Introspection

Filed Under: Poker

This month has been a disaster. When things are going as poorly as they are right now it becomes very difficult to get up the motivation necessary to post. I'm hoping that taking a closer look at what's gone wrong and putting it down may help me overcome my current rut, or at least put it in perspective.

I'm going to need a two prong approach here so let's talk about tournament play first. The cold hard fact is that I haven't cashed in a single money tournament. I'm quantifying that with the "money" designation because I have placed in a few token and satellite tournaments. The last time I had a month without a cash was in January, and in that month I only played four tournaments. This month I've played in 17 so far and been completely unsuccessful.

I track my average finish position as a percentage of the field size and I'm averaging 60% right now. That means that if every tournament had 100 players my finish would average out to 60th. My best month was April and my average finish percentage was 28%. In that month I played 32 tournaments. If we extend my non cashing streak I can go back into June which puts me at 24 tournaments now without a cash. Up until the beginning of my bad streak I had averaged a cash every 4.34 tournaments in 2006.

Why now? The answer to this is easy. It's the cause of the answer which just now dawns on me as I'm righting this. I'll start with the answer. I've been playing like crap. I've had a severe lack of patience in the first hour of these things and that is a requirement. I only have one event where I felt I played the best I could and that one ended in back to back beats.

The reason I'm playing poorly is because, deep down, I know I shouldn't be. I have a son who lives with me during the summer for about 2 1/2 months. Instead of taking the 4-5 hours out at night to play a tourney, I should be spending it all with him, and the rest of my family. I believe this has led to my lack of patience and poor play. I'm going to remedy that by cutting down my play at night. Unless I have an event that I really feel the need to sit down for I'm not going to bother. I've gotten into a habit of playing a few of the guaranteed tourneys about 5 nights a week but that will stop for now.

What about the ring games? This one is a lot easier to deal with than the tournaments. I spent the first week of July playing to almost exactly dead even finishing down $11. I play my cash game almost exclusively while at work so the distractions are different than my tournament play and I can always sit out if I need to.

Sunday the ninth is when it happened. I went on tilt. I tossed out 5 buy ins which goes well beyond my normal tolerance. On July tenth I made the decision to drop down a level until I felt I had my mind and game back in order. It has turned out to be a good move as I haven't had a losing session since and have finished up 6 buyins on the week. With the money being half as much I still haven't recovered from the Sunday Tiltathon. I've decided that when I get up an additional 6 buyins I'll move back up a level.

I'm used to playing my cash games in shorter sessions which will lead to me playing more cash games for the rest of the month. I generally stay up an hour or two after the rest of the family has gone to bed so that will lend itself to picking up more ring games at home. I'll throw in a few token satellites and probably just focus on that for the time being.

In other news Actyper has finally qualified for the WSOP main event in the eleventh hour so go wish him well.