Losing that loving feeling

I have to admit, it takes something very significant in poker to get my attention these days. I'm confident in my longterm winrate and my brain has become (relatively) desensitized to the natural swings that poker brings. This relegates my brain to just "mindlessly" play through the variance to achieve said winrate. Obviously big wins and losses still affect me, but the scales have changed dramatically since I first started.

Take for instance this week. I played solid all week and brought in an above average haul. Friday night I get drunk and play and drop $1.5k. And to be honest, I could really care less. Sure I'll have to put in an extra few hours at the table to make up for it but thats it. I know its coming back, its just a matter of time. While this confidence is helpful in playing the game of poker, it also could have dangerous side effects.

Since my emotions have become increasingly less of a factor when playing I tend to play a much more robotic game. This style is a winning style (for now) but I'm positive I'm not challenging myself to improve. And if you lose the desire to improve and adapt in poker, you lose the desire to win.

All this can also been seen in the microcosm of my life as well. When I read back on this blog throughout the years, I can see myself giving less and less attention to individual hands. I can go on stretches of 10-20k hands where I don't really feel the need to post a single hand. Most of the time when I am reflecting on the hands I played that day I can quickly assign the net result into a few categories that I've already "dealt with" in my psyche. For example if I lost a pot with Kings vs Aces preflop it doesn't even hit my radar since it was an inevitability and just part of variance - therefore I can quickly stash that away in the the variance drawer. If another hand I overplay my hand and lose my stack, I can put that in the "I'm a retard" drawer. Trust me that one is overflowing.

But rare is the hand where I can identify a unique problem that actually makes me question my entire game. This type of hand used to be a daily occurrence. Obviously this makes sense due to the fact that if I play more hands I'm going to become more familiar with situations that become common. But the fact that I rarely get riled up over an individual hand still scares me. I need that emotion to keep my brain active. I need it to continue to become a better poker player.

Its interesting, this phenomenon. It is often said that emotion and poker must be separated for success to occur. And while I believe this to be true on a basic level, it starts to lose its merits once your game becomes stale and dormant due to the loss of total life emotion in general.

What it comes down to for me I think is that I need to continuously be challenged to keep the passion alive. However the only real way to do this in poker is to move up in stakes, which is always a scary proposition, but is something I really must always keep in mind for my long term goals. At the levels I'm at right now I can make a very comfortable income and its easy to become comfortable doing so. However for the sake of my long term overall game, its a necessity.

The Great Shortstacking Experiment

I've been really sick lately, and playing with a headache and sore throat isn't fun or profitable. I'm actually having troubles even writing this as my head just isn't in the right place. But I still have needed to work, so I've been experimenting with shortstacking cash games for the past week.

"Shortstacking" is basically buying in to a table for the minimum and mostly going all in preflop facing raises. I can do this without paying much attention at all, and my sit&go background helps out immensely as its mostly about math and ranges. I can also play 12 tables with ease, which technically has the potential for more income than 4-5 tabling 400NL full stack assuming a similar win rate. Whats interesting is I can actually achieve a similar win rate shortstacking compared to fullstacking. It's not quite that high, but for no real effort or thought, its a decent substitute.

Whats also interesting is that its despised throughout the poker world - especially if you are good at it. Poker players hate it because it pretty much ruins the "game" meaning that too many pots become about preflop decisions, and not about the multistreet ones. It also has an effect of shutting out the fish as if a tag raises and I push fish will just fold, and tags have to play vs my perfect pushing range preflop instead of bad fish postflop. But, fuck em, I'm sick.

Like sit&go's, variance is a huge factor, and 100% beyond your control. Because you are going all in preflop hundreds of times you are completely at the mercy of the cards, and sometimes the runs can get real ugly. However, only the long run is important, and thats all that I'm concerned with. But, just to show you how stupid things can get, heres a graff.




























Another poker EV graph. The red line is what I should have won in my all ins, and the blue line is what I did win. The chart below identifies the exact numbers. The important number is the "Net Run (All-Ins)" where is states that I've lost -$1587.07 in equity. To put that in perspective, I buy in for $40 at a time. Being down $1587 that means I'm down a ridiculous 39.7 buyins JUST IN EQUITY. So in the long run I'll win lots of monies, but right now I just gotta take it up the ass.

and thats it for now, I need to go back to bed