Played a total of only about 300 hands of poker this weekend, which is light for me. Normally, I play 300+ hands on both Saturday and Sunday, so this is about half of what I normally do. But that's not bad news. In fact, I consider it good news. For the past two days, I traded quantity for quality. Let me explain.
As you may have noticed, the past two months have been pretty rough for me and my bankroll. Part bad beats and running bad, part tilt and bug-tilt, and part (frankly) poor play on my behalf have resulted in a precipitous drop in my online working capital. To turn the money ship around, I've been tightening up my game and trying to do all the right things whenever I sit down to play. It's been more or less working, too, with a slow upward slope in the bankroll. This weekend I took this "perfect poker" approach to a new level.
The Guru likes to assign students of his (that are struggling) to play just 25 Perfect Hands of Poker. He doesn't care if you win or lose, but he wants to see your PokerTracker stats for 25 hands of poker. If he can't find anything wrong with those two dozen hands, he'll up the assignment to 50 hands, and so on. The net result doesn't matter; what's important is whether you're playing optimally or not. It's that old poker adage writ anew: Ignore the results and just work on getting your money in with the best of it. The money part will take care of itself.
Well, I tried a modified Guru's approach this weekend-- and had some good success to boot. I limited myself to 25 hands per sessions. (Actually, when I surpassed 25 played hands, I would continue playing until the blinds hit me, so my average was something like 28 hands per session... but I digress.) After each session, I'd go do "normal" stuff around the house for at least a couple of hours. When I came back to play the next time, I would first examine my previous hands for obvious leaks before continuing with the next 25 hands of poker.
The interesting thing to note is how often I would discover hands that I thought I'd played correctly, only to rethink the hand postmortem when I examined it without the pressure of a live game attached. There were 3 or 4 hands in particular that I probably shouldn't have been in involved with that I played (and got lucky with, too). Similarly, there were hands I should have tried to steal with, others that I took too far before folding, and some that I folded too easily.
In any case, I am still fairly happy with my results. I made ~$20 in those 300 hands, and I think I helped my game get better. I'm going to increase the number of hands I play per session this week, but I'm still going to try approaching each session with the mantra "play each hand perfectly." I'll let you know how it goes...
In other poker news, Full Tilt Poker has added "micro" limits to the games it spreads. These include 1/2-cent NL (aka $2NL) and 5/10-cent limit. Pretty cool. Considering the bankroll building experiment that Daniel Negreanu is doing over on 'Stars, I'm halfway serious about starting up another YIPES-like undertaking.... twenty-five hands at a time.
All-in for now...
-Bug
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