Horseshoe Update; Redline Thoughts

I've been playing a lot of 1/2 at the Horseshoe over the past week and overall I'm stuck $361 over maybe 25 hours of play, which, hilariously, probably works out to less than 1,000 hands. I initially lost almost 6 buyins through a combination of bad luck and horrific play, but I booked a huge win last night to recover a good deal of it. At one point last night, I was sitting with a $1,000+ stack and couldn't stop giggling every time I looked at it.

Online, I think my play recently has been just okay. I've able to avoid making too many huge mistakes recently but I feel like I'm still barely staying afloat and not crushing the games like I feel like I should be able to crush them. Troublingly, I've developed a massively negative redline deficit, the telltale sign of a TAGfish. This is really frustrating and embarassing because I thought I had solved this problem a months ago, since I kept a nice breakeven and even frequently positive redline when I was playing NL100 and 1/2. Now that I've moved back down to NL50 and my redline looks like a fucking waterslide again, I'm no longer sure why this was the case. Was I doing something different during that stretch to play more monstrously that I've now somehow forgotten how to do? Or was it just because I was getting really good cards and the regs at those stakes were good enough to fold their pairs to my third barrels instead of paying me off?

One hypothesis I've been considering is that I've adjusted suboptimally to villains at NL50. I know that the average bad player at NL50 is more stationy. What I've been doing so far in response to this is one-barreling lots of hands against them. My rationale for doing this is twofold: first, the flop cbet is just so good at getting people to fold and works so often even against players who have a general tendency to be calling stations that it's probably still profitable, and second, checking the flop as the preflop raiser just seems so pathetically weak and basically like begging your opponent to take the pot away from you. As a consequence, my flop cbet% hovers around 80-90%.

But it definitely seems possible that there are flaws in one or both of these components of my reasoning. I've been considering that there may be certain types of loose-passive villains against whom one-barreling does show a profit, but against whom a polarized strategy of either checking or committing to multiple barrels would be more profitable. And there may also be villains - possibly the same villains - who will still play weakly and won't stab at the pot even after the preflop raiser shows weakness by checking the flop. It seems possible that at least part of my enormous redline deficit has come from one-barreling against these types of players, which could be a significant leak. This is something I will try to keep in mind at the tables.

NL50 Progress

$336.60 / $500.00 after 22,365 hands