Month End Review - November #Disaster Strikes

November Review- December Goals

Poker

It's been awhile since I've updated my blog and hopefully the graph to the left will illustrate sort of the reason. Unlike the beautiful results that I've attained in October. This month started off as a disaster and didn't really result in my full recovery. Thankfully for the Pokerstars VIP system I somehow managed to end the month in the positive despite the atrocious results on the tables.  I took 4-5 days off in November attempting to freshen my mind from the continuous downswings that never seemed to cease.

The Numbers 

Now as you can see to the left 200nl was a complete disaster for me. Considering the small sample size along with the "negative" "ev winrate" it's pretty easy to conclude that I played awful and ran just as awful. I ended up making 127859.19 VPPs for the month. Full-Ring Zoom is a breeze as usual, my 6-max game deteriorated. Approximately 255 hours on the tables as well. This worked out to be 18$/hour after losses despite the ridiculously poor performance on the tables. 

Lessons

Butchering my Game Plan- I made every single possible mistake possible last month. I played late into the night with the notion of "chasing my losses", lost track of what a profitable game was, and spewed relentlessly. It had began bad to the point that I had other players on the table commenting on how my play is so much worse/ different than before. The FOLD button also seems to magically disappear from my field of view while on a downswing and been replaced by the "Shove or Call option". 

You don't have to win every pot- If only I could have repeated this to myself while on the tables. . . countless amount of money would have been saved. My biggest losing day for the month I had dropped almost 4x the amount more than my biggest winning day. (-5.7k vs +1.6k) . Neglecting stop losses and constantly peeking at my graph mid-session resulted in poor performance on the tables and self inducing tilt. 

Variance is variance, let it go- What is variance and what isn't?. Let's just take a breather and assume that my plays were 100% best to my abilities and 0% tilt-play was involved. Well had I run at "Expected Value", my month would have been at approximately +9.4k. Had I run 4.6k above rather than below, I would have ended the month at +14k profit. 

Stop blaming variance- Rather complimentary to my previous lesson. There's a line, sometimes a thick line sometimes a thin line between variance and poor play. 

eg. I call a 6bet-shove with 9Ts and lose to AK-Situation 1 

eg. I call a 5bet-shove with KK and lose to AA-Situation 2

In almost 95% of the cases situation 2 is "variance" situation 1 is "bad play". Despite having more "equity vs the hand" in situation 1. There's a pretty clear line of the two hypothetical examples I gave is variance/bad play. As ranges become thinner and thinner it becomes less conclusive whether a play is poor or good.

That being said, I don't think that my game has "evolved" to that level of strategy; nor do I think that the skill levels at small stakes (100-200nl) have reached the epitome of poker. 

*Note to self* - Don't overestimate fold equity or thin value. It's an easy sure fire way to kick up variance through the roof. 

Goals for December

• Hit up the gym 4-5x a week. 
• Hit Supernova Elite
• Work on maintaining A-Game and hopefully recover from "november Downswing"
• Manage Time much better
• Have lots of fun "It is the holidays"
• 3evbb/100 - 200k hands -
• Not checking my results relentlessly. (Hopefully just once a day. . then couple days. . then week.)