I recently made a PG&C thread, and then I very quickly decided to have a different relationship with poker than I expected I would in 2021.

I made that earlier thread with the idea that I wouldn’t be playing a lot, and then I decided to start playing a lot again, for a handful of somewhat unsurprising reasons: I had some free time that I didn’t plan on and I did the math on what kind of hourly I could reasonably expect if I started to rebuild back to my old stomping grounds.

PLO cash is my specialty, but I’ll play some NLH cash if I don’t need to play exclusively against solid regs and I’ve never been able to escape the draw of MTTs’ fun and profitability. It’s always satisfying to make a final table, and MTTs just seem like they’re going to be beatable as long as any kind of poker will be. (Also, speaking of final tables, I play STTs a bit too. Little bit of everything over here!)

Not long ago, I was chasing the proper poker pro dream, and it just went discouragingly poorly. I took a few modest shots at live MTTs and went on a pretty improbable cashless streak, and online I ran many cash BIs and MTT BBs below EV. Not the best path to building a poker career.

Thanks to good BRM (outside of live shots) I never actually went broke, but the amount of objective bad luck I’d faced was enough to make the difference between having a pretty invulnerable professional bankroll and still trying to build one. And I had spent so long trying to build that bankroll already that I just needed to stop playing for a while. I wasn’t willing to be disappointed again.

But here I am again, and I’m willing to be disappointed, haha… I think.

That’s actually a big part of the purpose of this thread: my results-related goals are so unglamorous that I didn’t think they merited a thread (I basically just want to maintain a healthy small-stakes hourly; I have very little desire to play above PLO200 and need to digest those USD swings), but I still have mental game leaks that I’m trying to overcome.

In one sense, I can excuse myself for getting bent out of shape over running bad when it happens, due to the arguably life-changing runbad I had to endure. It’s borderline traumatic, you know? And I obviously hope that things go significantly better this time. (They have so far, for the most part. I’m way below MTT EV BBs the past couple of weeks, but oh well.)

In another sense, perfecting my mental game means truly and deeply getting over that quasi-traumatized feeling and frankly being a better loser.

I’m still not above complaining about things (I've done a little bit of it in this very post, haha). If I’ve had a stretch of losing more all-in races (or facing more expensively improbable situations) than I feel like I should, I still take it kind of personally (even if intellectually I know I shouldn’t). Even though it thankfully doesn’t affect my decision-making very much, it’s an unpleasant and unproductive feeling that I should be better at processing by now.

This isn’t to say that this is going to be a purely emotional journal or something. I expect to post some analysis, some brags, and some beats. (Hopefully not too many self-pitying or angry beats… that would defeat the purpose of my mental game challenge!)

Overall, I think my actual poker goal is to become a better loser while winning a nice (but not island-shopping) amount of money. I’m pretty confident about the second part (if I can run somewhat close to EV; it’s promised to nobody, though), but the mental game stuff is the bigger challenge.

First

glgl

Let's kick this off with a goofy (and, at the time, infuriating) NL50 cash HH.

NL Holdem 0.50(BB)
SB ($84.24)
HERO ($50)
HJ ($69.46)
CO ($46.05)
BTN ($63.72)

Dealt to Hero: 8 7

HJ Raises To $1.50, CO Folds, BTN Folds, SB Folds, HERO Raises To $5.50, HJ Calls $4

Hero SPR on Flop: [3.96 effective]
Flop ($11.25): 8 K 3
HERO Checks, HJ Bets $5.84 (Rem. Stack: $58.12), HERO Calls $5.84 (Rem. Stack: $38.66)

Turn ($22.93): 8 K 3 8
HERO Checks, HJ Bets $3 (Rem. Stack: $55.12), HERO Raises To $37.73 (Rem. Stack: $0.93), HJ Calls $34.73 (Rem. Stack: $20.39)

River ($98.39): 8 K 3 8 K
HERO Checks, HJ Bets $20.39 (allin), HERO Calls $0.93 (allin)

HJ shows: A K

HJ wins: $97.75

Turn was, as you might expect, a misclick. I clicked my overbet shortcut button and I really thought it was all of my chips when I saw the amount in the text box.

