♠ Wednesday, June 30, 2004
A Quick Note on Week Twenty-One
In the tradition of losing weeks, I'm not going to say a lot about this week. Here, though, the tradition is strengthened by something else entirely.
I've found some great games. Great games. The loosest $5/$10 games I've ever seen online. They're my secret for the moment, but they truly are great games. So I sat.
Unfortunately, there were two problems with this. First, a loose game is high-variance; I had high odds that I'd go broke. (I didn't even think of this when I sat down; the game was so good that losing money never occurred to me.) The second problem is that I found myself unable to adjust my game back to playing a super-loose table. Particularly, people were playing unpredictably enough that I often didn't know where I stood. Also, I couldn't keep myself from trying to take pots that nobody else seemed to want; in a loose game nobody may want it but people don't particularly want to give it up, either.
One of the bad things about these loose tables is that there often aren't many of them; this means that sometimes you're forced to play a short game. And my short game has gone to pot. Six months ago, I loved my short game, but every short-handed session I played this week was a big loser.
What really hurts about this, is that these are great games, but they've done enough damage to my already unhealthy bankroll that I was forced to leave them and return to the $25NL tables, where the upside is a lot lower.
What hurts more is that my bankroll is again dangerously low (it reached depths even below where I was worried last week), so much so that I am right near total ruin. Things aren't that desperate yet but one bad day, and I'm right to where I'll need to be bankrolled to continue.
To rebuild my bankroll, I am sticking, for now, to the relatively low-variance $25 NL games, and even more, I'm single-tabling. The idea behind single-tabling is that even if its EV is less than multitabling, single-tabling gives me more time to make each decision, and so I'm less likely to make a stupid one. And I can't afford stupid decisions right now; I've already made plenty over the last several weeks.
Tomorrow night is the Lithuanians' game; hopefully I get another chance to pull $50 or so out of that game, because even that $50 would help a lot. And, hey, I haven't checked my $210,000,000 lottery ticket yet; I might already be a gazillionaire. Let's see, either I win, or I don't; that makes the odds 50/50, right?
