Tuesday, February 17, 2009

thanx to JC a quick blog post before dinner

JC added to the comments so we get a quick blog post.

So to answer his first question I tend to not get to upset about the beats anymore, although to be fair I've been running ridiculously well this month and all praise be to the poker gods (imo). After you've played long enough and enough hands you've pretty much seen it all. I've had $20,000 swings in 24 hours, so losing or winning a $1k pot doesn't really phase me. I still get excited when I win, and obviously it's dissappointing when your hand doesn't hold up, but I almost always have another 15 tables going so there is no time to really get caught up in the random turn of a card. In the long run it will work itself out, and since I can't control it I can't worry about it. I'm much more likely to get tilted if I make a horrendous play in a hand, especially if it is a really terrible river call for a large portion of my stack. Sometimes if I make a terrible play and find myself upset at it I'll just go ahead and wrap up the session because I might not be playing my A game, and I don't want to start questioning all of my plays because of one mistakes. But those occasions are rare anymore and it's due to the fact that I've played well over a million hands over poker now and it's become a pretty unemotional game.

Also it helps that I don't consider the money in my poker account as "my money" until it hits my checking account. It is the same way that if you make some money in the market you can't go out and celebrate by spending on something extravagant, because the gains are all on paper. Until you sell or get dividends (and pay the requisite taxes) you haven't actually made anything. And you should treat your daily finances as such. That really helps you not let the beats at the table affect you when you know it isn't going to impact your ability to pay bills or taxes, get groceries, go on trips etc.

As to JC's second question, I've tinkered with 16 tabling since november of last year. At first it was probably a mistake because I simply couldn't handle the tables. But then I gradually got more and more comfortable with both 16 tabling and full ring (which I didn't have as much experience with). By late december I had it pretty well worked out and found that 16-tabling 2/4 was probably more profitable than trying to table select and 6-9 table 5/10. Plus I had been running bad for almost 8 weeks and the swings at 5/10 were really starting to stress me out. At this point the swings at 2/4 seem like nothing, so I think I really play better as the money matters even less to me at 2/4. Gradually I started working in 6max games into the 16 tables so that now I usually play a mix of FR and 6max. Usually the mix is something like 4-1 or 3-1 full ring to 6max. Now I rarely have any trouble keeping up with the tables, and I actually enjoy the speed of the game and find that the quick pace and constantly seeing new hands helps me grind longer sessions. I've played several 4 hour plus sessions this month which I used to struggle with in nl, and I think I can credit 16 tabling to that.

that's all for now. probably a non poker post coming soon.

thanks for reading folks

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