A look back at all I have accomplished
And how little it was.
In the beautiful graph above, you will see my first consistent losses early own, when I was clearing my $350 in bonus money over my time off around Christmas. Then you will see a general up trend for a few months where it looked like I had finally clued in. And then lately, where it looks like I have lost all knowledge of the game of poker and totally sucked. Sucked while loosing large amounts of money in a very short time.
I leave for Ireland Thursday and I am not planning on playing poker until after I get back. More importantly, I am planning on spending some time relearning the game, as well as reviewing my hand histories. There is some knowledge from the uptrend that I have lost, that I need to regain.
In the last six weeks or so, I will catch myself playing some very good poker. Winning pots when I have nothing, minimizing losses, and building large pots when I have the dominate hand. The problem is, I have been playing really inconsistent poker. Last Friday, I played wonderfully. I sat at a table with a maniac. This man made the table awesome, he put the entire table on tilt except for me. Everyone congratulated me greatly when I finally busted him out, but I took over $80 from the table, and not all of it was the maniacs. He made the table incredibly profitable for me. Saturday, I lost my cool and went on tilt for something like $70 in 15 minutes. I think my win rate at that table averaged out to $-250/hr. Overall, I lost all my winnings from Friday and gave back another $50. I did manage to clear a bonus of $100 while on tilt, but again, not playing at all, I was up $130. Playing and clearing a bonus, I was up $50. Bad play Sunday and Monday wiped that profit out as well.
I stopped hating poker and started hating myself. The tilt table was 100% my fault. At one point I was up $28. That would have been a good time to move to another table and start grinding again. But no, I kept playing like a maniac, and like most maniacs, ended loosing it all. Over the weekend I had 16 loosing sessions, 9 of which were over $20. Wow, I had 18 winning sessions, too bad only 5 of those sessions were over $20.
Not reviewing my stats is definately a problem. Had I known that I was actually winning more often then loosing, maybe I could have avoided some tilt. It sure felt like I was loosing everytime I sat down at a table.
A friend of mine has been taking the numerical analysis approach to poker. He has noticed a trend that once you hit a certain dollar amount, that is your max for the table. Now the conspiracy theorists would say that the system is rigged. Luckily, his point was that there are probably other reasons causing that ceiling. So the goal is for me to review my play, and see that trends I can find. The dollar amount seems like it would be physcological for the most part. It could also be mental endurance. You are only profitable at your skill level when you are at the top of your game. I have seen this with my play and I bet if I go back and review, I will find that I loose money more often when playing late, or putting in long hours of continuous play. It is also possible that your playing style is not profitable in the long run, but is not what other players at the table expect, so you are profitable for a short period, and once enough people at the table catch on, your play becomes break even or you start to leak money.
Luckily, I have excellant stats on my play thanks to PokerOffice. Things I will be looking for in my game include, time of day when I played, how many hands have I played, how many hands/hour are being played, how many minutes have I played at the table, how many minutes have I played in that day and of course how do all those data points map to my profit.
I don’t think I need a mental break from poker the theory, but I need a break from the game. I sit down expecting to win big everytime. Lately when I sit at a table, it is a question of how I can make $10. But I should know that some days I will win the $10, and some days I will loose $6, but as long as I am winning more money than I am loosing than I am playing the right game. I have no idea how Ireland will reprogram my brain for this but hopefully not stilling at a table online for a couple weeks will help.