The Worst Case Scenario

Posted by icemonkey9 on Aug 28, 2009 in General | 2 comments

Good friend BW07507 calls it "the 200nl curse" and it appears to have hit me rather hard.  When you move up in stakes there's always one worst case scenario in the bank of your mind that might happen to you.  What is it? Well, you move up, run bad and play a few hands poorly at the higher stakes, be forced to move down, and then run bad there too. So no matter where you play, you lose.

This is the case for me unfortunately. I've been sending hands for analysis to friends and there's been some good discussion. I'd say right now it's a little obvious I am not playing my best poker right now. On top of that I keep getting the "one pip higher by the villain" thing which is very frustrating. In the last four sessions I've had KK<AA all in preflop where the villain is a loose fishy player. On top of that I've been having too many of these hands to even count:

Well that's great ... I can't even get pokerhandreplays.com to work right now. LOL it's been that kind of month people. What can go wrong HAS gone wrong. Let's try to recount this hand:

I have AK in EP and make a raise and get called by 4 other villains. The flop comes AT3 and I lead out for about 70% of pot and I am insta-called by the bad reg, called by the passive fish, fold, and then min-raised by the LAG fish. I fold, the bad reg raises, the middle fish folds, and the LAG fish shoves and is called by the bad reg.  The bad reg shows AQ and the LAG fish shows 33. It's been very frustrating because I have perceived the number of times a villain flops a set against my TPTK or overpair to be much MUCH greater than expectation. Conversely, I've only been hitting 9% of sets all month and it's been 17k hands ... and as Jurn points out hitting sets isn't the thing it's getting paid for them. That definitely hasn't happened.

So all in all looks like a standard downswing. Had the confidence shaken because of the blown shot at 200nl plus the cooler hands. That's given way to me making some poor decisions on a few hands that cost some stacks. The plan is for me to relax, reflect and study and then head back with a level head. Some winning sessions will definitely restore the confidence and I'll go from there.