I was wrong and this hand kicked my NL50 EV WR pretty hard. This is another mental game thing: I can get a little bit egomaniacal about my EV WR to maintain confidence in my game, and knowing that I "should" have the $EV of this hand's turn equity in my database is kind of frustrating.

It doesn't help that I'm really not sure if I'm a favorite at NLH cash. Over the past few years, I honestly haven't had a positive EV WR at NLH cash overall, but the EV WR I see is not beyond the bounds of variance amidst winning play (and I've been improving over this entire period, too, so I don't want to assess my NLH skill by my play from like 18 months ago).

My EV WR is very breakevenish so far this year, and—while I'm 100% sure that regs have outplayed me in the past (and probably continue to have an edge on me in a lot of spots, though I've noticed big leaks in their games as I study hands after the fact)—I feel like at NLH cash in particular I've constantly been put in a ton of particularly unlucky situations. Just nightmare runouts (see above, misclick or no) and running into the top of folks' ranges in the biggest pots I play. It's easy to feel like that's distorting things a lot, but I don't want to make too many excuses. (Hence my continuing study and careful game selection.)

I'm going to continue to play a little bit of NLH cash when I don't have enough tables from PLO and tournaments, so we'll see how it all goes.

I guess I could have included beating NL100 as a poker goal, but I really don't mind not being able to beat NL100+ if I just can't. It's just not a priority to me, as much as it would be nice. Most of the volume I put in is PLO and MTTs, so spending a disproportionate amount of time studying 100bb NLH is just not particularly efficient in my poker life. (I do study it some, of course.)

And this is why I try really hard to avoid regs; I'm sure they know 100bb+ NLH much better than I do. And that's fine.

I look forward to mostly trading small pots with them while we separately try to stack recs. This isn't to say that I forfeit EV when "the book" dictates playing a re-raised pot with them, but I just don't want many of these players at my table and I definitely get a little uncomfortable when the pot gets big against one of them.

(Edit: btw, villain in this HH was not a solid reg at all. You could probably guess from the turn bet size.)

<3

In...GL..have you ram sims for NLH recently?

That misclick is brutal..I know exactly what you mean about it screwing the EV. I also know how everytime you look at your graph for next 5k hands your going to think about it. I've been there, both in game and in mentality. Do you have the mental game book?

Yeah, I've been working with Monker for NLH preflop quite a bit. I'm going to set up a sim here in a few minutes, actually. I greatly prefer GTO+ for actually studying postflop, though. It's just such a better piece of software in general (just from, like, a UI/UX/usability perspective), and the "Play Against the Solution" feature is kind of great. (I wish there were additional ways to filter a database of solutions for drilling, though.)

I listened to the Tendler/Carter audiobook a while ago. I think it's really good, but I don't think about it in specificity very often anymore. Maybe sometimes in terms of "entitlement tilt" (unless I'm misremembering that being a part of it), as I think that's a pretty major component of what gets me irritated.

It happened just last night as I was playing an 8-game MTT. I wrote in my other thread about how I get disproportionately unhappy about being card-dead in 8-game, and sure enough it struck again. I have to imagine this is "entitlement tilt" territory, as my feeling is basically "these people are making huge mistakes preflop/3rd/etc; why can't I win chips off them?!"

The truth is that I could spend more time studying all of the fixed limit games in the mix. I don't think there are huge opportunities I'm missing by being perhaps too tight (and therefore maybe feeling a little more card-dead than I actually am), but studying more can only help.

I have Ray Zee's FLO8/Stud8 book right next to me at the moment, and I'm also very interested in Dylan Linde's far more recent mixed games book. If nothing else, my 27TD knowledge is based almost entirely on Negreanu's Super System 2 chapter, and surely there's something more to be learned than that.

