Ugggghhhhhh, it's been Black Wednesday for me. My fear before this week was to have a horrid day like today. I wasn't overconfident and was playing my normal game but somehow things just never seemed to fall my way, even the coin flips with the ‘$20 special’ players were going against me. I won't bore you with the bad beat stories or how I always seemed to get K-K when someone else had A-A, etc (OK, just slip that one in), but the end result is that I have basically done my bankroll. From being upbeat and confident 24 hours ago, I am staring at a definite possibility that I may not be able to complete this week’s Grading hours, let alone next week’s as well. It's very depressing, but looking on the brighter side, I have a woman that loves me… and she might lend me some money :-). In all seriousness, I would never normally borrow to gamble, but knowing my bankroll was not really sufficient from the beginning, I have already borrowed to get this far.
Thursday. It’s workshop day today, so I will have a chance to reflect on where I am with my game and how much I am prepared to pay to achieve Green Belt status. It was good to see my fellow Graders and we had a good day of talk and thought
Friday. Am I going to give u ? No, of course not! I must admit that when it came to loading up my Black Belt Poker account again I did do some soul searching to be sure I really wanted to do this. The answer was still, ‘Yes!’ but I couldn't bring myself to fire up with full buy-ins (which was my original plan), so ended up with $50 buy-ins. As normal, I started with two six-max tables whilst in the waiting list for the full-ring, 10 hands in I managed to get 9-9 on the big blind against the small blind who called my raise. Being too aggressive on the K-x-x flop got myself pot committed and all in against K-Q, so not the nice positive start I wanted for my session! Luckily, the other six-max table was very profitable and I finished $20 up for the two tables in the 30 minutes I played them.
Once I was running on the four full-ring tables I was playing OK, but probably a little bit defensively, as I was around $80 down when I took a break at two hours. I decided I had to refocus and believe in myself so the second two hour session saw me take the brave pill, put on my waterproof underpants and load up for four tables at full $100 buy-ins! I am not sure whether it was just a good run or whether playing full buy-in made the difference, but my results suddenly improved dramatically! The second session ended $176 up and gave me my biggest days positive result since I started the Grading... I couldn't believe it! I guess I was being more selective of the hands I played as I was more conscious of the stack I could lose and did find myself able to three-bet more streets. Were opponents folding to my aggression more? Whatever the answer, it certainly pushed my confidence back to it's earlier high levels
In the fulfilling glow of self satisfaction and happiness of a good day at the tables, I decided to take some relaxing time too flick through my results in Poker Tracker (as the wife was in the middle of watching one of her programs on TV as well). I didn't have time to look at my sessions in detail so reviewed my still depressing looking EV graph, then idly clicked through some of the other tabs (which I don't normally bother to look at all that much).
When clicking on ‘Positions’, I noticed a lot of big green numbers and a couple of huge red negative numbers, which I then realised showed that I was actually doing OK in all positions except small blind where I have lost over $400 and big blind where I have lost over $950! My jaw dropped at this revelation and I couldn't believe that I had never bothered to look at this chart before. Seems the majority of my problems are to do with the blinds, although I haven't quite worked out what these figures really tell me yet., so I will need to do more research and analysis in this area. If improving my game to better profitability is simply playing the blinds better, then I would be happy with that!
Overall it was a weird week, Istarted out feeling a bit anxious but then with two good days of results behind me was confident and relaxed…. then the big down on Wednesday really shook me, but Friday is the high point of the whole five weeks! That's poker I guess. :-)