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Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Variance or bad plays (or both)?

Things aren't going very well as I am down about 5 buyins at 5NL so far this month.
I am definately running bad: my EV stat tells me I should be up $5 instead of down $25. You know, just the usual bad beats. Also, I played some big combodraws, where I am 50%-40% to win the pot, very aggressive but then missed. Again, I didn't tilt as bad as I used to, but still made some mistakes I shouldn't have, making calls when that little voice in the back of my head told me not to.

In an effort to turn things around, I started playing a bit tighter post-flop even though I'm not all too happy with that, because now I sometimes feel I'm just weak-tight. I also disabled my own stats on the HUD as I noticed I sometimes make decisions based on my own stats, like "I should 3bet here because I haven't 3bet enough".

Even though I show a profit almost every month, I really need some kind of winning streak to build confidence. It's nice to see that bankroll grow slowly but steadily, but 3/4 of all my profits have come from bonusses and rakeback and that just doesn't make me feel like a winning poker player.

I guess I'll just have to keep trying...

1 comment:

  1. Yeah variance sucks, especially if you let it sip into your mentality. A good tip is to stop looking at your graph and daily profits or losses (;p).

    I played alot of poker in the past but i quit because of the problems that you wrote about in your post. Now i just do other stuff related to poker because i still have the passion for poker but not to play endless hours per day.

    The book Elements of Poker - Poker Boeken will help you ALOT with confidence and general mindset with your poker game. It covers alot of ground on tilt and how to think about poker in general. I higly recommend this book.

    Greetings,
    Jelle Henkens

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