The Long Bumpy Road Begins

Well that wasn't exactly how I envisioned it.

At my first check-in here, I am sitting somewhere around $80.00 in my account. I have a few excuses reasons which I will go over here.

1. The game has changed.

Hey look at that, turns out poker *is* an ever-evolving, changing beast that must be adjusted to after all. Truthfully, I knew this going in. I have been concentrating on my live game for the most part for the last however long, so getting back on the micros for this challenge was going to be an adjustment regardless.

I basically jumped in and started doing a similar style to the last time I was at these stakes. I tend to raise a bunch, and be one of the few people at the table 3-betting. After a while, the inner calling-station will arise in these bottom level players, and they will start calling me down with any top pair, sometimes worse. For some reason though, over the course of the whole weekend, everyone just folded everything the whole time.

Somewhere along the way, the micros on Cake have become massively nitty. I just kept running the table over again and again. I would lose the occasional big pot when they would hit a real hand against my real hand, but overall I was just steamrolling. But one thing was missing: I wasn't winning the big pots from some guy just getting sick of me betting, hitting his top pair 3rd kicker and calling me down for stacks. Inexplicably, they would put in 2/3rds of their stack, then fold anyway.

Fucking nits.

2. I ran significantly below EV.

In other words, I just got unlucky a lot. I looked at my graph which has this option of showing you how much you would have made had you ran at exactly neutral EV and compare that to what you did make. If your actual number is above the EV one, then you are running good. If it's below, it's the opposite.

Mine was WAY the opposite.

This graph however isn't statistically perfect, and is only a guide as to how you are running. Doesn't really mean that much at the end of the day.

What does mean something is that A) I avoided tilt for the most part and B) I would have just been slightly above break even had I ran EV neutral.

Combined with rakeback, I would be up a bit for the session, but not where I want to be.

3. I didn't play my A game.

Before, I could get away with so much that I hardly even tried to play my A-game. It isn't about A-game at these levels necessarily. You don't make reads like you do at higher levels. You pick up a good hand and you jam in your money and get paid by a worse hand. Rinse and repeat until you are ready to move up.

Well since it seems like that isn't going to fly on this go-around, I will have to actually (gasp) try to play well. Fine.

This means value betting, but staying aggressive (since they are folding FAR too often). Basically I am going to keep hammering away, but when I really want to get paid off, I will revert to actual poker and bet amounts that are likely to get paid off by my opponents range.

God, I didn't want to have to do this, but Cake, you made me do it. Full on Marsh assault is active.

Don't say I didn't warn you..


(the graph at the top is still the old one at the time of this writing, still figuring out how to show my damn new graph up there..)