Finally Booked A Win

Ship the $234.18 winning session - my first in weeks.

I played some heads up 1/2 on tables about to break and tables just being formed and ran good at this insanely high-variance game that I probably shouldn't have been playing given the fairly dire straits in which my bankroll finds itself after the past couple of weeks. I sat against opponents who displayed the classic fish signal of sitting with less than a full stack and thankfully got pretty good cards and was on the good side of some coolers. Unfortunately I still lost about $90 overall at 1/2, putting me almost exactly even over the 10,000 hands I've played at the stake, $600 away from the -3bi stoploss I set for myself.

In what seems to be emerging as a pattern, I did much better at NL100, booking a $320 win. The contrast between my results at NL100 and those at 1/2 is pretty stark when I look at the HEM report for each stake. I'm pretty sure I'm still running unsustainably good at NL100 and I hope I'm playing better at 1/2 than my results indicate.

Winning is nice but it's still kind of sigh-inducing to realize that if this hadn't happened, I'd still be down. As I have discussed previously in some depth on this blog, I'm still terrified that I'm only capable of winning when I'm on the good side of sick coolers where I get it in with two outs and get there. This is one of the hardest aspects of poker psychologically for me. I guess there's nothing I can do except try to make good decisions at all times and accept whatever things happen that I can't control. I hope someday I can consistently outplay people and crush even without running jet-engine hot.

STILL Losing

Just played another session and lost another $300. I quit after this happened and villain showed Jd8d. This hand is pretty much what the past couple of weeks have been like for me. People are pushing me around and I don't know how to deal with it.

I'm $700 away from my stoploss for 1/2. My bankroll has dipped below $6,000. I'm on smoldering lifetilt and I have no idea how I'm going to deal with whatever poker throws at me next. I feel totally lost and incompetent. I wish I knew what I had to do to start winning again.

Still Losing; How to Improve?

Played again today and lost $600. I've lost $2,200 over the past 8,000 hands, cutting my profit for the month down to roughly $900. Same old story - everyone's calling me down, everyone's playing back at me, I'm bricking all my draws in big pots but can't manage to build a decent sized pot for the hands where I hit, blah blah blah blah bla

I still feel like I'm mostly playing well and making good decisions, but I feel ridiculous dismissing an 11-buyin downswing over 8,000 hands as just variance. Whatever it is, it's psychologically pretty painful and I hope it turns around soon. God, I hate thinking about how hard I'm going to have to grind to win back those 11 buyins and how long it's going to take before I'm out of the hole. My total lifetime profit from 1/2 has dropped to around $400, and I'm getting perilously close to my -$600 stoploss for the stake. I've never had to move down before, and being a mere 5 buyins away from having to do so sucks a lot.

During times like this, I frequently wish I had a coach or at least a membership to CardRunners so I could try to glean some insight from proven winning players at these levels. I'm getting to the point in my poker career where a CardRunners account might conceivably be able to pay for itself - it's $400 a year and I can start to imagine the things I learn saving me at least 2 buyins over the course of a year playing 1/2. But it's not quite clear to me that I wouldn't be able to learn the same things just by reading articles and forum posts and chatting, and I'm also afraid that it would end up being like a gym membership where I've paid for it as a resource but, out of sloth, I never actually utilize it. So I'm not going to pull the trigger yet.

Another interesting and kind of funny thing preventing me from dropping four hundo on a CR membership is that I've already lost so much at the tables that $400 would represent a nontrivial hit to my bankroll. Of course, when I'm winning, I don't want to spend money on a CR membership either because I feel like I don't need it - I'm winning on my own right? Heh.

Every now and then you hear about some sick baller who joined CR as struggling small stakes players and is now making six figs crushing the games, but I'm always skeptical as to how big of a factor CR really was in the growth of players like that. I strongly suspect that anyone who is capable of making six figs playing poker would have gone on to enjoy great success even without CR.

If a CR membership is borderline-worth-it, then there's no way getting actual human coaching can possibly be worth it. Anyone good enough to give me worthwhile advice for 1/2 is good enough to beat 1/2 and is therefore good enough to charge an hourly rate way above what I can afford. I can't imagine that over the course of an hour of coaching, anyone would be able to give me enough advice to justify paying him $300 or whatever exorbitant price those guys charge to sweat you. Over the course of that hour we would be lucky to see one interesting spot and whatever advice he would give me about it would probably be worth something like 0.0000047 BB/100 in the long run and I just don't see it being worth it.

I'm definitely not satisfied with the rate at which I'm improving as a player, and obviously I'm extremely dissastisfied with my results over the past few weeks, but for now, at least in the short term, I think I'm going to stick with just reading books, reading the free CardRunners blogs, and trying to get input about difficult spots from forums and chat.

I Did It

Today marks a momentous accomplishment in my poker career - for the first time ever, I lost one thousand dollars in one day at the tables.

This sucks. I look forward to the day when a grand is less than one buyin for me and I don't have to sweat four-fig downswings. Hopefully, that day actually comes.

