Recent (un)success

A well, it's been a while and I've been recovering from a biggish downfall again. I don't even remember anymore what happend, but it's not important as I've recovered pretty well. HOWEVER!

Yesterday, my roll was around 15 buy-ins for NL100, so I figured to play one table just to get a feel for it. I think I played fairly good most of the time, but it all boiled down to three keyhands. I had KK on KQ9 flop against JT which cost me a full buy-in, then I had JJ and reraised EP raiser who had been raising a lot of pots. Now he called which made me suspicious, this is a play many do with either QQ or AK as they don't want to get all their schmuck in before the flop. Flop came down Qxx and he checked, now I make a sizable continuation bet, figuring he might've called me with JJ-. He calls, now I'm quite sure he has either big pair like kings (knowing I'd probably have AA/QQ) or he has flopped top set. So naturally I feel beat here so I check the turn behind him. River brings a Jack, giving me second nuts. He pushes for $60 more into $80 pot, I feel iffy, close my eyes and make a desperate crying call and WHAM, another $100 gone.

The third hand that eventually forced me to close the table was this. I picked the wrong calling station to try to semi-bluff out of this one and folding on flop would've been the best move for sure. Either way, shit rains and I couldn't really help it and I ended up $360 down total (some came from tournies though. I final tabled one $4.4 MTT, but died against "a stealer" who was "stealing" with pocket rockets). Other MTTs kinda went to hell after I got called by ridiculous hands and well, couldn't do much there.

So now my roll is around $1100 and I'm looking forward into playing some NL50 and 8-tabling NL25 fr for "certain" profit. I guess I'll just have to go for $3k before I even try goin' up. I also whored some bonuses which explains my raise of roll and I still might whore some more to build up since it's a quite fast and safe way to get roll going. I (think) am also attending the next months MTT challenge in (afaik) Travis' team. I'll work my ass of for it to get the points, even if it's from low buy-in tournies, I still think I can do it. Let's hope so.

Tournaments have been going well for me in general - I now have back-to-back wins of LiquidPoker weekly tournament. That's also one of my main bankroll boosters - to be honest, cashgames have been going to hell, mostly because I bluff away all that I win when I sense weakness. This of course is a bad play since most people seem to be calling stations not being able to laydown mid or lowpair. ^^

So besides concentrating more on nutpeddling, I will go through my overall thought process to get away from my bluffing addiction. So
from He's weak => Bet him out I will go to He's weak => He's still stronger than my nothing => Fold if I don't have outs. Also, semibluffing (pushing & such) with draws seems to suck at these limits and even if it was slightly EV, it's still variance increasing factor and that's not really how I like it to be. I will start posting weekly reports from next week forth again now that I'm properly back with the game.

And maybe this time, I'll play NL50 until $2500. In fact, I decide now that I won't move to NL100 before I'm there. That means 30 buy-ins. Should I be able to average a buy-in a day, it means I could move up in one month. This far it hasn't actually went so well, but it will, since I've identified my leaks, now all I have to do is plug 'em ^^

Also, if you feel like starting to play at Stars, I've recently become a PokerStars affiliate, you can message me about hmmn... well, let's say I might be able to offer some promotional thing if you're just signing up. muhweli@gmail.com will serve as a proper way to contact me.