The year after I got married.

So having played a few hands and reminded myself how frustrating this game can be I guess its time for a quick review:

Hands played : 2214 (2NL FR)
Result : -$4.21

Its obvious looking through Holdem Manager that the figures are not generally that helpful due to the sample size. However, after some scrutiny it appears my leakiest action is flat calls on the flop, where i have lost far to many smaller pots. Adjustment of this action, by not calling any mid pairs, or top pair bad kicker, and the odd draw with bad pot odds would have left me break even which seems like a decent improvement, assuming I'm also right about a few other errors made on individual hands worth a total of around $3. The flop calls saw no significant wins, but instead a myriad of 5/20bb losses.

I think my psychology was often that I was probably ahead at the flop and didn't want to give that up, however the poor showdown value of my hands left me with folding to any action as the only real option at the turn/river, which would almost always also see cards that further weakened my hand. There would surely be occasions where my hand strength increased, but obviously these are not common, and even where they do happen there is a seems to me a limited range of hands that my opponents would have paid up for to any significant action, and when they do pay up I'm probably exposing myself to the risk of having 2nd bests a lot of the time aswell.

Floating the flop to bet the turn is also obviously a valid enough move but I strongly suspect that I am almost totally unable to determine the right situation for this at the moment.

..........

Interestingly, all this led me to think a lot about the value of raising rather than calling in many situations in general earlier in the hand, especially with position. I think I have a lot of fear about getting burnt with TPTK hands by playing too fast and getting too much money in early so I tend to call bets rather than play the hand aggressively. Its hard for me to gauge, I seem to get burnt on these hands alot more often than not, yet at the same time I frequently observe large pots being won by such hands. Maybe I'm better to raise in spots like that, I can probably push some better hands out, give weaker hands the chance to make a bad call and find out if I'm badly beaten all with the one flop action rather than cautiously calling my way through multiple streets with no idea whats going to happen.. the idea probably needs some testing I suppose, and as always it will depend on so many other factors.

Speaking of raising, -

In this hand I didn't really know what I should do, I only have 4 hands on villain.

NL Holdem $0.02(BB)
SB ($0.98)
BB ($1.81)
UTG ($0.36)
UTG+1 ($1.61)
Hero ($2.06)
MP1 ($2.01)
CO ($0.66)
BTN ($2)

Dealt to Hero A K

fold, UTG+1 raises to $0.10, Hero raises to $0.28, fold, CO calls $0.28, fold, fold, fold, UTG+1 raises to $0.68 Now what?

Is this a fold? I feel like with the caller there is no way I'm not facing big pairs here, the caller probably has a small edge on me with a lower PP, anything up to QQ, and the raiser could easily have AA/KK and even if he doesn't I still don't see myself being ahead so I think it seems like a fold..

But thats what I thought later after I burnt the money..

.............

All that aside, I managed to tackle a relatively new chopin etude the last few days, its been on my to do list for a while as I quite like it but it did my head in a while ago when I first had a go. The chopin etudes are a set of extremely ballsy technical studies for piano that are a bit of a staple in the diet of the average concert pianist. There are 24 of them in total. These pieces of music changed the way piano was thought about when they were written, pushing the barriers of what was physically possible and can take the better part of a lifetime to thoroughly master. I can play a few of them well, and a lot of them badly..

Check out the pretty blond girl playing the one I'm working on here.. I won't be playing it that quickly for a while.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43mvd1lKd3k

..

In other news, due to my wife's chronic inflammatory pain condition called Ankylosing Spondilitis we have decided to go through a kind of detox diet for the next two weeks. This involved consuming only juice/smoothies filled with more fruit in a single dose that I would like to eat in a week. Today was day one. I could use a slice of bread and something meaty right about now.

So after some swing-swonging I feel like after today's session I've finally reigned myself in from my most troublesome errors and can start moving forward more positively.

My stats bar today's session have run a bit wide I think, around 20/12 which strikes me as being a pretty fair margin outside ideal for a FR game. I tightened up a lot more UTG and in the MP today, as well as started raising 55-99 in unopened pots where previously I had been limping. I also tightened up my blind stealing range a bit, which had previously been pretty wild. AND (this is probably the most significant) I started folding to standard raises preflop with weaker unpaired hands like AJ, KJ/KQ that are often dominated.

The zoom games seem to suit me better, i get too involved in the standard games out of impatience I think. Probably just need to work on some self discipline.

Today I ran at 13/9 over 1600 hands and also had this kind of semi zen brain click where I started to think a lot more clearly about appropriate places to cbet based on position, and board texture. I had good results today, partially thanks to the fact that I managed to let go of my TP type hands when facing aggression, and partially thanks to a few nutters who paid my rockets on PR all ins.

I'm still down overall, but I feel much more stable because I think I played better. I find that if I get a bad beat (and I've had a couple so far) it tends not to have much of an effect on me emotionally, but when i screw up and know it that really tilts me. Fast.

Interesting point for the day's review:
My worst performing preflop scenario is facing a single raiser, where I've dropped 518bb over 5500 hands. Interestingly though, the same situation is +29bb if the sb/bb is removed from the equation, so perhaps that is not really relevant.

Overall my blind play is -666bb, based on the number of hands played the total cost of the blinds should be 927.5bb so I'm theoretically winning from that position perhaps, but I wonder if I should be doing better from there. We will have to see as more hands come through the system I guess before making any concrete adjustments there.

Here's my graph so far: