Daytime EV

I feel a little shaken. Every time I play in the daytime I get whipped, and its happening again. I don't understand it. I have often thought there might be a markedly different player base during the day, but the lineups right now look pretty much the same as they do at night.

Do I play better when slightly drunk? Christ knows. I do know that lately I seem to have a knack of making the big fold and being wrong, or the big bet or raise and also being wrong. I folded to the most suspicious, odd bet last night and was wrong - yet the guy's action made no sense at all. Against a player with chips who had shown strength on the flop (me) and another almost all-in so he would surely have to show down his hand, he came out with a huge pot bet. I was a whisker from calling with my moderate hand, but couldn't raise the bollocks to do so because there just seemed no way he could make that bet without at least some kind of hand. Well, he had and he was extremely lucky to take the pot against the all-in dude thanks to a fortuitous river (I would have taken a three figure pot, had I called).

Today I made the big allin raise (in PLO) with nut flush draw and the biggest straight draw I think I have ever seen. The board paired instead, which was about a six or seven outer because between the three players in the pot we had paired a number of the board cards in our hands. I would love to look at the hand history to contemplate how I played the hand and what I was up against, but my site seems to take hours to get a history up in its database. I would have thought it would have been almost instantaneous. How quickly does your site do it?

As we speak I am getting my brains hammered in at a PLO8 table, sitting with the remnants of my bankroll and getting improbably scooped out of pots left, right and centre. I've drawn heavy on the bankroll this month (that post-Christmas thing) but have been steadily topping it up all the time - until decimation last night and today. As ever, in big-bet small-bankroll play (sometimes known as 'stupidity') its the big pots going against me that has really not helped. I've had a couple of excellent freerolls over loony opponents when all the money has gone in, but have missed the freeroll each time and just had to share the pot.

So much for my fucking day off work, relaxing. I'm going to have to make a FUCKING deposit again.

Oh well. Irony News now. After writing that I wouldn't be playing any different games, I suddenly found myself playing limit hold 'em last night. I was waiting for a pot limit omaha seat of course (if only I had kept on waiting, but that's another story) and found myself giving it a go, just at a $1/$2 table. It was a full ring table but we were five handed or so most of the time, and I played pretty well to win $20 in 45 minutes or so before leaving to focus on my normal games. More's the pity.

Later I even chanced my arm in a limit hold 'em tournament, of all things. Finished a disappointing 23rd of 52, and was amazed to see that lucky idiots can build monster stacks in limit tourneys just like in no limit. The story of my attempt was that my aces got cracked by bottom pair turning into trips on the river, setting me back considerably. I would have been in the top two or three stacks without that. However, I played pretty well to get back into contention, before finding it impossible to find anything to defend with against frequent preflop raises as the limits started to get serious. Then I probably cracked up slightly, making a raise with a (huge) draw on the turn when I could have just called and seen if I hit. That strategy would have saved me two bets, as I felt compelled to try to steal the river and got called by a dude with a pair smaller than three of the board cards. I'm not knocking his call, I probably need to get a better sense of how people play these events, and throwing away two big bets at that stage left me as good as dead.

Interesting experience anyway. I'm about to sign off and walk the dogs (for fuck's sake) and shake my head and mutter about losing most of my bankroll inside a day. It is really galling that I haven't managed anything other than small incremental wins for weeks and weeks and weeks, but the losses when they come always seem to be large. I need a run where two or three large pots in a row actually go my way and give me a monster stack to really start bossing a table.

Fucking hell. Poker has just turned a much-needed and anticipated day off into a day of frustration, stress, angst and disappointment.

The bankroll thing

Apparently, those of us who expressed disappointment at the poker blogging ‘community’ need to ‘get over ourselves’. Personally, I think that advice applies rather more directly to those members of that ‘community’ who thought it appropriate to call a woman a ‘c*nt’ over her criticism of a poker hand. Its been quite bizarre to watch; like ‘Don’t diss da community’... ‘Criticise one of us, you criticise all of us’. Anyone would think that stripper had called everyone’s mother a ‘ho’ rather than having made some blinkered, mild criticisms of the playing of a goofy poker hand.

I should also like to point out that I, for one, was not ‘whining’ about being disappointed – if anything, I was sneering.

Oh well. If nothing else, the whole overblown episode has at least provided evidence that people are still reading my stuff - I got some actual to goodness comments – and I won’t try to bashfully pretend I’m not pleased. However, I do think my content has gone downhill over the last few months. It would be nice to have some striking new poker thoughts or experiences, but for the moment I can’t see myself jumping around into different games or anything else that might stir up some reflective material. My biggest aim this year is to move up in limits, but that goal is in tension with my ongoing need to withdraw bankroll funds for food and beer and train tickets and whatnot.

The forthcoming need to pay rent will not exactly help the quest to build the bankroll, either, although it may be balanced by the opportunity to play many more hours once I live in my own space. Its all most frustrating, the bankroll thing (or, more accurately, the debt thing). If I hadn’t been stripping the bankroll for the past six months I would be in the comfort zone to play significantly higher than my present, bottom-feeding environment.

Talking of bottom-feeders, my friend and I got conned in London by a guy selling something which proved not to be what he said it was. I expect you catch my drift. It would be nice to be able to buy such things from legal, licensed vendors.

On a slightly related note, I have smoked only two cigarettes in the last 48 hours. I started reading the famous Allen Carr book on quitting smoking, and even though I haven’t got very far in it does seem to have lowered my motivation to smoke quite considerably. I hope this will continue.

And finally, sports. New England face a tough AFC Championship game next week, against Pittsburgh. The Steelers are one of the only two teams to beat the Pats this season, and I think may have inflicted two of their last three defeats. Should be quite a match.