Getting Sloppy

I've been going through the usual ups and downs of poker.  I failed to cash in 8 of 9 tournaments, then I played two last night and cashed both of them.  I think I wound up down a dollar or two during the last week. I know it was something close to breaking even.


I get frustrated with all of the things that I don't know.  I just finished watching a couple of Jonathan Little's coaching videos where he was talking about how often, in certain spots, you expect your opponent to fold, and also about how much equity you have.  It seems that your equity plus how likely villain is to fold are added together in some kind of formula.  I've been watching coaching videos for several years and I've been playing for something like ten years and I never heard of those things being combined in that way.

It's a neverending struggle to keep up with all of the things that I should know, and after that, incorporating that new information into my play.  Somewhere down the road I'll deal with that idea from Jonathan Little.

The last week or so I got sloppy.  I've been working on something that I already knew how to do, or at least I thought that I did.  I need to keep my VPIP (money Voluntarily Put In Pot) and PFR (Pre- Flop Raise) percentages fairly close together. On one of her videos, Katie Dozier (aka Hot Jenny) mentioned and showed those percentages enough times in one of her videos that I finally woke up and realized what I was doing.

Her percentages in the online tournament shown on the video were 16/11.  My PFR, like hers, is usually pretty close to 11, but my VPIP has been sneaking well up into the 20s quite often.  A spread of 10 or more is way too much.  My numbers need to look more like hers, so I've been working on that in the last week or so. It's a bad habit and I need to check myself every few hands to make sure that I'm not going off the reservation.  Maybe I should put a piece of paper on the wall in front of me and write, in big letters, WATCH YOUR VPIP.

It's just one of the many, many areas where I need to improve.  The difference is that this time, I knew better but I did it anyway. "With this hand I might hit something good" isn't much of a strategy.