What I Was Doing All That Time

As you can see, I basically stopped posted in May and I'm just now starting to post regularly again. This is because I essentially stopped playing poker. In June, I started my summer job at a law firm and was working full-time. My plan had been to grind pretty hard every night but I found myself feeling pretty tired after work every day, and honestly, I just wasn't really feeling it because I had just been struggling so hard to break even after my dramatic rise and fall early in the year. So I ended up basically never playing during the week, and on weekends, I would typically just one-table or two-table NL100. Things continued like this after my job ended and after I went back to Chicago for school and carried on this way until November. I ran fantastically good EV-wise during this period, though I averaged roughly 2500 hands per month during that stretch:

The flat stretch in the beginning was me trying to win at NL10, which proved a lot harder than I expected. The flat stretch at the end was me trying to learn PLO by playing PLO2 on Stars, which also proved a lot harder than I expected. I played these games because I was pursuing a poker goal of trying to make my PTRs on both Stars and FTP green for every stake I've ever played. This is still something I want to do eventually, but I put it on the backburner in November because of Rush Week.

As anyone who knows me can confirm, I'm a huge bonuswhore and couldn't pass up an opportunity like Rush Week, even though I still had residual feelings of resentment and hatred for Rush due to its role in my catastrophic downfall in the early part of this year. But I was able to put those feelings aside and grind out a $50 Rush Week bonus on two tables of full-ring NL50, and I actually did pretty well in the games.

Then came December and the Iron Man Year-End Bonus chase, during which I've played a mix of full-ring NL50 Rush and regular 6-max NL100. I've been so thoroughly demolished at NL100 that I've cut it out entirely. I have no idea whether I can actually beat NL100 and my struggles with it really epitomize the biggest problem I have in poker, which is not being able to tell whether I'm running bad or playing bad. There have been lots of coolerish spots that might not actually be coolers because villain might not be shipping with anything except exactly the nuts, but I don't know enough about villain or his tendencies to know for sure. I've been losing stack after stack in spots like these and it's left me feeling pretty lost.

So I think I'm just going to grind NL50 FR Rush for a while and see how that goes. I went on a nice little tear over about 15,000 hands of it where I was winning at 5.6 BB/100 with an amazingly smooth graph, but over the past 6,000 hands, I've been losing at -6.9 BB/100 with an equally smooth graph, so we'll see how it goes from here.