Hello blog, how have you been? That's good. I've been doing pretty well too. I managed to sneak in 1,000 hands of online poker this week. Care to dissect the results with me?
It's been a long time since I spent any serious amount of time at the virtual felt. Having withdrawn most of my funds after the last go-round, and using the remainder for things like staking some donkey in the WSOP, or paying some skinny-fat dude for a Yankee ticket, there wasn't much to work with. The grand sum of $160 was in my account. Being the responsible bankroll manager that I am, I took that money and farted around at the $0.50 / $1 tables, right? Of course not. I headed straight to $3/$6.
1,000 hands later, it's safe to say that I'm a donkey. It's rather embarassing to admit that, and a fairly distressing turn of events. I have two major leaks, which we'll get to in a moment. First, a word about the state of online play.
It's no secret to anyone who's been around this industry for many years that the games are not as soft as they used to be. It's a combination of things: (1) players have matured as they have logged thousands of hours playing; (2) the flow of new money into sites has slowed as poker gets played out on TV and the UIGEA closes off the spigot from a torrent to a trickle; (3) the bad players that remain go bust and have no easy means of reloading their accounts, leading to a natural thinning of the herd (so to speak).
In light of these three factors, it's no surprise that play at the tables revealed itself to be more aggressive, and less donk-tacular. There were still some donk-tacular plays, just not nearly as many as their used to be. With this backdrop, and with my general decline in frequency of play over the last two years, the online players have, relative to me, improved quite a bit.
Oh, and I'm a fucking donkey. Let's get right to that. My style seems not to have changed much from the last time I took any sort of stab at online poker. I'm playing a 20/13 pre-flop range, with a fairly smooth aggression factor curve after the flop of aggressive on the flop, super aggressive on the turn, and aggressive on the river. However, where my play deviates is revealed in the two glaring weaknesses I've developed, as revealed by PokerTracker.
(A) I seem to overvalue medium aces. My six loss leaders, by number of big bets lost per hand, in descending order, are: ATs, A5s, AJo, 75s, AJs, A9o. By themselves, those 6 hands, dealt to me a total of 33 times, account for losses of 57 big bets. Over 1,000 hands. Eek. (B) I cannot seem to fucking fold when it is obvious that I'm beat. The statistics bear it out: Went to Showdown -- 39.22% (this used to be more in the 35% area); Won $ at Showdown -- 48.75% (this used to be more in the 55% area); and the killer, Won $ at Showdown When Just Calling River: 12.00% (fucking abysmal).
There's a third weakness, called "once a session, F-Train goes complete fucking insane and donks off 5 or 6 bets in a huge pot he has no hopes of winning, usually defending his big blind", but that problem is easily corrected. The other two weaknesses are more complex.
Tackling (B) first, I think I need to just trust my intuition more. Playing 6-max got me in the habit of calling down more frequently, and that's not a winning strategy in a full ring game. Too many times, I put Villain on a hand on the turn, only to see myself calling turn raises and river bets to find out that yes, I was right. Hopefully, the combination of remembering that I'm calling too often, and knocking more rust off my game (by playing more) will curb this impulse, saving me bets that I don't need to give away.
(A), on the other hand, I'm not sure what to do. I could just eliminate those hands from my repertoire altogether, until I feel more secure in my game, and then add them back in one at a time. That doesn't feel completely right though. I'm open to suggestions as to how to deal with this problem.
The end result of my 1,000 hands showed me as a winner, but the amount -- 28 big bets -- is laughable and statistically irrelevant, especially since I was up 28 big bets after 200 hands. That's right, for 800 hands, I played solidly break-even poker, without losing to more than my share of suckouts. That's laughable. I should be able to beat $3/$6 handily, even online. (For what it's worth, $3/$6 online is tougher than $20/40 at the Borgata. I'm not kidding.) But "should" being able to do something doesn't equate to actually doing it, and just resting on that pomposity and ego is what leads to going busto.
Looks like I have some work to do.
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