Mmm, I didn’t provide much context to the quote from Benabadbeat about wallowing in variance. There is a distinction of course between understanding variance, via a calculator, which is certainly beneficial, and dealing with its emotional impact.

It’s a useful comparative exercise, though, now that I think about it, particularly in relation to behavioural psychology. One of Kahnamen’s points is that, generally, people don’t adequately grasp the probability of events. As poker players we are better at thinking probabilistically, so a variance calculator is definitely helpful, insofar as we can rationalise run bad, for instance, by seeing that it’s, say, a 10% chance (given a certain historical win rate and standard deviation). In other words, this monthly stretch of poor results is going to happen every now and again, just like every so often we lose with a set against a gutshot AI on the turn.

The point is that such an understanding doesn’t rid us entirely of the negative emotion, although if we’re vigilant in applying CBT, eventually it might dissipate, as with your ‘drop the storyline’ example, with which I fundamentally agree.

I guess what I’m saying is that we can’t just disregard or avoid the negative emotion, and, ultimately, don’t have to experience it as negative. The idea of wallowing in variance is that it can promote curiosity rather than repulsion and shame. Obviously, curiosity is better for us, because it’s more likely to lead us back to the space of strategic thinking.

Anyway, glad to hear you’re referencing some buddhistic wisdom, too—a positive that can be drawn from the run bad.

it is good to be back

NL Holdem $18.50+$1.50 (100BB)
HERO ($1252)
BB ($1325)
UTG ($1734)
HJ ($1438)
CO ($1351)
BTN ($1900)

Dealt to Hero: A A

UTG Calls $100, HJ Folds, CO Folds, BTN Folds, HERO Raises To $1252 (allin), BB Raises To $1325 (allin), UTG Folds

Flop ($2677): K Q J

Turn ($2677): K Q J Q

River ($2677): K Q J Q 6

BB shows: A Q

BB wins: $2604

(Other games are going better at the same time, so I don't feel too bad but... c'mon.)

Thanks in part to a decent final table result in a small tournament, I had a +7.8% (bankroll) session after my little break, which is:

1: Big enough to feel positive about. (It doesn't feel "ho hum, practically breakeven".)

2: Not big enough to feel excited or deeply relieved about.

3: Far better than a fourth consecutive losing session. (It would have meant losing 9 of my last 11 sessions, too. I really only took note of how L-heavy this stretch of sessions was tonight; no wonder I felt exhausted by it.)

Hopefully this is the beginning of some unremarkably (or remarkably!) positive results. As always, I really don't plan on posting every session, but I'm in fairly precarious shape my bankroll is at kind of a tipping point: I could really use a nice upswing.

I've had to drop stakes twice this month, the second time being today just because I wasn't comfortable playing PLO50. I knew if I'd dropped 2 BIs early I'd have gotten distracted by it.

I don't anticipate wanting to move up to PLO50 in my next session; I think I'd like a few more BIs for it. Not a ton; I'm just feeling a tad uncomfortable.

Remember, the goal is being comfortably bankrolled for PLO100... so there's a lot of road left before that happens.

I'm trying to be patient.

I just wanted to check in a little.

In two days, I had a third and a second in the same nightly tournament. Nothing huge (either in entrants or prizes), but the stake is very close to my ABI for MTTs, so it's far from trivial.

It's exactly the result I needed, in theory.

That is, if everything else I play wasn't going so poorly.

Considering how fortunate those final table results are, it's been pretty frustrating how my bankroll hasn't changed very significantly at all due to just having miserable luck at cash and continuing woes in tournaments in general (despite these two top-3 finishes).

You'd think that diversifying and increasing my volume would help "the long run" get here sooner, but it's just been that much more frustrating when I can seemingly only get one or none of the three things I play (cash, MTTs, STTs) to go well at a time.

As I said, I'm trying to be patient, but I'm no longer in a "succeed no matter what" mindset. Not because I'm giving up yet (I'm not), but because I know how far I am from my financial goals with the game... and I know that, even if I'm cool-headed and play my best (which should be more than good enough), absolutely nothing is guaranteed.

I just need to prepare myself for the possibility that, through no cosmic injustice other than luck's indifference, I may not be able to succeed in the way I can reasonably expect to.

And here's the thing: I love poker. I really do. It's an incredible game and I love studying it. I don't always enjoy playing it, but the decisions are generally interesting enough to me (which is why I think I'm wired to succeed at it; I basically have a calm, sustainable interest in the game and not an adrenaline-fueled craving for its swings or rewards).

