After a frustrating session this morning and some sessions over the past few days, I'm back down to my initial $50 after being up five buyins earlier in the week. Overall there were a few hands that I made a mistake on that accounted for around 1-2 buyins, and the other 3 were from variance.

Biggest Mistakes:

1. Called a weak 3BB raise with AQo, shoved the turn when I hit the A and ran into AK. I nearly got the villain to fold, called me down at the last second.

2. Not firing two bullets against the right opponents. There were some hands that I could have taken down had I fired the turn instead of checking after cbetting.

Best Plays:

1. Raising with 66, getting two callers then a reraise, calculating the implied odds for a set and calling the reraise. Hit the set and then got check raised, which I shoved to crack someones Aces. Very standard, but it feels so good!

2. Taking down a ton of pots in position with cbets with pocket pairs.

Write down the money plays:

1. Raising to 8x the BB with Aces in the SB in a limped pot, getting two callers. Bet full pot on a decent board (4h, 8h, Js) with only a flush draw, and get shoved by an unknown. Fist-pump call. Turn Q and river 2 both appear to be blanks until the villain flips up 42o. He shoved with bottom pair and no draw and gets my stack. Luckily I knew to stop playing after this because I was a little tilted.

2. Raise with 10s, get shoved by a bad player with half a stack, I call. 4 junkers, then then an A hits on the river, villain shows A5o.

Best Lessons:

1. At $2Nl, there might be one player whose range isn't the whole deck, and it pays to know who that is.

2. Learning to identify the calling stations.

3. Learning to muck big cards in the face of a raise, even if you have been waiting many orbits for them.

4. KJo is frustrating to play, and KJs is not much better.

5. I can fold 50 hands in a session, pick up one big pot, and be better off than if I had played 5-10 of the 50.

It's back to the grindstone!