I've got a terrible headache and I won't be partying like it's 1999 tonight, so I may as well do my review of the year now.
2017 was bad. Very bad. While I'm grateful to have formed new friendships with some wonderful poker people, and enjoyed following their progress, I spent a lot of time going backwards, both in poker and in life. I spent much of the year being ill and depressed, and - if I focus on the monetary value of virtual chips - I had by far the worst poker results of my so-called career. Even though I know a
little bit about variance, getting destroyed in tournaments came as a great shock after winning so effortlessly in 2016. At times, it
felt like the games on Unibet were rigged against me. I couldn't win at 10NL or even 4NL, and the tournaments - especially the UK25 satties - were processions of runbad. Of course my tourney sample size was small enough to be considered largely meaningless, but that doesn't make it any less painful. My weekly spreadsheets were full of minus signs and red numbers, and I came close to quitting the game several times. It just stopped being fun.
One of the few positives about 2017 is that I feel I improved my understanding of poker theory. I learned quite a bit about ICM when I had a three month subscription to ICMizer, but I learned even more by reading a couple of books (Janda's second in particular), being very active on the forums, discussing spots with Skype/Twitter buddies, and putting in the hours with Snowie. In the final month of the year, I crushed the Snowbots in my training sessions, getting
my first sub-5.00 monthly error rating of the year, and winning at a ludicrous 31bb/100. I'm yet to make a blunder in the 300 hands of my latest batch of 1000 hands, so my #SnowieChallenge stats for the year look like this:
Unfortunately, being able to play a pseudo-GTO style against a bunch of robots doesn't necessarily translate to beating real people that have exploitable leaks. I think I've mentioned this before, but I have a lot of trouble adjusting to random players, due to my resistance to deviating from what I've learned is "correct", and my autistic inability to understand the thought processes of under-skilled players. When I can't understand a strategy, I struggle to work out how to beat it. :/
Before I digress too much, let's get on to the real money results and giraffes.
Let's start with the very small sample of cashgames I played on Unibet at 4NL, 10NL, and 25NL. (All games I crushed in previous years). This is a pathetic sample, mostly from the first 3 months of the year, as I originally planned to focused on tourneys this year, so I only played cash if I had a ticket from a promo/rakeback. I only post the graph for my future self to look back and laugh at. I actually did best at the Banzai push-fold games, which are mostly just luck anyway.
Tourneys on Unibet went horribly after the first few weeks of the year. I didn't keep track of my ROI in 2016, but I'd estimate it was close to 50%. In 2017, it went to minus 15. My buy-ins were much higher than the previous year, but the games didn't seem much tougher. I just ran horrendously at the handful of 50s and 100s I played. (No cashes at all at 50+).
Losing more than 600 euros would have been unthinkable a year ago (I've never had more than 300 quid in my account), but I'll repeat what I've said a number of times in this thread: Some of the games were on free tickets, and I didn't lose a single cent of folding money (I somehow still cashed out a couple of times). I've also still got a ticket roll of about 750 euros, so I'll still be playing stupid games (satties) in 2018.
Some time in the middle of the year I played a little bit of Zoom and didn't win, but it was nice to get back to playing 100bb deep and have access to HUD stats and a database of hands to analyse. The results from June/July are in another database, but I think I more or less broke even. In October, I started grinding (if you can call 3000 hands a week "grinding") on Stars again. It took me a while to get up to speed, not least because I couldn't manage more than 1 table at first. (I'm comfortable with 2 now, but I'll never be a mass-tabler). The 2NLz players are better at poker than Unibet's tourney players, but they play somewhat differently and it's been interesting to work out the field's tendencies. It was only in the final few weeks of the year that I accepted that I was overthinking and trying to be "too clever" against terrible players. While it might be useful/important to do use fancy overbets and slowplays at higher stakes, 2NL can still be beaten with a basic ABC strategy, albeit one enhanced by study of theory. By cutting down on my fancy plays, and improving my discipline a little, I reduced the tilt and variance and bounced back strongly after a hideous 17 buy-in downsw0ng. The games over Christmas seemed particularly good, and thanks to running well against donators I finished the year with a sweet upswing of 20 buy-ins in 8000 hands. Here's the graph for all my cashgames on Stars since October 1st:
The breakdown by stake shows a familar story. Every time I took a little stab at 5NLz or 10NLz, I quickly lost a stack or two, but I'm convinced it was just bad card distribution and general runbad. FWIW, I hated almost every minute I played on the regular (non-Zoom) tables. They might be softer in general, but I found them incredibly annoying, as tables kept dying just as I was getting into my groove.
It's kind of weird/annoying, but despite crushing 2NL every time I've played it since 2012, and briefly getting as high on 50NL on Unibet (where I was at the start of this thread), I'm pretty sure I'm a lifetime loser at 5NLz and 10NLz on Stars. That annoyance is going to form the basis of my goals for 2018. I haven't formulated the exact goal/structure yet, but I think I'm going to attempt to go from 5NLz to 50NLz using aggro BRM. (I apparently love setting myself up to fail!)
I'll start a new thread and let everyone know when I begin that challenge.
For now, I want to thank everyone who provided positive input in this thread and elsewhere on the forum. I appreciate it. Hopefully some of you will follow me to the new thread when I post the link.
Happy New Year!