But most people who play poker spend time with it for fun, money, or both.

Well I ain't having much fun and I have been losing money pretty consistently for around a month.

Whenever poker starts feeling like an expensive hobby, my interest drops precipitously for a number of reasons.

Most simply, there are -$EV hobbies I would rank firmly ahead of poker. If I have to spend time and money on something, it's not going to be poker.

If I can spend time on poker and get money out of it, on the other hand? I'm into it.

And for now, I'm still into it.

But last year when I gave up on playing full-time, it was just feeling too much like an expensive hobby, and that feeling is haunting me again.

Yeah: just like this year, last year I could look at my EV winrates and be confident that the long run would reward me, but knowing something and feeling something are two different things.

And this year I think I have a much better mental game than even just last year... and I think I'm a much better loser than I was then (I've gotten more practice!)... but I still don't have infinite emotional capacity for banging my head against this.

Like, in some ways it's really good that I am bound to run out of emotional resources for the game before I will run out of financial resources for the game (like, within reason: I'm not independently wealthy or anything... I'm just not willing to play extremely low stakes to rebuild or subject myself to utterly Sisyphean poker volume in general).

It's better to be angry with a card game than it is to be broke.

But I would really prefer to be both happy with a card game and relatively wealthy from it. (Shocking, I know.)

And, again, I'm trying to be patient and I think I'm actually doing a pretty good job at it.

I just can't wait forever.

I honestly believe that poker is the thing that, in theory, I can make the most money doing in my life. But if luck never lets me prove it then... I dunno, what can I do about that? (Not much.)

I'm still fairly hopeful. Again, I know how well I'm playing. I'm not worried that I'm not a favorite in my games.

I'm just worried that, yet again, it won't matter enough and I won't see the results I can expect. And I'm just in a little bit of a "plan for the worst" mode lately, sad as it may be.

Was at the final two tables of two different tournaments this afternoon. Was excited to quite probably have a pretty good session.

In one MTT, I was fifth of ten in chips. 9-handed final table; we'd been hand-for-hand for quite a while. My table was so much worse than a penultimate table usually is; I was really excited to win some more chips heading to the final table and try to make a top 3 run.

Then I got TT all in preflop versus a shorter stack's 88. River 8, standard; lost most of my stack. A few hands later, I get all-in with A5s versus KTs and I'm out 10th.

Painfully typical.

Yesterday (I think it was), I finally decided to filter for all-in preflops to see my winrate versus my EV winrate, just to see if the numbers match how I feel things have gone.

I wasn't a huge volume MTT player before this year (and I'm still only, like, a "serious"-ish volume MTT player, not "huge"), but, in my years-old database: in my 2nd and 3rd highest volume tournament sites, I have a positive EV WR and a negative WR for preflop all-ins.

In my highest volume site (where I'm playing now), my WR is less than 18% of my EV WR.

(4th and final site in volume is only 1341 hands and not even a positive EV WR tbh, but guess what: still ran way under EV.)

It's very, very hard not to expect to lose all-ins at a disproportionate rate when it's been happening to me for literally years. (And it's very hard not to feel sorry for myself and angry about all of this.) It might be my single biggest mental game challenge, and it makes such a huge difference in my results when you consider the cost of losing all-ins in tournaments (both immediate and WRT final table opportunities).

(Less remarkably: I busted the other penultimate table running AKo into AA, but I had a healthy stack and it was also irritating.)

Also, I started off cash today up two buyins early and then just ended up card-dead for the rest of the session to ultimately finish in the red for half a BI. (When I say "card-dead" I don't mean I was never finding bluffs, obviously. But flat showdown winnings in PLO don't really make for profit very often. If you need proof, I can show you my last ~15k hands.)

Small losing session overall, but when (on average) I really could have expected some final table prizes... it's hard not to be pretty frustrated.

I’m fairly sure you’re aware of what I’m doing here in highlighting the emotive language and phrasing. I appreciate and value the honesty of you describing what you’re feeling about these sessions, where variance is clearly not on your side. I also can empathise, having been through similar stretches, mostly in live games (and I’ll acknowledge that my playing style and lack of discipline has perhaps contributed to my negative results, as you might guess from some of my HHs). But, I put to you this proposition, which I draw from prospect theory: since our experience of the pain from a loss is 2.5x the intensity of the pleasure we gain from a win, it seems logical to lower our expectations of winning, as a default. In practice this means actively minimising our natural excitement when making a final table or seeing that we’re AI with TT v 88. It also means thinking about our results not in years but in the cold data of hands played (bookending results in years can easily create a misleading sense of progress or regression). While I understand how what I’m proposing here might seem face-palm obvious, I reckon it has value as a kind of CBT exercise, insofar as the logic will typically subsume the emotion. That being said, I still believe it’s healthy to acknowledge and accept (or just wallow a little) in the pain when it inevitably occurs—but, hopefully, truncating the expectations can reduce the intensity of this pain and therefore accepting it will become less of a task.

