orbit later:
Grabbed by Holdem Manager
NL Holdem $0.20(BB) Replayer
SB ($43.62)
Hero ($63.68)
UTG ($35.79)
CO ($27.14)
BTN ($20)
Dealt to Hero 9♦ 9♠
UTG raises to $0.60, CO raises to $2.10, BTN calls $2.10, fold, Hero calls $1.90, fold
FLOP ($7) 9♥ 8♥ 5♥
Hero checks, CO bets $5.25, BTN folds, Hero raises to $61.58 (AI), CO calls $19.79 (AI)
TURN ($57.08) 9♥ 8♥ 5♥ Q♠
RIVER ($57.08) 9♥ 8♥ 5♥ Q♠ 5♠
Hero shows 9♦ 9♠
(Pre 67%, Flop 33.4%, Turn 20.5%)
CO shows 6♥ Q♥
(Pre 33%, Flop 66.6%, Turn 79.5%)
Hero wins $54.23
Much less thought process here, I was already sure he was steaming and decided to call mainly for set value since there was already another guy who called his 3bet. Seeing as he cbet big I thought he'd probably call me with any FD, any overpair, maybe even 88 or lower set. I decided to just ship it in because another heart would just be devastating for my hand, and raising any smaller would just be an incentive to push it in on the turn regardless. He had a flush with a garbage 3bet hand, but I sucked out on the river which pissed him right the hell off, much to my amusement. Thank you, lady luck, today you were much less of a bitch to me than usual.
Bankroll is now 565 euro. I know, I know, terrible compared to last week, but I'm climbing out of a 35BI hole, so cut me some slack. I must admit there are a lot of at least decent regs playing now, it's much harder to take money off of people. When I was playing a few years ago it was more like shipping it with TPTK and winning money, but nowadays if a fish sits at a table it's a contest of who can take the most money off of him before he busts. I actually feel the need to sharpen up my game in order to beat the iPoker NL20 regs. Recently I heard someone say that beating a limit doesn't mean making profit, it means being able to exploit the regs rather than just seeking out the fish. I'm trying to follow that principle, not to the point of playing regs only for "practice" as I'm done playing just any table. What I want to do is being able to profitably exploit other regs by spotting leaks in their game they don't even know about. I'll need that like air at NL50.
Slice of real life. Talked to a social assistant, she assured me that I'll get my money starting the end of April. This means I'm moving out. Finally! Freedom, here I come! Now all I need is a network card with wireless reception and I'm golden. It seems that life will finally start looking up for me after all. If everything goes according to plan (not that it ever does, but that doesn't mean I'll stop planning) my time will be equally split between poker for later potential source of income and school for potential source of girlfriends. This is the last week of Easter break, so my volume will expectedly have to suffer from Monday onwards, no more all-night sessions.
Expect an emotionally overloaded entry within a week.
Tuesday, April 26
Some salt and sugar this week. After a few more losing sessions I managed to pull myself up into green, as I'm used to, but this isn't a good thing. Oh no. I raked over 1000 euro during my poker adventures on William Hill, and that got me Diamond status, but I still don't see any significant improvement in my winrate, and after years of experience I still manage to somehow get angry at wasting time without making sufficient profit, or being unable to climb out of a hole in a single session. You might better know it as tilt. In other words, I'm a worthless Diamond. Now on to the sugar.
I discovered that the less I check my session balance, the less my play becomes results oriented. This means I don't feel like I'm compensating for previous losses within my session when I'm playing, and that leads me to making more objective decisions. For example, today I made 150 euro in 1200 hands, I knew it was going well but only found out how much I won after I started closing down tables. I checked my balance once or twice during the session, compared to every two minutes or so in previous (mostly unsuccessful) sessions. Current BR is 710 euro plus change.
I'm still playing on WH despite having cleared my full bonus, which was worth $600, so subtract that amount (converted to euro) from my roll and you can found out just how bad my winrate is. I think that I'm well on my way to become a rakeback pro, but hitting Diamond status made me take action against that. I'm pretty embarrassed at my lack of success on NL20 (although I openly admit it), therefore I'm studying more and more strategy to slowly yet surely pull my net winrate above my rake. I just keep telling myself I used to beat NL100, so if I'm ever to return there I must keep honing my skills and grind regularly while applying the principles I learned. And I believe I will, be it sooner or later.
