Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Staying on target

Woohoo! I'm on vacation this week, and I have few plans except to relax, run errands and play poker.

I already played a lot over the weekend, with results in line with expectations. I won on Friday and Sunday, and I lost on Saturday.

The reason I lost on Saturday is obvious to me: I played too much and noticed a decline in my focus, but I kept playing. I should have stopped when I realized that I wasn't as sharp. Gaining awareness of when I'm not playing as well as I should be is something I've been working on for as long as I've been playing poker, and it's not easy. There have been many times when I wasn't able to tell the difference between my A game and my C game.

I picture a graph, with the X axis being the hours I've played and the Y axis being my level of play. In the first hour and a half that I play in a session, I usually can make accurate reads and hold the confidence to act on them -- this is my A game. In the next 30 minutes to an hour, I start to decline into my B game. After that, I tend to run on autopilot, shying away from big pots and falling back on experience rather than analytical thinking, which is my C game.

The graph would look something like this:

It's difficult to attempt assigning winrates to each of my game levels, but I can tell you that my A game is unquestionably profitable, and my C game is borderline depending on game conditions at the 5/10 6-max level.

I intend to play many hands this week to the best of my ability. The way to do that is to break up my sessions into 1.5-2 hour blocks so that I stay fresh, rather than never leaving the computer even to relieve yourself. Sick.


kurokitty said...

You're probably looking at the game the wrong way if you're thinking in terms of "win" and "lose." Sure in the long-term - the pocketbook -- it's zero-sum. But you can "lose" money and play well because of variance. I'd rather know that I was playing my so-called "A" game and not adding money to the account for a session than "winning" money and not playing well or not understanding why I did it.

Gnome said...

Right, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. In the long run, you "win" by making good decisions and "lose" by making bad ones, and money follows the quality of your choices. Sometimes variance is a factor, but this weekend I could tell that a dropoff in earnings was directly caused by a lower level of play.