Irritating afternoon, but I'm pleased with how I'm dealing with it.

I had a really good day at the tables in my previous session, increasing my bankroll by like 15%.

Lost pretty much all of it today. (The 15%, not the bankroll.)

Cash just went really poorly (a few BIs below EV and running into the top of goofballs' ranges; mega-whiffed too many 3BPs, too), and I ran really bad at important times in tournaments I played.

I was set up to go pretty deep in a couple and got pretty brutalized. Final two tables, ATo < A9o AIPF, for example.

I'm disappointed by the session, but not distracted. I'm appreciating the difference.

I'm sure it helps that it all feels a bit "easy come, easy go" from last session. (And it was indeed very "easy come" at my cash tables; I just couldn't miss all-in for the most part.)

The main thing that makes me uneasy is that I'm really only one very (but not extremely) bad session from not being comfortable at PLO100 anymore, and I really want to stay at PLO100. The games are good and I have a really good EV WR (but I'm also not going to put my entire bankroll at risk if I drop below a certain amount of BIs).

But I'm also willing to grind it out if I have to move down. I'm feeling pretty patient overall, but I'm sure there will be limits to that. If I'm not firmly at PLO100 6 weeks from now, I think I'll start to get pretty antsy about it and frustrated that things aren't going better.

But why get pre-antsy about it? I'm not antsy! I swear!

Mental game spew incoming:

I guess I'm just never supposed to succeed at poker.

The session I didn't want came, and then some.

In this moment, I want to quit.

In the sobriety of actually seeing the result of today's session (I was still mid-session when I wrote the above ragebarf), I'm not feeling quite as dejected. I was expecting a worse number.

It's still really bad. I lost 29% of my bankroll today, from where it started this morning.

It's still really discouraging.

I think I'll be okay tomorrow, but I might need to just quit NLH cash (like I did last time it had a negative effect on my bankroll). Being able to focus better on my PLO cash tables in particular will help anyway; I think I've been missing some flop bets due to playing too many tables.

But yeah: at a NL50 table I made a pyromaniacal call today and maybe I just shouldn't trust myself with ~100bb NLH outside of early stages of tournaments. I don't know.

In this 3bet NL50 pot, I flopped two pair against a bad player who cbet then overbet a blank turn by a ton and I snap called. Yes, they were bad. Yes, I had two pair in a 3bet pot. No, they were never ever ever ever bluffing. Never. It would have taken an extremely odd line and/or a super unlikely combo.

It was a complete waste of money.

So were all of the other times I called weak-tight players' PSBs on the river with theoretically sound bluffcatchers.

I honestly just don't have a feel for NLH like I do with PLO, and as much as I may be making unexploitable river calls like I've trained on in GTO+... it's just torch city in practice against a lot of these players.

Another irritating thing about today is that I know I didn't play my best. This was even before I got irritated at any results; I really only made a few tilty decisions today.

I just was on a really (honestly) uncommon B (or maybe even as low as C+) gear.

I usually trust myself a ton and feel great about my game, but I was just making calls I wouldn't normally make today and I'm not happy with myself about it. Again, it's just so rare for me to play less than my best, and it was expensive today.

My 2021 hourly was great mid-January, and it was good earlier today... and now it's pretty pitiful. I'm still in the black, but it's "what are we actually doing here" territory.

And now I can't play PLO100 for probably at least a week or two. That hurts my hourly a ton, especially because it's not uncommon for there to be fewer PLO50 tables than PLO100 tables where I play.

I mean, look: I've been using aggressive PLO BRM. Nothing absurd, but more aggressive than I would normally advocate or use.

I know I can beat PLO100 healthily so I want to get there and stay there.

But it got very swingy for me there today. My BRM aggression didn't work out and it's a big setback.

It's a big, frustrating setback.

Edit: I want to clarify to not sound quite as hard on myself.

