Sickening

September 26, 2009 by Mark Stuart

Can’t believe my last blog was about two months ago – where does time go these days?! I’m sure there’s less hours in the day since I turned 30 nearly a year ago.

Anyway, I want to say something about poker – I hate it. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! Just when you think you’ve got it licked it reaches inside you, rips out your heart and smushes it in its grubby mitt.

As I’ve said in previous posts I’ve finally made the conversion to cash games from sit-and-gos and tournaments, and for the most part, I’m enjoying it far more. No more playing for five hours to go out on the bubble, no more all-in fests with razor-thin edges if you’re lucky, and – I was hoping – I would have some lovely profit to show for it.

But I haven’t. It’ 1.54am and I’m writing this because I’ve had a couple of stinking days. I’m starting from scratch with 6-max cash games and trying to beat the 25NL and 50NL games before moving up. Two days ago I was beating the 25NL game for nearly 14BB/100 and now it’s down to less than 2BB/100 after about 7,500 hands. I was nearly sick in my mouth tonight with the amount of horrific outdraws, coolers and general bad beats. I played well at first limiting the losses, but I seemed to become a bit of a station towards the end of the session and that is something I know I’ll have to work on. But I know most of it was down to tilt.

Here’s a great illustration, though, from my last hand of the night. I raise UTG with JTs and get 3-bet from guy to my left; I’m tilting so I call. Flop comes 5-Q-3 and I check, he checks too, which I thought was very odd. One thought popped into my mind straight away though – he’s flopped top set with QQ and is now trying to slowplay. Anyway, turn is a J, so now I have second pair. I check, he bet $5 into pot of around $6.50. Everything in my body told me to fold, so I called. River is a blank, I check, he bets $11.25 and I of course make the call, only for him to – you guessed it- flip up QQ for top set. I laughed, immediately closed down the poker site and decided to write this. I have to get it off my chest and the weight does seem to be lifting as I type.

Anyway, my Hold’em Manager graph is looking very sick, and according to the light green line I’m running nearly $400 below expectation over nearly 14,000 hands. At 25NL and 50NL!!! I think that’s maybe 6-7 BB/100 below EV. SICK!!

Back to the tables tomorrow I guess – would be nice to turn some kind of profit this month, and weekends are full of bad recreational players so hopefully I should get some back.

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