kardi31 said
Hi TPE nation,

I’ve been struggling with playing Saturday tournaments on Pokerstars for quite a while now. During weekdays everything goes really well, but on Saturdays (sometimes Sundays as well but it goes much better) I lose a bunch of money. 

On Saturday the bounties are bigger on PS. Much more fun/rec players are on the tables. I’ve tried many different things to adjust by opening bigger size / 3betting more / playing looser / playing tighter etc etc. Nothing seems to be working. I tried outplaying them post-flop but in every hand you face at least 3-4 opponents on the flop. Getting all-in more often pre is not working either. I feel like I’m getting bad-beaten left and right each and every Saturday. Villains getting in with some crazy cards. 

 

Do you have some tips how to adjust? 

Thanks  

This just seems like a standard results-orientation issue, honestly. When you say “nothing seems to be working”, what do you mean? Do you expect there to be some adjustment you can make to your game that causes you to instantly crush Saturdays? The fact that your metric for evaluating your performance is “I lose a bunch of money” says a lot.

The only metric you could possibly be using to judge whether something is ‘working’ or not is results, since there’s no way you have a big enough sample of Saturday sessions to go on – at least, you don’t have a big enough sample of how you play when using each of the various experimental strategies you’ve tried out. You can’t even reliably use EVbb/100 in bounty events, since it doesn’t factor in bounty ICM, so you really have nothing to go on with those games.

If you feel like you’re getting bad beats left and right, that’s an issue with your feelings, not with the game itself. Bad beats happen at the same frequency for everyone, on every day of the week.

Relax. Recognize that you’re playing high-variance games. Trust your game. Embrace the variance. Analyze your decisions retrospectively. Run some calculations. Do whatever you need to do in order to feel confident before you play, or don’t play. But don’t expect that there’s anything you can do that can protect you from experiencing variance in this way.