Enuff Z Nuff

Well, that was fun, but this tournement challange is too exhausting to continue... For those of you following at home, you know that I went to the $10 level and managed an unabated slide for around 10 rounds, crippling me within a day. I decided to fall back to the $5 level to regroup, which I did, but you just can't make any real progress at that level. Bolstered by my good run at the $5 level I decided to go back to the $10 level.. And again got my ass handed to me. Since I'm not rolled properly to get anywhere near the $20 level, I'm just going to throw the towel in on this.


Really, the biggest problem I've had with the last few games was just a simple lack of playable hands. Of course, at this level, you are going to be showing down the best hand in order to win, so with no real playable hands, you're pretty much screwed.

In other news, I moved my cash from Eurobet (3000 players online) to PokerStars (55000 players online). Partly to hunt for some squishy soft games, and partly because I wanted to get in on the final round of Saturdays With Pauly... Which I managed to miss because I was too preoccupied to read a clock. So I played two tables of .50/1 for a little while and broke pretty much even.

So, thus ends what could have been a decent run.. I'm still completely baffled as to what the hell happened with the $10 level. Variance, I'm guessing... It's a bitch.

Trends

"Bears one hunerd tirty-two, Packers, negative tree!" - Superfans

Well, for the first time since I started this whole sit and go deal, I dropped briefly below my original $50. This slide reminds me of the one that ultimately put me out of poker for most of the year. I couldn't believe the difference in caliber of player from the $5 to the $10 level, and by that I mean that the skill level actually went down considerably, and the aggression of these really bad players went up. Normally, this would be a good thing, but unfortunately, you don't have time in a sit and go to just hang out and wait for the hand to club these idiots into submission with, so I'm forced to make moves with drawing hands, and you know how Party is about drawing hands. Forget odds, it's a crapshoot.

So, as for the challange, I've fallen back to the $5+$1 level to regroup and attempt to stop the bleeding, which I've been only mildly successful in doing. I've been hovering right at my original $50 for the last few rounds. I had a great opportunity to score a win on my last round, finding myself against a genuinely bad heads up player, but I ended up with a couple of bad draws and that was that.


Incredible how I managed to get my ass eaten out by the $10 level. I really honestly thought it was bad luck, but with a little research I found that I was mixing with these idiots a little too early in the game attempting to get into a decent position early, and many times I'd get into the later rounds somewhat crippled. I actually ran into a post I remember some time ago from the Poker Nerd, who was doing sit and goes for bankroll building, and getting some impressive numbers. He posted a little guide on how he does things so, since Doyle's advice seems to not be working, I've adopted his plan for a little while to see if I can get out of the basement here. Still, I'm awefully close to going bust here, so if I can score the 50% ROI he says he was getting with this strategy, I might still find myself out of it. Luck is a bitch.

Speaking of bitch, I saw on Coral (which now has about 3 dozen players, thanks to the Party split) that they had a $200 guerenteed NL tourney for $2+$0, with unlimited rebuys for $2 for the first hour and one add-on after the first hour. I'm never doing that again. The first 30 minutes was a complete all-in fest, and when the smoke cleared the luckiest of players (and I do mean the luckiest, because when you have a pot contested 4 ways all-in, skill is gone, my friends) had stacks around 12000 chips. Meanwhile those that were unlucky ended up with stacks anywhere from 2000 to 3500 chips. My the end of the first hour the average stack size was 5500 chips. I had 2800. What a waste of time. My math was wrong anyway.. There were only like 30 people in the tourney, and with a $200 guerenteed pool, the overlay was tremendous...With all the rebuys, though, that was out the window. Unless I didn't do any rebuys, but for that to have worked, I'd have had to get lucky at least twice inside of 30 minutes. May as well have walked up to a slot machine. I was out in 14th, remarkably.

Level DOWN!

Okay... The Poker Godz hate me. I've been sucked out on more then Ron Jeremy at Hedonism III, so it's back to the $5-$1 level for me until I manage to somehow unfook my game.

I've done some piss poor playing, I'm sure, but it just seems to me that all the friggin nutcases and gamboooooooolers have found a home at the $10 level. Raise a good hand? Called.... Often times in multiple places. Insert witty fish schooling quip here. The last few games I haven't gotten anything worthwhile to play, and in the rare instances I did, no one would go with me, so I'd get the blinds. In truth, with such a crappy ROI at the lower level, I probably had no business going up until I managed to figure out what was going wrong. Back to the proverbial drawing board, I guess.

Happy joy time.

Weeeeee!

Whelp... Not much to say here! I moved to the 10+1 level, and my luck dried up. 0 for 7 in the money on the 10+1 level, so I'm thinking I'm going to pretty much be done with this before first snow. Outstanding.

Level Up!

"Remember your training, and you WILL make it out alive!"

Okay the party at $5+$1 is over... I cut it short by a few rounds simply because I think I'd rather gouge my eyes out of their sockets with a crab fork then play another round of that level. I can face just as crappy players at the $10+$1 level and the ROI will be better just on principle.

Let's go to the graphics..




As you can see, not the best results from this level...

Starting with $50, I ended this level in 93 hands, with a final balance of $167, for a +$117 gain.

Part of the problem I think is that by and large, the players suck at this level, and thus, do much sucking out. I'm trying to amp up my aggression, which is certainly good, and it works against decent players and works great against the sea of tight-passive players that seem to be emerging on Party, but you just can't hammer on a loose-aggresive with raise after raise without having to occasionally come up with the goods. Today in particular was a good day for the dominated hand. I played about 6 rounds of $5+$1 today and I saw AT LEAST a dozen instances where hands with less then a 15% chance end up taking the pot. It was craptacular. I only ended up on the receiving end of two of those, and managed to suck out on a third, so it really didn't directly effect me, though indirectly it made a difference I'm sure. I saw one hand where it was 22 vs 99 vs AA. You can guess who got the river miracle.

I've been mining around for some information on single table tourneys, strategy and the likes. I've poked around 2+2 a little bit, but I was quickly reminded why I haven't been there in over a year. Very little useful information, and it's buried deep in the condecending replies and the idiot hand discussion (I'm short stacked in the big blind and have AA, Button goes all in, what do I do?)... I've had my nose in the Super System bible for No Limit for the last two weeks or so, and am on my second readthrough of that section, but again, his advice is only useful against players who know what the hell they're doing (his quote, "you can't put a man on a hand if he doesn't even know what he has" certainly has meaning here).

Hopefully this next level will at least see a better return on investment percentage. There's still plenty of gawdaweful players at this level, but hopefully not quite the schools I've run into as of late...