O-Poker

Busy Work Week

I was planning to try to get in a lot of hands this week, but then work got in the way. I got a call Tuesday afternoon from one of our clients asking what I had going on for the next couple of days.

Me: “Ummmmm, Why?” (while trying really hard to come up with some good excuse)

Client: “We need you to fly to San Antonio tomorrow for a project and fly back Thursday.”

Me: “Ummm, uhhh, ummm, when? What? Where? Ummm, When?”

A few hours later I was booking my trip. It wasn’t going to be as bad as I initially thought. One guy had to be back in town by 6 PM last (Thurs) night, so we booked a flight that left San Antonio at noon.

Our return flight was San Antonio to Houston to Orlando. We showed up at the airport around 10:45 AM, checked out flight status and it read that it was delayed 30 minutes. We would be cutting it close since our layover in Houston was only 45-50 minutes. We hurried through the security strip search (not quite, but it feels like it sometimes) and when we got to the other end an announcement came across the PA system: “Flight XXX has been cancelled.” Ummm, uhhhh, ummm, when, What? Where?

We quickly went back to the check-in desk and booked a new flight that was supposed to leave around noon also. It was a direct flight that had 2 intermediate stops. San Antonio to Dallas to New Orleans to Orlando. To make a long boring story a little bit shorter, we arrived in Orlando 2 ½ hours after we were scheduled on a flight that departed 1 hour late and waited on the Dallas runway to takeoff for 45 minutes. Good thing I got three servings of peanuts though.
I’m not sure how traveling salesmen handle it. I would go crazy after of couple of months of traveling like that.

I didn’t log onto the internet the entire trip, so I am obviously way behind on reading blogs and forums, didn’t play any poker and didn’t get a chance to put up any posts. I'm going to try and catch up a little today.
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Quantity vs. Quality

I’m wondering if my posts as of late have been sounding to woe is me. Maybe I have been whining too much about the coolers, bad beats, etc (even though I’m trying not to post them anymore.)

A comment by TheRealDMoney made me think:

“Not that i know either way but the feeling i've been getting is your cash game has had alot more variance in it over the past couple months then i've noticed previously.
Have you just been playing without reviewing hands and stats etc?
Or have you been putting in the time to keep your A game up?
What has been your main game? 1/2NL 6max? or have you been jumping around levels alot as well as table sizes (HU, 6max, 9 or 10 handed etc).
Just curious.”

The short answer is that I have been trying to concentrate more on quality vs. quantity. At times, I have been guilty of not playing my best because I wanted to get hands in when I should have been sleeping or doing something else. I have played while watching TV or doing other things.

I’m guessing TheRealDMoney’s comment had been brewing but he finally posted it when I said, “think that I'm going to limit myself to 1 or 2 tables if I'm doing something else (watching TV, talking to my wife, surfing the internet, etc, etc, etc) and 4 tables max if I am playing without any distractions. No more 6 tabling until at least the end of the month.”

I guess that sounds a little negative. I posted it because I have been letting distractions get in the way. There is no way I can play my “A” game on 6 tables while watching TV and carrying on a conversation with my wife. I also noticed that my reads start to drop off after about 1 hour if I am playing 6 tables. This is why I decided to strictly limit myself to either 2 or 4 tables for the rest of the month.

I don’t think that my cash games have had any more variance than normal for the past month or so. I did experience quite a bit of variance a few months ago though. I took time out and really reviewed a lot of my losing and winning hand histories, found some leaks and plugged them. The last month or so has been decent (cash game wise), but I haven’t been playing nearly as many hands as I would like so the ups and downs may appear magnified even though they aren’t.

The biggest thing (leak) that I am still working and still have problems doing is leaving a table if a good hyper-aggressive player has position on me. Sometimes, I put myself in unnecessarily difficult spots that could be avoided by just moving to a better table.

I address each of TheRealDMoney’s questions:
Have you just been playing without reviewing hands and stats etc? – Sometimes. I am trying to make a concerted effort to review the previous session before playing the next.

What has been your main game? 1/2NL 6max? or have you been jumping around levels alot as well as table sizes (HU, 6max, 9 or 10 handed etc). My main game is currently 2/4nl 6 max. I spent a lot of time jumping into SNGs, FTOPS sats, FTOPS tourneys and some random mtts earlier this month and had poor results. I was kicking myself because, I knew that I should have just stuck with the cash games and I’m sure some of that frustration has come across in the blog.

As far as comparing the variance, the more hands that you put in the smaller the variance looks on a graph. The two graphs below show a month where I played 50k hands (10/07) vs. this month’s 12.8k hands. At first glance, the variance on the 50k hand graph looks much smaller than the 12.8k hand graph. This isn’t the case though. The 50k hand graph has a 10 buy-in downswing, but the biggest downswing on the 12.8k hand graph is only a little less than 6 buy-ins. In theory, if you carried the current month graph out through 50k hands it would wind up with approximately the same total for 50k hands as my October graph.






I like comments like TheRealDMoney’s because they really make me go back and review aspects of my game. After reading through my last few posts, his comment, and my recent thoughts (see last post), I am focusing on Quality vs. Quantity. I’m going to work really hard to keep from falling into to playing in robot mode.