Making a copy of a post I just made over at my blog http://www.gen-xxx.com

So as I said in my last WoW post, I was getting a little burnt out and needed to get back to something and that something was poker, and I’m glad I have.

I stopped playing at the start of the year after an horendous december that saw me having 1 winning day for the month. I decided after I got home from visiting my folks that I’d take time out to go back over hand histories, rewatch some training videos and replays of hands I had played, check my stats and reread a couple of books. After going over my stats and checking hand histories, along with PokerEV graphs, it seemed that pretty much I was just behind on luck where none of my draws were hitting or I was getting rivered by hands like J2 making 2 pair against KK etc rather than a lot of bad play.

Yes there was some donkage in there but mostly it was just short-term variance that was compounded by me not playing enough hours to counteract it, so I’d get behind on a couple of tables and then have something come up that I had to do to help my folks out, or go somewhere etc that meant I had to leave the tables without having a chance to recover as I got into a better flow on the tables and started getting reads on players. I have a major leak in my game where I will quite often get stuck on at least 2 tables making light call-downs for information in situations hwere I may just be good and then over the next few hours get myself back up into the black for the night, so if I get to a point where I can’t spend at least 4 or 5 hours straight on the tables I will likely end up stuck and that was what happened.

Anyway, had some other stuff going on with poker so I decided to spend time playing WoW while that was sorted and to also help clear my mind of poker since I knew when I was ready to play again I’d feel it. Friday came last week and my desire to play WoW disappeared and my mind was telling me I had to install my room clients and pokertracker and pokeroffice and get into the game, so I did. I spent about 3 hours playing at PokerStars before bed and was doing ok but a little tired so I logged….30 minutes in bed and I just had to open up PokerStars again and get back to it so I did…..7 hours later, at 11am, I fell back into bed having played 2200 hands of 6-max limit with a win-rate of 10bb/100….ship it.

Last 3 days since then I have played another 2000 hands and my winrate is down to about 7.8bb/100 with a total of 348BB won since I restarted saturday morning. I’m sure this is just some positive variance kicking in but I also know I am playing better, making better reads and more importabtly, better laydowns. I’m also actually practising table-selection now rather than just taking what is available, ie I’ll wait for a seat at a table with 68% players per flop than just sit at the first one open, even if it’s only 28% players per flop, and I think this has been the major factor to my crushing it…I am playing the tables with the worst players on them, the ones that are playing any two cards (and given I have people in PokerTracker now that have 80% VP$IP over 250+ hands I know it’s not an anomoly), and so I can just wait for decent hands and value-bet them to hell. This is also allowing me to move my game away from where it used to be and open it up a bit from TAG to SLAG, getting a feel for playing a slightly wider range than I used to and learning to understand where something like JQo is behind to someone even if it was ahead of their range preflop…I have moved from 20/9 previously to 32/12 player now, and yes I still have to lower my VP$IP (need to stop playing so much from the blinds even when getting a good price, along with Axs from before the CO) and up my pfr (this is still low because of the players I’m facing, there is no point raising something like JQs/55/etc from any position when you are getting 4+ players per flop that won’t fold…would rather leave that for hands I’d usually 3-bet).

I’m going to try to keep this up for the rest of the month and am trying to play 30k hands this month just to force myself back into the game, and also to make sure I stay around long enough to recover my initial donk-offs. The only thing that might cause me to stop playing before finishing 1k hands on a night would be if I get majorly ahead and then start donking off like I noticed I was doing last night. After about 200 hands I was 70bb up for the night yet after I finished I was only 26bb up and looking through PokerTracker showed me why, I started losing focus and calling down stupid things where I knew I was beat and by what just because “I’m way up for the night, will only cost me 1bb to see”…essentially the same thoughts that go through my head at the start of the night, and also by calling down ultra-light against the donks because bottom pair is often good against them. Maybe I need to just start beleiving them when they lead out and then reraise me on a board of 252 for instance.