I had rakeback from before Black Friday paid into my account today. Hopefully Full Tilt are getting their accounts in order for cashouts to U.S. players.

Variance is like Marmite - you either love it or you hate it. We all hate it when we are on a downswing, and end up thinking "How can I run so bad?" . On the other hand, we all recognize the need for it. Without variance Phil Hellmuth would win every single hand and drain the entire poker economy of every last cent.

I tend to review my results in Holdem Manager monthly. It's not really a big enough sample but I play around 20-30k hands in a typical month. I noticed a trend in the monthly results, I'm usually running above expectation when I'm winning and below expectation when losing.

Now, I know all-in EV doesn't give our true expected value but it's not a bad measure of how well we are running in all-in pots. I think the reason for this trend is the following. Let's consider when we are playing well and get the money in good, say a 4:1 favourite. It is obvious that in the long term we will win 80% of the pot on average. But what about in the short term? We expect to win 80% of the time and when we do win we are running above expectation. So, when we get all-in, say with AA vs an underpair preflop, we will run above expectation 80% of the time. If we are playing bad such as getting all-in as a 4:1 dog then we will run below expectation 80% of the time.

Perhaps it doesn't even make sense to look at expectation over the short term since by definition it gives the average over a very large sample size. However, it does fit with my observations and it makes me feel good to think that when I'm running good I'm not just lucky but also likely to be playing well.

By the way, I've been enjoying Verneer's blog quite a bit recently. If you haven't seen it go check it out.

I was playing earlier today on Full Tilt when something strange happened. When it was my turn to act I could only see one card. I hit the time bank and tried resizing the table but the second card didn't show up.

I wasn't sure what to do but decided to just fold the hand. I did manage to get a screenshot before I folded though.

I was lazy and didn't do my recap since the last blog entry. I had some good results at 50NL and took another shot at 100NL. Luckily for me I ran good this time and since then I've been playing those games consistently.

This month is going well so far. I'm up about 14 BI's and at my current rate of play should be able to clear my mid-year bonus on FT.

I think I'll throw some personal stuff in this one rather than just poker talk.

I just started teaching since the Summer term began a few weeks ago. It's pretty much the same old thing since I've been teaching these physics classes for about 6 years now. I had a good 4th of July, went to a bbq, had a few beers and then watched the fireworks from a park that's right by my apartment.

Last month I went rock climbing with some people from university. It was a lot of fun and not too expensive. I always thought it was quite pricey so never really got around to it before. Yesterday I went out and played some football. I had only been playing indoor for a while so it was really nice to get outside and play, especially with the great weather we had here in Philly.

Here are my results since the last blog post



So, I didn't run very well at 100NL and I think that it did influence the quality of my play. Since I wasn't playing my best I decided to move back down to 50NL. I still don't think 100NL is all that different and I expect when I move back up that I'll be a winning player at that limit.

I recently had two coaching sessions with Jonathan Gaynor aka wooz on CR. I think the sessions went well and have really helped me to improve my game. I've been having a good month so far and expect to be moving back up to 100NL very soon.

Well, I've never written a blog before and I can't imagine who would want to read this but I'm going to post anyway. My main reason for creating this is to keep a record to look back at in future and hopefully see how I've improved.

This month I moved up from 25NL to 50NL. I took a few shots and lost a few buy-ins but now it's my regular game. My current HM database only has results from this year since I got myself a new computer in January.

Here's the graph of my results so far this year (~30k hands):