So I was very excited about poker again and full of expectations, I decided to push it a little and play a lot more hands than normal. I usually play 500-1000 hands but I was feeling confident so on Wednesday I played about 3400 hands. Well, it was a disaster, I was down 4 buy ins. The next day and every day since I’ve just been playing my normal casual amount and everything has been great – in fact it feels like I can’t lose (Today I played 90 hands and am up 2.5 buy ins). I’m also going to go over those 3400 hands and figure out how much of that is bad play vs bad luck. I know I made a bad call early and it put me on tilt. That affected every hand I played after that. I took some bad beats – got more frustrated but kept going. I’m usually good with bad beats but when I make a mistake it affects me.
Thankfully, I’m still on track and the bankroll has bounced back. It just makes you realize that poker WILL kick your ass, if you are not on top of things.
I still feel like I’m being lazy by not putting in a lot of hands. Then part of me thinks, why bother when playing fewer hands is so profitable for me. I might have to start adding volume gradually to maintain my winrate, and learn to quit when things aren’t going well so it doesn’t snowball into a disaster. Arhhh, its never easy, is it?
To an extent I think you can have volume and win rate, though you have to take your time and adjust to it. If your normal routine is 1k hands, try adding an extra 500 hand session in and after a few day’s or a week try and get up to 2k hands. If your honest assessment of yourself is that your playing well and your focused then there should be no problem putting in more hours that day, in fact it makes sense, you want to maximize the time you spend on your A game. So if you feel like your playing great by all means play on.
I really struggle with this as well, I get tired really easily, and find it hard to focus. I’ve only been awake a couple of hours today, but already feel too tired to be productive at the tables, so I’m going to watch a video maybe even take a nap to recompose myself.
You might be able to do me a favor actually. Its been suggested to me that I could coach 10nl and bellow players, maybe we could do an hours sweat some time and you could give me your opinion if I have anything to offer.
gl
Comment by Luckystraights — June 15, 2010 @ 9:24 am |
Hey Lucky, That sounds great, I’ll email you.
thx
Comment by chipmunkey — June 17, 2010 @ 3:27 pm |