When the hell was it? Wednesday or some such. I'd run my way up to $10, which was my target for moving from 2c/4c to 5c/10c. Feeling pretty pleased with myself too. Posted a win on my first 5c/10c session - was almost up to $12. Feeling even more pleased with myself. And then I found a whole new way of screwing things up. I thought I'd seen them all, but NO - there was yet another one out there just waiting for me to discover it. I am nothing if not a poker innovator when it comes to screw-ups.
It happened like this: I'd been using the Poker Stars limit filter to block out all the games I wasn't interested in. At first I'd restricted things to 2c/4c only, but then as my bankroll approached the $10 threshold I started watching the 5c/10c games as well. And when I moved up to 5c/10c I filtered out the 2c/4c games and added in the 10c/20c games (file under "hubris"). Like I said, I posted a healthy little win from my first 5c/10c session during Wednesday (?) afternoon and sat down to my second session in the evening with high hopes. Life was good.
First hand folded round to the small blind who raised my BB. I forget exactly what I had but it was enough to warrant a three-bet to show him I wasn't about to be pushed around. Biff, pow, he hit (probably), I didn't and when he bet on the end I figured I'd made my point and it was time to retire gracefully from the hand. Except that at this point - and only at this point - I realised he'd just bet 20c. How the hell could he bet 20c in a 5c/10c game? The answer, of course, was that I'd managed to sit down at a 10c/20c game without realising it. I mean, what sort of idiot sits down at a game and doesn't know the stakes he's playing for? Turns out the answer is: me.
FFS. Now I was 60c in the hole so I had a decision to make. I could take my entirely self-inflicted injury on the chin and move down to the level I'd meant to play at, or I could stick around and hope to win it back by picking up a winning hand. Guess which choice would've been the sensible one to make. And then guess which one I made. Yup, I stuck around. My cards went dead. I got blinded down another 60c, missed with a big ace and before you know it my 60c loss was a $2 loss. So I opened up a second table to help speed things along (file under "mental health problems"). Actually, this moronic tactic very nearly worked: I won a hand or two on the second table and was within one pot of breaking even at which point I would've been out of there in a flash.
And then I got aces on table one. And they were cracked by kings in the hole when the flop came Kxx. And then everything went to hell. I had aces cracked twice more, a flopped flush beaten by a better flush and a set beaten by a guy who drew to an inside straight on the river and hit it. As runs of bad luck go that's pretty standard, but of course it had to happen when I was playing out of my league from a bankroll point of view so every damn suckout cost me double. What was meant to be profitable little 5c/10c session turned into a hit-and-run 10c/20c session which turned into a four hour, two table 10c/20c session at the end of which my stats looked as follows:
Bankroll: $5.10
FPPs: 1820
Yeah, I'd managed to lose over half my fucking bankroll. A whole week's worth of grinding wiped out by a stupid oversight compounded by an even stupider attempt to dig myself out of the hole. Next day I was too depressed to look at Poker Stars and too ashamed to write up my idiocy in this blog. I took a few days off, which was probably the most sensible thing I'd done in a while.
Well, now I've digested and reflected. It's cost me a week, but that's not the end of the world. One week here or there isn't going to kill me. But the more important reflection is probably this: I ought to be careful about the evening games. One reason why I lost so much was that the game was very lively. Generally speaking, the evening games are looser than the ones in the afternoon. Potentially that means greater profits but it also means a higher variation: on a good day you win a heap, but on a bad day you lose quite a chunk. And when you're playing off a small bankroll (like me) it's better to stick to low-risk/low-reward games. So from now on I might restrict my evening play to freeroll tourneys and save my limit game for the afternoons - at least until my bankroll isn't so paltry.
That's my tale of woe. I've taking my licking and gotten over it. Back to the grind.
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