Had a bit of a downswing a couple months back, and tried to grind it back playing low stakes. Instead, I managed to grind the last $100 into nothing playing the lowest possible stakes, without ever figuring out why.

It was a good run from the last deposit of 60 quid last fall, and I withdrew more than twice that along the way, but I've run into a wall trying to figure out my game there. For now, I've reloaded a small stake just to play in forum league games (hint hint), and started a new project.

The new thing involves playing 6 max 2 card on some other 2-bit network (it's got "stars" in the name... and "poker"), where I can use all the features of poker tracker. Started with a BR of $100, and playing 5c blinds now. The plan is to work through and understand all the usual stats. Will blog some thoughts as I figure these things out.

If all goes well, I'll be looking to swap $ back to cake someday.

MediumFish

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I dread posting these things now, knowing that the big downswing is just around the corner.

Got spooked last month by an extended tilty downswing, so I decided to drop down to 5c/10c until I'd analysed what went wrong, or had mastered the game sufficiently to move back up. Neither of those things happened.

The games at 2c/4c are a license to print money in very small denominations. I can beat the 5c/10c games reliably if I take them seriously. For some reason, I've never mastered the 10c/20c level. Sometimes I sit down, and people spew a couple buyins at me right away. Other times I'll sit there for hours seeing no action and slowly lose money.

After a few weeks of 5c/10c, I got bored. So I did the sensible thing and started four-tabling 25c/50c with half my online BR in play. Clearly I will have learned a valuable lesson from this when it all goes pear-shaped, but it seems to working out so far.

MediumFish

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After looking at the data, I've decided to stick to playing short, focused session of cash. The sessions I've played less than 50 hands have been +EV on average, between 50 and 100 hands have been about break even, and more than 100 hands have been decidedly -EV.

Not sure how scientific this observation is, but I think the approach can't hurt, and there are other things to do than play poker.

MediumFish

Played the HORSE warmup this week. I lasted a fair bit. With hindsight I'm very happy that I finished no where near cashing, since people were there until morning. I highly recommend it, though, and may even give the 200 a shot. I think my biggest leak was chasing draws in the stud games.

Current graph, following by boring explanation of why the new look:
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(My non-standard approach to graphing results stopped working recently when Excel refused to plot more than 32k points. The new plot just has a point for each session instead of a point for every hand. At the same time, I decided to pitch the microgaming data since it's a pain managing the two formats, and my play was rubbish back then. Next time, I'll rebase the graph to start at 0 so it looks better.)

MediumFish

Not too happy with the past couple weeks. Basic stats say I'm playing the same as January, maybe even a bit tighter.

Rakeback continues, so the rout won't be as bad as the graph shows. I've dropped back to 5/10 and 10/20 until I can figure out what's going on.

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MediumFish