Max and I both went to Chicago for the WSOP circuit event there. It got hyped up like it was going to get 400-500 people but it only got 220, which was pretty disappointing. To be honest I probably would not have went if I knew there would be so little people.

Max busted out Day 1 while I busted out Day 2. Max found himself at a tough table with Faraz Jaka and Vanessa Selbst. He told me about an insane fold he made against Jaka. The hand went something like this: 30k stacks and 100/200 blinds. Max raised 600 from MP with AKo. Jaka called from the SB, BB called as well. Flop came AKT two hearts, Max flopped top two. Both guys check, Max cbets 1200, Jaka calls, other guy folds. Turn comes a 7. Jaka checks, Max bets 3200, Jaka calls. River is a 9, no flush has completed. Jaka checks, Max bets 7200, Jaka thinks for a bit and shoves. Max folded. We discussed the hand afterwords and decided that even though Jaka was repping basically nothing besides 86hh and J8hh, it would be an insanely bad spot to bluff. Max has every nut hand in his range and there’s no reason for Jaka to think he has anything else than the nuts. So I agree with his fold.

I felt like I played kind of poorly day 1 but greatly improved my play day 2. I realized with these tournaments that you very rarely see hero calls, which means basically whenever someone has a weak hand, no matter what you are repping, they will fold. Clearly after a point of betting and raising a shitload people are going to start hero calling a lot. But until I sense that point has come I’m going to start pounding away at good spots to bluff in terms of what my opponent has, not what I have necessarily.

Unfortunately, after chipping up on day 2 from a short stack to a 28bb one, I busted out. The hand was a pretty standard good bluff hand. I raised to 2.5x BB from HJ with A6o. Guy who had a lot of chips and hadn’t 3bet me yet today, but was young and clearly the type to do so, 3bet me pretty standard, about 8bbs in the CO. My rudimentary math found that he’d have to fold something like 40% of the time for a shove to be good. I think it was pretty obvious that was the case. Despite the fact  I couldn’t pick up any tells from his body language, I went for it anyways and he called with QQ. I didn’t bink an Ace.

Next tournament is the NAPT in LA. I’m pretty pumped about this one because it has a HU event which is my speciality.

Until then.

Right now, I’m in the midst of one of the most epic downswings I’ve ever had in my career. I’ve been focusing on mainly super turbos recently and at first it was going well. I anticipated intially, given the winrate ceiling seems to be about 3% for even the best players, that super turbos would give way to some ridiculous swings. When it was going well, it seemed like maybe that wasn’t the case, but wow was I wrong!

It’s been pretty brutal the last couple of weeks. As any of you know who have been through a really terrible run, when you are running really bad, you start second guessing the crap out of yourself and your confidence is shot. I started experimenting with tons of different strategies because I felt like I had to be doing something wrong. In hindsight, I definitely had some leaks but the downswing made them seem bigger than they were. I felt like I had to do something drastic when I really didn’t. I started doubting what I knew someones preflop range was because it just seemed like I had to be wrong.

However, when I thought about it more, I realized that when I was upswinging initially, I had the exact opposite effect happen. I thought I had mastered super turbos, that I was better than everyone else and there was no need to work on my game. I didn’t really assume ranges, I did basically what I felt like because it worked. In both cases, I was swayed by my emotions of good variance and bad when I was trying to determine the correct play.

And this is where I came to this realization. I can’t just play and play and play and tweak my strategy from that, because what I assume my opponent is doing is almost always swayed by variance. What I need to do is take time while I’m not playing and talk to friends, do some math, work with some of the amazing programs available to poker players, and watch videos, and from that think about different spots and strategies. From that, I can figure out whats best and improve in spots I’m struggling with. I estimate that the time I spend doing this is about 5% my total poker work, when in reality I should strive for it to be more like 20-25%. Especially when learning a new game like this.

I despise the hell out of this downswing. But without it I would have never came to this realization, and for that I’m thankful.

After a very successful London, Danny and I have got a little bit of the live tournament bug. We heavily discussed strategy of live tournaments while in London and came to some really cool conclusions. I really don’t want to go into it much, but I’ll just say that these conclusions, when put into practice, will probably look retarded to an outside observer.

The two tournaments coming up are:

10k WSOP Circuit Regional Championship, Horseshoe Hammond. October 25th to the 28th.
NAPT LA 5k headsup. November 11th and 12th
NAPT LA 5k Main Event. November 12th-16th

As always, there will be updates on our twitter as well as some on this blog. Hopefully some more good luck can come our way.

After I got back from London I took 2 days off and now I’m back at the tables. I learned so freaking much there. It was one of the best trips for poker learning I’ve ever had. Max and I really improved our live poker games, and conversations with Urnotindanger and H2olga gave me a lot of insight and reassurance about poker theory. So I’m feeling pretty confident.

Results haven’t showed though, I’m down a lot since my tourney score. I decided to play some 25/50 hu and some 5k hu sngs, and those are basically responsible for all my losses. I think I’m going to stick to low stakes for a little bit until I get back in upswing mode. When playing lower, I go  6 or 7 tables at a time and I feel like im playing fantastically relative to the challenge of that many opponents at once. It’s also pretty sweet to get a ton of rakeback.

I’m considering going to the WSOP circuit event in Indiana at the end of the month. I enjoy live poker tournaments a lot but I’ve been traveling so much I’ve been itching to settle down. However, its supposed to get over 300 players, many of them big fish. And its nationally televised, which is even more awesome. I’ll probably end up going.

In other news, I’m adopting a stray cat. This black cat has been wandering outside my house and we kept leaving out food for it to see if he/she was feral. One day she finally let us get close to her (we saw it was a she) and she was so freaking cute and affectionate, not feral at all. I took her into the vet a few days ago and shes perfectly healthy. Right now I’m looking for a new place to move into, and the search became harder with a pet. At the same time, I love cats so its an obstacle worth having.

Anyways, I’m going to go grind for another two hours.