The Swings and Spins

The past 2 weeks have been characterized by change. I switched from playing 6-max SNGs to playing a format I use to grind a lot; spin and goes. The games still seem to be fairly soft, with players at the $15 level making some huge mistakes, which due to the chip EV format of them (winnter take all) benefits directly. In other words, due to the lack of ICM it's way harder to get punished by someone making too wide of a call on the bubble. Due to my mediocre results in the 6-max SNGs (<1% ROI after 1k games) I decided to make the switch, and have enjoyed the ups and downs that come with playing these hyper turbo lottery style tournaments.

When running bad, I sometimes enter a strange state. I finally managed to come up with a term for it. I call it "platonic paranoia". Platonic paranoia is a non-emotional state in which you assume your opponets have know your strategy/actual hand perfectly and are respondning to whatever you are doing. You are not emotional because you feel like this is just a fact. You then try to counter what you think they are doing to counter you, and end up plaing hands in all kinds of strange matters. Not getting value when you should, calling hands that you shouldn't etc.

The counter to this mindset is to remember that poker is a very hard game, a game of making less mistakes than your opponents. You don't have to play perfect, nobody does. I call this mode "The counterpuncher", it's a mode were you play your own solid game, and wait for your opponets to over extend into you. Then you get them. You don't have to "do" anything.

For accountability, here are my results for the first little bit:

Hope all is well, whoever and wherever you are!

The Nash trap

The first 2 weeks of playing semi-full time are done, and here are the somewhat underwhelming results:

After talking to a good friend an an excellent SNG player I found out I had a real case of Nash-fever. Inputing hands into ICMIzer and just clicking the very temting "Create Nash Equilibrium"-button. Don't get me wrong, it's a great tool and very good to get a baseline of what is a reasonable or even good strategy vs a compitent opponent, but can lead to some pretty big mistakes when it comes to playing against humans. I knew all this getting back into SNGs, but still fell into that trap.

In our conversation I realized I had a fear of getting exploited. This lead me to almost always taking the agressive action in game, i.e. shove/call. I basilcy found myself asking in our call (but not using those words) for promission to fold a bunch of nash calls generally, and vs unknowns/recreationals specifically. He said "yes", and since then I feel way better in game. There is more of a relaxed flow when I play, the flow of just playing my game and not worrying about getting exploited.

I also did a decent amount of studying, putting in 1-2 hours every with watching what people are doing (going through PT4 and seeing showdowns) as well as spending time with ICMizer.

The goals for April:

[] Play at least 1000 $15 games
[] Find a good setup and get comfortable 8-9 tabling (6 currenlty)
[] Find a study partner

Hope you have a nice week, whoever you are!

PS: Saw a guy make a -9% price pool call yesterday. That means that the call, on average, loses him $7.68. Might not sound like a lot of money, but considering the buy-in is $15 that a -51% ROI call.