Playing worse than my best wasn't what cost me 29% of my bankroll today. It didn't help and it was definitely responsible for part of it, but I also ran quite a few BIs below EV (in my highest games, no less) and ran into set-over-set in NLH and was generally having trouble gathering showdown winnings. Lots of missed multiway flops and bad runouts in inflated pots. (It was way fun opening KQ, getting a BTN caller, flopping AJT and seeing a river Q so I had the pleasure of chopping with... dummy BTN's flatted/floated KK! Wee!)

Dude...this really is the wrong time to be getting involved in online poker like this. You're very late to the party and the game is extremely stale and dead at this point. Everything is about solvers now.

oh wow thanks for the sage advice what else have you learned in your less than a year on 2p2 i would really appreciate even more appropriate, tasteful, and well-timed wisdom if you can spare some

also what is a solver

is it anything like this "monker" program that i'm running a sim with right now or the GTO+ program that i've already mentioned in this thread too?

Sorry about your day, dude. Nothing wrong with a little rage barf now and then. Everyone's been there.

Just what I get from reading a few paragraphs from you but it really doesn't seem like your heart is really in the nlh cash games. If you're just sprinkling them in to fill up tables maybe just drop down there or shortstack or something so it isn't weighted as heavily?

Youre good enough to beat plo 100 and thats your immediate goal. Wouldn't it be better to just focus more/all of your resources on that until you're at least past this initial startup bankroll hurdle thing? At which point you'd have much more flexibility and less pressure, right?
Gl!

I think your perception of my NLH cash feelings is pretty accurate.

It's just hard not to go for some volume there to try to increase my hourly slightly (even if it's just the few bucks an hour of NL50).

But I don't have super strong evidence that I'm actually +EV at NLH cash and if the highest I can beat is NL50 (which is what my database shows; though NL100 hasn't seemed that much tougher lately tbh and my samples aren't mega conclusive as I've said) then I might just be able to make up that modest difference in hourly by having more mental cycles for the other tables I'm playing anyway.

Playing NLH cash is probably too much to juggle, both study-wise and in terms of multitasking.

I noticed in this past session that I was feeling a little overwhelmed needing to mentally switch between processing 100bb NLH cash postflop and 100bb PLO cash postflop (as they can play quite differently in deceptively similar spots; the thought process is different, at least... and I think I ended up autopiloting and checking too many flops in PLO as a result).

So yeah.

I've got plenty to work on (and work through in real-time at the tables) without NLH cash challenging me too. I've alluded to how it's not my first priority for study (it's honestly like fourth or fifth) and given how tough NLH games are on average (though where I play isn't so tough a lot of the time), that's probably a bad combination.

Also, deeper-stacked NLH frankly stresses me out a lot of the time. Sweating players' ranges just gets anxious for me sometimes. Like, our value bets in NLH are lower in absolute hand strength a lot of the time than PLO, and the looming threat of running into the top of my opponent's range can sometimes send my imagination spinning.

I don't start crying from the anxiety or anything, but it makes deep-stacked NLH suspenseful in a way that can be a little taxing to me. (Conversely, with tournament NLH you're rarely deep enough to feel anything but "idk SPR is too low to really worry about running into a monster; obvious bet is obvious". And with PLO I'm just far more confident.)

Umm...you help me with PLO, I help with NLH?

I mean you have no reason to believe I'm good at NLH but as I said in my PG&C I lost ALL my HHs because I went cheap-o on my SSD. Im a crusher at 50NL, only one time did I lose over a long period. 50k hands I was down like 50Bis on ACR. I made a thread about it which was the same time they were being exposed for bots. ACR actually refunded me 31.5Bis when it was all said and done.(albeit like 6 months later) It was blitz as well and there was no working HUD at the time. Thats also the reason I refused to play on ACR before. But on ignition I was a double digit winner up to 200NL but was super aggro with BRM and was using it for live poker as well so it wasn't a long term thing. I was actually happy with my job at that time ( and posting on FTR not 2+2). Then I found PLO and was basically grinding NL to fund my PLO gambool because there wasn't any content out yet that was significant to the game. Anyway sorry for the long ass post, just figured id offer up some help

Haha, I'm not 100% clear on the offer in your post.

