Downswingaments

In short, I was on an epic downswing. The whole thing was pretty soul-crushing because I still think I played well for the most part. It's just really really really hard to stay motivated if your 2-pair keeps on running into better 2-pair, or your straight runs into full house after full house. The worst is if some donk keeps on calling you down to the river, just to hit his bloody 3 outer on the last card...it's fine the first time, and I can handle the 2nd time...but if it keeps on happening over and over again I'm going nuts. My bankroll dipped down to $154 at one point!!

The one thing I need to stop doing is continue playing if I lost more than like 8 BI, that's when my play starts to deteriorate. I went over a few hands this afternoon, and noticed that I made some horribly pointless bluffs when I shouldn't have...just because I try too hard to win pots. The thing that keeps me going is that I'm still running better than I should according to HEM's EV graph.

Good example of how the past 3 days went:

PokerStars Game #25606268972: Tournament #145417960, $11.00+$0.50 Hold'em No Limit - Match Round I, Level I (10/20) - 2009/03/04 22:57:32 GMT [2009/03/04 17:57:32 ET]
Table '145417960 1' 2-max Seat #1 is the button
Seat 1: Hero (1500 in chips)
Seat 2: Villain (1500 in chips)
Hero: posts small blind 10
Villain: posts big blind 20
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Hero [7s 9s]
Hero: raises 40 to 60
Villain: calls 40
*** FLOP *** [Tc 8d Js]
Villain: checks
Hero: bets 70
Villain: raises 150 to 220
Hero: raises 300 to 520
Villain: calls 300
*** TURN *** [Tc 8d Js] [Qs]
Villain: bets 920 and is all-in
Hero: calls 920 and is all-in
*** RIVER *** [Tc 8d Js Qs] [2s]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Villain: shows [Ts 6s] (a flush, Queen high)
Hero: shows [7s 9s] (a flush, Queen high - lower cards)
Villain collected 3000 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 3000 | Rake 0
Board [Tc 8d Js Qs 2s]
Seat 1: Hero (button) (small blind) showed [7s 9s] and lost with a flush, Queen high
Seat 2: Villain (big blind) showed [Ts 6s] and won (3000) with a flush, Queen high

On the flop, I'm a 93% favorite to win, and even on the turn it's 81%. The small flop bet was to sucker him in, since this villain normally folded to any flop cbet unless he has a piece of the flop, or I showed weakness. When he reraised my flop cbet, I figured he probably has the strong jack, a set, two pair, or an overpair...and he NEVER folded top pair throughout the entire match. Nevertheless, I wanted to keep him in in the pot, so I only reraised him 2.5x his flop 3bet. When he went all-in on the turn, I was a bit worried about AK, but at that point there were too many chips in the pot, and no way I'm folding a straight. Never expected him to call a 4bet with bloody MPWK, and then shove the turn!!

On the upside, I noticed that I had $82 left on Cake, and I decided to play some HU cash kamikaze style...that worked out well, and I transferred the money over to Stars. So overall I'm down "only" $19 since posting last time. Still pretty pissed off because I put in a ton of games.

I'm flying back home to Switzerland tomorrow for a 3 week vacation. Plenty of time to catch up on HUSNG.com and TheSNGacademy videos, review hands, and hopefully achieve enough VPPs for Silverstar until mid-March. I'm also going to clear a $50 bonus in the next 2-3 days. Over the next few days I'm going to play a lot of 4-mans, I have a pretty sick ROI in them (133%...61% ITM!), and seem to be doing well in the second level of those matches. Two days ago was awesome, and I won 7 out of 10 4-man matches, great bankroll booster.

Anyway, a few notes to myself:

- Just play straight-forward and don't try to be too tricky!! It's pointless to try out "special" stuff if your opponents aren't thinking players.
- 8BI stop loss, just do it!
- Don't slow play your strong hands.
- Don't triple barrel bluff at the $11 level.
- Really, don't triple barrel bluff at the $11 level!!

I've also updated my HEM HUD because I started multi-tabling and a HUD helps a bit. Here's the download link in case anyone's interested: LINK

Current bankroll: $392