Friday, September 21, 2007

Poker :: Lousy monthly analysis

Hi everyone. It is gonna to be a lousy month for me. Both the ankle injury and being terribly busy at job messed up everything... As a follow-up for previous post on "average Joe's" 15 month poker venture, here I'm posting a quick overview how I look back at my performance at cash rings after each month (I don't plan any more sessions for September). For example, analysis graph for September looks like this:

I played 6000 hands only, which were just enough to get 4k VPP to maintain the GoldVIP status. I'm not even planing to grind it to PlatinumVIP in nearest future. Most of the time I four tabled, so this makes 250 hands / hour, totaling 24 hours per month. This is really where I thought I'm at - 4-hour long session early Saturday morning (to steal the rest of tired USA guys battered stacks after they bust out late from midnight's tourneys:) and a couple of 2-hour long sessions in the evenings during the work week.
Beginning of the month wasn't too good, but most of those first 2k hands were played "to fill up space" while I was playing few tournaments. From the graph I can clearly see that mixing up tourneys and cash might be a leak that doesn't allow to make the maximum. In fact, missing opportunities to steal weak set of blinds makes HUGE difference in these middle stake cash games. Lets say, if this opportunity arises every 3 orbits (and it definitely arises, if not - that means its time for you to move to other table / go down a level:) and you miss it, it piles up to 2BB/100 hands, or $1k+ if you play 6k hands / month. And its far too easy to miss ALL the stealing opportunities when you have two tourneys going on at the same time - Q3 - autofold, J8 - autofold, and all of the sudden you are costing yourself a fortune in the long run :)
Few last sessions were really good when I finally identified quite a lot of NL6 players as "horrible" and started to pick on them and play big pots, made few big river calls that turned out to be correct, etc. Yet again, looking at the PokerTracker stats I see that my biggest losing hands at this moment are JJ, AQo and T9s - lost about the same with all of them. I should play first two less aggressive from EP I guess, and stop playing the latter one for value :) Funny enough, 86s (that I marked as my fav on pocket fives) in fact is making me 4th biggest profit (after AA, KK and QQ). Last bit of personal advice for mid stake cash is - NEVER go all-in with AK preflop if you expect to get called. Donked couple of buyins (lost races vs QQ and 99) this month in blind confrontation this way and am still hating myself for that. Its so much easier to win by playing post flop poker that you simply do not need to do any open gambling :) Unless you feel like it ;) Jam this 86s in! ;)

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