Well, I'm having a ball playing with my new Hold'em Manager and HUD. I'm still pretty far down on the learning curve with the program, but slowly and surely I'm figuring it out. As I mentioned in my last post, I really like the interface, but there are some filters seem unnecessarily hard to find. I'm also a bit perplexed why the filter layout is so different between Cash Games and Tournaments. I am more or less figuring out Cash stats, but then when I switched to Tourneys today, I was confused. All the filters and info is there in both tabs, but the Graphical User Interface (GUI) is significantly different between the two. Weird.
In any case, the main thing I've did this morning prior to playing was work with individual hand filters and positional stats in HEM, looking for leaks. I also fired up PokerStove and overall spent a good 2+ hours looking at how all my hands (IP and OOP) have held up vs. what PS says the results should have been.
The exercise was well worth it, as I discovered a couple of significant leaks in my game. Well, maybe "leak" is the wrong word. Perhaps a better term would be "variance enhancer," as I've been making a pretty good overall earn rate lately despite these issues, but my variance has been unusually high. Part of the problem, frankly, was just that I've opened up my game a little too much in nearly all positions. I didn't think this was true, but the data don't lie. For instance, it turns out I've been playing progressively more and more small pairs in early-middle position, even though I really thought I wasn't playing that many. I've also opened up just a tad too much with pseudo-trap hands, like KJs and ATo in early-middle. Again, it wasn't a huge problem, but it was just enough to cause some big swings in my earn rate.
Anyway, the short version of this long story is that I re-tooled my cash game a bit, and actually went to the trouble of creating a starting hand chart based on my analysis. Yes, this is a bit odd for someone who's played as many hands as I have, but I felt I really need to get myself back into a tighter groove than I have been playing. Pre-flop hand selection from a chart optimized to my style of play seemed like a good way to make this happen. I also wanted to work on upping my aggression a tick or so, so this exercise has helped on that front, too.
So, how's it working out? Well, I played three separate 1-hour sessions today with the new chart, with just one table of $0.25/0.50 FR Rush NLHE open at a time. Total number of hands was 770. Not a lot of data, true, but enough to start seeing trends. My VPIP was just about normal for me, hovering at 15.7, but my PFR was significantly higher than usual at 14.3. This gives a PFR:VPIP ratio of 91%, which is right where I want it to be long term. My variance seems to have settled down a lot, too, which is clearly a result of the starting hand chart keeping me out of tough spots PF. Tight+Aggressive+Cautious=Steady Profit.
How steady? Overall, I made $88 for the effort, which comes to a whopping 23ptbb/100, or about $30/hour. Not too shabby. I did run a little well, with one kinda suck-out (it was a 2-barrel semi-bluff with an open-ender that got there on the river against a slow-played pair of kings), but I also had a couple of bad beats that more or less negated most of the "luck" I saw. Per HEM, I should have won about $74 for the entire three session (i.e., considering all-in EV predictions), which equates to a still pretty respectable 19ptbb/100. Now, I don't expect to be able to continue anywhere near this rate long-term, but I do expect (hope?) to see some continued steady profit.
I'm planning on continuing with this new starting hand chart for the remainder of 2010, and then reevaluate the stats and see how it's really working out with some significant number of data as I head into 2011.
In other news, I ate some more peanuts today, playing four super-turbos (one $4.40 and three $10.50 games) with an ITM of 50% and a ROI of 117%. Nice to add some money to the 'roll from this addiction for a change. Sigh.
All-in for now...
-Bug
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