I mean, outside of (not) having the experience to not make bad calls versus recs, I have the tools to help myself with NLH cash if I want to pursue it.

It's just becoming clear that it doesn't make sense to invest time or energy in it anymore when I can probably increase my PLO/MTT/STT winrates/ROIs slightly by never adding NLH cash tables to my sessions.

I'm more motivated to study those games anyway, including the mixed games I mention so I can be an even bigger, more confident favorite in the soft 8-game MTTs available to me.

*** ***

Anyway, unfortunate session today getting back at it. Even without playing NLH cash, I think I had myself playing too many STTs at one point so I was overwhelmed yet again (and low on timebank and timing out sometimes on some tables). Not for the whole session, but for a little while in the middle of it. I need to be more careful not to exceed probably 8 tables. Strictly speaking, I can keep up with around 13 but I know I'm not playing my best. Up to 8 and I think I can pay enough attention to sacrifice virtually no EV. Beyond that, it's hectic.

Ran bad in some really unfortunate spots, though. Stone-bubbled a tournament I was mostly doing great in on what I'm mostly sure was a standard SB shove. Near-bubbled another AKo < ATo AIPF. (None of this is that extraordinary; I could just sure use a deep MTT run at the moment and not even cashing is not helping my downswing.)

And cash was frustrating. This one maniac just ran amazing against me, all-in and not.

Cash EV WR for the day: 12.49 bb/100. Actual cash WR for the day: -5.43 bb/100. Yuck.

All PLO now, obv. I had to table-start from nothing at PLO30 and PLO50 and thankfully things got hopping pretty quickly, but seeing the extremely beatable PLO100 tables running was annoying (especially when the levels below were empty). Pure volume/traffic is another reason I really want to get back up to PLO100.

Gonna be back at the tables later tonight. Hopefully I can find some kind of win to get things going in the positive direction financially, but that's not something I can control. Just going to try to keep my head on straight and keep playing my best (which I can trust to be profitable).

I was offer a DB review..like I send you my last 10k PLO hands and you send me last 10k NLH hands..ill make a video with what I find and send it to you and vice versa.

If not its cool, I just know that when I had a coach in NL years ago he found a bunch of spots that were small but added up. So I thought some fresh eyes could be helpful. Vice versa as well I could use a set of fresh eyes on my plo hands lol

Also hypers are brutal..I started playing them yesterday to grab the $50 from the rake race and uhhh i quickly remembered why I hate them soooo much haha

What speed STTs do you play? Do you use icmizer or monker?

I'm going to respectfully and gratefully decline almost entirely just due to my aforementioned divestment from NLH cash.

I play 6-player turbos. I haven't invested in ICMizer; Monker's ICM feature presumably gets me where I need to be (or close enough).

Yeah I'm using monker too, I checked a few spots vs icmizer and its within a few combos. GLGL

lol, the 8-game runbad just won't stop.

It's absurd!

In tonight's 8-game, I had a zillion scoop outs on 4th in a stud8 hand and wound up with absolutely no showdown value for either half of the pot.

And I can't remember the last 27TD pot I won at showdown. Sincerely, I can't. Not tonight, not the other night, not the tournament before that.

It was just ridiculous tonight! One hand, I started with 5432x (I think x was a Q or something).

First draw, 6. No good.

Second: 3. Also no good.

Third: SIX AGAIN.

Folks more experience with 27TD probably aren't impressed, but yeesho. (I had another similar brick-out hand in the same 27TD round, too!)

Anyway, complaint out of the way. It just continues to be very annoying when these 8-game fields are VERY soft. I know I need to work on my mixed games but I also know these players are very bad. I'm going to pull the trigger on that Linde book sooner or later; I want a refresher on the fundamentals from someone who's worked on it more recently than the classic authors (no disrespect meant).

