Monthly wrap up and balance

Well, last month was about as close to a train wreck as it could have been while I still hit most of my goals. I moved up from 10NL rush to 25NL rush, then I hit my biggest downswing ever, 11. I was well on my way to recovering from that and felt confident that I had figured out a solid playing style for 25NL that was profitable for me when my HUD stopped working correctly, at the end or RUSH week no less. So I moved to the regular tables. That has been going really well from a theoretical stand point. Oddly, the better I played statistically, the worse I did financially. I wound up finishing the month $180 below EV, but even with that I still made my goals.

$75 for iron man
$50 for rush week
$80 in rakeback
$35 in tournament play
$65 in NL
and $12 in PLO

for a grand total of:
$305 - so I beat my goal by $5!

My goals for next month are to:
1) make $500 in total profit
2) Get Table ninja set up so I can start playing 16 tables instead of 10.
3) Get a stat review from Mpethy.

and 4) take a shot at 50NL with a plan of dropping down if I drop 2 buy ins and winning 625NL buy ins. This is actually unlikely to happen unless I hit my $500 goal early, but it's still on the list!

I had a very good start to this month yesterday, when I won 3 buy ins. It feels good to hit 15% of your monthly goal in one day!


Now...


BALANCE:

I have seen a lot of people at 2P2 and heard a lot of instructors at CR talking about balance and unexploitable play lately, and it is absolutely driving me nuts. Balance is a fine and wonderful thing against regs you are going to be playing on a regular basis and who are going to actually notice. As a matter of fact, in today's game I think it is something you have to do or you will become a reg fish target. That said, I am so damn sick of people talking about balance. Listen, if you are playing 25NL or below, please forget about balance. Even if you happen to be playing someone often enough that they are building reads on you, what are the odds that particular player is good enough to figure out what you are doing AND is able to proplerly exploit it? I mean really, there are so few player at that level who can exploit you in that manner, and if you are playing against them then you have bigger problems than balance (like table selection?).

Also, if you don't have history with someone, THEN THERE IS NO NEED FOR BALANCE! Seriously, if you have only played 100 hands, then no, you don't need to be bluffing in that spot to balance your range and you don't need to C-bet that A high dry board with AK. You could and should take the line that will have the highest expected value at that point. And maybe that means check folding instead of C-betting. Maybe that means you bluff catch instead of value bet. You simply don't have enough hands/history to make it worth the decreased win rate. If for some reason you start playing this person all the time AND they are able to adjust if you play unbalanced, then by all means start balancing your ranges. But you lose so much money if you are adjusting before that moment, and frankly it would be better to be unbalanced and be taken advantage of by the few regs who noticed than it is to lose out on the extra value that you get from being exploiting all the fish.

Rant over!

And random brag. I did a player report last night on players I had 500 hands or more. Of the 6 players I have that many hands on, only 1 was a winner. Table selection is one of the least appriciated skills!

On the down side, I have been starting tables recently, and I got owned playing HU for a bit last night. Lost half a buy in. Lesson learned (outside of HU play) is that when you start a table, make sure it's NL and not PL!