So, I hesitate to respond in any way that minimizes the validity of what you're saying, but asking me to lower my expectations when I've written quite recently about specifically (mentally) preparing for the worst possible outcomes for all of this seems a little inappropriate, right?

I don't mean this in an offended, pearl-clutching "you're being HIGHLY inappropriate" way, and I don't mean to be defensive. If anything, I'm trying to acknowledge what you're saying and agree to a large extent, while also saying "yes, and what you describe is already where I'm at".

I just mean, like... man, my expectations could hardly have gotten conditioned to be lower at this point. My entire poker career has been one of literally, statistically falling far short of expectation (that is, EV) on the whole.

This entire thread (lately, at least) is an exercise in not allowing my emotional expectations to fall so low that they eclipse the statistical expectations that suggest that poker is a highly profitable pursuit for me.

I think you misunderstood my use of "years" as my ultimate measure of volume or results (or, like, arbitrary bookkeeping). I've been playing a lot of poker in those years. Years = hundreds of thousands of hands (mostly cash by far, admittedly, but I'm dramatically below EV in both cash and tournaments).

I humbly, respectfully don't really understand your point.

I was very close to posting a few paragraphs that attempted to elaborate on some of what I think is inappropriate about what you're saying, but I'm just not confident enough about what you meant, so I'd rather not get out over my skis about it.

Really like this thread. And its good to see some more PLO related action in this part of the forum. Cheers

yes i'm very proud of the high-quality PLO content i've brought to this thread it is definitely not overwhelmed by whining

:P

No, seriously: thanks.

I'm getting completely fed up with tournaments.

For preflop all-ins, I would just really appreciate it if my EV WR and my WR could at least be on the same side of zero this year. I think that might help?

The truth is that the hourly I expect to gain from playing MTTs is pretty modest. Maybe it's not worth the stress to keep them in the mix. I don't know.

With a handful of exceptions, maybe MTTs are just something I should cut out until I've already built my bankroll to more of where I want it to be. Could take some kind of a break, at least.

Is the point of the tourneys mostly just to fill in extra tables for volume?

Not, like, for the sake of it. That'd be kind of weird.

The idea was that I almost certainly have a positive ROI in these games and it would increase my hourly to play them. (A big win or series of wins could also transform my bankroll nicely, to an extent that cash games can't provide on the same time scale.)

I still think that's true regarding my ROI, but I just cannot feel good about continuing to fire at (most of) them anymore.

I'm honestly disgusted by the idea at this point. They've just gone so extraordinarily poorly, and it's frankly just felt really bad. (This is why I've compulsively checked my feelings against my database on this stuff; just, like "there's a factual basis for it feeling like I'm running terribly, right?"... and, yup, it's right there in undeniable numbers.)

I've just gotten so conditioned to expect my tournament-life all-ins to go improbably poorly that I'm fed up and need a partial, temporary break from the high-variance push/fold grind. (That said, I'm going to keep at STTs. They're mildly less infuriating. Mildly.)

I can keep plenty busy without these games. My theoretical hourly will certainly drop somewhat, but yo my actual hourly is toiletsville these days so I'm trying to make some lower-variance choices in my poker diet for the time being!

I feel completely sick again.

Nothing is working. Nothing.

AA vs JJ AIPF? TT vs 99 AIPF? Nope. That doesn't work.

If anything should work fairly often, you would think it would be that, and it doesn't work.

Stopped playing early tonight despite still having bullets available for a PLO tournament within my bankroll that I should have a huge edge in.

Just so tired of losing. Sick, actually. Actually sick.

This isn't fun at all. I'm so effing angry and I am so good at this game and the universe refuses to allow me to succeed at it.

(No, not in some personal way. I'm not that irrational right now.)

In both tournaments and cash this week, my WR and EV WR are on opposite sides of zero. EV WR in both cases is pretty healthy (a little less so in tournaments; I've run standard shoves into KK+ kind of often this week).

It just feels so bad and I honestly cannot take it much longer.

