The Shark Tank

A spate of terrible, terrible weather gave me some down time at home to plow through some hands and get in enough play to requalify for Platinum for another month.  Unfortunately, this seems to have caused my table selection to go out the window.  As a result, I managed to give back a lot of the profit I had accumulated earlier in the month.  I can’t even say that I especially took a lot of bad beats, I think I mostly played poorly.  I was four tabling pretty much the whole time and this resulted in some situations where I played foolishly.  There were several hands where as soon as the hand ended, I knew that I should have played them differently.  I hate when that happens.

I also am about to give up on my experiment where I never capped pre-flop out of position.  I started doing that based on some input from Willem and some big blind decisions discussed on ITH.  I understand the idea (which is that you can check-raise the flop and get the same pot size), but I find it doesn’t work nearly as well for me.  A lot of hands don’t go to showdown and you simply win less of them when you don’t cap.  I’m going to return to capping lighter than most people.  A review of my database suggests that I was getting better results when I do so.

Sometimes a guy calls you when you check raise the flop, figuring you have a smaller pair or caught top pair on the flop and his AQ is good.  By the time he gets to the river, he figures he has to call one more.  If you cap and bang all the way down, he figures he is against AK at best and you often get the fold.

I still will book a profit for the month, barring any dramatic self-destruct in the next night or two, but it is much less than it could have been.  I think I have to be careful to avoid playing when I’m not sharp because I can’t just coast along on auto-pilot against better players without some bad consequence.

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