blip in the radar

im down about $900 over my last 5500 hands or so. i did something pretty stupid last friday; i sat down to put in a quick session that got cut quicker than i thought but in the few hands i had played i had a guy (w/ prev history of playing uber aggy pre) 3-bet me everytime i opened a pot. no matter what position or no matter what his hand was it was an auto 3-bet. so i was shooting the shit on the phone with a friend and decided to just leave this table up and gambool with him. the end result was i lost like $600 in about 20 hands to him by 4-betting everything i opened and either getting it in pre or jamming the flop. well he started picking up hands and i ran AJ into KK, 88 into AK, 55 into 88 and 55 into TT. obviously the 55 hands were probably too thin to be jamming but i think a 4-bet/jam flop range of 88+, AJ+ would be profitiable against this guy. i did a little googling on this guy after to see whether or not he's just some hsnl player dicking around and saw that he was playing 25/50 online in early 06 but he's def a reg now at 1/2. pretty interesting and i hope to run into him again because as long as i can handle some variance i think it will be a great spot for me ev wise.

after that session i was a complete tilt monkey so i went and cooled off and had a relaxing night, put it behind me and got in a decent session on saturday aft. things couldn't have started off worse and about halfway through the 1200 hands i was stuck close to 1k but stayed strong and came back to only lose about a half buy-in which felt like a great success. since then im basically even although i ran pretty bad last night and managed to only book a small loss.

im pretty happy with the quantity of hands i've been getting in and should be able to make my goal of 20k hands for the month. im getting a little more comfortable with 6 tabling now so i will do that from time to time but won't make it a constant. i've also noticed a general sense of passivity has come into my game and i think often times of late i've been making the easy decision of just calling instead of raising/folding. this is esp geared towards 3-betting and i've been passing up great spots to squeeze or 3-bet loose openers. so i've been opening that up a little bit and i think it def makes me harder to play against and should also help me get action on my bigger hands. i've also slightly increased my opening range from utg and mp in 6-max with good results and should aid in blurring my range a little more. im also getting back into the habit of pounding on limpers with decent hands but have adjusted my isolation raise to 5.5x the bb instead of the typical pot sized raise of 4.5x the bb. this helps build a pot in pos with a bad player while keeping the more aggressive players from 4-bet bluffing me since it's a much more expensive play to make compared to pot size raising.

things i need to work on:

- assigning villains a hand range and then further narrowing down that hand range based on street by street action. (<<<<<<<<<< this is a big one)

- mentally going through and determining my rough equity against a villains range during the hand

- maximizing value in small to medium sized pots when i know i have the best hand

i got my books in the mail yesterday and will start on the proffessional nl holdem book first. i also realized when i opened the box that the stoxtrader book is a limit holdem book, not nl so i might return that. i've also been mixing in a table of o8 or horse once in a while when winding down my nl sessions and have made some good money just playing tight solid. it's such easy money and even on a 2/4 table there are rarely any players sitting with more than 10 big bets. i think after i read the plo book by hwang i will probably study up on some videos and start playing cap plo games once in a while. i don't see myself playing anything other than the cap plo games in the near future as i want to keep my main focus on studying and crushing nlhe.

tg