Last night I played a little over 500 hands at 100nl on Stars. I felt like I played a pretty solid game overall, playing 19/17/7. The 7 seems kinda high, but since I am taking more stabs in limped pots, that number is going to be pretty high. To me, as long as their is some sort of reason for a deviation from my standard indicators of play, then it is fine. My 3bet% was a bit higher than on AP, at 4.4%, and I am sure that number will rise a bit as well. I looked in HM and my distribution was pretty good too, with less than 30% of my 3bets being AA, KK, and AK.
I lost close to a BI. This was a little disheartening when i saw in HM that I had two hands each with a BI profit. I looked closer and I did not win even 1 hand where I 3bet and saw a flop. That can cause you to trickle off money quickly. Also, I had a stretch where I was getting raised off my hands left and right on both the flop and the turn and I could not proceed or do anything about it. This may be super normal for other people, but I was pretty pleased with myself in that I stayed focused on my tables, and did nto get rattled by it. This raising the flop and turn was a barrage for about 5 minutes that took a BI from me as well. In the past, I would have been bothered by it, but I am happy to say it did not affect me today. I had a weird JJ hand that I posted on leggo and talked to Probability about as well. There were many failed cbets against donks and regs alike on super dry boards. Basically, after review, I am chalking this up to variance, especially with all the 3bet pots I lost that add up so quickly. I honestly look at how I played and the reasons for plays I made and I feel like it is some of the best poker I have played in some time.
I watched a video a friend made for me. I sent him the play, and he commented over the play with his thoughts. Some notes I have from the video include that I need to be raising when the SB limps into me much more often. Like damn near 100% of the time. I have been a little better, but I still need to improve on what I call the Nutedawg Principle (I call it this because it is where I first heard it). The idea is a preflop concept where your opening range is not a set hand range like is initially taught to poker players, but a variable hand range based on the players around. I will give a couple of examples. First you are UTG and a 53/8 fish is in the CO. Here we could say raising QJ UTG will be profitable because you can play it profitably postflop against the fish and the regs will give your raise respect. Conversely, raising a hand like 76s here would be pretty bad, because we don’t want to be OOP against the fish with such a marginal holding. We can be dominated a lot bythe fish, whereas we will be dominating quite often with a hand like QJ. Now if that same fish in the SB, we would definitely justify raising that same 76s, because WE are now in position on the fish. Of course if we had some annoying players behind us, maybe we fold the 76s, but you get the point. The same is true in the example from the video where I was playing really tight on one table where I had 2 nits to my left and 2 fish and a reg to my right. I should have been playing like 40/35 on that table based on these dynamics, but was instead playing more my hand range instead of seeing the table for what it was. That is an area where I could use more focus for sure.
Another point made was that I ost value on a hand where I raised smallish to get a call on the river, where based on stack sizes I should have just jammed. If the caller’s range is inelastic (I think I have this term right) in the sense that he will call regardless of the bet sizing, I always need to be betting more to get that call. A player took an interesting line against me that was pretty neat too. The villain had called OOP with AJ (that I am not a huge fan of, but the line was postflop anyways). He flopped TPTK and called a cbet. He then donked the turn into me, I called and we both checked the river. I don’t remember my actual hand, but it is kinda neat. He leads the turn, where I should not be raising worse hands, and then he can get into check/call mode, as I certainly could be value betting worse jacks on the river. An interesting ine.
I talked through some hands with m0niker like the good ol’ days, and that seemed pretty good. Beneficial to think about some interesting spots and why we thought of doing certain plays.
I did make a video as well for Matt for the lesson tomorrow. I went ahead and just got 4 more lessons as I think he explained things well in the first lesson and think I can learn a lot from him. This should be a valuable investment imo. I am not sure if I will get in any hands today, I have a 9pm softball game and might just relax with the wife when I get home until then, depends on what she is doing.
Next month I am going to be revising my monthly goals. I am going to remove the sweats as I am not sure they help as much as they did in the past. I am going to add video reviews that I make along with weekly lessons. I also think I may add some exercise goals as well to encourage me to get my ass back in shape. I think that would be good for my geenral quality of life, so obviously a good thing to do.