STTs are now probably out of my poker diet indefinitely too. I'm just entirely tired of losing preflop all-ins (this week, AIPF: EV WR 10.93, WR -8.15 very fun and very fun and very fun), and that seems to be the main thing I do with preflop all-ins so why subject myself to it?

I'm already calming down a little bit. I just need to feel angry for a little while. I'll get back to the (PLO cash) tables, but the bankroll situation is honestly getting really precarious and it's really stressful. It's so frustrating knowing that I should be succeeding at this, and I just feel like I'm constantly backsliding into not even being able to persist financially. (And I don't use aggressive BRM! 35-40 BIs for PLO was as aggressive as I got this year, and I'm not doing that anymore and even that was mixing in tables from 1-2 stakes lower!)

I was about to add a HH from tonight that was kind of interesting, but whatever. I really don't feel like it.

If I'm perfectly honest: I'm just really not interested in opening myself up to criticism of my play right now. If I'm not already competent, I never will be. I've worked really, really hard at this stuff, and I have a ton of evidence suggesting that I am very, very good at this game (a number of forms of it, too).

I'm always interested in improving (I was poring over Monker and taking notes just this afternoon), but being told that I'm not doing my part at the table to succeed is just not something I am willing to hear at the moment.

I'm not saying that's cool-headed of me.

I am not feeling cool-headed.

I love pro wrestling.

I wanted to write a little bit about it before my mood is soured or buoyed by my first session of the week (my poker week starts on Sunday evening), because it's actually really important to my mental game (silly as it may sound).

I liked pro wrestling a lot as a kid. I had the good fortune to be watching WCW and (then) WWF at (arguably) their creative peaks (putting aside a lot of regrettable ideas alongside their best drama), but my interests wandered elsewhere shortly after WCW was bought.

In the 2010s, I slowly became a big fan of wrestling again. CM Punk caught my attention as a character and, as NXT evolved into its own promotion, I checked in and out of following WWE until, by the time they introduced the Universal Championship, I was watching pretty much everything they were putting out.

For a long time, my fascination with pro wrestling was basically a fascination with the idea of it as a performative, cooperative sport. I just thought (and still think) that's really cool.

Wrestle Kingdom 11 changed everything for me.

"Omega? Okada? Six stars? What's this?"

Well, "this" is puroresu: Japanese pro wrestling.

I'm an American; I can only be expected to be so aware of Japanese culture beyond the stuff that's most visible in this country.

In a few short years, I've developed an overwhelming bias towards Japanese pro wrestling.

Yes, WWE has an absurdly talented roster. No, I don't care about WWE in general because they're allergic to good storytelling and consistent stakes. (I also hate important aspects of their TV production; I won't get into it at the moment.)

And AEW has flashes of brilliance. With Omega and the Bucks, it's hard not to. But they haven't really been what I wanted them to be.

I wanted them to be New Japan but with more shows near me, basically.

Because the puroresu aesthetic ("fighting spirit") is infinitely compelling to me when I'm spending a lot of time on poker.

Yes, the Minoru Suzuki that is variance is going to knock me down and laugh at me sadistically.

But seeing the performed resilience of, say, a Kota Ibushi or Tomohiro Ishii... a defiant unwillingness to give up and a deeply-held courage to face adversity and overcome it (despite, by all appearances, being completely knocked out of contention)...

It's inspiring to me in a way that I've really needed, as poker has constantly been more difficult for me results-wise than it should have been, on average.

It's a little dorky. (It's perhaps more than a little dorky.)

But having these images of people refusing to fail even when things aren't going their way immediately... yeah, it's just really valuable to me, just in showing me what resilience can look like.

Because mustering my own resilience can sometimes be pretty challenging.

(Btw, I'm constantly months behind on wrestling these days; I just recently finished the 2020 G1 Climax. No BOSJ/WK/etc spoilers pleeeeease.)

This was not the update opening I was expecting

I started watching around the same time as you and have gone away and come back a few times over the years. Usually lose interest after awhile because of some of the stuff you mentioned about WWE just being unable to get out of its own way almost.

Good luck this week!

With the caveat that these days I really only check in periodically for highly-rated matches, here's the main thing that I've realized about WWE, particularly compared to puroresu:

They are miserably bad at making things feel like they matter. And that's the number one thing you need to do with a fake sport.

Even with real sports, if you don't have the weight of the sport's history and culture, it's really hard for people to buy-in.

WWE is the largest pro wrestling brand in the world, but you wouldn't know it from how they present themselves (beyond the stuff that feels the most transparently Publicly-Traded-Corporation).