With no bonus and only the 50% weeks promo, it would be more profitable for me to move my roll to a flat RB site. Still, I want to play here for at least one more week, until the beginning of May, so I can get $100 after I rake $200, most profitable of the weeks in the promo. Additionally, my VIP status gets updated on May 3, one day before the end of said promo week, and I'll also receive additional points due to VIP level boost. Which means I can cash them out all at once and move to EuroPoker. Or another site if I find attractive promotions. In any case, the points cashout will likely be very low in terms of rakeback, but so far this gives me time to focus on improving my winrate.
Slice of real life. My new room is pretty large, bigger than I really need it to be but it feels nice to have some space for your money. I got a sink with hot and cold water, fast internet, a comfy bed, a little furniture for my clothes and other stuff, and an awesome view from the fifth floor. There's a common room with a widescreen TV and a balcony, so I don't have to go all the way down just to smoke. Wouldn't be too much of a problem though, there are two elevators present. I'm very satisfied, although I would have been satisfied with anything at this stage as long as I could leave the house. I'd like to close this segment with a quote:
"Of course I'm afraid they (the risks) may one day cost me my life, but my greatest fear is not taking them only to lay on my death bed and discover that I never truly lived."
Friday, May 13
It's been a couple of weeks, still running good. I made the $200 mark on William Hill and got $100 from the rake chase. After that, I cashed out my WH points for $375 and another $20 on top of that. Now I only have a couple of tokens and some points to spend on cheap tournaments. I cashed out little over 1300 euro from my WH account and made an $800 deposit to PKR, where I've been making profit so far.
Last days with William Hill. Not bad, I learned a few new tricks and picked up on some trends like light 4betting, which I found a bit strange since I didn't expect to run into this kind of play on a regular basis on such low stakes as NL20. Still, I was lacking some volume and on the last day of the chase I noticed I needed more points than I could generate playing NL20 unless I 10-tabled for 8 hours straight. So I took a shot at NL50 and it went well, made some money but most importantly generated just enough rake to qualify for the $100, which I happily received.
Cashing out was a bit more difficult than on other platforms, the option wasn't even available in the cashier until I emailed the support, they asked me for my ID, I sent them a copy of both sides, they approved and I was about to cash my roll out. Little did I know that the cashier would only let me withdraw through bank wire. So I contacted live support and asked them what the problem was, they said they'd look into it and immediately enabled Neteller as a cashout option. At that point I finally made the withdrawal and was looking for another room while thinking about my money which was converted into electric pulses and floating somewhere in the digital stream with no real guarantee that it will ever reach my account. But I got it a few days later, so no complaints.
I decided to try out PKR. For several reasons, one of which was the entire concept of slow, realistic 3D poker that, combined with the intense difficulty in the department of multitabling, ought to keep solid regs away. And I was right in some sense, I met a few regs but they're not impressive, and there's really a lot of horrible players there. Rakeback was another reason, and the FDB equals 50% RB, only it is paid out in one lump sum, so I have to generate $1600 of rake in 60 days from my deposit in order to receive it. Although I don't like the software, especially the fact that HEM only works on one table and the stats are all messed up, I should really play more often to clear that bonus.
I've been playing NL50 SH since my deposit. My shot on iPoker went successfully, and I imagined PKR players would be a little weaker, so I took the risk of playing with only 16BI. After all, I could always make another deposit in a week (weird PKR deposit limits) so it's not really outside of my BR. Right now I have about $1330, plus the money still left in my Neteller account after the initial $800 deposit. The software says my progress to the next VIP level is 30%, and my FDB is 8% cleared.
Well, that's my progress so far, will post a more detailed review of PKR later.
Tuesday, May 17
I thought it appropriate to write about my PKR experiences, among which I'll list and comment on such mundane things as the software, level of play and VIP program, but a brief (yet graphed) analysis of my play and performance will also be included.
To start this one off, I have mixed feelings about PKR. I first decided to try this room because it was deemed fishy and not very grinder-friendly, so I was hoping for little strong opposition. That, and the amount of rake I generated last month should easily get me in the top 10 of the rake race, but more on that later. PKR has some drawbacks, but I'm having the feeling the pros outweigh the cons. Not to the same extent as some other sites, but the room is definitely worth visiting just to say you have tried it. And for the gratuitous amount of seafood on the poker menu.
Le software.
One thing I learned to always do before making a deposit is to download and try out the software to see how multitabling works out. But the main reason for downloading PKR software was for me to see exactly how many tables are open at my limit. PokerScout offers some help in that department, but it doesn't go into much more detail than the amount of cash game players currently online. So I thought I'd have a little meet-and-greet with PKR and started downloading the software. Immediately, I was astounded by the (lack of) progress of the download bar, and the installation process which took nearly as much time as downloading. PKR now occupies 1.13GB worth of my HDD space. One heavy sucker, doesn't slow my system down too much though. I always start it up in lowered graphic settings mode, minimize all the fancy features that lure the players to the site and set the camera to "overview."
