Thursday, July 30, 2009
The Grind
Last night’s grinding didn’t go too well, but it could have been much worse! I four tabled to try to earn a lot of VPPs being I only had 3 days left in this month to maintain my VIP status on Poker Stars. I especially like to play in the 30K free roll on Saturday being I cash in 50% of the ones I play in. After an hour I was getting crushed down 60BBs! One hand really stung when I had A-K of spades and made the nut flush on the turn. I bet, got raised, so I re-raised just praying the board wouldn’t pair. Of course it did and he bet right into me, made the crying call to be shown the full house, with his pocket threes. That pot was huge being we had 5 players setting a three bet pre-flop! Knew I wasn’t going to have a winning night but kept trying to recover my loses anyway. At least this gave me incentive to earn more points. By the end of the night I made a comeback to only be down 25BBs. It’s kind of a moral victory when I earn back more than half of my low point in a bad session. Been playing Poker long enough to know that some nights, no matter what I do I will lose anyway. Looking back in my records I win around 72% of my ring sessions. This is pretty high but the problem is my losing sessions are usually really bad and my winning sessions aren’t always that big. Am still a winning player over all but need to work on using some kind of a stop loss rule on bad nights. This is a leak I have been trying to plug for years. When I am winning I lose incentive to keep playing and am happy “booking a win”, but when behind I get hungry to get revenge to get my money back. Like I said before some days no matter what you do you will lose, so these days can be real bad. Always room for improvement in this crazy game of Poker. Thanks for reading and good luck at the tables. Tony
I still struggle with the question of whether to have a stop-loss rule or not...to this day my best winning sessions are still dwarfed by my worst losing ones. As for walking away from wins, it helps having a goal to earn a certain # of VPPs (FTPs in my case) so you force yourself play through your quota even if you're tempted to book a win and wuss out...I've had plenty of +50BB sessions that I normally would have quit turn into +125BB ones (and had others turn into like -10BB losses, but that's variance for ya). As long as the games are good and you can honestly judge that you're not on tilt, stick it out.
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