Today is the last day of my Brunson period, and it didn’t quite go as planned. I had intended to take a few shots at NL25 if I was at least +3BB/100 across all sites. I was only positive on PokerStars, but only if I count the morning of February 1st. That day, I finished with just over 3BB/100—specifically, 3.39 BB/100 over 2,694 hands. On 888, I backed $17.88 and had -5.05 BB/100. On Coolbet, I lost 10 buy-ins, or more precisely, -$96.34 and -27.74 BB/100 over 3,473 hands.
I went through the results a little quickly, and when I review the big losses, I often find that I entered with the best hand and then there’s often not much to do but let the cards play out and hope that the hand will stand. For example, I had AA, flopped a set of Aces, but was outdrawn by a flush on the river. There wasn’t anything I could do about that either. I think most of my losses when going all-in at Coolbet were mostly coolers.
I did take a shot at NL25. The first session went well, as I finished with 49BB/100 over 102 hands. I wouldn’t have played more NL25 that day, but that lasted only an hour. My wife and I was watching a totally pointless Stallone movie, so I decided to play some NL10. Of course, I sat down at NL25 instead and lost 431BB/100 in 33 hands! At least I managed to close NL25, but I tilted off on NL10 for a while more before finally turning off the computer.
I decided to fill in a Cash Game tracker, which I hadn’t done in over a year. It took a while to get started because I reformatted my computer in November and lost the poker tracker, so I had to rebuild all the filters. I plan to take some time time with it and analyze things more thoroughly, and maybe even include hands from the other side of the year. If I remember correctly, the result was better, at least not as bad as in January.
I sent my CGT to Sky, and he was probably even more shocked than I was. He recommended I should play KISS ranges and stay at NL5 until they are properly internalized and the results are in the black. I’ve been doing that, and I’m also drilling KISS ranges with the Excel sheet I made a few years ago. I can quickly conclude that I’ve been playing far too wide. I think that started when I began incorporating Arnold Snyder’s approach into my tournament game.
Either way, I’ll stay at NL5 until my game stabilizes and use the time until the next Doyle Brunson period to focus on sailing and poker studies.
Tonight, in about an hour, there’s a workshop with Sky as he builds his new course. The topic for tonight is: Attack Checks with OOP Probes.
And as usual I’m happy just to get some words down here.