Quote:
Originally Posted by mpethybridge
For the vast majority of you who have negative red lines, like me, the reason is simple: you're folding about 90% of your blinds.
Folding your blinds most of the time is fine. It is correct. It is smart. And it leads to a negative red line. Thus, A NEGATIVE RED LINE IS NOT A LEAK.
Red line has nothing to do with the blinds, because everybody at the table pays the same amount of blinds. If you fold your BB in game #1, then fold your SB in game #2, and you steal the blinds from the next two players in game #3, you are breaking even, also in your red line. So the red line has NOTHING to do with the blinds, maybe only with the rake you pay, but if people fold you don't pay rake, so even then it has NOTHING to do with the blinds. If your red line is negative, it means you are folding more hands to your opponents in marginal situations, and if it's positive you make them fold more in marginal situations. I had a negative line also for a long time, but for the last 10,000 it's positive, and this includes paying the blinds. I was quite surprised at first that this is only the result from some minor changes in my game. Actually my goal was to try to make the red line stay horizontal, but to my own surprise it's up for about half of my green line now, going parallel with my blue and yellow line. So I think it's a leak if people have a red line that is constantly going down, even at the micros. But I have to add, that you have to be extremely concentrated to achieve this, not playing too many tables at the same time (4-6 tables max at the micros) and probably only 1 or 2 at higher stakes. Also don't play for more than 60 minutes in a row, or your concentration will go down. Also your blue line will suffer from a better red line (I had a 55% W$SD and it dropped to 51-52%) but still it's going up. But the important thing is that you can improve your red line with better play, but NOT YOUR BLUE LINE. Blue line is just showdowns, coinflips, people who call your advanced bluffs, and donks who push with any two cards and who you can call with QQ+. So you simply have not so much influence on these things. If you feel like tilting just look at your blue line. If it goes down you know that you probably just had a bad streak of cards, not because of bad play (well, maybe also that, but if you have a brain your blue line must eventually go up again). The real thing you have to worry about, is that your red line is exactly the opposite of your blue line, going slightly down like a downhill slope. Of course I could have been on a heater for the last 10K hands, but it feels like I fixed a leak so I just keep on playing like this and see if things keep going as expected.
I went from 2 BB/100 to 5 BB/100 so I hope I can keep going like this.
XL.
Last edited by XL Poker; 03-30-2011 at 04:32 PM.