January SNG Quest: The second half

I had prepared myself for the inevitable downswing. I knew that beautiful 43% SNG ROI I posted in the first half of January couldn’t last for long. Perhaps my post jinxed it for me. Because I proceeded to lose the next fifteen straight.

Yup, you read that right. 15 SNGs, not one cash. It’s really nothing more than your standard bad SNG run, but when you’re not playing that many hours to begin with, it feels like a colossal failure. I’m calling it the Neteller curse, because my game started tanking the minute those two hippie-CEOs were pinched by the Feds. My extremely complex mathematical calculations tell me that about 40% of the time, I was getting in as a decent to overwhelming favorite (3-2 or better), about 40% of the time I was losing coinflips in situations where I had to push in short (under 10 BB), and the other 20% were situations in which pairs ran into bigger pairs. You know, the TT vs. JJ variety. Add in the standard deviation of me just being an idiot and a donkey and you have a pretty good picture of the last couple of weeks.

Frustrated with SNGs, I played a few MTTs and peep token satellites to try and boost my confidence by winning at something. I won a few tokens, but pretty much flamed out at everything I used them for, including last night’s first WPBT Player of the Year event, where I finished an unspectacular 26th of 61. More people must read this space than I thought, because at one point this week, a reader popped into the observer chat while I was playing a satellite and said “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be concentrating on SNGs instead of satellites?”

Well, yeah, but when you lose 15 in a row, it’s not like you’re running back for more right away.

It’s not like I’m alone on this. Just check out Grubby’s graph. I’m not cool enough to make a graph and if I did, it would probably make me cry.

I keed, I keed. But at least from the vantage point of my scambled brain, the days of the super-soft low limit SNGs are gone. I don’t look up players on SharkScope (and took myself off that database a loooong time ago) but do usually check to see how many games/what limits my opponents are playing before I register for a SNG. Imperfect information, of course, but I’m less likely to sit down with a guy who is grinding six or more SNGs at once. Though at this point, who knows, he could suck as badly as I do.

So, that was an interesting little experiment, despite the little success I had at it. Pauly returns to Los Angeles from his month-long Australian sojurn tomorrow, and his arrival (as well as the screenplay I’m desperately trying to finish) are the perfect excuses for taking a break from online poker. I should probably give that second Harrington book a bit of a re-read as well, whenever I find the time.

In the meantime, you should be reading Absinthetics, for once again February is upon us, and our hero Ryan is making another run at the L.A. Poker Classic. He’s playing (almost) every event (and there are like, 30 of them) and live-blogging his progress from his trusty SideKick. Good luck, Ryan and don’t eat the tacos at Commerce. Eeeew.

And… if your Full Tilt balance is looking, well, like mine, fear not because Wirecard is coming. Launching for Full Tilt’s U.S. players on Feb. 1, it’s a reloadable MasterCard run out of a German bank. Anyone care to wager on how long it stays open to American players before the Federales shut it down? Oh, wait. That would be an illegal internet wager. Thanks to Jen Leo for the heads-up!