Late in 2013 I wanted to give NL another shot and hope to prove that poker is not rigged and that the long-term variances would always win.

Starting this year playing the lowest micro stakes 1c/2c in the Zoom format I was doing very well. It was harder to rise the bankroll for I was transfer funds to a friend. This guaranteed me profits as this player always pays. Like other players what they call easy money however.

Early in February after my bankroll moved to triple digits, I was able to try out the 2c/5c game and things kept going well. There were spells were I was breaking even over a week or weeks where gains were grinding at a very small level. In a day you are playing a few thousand hands and you will have some bad beats and some bad spots. Everything balances because you will have opponents in bad spots and have some play so bad the profits are guaranteed if your play remains solid.

For three days last week I was able to have some decent luck. I still had my share of suckouts and on one day in particular everyone was giving away their chips by playing very poorly. With the balance climbing over 250 I tried the 5c/10c game. What I would do to move into higher levels is play three tables of the current level (2/5) and one table on the higher one.

Sunday Morning. Balance is over 325 with a total sum of around 115,000 hands with a +10 BB/100 combined among all three levels. All of a sudden on two tables I get two very bad beats. The first was having KQ and flopping top two pair and a low rag card and two of a suit. I made a large flop bet and my opponent called and another rag fell on the turn. I was very confident that going all-in on the turn was smart for if this player had a hand like AK or AA I love giving this player a tough decision and may pay me off. If this player flopped bottom set, then its probably going to end this way anyway and if this player has JT or suits then I will force you to gamble for the wrong price. Player called with a flush draw and gutshot straight and hit the flush and the loss was 130bb's. Meanwhile on the other room I had AQ and flopped top pair queens against a relative short stack of 50 bb's. I had three bet this player preflop and on the turn when a blank pulled off I pushed my stack for JJ to call and then hitting his jack on the river.

Normally losing these two pots in a day is not that uncommon when you are playing 1500-7000 hands a day, but it did not stop there and has not shown signs yet of stopping.

Currently over the last 12,000 hands since Sunday Morning I am running at a BB/100 rate of about -6bb/100. It seems every aspect of the game is very cold and to get you. I can have KQ on a JT4 board with about 10 bb's in the pot and a bet of 5 I feel I should fold based on what the probabilities are. I could raise, but this will result in a larger pot and you just know you are going to miss. I could call, but are the implied odds to win up to 100bb possible? I already know that both calling and raising are both solid plays here and I never did fold those spots and my play was very good during this run. I used to tilt many years ago, but I do not tilt anymore. Maybe I do tilt, but tilting for me is not laying down JJ with a 984 board when I know I'm in trouble and still call anyway.

The interesting thing is this is about the ninth or tenth time over the last decade this has happened to me where I get an extreme long lasting heavy dose of this and I try and calculate the odds of being able to maintain a good game and experiencing this and its kind of astronomical.

My last session I had AK suited on the button and the action started with a 3x raise in early position and the hijack player 3betting standard amount. I said "FOLD" when I noticed that, but I had a note on the three better that said "3 bet garbage big in pos'n" as well as "caught triple barrell bluffing all-in" and "high VPP/PFR/3BET" I decided to raise 3x to his 3bet and was shoved all-in. I did call and this player had aces and another bad spot for me.

A few hands later I picked up AA and had made a very large preflop raise to the point where QJ hit top pair and ended up losing their entire stack. After seeing this I say to myself, "how am I losing at this extreme frequency when idiots play like this exists?" It seems that half the time when I win a full buy-in that its because of idiot play where hands reversed that scenario would not take place. The other half, yeah you did nothing wrong or you had a bad spot in set over set. I am now even on this session.

Later in the session I pick up AQs and min raise 2c/5c UTG with one middle position caller. Flop comes [3h 2s 8s] I lead out 0.20 and get min raised to 0.40. I felt my play was better to take the pot odds to call and not make a raise. [3h 2s 8s] [6s] I hit the nuts on the turn as the flush card comes with no board pair and no straight flush possible. I lead out a 0.50 bet and was raised to 2.55 and it was a no brainer for me to go all in for 5.31. I lost this hand because I was up against 22. I look back at the play here and notice my opponent only min raised me preflop and thus not protecting against my flush draw. Then when the flush card hit and I lead out this player felt it was best to pass on correct pot odds to "call" and make a big raise. It is very common for me to notice opponents playing horrible, but to get hands like this end so cruel about 200% more than normal it makes me wonder.

What I find interesting is that I am very strict in suited cards that I play. Almost 90% of the time I go into a flop with suited cards it is either KQ, KJ or ace high suited. I hate 78s, even JTs for several reasons. My theory is that because everyone else goes out of their way to play suited anything that over many hands I will usually be the one ahead in flush versus flush. So far that has not been the case as the only time this year I have won flush versus flush was when I had 8high suited without yet hitting an ace high flush and opponent hitting flush as well. This is another math head scratcher, but maybe I need a million hands to see the variance here.

Im going to go back playing and wondering if I should expect to lose over the next thousand hands. Why do cold streaks sometimes seem to take forever to end. These constant streaks has been what has stopped me from making it big in the business to barely making five digits net sum.

If you read some, most of all of this, all I can say is wow

;

Spiderman

Rob wins thread