Week one of Feb hasn't gone as well as the whole of January, I've had losing days on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, so I've taken Friday off so that I can start the month fresh on Monday.



I don't think I have been playing badly, but its slightly worrying that I'm actually still running good in all-in EV, so these results could have been about 50% worse. I think that most of my losses have been very standard; AK running into AA preflop, value betting a strong hand on 3 streets and being shocked to see I was behind to something unlikely the whole time; and a few opponents floating and hitting long shots I couldn't really expect them to have.

The weird thing is that losing a bit has actually been slightly calming. I think that when you run good for a while, the longer it lasts the more dramatic a future downswing is going to seem, so at the moment -6 buy-ins is fine. If it had come three quarters of the way through January it wouldn't have even been a notable result.

I'm still playing/learning a bit of 1/2 PLO, and I've decided to concentrate on 6-max for the time being. Its interesting to note that before I got a lot better at NLHE I thought I was ok at PLO as well. Now, the experience of knowing one poker game in such depth makes playing a different one scarier, because even without having a great overall strategy, I can see the points in which I know that I don't know something well. Its possible that thinking like that is actually slowing me down, because I might be trying to construct the overall game plan without knowing smaller elements well-enough.

I'm considering reverting to nut-peddling for a while to get re-used to how often each hand occurs and wins, whereas before I was trying to work out a higher level: For example, I'd look for a board in which the opponent should have to fold slightly too much on each street or else he'd be making miserable and costly check-guess-calls, plan to fire bets on all the turns and rivers that make may range look the strongest (and when it was the strongest), and then try to fit the hands I get dealt back into that strategy. Now I think I should spend a while going back to playing my hand, and folding out better and getting called by worse, before giving the metagame another go.

I haven't played any poker at all today, since it was the day off to end my losing streak. Instead I spent the afternoon going to the gym for a swim and then a long time in the steam room, deciding that I should make more effort to appreciate the fact that I don't have to be in work on a Friday afternoon :)