Le multitabling.
Multitabling is difficult for me, and here's why. I set PKR's resolution to 1680x1050, basically fullscreen, so I can optimally use the space on my screen. PKR neatly and automatically tiles all the tables for you, and this brings up mixed feelings. On one hand, you can't resize the windows or move them. On the other, you don't have to, it's all done for you. Handy since your screen is always optimally filled with up to 9 tiled tables. I usually play 6, a cutback from 10-12 I used to play on iPoker, which also means a drop in volume, but it's being offset by the winrate. This cutback is due to the fact that the print gets too small for me to read clearly from 7 tables onwards. And it's made worse by those tables where you have to click a button to see your hole cards for 3 seconds, so your choices are either not to play those tables and ignore the fish sitting there, or accept the disadvantages of making pointless additional clicks every so often. Aside from all the tiling, there's also the "main screen" thing where all tables but one are minimized, so to speak, and the "main table" periodically switches to another table whenever it's your turn to act. May be handy for some, but I like to have an overview of all my tables at once so I don't use this feature. Table selection feels awkward as I usually sort the tables by VPiP, but this column doesn't even exist in the lobby. One final complaint that I feel belongs in the multitabling segment is the time it takes to get yourself on a waiting list. It takes 3 clicks on 3 different buttons, 4 clicks if you count selecting the table. Doesn't sound annoying until you find yourself having to click 4 times for something that could and should be able to be accomplished in just one.
Le HEM.
Now I'll address HEM. It works, but only on one table, and the stats don't switch places after the table's been resized due to opening new ones. Some people say they can just switch the stats by manually selecting another table using Table Manager, but mine only lists one table even if I'm playing 6, so that's not even an option for me, and if it were I wouldn't use it due to its impracticality. In case you didn't know, PKR does not open new windows for tables you open, it encapsulates them, which I suspect is the cause of HEM's problems here. The HUD was more of a nuisance than a help in this scenario, so I decided to turn it off until I find a suitable solution. Playing without stats feels a little weird, all the info has to come from notes, taking which can be time-consuming if done excessively for little yet important things that you normally find out just by glancing at someone's stats.
Le level.
Luckily, the level of play on NL50 is overall atrocious. Granted, I've been running hot over a small sample size, but when you see people calling 3 streets until they're all-in with K8 second pair no kicker, larger winrates suddenly become more plausible. Usually there's only one or two regs per table, and between zero and one solid players (myself excluded). There are a few guys who make it tough for you to get their money, but most just seem to be there for the excitement of -almost- playing live for money in the comfort of their own home. Those are the guys with no basic knowledge of strategy. My approach towards them is very simple: find leaks and continue exploiting until they adapt. They usually don't.
Le VIP.
PKR has a relatively strange VIP progam. Once you make it to a VIP level, it's yours for life. More detailed info can be found on their site. I recently got the first one attainable, Bronze, and my progress to Silver is 7%. Bronze doesn't offer any benefits compared to Basic, Silver will mean I'll lose the PKR points booster (haven't even looked up what that is yet) but will get a subscription to PKR magazine (oh joy!) and retain the monthly prize draws and competitions thingy. The latter will also disappear for Gold members, but they will get higher deposit limits along with "gifts and hospitality" whatever that might include. Platinum and Diamond also get VIP access to PKR events, but honestly I don't even think I'll make it to Gold as I'm planning to switch rooms once my FDB is cleared.
Le Traffic.
No complaints here, it seems every time I log on there are at least as many NL50SH tables active as NL20SH euro tables at iPoker. PKR also doesn't additionally segregate tables by currency, everything's in $. This will make me start tearing my hair out after being presented with the conversion costs after I withdraw somewhere in the future, but let's ignore this impending doom for now. During rush hours there are plenty of tables open so you can pick the ones with largest average pot. Anything above $10 usually gets my priority. As I'm typing this, there are 22 tables with at least 2 players. There are currently 5219 players online, 845 of which are playing cash games. That number goes up to 1522 during rush hours. Stats shamelessly stolen from PokerScout.
Le performance.
Skipped straight to this segment due to tl;dr? Don't worry, you didn't miss much. The interesting bit starts here. I've had an awesome run over less than 4k hands, running at over 50bb/100 as this graph illustrates:
I played another session yesterday after saving the graph, but ended up BE so I decided just to post this graph instead of saving and uploading another one. As for the FDB, it's 14% cleared and I'm well on my way to receiving additional $800 in less than two months. Currently I'm reading Brunson's Super System, occasionally watching some videos and reading articles. The aim is, as always, not only to win money, but also to ensure the winrate's increase in the future.
