I don't blog that much about poker (some might disagree, but w/e) considering how much mental energy I give the game. The main reason is I feel like my poker blogs are kind of a broken record. Like, how many different ways can you say 'Man there's a shit ton of variance in poker'? And whenever I go to blog about the game, that's what usually comes out, whether I'm currently running good or bad. Truth be told, I have written a few poker blogs and then just not bothered posting them. Cause even by the low, low standards of blogging, they strike me as pointless meanderings.
If you're reading this, by the way, it means I indulged and published this one, but as I write it's touch and go.
I actually do enjoy reading other poker players's variance blogs (and no, I don't think I've come across a semi-regularly updated poker blog that didn't at times turn to the swongs). I find them comforting in the extreme. Cause the struggle to fully accept the swings is at least as frustrating as the variance itself. I've seen the charts of what my results graph should look like, given my presumed winrate and standard deviation, and it's swingy as a key party.
Yet, when my (relatively) short-term results are good, I feel like I've had a breakthrough and now have the game licked. And when they are bad, I feel like I'll never win again. I give lip service to more rational viewpoints, but that's really the way I feel. Lately I don't think my play suffers that much in deference to those feelings (I have in the past seen my play deteriorate in reaction to both hot and cold streaks). And that's probably the most important thing. It'd be nice to get to a point where I really don't feel affected by 20+ buy-in swings one way or the other, but I doubt very much that's gonna happen. At least anytime soon.
Anyway, this is all to say I'm getting crushed at 100NL. I still feel it's a level I can beat. In fact, I hope to be up to 200NL by the end of the year. But right now over a 50k+ sample I'm losing at about 1bb/100. It's actually worse than that, cause for the first half of those hands I was up a fair bit. Meanwhile, over around the same sample size at 50NL, I'm up around 9bb/100. I do think there's a decent jump between those two levels, but nowhere near enough to justify that much difference (especially when the higher relative rake of 50NL is considered).
If I really felt like 50NL was the best game I could beat while mass tabling, I could accept that. I don't think I'd hit SNE (maybe if I wasn't traveling with the band so much, but even then it'd be a challenge), but any kind of decent win rate combined with still getting to say 800k VPP's would make for an okay year. It's just that, this blog's title notwithstanding, I don't think 100NL is really all that tough. Problem is I don't know for sure. I know I'm not as good or as bad as the extremes, but where exactly I fall between them is impossible to know. All I can do is keep following my bankroll rules (I'm one more bad session away from playing 50NL anyway), try to plug my leaks as best as I can (playing this many hands does seem to help me recognize them quicker), and just see what happens.
Oh. And try not to blog about it too much.
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