¡No Más!

It's been several days since my last update. The reasons are many, but paramount to what you,my faithful readers, are interested in is that I've been doing much thinking and next to no playing of poker in the last week. Any poker I have attempted to play has had the recently very predictable result of a loss of bankroll.

A mere couple of weeks ago I had great aspirations for my poker play. The idea was to work my way slowly, as I always have been able to, though the 50/1 level to an appropriate level for 1/2, and just carefully sort of grind my way up from there. To beat the boredom of the grind, I was thinking of playing a multi-table tourney a week (starting a the $5 ones). -EV, to be sure, but it's good experience and it mixes things up a little bit. I was hoping to be able to comfortably sit the $3/$6 limit games by the time the weather was warm again, but so long as I was making progress towards my goal, I would be happy.

Well, after about 3 weeks of almost straight losses, I'm completely baffled by what is going wrong. I think I'm making the same plays I've made a hundred different times in the situations I see, but they all invariably result in me losing. I've tried to break down the numbers, to look for holes, but there's just nothing that is jumping out and saying "here's the problem, bonehead". My basic stats from the previous few months compared to this one look essentially the same! It's not like I've suddenly become a maniac or a calling station so far as I can tell, but again, the frustration and the disappointment is likely clouding my judgement. All I know at this point is that when I get a hand that connects and I bet into it, I expect to lose.

I'm just very disappointed in myself. I've been playing poker for almost a year now, and by this time I should be crushing the 50/1 game and I should definately have game for the 1/2 tables, yet that's not what's happening. I am only marginally successful at 50/1 and any attempts to play the 1/2 tables result in steady, sometimes crushing losses. The short handed 1/2 games were likely big winners for me due to varience and finding tables with God aweful players on them. It seems that the truely bad 1/2 shorthanded players have either busted out or grown a brain. I can't find anyone these days on the 1/2 tables voluntarily putting money in the pot 80% of the time. These guys were like taking candy from a corpse. Just wait until you have a hand and pound them to dust. Any idiot could win against these guys.

So, I only have to assume that I'm not improving at all. Likely because I'm playing at the lowest level with the worst players, and the only way to win against the random array of hands that bottom level players play is to play straight A-B-C poker. There is no reward for betting for results. If you have a hand, you bet/raise. If you don't you check/fold. This is where I've been for a year. If I were any sort of a programmer, I could have written a bot long ago to play this level and just let it rip. God knows I could have used the time to sit and read a few poker books and maybe learned a little something.

So, this long and bizarre journey has come full circle for me. I have taken a majority of my bankroll out. There were several things I wanted to do with my poker money, but when I was making steady gains it was easy to say "I'll just wait". If I were making money at the rate I'm losing it, I'd be bankrolled for the 1/2 game by this time next week. As it is, I just couldn't stand to lose the opportunity to do this as the possibility existed that I would lose to the point that I no longer had the opportunity, so out it went.

The bankroll stands at a tick over $50.

I have, in effect, started over. Maybe. I'm not even motivated at this point to continue in the way I have been going. Poker has ceased being fun, and the reason is as I stated before. I'm on automatic. I can't afford a coach, especially if I'm constantly losing, and anything I learn would be wasted on a majority of the bottom limit cretins. I feel like an ass asking for someone to mentor me. There's gotta be better things for better players then me to do then spend valuable time breaking my of bad habits, and if I were to get into a mentor situation, I would want to actually have "sessions" where we can talk and go over things. I can't ask anyone to do that and not repay them somehow.

So where does this go from here? To be quite honest, I don't know. As this is a poker blog I'd be remiss if I were to begin deviating into other subjects. I could come on here and start taking about poker stuff, but without me actually playing, I can't imagine there being enough content to be worth visiting here anymore. I don't want to stop playing poker, but I don't want to continue to pound out the hours if I'm not improving. I mean, at this point, I don't even know if I suck or not. I don't know a goddamn thing, really, except that I feel like I'm sitting at the bottom of a well and there's no ladder. I've spent enough time trying to climb out to know that, unless a ladder is thrown, there is no point in continuing to dig at the muddy walls.