There and back again

If you look at my stats for last week, I’m up around 9 or so buy ins. Definitely one of my best weeks on record and you’d think a reason to click your heels together.

If you look at my stats for the last 2 weeks combined, I’m up only 2 buy ins – far from spectacular...

So yes, 2 weeks ago I hit a God awful downturn of 6+ buyins for that week but managed to dig myself out the following week. Along the way, I learnt some important lessons:

- I’d started playing without my usual patience and started pushing draws much harder.
- I’d shifted slightly towards calling down LAG’s too much and looking to make too many hero calls very light.
- It definitely started to affect my decision making. One change was that I started slow playing big hands looking for more value. There was one particular hand when I got brutalised after I flopped a set against a TAG. I played it slow to the river hoping he would catch up. The only problem was he hit runner full house and most of our stacks went in on the river.
- Playing Omaha or tournaments can really help break that losing mindset. I don’t like sitting out because I find myself thinking about the losses and I want to turn things around as sooner rather than later. To me its more important to break the cycle than take a break.
- By concentrating on only opening pots with a raise, my decision making become much simpler and I got in far fewer trickier spots. It’s also very conceivable that this latest downturn may have bit hard enough to fix some obvious leaks in my game.