Quote Originally Posted by wonderland
Nice post Robb, thanks for helping me and other micro grinders, it's fucking diamond, what an example to set for community spirit. Dude, what happened in march? that looks sore! The good thing about your losses is that you're able to own them, seems like a self discipline thing. Better that than to be playing your A game and losing hand over fist!
March...I've sort of blocked out those nightmares. Oddly, in late February, I had this major leap forward in terms of estimating opponents' ranges. I got WAYYYY better at thin value reads and bets. That had two consequences. First, it's higher variance, since you're behind more when betting/raising on the turn/river. It's also ++EV overall and generally made me a more difficult opponent for my opponents to take on, since I was so much more aggressive (correctly) late in hands.

Well, that went fine for a while, improved win rate, blah, blah. Then I lost focus, played tired (I worked a ton, huge stress for a while there), and was just spewing, TELLING myself it was thin value when it was only a desire to bet, bet, bet. I lost a few BI's, tried to refocus, hit a couple of cooler hands which caused tilt and more spew and then spiraled on down until I couldn't tell what thick value was. Oh, yeah, and the worst of it was a - 10 BI session at 50nl that was like two hours. I totally get the doomswitch idea now. I felt like I couldn't touch the computer without paying $200 in coolered-then-tilt tax.

So I mostly quit playing for two weeks during which I worked 90 - 100 hours each week. When I came back, I was better, but rusty. So my game stabilized for like 2k hands at the end of March, and April began with me trying to recover from exhaustion, ease past another 60 hour work week or two, and just grind.

That's why I went down to 25nl. I wasn't sure of my game after the period from March doomswitch through two weeks off into the first week of April. I thought I was playing well, but the swings were still there. So I dropped down to 25nl, had a nice joy ride, then grabbed that heater and rode it to 100nl.

Quote Originally Posted by wonderland
Come on heater... traction, what a great term, that's what i'm hoping for this shot at ten. Start tables and get a couple of buy-ins and hold... hold.
Still, don't be afraid to commit some chips. I think you'll find it interesting when you look at my 25nl, 50nl, 100nl stats from April that my game is pretty consistent at all three levels in terms of aggression, 3betting, etc. But at 100nl, I'm tighter. The way to "turtle up" for a shot a new level imo is to play good solid starting hands from all positions, and then fire away post flop since your range is strong and your cards generally are live. The worst thing to do is to get weak-tight in big pots. Which is the major reason I lost so much at 25nl when I took those failed shots at it last Spring and Summer.

After the turtling - you can start opening up from LP first, getting back to stealing 30% +, then finding more good spots to play. But your post flop game just HAS to be solid and aggressive to win.