They have a weird disdain for their own history (and not even the parts they should: Ultimate Warrior, for one example) and there is just no prestige to anything that happens moment-to-moment.

It just all feels nearsighted and arbitrary, down to the Royal Rumble being the thing that punches your ticket to main-eventing their biggest show of the year. Like, why not just have everyone play roulette? It would make almost as much sense as a competition.

Compare that to NJPW:

The thing that gets you into the main event of Wrestle Kingdom is a grueling singles tournament with an increasingly prestigious history.

When there is a championship match, the champion is presented as the nth holder of that particular belt. The IWGP heavyweight title has a past champions montage they play before it's contested.

They love their history and they make you want to love it too.

WWE won't even keep the Intercontinental Championship looking the same. It's not like WWE is the only company to ever change belt designs, but like: when you have people competing for (roughly) the same object that was held by most of WWE's biggest stars (especially from the 90s until now: Hart, Michaels, etc)... that adds such a simple, compelling narrative layer.

But no, I guess WWE wants to sell new toys or whatever.

And WWE has two world titles? And ever since they couldn't let AEW just do their own thing on Wednesdays, you could argue the NXT title is a third world title on the same level?

The amount of effort it takes to parse what is supposed to matter most in WWE is just exhausting (let alone keeping up with all of their content).

And, like, I don't make time for the entirety of even NJPW shows anymore. I watch what gets 4*+ from Dave Meltzer or 8/10+ on cagematch.net.

The idea of having the patience to constantly be underwhelmed by WWE is just unimaginable to me.

There's too much great wrestling in the world to sit through bad wrestling. (I don't even personally get to all of the great wrestling or keep up with the slices I choose to in a timely way! Again, I haven't watched Wrestle Kingdom and it's March now!)

Anyway, to step out of DevWil's Kayfabe Corner and get back to poker:

Had a generally nice couple of days to start my week. Made the final three of two MTTs in two days, one of which being an 8-game tournament.

While I'm disappointed with important aspects of Linde's mixed games book, I think it was really crucial in helping me through the FLHE and 27TD rounds of 8-game and helping me to finish top 3.

I've also become more savvy about the less obvious aspects of shorthanded stud8, razz, and FLO8.

Mental game-wise: I've obviously folded MTTs back into my routine. In the downtime between the end of my previous poker week and the start of this poker week, I found myself mentally refreshed and ready to lose some flips, to put it simply.

As I kept playing tournaments... I was being especially mindful of how losing all-ins was affecting me.

The first few I lost as a favorite were pretty easy to shrug off.

But this stuff really does get to me over time. This week, my WR AIPF is around half of my EV WR and I'm already starting to feel it.

And considering how distinctly poorly I ran AIPF last month (EV WR 4.42, WR -5.71), I don't blame myself at all for feeling totally snakebitten.

And running that bad all-in has such exaggerated financial effects in MTTs.

Today, I was at the final two tables of a tournament I'd spent a long time as chip leader of. For most of the time the money bubble hadn't yet burst, I was top 3 in chips.

And with two tables left (ITM), I believe I was sitting at 5th in chips or something like that.

And then a fairly short stack shoved, I called with JJ in the BB, and they turned over 99.

Safe flop. Turn 9, and suddenly I'm near the bottom in chips.

And then I busted the tournament in 11th (9-handed FT) in pretty unlucky fashion as well.

Last month, I also ran significantly under EV in cash.

But with cash, you can always just buy back in. There's a far more immediate sense of "ah, I'll get 'em next time". The long run may be long, but it's also less messy.

Conversely, when you're at the final two tables of a tournament and you lose an 80/20 that's the difference between you almost assuredly FT'ing or you maybe not even sneaking into 9th place... that's an enormously expensive proposition. And it just gets amplified even more when you're losing these vital races and you're not even ITM yet.

So when I have a whole month where my EV WR and WR aren't even on the same side of zero for AIPFs... (and, in fact, the absolute value of my negative WR was greater than the absolute value of my EV WR)...

Yeah, man, that's completely exhausting. And while I had a couple of days to reset from that feeling, it's not going to take many times losing as a favorite at crucial moments for me to fall back into how I was feeling.

So, I dunno. I'm just going to try to stay vigilant about those feelings, you know?

I'm not sure what exactly I'll do about them if they crop up.

I'm hoping to just run really good instead.

Yeah, let's do that.

I put in a really rare 9-hour session yesterday, which followed three winning sessions in a row plus building optimism that I would soon hit the figure I have in mind for taking shots at PLO100.

