Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Dancing with the Doomswitch

I haven’t updated in a while for a few reasons, foremost I’ve been taking a beating! I moved to a new site and made $1k there in 3k hands and then took a shot at $200nl about a week ago today, and I instantly lost $1k in 1k hands and was shell shocked to say the least. Obviously I moved down to $100nl again and I’ve been trying to get back in order, but to no avail and I’m down a further $300 over the following 5k hands which brings me to today. My play has definitely been affected by the swing and I’m making some tilty calls and shoves and being passive in bad spots for fear of the swing continuing. This is clear from my won w/o showdown going back to its old ways. This if for sure the low-point of my 8 or so months playing poker so far. I’m really terrible at taking the rough with the smooth and I got far sicker about losing the $1k than I was happy to win the $1k the week before.

I really have no handle on the fact that 10 buyin downswings are commonplace in a 50k sample, and that 10-15k breakeven stretches are quite normal. I bought the ‘ Zen and the Art of Poker’ book a while back and I’ve been reading over it over the last few days and it’s definitely helped to calm me down and get me thinking better.

Over the last day or so, I’ve switched to just playing 4 tables and trying to concentrate on every decision to get my thought process back and its looking up a little bit. All I can do is keep plugging away and trying to make the right decision every time.

One great point I read in the book is about trying to win every hand. I always used to get just slightly annoyed if I didn’t win a hand where I VP$IP but the truth is you’re only going to win at showdown and in hands where you’re the PFR about 55% of the time max…this means that almost ½ the time, you’re pissed off, and human nature means that you remember the losses more than the wins, so overall if you go in with the mindset of being even a tiny bit upset when you lose a hand, you’ll end up very negative overall and I think this lets the inner-‘nit’ thrive. So the goal is to try and just make the right decision vs. the opponents range and let whatever happens happen.

I still have about 57 buyins for 100nl, and I’m going to stick with it until I get to about $7k or get some confidence back, which might be in 2 weeks or it might be in 6 weeks. I’m still on par with the goals I set myself at the start of the year, so I’m gonna try and think positive….If I was offered a guarantee in January that I’d be where I am now in terms of bankroll and development I’d have snapped called.

Finally, I’m just going to make occasional updates every now and then as I was kind of getting bored of the weekly report thing. GL!

1 comment:

dvdfan said...

Hey Zuutroy, Sounds very similar to me, ive had too many 10 bi downswings that im pretty convinced its not variance in my case and bad play, everytime i move up i seem to lose 5-7 bi off that bat, happened at 100nl and 200nl for me.

Ive found reducing tables helped alot too but again ive gone from -11bi in 1 day to +20 something buyins over a 15 days period immediately followed by a 5 bi downswing over the last 2 days before i eventually got 2 of those bi back before finishing up my session.

Im going to try some sort of stop gap system where i stop after losing x amount of bi because i think unknown to myslef im semi tilting when i lose 3 or more bi's so when this happens ill get on the wii, go for a pint or game of pitch n putt or something. Anyway that book sounds interesting and it might be worth buyin so i might check it out