They tell you that the first step in recovery is to admit that you have a problem. To stop living in denial, stand up and face the demon and then prepare to spend the rest of your life fighting it. Well here it goes.
My name is LPG and I am addicted to playing AQ waaaaaaay to aggressively. I am also addicted to playing TP/TK hands like they are the absolute nuts with little to no concept of pot control.
Whew. I feel a little better now. So what does this all mean. Well I am constantly working on my game, looking for leaks, trying to plug them, then looking for the ones behind them and well you get it…rinse and repeat. So Monday was a pretty enlightening night for me. It probably isn't the best thing in the world to be the player at the table with the "inf" aggression factor. Bullets are only effective if the other guy believes you. No sense shooting if he is standing behind a concrete wall, all you are doing is wasting ammunition. And there in lies the revelation. I need to stop wasting ammunition. I am not advocating playing passively, but I sure as hell need to slow it down a lot, because other players notes on me have to contain the words "spewtard". If they don't I would be surprised.
So what is the grand plan to fix this. Well it looks a little something like this. I have shifted over to cash play for the near future. I am going to sneak in a couple of Mini-UBOC events still (so no worries there) but I am clamping down my MTT schedule a lot for the near term and I am going into a study/cash cycle. The reason I am shifting to cash is that it affords me the opportunity to do a couple of things
1. It removed the pressure of escalating blinds and antes thereby taking the need to make adjustments to those dynamics out of the equation.
2. It allows me to sit at a table where the players are more likely to stay constant for a longer period of time, forcing me to read them, understand myself and to go through adjust/counter adjust cycles. Essentially it forces me to continually think about what is going on, something that doesn't always happen in a tourney due to the frequent table changes.
3. It allows me to focus on playing better in position, tighten up my starting hand requirements and focus on my post flop lines without the villains feeling the pressures from #1 and augmenting their play (essentially taking the TP/TK is the nuts phenomena out of the game).
So last night was session number 1 in this new work plan and for the most part I am very pleased with how it went. I put in 400 hands on 2 tables of 50nl and spent the vast majority of the session with a nice little profit. Then the monster reared its ugly head. I ended up in a BvB battle where the SB raised to 3x and I flatted in the BB in position with AQo. You can make an argument for 3betting here, but like I said I am trying to be a bit more deceptive and avoid bloating pots so I opt for flatting (plus it keeps weaker Ax hands lurking around, something I am starting to be interested in doing more of now). Flop comes down T94 with two diamonds. SB checks. I bet 2/3 pot. He calls. Turn comes Qh. Looks good right. SB leads the turn. Now here is where something should have stopped me for a sec and I should have thought a little about what to do on the river. What did I do, I said… Hot damn, must be a weaker Q (KQ, QJ, JT), Tx or some sort of combo draw that is calling me here, time to push the envelope and squeeze out some serious value. River comes down 2c, a total blank to all the draws. After the turn action I have a pot sized shove on the river and the .357 Magnum is loaded, aimed and ready to fire. The SB shoves. Rather than stop again here and think what am I looking at, I gladly ablige him and snap his ass off with my TP/TK hand. What do you think was there when he rolled over. Well it turns out i was right, it was a Tx type hand. Trouble was it was TT for a flopped set. So session over, and I end up down for it by a little bit (not terrible actually, but it was the principle of the thing that stopped me). So I cut my losses and went back to look at the hand. Thinking about it some more the turn lead wasn't completely defining as it could have been a hand inside the range that I thought so I don't think my peeling a card there was bad. Calling the river shove though, I can't seem to like that no matter how hard I try. Moral of the story, LPG needs to go back to the tables with renewed focus. Pot Control and paying more attention to the action to ensure that I am thinking through clearly. I am very confident that things will right themselves pretty quickly, but I need to make sure I focus. I'll let you know tomorrow how tonights session goes. This is the Gman out. May all your flushes be royal!