"When I bet...

I either have nuts or balls." -Some wise man

Either way. It went bad again. I lost the winnings from the day before with some extra, now totaling my Poker Heaven "winnings" at -$50 or so. So almost three buy-in drop yesterday, total. I did get the first $10 of my bonus claimed though and another $10 will be coming in RB. I think I got pretty close to the second one actually.

Anyway, as an observation, I realized (actually friend kinda pointed it out) that my so called "downswing" begun once the Stars introduced H.O.R.S.E games into their repertoire. I realized that after that, I haven't had a single pure Hold'em session. If nothing else, I've played a couple of hours of Razz before starting Hold'em sessions. Call me crazy, but I think these might actually correlate. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had indeed concentrated mostly on the other games and the NL Hold'em tables were just fluidly streaming on their own.

I started out the session yesterday strong though, but that's not always good enough. I also played 5-card stud, Omaha Hi. Omaha Hi ended up a bit down as did Hold'em, 5-card stud I was up 25 BB at best, but quit at +10 BB or so, players there were so horrible and I don't consider to be good at it (was playin' $0.5/$1 fixed). Anyways, here are few of the treats from my Hold'em session. It was artsy fartsy and the beginning is from the table once it had dried out of some players. Basically it's me HU vs some huuuge fish I already knew was retarded. He loved his pairs über alles and had already doubled once from someone by going all-in with less than stellar holdings and sucking out. So here goes the hands and my reasoning to them:

Midpair no kicker = nutz. Myea, this hand was quite bizarre. I already knew he was a light caller, also he made a huge overbet, I don't think he would've done it if he wanted a call -> I don't think he held that much. Granted, I wasn't waiting for a call for my push either, $15 extra from him would've been very nice at this point, but well... "He had outs".

Pair + FD and ofc... I'm not sure what's the general way to play these hands, but I figured pushing isn't bad. The fact that this guy was a habitual light caller might've meant that playing it slower would've been better and cheaper way to go, but there aren't situations where I'm badly behind and if I have even a couple of % FE, it's already nicely +EV for me instead of just being coinflip. Ofc, he ended up "consuming" some of my outs here, so I wasn't in as good of a shape as I thought.

Same guy hitting... I called the turn, because I didn't feel he had a pair. Of course he hit the turn. River I figured it's most likely a split - wrong again.

Guy making monster reads. Heh, I think this hand is one of those that played itself. The funny thing is, I would've pushed with QQ+ here the same way as well, figuring he's probably quite strong after calling my preflop raise. After the hand he said "I knew what you had, because you overbet so easy call." Okay so he put me on two overcards and a flushdraw (on a sidenote, for this sir, it was the first overbet I made in the table). Sir, may I remind you that even if you're correct 100% of the time, it's still coinflip to the deepest extent. 1-2% margin in error and he's behind. But I guess he's a God of poker - so well played by him.

Amongst the last hands of the session. The raise is big, yes. Reason for that is the small stack earlier pushed me off 97s (shame on him!) when I made a normal raise. Also I did this slight overbet a couple of times with crap. This time I even added 1 BB to induce a poosh. Luckily he was the short stack and that 44 kinda came as a little surprise.

So bathing in Sklansky bucks, but those don't buy me food. Anyway, I did win one all-in when it was pushed on turn with me holding a flush against one pair - he was drawing dead. Yay. At least I could win that. Also the client has some silly glitches, I was going to pot top set, but instead it went as minbet since the scroller sucks hardcore. I got like gazillion calls and had to lay it down next street when all possible draws got there and there was mad action.

Anyway, I shall now take a day off, perhaps continue tomorrow from NL25 to get more confidence and to also get myself in the NL Hold'em zone again (or perhaps Omaha Hi/Lo zone). Either way, I won't be mixing them up anymore since I think that has played more than a minor part in the unsuccess of the recent sessions.

Cheers.