As if my previous pessimistic mood was a forebode of things to come, it turned out to be "one of those days". Sets on my AA, flopping trips and guy with overpair hitting a boat even though I overraised the pot, runner runner straight by the table donk, you name it, I saw it.

But I kept some track in my head of how I lost money. Started the session with $270, down to $225, so I lost $45 total. Now, the funny thing is that even though the cards hated me today, I actually lost MORE on "stupidity" than on actual card suckage. The "net loss" on card variance is $20. The other $25 I lost on stupidity.. but a calculated kind. The reason is that I wanted to try out some things, because there is one specific thing that isn't too clear to me yet, one improvement I want to incorporate into my game.

The first $10 were lost on a stupid bluff. I just wanted to see what my opp would do, for feedback purposes. I knew it was probably stupid, but I just wanted to know. And yeah, he ended up doing what I suspected, and having the hand I suspected too.

The other $15 that I lost on "stupid play" were because of this one thing that's been playing in my mind lately, a definite thing I can improve on in my game. Bluffing at the lower limits isn't very profitable, and actually isn't all *too* profitable on the whole. It clouds your real hands and can take down a bunch of little pots.. but you are usually never going to make "big winnings" on bluffs. I bluff now and then when the situation calls for it, but to go strong on bluffing is lunacy imho. (because you'll not be destacking someone even if you can succesfully bluff a lot of the time.. it's always relatively smaller pots)

There is however another matter that DOES have a high return-on-investment if you can get it right.. and that is: seeing through bluffs and semi-bluffs. Sometimes people just stone cold bluff, and I am sensing some sort of pattern to "catch" these, but it's still not too sure so I needed to call some raises just to see what they did actually have. Another thing is the semi-bluff; Typically an all-in from a player with a not-too-large stack, which isn't always a monster, but can just as likely be a draw of some sort. I guess their reasoning is "if I push, they'll probably fold, and if they don't, I could still get lucky". But the truth of the matter is, calling these semi-bluffs with a simple TP is +EV.

The hands you see people do this with are flush draws, double sided straight draws and even simple gut shots. All of them have <50% to hit. So if the average situation is a 3x pot all-in, that leaves you with a 42% investment to call, for a >50% chance to win.. so given that you can with some accuracy sniff out these bluffs and semi-bluffs, they give you a potentially nice ROI.


But anyway, the point is here.. I just thought it was surprising that on the whole, even though the cards totally sucked, I ended up losing more on my "experiments" than on card variance!