Out Of My Depth

I have no idea how I'm supposed to win at NL100 when villains are capable of doing things like this. I have this guy drawing dead and he is somehow able to make this sick bluff and show me As4s after I fold and show my AA. How can he possibly do this? Does my range really look that weak after I barrel on that terrifying turn? Am I giving him too much credit after he checkraises that terrifying turn? What the fuck?

Part of me thinks that I need to more aware of spots where I can do this to people on superscary cards, but part of me thinks that nobody else at NL100 on Cake will make the fold I made. Short of taking meticulous notes on every hand I see every villain play and doing deep analysis to figure out who of them is capable of folding, I don't see what I can do about this.

I really hope this guy is just a fish who stumbled upon an incredibly sick play but I can't shake the feeling that IT IS I WHO AM THE FISH...

Am I Insane?

Just played a little 267-hand session and lost $278.60. Love that -$1/hand lossrate.

One of the most personally frustrating things about poker for me is my horrible tendency to make the same fairly obvious and very expensive mistakes over and over. I seem to have some sort of poker learning disability that prevents me from learning from my own past mistakes. For example, this hand highlights probably the biggest and most persistent leak in my entire game, which is my inability to fold one pair on late streets when it's clearly no good.

Villain there is a huge fish but there is still almost no way my aces are ever good on this river. I lose to any heart. I lose to any 9. I lose to QJ, QT, JT, and even weird random AK that might get played like this by a fish. He is almost never betting when I check there with anything that I'm beating. He checks behind nearly all of the time even with his AQ with no heart or KQ with no heart or KK with no heart or Q7 with no heart or whatever I'm desperately hoping he has when I call. Welp, seeya later, $100! No idea why I keep doing this to myself. There's a quote that I've seen attributed to Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison and a whole host of other smart people from across history that goes something like "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Am I insane?

This was another expensive failure that I just inflicted upon myself. I pick up a little suited 1-gapper in the small blind here and 3bet a TAGgish player who I suspect is opening pretty wide from the button. I get called, which is bad for me - 3betting light and getting flatcalled by a player in position is a spot where I'm still pretty uncomfortable. On the flop I think his range is mostly AK, AQ, JJ, and TT, with possibly some AA-QQ and 99 in there as well. I flop the ol' gutshot with backdoor straight flush draw and bet trying to represent AK and fold out everything except his AK/KK/AA and possibly some bluffcatching pairs if he doesn't believe me, but he calls. I'm even more uncomfortable here and am quickly losing confidence in my ability to range him accurately any more.

I think the turn is actually a good card for me, giving me a bunch of flush outs without sullying my 4 outs to a straight, but at this point I'm thinking that he's defined his hand within a pretty narrow range of pairs and now possibly trips and I don't think I have much fold equity on this turn against the range of hand that call my flop bet. I was debating between (1) checking and giving up if he bets, and (2) overbet-shoving trying to push him off his weaker bluffcatching hands and get it in with decent equity against AK, but I timed out and got auto-checked by Cake's horrible software that doesn't allow you to request extra time in cash games. In retrospect, checking might not be terrible because with his AK he might try to make a small valuebet hoping to get called by TT-AA that I have trouble laying down, and I might be able to call getting good implied odds and stacking him if I hit my well-disguised straight or backdoor flush. This didn't occur to me at the time, and I have no idea if it's analytically sound. I would love anyone's input on what the correct play is here.

He checks behind on this turn, which I don't think gives me any more information about his range. Obviously I miss on the river. I check basically because I still really think his range is dominated by AK here and I really don't want to put any more money into this pot. In retrospect, a play consider here might be to bet some amount like $23, because I think he has a lot of trouble calling that with QQ or worse and I can easily fold to his shove if he has AK or AA. But I just don't know if he has worse than AK often enough here to make that play profitable. Again, I would love anyone's input on the best way to play this river.

As you can see, he checked behind again on the river and showed up with a hand that I hadn't even considered in his range. This is more or less the worst thing that can happen in poker and basically tells me that I severely fucked up this hand. Whenever this happens, it basically makes me feel like a complete novice, like I know nothing about poker and need to start over from the beginning.

And that's more or less how this entire session made me feel. Nothing I was trying was working, everyone was playing back at me, I felt like I was getting pushed around by everyone, and I just couldn't stop bleeding money. It's a pretty discouraging feeling, especially compounded with the despair that comes from knowing that your most expensive mistakes are ones you should know better than to make, and not knowing why you still keep making them.

McRib is Back

After hearing me talk about how often I eat at McDonalds these days since it's the closest and cheapest food option to my school, my parents started sending me McDonalds gift cards ("Arch Cards") during exam periods. Each card is accompanied by a note reminding me that the purpose of this gift is to make it unnecessary for me to cook during exam periods, thereby saving me time that I should spend studying harder. Let's hear it for Asian parents.

Seldom do I actually use up the entire balance of the gift card by the end of exams, so I usually have some money left on the card that I can use for lunch for the first few weeks of the following semester. Yesterday, I visited McDonalds and saw to my delight that the McRib was back on the menu.