I generally don't like to play for more than 3-6 hours at a time (and anything beyond 4 hours is generally only because I'm deep in one my latest-scheduled MTTs).

It was my worst session of the year so far.

I honestly don't think the length and the result are related. Not as much as you would expect, at least.

I really think I played my best or close to it the whole time (there was one pot where I figured I was taking a slightly -EV race and just went for it, but that's probably the only really truly tilted moment I had), and I played so long because the PLO cash games ran (healthily) later than they normally do and I was more motivated to stay in them than I usually am. (And not even in, like, a "revenge-y" or loss-chasing way, to be honest.)

But yeah, man... there are just times where you go 0/4 on MTT bullets fired at an MTT at the top of your range of buy-ins... and then you also have probably the most intensely miserable stretch of cash you've had in your whole career.

I didn't even run that bad all in. I ran below EV, but not by nearly as much as I lost overall. It was just a really irritating stretch of mostly:

1. Raise or reraise preflop
2. Flop absolutely nothing on an unfriendly texture (often multiway)
3. Try really hard to bluff just often enough to eke out some small wins here and there (and maintain balance)
4. Try really hard not to bluff too often

It was just absurdly unpleasant to fight through. The cards could hardly have been less cooperative.

I also ran into some fairly legitimate coolers, ran some big bluffs that should have worked on average and didn't (I honestly wasn't getting super out of line, even for games where underbluffing is arguably necessary), and was just always missing my draws or otherwise having nightmare runouts.

Just really horrible stuff that makes me wonder how some people play this game solely for fun.

Anyway... yeah, it was a really long session. And I knew I was losing, but I honestly don't think I was in "chasing losses" territory, mentally. It was more "these good games are still running, I still feel like I'm playing my best, and I can just take tomorrow afternoon off anyway (when cash traffic is worse than it is now) instead of calling it a night".

Now, what I will say about myself is this: sometimes when I know I'm having a really bad session, I will avoid ending it because that means I can avoid looking at my balance to log it in the spreadsheet I keep of every session. That was definitely part of the equation last night.

And I also need to say that, after that 9-hour session, I was in a sort of new mental space for me.

I was obviously very frustrated, to begin with. That's not a new feeling.

But the fact that this frustration felt so familiar (as, without being too self-pitying about it, I've faced a lot of large setbacks in my poker career)... it made it a lot easier to digest.

And whereas in the past I think I would have been more likely to feel like "what's the point of playing when I feel like I'll never succeed at this?"... afterwards I was feeling much more like "okay, well, if it gets any worse than this it won't even feel that much worse so there's no point in dreading that... and I know I can expect to succeed at this, so I'll keep trying".

When things aren't going well for me in poker, a lot of my negative feelings come from a notion of "there's no reason this has to go better tomorrow or the next day; it could just keep going badly and there's absolutely no statistical reason it couldn't". And gazing into that abyss is a pretty anxious thing when I really care about succeeding at this.

So yeah, instead of feeling "this might continue to go badly and that will feel even worse", I felt "this might continue to go badly and that will feel almost exactly the same as it has for most of the time I've tried to make this work as an occupation, so why worry about that?"

It's going to go how it's going to go, and I honestly can't imagine getting much more frustrated than I already have been... so I've developed a new level of comfort with failing at this, in all honesty.

And it left me ready to wake up and play the afternoon session I thought I'd skip.

And it's a good thing I played. I ICM-chopped heads up with a small chip lead in a relatively big MTT.

Normally, I would have been eager to play it out as I think I generally am able to exert a large edge when I get HU in a tournament. In my limited experience, a random player left with me HU at a final table typically is just not a very good HUNLH player (as much as I'm a very so-so one myself). But honestly: the difference between 1st and an ICM deal just wasn't very compelling to me, whereas getting 2nd vs 1st would have been pretty annoying.

But...

I think I've played enough poker in the past 24 hours and I would like to spend the rest of my day not playing poker.

So, I'll take this evening off and I'll get back to it tomorrow. Hopefully I can continue to build towards getting back to PLO100.

By the way, I was able to increase my bankroll by about 17% this week.

It's amazing what's possible when you win some preflop all-ins in tournaments.

Very pleased. Still not at my PLO100 shot-taking figure, but I don't want to rush that so I'm fine to be patient.

Been having very water-treading results lately. That's always a little frustrating, but it's especially irritating when I'm just a good (not great) session away from hitting the number I have in mind for playing PLO100 again.

I've been getting a little more confident in my NLH from playing so much of it in tournaments, and I decided today to fire up some NL30 to see how I felt about playing some NLH cash again. (I want to be careful about it, though.)

