Toughing It Out

It’s assessment season again and I’ve been trying to catch up on all the work that I was meant to do during the Easter break. As a result, I haven’t had much time for poker or blogging. During the times that I did play poker, I didn’t manage to stick to my goal of exclusively playing tournaments at all. In fact, I think I’ve only played one. I like to blame this mostly on daylight savings time changes both here and in the US which have resulted in the MTTs starting at wacko times. In all truth though, I just can’t be bothered to one-table a tournament when I can fire up SpadeEye instead and plonk myself next to several fish.

Unfortunately, ever since my move to MSNL, it seems that I’m one of them! I cannot for the life of me beat 2/4 NL and 3/6 NL. You might wonder why I even play 3/6 if I can’t beat 2/4 but the fact is that 3/6 actually seems easier than 2/4. I put this down to 3/6 players being the failures from 5/10 whereas 2/4 seems to contain all the good regulars who want to put in the hours at 2/4 before proceeding quickly to 3/6 and 5/10.

I knew that the variance would increase as I moved up stakes but I never imagined the extent to which it could happen. It’s really quite frustrating and hard to deal with. Just yesterday I quit a short session 2.3K down and felt down in the pits. Later that night, I decided to take a quick 20 minute break from my law assignment and fire up a few tables. Three and a half hours later I quit 3.5K richer. No doubt I will lose half of it back in my next session. This process has been repeating itself for me over and over again the last few weeks and I simply can’t wait for the day that my graph decides to veer north-east and stay that way. I’ve attached the graph for the last 35 days below.

As you can see, in addition to the insane swings, it’s just been one long break-even stretch. Man, if I’m going to get nowhere, at least let me get nowhere in peace! I also never realised just how long a break-even spell can go for. I had heard of people breaking-even for 30,000 hands at a time but I never really believed it. After all, surely by the end of 30,000 hands, variance would catch up with you and you’d either realise you sucked and drop down or come out on top and rake in the dough? Not so it seems. It’s only since I bought Holdem Manager that I’ve begun to realise just how long it can take for expected winnings to catch up with actual winnings. The most depressing thing is that my break-even spell is a result of me running ABOVE expectation, not below it. Last month (the first full month I’ve had HEM) I was 4K above expectation after 30,000 hands. This constituted almost half my winnings for the month. This month I’ve played 12,000 hands and was 2K below expectation for the first 10,000 hands. After my good session yesterday (in which I won about 4 coin-flips in a row) I’m a couple hundred bucks above expectation for the month meaning I’ve now been running good for almost 50,000 hands! Quite depressing given the fact that I’m only beating MSNL for 2.7 PTBB/100 at the moment. With my luck factored out, I’d only be beating it for 1.0PTBB/100.

I may be being a bit hard on myself and I guess I shouldn’t expect too much from my initial foray into MSNL. I have after all only been playing it for a month and a half. It is however annoying to know that if I was playing 1/2 throughout this time I’d definitely be winning and winning without nearly the amount of swings that I experience at 2/4 and 3/6. Sometimes I do just want to go back to 1/2, grind out some easy dollars every day and not have to worry about daily swings of thousands of dollars. My ambitious side however always gets the better of me and I invariably find myself sitting at numerous MSNL tables at which I have little if any edge. And this is so even though I game select very well. In the end, I know that investing the time (and money) at MSNL right now will reap the rewards in the long run. It’s just so hard to persevere while getting to that long run...