Half a step forward

Well, one of the hardest things in poker is to get back after a big downswing. Your confidence is low and you want to tweak your game. This is probably easier for an established player, but for an up and comer who is tweaking their game every session anyway, the uncertainty makes overadjustment a little to easy of a trap to fall into.

Last night I fired up another session of 25NL and it didn't start off well. I ran a bluff catching line on someone, but they showed up with TT to my 88. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have done that with 88 (although I think it would have been a great line with 99), although it was pretty close, so I don't regret it. A few hands later I defend with AJ, but wind up loosing another medium pot to runner runner flush. At this point I was down half a buy in. It's not much, but it gave me the feeling of running on a treadmill. I wound up hovering between down a half a buy in to a full buy in for most of the session. About half way through I ran my TPGK into a flush draw and it held, and I thought my session was about to turn around. But about 5 hands later my set ran into a 4 flush board, so I had to let it go. Then I ran my AA into a set, but I think I lost the minimum on the hand.

Then I hit a FH against a flush, and from that point forward I slowly increased my winnings. I wound up winning about $15. Not a great session (or even a good one really) but it definately helped my poker ego to have a couple of winners in a row. Oddly enough I had started playing a much more weak tight game, which seems to be working. People are just floating and trying to take pots away to much. I C-bet less than 60%, but still have a success rate of under 40%. I'm not sure how much I like playing the more passive trapping style, but a lot the time I am picking up an extra bet in situations where I wouldn't be getting any. The bet check call line and check call lead lines have become much more common.

An example of this was last night when I had AK. I isolated to limpers (I don't iso light anymore unless I know the villan is limping trash - to many players limping strong hands at rush) and the flop came down K84. It was a 3 way pot and I had position, so I decided to check it back. I think betting here gets to many folds and the flop was dry as hell. The plan worked, as the second player lead out for $2 on a turned 4. Not a bad card for me as it pretty much removes a set of 4's. I call and do a happy dance as the other player in the hand called. The river is another 8, so I called again. Sadly, the villan happened to have 78 in the hand, but you can't really get upset about someone hitting a 2 outer on you. On the other hand, it's hard to take a long term approach when you are trying to dig out of a whole.