Progress since the "switch"

After the fiasco on the 4th of this month, I did a lot of thinking, reviewing, reading, and some more thinking. I dropped tables for awhile to 16 and focused more on picking up dead money and playing the player rather than just nitting it up and making hands. I broke down my playing style into pure nuts and bolts and figured out I have been focusing too much on showdown dollars and not enough on playing poker and maximizing my earn both when I do AND don't hit a hand.

The results so far have been startling. I almost immediately ran hot and was like 9BB/100 for a few days. Of course then variance struck and I got coolered a few times as well as the usual suckout mayhem. But surprisingly, my "bad" sessions where I overall lost showdown dollars due to running bad were suddenly not so bad anymore. I was either breaking even or making a small profit in non-showdown earnings and it really buffered me against the big downswing. I still have had 3 moderate sized swings, but they would have been much worse if I had my "normal" non-showdown results.

I have now gradually moved back to playing 24 tables (fast btw) and I am still able to rather easily make the correct decisions (as correct as they are playing half the tables.) I am averaging 1650-1750 hands per hour now.. which gives a nice boost to my rakeback and hourly rate. And will get me to supernova faster. (cha ching)

What specific changes did I make? Its hard to say but it really was kind of an epiphany. It results in a major overhaul of my HUD which let's me focus more on the newly discovered important parts of playing winning poker. I can now exploit the exploitable, avoid the good players when necessary, and in the process create the type of image that gets me paid on my big hands. I know that the regulars all have HUDs and are for the most part using the stats I used to use. Their read on me based on stats will now be way off and it will make them play (hopefully) very poorly against me.

Besides the above, another huge change for me was finding what I feel is the optimum range in all positions for both opening, calling, and 3-betting. I won't go into details for obvious reasons. Anyways, here is my graph for the month. Its pretty easy to spot where the "epiphany" was.

My only goal for the rest of the month is to play all of my scheduled hours and to not slack any.