A few days, or weeks, late as usual, I return with my head hanging kind of low to post a graph I’d rather keep to myself. Let’s get that out of the way first. Here’s my March results at 25NL.

As you can see, the month started out in a stellar downswing. Downswing being a euphemism for really bad horrible play. I managed to recover, only to fall back into the negative again, and then barely pull myself up to a positive finish for the month. I had my first coaching session during the last week of the month, so I suppose that at least shows the coaching had helped some.
The first week of April I had my second session with Coach Nino, which was followed fairly quickly by a third “emergency” session.
During the second session, El Nino 1 suggested that I stay at 10NL for now so that my costly mistakes won’t cost me quite so much as I’m getting used to my new style of play. If there was any one golden piece of advice he gave me, that was it. After our second session, when I began to really increase the ranges of hands I played, I swiftly dropped about 12 buy-ins at 10NL over about a 5 day period. That was what prompted our emergency 3rd coaching session.
I sent him an email, desperate and crazy, explaining how badly I’d been doing and he suggested that we get together (virtually) and I watch him play a few hands to demonstrate more visually what he had been trying to explain to me. Whenever I try to change something in my play I have this tendency to think “I know more now…so I should win more now.” That inevitably leads to me spewing out money all over the place thinking that I’m outplaying the fish when, in fact, I am making myself the new king fish at the table.
After watching him play for a while I realized I was allowing myself to get far too aggressive where it was not warranted, and I finally started to get it. I needed to reel myself back in, and think more.
April started out looking about the same as the beginning of March, but over the last few days I’ve been able to get back to winning and have a much better understanding of what I’m doing, and what I expect to be doing in the future as the coaching and my growth within the game continues.
On a slightly different subject, PokerStars changed the minimum/maximum buy-ins for their cash game tables today, which I was thrilled about. My face lit up in a smile when I logged in today to see that they were finally doing something about the rampant shortstack problem that has plagued the games there since Full Tilt raised their minimums a few months back.
My smile soon faded as I realized that with the new software update, my version of PokerTracker stopped working. I quickly went to the PokerTracker site and found the update to make everything peachy again, only to run into more problems.
With the new update, I needed to run all kinds of maintenance operations on my database before the new version will run. Unfortunately, I tried to run the maintenace routines twice, only to have them run for roughly 90 minutes before PostgreSQL (the database engine behind PokerTracker) crashed. So that was 3 hours of wasted time. I then tried to run the maintenance directly from PG, which seemed to work, but then PokerTracker still wanted to update it’s cache before it will do anything else. I started the process of “rebuilding” the cache, only to have it run for another 90 minutes and crash again. So again, I restarted everything and went back to have it “update” the cache instead of rebuild. As I write this, that process has been running for 2 1/2 hours so far. I have something like a 5 gigabyte database, so everything takes forever. Luckily, so far, it has not crashed, but it’s looking like there isn’t going to be any poker for me today. Even if this thing finished up in the next few minutes, I’m so frustrated by the process taking all day that I’m really in no mood to play anymore.
So here I sit, sipping some wine, trying to figure out what to do with myself for the next few hours since I can’t really use the computer for much else while the database stuff is running. Hopefully tomorrow will be a smoother day and I can really enjoy the “new” games on PokerStars. I’m absolutely dying to see how the buy-in changes affect the games. And, of course, I’m hoping my winning streak will continue, and that my win rate might even increase without having to deal with the shortstacks anymore.
I guess that’s it for me for now…
May the fish be with you…