Running bad, then running good

Sorry for the long delay between my last post and this one. Immediately after I made the last post I started running pretty poorly. I began this bad run by moving up to 200nl. Right when I moved up, I ran and played pretty well and ended up winning around $1500 pretty quickly. Then in a single day I dropped about 12 buyins at 200nl, which resulted in my biggest losing day to date. I'd be hard pressed to say I played my best game, but I certainly had my share of bad beats and cold decks. This included 4 (!!!) set over sets, a KK < AA, and a lot of missed draws. After this day I moved back down to 100nl, where I dropped another 13 or so buyins. Again, I don't think I was playing my best but I was definitely running ice cold. From here I dropped back to 50nl to try to regain some of my confidence and bankroll.

At 50nl, I continued to run poorly. I finally had enough and decided to take about a week off. All said and done, I ran about $2,000 below expectation in all in situations during this downswing (courtesy of PokerEV software, a very cool program).

So I took a break. The timing on this break was good since a friend of mine was getting married and my brother was in town for the wedding. After all the festivities were done and everyone had left town, I got back into playing 50nl. I ran well and played well and got my bankroll to the point where I could play 100nl again. I also made the decision that I am going to start playing some tournaments and other random non-NLH poker games. Things were just becoming too much of a grind. The money is ok, but life really isn't fun when you 12-table 100nl for any substantial amount of your day every day. Playing tournaments and other games will give me a chance to mix things up and not make poker so monotonous.

Coming back into tournament poker has been somewhat interesting. It's been about a week so far and it's been very good to see that there are still some extremely weak players playing in tournaments these days. I'm talking about the kind of people who put 75bbs in preflop with ATo, and the kind of people who stack of with middle pair regardless of the circumstances. I'm looking forward to playing more of these, and hopefully it will keep my mind fresh and my life interesting.

So far, I have made it deep into 3 tournaments since I have gotten back into them. I got 5th in a 20-table $20-buyin SNG on stars for about $240, losing a race with AJs to 77 in a button/BB battle. Pretty standard. I then got 6th in a $24-buyin $4k-gtd HORSE tourney on full tilt. Things finally fell apart for me here when I played an 80K razz pot (betting was 5k/10k and avg stack was 50k) where I got pot stuck early in the hand and ended up getting in with A35KQ vs 35665 and losing.

Finally, yesterday I got 2nd in the $50-buyin $15K-gtd NLH tourney on full tilt. This tourney was completely standard. I stole blinds like a madman and didn't get caught very often. I won 5 races (55 > AK, TT > KQ, AQ > TT and some others I don't remember) and beat JJ with A9s. At the final table I had good timing with my steals and ended up catching some hands when we were shorthanded to knock out the last few players. When I got heads up, I was behind about 330k to 370k in chips at the 2.5k/5k level. I won a few small pots and I thought my opponent was pretty weak. The deciding hand came when we got about 330k in preflop with my 99 vs. his KJo. I had him covered at this point, but I didn't win this race and busted a few hands later in unspectacular fashion.

I can't really complain, since won 5 races to get to that point. But it would have been nice to win the 6th one. 1st paid about $4400 and 2nd paid $2800. But like I said, I can't really complain in this spot.

I plan on moving back up to 200nl now since I've had such a good week with tourneys and winning at 100nl. I also have played live 4 times in the last week or so, and have done well. But I think I will save that for the next post...