Man. Productive weekend, but it somehow seemed to last about 12 minutes. Now I'm back at the cube monkey grind, looking around, feeling like I just escaped this place for the weekend, oh, fifteen minutes ago.
Poker and I made up slightly on Sunday but we're still not really speaking. I spent some time with my other girlfriend, blackjack, and she kicked me in the junk, too. Not my finest degenerate weekend. Junk kicking hos.
I should quit my whining, as far as poker goes. I've logged about 17,000 hands at 15/30 and so far I'm a net winner. Granted, I'm up a whopping $27.32, and am about $5K below my high-water mark earlier in the month, but it obviously could be much, much worse.
One of the things I'm struggling with most comes from a reasonably surprising place. While I've used PokerTracker for quite awhile, until recently I hadn't gone down the hardcore data mining/analysis road. I've been doing a lot of that lately, looking at different PT stats and win/rates, scouring forums, crunching numbers, etc.
What's surprising is that while I can deal with all sorts of short term craziness, as far as suckouts and bad beats go, I'm having a hard time dealing with my relative treading of water in the long run, compared to other players in my database. First things first, 17,000 hands is a drop in the statistical bucket, and I definitely realize that. But it's odd that going 0-9 with AA over the weekend doesn't really phase me or cause me to bash my head against the monitor, yet seeing and tracking an absolute muppet who should be stuck multiple thousands of dollars pull in 15K in profits so far this month causes me much frustration and, at times, slight hopelessness.
A large part of it is that I think too damn much. It's also not helping as far as looking towards poker as a potential job-replacement type thing, either, even in the cautious, dip-a-toe-in-the-water-first way I'm approaching it. Even acknowledging limited sample sizes, I'm a bit at the throw my hands up in the air stage, as the randomness of results is a bit discouraging, especially when one starts paying close attention and crunching all sorts of numbers. I definitely understand and embrace the value of a big picture approach. It's just hard to get excited lately when facing the reality of the month to month variance, and the fact that if you play a reasonable number of hands each month, recreationally, your results (and the results of other players playing a similar number of hands) will be a bit of a crap shoot.
All that whining aside, it's been a good learning experience, I'm not losing money, and I'm not throwing in the towel or changing a thing I'm doing. I'm playing better than I was a month ago and will be playing better than I am now a month from now.
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I, also, have never gone down the data mining route. I would be interested to see how you or anybody goes about this and what you look for in your data mining. I just join a waiting list for over 7 people. Look at the stats of the table and adjust my play accordingly. That can't be the best +EV strategy. I only play 5/10; but I guess the theory would be the same at whatever level.
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