Friday, September 08, 2006

Riding out the ass end of variance

If you play at Party, I found this really neat AHK script that automatically gets rid of the Monster jackpot counter, closes Party's pop-up windows and makes your system run faster.

Here is the link to DeMonster.

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I would say the last few days have been a roller coaster, but roller coasters at least go up sometimes. My bankroll is just going down.

I know it's only been a few days since this run started with my accidental $445 bet, but I've lost nine or 10 buy-ins at 3/6 NL 6-max in that time. As far as I can tell, only one of those bust-outs was entirely caused by my donkish play. The rest were due to bad beats and cold decks.

What can you do when variance decides to slap you around a little?

There's no way to avoid bad beats. You have to be doing something right to even suffer a bad beat -- you have to get in with the best of it, which is exactly your goal on every hand.

But I have a few ideas about some of the things I can control that went wrong:

_ I tilted. When bad luck hits, tilt can happen. I should have stopped playing the moment I got angry.

_ I wasn't comfortable playing 3/6 NL 6-max games. It's still a pretty new limit to me, and I'm not familiar with the nuances of how the play differs from 2/4.

_ I played three tables throughout, but I should have scaled back to two tables so that I could focus on what I was doing.

This kind of dreadful run hits at least once a year for me. I don't think it's avoidable -- eventually, cards are simply going to get cold, and I'm going to have to deal with it. That's OK. They say the measure of a good player is his ability to deal with the bad times.

This run might already be over. Pittsburgh won me $1,000 through that fantastic Mansion promotion, and I started winning again later on tonight after I stepped back down to 2/4 6-max.

It's frustrating, but I still feel good about my play. What more can you hope for than to get your money in with the best hand?

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