I felt pretty good about it. I would have felt better if this hand went better:

NL Holdem 0.30(BB)
HJ ($23.93) [VPIP: 71.1% | PFR: 37.3% | AGG: 41.1% | Hands: 84]
HERO ($32.85)
BTN ($31.87)
SB ($30)
BB ($26.72)
UTG ($34.28)

Dealt to Hero: K K

UTG Folds, HJ Raises To $0.67, HERO Raises To $2.10, BTN Folds, SB Raises To $8.25, BB Folds, HJ Raises To $14.40, HERO Raises To $32.85 (allin), SB Folds, HJ Calls $9.53 (allin)

Flop ($65.33): 5 6 Q

Turn ($65.33): 5 6 Q 2

River ($65.33): 5 6 Q 2 T

HJ shows: 6 T

HJ wins: $54.41


The cold 4bet from SB (who I've figured as either the loose side of good or the tight side of spewy) did have me concerned and I haven't looked closely at what these ranges are supposed to look like, but with HJ being so wacky I figured we weren't in Monkerland anyway. I figured I'm supposed to shove KK and AKs?

I meant to respond last week on your last wrestling update but it slipped my mind.
It initially sounds dumb but makes a ton of sense:

That was my biggest overarching beef with it every time I would start to fall off the wagon. It rarely felt like anything mattered. And I know it doesn't really matter but man, they just don't seem concerned about it at all. Stories are not important if you're not invested in them, and they give you very little reason to invest in anything and I never understood why.

I disagree without in part about the rumble though. Its kind of an odd shortcut but to me it walks the line between being 'real real' and 'real enough but also obviously this whole thing is just for entertainment so we're just gonna do this crazy thing and whoever wins gets a golden ticket'.

Not saying that there are not other ways and better ways to do this, like the tournament style you mentioned (and I'd be up for that for sure) but I wouldn't want this to go away. The surprise entrances and the walk up music and throwback guys they put in there always made this my favorite event.



Back to poker

Glad to hear you turned a bit of a corner there with the runbad. I know you were at .5/1 before but not sure how long it was and I'm curious to see your thoughts on the population differences in general between .25.50 and .50/1 as you get a sample size built up

Ahh one other thing I wanted to point out which I found particularly relevant/helpful was you saying

Oftentimes in the past I would have days where I definitely would not want to play poker. And many of these times I would play anyways because I didn't really have a good sense of why I didn't want to play. Was I avoiding it because I had been winning lately and wanted to savory the feeling of winning and not risk it? Was I feeling unlucky for some reason and was sure I would lose if I played? Was I just procrastinating? And since I didn't have a good answer (I know I'm not 'unlucky' right now, if I am procrastinating, I shouldn't be, and if I just wanted to savor winning, well... too bad cuz I know I can't win all the time and I need to get better at living with that fact.

Alot of the sessions following this internal debate would end poorly. Like me tilting off many buyins bad. Not always, but the % chance of this happening was much greater when I was in this mindset of not really wanting to play.

Reading being 'ready to lose some flips' was a little light bulb moment and I realized thats what my issue was many of those times. I was not in the mood to lose flips. And youre just gonna lose some flips most times when you play.

I dont know.... being able to get closer to pinpointing an actual issue makes it easier for me to deal with. So instead of just wondering why I don't feel like playing one day and then just forcing myself to play like, 'just rub some dirt on it' vs thinking 'man losing a couple buyins right now to a guy 4 betting my AAKKds with his 2223 is just not something I want to deal with right this minute. I recognize this and maybe later today or tomorrow I'll be in a place where that won't send me off the deep end, so I'll just play then' is just way more constructive for me.

So asking myself if I'm ready to lose some flips is something I try to do now before I log in.

The Royal Rumble can be kind of fun (surprise entrance music is probably the best part) but it's also long and now there are two and now I can't help but compare it to the G1 Climax.

But yeah... I mean, the consensus WRT WWE's storytelling is largely that Vince McMahon often changes his mind or loses interest, and he's ultimately the guy making all of the big decisions. And when a storyteller can't even maintain interest in what they're offering, it's a pretty big ask for the audience to continue to care (though plenty of people do; I don't understand how).

Re: moving up, in all honestly, whenever I peek at who's at the tables from the lobby, the PLO100 games seem significantly less easy than they were last year and they seem significantly less easy than PLO50. I have some insight into the regs due to some of them playing some PLO50 sometimes, as well as having history from when I did play PLO100.

