Yeesh, January was painful. As alluded to in my last blog post I really did some analysis of my game this month.
Game analysis is something I really need to do more, in fact, I think all players should. It's so easy to not do self-analysis when you are constantly winning, it's easy to think that all the decisions you are making are the right ones and that you are finally not getting sucked out or cold decked. However, when things go bad, whether that's bad for a session, a week or a month; players tend to over-analysis their games and make radical changes to try to get back to winning. This in turn could lead to a further spiral down the tunnel of suck, since long streaks of losing sessions isn't uncommon for any player.
My analysis pin-pointed a few things that I needed to keep an eye on when it came to my play. Two of them I've listed below:
--The first being my image. Where online play table image is normally focused on things like LAG(Loose-Aggressive) & TAG(Tight-Aggressive), live play isn't as much. As Bart Hanson puts it, live play table images are generally categorized in 1 of 2 ways "Losing this session" & "Winning this session". Most low-limit players aren't sophisticated enough(or don't care enough) to really monitor how many hands you are playing out of 100, they just notice whether you are winning or losing. A losing table image will get you called down light more frequently, while a recent string of winning pots and a winning image will get you more respect.
--Open limping, I'm doing it way to much. Where there are many situations when over-limping may be the right play, I'm finding very few situations where open-limping is profitable.
The first picture is my running total so far and the second is a graph of just January. So as you can see January was another winning month, but it wasn't a great month, it was painful!
The roller-coaster downward slide that went on for the majority of the month had a very noticeable impact on my overall results this far. Although my standard deviation remained about the same, my hourly win-rate was halved and my average winning session was as well. I can't really complain about some of the bad beats/suckouts I took because everyone goes thru those, but let's just say they were numerous.
I'm still winning the VAST majority of my sessions(70.4%) but my winning sessions are trending to be smaller than my losing sessions. I attribute some of this to quitting too early when winning and/or playing too long when losing. I'll be more attentive to that moving forward. "Quitting well" is a skill, just like anything else and it's something I need to work on...obviously. I think I may have solved the other half of my quitting problem but just not posting individual session results to this blog, that was really weighing on my mind at the tables.
On the good side, I do believe I kept my cool during most of the month, even as I realized that something with my game was really, really off. The analysis I did towards the end of the month may have been my saving grace over the last 30 days.
Overall, I'm still pleased with the results thus far. Far be it from me to complain about winning!
Below is the graph of the challenge so far.
See you in February!
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