Rough day at the office

After getting my roll within a few cents of the $190 mark I had a disastrous day. Had a bad run at .02/.05 so I geared down to .01/.02 to grind my roll back up and that's where I had a string of three horrific beats against the same guy in short succession. I picked up premium starters and this guy was playing any four cards for stacks so I got my money in 2:1'ish three times and lost all of them. It happens, not the majority of the time but it happens.

I get a decent session of penny stakes in later and move back up to nickels where I endure the lethal combination of run bad/play bad. Looking at the hands later I can see that after having people catch their draws on me I started to revert to trying to push big hands through again and ended up getting my money in bad in some big hands. I failed miserably at some bluff attemptts. Had one player who was unable to fold his AAxx on a paired connected board. Another guy just had to chase his flush draw on a four liner to a straight. At the nadir of the day I was down $12 from my peak which was really disturbing since I try to keep my variance really small. Twelve bucks is still only about 6% of my roll and that was over many sessions and many tables but considering that I buy in for $1.75 max that represents a pretty bad run. My green line also came dangerously close to falling below even and I don't want that happening ever again.

The only bright spot today was that I ended up on an absolutely scorching heater as I was shutting down tables. Top set of Aces on the flop, falls behind to broadway on the turn, but I get stubborn and push it through to quad up on the river. Bad play, good results. Top two versus bottom two for fat stacks. Top two dodges a GSSFD and a separate flush draw to pull down a healthy three way pot. Top set of queens stacks KKQ8 who can't let go of top pair and an overpair to the board. All told I get about $5 back to end up a few cents to the good for the session.

I see some similarities in my chart to when I was getting my .01/.02 game turned around. 6000 hands in on the nickel stakes I have had some ups and a long protracted down (see below). Overall I'm still EV+ including rakeback but the next step is to get EV+ excluding rakeback just as I did with the penny tables. I'll feel better about the EV figure after I get at least 10K hands in at .02/.05. For now at least I'll keep grinding away at the penny tables for the bread and butter and take shots at nickel sessions.