This post is more than sufficiently long by now, so I'll cut it short here. May post more in days to come, if the approaching exams don't bury me in schoolwork.
Friday, July 8
Oh yes, it's that time of month again when my blog gets its temporary resurrection after which it's reburied in the depths of oblivion until the author gets off his lazy behind (noticing the semi-permanent butt groove in his chair) to do some typing labor. Now, I'm through apologizing for the inconsistencies in the time frame of my posts. Acceptance of one's laziness is the first step to curing it, but it also just so happens to be the only step lazy people are willing to take. But general antipathy towards action is not the main reason for my absence here, this time I believe to have an acceptable excuse. More on that later.
So what of my poker profits, you ask? Not much, stuck at around $1k, the attempt to rake $1k6 ended up being a total failure (bye bye FDB, that's another lump sum I'm not putting in my pocket), the profits have been scarce over an overly elongated period of time and I lost most of my grinding motivation. All in all, poker's going crappy and I have no plans of actively returning to the felt for the next month or so. Everything after this paragraph is going to be all about my RL, so you've been warned.
Don't expect the reader to know I'm a student as I at times forget it myself, but nevertheless my studies have taken a relatively important role in my life, more so than I previously expected. Languages are just fun to learn, I'd still be perfecting my linguistic skills if I were studying something else. I'm getting the results of my exams tomorrow, only concerned about 4 of them but looking forward to finding out which ones I passed anyway. No stress.
Can't believe I haven't previously mentioned this, but I'm only recently back from Ghent, where I'd been staying for 2 months, the school got me a cheap but comfy room in a student residence, a building owned by the school specifically for students to live in. 5 different floors with 100 rooms each, bottom floor was dedicated to Erasmus (foreign exchange) students. Every heterosexual male reading will understand why I didn't have much time for poker during my stay over there. The answer to the first question that comes to your mind after reading the previous sentence is: yes, a lot.
Thinking back I would most definitely describe those two months as the happiest consecutively lasting period of my life. Met a lot of new people, made a few new friends and smoked more weed than I could handle. Going out, partying, having fun, living the life. And next academic year it'll start all over again, with the exception of me being there from the beginning instead of just two months. So I can positively conclude that the best times of my life are still ahead of me.
I could write pages upon pages about my all but sober adventures in Ghent, but before I do I feel the compulsive urge to tell all about how I got arrested a few days ago. So me and a friend went out for a smoke on the roof of the local mall, which was completely converted to a parking lot. I like going up there, the view is nice. Little did we know, the gates were locked by the time we got back. So it's almost midnight, we're stuck on the roof of a mall, there's no one there and just to piss us off a tiny bit more lady luck found the perfect moment to make it rain.
So what are two guys to do in a situation like this? Stand in the rain and catch bronchitis? To hell with that, we just tried out every door we came across. All locked, of course, but soon we discovered one with a code pad and an intercom. So we dialed the number for dispatch, no answer. We did it a couple more times and I heard the door click. I tried it, and sure enough it was open. So we stepped inside and took the stairs downwards, right into the mall. Some ten minutes later mall security showed up, together with the cops.
So we come up to them and try to explain we were trying to find a way out, what we were greeted with was a demand to raise our hands and slowly move forward, I had lights in my face but I was pretty sure they were all pointing guns at us. So we got patted down, had to explain how we got there four times and waited for an hour or so for no apparent reason before they took us to the station for prints and flashes. Apparently, there was no dispatcher present and to date no one including us knows how we got that door open.
So if there's anything I want you to remember after reading this story, it's that the police will treat you as worthless criminal scum until conclusively proven otherwise.
Saturday, March 2
A year and a half of poker negligence finally came to an end when I found myself being drawn back to the felt about a month ago. And the last couple of days have been good, so this little collection of monologues is about to get replenished. I'm still playing at PKR, where I managed to turn what little I hadn't withdrawn last year into $350. The month long relaunch journey was rather shaky, however.
My eventual success, as I've come to consider it, started in late January as a way to unwind and have some fun playing cards without the intention of making money. Meaning I started playing poker again with the mentality of a fish, no particular strategy other than the basics I learned over the years, no BRM, just a set of 4 $12 SnG of different formats. Because the traffic was awful and I wanted to play rather than wait for people to register. It'd been a couple of years since I made any kind of decent profit playing SnG, and despite my (former) self-evaluation I eventually had to conclude I suck at them. Not that there weren't enough bad players, it's just that I barely managed to break even. But that's a conclusion I only arrived at a couple days ago.
