Suck it up and move on.

Loss: $58

I was hoping to delay my update as long a possible in order to show that I'd recovered from a couple of bad days of poker. Unfortunately the badness has continued to run.

I'll sum up the last week or so like this. 100-200 hands of total boredom. Maybe the occasional raise before the flop, limp in with pocket pairs, called down a flush/straight draw until the action gets too fast. The mediocrity is occasionally punctuated by the following examples:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1171538 (vicious board so I don't know where I am)

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1171544 (didn't play the hand very well but after so many hands of boredom curiosity gets the better of me)

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1171552 (not a very well played hand, horrible infact, but I've had a lot of these where the other guy just shoves with me having a decent hand but up against all sorts of made draws.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1171561 (the board giving me enough rope to hang myself because I'm not realising that an Ace still beats my runner runner pair - due to boredom, frustration)

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1171567 (another really strange hand. His call on the flop set off all sorts of alarms bells in my head and the check to me on the turn confirmed it. Should I be folding KKs in this spot? I really don't know, my head/game's been messed up by so much of this going on in recent days)

So it's that sort of stuff which has culminated in maybe one or two of these:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1171581 (I just simply decided that there was no way he'd flopped a flush. But what do convincingly beat, AQ and AJ?).

For the last week or so in every session I've played I started off with terrible cards and the sort of situations I've faced above. Then, after two hours I seem to get a card rush and recoup some of the money I've lost (but obviously not all of it). By then, though, I'm not playing at my peak and I donk off money with curiosity plays and calls. I've tried mixing up my game a little by going back to just betting aggressive but it's back to horrible days on when players just call you or reraise you simply because there's a button there that allows them to do it.

$13 of this lot has been down to two pokerstars $3 sngs and a $7 MTT on Bodog that Nick convinced me to play in. Everyone folded to my raises except when i doubled up with QQs so I never had a stack I could play with - because I couldn't win a significant number of chips. With 60 out of the original 400 left I pushed my last 4,000 into someone's Aces.

Adding to this blog entry of misery is 888's decision to update the software (which I haven't done yet) and bring in 'Fast' table cash rooms on the levels I play ($10 and $25). You only get 10 seconds to make decisions which just isn't long enough for a player like me who likes to weigh up outs, pots, stacks how the board is going to develop.

I'm on my worst run since December and it just feels like really hard, unworthy work at the moment. I suppose I should just be glad that my bankroll is large enough to sustain a hit like this and still feel more than comfortable. It's just annoying because I was trying to establish confidence and play in higher stakes. I feel like I'm slumming it until the cards start coming again.


There is one plus side to poker at the moment. I've been reading Antony Holden's excellent sequel to Big Deal, Bigger Deal. I didn't really get into Big Deal that much because it was from a world not many of us online poker players can properly relate to. But Bigger Deal is much more contemporary and it charts many of the characters I have heard of and do know of in the poker world. It won't improve your games and Holden's insistence on name dropping the rich and famous he's come into contact with is a bit irksome but it's a bloody good read with some interesting stuff about poker's current boom.