Playing better, but winning less!

With a title like that, I think I've given you the opportunity to complete skip this blog entry because as a summary, it pretty much covers it all.

The last few days grind have been a struggle to say the least.  Thanks to an impromptu visit back home and also coming down with a nasty cold, I've had a lot more time to invest into playing MTTs, something which I was clearly failing at now that I'd returned to university. What I've been working on specifically the last few days, is to work out a specific nightly schedule to which I can stick to barring any specific Pokerstars promotions or of course, if it's Sunday. What I've been searching for specifically is value. Unfortunately, it's a little harder to find than simply to open up the lobby and pick the tournaments with the biggest prize pools, it's a far more subtle art. After all, if I hadn't put in the effort to find the value almost 2 years ago, I never would have found the beautiful game we all love so much, O8. The rebuys specifically I find to be great value, in particular the $3r PLO and the $5 2R1A. Because of the somewhat small initial buyin, the fish seem attracted to these games but squander their initial stacks almost instantly and invariably rebuy. In the PLO, I've seen terrible players donate almost 10 full buyins to the prize pool before getting lucky and running up a stack, clearly for me to obtain later. However, even with these goldmines, I still seem to be losing.

Now, I don't want to turn this post into a rant about how bad I run, but dude, I run so bad! It's not so much the crazy one outers and sick suck outs, but more losing the important flips at crucial times interspersed between set ups and coolers. In the past few days, I've managed to build up quite large stacks in the big field NLHE MTTs only to make the final 50 orso for little more than a min cash. Unfortunately, it's become quite the bad habit. It's not all doom and gloom though, I have felt my game continually improving since I made the transition to playing MTTs full time and the more I play, identify regs and understand how the fish think, the more deep runs I'll make. What I think I've particularly improved upon is the chip accumulation phase of the tournaments, which allows me to have more attempts at the big money, from which some day I can feel I'll hit it big. For now though, I'm still experiencing steady small losses, but that's MTT variance for you. All the pros warn you about it but when you get off to such a good start, like I did at the beginning of the stake, you always feel like your invincible and can only keep winning. This is not the case.

Well there's a quick update on how things are going. I'm sorry everything's a bit vague but with a bit of luck, we'll have some big scores and deep runs to get into specifics over in the near future. Wishing everybody luck at the tables and remember to follow me on Twitter (@Grimiscool) if you enjoy my random ramblings. Bye!