What A Difference A Day Makes

Yesterday's post was all bad beats and bad news. This time it's the opposite:

After a week of getting killed at $3+.40 single table SnGs, I was rethinking how I could turn things around. I was demoralized and starting to panic a bit. Was there something fundamentally wrong with what I was doing? Had I simply run into opp that was better than me? Had I forgotten how to play? How to win? What was going wrong?

I had a couple of hours of free time last night, so it was a good opportunity to try something new (and see if I could find out what I was doing to create the losses). My strikeouts in the SnGs had been mostly bad beats, which would ordinarily mean I wasn't doing anything fundamentally wrong. As the Guru likes to say, "If bad beats are your only problem, you've got a good problem indeed."

But that wasn't helping my psyche. Even though I thought I was playing good poker, it was still unsettingly. Was I really playing the best poker I could? Or had I lost something in my game?

I also figured I needed something new, but old at the same time. I needed to break the losing SnG cycle. I needed to go back to basics. So what did I do?

In the end, I decided to play a single high(er) stakes game of limit poker and focus just on it. No multi tabling. No surfing the internet at the same time. No distractions other than the game itself. I found a juicy $.25/.50 game and said, "what the hell," and jumped in with both feet. I even pulled up my old starting hand selection chart and decided to follow it to the letter. If I was gonna go down, I was gonna go down swinging.

Thirty minutes later I was up $10! Seriously. There were a couple of fishy players at the table who just wouldn't go away with their bottom pairs and gutshot draws. It was almost too easy.

I then said, okay, let's try a SnG again. Same strategy: one game, no distractions, solid poker. I took second place without breaking too much of a sweat. A relatively easy $5 profit for 45 minutes of play. Then I jumped back into a different $.25/.50 limit game and pulled in another $10 in about 45 minutes.

Can you say WOW? This $25 upswing was the biggest single day gain I've posted yet in the YIPES experiment. Even better, I'm over the $80 bogie for the month of July. My psyche feels repaired and I'm mentally ready again to jump back into the fray today.

Now, mind you, I'm not kidding myself. While I didn't suckout on anyone in any of the sessions last night, I was certainly dealt some good cards. Notably, I picked up the nut flush draw twice in my limit games, and in both cases got there on the turn and received a lot of action from multiple players. In one mega-$$ instance, the opp held the second nuts and kept reraising me. I also picked up a set of fours that paid off pretty big. In other words, the cards cooperated. I can't expect that to happen every time, nor can I expect to post those kind of gains every time I "get serious" about playing, like I did last night.

I also realize that I took a big gamble jumping into the $.25/.50 level. Technically speaking, my bankroll isn't large enough to support those stakes. I really should drop back down to the $.10/.20 level again-- although it's tempting to try the higher stakes again and see if I can really run up the bank roll on a "serious" session of poker. We'll see how I feel later today. In the meantime, at least I know that nothing fundamental has gone wrong with my game.

What a difference a day makes.

All-in for now...

-Bug