The past two days have been particularly disgusting. The beats I have taken are tremendously awful (AKs vs 83o, QQ vs 55, KK vs KK!!). I won't bore you with the whining details, but I'll just say that I've started to wonder if I seriously did something to piss off the poker gods. I also began to wonder if I simply suck, or have been so out of practice that it's inevitable that I'll go through a series of losses before getting back on track.
My best finish? In a freeroll! Perusing the list of sit n goes a Poker After Dark one pops up, and thankfully I still have lightening-fast reflexes, as I was able to get in the 360-seat, winner-only advances tournament. If you've ever played in one of these, you've seen the insanity that ensues: it's NOT uncommon to see 4 or 5 people all-in on the first or second hand! Not a bad strategy, I guess: it's free, and you need a TON of chips to make it deep. I avoided the madness though, and played my super-duper-tight strategy that typically works alright. At one point, I was up to something like 20K in chips, had seen a grand total of 5 flops, won all 3 showdowns I had, won the 2 others with preflop bets, and had won 2 pots preflop. That's it - a grand total of 7 pots in about 3 hours! Where did I finish? 5th. Of course there's no way I could possibly play that tight at the final table, but if anyone had been paying attention to such things I probably would have been considered one of the biggest NITS they'd seen. The ending for me would probably startle young children and cause cardiac arrhythmia in the elderly, so I'll hang on to that myself.
Checking out my sharkscope stats, my ROI looks like a big V: a peak on the $2 tourny's, a straight line down to the $5, and a straight line up to $10. Which means that I do best in $2's and $10's, but suck profusely at $5's. Not sure I get that, but - whatever. Since venturing back into the online gaming world, I have yet to play a $10 sit n go, as even though the stats point to my doing better in them, I've been running so poorly that it just seems like it'd be a waste of $10 that I could have used to donk around in 5 $2 games. Another thing to consider, too, is this: $2.25 / 18-seat tourny's pay just a little less than the $5 / 6-seaters do for 1st and 2nd. Just a few dollars, but I think it may make $$ sense to stick to the $2/18's for now until I start running better, or playing better.
I dunno... maybe I do suck at this game. It's tough sometimes to keep remembering that I've won a good amount of cash and a few tournaments, gone deep in a large number of tournaments, won an OK amount in online cash games online and live.... And now I play in a deep-stacked $26 tournament, and can't get squat going. I have found myself playing more timid online than I remember playing, yet I also can't bring myself to push back -- someone re-raises me, and even though I have an OK hand, I don't push back because I may be beat. I've been sometimes playing scared, I know. And I have to get over that.
I'm looking forward to my Vegas trip in August (yea, you read right: I chose August to go to Las Vegas - brilliant!). I'm psyched to get back to a live NL cash game. I'm staying away from the limit tables until I have a big enough bankroll where I can play bigger games. While I know they'll all be filled with fair-number of donks, they most heavily populate the 3-6 games.
- thePokerDegen
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