GrogBlog- In Depth Analyis: A reset, of sorts

Lots of things to talk about, where to start? Well, I may as well lay it on the line that my current money situation in life and bankroll is pretty dire, and I don't have much option any more but to start winning and winning consistently.

I had a day today not of playing poker, but of opening letters from the past 6 months and sorting them out. Things like a pile of unopened letters are one of the things that just subtly tilt me, along with house mess and the fact that I didn't rinse out the blender and now it's impossible to clean. In the letters I found all sorts of stuff; court dates, speeding fines, overdue tax returns that've now been referred, bounced checks, yada yada. I actually managed to get TWO speeding tickets on a single day in July it seems, one in Lincoln where I was on a stag do, and then another returning to Hull. Could mean the end of my licence for a little while as I already have 6 points, I'll have to see.

I was pretty down last night, had my worst day of poker in a long long time, brought on by being tilted at my play in the $150r wcoop where I made an horrendous fold with QQ overpair in a big pot with 50bbs on T62ss VS someone who turned out to be a huge fish. In the 10 days leading up to that, I'd been doing pretty well. All wiped out though in this day obviously, as is usually the way with closet-tilt-monkey-accident-waiting-to-happen types who think their demons are over through two weeks of playing decent.

I liken it to being an alcoholic. You don't meet many recovering alcoholics who can now just partake in the odd drink. They're literally stone cold sober. They don't trust themselves, don't have the skills to handle the odd pint of Stella without going over the edge. There'll be a part of their brain telling themselves that they can, indeed, indulge again just this once, it won't be a problem. But through tons of counselling and maybe some self hatred at their behaviour, they've learned to overcome these demons. Some day I'll be there with tilt...... I can't handle a small amount, it will grow, even suble tilt makes me lose. One day I will know this, overcome the demons urging me to play on, and go clean that blender instead.

So yeah, I started off the month deciding to 16 table AGAIN. I decided that I needed the guaranteed payment of rakeback, and $7.5k for playing 150k hands seemed like an OK offer. Especially when I started off winning at a stretch. By the 15th though I was down $6k in cash, and in the exponential woe that was engulfing me was easily on course to shatter $12k in losses by month end. $7.5k in rakeback wasn't going to cut it. The next time I plan to 16 table, the first person to PM me linking this blog wins $100.

I started to 4 table. Did well, then upped it to 6, did well. I've a new-found respect for stats in a lot of spots, watched a few videos on the subject and have been getting good at mathematically quantifying a lot of the things I do, and maybe shouldn't do.

But yeah, I'm happy enough with the technical part of my game, but feel as though I need to attach a lot more importance to each and every session. It's kind of weird..... like without fail, if I were to write a blog, spend my session forcing myself to wait 5 seconds over every decision, take notes, quit when the slightest tilted etc, I win absolutely without fail. The trouble is, that the assigning of importance to events is dependent on their frequency, and so getting in the volume required to make money means I treat each session with less and less respect.

I suppose that things then start to feel a little stale, and that's the point where the best players/ grinders force themselves to freshen things up. Like do some analysis, think about a new concept from a video etc.

I feel pretty determined though. I've got that chart of 'skill of poker' that I still whole heartedly believe in, but need to remember that I do. I need more thought, more blogs, more note taking, more attention to detail, more analysis.

Onto technical stuff. I watched a bluefire video today, purely becuase in my annual check of my bank account I realised I'd been paying them a subscription for the past 2 years without knowing it. I've even borrowed other log-ins before! Anyway, this guy 'Alan', never heard of him but he's a 1-2 grinder and into stats and database analysis. Watched an interesting video on defending 3bet ranges...........

Now me and a friend, let's call him Dodgyken, or Martin Coleman for short. We've kinda settled in our various analyses that folding a lot to 3bets is good, and defending on the whole =......... bad. This guy Alan has a fold to 3bet of only 45%. What he then did is analyse his flatting with various hands to see if he was making money. I looked at my database and started to do the same.

Now this is the kind of defending range I'm talking about (taking out the obvious 4bet/ defends). Currently some hands I will always/ usually defend, but probably only KQs, QJs and KQo are dead certs. VS some tighter regs even KQo isn't a dead cert defend.

Now if we were to fold every time, we lose around $6 which is our open raise. What we have to look at when defending is simply that by doing so we lose less than $6 per hand. Even looking at the weaker part of this range, lifetime I'm losing far less than the $6 per hand. I'm losing something like $2.50 for the entire range, and $4-5.50 for the weaker part of the range. What this means is I should probably be defending a whole ton more than I am, and indeed is a pretty big leak when you add it up over time.

Defending more also has the effect that, eventually, people are going to pick on you less. Everyone has fold to 3bet in their HUD, everyone has it set to go green when it hits 65%. You get 3bet an absolute shit-ton, but its difficult to quantify exactly how much more when looking at raw HUD numbers.

So in summary, I plan to defend a whole lot more and get my fold to 3bet down to around 50%. It's currently at 70%. In conjunction with this then I'm really going to concentrate a lot in playing 3bet pots as the caller. I think there's a lot of potential for exploiting regs. For one, most have a cbet flop in 3bet pot % of like 80%. With say a 10% 3betting range (and it IS going to be much wider VS my 70% fold to 3bet stat, and in late position) they just don't connect often enough to be able to continue. The guys who I've never really seen spew then, are getting bluff minraised with any kind of equity until I'm blue in the face.

Other stuff, in conjunction with reads, is that plenty of people have the opposite leak, they give up too frequently, especially VS my now wider calling range IP (that won't register for a while). Other leaks are going to be having a zero% CC or CR range, so when they check it's time to print money. Other guys are going to be one and done a lot, etc.

So, that's about it. Taking each session really seriously I always do really well. There' so much money to be made paying attention to every tiny detail, every read, inferred read, betsizing tell, timing tell, etc. I'm starting a new graph that you can see as a widget on the blog, and I'll do a review after 50k hands and then a fuller database review after 100k.

This is what poker is about these days. Edges don't come easily and you have to look deeper and deeper in the technical void to find them. There's still plenty of low hanging fruit in the non-technical arena though, and so long as I can pick off those over the next 100k hands then I should do ok.

dan

ps: I haven't felt this owned in a while