It's been a long time since I posted, sorry for the break. With the new baby, I haven't had time for pretty much anything that doesn't involve milk or poop. I did get to play some poker here & there and learned a couple of valuable lessons the hard way.
1. I can't play poker when my baby cries.
Seriously, it puts me on insta-tilt. I could probably ignore any other baby, but when it's my baby, it puts me into fight or flight mode. Which usually translates into fight mode, which means playing very loose aggressive and not giving up pots when I'm clearly behind. Once I realized what was happening to me, I learned to sit out until the little guy relaxes.
2. Winning big really taxes my discipline.
I was doing OK sticking to no-limit cash games, cheap tournaments, and cheap heads-up sit & goes. And then I won about $800 in a $30 tournament about six weeks ago, boosting my online bankroll up past $2k. Once that happened, I completely ignored my own rules and started playing a lot of high variance games & expensive tournaments. I got stacked a few times in a row in a $200 NL game, lost a $200 heads up match, didn't make the money in a series of $100 tournaments, and pretty much whittled my online bankroll down to $700 before I put on the breaks. It all happened over the course of a week or two.
That was quite a psychological blow. I had been a steady winner up to that point, which is why I started to reach for a higher & higher win rate with no-limit games & big tournaments. But my bankroll was in no position to survive the inevitable downswing. I could lament my bad luck (i.e. getting stacked in no-limit by having my full house beaten by quads or having my nut flush beaten by a strait flush). But it was my own damn fault for playing beyond my bankroll to begin with. If I had been playing lower stakes, I could've taken those blows without sweating it instead of losing over half my winnings.
Now, my cash bankroll is still very healthy. I've been doing well in the local home games and that stash just keeps growing. Previously, I had been counting my cash & online bankroll together when deciding what stakes to play. But once I started my downswing, I realized it would be unacceptable to have to reload an online poker account using my cash winnings. So I now treat them as totally separate bankrolls and choose my stakes accordingly.
So as I said, I put on the breaks. Hard. I started playing low-limit HORSE almost exclusively. It's a mixed limit game, where it switches to a different form of poker every 10 hands: Hold'em, Omaha 8, Razz, Seven Card Stud, and Seven Card Stud 8. I can beat the $1/$2 game for over $10/hour, consistently, with an extremely low variance. So that's where I'm at now, slowly building up my bankroll. The game is really a lot of fun, so I'll talk a bit more about it in my next post.