41 Days of Poker--A Quick Tournament Exit

I played a tournament tonight (the same structure as the one that I cashed on Sunday) and it didn't go well.

I don't think that I made many mistakes and I'm starting to get a feel for playing a lot of speculative hands.  I'm always working on adding hands, on the theory (pretty well accepted) that one should play as many hands as they can play well.  I still have a lot of work to do.  I need to add more king- queen- and jack-high hands to my range, but that's a project for a later date.

Last night (Thursday) I was dealt a lot of suited connectors and semi-connectors such as 65s and T8s. Almost every time I flopped a promising draw that didn't go anywhere.  I missed flushes or straights on the river quite a few times.

I flopped well but couldn't get anything from it.  Non-speculative hands didn't work out very well either.  The only broadway hand that I saw was AJo, and I don't remember getting dealt any pairs until my last hand of the tournament.  Shortly after the AJ hand I limped with T9.  I  flopped middle pair (nines), bet it and got five callers, making my chance of my pair holding up close to zero.  Nothing was working and I rode the nonstop variance train out of the tournament.

I wasn't getting good cards in general, the speculative hands went nowhere, and missing all of those draws to eight or more outs depleted my stack rather quickly over the first hour.

I ended my tournament by playing two big hands against one of the top players in the area.  On the first hand I flopped two small pairs on a very wet board and I made a large bet to price out straight draws.  She had flopped the straight and I lost a lot of chips on that hand. My last hand I was dealt aces, she made a large bet and I called.  After a disconnected 9xx flop she made another big bet, making the pot size more than 1/3 of my stack, and I shoved.  She showed pocket nines, giving her a set, she had me covered, and I was done for the night.

I had thought about shoving my aces preflop, but that seemed excessive when the pot was not very large, maybe 10% of my stack. I didn't think the math was right for a shove, but my instincts were to go all in.  I went with the math, it didn't work out for me, and I was done for the night.

Since I only won a few buy-ins on Sunday I have to be really careful about my tournament choices.  The tournament that I played tonight and on Sunday has the best structure for the way I play and I'll pick my spots and not play anything but that one for now.  I will play it in my city on Sundays, but not any more on Thursdays, when the field, and therefore the prize pool is much smaller.  I will either play once a week, or go out of town to play the Wednesday tournament there.

My 41 days of poker certainly isn't turning out the way I had hoped.  In two weeks I go back to taking care of my mother-in-law two days a week.  That's not a lot of time, but the schedule is always changing, and family communication has been a real problem.  I just want to know what the plan is, but it seems to be all about on manipulative family member who always gets here way.

That said I've been using what free time I have left to do some good studying.  I've gone through several coaching videos and worked on my flash cards.  I spent some time running different scenarios on the Equilab equity calculator yesterday and in general I've done some good work on my game.

I'm getting a good idea of what my strengths and weaknesses are, I play better in tournaments with larger fields.  I can play my speculative hands early when effective stacks are high and win some big pots at a full table.  And more players means that play goes longer and final table stacks will be shorter.  A lot of otherwise good charity room players don't understand when it's time for shove or fold poker, and I have an advantage there.

41 Days of Poker

The last two weeks have been eventful, to say the least.  Too much happened to explain every point, so I'll just list what happened and elaborate in future posts:

The downswing was relentless, and as I burned though most of my poker money, I started mixing in some online play.

Online is going very well, when Americas Cardroom doesn't stall or crash.  Playing $1 to $3 tournaments, I increased the $47 that was sitting on the site to $147.  I don't want to rely very heavily  on online poker, for several reasons I will detail in a future post.

I finally blew though all of my poker funds.  My wife gave me $60 out of the family budget, and Sunday 10/18 in my local poker room I took 4th place out of 62 and got myself a few buy-ins.  I will be playing the same tournament, which runs twice a week in two miles from my house, tomorrow (Thursday.)

That isn't the first time type that I had to fight through a big downswing.  Downswings (the mathematical term is  "negative variance are unavoidable in any game with significant variance--math doesn't lie. When I first started playing poker I put $50 on an online site, played about even (mostly $1 tournaments) for a while, then finally lost it all after three months.  I gave it another try with another $50 and before long I cashed a $3 tournament, coming in 7th of 4,200 players for $384.  I'll just have to make an equally good comeback with live poker.

In my slow, step-by-step, plodding way, I continue to learn and improve.  I have improved a lot in two areas:

1. I'm getting out of trouble when I need to.   I've played several live hands lately where  I had a big hand, but realized it wasn't good enough and got out of trouble just in time.  In each case I had top pair or better, I folded at some point in the hand, and every time villian showed me a straight or better.

2. I'm getting a lot better at playing more hands.  I'm working at getting lot of speculative hands into the mix.  I'm doing well with that and I'm definitely confusing some opponents when I win pots with hands like 65s, 86s and 98o.

More detail to follow in future posts.