Despite 8-game, I had some okay MTT cashes tonight (no FTs unfortunately; just very "recoup"-y results for my overall slate this evening), and I ended up winning more than 11 BIs at PLO cash today.

Didn't even run that far above EV! Just had the pleasure of super duper crushin' it.

A very welcome upswing session after a challenging run. Grateful for it.

Bankroll-wise, I'm back to the point where I started taking PLO100 shots "on the way up" this year... but I'm going to be a little more patient this time.

I just don't need the potential frustration, and I'm honestly putting up huge numbers at PLO50 and 5cPLO50 anyway. I'm not assuming it's sustainable, but it makes rebuilding a PLO100 bankroll a lot more palatable!

I just played a long, disappointing session. Just lots of irritating moments and various opportunities that didn't pan out.

I'm effectively in a three-week downswing, and I'm feeling frustrated and frankly impatient.

I'm trying to stay optimistic and cool-headed but this is all feeling uncomfortably familiar: being unable to turn important (but modest) corners in my poker career.

I'm playing really well, and I'm studying like every day.

My EV winrates (and weak opponents) are such that I could probably just be like "eh, good enough" and stop studying.

But I'm trying to seriously invest myself into this. Because I seriously want it to go well. I want to do everything I can to make it go well.

But it's just... not really going very well. It could be much worse (I'm fairly firmly in the black), but the past few weeks have been pretty difficult to deal with.

I just don't feel like I'm making progress results-wise, and it's literally just not feeling very rewarding.

It's hard not to get nervous that things just won't work out, and when I know how hard I'm working at this... it's just not pleasant to imagine not succeeding.

To add something more technical:

I've been reading Linde's book. I've found it helpful but just slightly disappointing so far. I feel like it's just slightly too heavy on facts I could run in PPT myself, but I do think it's helping with all of the games I've read about so far.

I think I my expectations were a little too high. It's called "Mastering Mixed Games" but I feel like it doesn't go quite that far, and I'd be surprised if it's really going to outshine classic stud/etc books like I figured it would.

I still like it and I'm glad to have it, but I'm just finding it somewhat basic. (But I wanted a refresher on little more than the basics of a lot of these games, so I'm not horribly unsatisfied.)

I shouldn't be shocked, for the price tag.

One specific thing it's helping me with is loosening up in shorthanded games. It's not like I was never stealing before, but (as I sort of suspected) I was being too tight in a number of situations. (I just didn't want to loosen up without some expert advice telling me to.)

For instance, I was devaluing high-only starting hands in the split-pot games too much.

Spending the afternoon poring over different things, both strategic and otherwise.

For the strategic, I'm trying to get a firmer grip on some preflop guidelines for PLO. Honestly, right now I kind of wing it (after having done my PLO Matrix homework a long time ago) and I'm sure I'm not far off, but I want some concrete boundaries for tight, medium, and loose 3bet ranges. So I'm just delving into how those are constructed exactly (and then making some less exact simplifications).

For the non-strategic, I just delved into my aggregated SharkScope for the first time, after opting in on my current site (don't ask; it's not impossible to figure out if you really want to but I'd prefer not to broadcast it here).

No wonder I'm feeling so frustrated; I'm on a really long MTT downswing that I wasn't fully appreciating the extent of (due to how many different things I play and how I don't bother entering MTT results into my DB).

I knew from my cash and STT results not resulting in a better overall result that MTTs were not going well, but seeing the graph just really puts it in perspective.

I'm very certain that it's just an unlucky run (inescapable with MTTs), but that doesn't make it feel good!

I'm beating STTs very comfortably (so I'm confident about my push/fold game) and my EV bb/100 is high single digit overall (so the rest of my play should be fine too).

But yeah: in my years-old database, my EV WR and actual WR for red/orange M are on opposite sides of zero.

A sample like that is bound to create a lot of unlucky tournament deaths (and negative feelings, as a result).

I'm tempted to just stick to PLO (including PLO MTTs) and STTs until my bankroll is healthier, but I don't see much merit in that really.

