Quest of a Closet Poker Player

My February on the felt had been quite a topsy turvy one, losing $500-700 in a session only to claw my way back. I made a couple of very big changes today. Although one data point does not a trend make, I’ll definitely take it all the way to the bank.

The first change I made was to email PokerTracker, tell them I’d moved laptops, and see if I could get PT up and running on this laptop. While I finally figured out I hadn’t been saving my hand histories the first six weeks of the year, the folks at PokerTracker were good enough to send a new registration key to me. It’s great to be back with PokerTracker by my side. I don’t have a HUD program that goes with it, but just to know that I was grabbing all of this data to help me analyze my play later was a big help.

The second change, which was a big leap for me, was four-tabling when I was playing $0.50/1.00 NLHE. I’m a single tabler, and anyone who has dropped by knows that my NLHE leaves alot to be desired, but four tabling helped me in several key ways.

Reload For some reason, playing four tables and having to reload just distanced me from the emotion of getting felted by someone. I just felt alot more matter-of-fact regarding my decisions, and if it didn’t work out so be it.

Better Decisions I was able to get away from marginal hands easier, probably because I had three other tables going that I had to figure out. The comfort with reloading made it easier to make good calls when I needed to, as well as when I needed to raise or move in.

Closing Tables Single tabling, it is easy to get into a testosterone-laced battle against a single villain. I would have tilted a bit and either abandoned playing or donked off more funds to someone single tabling. I started late just deciding that a guy had my number and closing up shop.

Seeing with Clarity Granted, it’s just the first day, but it was alot like the first time I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw the Monet’s for the first time. I’ve stared and stared at players and hands, but patterns started to emerge from the murky world of calls and bets. I’m a long, long way from being goot, but I started to get a glimpse of it.

Reasonable Stakes I felt alot more comfortable playing four $0.50/1.00 NLHE tables than one $2/4 NLHE table. Until I can become fairly competent, I think it should stay that way for a bit.

All in all, about 650 hands played, $459 to the goot. That puts the month at +$1534, so I’ll take it. I have alot of confidence in my LHE game having fought through so much, and I’m convinced that I’m due for a bigtime session. The only problem is that there just aren’t any games to speak of. Any input regarding four-tabling as well as table mining would be greatly appreciated.

I missed the MATH tonight, but it ended in an epic battle with Smokkee falling to bayne_s heads-up at the end. Bayne is my buddy, one of the CC’s Partner applicants who won a seat to the Aussie Millions recently. Smokkee is solid to be sure, but I knew he was up for a battle. Congrats to both as well as omega man 99 for taking third place cash.

That’s it for now, and I’m off to sleep on a sofa somewhere as I’m now in a fully insomniac state at night. I’ll catch some sleep and be ready for a big day of work tomorrow. I have a goal of very productive days the rest of the week, so let’s hope I can do just that. Thanks for stopping by, and have a good Tuesday.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 2:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized.