The final Grading week has dawned and I have mixed feelings.
In some ways I feel like it’s getting towards the end of term and I am happy the enforced hard slog will be over, but on the other hand, I have enjoyed the push and challenge of completing the Grading hours and the interaction with my fellow Graders. I also don't want to blow my bankroll on stupid play trying to get to a profit, so need to be just as disciplined and focused as previous weeks and play my normal game.
Monday starts with my normal pattern of events: start out on s-max and make a reasonable profit, switch to full-ring and start well, then gradually slide down to a small loss for the day! This time is a little different in that reviewing my hands, I am pretty happy with my play generally and did get quite unlucky this session. There are still two or three times when I am paying off river bets when I should know better, so need to focus on that leak as well! Just for a laugh, I did run up a $1/2 table for a couple of hours and ended up $8 down, which wasn't too bad I thought. Actually, I found the level of play pretty similar to the $0.50/1 and there are still short stackers, even at this level.
Tuesday was such a rush and it seemed I could do no wrong, even when I did very wrong! Early on in my session I managed to reraise Q-Q against a short stack and find a big stack behind me wake up and re-reraise. I decided to push and was horrified to see the big stack had K-K and the short stack T-T. The flop came K-T-x and I was looking for the ‘get more chips’ button when I noticed a huge amount of chips were just shoved over to me. Yes, I had got runner-runner straight so didn't need those chips anymore! I was hitting hands and after reviewing my hands I am still generally pretty happy with my performance. The day had ended up being my biggest up day since the Grading started, so I am pretty happy at the moment and it comes at just the right time!
Wednesday turned out to be a terrible day. Slightly bizarrely, I had a reasonable session on three of my four tables but a horrendous session on just one table. It was not only cold decks (A-9 hitting A-A-8-T-8 board against A-T) and suck outs (my A-A being stacked by J-6o), but any silly mistakes all seemed to happen on this one table for some reason. The stupidest thing I did was to raise J-J from early position, get distracted by action on another table then come back to find a tight player had called, then a short stack LAG had lumped all in. Thinking I wanted to push the tight player out the way I just clicked all-in and immediately realised the tight player had raised! Before the cards showed I knew I was in the deep stuff, and sure enough was facing A-A and K-K. A stupid lapse of concentration that cost me $100 as I would have folded for sure had I followed the action. Trawling though my hands on this table was a nightmare to relive but had the comfort of pretty solid play and reasonable results on my other tables.
Thursday I shouldn't have played at all. I was feeling mentally drained and tired, but only had to do about three hours and wasn't sure I would feel better Friday so went ahead anyway. Dropping three buy-ins in about 30 minutes seemed almost inevitable given my mood, but I did manage to pull it back a bit and it wasn't such a bad day as Wednesday, but there is no doubt my head was in the wrong place.
I have now managed to complete the hours, so have achieved Green Belt which is fantastic :-). It's just a shame my Grading ended on a bit of a downer but just shows how important it is to be feeling fresh, eager and alert when playing poker!
It is more of a shame that I have to withdraw from being considered for a Blue Belt package. Even I don't think I really have a realistic chance, but my personal circumstances are such that I would not be able to attend the Irish Open anyway, so there is no point in my even being considered.
Good luck to my fellow Graders and hope to see you on the tables soon.