First of all, I want to say that I have never considered myself a "Good" player. I don't mean that in the way that most people say, "He's a good player" or "That dude sucks." I use the terms "Good", "Above Average", and "Average" as an official, objective ranking. While I would consider myself a "Good" tournament player, I'm only an "Average" Limit Holdem player.
However, this post is about NL Cash, specifically $1/$2 and $2/$3. While I've consider myself an "Above Average, approaching Good" player, I have always been a winning player. I have kept records in a database for the past five years, along with over 300 blog entries, that show I have been a winning player over the long run.
However, I can no longer say that. Here are the numbers since I moved out to Reno back in October '10.
$1/$2 NL: -$1207 ~ 87 Sessions (-$13.87/Session) ~ 233.50 hrs (-$5.17/hr)
$2/$3 NL: -$490 ~ 40 Sessions (-$12.25/Session) ~ 120.25 hrs (-$4.07/hr)
Last 20 Sessions (combined): -$1586 ~ 7-13 ~ 54.25 hrs
These numbers aren't catastrophic, and aren't telling me to quit poker and take up pottery. However, the sample size is large enough to tell me that something is very wrong. Here are three things that I believe are affecting my winrate.
1) Fancy Play Syndrome - A while back, one of the things that I wanted to improve in order to become a "Good" NL player was to win without cards. You know, running without the ball, making something from nothing, reading situations and taking advantage of them, getting maximum value from 6-high...
Overall, I have gotten better at this, as documented through various Hands Of The Day and Running Logs. It's a good tool to use once or twice a session to help increase my winrate.
The problem is that there are sessions which I'm doing it once or twice an hour, or even per orbit. I ended up burning through chips by calling to float on the Flop and/or Turn, and then having to fold on the River. Other times, I put out a big raise, and run into a monster.
There's no doubt that I'm often the best player at the table. But I'm not good enough to play so reckless, just to prove that I'm smarter than the other players.
2) Patience - Before I moved to Reno, I was known as patient player, in both cash games and tournaments. However, those days are long gone.
Why?
Well, as for cash games, if you look closely at the numbers above, you'll see that I'm averaging only 2.75 hours per session. With my work schedule of six long days per week, it's rare that I play a session of six hours or longer, with many sessions being two hours or less. In shorter sessions, you need to catch some cards in order to win. If I'm not catching the cards, sometimes I try to make things happen, which is what I just talked about.
In tournaments, I played mostly home tournaments back in Cleveland, and those tourneys had pretty good structures. In Reno, it's been mostly Daily Donkaments, and you need a different mindset for those. When I have played in the occasional bigger tourney, I have still gone in with the donkament mindset, and have gotten into some trouble with it.
3) Luck/Variance - As I've mentioned before, I don't like the term "Running Bad", mostly because I think that many players use it as an excuse. But maybe ignoring the "Luck Factor" of poker is just as bad as using it as a crutch.
Last winter, I went on a heater, and was piling up the money. But since the spring, it's been going downhill. There has been a few spikes up, but things haven't been going good for a while now.
Last weekend, I was gonna play every day from Wednesday through Sunday, due to the holiday weekend. I had Thursday off from work, and my Friday night bowling league was off due to the holiday. I set a goal of making $1000 in the $1/$2 games, to see if I could focus on playing good, and making money. Here are the results.
Wed 11.23 (Atlantis) -$81 ~ 5.25 hrs
Thur 11.24 (Grand Sierra) +$209 ~ 3.25 hrs
Thur 11.24 (Peppermill) -$300 ~ 1.50 hrs
Fri 11.25 (Atlantis) -$289 ~ 1.75 hrs
I quit after this, as it looked like I was more likely to lose $1000 instead of winning it. I didn't even play on Saturday night. On Sunday, I did the Double Daily Donkament thing, and airballed both of them.
I'm taking this entire week off to clear my head, and I won't be stepping foot in a casino until Sunday. Hopefully, I can improve on #1 and #2, but #3 is something that I just have to deal with.
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