I'm not intimidated by the regs (it's less that they're tough and more that they're just not see-most-flops-and-only-raise-AA-preflop clueless), and I'm sure plenty of bad players still wander in. But it's still a little annoying to see that the games aren't as good as they were fairly recently (though I may just have a mistaken impression of the current traffic anyway).

And re: losing some flips, I'd suggest it's closely related to the bankroll stuff we've discussed before. Like, if you're not emotionally prepared for the balance in the Cashier page/window/whatever to be lower at the end of your session than it was at the beginning, you're not mentally ready to play that day. Knowing that you're fairly (though not majority) likely to have a losing session even with perfect play and knowing that you have the bankroll to absorb that is such a helpful tool for maintaining one's mental game.

I'm getting pretty frustrated.

After my past two sessions, I've slipped far enough from my PLO100 shot-taking figure that it just doesn't even make sense to think about it.

I'm playing my best, and my best is improving constantly. I just have no idea what I could be doing better in any major way, and I'm just not winning.

I'm working so hard on my game daily. Most nights I'm running a (batch of) Monker sim(s) while I sleep. Most days I'm taking notes on one or more sims.

And... I'm just breakeven in cash games for 2021? Come on.

I'm approaching 100k hands for the year and it just feels like I can't win.

There's just no better word for it than "frustrating", and I'm feeling that to such an overwhelming degree when I think about how things are going.

I feel like there's just no relationship between how hard I work at this and the results, and that's so discouraging. Yet my games are super beatable. And I know what I need to do to beat them. And I do that. But... it's not working.

It's very hard to have a clear view of it, but I honestly feel like I'm just hardly ever flopping anything. I'm not even flopping good bluff candidates a lot of the time (let alone hands I can make a lot of money with at showdown). I feel like I'm always staring at the wrong suits and I'm whiffing constantly in general.

I honestly think I'm doing a very good job of being patient and keeping a level head while I play, but at some point I would like to be winning, please?

I'm literally running out of ways to sharpen my most common decisions at the table, and any further work on my game should really only make a difference between making money and making more money.

I'm really not asking a lot out of poker. From the very beginning, I've said my goals are very unglamorous.

But there is absolutely no reason I should not be winning something. There are literally zero players in my PLO cash games who aren't making huge mistakes regularly.

And like I said: I am working on ironing out my most common mistakes practically every day.

It just boggles my mind that I can't seem to get rewarded for it at all at the tables.

So, last night I had a pretty good final table result that pushed me back to near (but not at) my PLO100 figure. (I also had a really annoying final table bubble result despite being set up for a really good run at said final table. Couldn't win a pot during the long bubble, lost a standard flip, the end: 10th place.)

I figured I'm tired of waiting and I went ahead and played PLO100 today.

That specifically went well. My other PLO tables did not.

I also decided to take a "shot" at NL50, which went pretty poorly.

So...

I'm deliberately (not carelessly or breathlessly) going to be a lot less patient about all of this.

Enough's enough. I can't tread water at the micros forever. Or, rather: I won't.

I'm going to use more aggressive BRM for cash games now, and I'm going to try to play more NLH cash when I have the screen real estate available for it (still always keeping my max tables at 8-10 with rare exceptions).

I've been trying to do this "the right way" in terms of being pretty conservative with my bankroll and being extremely patient, but at this point I just don't see much difference between being more aggressive and failing and being conservative and failing.

I'm giving myself a soft deadline of the end of March to get myself firmly established as playing PLO100 in particular and winning in general.

If April comes around and I haven't had a winning month (and maybe even if I've only won a little), I think I'm going to be changing my relationship to poker.

I'm already frustrated about that possibility.

I don't play 100% mistake-free poker (does anyone?) but I sincerely believe (and I think I have enough expertise to know) that I've been playing great all year, overall.

And between this year and the last time I tried to make a run at playing full-time, it's honestly pretty infuriating that I just can't get things to come together results-wise. I have really good reasons to believe that I should be able to be very successful at this, and it just keeps not working out.

I think I've gotten a lot better at losing this year, and I think I'm generally at a point where I can deal with a lack of success in poker very well.

But I just keep having a distinct lack of success at the worst time for it. Everyone who wants to build a solid poker career needs to catch some breaks early. There's just literally no way to build a bankroll otherwise.

And I've just never really caught those breaks.

And I need some big results soon or this is all just going to feel like a huge waste of time. And I hate that it's coming to that; I know I "deserve" better.

But I also know that all I can do is play my best and continue to improve my best. And I keep doing both things. So... I don't know. It'll work out or not.