Sunday, July 19, 2009

Dropping Down a Limit

I made the decision to stop playing 50-100 until I'm able to build my bankroll back up to 100K. I had decided earlier this week that if my Stars bankroll dropped below 60K, that I'd stop 50-100 - I had started the month with about 80K and am now down to 58K. Nearly every day this month has looked eerily similar to this:



What's frustrating (besides losing a lot of money) is that the 50-100 games aren't too much different than the 30-60 games in terms of skill level. In fact they are probably easier on a whole because I'm more selective with them. A big difference however is that I haven't been able to get many heads up and 3-handed hands in. There aren't a lot of heads up players at 50-100 and if a bad player sits, the sharks instantly swarm in and it ends up being 6-handed where my win rate is lower and variance is higher. So for my bankroll and mind's sake, 50-100 will have to wait.

This is what my dismal month has looked like to this point:



The Won$SD stat tells it all. I'm usually at about 50%.

On an unrelated note, I got to play heads up with Orel Hershiser for a while last night. He seemed like a very nice guy and a competent limit player. An observer asked him what he used to do when he was off his game and he said, "Practice, practice and I'd switch up my daily routine from time to time without changing the core components. Some of my best pitches were thrown in the bullpen. Also, I always believed I was the best." That's a champion talking.

2 comments:

  1. Tony,

    I tried your "narrating" trick last night. I was having a particularly rough session and am dealing with moving up in stakes, but before simply throwing my hands up, bemoaning my bad luck and screaming to the world, "I can't beat these guys," I slowed down, closed all but one table, and picked apart every little thing that my opponents were doing.

    I narrated out loud everything that was going on inside my head, and all of a sudden everything that I did made a whole lot more sense. And suddenly I realized, I've done this before, when I had a 500BB downer some years ago. I just stepped back, broke everything down, and started from scratch.

    You said in one post how amazing it is when you hear your thoughts out loud, how much more sense they make to you (and how insane your inner thoughts that aren't verbalized can be).

    Thanks for that tip. It works.

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  2. Ha that's awesome. I actually forgot all about that, it's been quite a while since I've done that. I'm on a bit of a downswing right now so maybe I'll try it :)

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