Fuzzy’s Poker

Over the last 3 months poker has been treating me rough; I suffered a 10 buyin downswing and was pretty melancholy about it. I’ve always played on the edge of my bankroll’s ability to withstand standard swings, mainly because I don’t rely on generating an income from poker and also because I’m willing to move up and down stakes very fluidly as required. I never really felt anything egotistical which would stop me moving down after suffering a downswing.

Since about July I had been going through a cycle of grinding a profit at 2/4, moving back up to 5/10 and running terribly. Rinse and repeat. Finally, after a truly hideous session at 5/10 the roller-coaster started to play on my emotions too much. I cashed out a large portion of my roll and left myself with $5,000 to play on. My initial plan was to drop way down to 1/2 and just grind. I wasn’t going to pay any attention to the size of my roll, wasn’t going to even think about moving up stakes. Just play.

The 2nd, and probably most important, part of this plan was to move my play back over onto Fortune and away from the shockingly slow hand rate at the site I’d played at previously. I felt a huge need to be able to play 30k+ hands a month rather than ~10k. Running bad over 5,000 hands doesn’t affect me the same way when its only 4 days compared to 2 weeks.

When talking this through with the poker crew the topic of taking a stake came up and I decided that it made sense. Not only because it would allow me to play 2/4 and keep 70% of the profit, but being responsible for other people’s money would ensure that I didn’t deviate from the plan the next time I felt like a bit of a gamble.

Of course, after taking the stake I went on a 6 buyin downswing. This obviously forced me to move down to 1/2 anyway. After moving down I punched through 5,000 hands very quickly, grinding out an increase of 4 buyins and then going on an epic heater and winning another 7 buyins in a single 500 hand session. I truly hadn’t run any where near as well as that session for at least 6 months.

On the weekend I used my remaining frequent player points on the old site to buy into their $100,000 guaranteed tournament. 7 hours later I took 2nd place for $15,000.

Boom!

So I’ve repaid the staking money, cashed out a little to celebrate and will now be heading back to 2/4 to grind the hell out of it for at least the rest of the year.

I’m very chuffed to have weathered through an intense “low time” in my poker career and come out the other side once again smelling like roses. What doesn’t frustrate you into quitting poker, only makes you stronger

What was on track to be my best month of cash game poker tailed off with quite a whimper. I had three rather disgusting sessions, both against extremely weak players who ran well. Most frustrating of all was the fact that the last of these woeful sessions happened on the last night of the month…

I can’t claim that they were all cooler situations, as I played poorly and on a number of occasions made crying calls that during session reviews were obviously terrible. I really kick myself for failing to give any credit to players who prove to be bad, even when they’re straying from their usual style of play. When a weak tight player suddenly starts making big bets at a big pot I’ve been falling into the trap of deciding that they’re playing back at me.

Still, it was a healthy month in the green and I am confident that I’ll play more level headed against the pool of poor players and clean them out.

The downer at the end of May was followed by a fairly ugly start to June. Combined with the cash outs I’ve been making, I found myself working with a fairly slim bankroll of around $3,000. I kicked off operation rebound with the goal of getting back to 5 figures ASAP. The course I plotted out involved a steady regime of short stacking and mid buy in tournaments.

Both parts of the strategy have paid off, I ran well driving the short stack and parlayed one of these shots into sitting deep with a terrible player at a 10/20 table. That adventure finished with me flopping a set and taking down a $5,000 pot.

On the tournament side of things, I’ve had 5 final table appearances over the last few days. While I haven’t succeeded in taking first prize in any of them, the 2nd’s and 3rd’s have helped top up the bankroll and I’m once again operating on 5 figures.

Best of all, my confidence in my game has returned and I feel that I’m playing well. I’d realised that a lot of my “most of the time” lines had actually become “every time”. By occasionally using the alternative line, against the right types of players, I’ve lowered my variance and added a handful of trapping options to my game.

I took a shot at the start of May, lost 3 flips and spent a few days licking my wounds. I felt I was playing good poker and ground it out and returned to the green. Alas I was reminded how fickle poker is as I managed to lose around 8 buyins to the most completely woeful players I’ve encountered for some time.

I dropped down the stakes and put through some hands just focusing on lowering variance and polishing up my game.

Rollercoaster!

Since about mid way through March I’d broken something on the site which was stopping me from making new posts. I’d been too busy actually playing poker to spend any time looking into it.

Tonight, after breaking even for May I decided to do something about it. I’ve moved the blog over onto the domain name I bought ages ago.

I had quite a rough month during March, the 7500 hands I have a graph for show the extent of the downswing pretty well. Thankfully I booked a few decent winning session in ungraphable cash game sessions and a couple of tourney cashes, I also racked up a healthy profit playing some blackjack. All in all I’ve managed to come out of March showing a profit, which is truly amazing when I think back on the hideous run of cards I was having.

I’m proud to say that I asked for voluntary exclusion from blackjack while I was well ahead. I was playing it during my poker sessions and it was plainly obvious that I wasn’t paying as much attention to the poker tables. Beyond that, its -EV!

On the whole I’m happy with how I played during Feb, I cashed out another decent chunk of money and spent it on cool stuff including booking a kick ass week long holiday with my missus to celebrate our 1st wedding anniversary.

I started the month with a very enjoyable hot streak at 5/10, going up 8 buy ins in 1700 hands in the 1st week. The 2nd week I didn’t fair so well, dropping about 5 buy ins back to some really terrible players. The hand which sums it all up saw me flop a set of 7’s vs my favourite moron’s set of 2’s. He river’d quads. Excellent.

After the series of harsh beats I decided to take some time off poker and only played a couple of short sessions during the rest of the month.

I’m eager to get in a decent amount of hands during March and get back to playing good solid poker.

I busted out of all the Sunday tournies with out making the money in any of them, which brings up the end of my “month of big buyin tournies”. I’ll be going back to only playing tournaments with less than $100 buyins and focusing more on my cash game again. I just felt like I was burning through too much of my roll in these high variance, 1000+ big buyin tournaments.

I have been playing some 5/10 cash games. I finished off the end of the month very well and it carried into the start of this month. I was up 7 buyins before the run good ran out. Since then I’ve suffered a number of hideous coolers and beats (the most painful being when I flopped a set of 7s and got all the money in vs a set of 2s, only to have the villain river quads), and drop 4 buyins back.

I’m cashing out the money I deposited on Fortune, Mansion and Stars to play in their big tournies. I’ll be spending that one some toys and fun things. I’ll be leaving myself with 35 buyins for 2/4 and plan on banging through a good amount of hands over the rest of Feb.

With all that said about no more big buyin tournaments, I had already bought into the $550 main event for the Joe Hachem series of tournies down at Crown Casino. I’ll be playing in that over the coming weekend and hope I can have some success in a real live tourney!

I’ve been approached with a staking & coaching offer by a player who I greatly respect. I’m obviously very keen on the idea and equally excited by the prospect of being coached by a highly skilled player and the opportunity to play in as many Sunday majors as I can fit into my schedule.

The deal would also include cash games and most probably see me start playing on the bigger networks such as Full Tilt and Pokerstars. Up until now I’ve really focused on playing at smaller sites where the player base is rather soft. Often these also haven’t supported Poker Tracker and stats overlays.

This is an amazing offer and really want to make the most of it. I’ll go into more detail when we’ve got all the specifics hammered out. Right now the backer is gearing up to play at the Los Angles Poker Classic, as soon as he gets a chance we’ll be going over the fine details.