You know what? That is exactly what i have been doing for a while. I have been playing the players and the tables. Sometimes i am playing laggish and sometimes i am a super rock. It depends on many things and how i feel about the table and what my reads are. It is really fun to play like this, th eonly problem i have is that it is now hard for me to play without HUd or GT+ and make decisions based in genral perception instead of an specific read. The whole idea of playing like that again makes my stomach move weird .

IMy long term stats in ipoker are 22/8/2.5 but today i played 26/14/2.7. The tables were unusually tight and i saw a lot of players laying down hands with proper pressure. I started playing more hands and trying to get them to fold. It worked because i raised the w$wsf from 32% to 37%. I lost a lot but mostly because of coolers and bad beats and basically no big hands. Te point is we need to stopo thinking that much about optimal stats because honestly things dont work like that. There are many styles that will make u a winning player, and all of them have good things and bad things.

Worst run of cards, ever.
391 hands, down $178. Cake poker is so fucking rigged. Jesus H. Christ on a stick performing third trimester abortions I run bad.

Somehow managed a recovery for the week afte that blood bath of a start. I earned $10 in bonus in that mess, so actually lost $188 at the tables I brought the weekly run at 50NL to only -$5.53, which is heartening, but I played quite a few hands this week, 3464, so not all that heartening. Well, take that back, I just checked and I ran just shy of 6ptbb/100 from Tuesday onward, so heartening after all. I mixed some HORSE, stud8, and a few SNG's in there as well, and that added up to a small win for the week with another $70 coming from bonus. Total for the week, another modest $153.92. I'm earning some unmentionable in there too, but I haven't been keeping weekly tabs on it. I'm guessing somewhere around $90 for the month.

I've logged a bit over 5800 hands at 50NL and I'm down a little under 2.5 buyins, so on the one hand, that's not too swell. On the other hand, I'm improving. Tilt has been less of a factor (though I did tilt off $30 on Monday). My general feel for the flow and strength of hands in various spots in 6-max has been getting better as well, though both still need considerable work.

Non-poker news: Dissertation is near completion. I plan on one more read through for content and one more for polishing it off. Have some references to track down, table of contents, and a bibliography to finish and then it's done. I've gotten zero work done on a paper I wanted to have finished by the end of July. Way too much procrastination. I'm so lazy. I'm hoping to have it done by the end of August now. Have several documents to work on for the job market, but not too much work there, so maybe this week for those. I was kind of hoping to have everything done, so I could burn through some poker hours prior to the start of the semester, but it isn't looking too likely at this point. Guess I'll have to settle for my usual 10-15 per week.

Mid-week report here to update monthly results. July was a very modest $375.24. I got in a little under 15.5K hands of SHNL. I had a few more from SNG's, HORSE, and stud8, but not all that much. July total is larger than last month, so that's in the plus column, but this is well below my expectations. I'm going to attempt to really focus when I play this month and double this amount, so I'm making the August goal $750.

Got off to another shitty start on Monday, but have dug out of yet another hole and am up just a bit for the week thus far. I helped a friend move today, so I'm tired and headed to bed. I'm slightly behind schedule on the dissertation, so may not be playing at all tomorrow.

Positive week overall. I made $233 and the bankroll is finally back over $4000. The day after my last post I got the ever-lovin shit kicked out of me. Lost $207 in 471 hands. Brutal stuff, but about 50 of that was poor play on my part. The rest were cooler hands, so not much I could do about those. Next day I roared back to win $129, but break even for the weekend. Played some SNG's and torched the hell outta those guys, which is basically why I had a winning week. Guess I should play more of them. Got the unmentionable payment for $95 as well, so that pushed the week total up a bit more.

6-max play is a real mind fuck, I've decided. At times I seriously wonder if I have any fucking clue what I'm doing out there. I posted two hands the other day, which were obvious FPS hands, but I couldn't see how bad they were at the time. I woke up sober the next day and they were pretty horrible. Basically, just stupid shit like that and some bad beats/coolers are mind fucking me. You can add that to the horrendous run at FR in the spring and it makes for a precarious mental game. This week makes three losing weeks in a row at 50NL. At this point, it's hard for me to decide if I actually am a winning player getting unlucky or what. At any rate, I will not be moving up to 100NL for at least two weeks. I need something approaching a good couple weeks to consider it at this point. I really am starting to think that I may not be cut out for 6-max; le sigh.

Well, what can I say about this week? I run bad in life and poker. Still sick from some damn cold that has apparently morphed into a sinus infection. I've been sick all week. Had family in town also, so didn't play as much as usual. Perhaps it was for the best, I ran like shit when I played. It's really hard for me to believe that I can keep running this badly, so I downloaded a pokerEV program to check. I run bad. Lost $91 this week at 50NL, which now makes for four weeks of losses. Dropped only $10 for all play w/ boni included, so guess it's good to have that stuff. It's going to be pretty difficult to reach my August goal at this point; I may have to run good, and I don't see that shit happening.

Here's a graph of my 25NL 6-max play at UB:


Around hand 4k is when I started playing TAG style. Around hand 7.5k is when I stopped. As the little box indicates, running bad made a 3ptbb/100 difference. I checked my play at PS from May. I ran bad there, but not too badly (a little more than 1ptbb/100 difference I think). Decided to check my FR db from UB also. Ran bad there too but was less than 1ptbb/100. Meh. I can't check Cake or Bodog, but I feel pretty confident about my running like shit at those sites as well. Seeing these graphs makes me....not really any better. On the one hand, I realize I'm probably not lying to myself when I say I run bad, on the other hand, I run bad. My particular brand of running bad happens frequently in big pots, when all the money is in the middle, so it's a costly sort of running bad.

Today's poker venture made me want to go Oedipal on my eyes. I see no point in continuing to play this game if fucking lucksack donkeys are just going to keep 2-5 outing me in big pots. Seriously, what the fuck is the point? I need several days off. Probably a lot more. I know not when I will be back; but judging from the tilt tonight, I need a long break. BTW, Cake is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo fucking rigged. Fuck that shithole!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I lost $30 this week. That is all.

I abso-fukin-lutely know what you mean...

still... I know you know this, but read .. it's a really good reminder in regard to the donks and stuff...

I played Friday-Sunday, and didn't really enjoy it. I played on Friday because that was the last day of bonus at Cake, and I was fairly close to qualifying another $10, so I played for a bit at the limit tables, got bored and stopped. I checked again on Saturday and the bonus was still live, so I played some NL50, made a small amount and cleared the bonus. Later went to Bodog and promptly ran KK into AA for the 4th time in 3K hands there (roughly 50 hands later I was on the opposite end for the first time, but not, of course, for a full stack). Usual shit, me collecting lots of Sklansky bucks, donks collecting the money. I haven't decided if I want to play this week or not. I think I continued playing this weekend just to kind of see what would happen more so than really wanting to play again. The beats didn't tilt me or anything...perhaps I've resigned myself to the inevitable, because I was basically numb.

Yo, I'm like a doctor and shit.

Seriously, I'm Dr. Geiststaat. I'm also seriously drunk right now, but I suppose such intoxication is expected when one achieves such status. My mom said she could now talk about her son the doctor and I remarked that she would eventually have to admit that her son was not a medical doctor and so deserving of no such ordinary praise. Nonetheless, only beauracratic crap stands in between me and the little piece of paper that says I know what the hell I'm doing. A bit surreal. Perhaps my luck is turning around. Donks beware.

Congrats