After a short while of reaching $200, dropping back to $100 and lower, and then repeating that little roller coaster a few more times, I decided to start applying BRM after all lest I went completely broke. I may not have been playing for the sake of getting rich, but I wanted to retain the possibility to gamble for amounts I actually cared about. Much better than going busto, as I eventually would have, had I continued to ignore BRM. So I dropped down to $6 limits, which weren't so scarcely populated. This helped a little, although I still frequented the $12 ones from time to time.
But then I decided to start playing tournaments, especially ones with a guaranteed prize pool. Despite the fact that most tournaments have late registration, I've always been a sucker for added value, so I thought why not join a tourney for some side action next to the SnG tournaments I'm enjoying? Maybe I'll even cash in some of them. And so I did. Blew some $15-20 out the window before I registered for some late night $3.50 tourney one night, which I eventually won for $75. So yeah, glad to know I'm not completely awful at tournaments, although luck was on my side that night. With that win added, my roll was about $180, but the confidence boost it gave me was worth much more.
After some more donking around I decided to stop playing those $12 money vampires and switch over to 6max cash games, the very format I made most of my money playing. Since I'm a financial investment genius, I chose the limit I only had 5BI for. So there I was, sitting at 4 $25 tables, waiting for the big blind to reach me, and before I even played my first hand I saw people limp-folding, among other such brilliant moves, and I figured this wouldn't be very difficult to get back into. Lo and behold, less than an hour in I was up three stacks. A month of messing about with SnG ended up being a break-even endeavour despite me taking down a tourney, whereas just an hour of cash games catapulted me over the $200 mark. Well fuck me...
Today's session started with me stubbornly trying to make a profit playing SnG, six $12 ones to be precise. I thought I'd only play four, but losing the first two rather quickly was reason enough to start up two more, just to have four on my screen. Terrible idea. I'm a stupid gambler. Only managed to win one of those to get back little over $40, at which point I already had three cash tables open, ready for another one. Two hours or so later I finished the session holding a great total of $350. I'm tempted to just withdraw what I have made and start from scratch using BRM out of fear of feeling like crap if (when) I lose what I amassed by playing the way I do.
I'm still weighing up how much I like to gamble against how much I want to win. BRM says I shouldn't play .10/.25 with my current roll, so it is well possible that I'll be re-reading this post in a few days, cursing my own stupidity after having donated my gambling balance to other recreational players. But at the very least I can honestly say I'm enjoying the game of poker again, and that's all that matters. For now...
Sunday, March 3
Rather unusual for me to actually update my blog regularly, but typing a little wall of text occasionally seems to help with venting. Roll is now $185, confidence rather low, rakeback still due. I'm starting to identify signs of poker addiction. Gambling addiction, actually, just limited to the game of poker.
It's always fun to win money, but one of the key concepts this site tries to teach people is emotionally distancing oneself from the game so that correct play and good decisions become more important than the actual results. And yet, after years of constantly reminding myself that it's all about playing well, losing money still hurts. More so after I just close down the game client in anger, and, after returning from a smoking break, come to a full realization of how quickly I turned a winning session into a tilt-governed clusterfuck after just one poorly played hand.
It is important to note that I started with $450 after winning two consecutive SnGs, should I ever come to re-read my own ramblings. That's over 50% of my roll donked away on bad play and lack of self-control, even after I realized I was playing quite poorly at best. Catching myself bluffing for stacks should be reason enough to immediately cut the losses. To a rational mind, anyway.
So there it is. Apparently, the game is only fun when I win. Not even then, actually. One of the prominent signs of long-term addiction is no longer getting enjoyment out of it, but rather engaging in the activity for the sake of no longer feeling crappy. This is why you should never play with the prospect of chasing your losses. Unfortunately, just understanding that concept is not enough, and neither is remembering it. It's the application in practice that matters, and even temporal inability to do that can instantly negate hours, days or even weeks of hard work.
But to end the sorrowful tirade of self-loathing on a positive note, at least I have more than the $100 I started with a month ago. Albeit the only positive thing pertaining to poker I can now think of. Better luck next session...
Monday, March 11
Finally went broke. Guess I should have laid off the 6max SnGs. Oh well, I've had some good times playing, even withdrew some money in the past, but it's time to finally put an end to my miserable poker adventure and say goodbye to PokerStrategy.