early august

have been playing a decent amount so far this month. most of my action has come at the 1/2nl deep w/ ante tables. these games have been by far the most aggressive games i've ever seen no matter played in. the amount of 3-betting / 4-betting / 5-betting pre-flop is just gross and every pot that is eligible will be squeezed regardless of positions and player types. the games are full of regs with the occasional fish or nit but for the most part it's just regs battling and stacking off 200bb deep w/ cheese.

the games are incredibly fun to play in but i believe i will stop playing them because a) the variance is insane and b) i may be a dog in most line-ups as i think a few 400nl regs are the mainstays in the games and are down at 200nl while learning adjustments for the ante games.

i will say that i have learned one very important thing of late though and that is not all tag/lag regs are created equal. i generally tag a player as a tough reg after i see his preflop stats after a 100 hands or so but lately as i'm getting better at hand reading and evaluating ranges i'm seeing some of the better players making pretty terrible mistakes. not that i don't make some really bad mistakes myself but i've generally felt that if you played 23/19 preflop and were a 400nl reg you were awesome at poker. true most people including myself have a decently solid pre-flop game but post flop is where the skill is and im starting to identify the tag fish when i see them. (as well as stop acting like one myself cuz i def am)

so anyways, i had a good start to the month following up a that $370 session with a 1k winning session but since then it's been $425, $415, $625 and $50 losing sessions. this puts me at slight loser for the month which is fine since it's only swinging 7-8 buyins which is normal. the first losing session i played pretty poorly and was unfocused for most of the session but i believe i've played a lot better since then and just haven't gotten the results.

funny enough the $50 loss tilted me after i was done the session because i saw that i was up about 700 playing pretty well, winning lots of small to medium sized pots before getting stacked twice and losing a couple of other good sized pots. i know for a fact though if i wasn't playing well this little losing stretch would have probably looked more like a 15 buyin downswing so hooray for not being a total fish.

short term plan is just to stick to the regular 200nl games and only play the ante tables when the game is soft. while enjoyable, the ante games are playing too tough right now to justify playing in them over a typical soft 200nl table.

tg

edit: oh yeah, also played 2 of my biggest pots in recent memory, once getting my TT in vs KK on a T42 flop over 300bb deep vs a tagfish that was tilting (i won) and the other was my AKo allin vs 9h7h in a 3bet pot 200bb deep on a K84hh flop (i lost). the second was cool because i would never usually raise and stack off like that 200bb deep but i had been raising this tagfishes cbets all night and he had been folding so it was a great spot to setup.