Disappointing month - Aug recap
Well as advertised, the monthly recap blog entry is as shitty to write as it was to play during the month of August. Actually it was shittier to play but you get the idea.As you can see from the graph below, the final tally was quite dreadful as I chalk up a losing month of poker. It was a very difficult month with few highs and lots of lows and a final 11 hour poker marathon on the night of the 31st got me to rally "up" to a -8k loss. Pretty pathetic when you have to book a +$5k session in order to finish -$8k on the month. Terrible.
Overall I've been looking through my PT and trying not to make excuses (but I still make them). I think I've been running too many medium-pot bluffs. Too often it's like no one folds for just one move. You need two "moves" to make it happen. For instance, friends of mine have often known me to say you can't 2 barrel on an A high flop and expect anyone to fold an A to you. You either need to fire the 3rd barrel or just stop at 1 barrel. I think a similar thing is true on flop raises. This month I did a lot of flop cbet raising where I'd expect people to give up and they won't -- unless you follow through with another big turn bet. I know these things are kind of abstract without hard examples but in general I'm not following through enough. Another example might be when you float someone on the flop, they c/c you on the turn, and then on the river on a lot of board textures it's very hard for them to have anything decent, so a bluff shove should be profitable... but failing to follow through on the river is light lighting the flop/turn $ I put in the pot on fire.
Others may disagree with that above paragraph but I sort of feel like that's part of what happened in august... not following through on the extra street. The problem is once you run so bad and get stuck a bunch it's hard to risk shoving another stack in the middle in another marginal bluff spot. Don't misunderstand, I don't feel like poor bluffs were the entire (or even the majority) reason why I had such a terrible month, but it was one contributing factor. The KK v AA 6x (won 1) and the AA v KK twice (lost 1) might have had something to do with it too. (ya ya there are the excuses again).
In any case, I'm planning to head up to NYC for a few days at the end of september and I'll be bringing my PT for krantz to look through. I'm really looking forward to that a lot. Jay continues to be the most knowledgable poker resource I have at my disposal and I'm really grateful to get his analysis/coaching when I can.
Another disappointment is the website I've been working so hard on still isn't up and running. We're trying to get this free application server set up through my uncle's friend but being that it's free we're kind of getting what we pay for. It's been frustrating to not be able to get the work we've done up for all to see and use. In any case I'm hoping that within a week or two we'll have our first release up and running. I'm excited to start slowing down the development phase of "da proj" and get on to having a working product to advertise and optimize and with a little luck, make a few bucks. So far I've got some really solid functionality built in but we'd still like to add a lot more. Making something is visually appealing and that people actually like to use is very time consuming. No youtube spamming, multi-color-flashing, music-jamming, slideshow spinning, tilt-o-whirl-puking, seizure inducing, myspace trainwreck of a website here. No sirrreee!
Or at least, that's the hope.
So back on to poker. I was happy to see the Homework problem 1 got some good feedback from my students as well as random blog visitors. It's always nice to see some comments from people that just stop by to the site. Unfortunately after this graph I deserve a few "you shouldn't have quit your day job" posts. lol. Despite the trainwreck that this month (and june) was I'm still well above programmer salary for the year. So that helps me sleep at night. If I cant get my poker results back on track and our website doesn't pan out to anything, there may be some code monkey consulting work in my future. Months like these are just really too stressful to handle, and having 2 of the last 3 months be really brutal has made me really question if I want to use this game as a sole source of income, even if my EV is higher than what it would be having a "real job".
That has prompted me to seriously focus on other ways of making money to ease the pain of the bad runs in poker. Certainly the website I'm talking about a lot is part of that, but also I've been looking into other methods of self sustaining. I've been getting really into the stock market lately, trying to keep up with the happenings in the financial world. Obviously I'm still very much a noob at all of it but you have to start somewhere. I could see myself, after a lot of work, trying to make a run at the swing trading or day trading game as an additional income stream. We'll see where it goes. I'm planning to pick up a couple books on it and learn as much as I can before putting any money behind doing a lot of active trading. I do plan to buy some stocks and start following companies in the near future though, which I'm sure i'll talk about the process I'm learning on the blog for anyone who is interested.
Well, sometimes it stings to do blog entries. certainly this is one of those times, but if I'm to stay true with the original purpose of this blog then I have to do it. If nothing else, perhaps I can make my resident blog hater raise his glass in cheers to another round of haterade.
Quick set of goals off the top of my head for september:
-Put up a good best man speech at my uncle's wedding.
-Play LESS THAN 50,000 hands. Force myself on fewer tables. (I felt like I've already been doing this but somehow I amassed 72,000 hands this month -- not sure how)
-Spend more time doing post session analysis
-Continue to help my students improve their game
-More interactive homeworks
-Launch Preemas.com -- our new website I keep talking about
Aaron
posted by WiltOnTilt at 2:51 AM
9 Comments:
How can you possibly coach others when you can't hack it yourself on poker table? What a fraud, i hope you lose all your money on the stock market.
Mr. Anonymous,
Thanks for the insightful comment.
Since I'm such a fraud and a hack, how about some HU poker? You didn't post your screen name so how about outing yourself while tossing the hate?
If you read my entry I knew I'd be getting a taste of the haters, so no shock there, but how about you put your money where your mouth is?
Aaron
And while I'm at it, if any of my students want to cancel their sessions with me because of this, they are certainly welcome to. I stand by my coaching and my reputation as a person as a player and I'm sure any of my students would tell you that I'm worth the price of admission.
As an exercise of stating the obvious, a real hack or fraud wouldn't post their true results if their goal was to swindle people from their money. The fact that you can't see that says a lot.
I have to admit when I saw you made the first hate comment it did bring a smile to my face :-)
Thanks for rooting against me in the stock market, that's just the type of extra incentive I need.
Aaron
wilt is definitely not a fraud. he's one of the nicest and smartest people i know with regards to poker and i would take his advice over most others.
Hmmm, trouble in the bedroom? Since you stay up all nite just to delete my sincere attempts to reveal your true color, I can almost smell your real problem. Maybe time to try viagra??
wtf ? I didn't delete any comments on this blog entry, and you know it.
Your attempted ruse is pathetic.
BTW you never came forward with your screen names on tilt/stars? Not interested in getting crushed HU ?
Aaron
WiltonTilt is one of our top coaches. Otherwise he wouldn't be coaching for 3-bet.
'Nuff said.
Nice try, hater. Since I'm the only one (besides Aaron) who can speak the truth on your most recent random sexual comment...no problems in the bedroom. In fact, just the opposite- everything is great!! My hubby plays cards and updates his blog a lot at night when I'm asleep, so that we can spend time together (and get it on) during the day. :) You are the loser who posts comments within hours of the blog being updated. Get a life!
Man, now he's putting up entries as his 'supposed' wife? lol.
Karma's a bitch dude!
-spikeyjak
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