Because I wouldn’t dream of letting Jason and his, you know, massive success get all of the badbeatscrew.com readership, I feel compelled to post.

When March started, I was playing 1/2 and often had my entire FTP roll of about 3k spread across 12 tables.  At some point during this month of playing about 85k hands of NLHE 6m cash, I peaked at around $40k in my FTP account, playing 5/10 with a “standard” 30-40 buyin bankroll.  Winning 5-figs on the month and getting halfway unstuck for the year, grinding my ass off to bring my bankroll back from the brink of bustitude, is actually admirable and something to be proud of.  I guess.

But this wouldn’t be a Leo blog post without a heavy dose of vitamin W.  No, I don’t mean , which I’m sure this post will get when I stop writing this at school and go home.  I mean whining, obviously.  Why the whining?  Because I happened to end the month on about a $10k downswing.  I guess it was natural that I regressed to the mean, given that I ran extremely good for most of the month, but it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth to end the month on such a bad note.  And, of course, I managed to get tantalizingly deep in a Sunday tournament with a huge stack, only to blast it off making a (likely) +EV, (definitely) high-variance 4bet shove that happened to run into AK.  So, given the myriad feelings of mostly-unjustified disappointment I have going into the end of this month, here is a list of things I’ll look to improve whenever I play next (I can’t really put in much time in April, due to the specter of law school exams hovering over me):

1.  Find a happy medium between spewmonster and nitbag in tournaments.  Jason does this extremely well.  Perhaps I’ll just watch all his PokerVT videos or something.

2.  Become less results-oriented, especially with tournaments.  Specifically, I need to stop feeling awful after I bust in a tournament when I get the money in bad (in a non-cooler spot).  Attempts to avoid this feeling certainly prevented me from spewing before, but it also made me pass up a bunch of spots in which I could accumulate chips.  Before this month, when I would get deepish in tournaments with a short stack (as it seems like I always did) and then lose a flip or whatever, I wouldn’t get that terrible feeling; I could just chalk up the loss to MTT variance.  But now, when I get deep in a tournament with a huge stack, like I had in the 2nd Chance Yesterday, and I go nuts 3-betting and 4-betting and accumulating like all those online MTT pros whose games I admire, and then I run into a real hand to bust, I just get so down on myself for spewing (even though busting from bleeding away chips slowly is still busting).  My brain switches into full-on self-hate mode, like, “you’re such a fucking moron for taking this moderatly +EV spot and risking all your chips when you could probably avoid blasting the fuck off and still find ways to accumulate by stealing from nits or actually picking up a hand how can you be so fucking stupid etc.”  I should probably stop that somehow.

3.  While I’ve found that I don’t suck that badly at 12-tabling on my 30″ monitor, there are certainly times when my game just turns into “automated button pushing.”  I can get away with this in tournaments, I guess, because I have to be tighter in full ring games anyway, and the generally smaller stacks lend themselves to more standard opening/shoving ranges, etc.  But when I get into that kind of rut against the regs in 6max games, they’ll pick up on it and start outplaying me badly.  This might be a form of tilt, but I gotta stop playing when it hits.

4.  Win more money without showdown (in cash as well as tournaments).  I don’t know if this just a stylistic thing, in that my cash game style (which has seemed to work well this month) is centered more around the hero call and getting value from people than getting people to make sick laydowns, or if it is indicative of overall bad play.  That red line on my PT3 graph has a disgusting downward trend that is difficult to ignore.  When I’m playing well, playing creatively, that downward trend levels out.  When I turn into an automaton who just presses buttons, that line falls off a god damn cliff (this shows that the Leotomaton is more inclined to just call/call and build big pots before giving up the hand like a bitch).  I vaguely recall, when this whole perma-downswing was at its worst, I had a pretty good red line.  OF course, I was playing a lot more HU then, so that probably has a decent amount to do with it.  Meh.

5.  I am still a dreadful PLO player.  Maybe I’ll watch some videos on it, but playing that shit in class (or, ever, really) is just burning money, even if it gets me those ftp points for iron man or whatever.  So, no more of that for me.

Anyway, I guess March isn’t over yet, and I’ll probably play donkaments and cash tonight, just to see if i can finish the month on a good note (and get that precious Iron Man status, obviously).  Hopefully, after tonight, I’ll be able to post the March graph and still say “at least you’re not stuck as bad as you were in February!”