Quote:
Originally Posted by AllUpInMyKoolAid
Hi All,
This past 12 months I have been working on my own 1k hour challenge at 1/2 NL. Needless to say it's not going well. I have been only able to play 8-10 hours every two weeks, but I'm down 6.5 buyins at 200 hrs.
The challenge though has taught me a lot. I have gotten better at categorizing players and thinking more critically about hands. Been a struggle to apply this to my game but I'll get there. I need to get in the habit of thinking at the table. After a day or two and thinking about the hand it seems a lot clearer. I just need to think at the table.
I have also just been introduced to variance, and boy is it a *****. I have taken a 10 buyin hit over the last three sessions due to running cold with limited premium hands, and 2nd best when I do hit. Since this challenge has began,I have lost 8/10 of the biggest pots I have played.
AA < KK twice for ~650 each
AA < 44. Dude flopped quads.
AA < 10-8os for 1300 - biggest pot I have ever played. I botched the flop big time.
10-9 < 44 ~780 - turned flush vs a set. Money goes in, he binks river
88 < QJ on J 8 2 board. Runner runner straight for 850. He went bonkers on flopand got it all in.
Oh well. I'll get there. Variance eventually turns right? RIGHT!?!?! :-)
Best of luck at the tables everyone. I look forward to updating progress soon.
Ha, thanks for the thread bump!
I'll be updating it again in another 320 hours or when I go busto, which ever comes first.
A 10 BI hit is obviously possible, but at the same time it is probably also one you should be a little concerned about too. I haven't quite had a 10 BI downswing yet, although I'm currently digging out of my second 9.5 BI downswing. For example: I'm assuming those AA vs KK hands were all-in preflop? If so, nothing to worry about; but if only a small percentage of stacks went in preflop and the bulk of the 215 bbs went in postflop, then you might want to evaluate your play. Ditto for the AA < 44 (again, if decent percentages of stacks went in preflop, especially HU, probably fine). Without seeing the exact HHs its hard to evaluate, but they could also easily just be coolers / run bad.
The scope of variance is probably a thing most of us will never fully wrap our heads around, it can be quite a monster. For example, lets say you play 10 pots this year getting in the money as a 80/20 fave and run at exactly EV, winning 8 and losing 2; however, it's possible the 8 pots you won were all small ones, while the 2 you lost were huge ones. You could still "run at EV" overall, in 80/20 spots, and still be a big loser! Course, over your lifetime (lol, like that means anything in poker), you should hopefully run near EV in all your big pots. But how many big pots will you really play? Might not be nearly as many as you think. This year I've gotten in $400+ (130+ bbs) twice preflop that I can remember (AK vs 63o and AK vs QJ vs ATC) and lost them both; if I had of won those two hands, my winrate this year would be 50% (!!!) higher than what it is over a ~500 hour sample size to date this year. Not that winning them would be running at EV (it would be running way over EV), but simply an example of how running good in big pots makes a huge difference over even a non-trivial sample size. Earlier this year someone popped into the chat thread and stated something along the lines of how his whole year was saved by winning a single hugenormous pot.
Anyways, just my rambling 2 cents, and good luck moving forward.
ETA: Also, as Mike says above, these are some pretty massive pots that I rarely see played in my 1/3 NL game. In which case, you will probably experience some pretty wild swings (where booking a 10 BI downswing will be a lot easier to accomplish).
GIswearthatisnotmyalternateaccount!G