Downswings

Really haven't had much to report pokerwise, been a pretty terrible month so far. Played 3 sundays and think my biggest cash is ~$900....so suffice it to say things have not gone well. That's the way tourneys go though and being able to continue to play well when on downswings is a big part of being a good tournament player. That said, I'm not sure I really do the best job of that, the last few hours of every Sunday are usually spent watching football while trying to forget the 10 hours and many dollars I just wasted :)

One thing I definitely have not been doing a good job of lately is putting in time away from the table. Having a daughter has made things awfully busy and when I do get some free time, going over hand histories and doing math is not really what I'm looking to do. But I've noticed a bunch of spots I'm unsure of the last few weeks so I'm going to have to put aside some time soon.

Most of it revolves around the "new" style of play. The general rule used to be if you have 10bb or less, you're in push/fold mode, above that you still have room to raise and fold if reraised. Then there was a brief period (still somewhat true) where that number jumped to 20 or even 25 and there were huge shoves everywhere and if someone raised when they had 20bb, they were almost never folding. Now people seem to slowly be settling in to somewhere in the middle, making some big shoves and mixing in some raise/calling and raise/folding with 15-25bb stacks. Knowing how to play vs someone who raise/calls say 88+/AQ, would just open shove if they had 22-88, Ax, KT+, QT+, JT or whatever and will raise/fold some % of the time isn't really intuitively obvious to me (and depends a whole lot on what that % is), so that's next on my list.

As for actually playing poker, will be mostly PLO and Sundays until PCA, I recently booked my flight and am leaving January 3rd, so looking forward to my first live tourney since WSOP.

Steve