May as well start with a year to date graph that will show the context of the blog to come.
So yeah, overall certainly not the end of the world, but also not exactly setting the world on fire. I'm about 5 days behind SNE pace which is fine now I'm 6 tabling, hourly without VPPs is $54, and if I sustained the winrate all year I'd be on for a $165k year with SNE.
And yet! The breakeven stretch is coming close to 250k hands. I finished the back end of 2014 and started 2015 very strongly and felt, and do feel, that I'm capable of so much more.
For the most part during the break even stretch, I've played fairly consistently- I would judge both my mental and technical game during the period as being something like 6/10, with 10 being the very best that I am capable of with a little application. I guess what has happened is the affliction common to all SNE grinders; I've caught the virus of 'VPP chasing' which comes at the expense of perfection.
Re-phrased, I think I've thought that 6/10 is going to be 'ok'. And by ok, I mean better results than in that sample. I've been waiting and waiting for the uptick to return me to the mean of at least my long term 2bb/100 winrate, but at this point I don't think it's ever going to come, not playing this way.
So yeah, neither my mental nor technical game have been very bad, nor very good. Technically, I'm typically not making a ton of obvious mistakes, but not doing anything wonderful either. When I'm playing well then somewhat unorthodox calls, bluffs and folds happen fairly regularly. At the moment, I'm just sorta like 'flat 3bet, flop J85ss, call flop, turn Ks, fold turn with TT, next hand' which is obviously all fine, but there's no X factor there, no tricks or decent handreading or fucking with people, or feeling in any particular spot that 'yes, THIS is where my edge lies'.
There's loads of details in poker that get missed. Almost an infinite number, but I'm talking about all the low hanging fruit type ones that rarely get mentioned in videos and take a bit of effort to process ingame, thinks like betsizing VS PSR. Maybe high volume just means I can't go super duper spidey sensey in every hand, but I'm not buying that just yet. It's certainly the case that if I 1-tabled I'd expect to win at a very high winrate, so doing the same at 4 or 6 tables is just a case of finding a way of repeating that ability at high frequency.
I've always talked about brain 'bandwidth', which is basically the processing power of the mind. One tabling, tilt free, we'd have the most bandwidth ever, and our decisions would be the best we are capable of.
Six tabling, the bandwidth is spread much thinner, so it's much more important to be tilt free so your mind is not occupied with unrelated, non strategy related stuff. To that end, I can improve my tilt control- I simply need to be more aware of the types of tilt and get back into the habit of constantly injecting solid logic in order to nullify them. For example, playing a bad river call over and over in our head is our mind basically wasting energy trying to solve a problem that simply doesn't need solving right now, because the hand is over. Saying to yourself though 'some mistakes are fine, we'll review after the session' puts an end to the problem, and frees up that vital brain bandwidth re-focus on solving whatever poker hand is happening at the time.
There's another huge way for me to free up brain bandwidth though, and that is to have a lot more defaults on earlier streets, when the pot is small. What is happening at the moment is that I'm doing too much thinking in game, on all tables, across lots of different types of flops and turns. So many of these spots are very repetitive, and can definitely be simplified such that no brain power is really needed.
When brain power is truly needed is in those medium and big pots where it's likely we're going to be swapping 100bbs one way or another. Those spots are huge for our winrate, and doing consistently well in them is difficult when I'm in 3 other single raised pots deciding whether to cbet in a very common, BTN-BB spot.
Things like what to cbet BTN-BB, what size to take, whether to check or bet, are very very very common and I'm wasting a lot of brain power on them.
I'll run through some common spots now and get some defaults down.
BTN-BB - definitely pretty crazy that I spend so much time thinking about this spot in-game. The jist of the spot is that I minraise, so BB's range is extremely wide and weak. I waste thinking time on whether or not to cbet, whether to barrel, and what size to take. This stuff is all fairly easy to get down: I'll cbet depolarised, so all pairs, and mostly be betting the turn too. I'll chose one of 3 sizings, 50%, 66% and 75%, depending on the wetness of the board. t44r is 50%, t82ss is 66%, QJTss is 75%. In terms of bluffs, I'll cbet anything that can bet the turn most of the time. On dryer boards, this might mean QJ on t44r. The other boards, just kinda common sense stuff. If we check and it checks through, we take our weak equity hands and delay bet, and leave pure bottom of range for post oak rivers. Anthing else on the flop, check!
Flop OOP spots as the caller. We flat and face a cbet. We're OOP, do we cc or check raise? Well, as a default I'm just going to solve this by never check raising flops, and going for turn check raises instead. The spots to do so should be fairly obvious- we have equity and can't check call. If flop checks through, we'll be bombing turn with all equity stuff, bombing med- strong value too (bomb = 75%), and leading 2nd pairs to med value at a 66% size for protection. Protection bets are only made when there are some worse hands that can call, thus shoring up the value element of the bet enough to make it profitable.
Flop OOP spots as the cbettor. If we have equity to continue, then I think I'm just going to have definitive plays depending on board texture. Type 1 and type 2 boards (very dry, and medium dry) are getting cbet, while type 3+ boards are getting checked with everything. It sorta follows that if we're cbetting type 1 and type 2, that our range when we check is going to be very weak and therefore not delay stabbing very much at all. I expect our cbet % HU for the type 1 and type 2 boards though to be pretty high, so this is not a big factor. Again, cbetting range is top pairs+, and hands that can barrel often. On the type 3 boards when we check, we can go to town with CRs and delay bomb bombs given the uncapped nature of our range.
So the above accounts for the most common spots I'm talking about that currently eat up brain power. What this should do is free up creativity in other spots allowing me to think more in the medium and bigger sized pots, this should lead to running more bluffs, more decent call downs, that kind of thing.
I'm tired from writing this, but I think I'm going to have to start blogging some hands to keep up my technical sharpness. So, I'll have a rest then put up another blog with hands, or maybe just update this one.
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