MTTs are having a really forceful downward effect on my results, but it's only going to take a few final tables to change that. And I'm playing well enough (and studying tournament NLH hard enough) to expect those results to come eventually. (And the fields I'm playing aren't enormous, by the way, so the "long run" is not as long as if I was playing the biggest sites in the world.)

It's just obviously really irritating when I'm objectively losing more than my share of races when short. It really adds up (or, more accurately, subtracts down).

But somehow actually seeing that downswing graphically has me feeling better, because it's sort of an external validation of this feeling I've had. I've had some MTT success this year so I didn't want to chalk anything up to bad MTT luck, but it's really undeniable seeing it visualized.

I'm sure this sounds like an excuse, but given my shortstack EV woes and my STT/EV WR successes... I just don't think I have any reason to think it won't turn around.

(Now, whether I feel like it will turn around or not... that's a different struggle. See my previous post, but I do feel better right now despite a pretty rotten afternoon session today. For a taste: A9 vs 94 AIPF, flop Axx turn 4 river 4 weeeeeeeeeeeee)

What is a decent EV-WR in STT?? HEM doesn't track STTs from ACR so its difficult for me to judge whether I'm +EV or not.

I'm not able to easily (or maybe at all) filter for STT EV WR specifically. DriveHUD (my HUD of choice since my Ignition days) is kind of clunky in general on the tournament side.

For all tournaments, my impression is that 5+ bb/100 is good, 10+ being great.

But you've interrupted what has been a fairly constant torrent of complaining, so let's get back to that.

I've now lost 43% of my bankroll in the past three weeks. Outside of playing PLO100 a little too early (and I do mean a little), I've been using very responsible BRM. MTTs in particular are just being a nightmare, and cash didn't help today.

So far this week (starting on Sunday), my tournament EV WR is 10.92. Actual WR? -2.58.

And that's not really accounting for hands like the following:

NL Holdem $9.10+$0.90 (500BB)
MP2 ($11265)
CO ($12006)
BTN ($13247)
SB ($21930)
HERO ($10405)
UTG ($4472)

Dealt to Hero: T T

UTG Folds, EP Raises To $1765, MP1 Folds, MP2 Folds, HJ Calls $1700, CO Folds, BTN Folds, SB Calls $1450, HERO Raises To $10405 (allin), EP Calls $8640, HJ Calls $8640, SB Folds

Flop ($33305): T 9 6
EP Bets $5000 (Rem. Stack: $13721), HJ Calls $4635 (allin)

Turn ($42940): T 9 6 8

River ($42940): T 9 6 8 J

HJ shows: J J
EP shows: 8 8

HJ wins: $9270
HJ wins: $33305

I swear that anytime I'm all in and an opponent has less than 20% equity on any street, I'm losing half the time. (Notice I didn't say "all the time"; I'm a LITTLE more realistic than that.) It's so frustrating to watch.

And here's a nice encapsulation of how cash went today. First, a couple of hands against the same maniac:

PL Omaha 0.50(BB)
HERO ($54.31)
BB ($57.27)

Dealt to Hero: 7 8 5 J

HERO Raises To $1.50, BB Calls $1

Hero SPR on Flop: [17.6 effective]
Flop ($3): J T J
BB Checks, HERO Checks

Turn ($3): J T J 7
BB Checks, HERO Bets $1.43 (Rem. Stack: $51.38), BB Raises To $2.86 (Rem. Stack: $52.91), HERO Calls $1.43 (Rem. Stack: $49.95)

River ($8.72): J T J 7 K
BB Bets $8.28 (Rem. Stack: $44.63), HERO Calls $8.28 (Rem. Stack: $41.67)

BB shows: 5 4 K K

BB wins: $24.78

PL Omaha 0.50(BB)
HERO ($82.99)
SB ($46.99)
BB ($83.41)
HJ ($15.74)
CO ($39.93)

Dealt to Hero: K Q 5 K

HJ Raises To $1.75, CO Folds, HERO Raises To $6, SB Folds, BB Folds, HJ Calls $4.25