The McRib was one of my favorite items on the McDonalds menu and I was pretty disappointed when it was removed from the regular menu a few years ago and transformed into a limited-time promotional item. I can see the business logic behind this, since the McRib was probably one of the weaker-selling items and making it a special limited-time thing probably boosts sales during the brief periods when it's available while eliminating the costs that would be associated with having it on the menu year-round, but I really liked the McRib was sad to see it go. I've somehow missed all of the limited-time promotions and as of yesterday morning, the last time I'd had a McRib was in high school.

So obviously I had a three-McRib lunch yesterday. I ate at about 1:30pm and was pretty ecstatic that McRib was going to be part of my life again, even if just for a limited time at participating McDonalds locations. But around 4:00pm, I started feeling...digestively unsettled. I have a pretty weak constitution in general so this isn't terribly uncommon and I usually deal with it just by forcing out a few burps and farts and basically walking it out and praying for no vomiting or diarrhea. But by 5:00pm it became very clear that this low-intensity approach wasn't going to be sufficient. I really wanted to just tough it out and survive through my 6pm-9pm class, but that just wasn't going to happen. I managed to grind out a miserable walk home, where I was very careful to stay within 3-second sprint distance of a trash can at all times.

As I stumbled into the lobby of my building, I was reminded that one of the elevators in our building is out of order, leaving only one functional elevator to serve the entire building. I cursed the world as I sat hunched over waiting for it; it was stopped on the 13th floor, then it went up to the 18th floor, then on its way down it had to stop at the 6th floor, then obviously it had to go to the basement before finally stopping at the ground floor to pick me up. Fuck my building.

So finally I'm able to burst through the door of my apartment, tear off my clothes, and collapse into a vomiting heap in front of my toilet. McRib does not taste as good coming up as it does going down. Vomiting sucks. The horrible bitter metallic taste of your digestive enzymes in the back of your throat is bad, but the worst part for me is always the dry heaves, when I can never decide whether to let them keep going and basically suffocate myself in the hope that I can force out a little extra load of puke, or to suppress them in search of relief from the pain. In between bouts of this, I was seized by attacks of liquid shits that were actually not really that bad in terms of intensity, but the odor certainly wasn't helping the vomit situation.

I've had plenty of stomach illnesses before, but never anything like this. By roughly 6pm, I was laid out on the floor of my apartment basically unable to move. The pins-and-needles numbness that had started with the first bout of vomiting had grown into full-blown spastic cramping palsy. It was pretty terrifying to be laying there and watching my hands and feet involuntarily twist around into weird abnormal angles and cramp up excruciatingly. I was pretty sure that I needed medical attention at this point because I was obviously extremely dehydrated and there was no way I was going to be able to keep down any fluids I drank. So I was able to crawl over to the heap of my clothes, dig my phone out of my pocket, and call an ambulance.

By the time the ambulance got to my apartment, I was literally moaning in agony as every muscle in my body was slowly and painfully inching toward full flexion. When the paramedics lifted me into the wheelchair, I looked down at my legs and saw them literally straighten out and lift up into the air completely on their own. And again the fucking elevator - I had to wait for like 5 minutes sitting there in that wheelchair with the paramedics because it just wouldn't fucking come.

Even after we finally got to the emergency room, it took me like 20 minutes to get triaged and another two hours or so before a nurse could even give me an IV and anti-nausea medicine. This entire time I was in pretty serious pain and was basically involuntarily making a huge scene in the ER waiting room with my flailing spastic limbs and grunting and begging for water. Frenzied thoughts raced in and out of my head about whether or not this was a breach of duty by the hospital and how I probably wouldn't even have a tort remedy for this because the standard of care in emergency rooms is just so shitty, and how I hope Obamacare allows me to get an IV immediately if this ever happens again.

About three hours after this I was finally able to see a doctor, who basically just told the nurses to keep giving me IV fluids until my blood pressure climbed back up into normal range. The nurse also helped me control my breathing, which sucked a lot and felt basically like I was holding my breath at the end of a marathon, but seemed to help with the cramping and palsy in my extremities.

I had weird feverish dreams about being a character in an RPG and fighting some sort of evil knight who didn't have very many hit points but had tons of armor so none of my attacks did much damage. I woke up this morning feeling still pretty awful but way better than last night. BP was normal, muscular control had returned, and I didn't feel like I was in any danger of vomiting. I'm back home now with instructions not to eat any heavy foods (as if there were any danger of that happening) and to rest for the next few days.

I've recently learned that two girls I know made out at a bar last night and I missed it because of this. I'm also going to have to miss a giant free food event tonight and a party tonight that I had been hoping to attend.

It's hard to make a strong causal connection between the McRib and my illness, even though circumstantially it seems obvious. I could easily just have rubbed my nose with a hand that was on a handrail that some sick person also used, or whatever. I'm pretty sure I don't have any sort of tort remedy against McDonalds for this - too hard to prove causation and probably no res ipsa available because the injury itself doesn't necessarily support an inference of negligence. I'm hesitant to blame the McRib, but I definitely won't be eating another one for a long time, possibly ever.