Adams Rants

Today was another intensive day of “grinding” (read “losing my bollocks”), putting in 3998 hands. I posted a while back that I was playing up to 8 tables to try and get myself into as many awkward and unique situations as possible. I now realise that this is far from the optimal approach as I haven’t been able to apply me thought process to as many hands as I wanted to. This resulted in a) not being able to extract value from my big hands due to taking a standard bet-bet-bet line more suited to full ring and b) not paying enough attention to spot set miners, hence some of my biggest losing hands have been AA-KK-QQ and I found myself constantly calling turn check raise all-ins versus nits on dry boards. Also I’d like to add that having 8 tables open isn’t ideal when you’re prone to tilting and I’m certainly guilty of injecting the $20NL economy with some easy cash! Anyway, I’ve decided to drop to 4 tables as I feel I concentrate better there. I may not get in as many hands leading to decreased amounts of rakeback but at least I’ll have a positive winrate which is far better than being a break even/losing multi-tabler.

Today’s session started at 11am and the very first hand saw me being dealt QQ and getting it all in on a ten high, two tone flop vs a 52/49/8 maniac who felted KT. A King on the turn led me to think that this was going to be another one of those days! I wasn’t far off, suffering some fairly horrendous beats (try getting 55 all-in against AQ on a 5QJ board only for iPoker to rustle up a runner runner Ace combo!). I also ran my boats into quads twice which never ceases to be frustrating! At one point I was down $197 which is just shy of 10 buyins… a considerable amount given that it was around lunchtime!

I then began my comeback, hitting a nice run of cards which even allowed me to get my money in bad on occasion and come out trumps which is proof that I don’t always run like Christy Brown down a flight of stairs! During this upswing my set % jumped from 4%, all the way up to 11%, still slightly below expectation but an improvement nonetheless. During this time I flopped quad sixes AND quad Kings and almost got paid both times! However, just as I broke even, I lost a few buyins in quick succession and once again found myself chasing for the day! Things went from bad to worse, dropping another 8 buyins before taking a break for dinner!

When I got back, I just loaded up 4 tables and found myself playing much better. I was running well, flopping two-pair on more than one occasion in 3bet pots. When I wasn’t able to flop monsters, I was able to read my opponents well, extracting value from my hands as well as being able to getaway from hands when I was beat. Something that I find myself being able to apply much better when only 4 tabling is interpreting “timing tells”. It’s more than difficult to do when the first time I observe an opponents action is when I’m about to time out myself!

So, how did I end my day? Slightly down I’m afraid, but that’s excluding rakeback so I’m up about $8 for the day which isn’t bad considering I was down 10buyins at one stage! You could argue that my time could be spent doing better things, but today I learnt that I’m capable of bringing back 10buyin swings in the one session when I put my mind to it. So in the coming days that’s exactly what I’m going to focus on doing - putting my mind to it! Coupled with dropping down to 4 tables, I hope to be able to crush the games in the coming days!

Before I go, I’ll leave you with my graph for the day! Oh and if anybody wants to exchange blog links, leave your address as a comment!