Hero SPR on Flop: [0.76 effective]
Flop ($12.75): T J 5
HJ Checks, HERO Bets $12.11 (Rem. Stack: $64.88), HJ Calls $9.74 (allin)

Turn ($34.60): T J 5 J

River ($34.60): T J 5 J 7

HJ shows: T J 8 T

HJ wins: $30.62

Finally, prepare your chef's kiss for this one (preflop is marginal but when this guy does this postflop as I suspected he generally would given my history with him, it's kinda deffo +EV):

PL Omaha 0.50(BB)
HERO ($50)
BTN ($36.13)
SB ($16.13)

Dealt to Hero: 4 3 4 2

BTN Raises To $1.75, SB Folds, HERO Calls $1.25

Hero SPR on Flop: [9.17 effective]
Flop ($3.75): 5 4 K
HERO Checks, BTN Bets $3.56 (Rem. Stack: $30.82), HERO Raises To $14.24 (Rem. Stack: $34.01), BTN Raises To $34.38 (allin), HERO Calls $20.14 (Rem. Stack: $13.87)

Turn ($72.51): 5 4 K K

River ($72.51): 5 4 K K K

BTN shows: T 9 A A

BTN wins: $71.01

YO MAYBE I SHOULDA WAITED FOR A SPOT WHERE I HAD 98%+ I DUNNO I'M NEW TO THIS GAME

Except I'm really not new to poker at all (check the 2p2 join date); I'm just constantly struggling to find results that correlate to the effort that I've put into it.

I just feel like I'm the guy losing 97/3 races regularly. (Obviously, this is stupid animal brain bias. But it's how it feels!)

There's stuff I've implemented into my PLO game recently that I know I was slow to adopt because of how unlucky I'd been versus loose players' ranges in the past. "I can't bet that here; what if they have one of the few rare combos I'm crushed by?!"

I've just run so bad in most of my poker career and it's so exhausting and disheartening. I know I should be getting more out of this game financially than I have.

I'm demonstrably a very good poker player and I'm constantly improving but I'm also constantly struggling to make money.

I know it's not due to overwhelming leaks in my play or overwhelmingly strong competition. The data shows I'm a favorite in my games, pretty incontrovertibly.

Also, as much as this thread is about improving my mental game, I know I've already got a very strong mental game (which, in my opinion, includes bankroll management).

There are loads of reasons that poker players do not succeed. You'll find them littered throughout the PG&C graveyard (and you can see preludes to busto in many currently active threads). There are really typical signs that I frankly (if haughtily) know that I don't have.

Let me put this in very concrete terms:

In my half-million hand database (which frankly includes probably ~80k hands early where I was still learning PLO and probably not a winning player), I am mid-five figures below EV in USD, playing almost entirely PLO100 and below. (Much of this on a run-it-twice friendly site, too!)

The amount of money I am below EV in this HALF A MILLION hand sample is more than 150% of my current bankroll. (Keep in mind that when I stepped away from poker last year some of that bankroll money went towards real-life things.)

Add that to my aforementioned red/orange zone tournament EV woes and my improbable live cashless streak, and it just feels like I'm cursed.

And I refuse to feel bad about feeling bad about this.

Statistically, I "deserve" better.

Emotionally, I fluctuate between wanting to give up (I'm not having much fun and I'm not making much money, so what's the point) and deciding to absolutely positively never ever ever give up on this (I've invested too much of myself into this thing that should be able to make me a lot of money).

I love poker. I really do. I think it's a fascinating game.

I just want it to start loving me back. (As pathetic as that sounds.)

lol, correction: not mid-five. Mid-four. I don't even know where "five" came from in my head, as it's not $5xxx.

I realized while not even in the same room as my computer "oh wait, did I write 'mid-five' in that post?"

Not trying to exaggerate my problems THAT much. (And if I was actually that far under EV at these stakes I really don't think I could muster the enthusiasm to play ever again.)