day 7, week 1 recap

first the stats:

• 24,000 hands
• 34 hours of poker played
• winrate = 16bb/100 hands (EV adjusted 13.5bb/100 hands)
• won just shy of 40 buy ins based on average stake size

Overall a great week at the tables, made better by the poker gods giving me some run-good.  I did miss my average hands per day goal by 4k hands which is pretty disappointing.  I think the biggest problem with keeping that goal is that I typically won't play more than 4k hands in a day if the tables aren't good, and I think I'll just wait for the weekend to make up the hands.  But then the weekend comes and my wife is home and I like to take some time away from the game to socialize with her and friends.  And in general I find it difficult to get in 5-6k hands in a day if I'm not dedicating my whole day to poker.  That's usually two 3 hour sessions, and it's hard to play two sessions in one day and not be brain fried by the end of the day.

When it comes to my rules I think I did very well at not playing more than 12 tables and making sure I was taking notes and not auto-piloting.  I did a very poor job of session reviews in that I only sporadically looked at a few hands.  I did watch several videos, and read a lot of strat threads.  (I often type out very detailed responses to strat threads on 2p2 and then just before hitting post I delete everything I've written.  It's mostly information protection.  I just don't think pros are going to feel comfortable sharing info the way they used to until things change in terms of global legislation and economy and the games get better.)  I also avoided playing too many cash tables when playing tournaments, but I primarily succeeded there by only one tabling a sunday tournament today.  I normally play 4-6 tournaments on sunday but I only played one today so I typically had 10-11 cash tables up while I was in it.

I also avoided reg filled tables unless there was an open seat, although I started lots of games by playing HU.  Lastly I worked hard on bet sizing.  I've tried several different things with bet sizing and sizing for future streets with different parts of my range and based on my preflop range.  My mind is constantly changing about what is the most effective way to size vs regs.  I'm not going to type up all of my thoughts in here, but in general I think it's important to try different things against different regs and see how they respond.  If you don't get to showdown you can't no for sure whether or not their reaction was honest or a bluff, but if you notice that player doesn't seem to change frequencies as you change bet sizes then you should respond in a way to exploit that lack of adjustment.  I think I was making some bad default sizes against regs earlier this year and it was causing me to leave money on the table.

overall I think the week was a huge success, and now the challenge is to keep it going for 7 more days.  I'd really really like to hit 28,000 hands for this week, so I'd best get a good start on it tomorrow.  I think the key is that everyday that I feel fresh and focused I need to shoot for 5k hands and not 4k.

hope everyone else is having a great August.  gl at the tables.

Jim