Peace out

Taking a break from teh poker. Its what the doctor ordered. Playing bad and dumb, trying to win all pots, never folding / making terrible folds. Not sure what sparked it all but hopefully a week off will cure what ails meh.

What? Variance in poker? WTF

This month has been absolutely fucked. Not two sessions have gone by without a $1k swing in either direction. I'm slowly losing my mind.

My once glorious new fishing hole has become a sea of nits, not willing to put a god damn penny in the pot without a set. And each time they check raise me, I always say to myself, "no way they have another fucking set". One stack later I find out that they do.

That line has been one of the most costly for me. Whenever any player, good or bad makes a bet that is basically only representing one hand (betting the river when the flush comes, etc) immediately I think, "oh he is just REPRESENTING the flush, no way is he going to be this obvious about it. And besides, I only need to be right like 1 in 3 times here to make money in the long run". It seemingly never works out for me.

Anyways, I had a concept in mind when I started this post. Its about extracting value from your hand at a table where every player is either loose/passive, or tight/passive. That is, you aren't going to be making any money catching people bluffing, or them overplaying their top pair/overpair type hands. In theory the only way to make money at this type of table is to value bet the shit out of the loose/passive players, and bluff a lot vs the tight/passive players.

This is old news.

But you'll still need cards to make any substantial money it seems. Sure you can steal Mr tightys blind every time, until he wakes up with a hand. And then since you've been bluffing him so much, he knows you'll be apt to fire more shells at him. He gets smart, slowplays his hand, and bam, another buyin gone for you. Its a trap I've been falling in regularly because I'm so desperate to make some money off all the tight/passive players that have come about. I think ultimately I just need to take my shots at all the extremely small pots they let me have, and shut down quicker when they show interest.

Poker is hard, even when your opponents suck.

All's quiet on the home front

Not much doin' in the land o' RikkiDee lately. Still not playing as much as I'd like to, and definitely not making as much as I'd like to (obvious). Since I took half of the month off, I couldn't expect much in the way of profits this month, but I'm still slacking to catch up regardless.

Its been almost 3 months since I (re)started playing cash games and I'm starting to feel pretty comfortable. I now know I'm not the best player, and I think just knowing that makes me more money. When I start thinking I'm too good, I get into win-every-pot mode and end up losing more.

Poker is funny that way. Especially at the limits that I play. Why don't I go eat some hay? Down by the bay? I just may.

Ahem, at the mid limits, you get a lot of guys who "know" how to play. They've worked there way through the micro limits and know how to beat the bad players. They know about relative hand values and how not to overplay their hands. And in theory they are the players that I should be able to take advantage of, if I can stay one step ahead of them.

The problem is, while they know not to stack off with just top pair vs a bad player, they'll jump out of their seat trying to get top pair all in vs a player like me. A player like me, is in essence a player like them, so they almost always figure if I'm pushing hard, I'm bluffing. They've seen it before and know they are prime targets to be bluffed due to their tightness. And since big hands don't come around that often, any aggression on my part is probably out of line.

All of that is kind of a roundabout way of saying that I still need improvement trying to "outplay" the regulars. And while a case could be made that theres no need to even worry about outplaying them consistently because most profits are made from the truly bad players, I'm always looking for additional edges. And also, if I ever want to move up in limits, I'll need to beat the regulars, or at least the bad regulars. I'm definitely improving, but like I mentioned earlier, the more confidence I get, the more pots I feel belong to me, and somehow I just get called down too often with trash.

Weird how that works.

Pretty much a filler post since I haven't been too active, but still a good tracking of my current thought process.

C+

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming

I'm such a little bitch.

I don't know how many times I've gotten the sand out of my vagina, only to find more in there weeks later.

Throughout the past year+ I've gone through some sick downswings and variance, and each time I feel like the sky is falling. And each time I recover fairly quickly and I feel like a douche for overreacting. This last downswing was no exception.

I think it was mostly due to the fact that since playing on this new site, I haven't had a losing session. So when I got bitchslapped to the tune of thousands of lost buyins, I quickly regressed to the hopeless bitch that I always do.

But I'm back even now. Man that was a fun ride. My new site doesn't exactly support poker tracker so I couldn't make a graph to show. But I decided to go through my hand histories anyways and construct a graph.

I feel its pretty damn accurate.

Emo rant

one thing that will forever suck about poker is when you lose, no one fucking gives a shit. Even if someone did listen to your story about your losses, they'll never understand. You simply can't convey how unprobable your losses are to anyone. And sometimes its not even how unprobable they were, its how they happened. It's like watching a baseball game. Yea, you see the score at the end and you watched the highlights on sportscenter, but unless you watched the whole game, you can't come near to understanding the drama that may have occurred.

And I don't even know what it is about losing that people feel the need to be heard, but its definitely a constant in poker. People can't stop talking about their losses -> no one gives a shit.

I had the worst day of my career today. And its going to take a serious gut check to get back in the game because this one ruined me.

edit - oh and this

Rikkidee1 was dealt: 8c - 7s

tjoffe Fold
mrAndreew Fold
Ellen2006 Fold
SirStaarx Fold
Blujee Raise (5.00)
RikkiDee1 Call (4.00)

Flop Ac - 2h - Tc

Blujee Bet (10.00)
RikkiDee1 Raise (36.00)
Blujee Raise (105.00)
RikkiDee1 All-In (274.77)
Blujee Call (195.77)

Turn Ac - 2h - Tc - Qh
River Ac - 2h - Tc - Qh - 8s

Blujee shows: Ad - As (three of a kind, aces)
RikkiDee1 shows: 8c - 7s (a pair of eights)