It's sometime amazing the swings you have in Poker. I play mainly Hold'em ($5/$10 to $10/$20) and Stud (2-6 Spread). At the beginning of May, I couldn't lose. I would only play premium hands because thats all I was seeing. I'd walk away from the $10/$20 table up over $700 in a matter of a couple of hours. My bankroll grew by over $2000 in a short 2 weeks of play.
And then it happened - my cards started to suck about 2 weeks ago. For instance, I sat patiently at a $6/$12 game yesterday for 4 hours taking small pots and waiting for big hands. Then I was dealt AK 3 times within 30 minutes with it never holding up - QQ cracked by KK, 88 cracked by 99 etc.
Now the $2000 I previously won now looks like $200. Furthermore, I did something I normally never do and that's buy some new toys out of the poker fund. So, in other words, my bankroll is starting to look very small.
I planned on playing $10/$20 Hold'em for 5 days in Vegas. Now it looks like I'll be playing $4/8 and $5/10.
Any suggestions on which card gods to pray to in the mean time. I have to turn my cards around.
Play tight and move down limit. Better to phave funds to play for the planned period you're there then bust out early. Also your bankrtoll wasn't exactly big for those limits to begin with.
You are correct that the swings will make a man out of you (or a crying little baby huddled in the corner in the fetal postion LOL )
I posted about a week ago how I hit 2 SFs in one week. I had a really good week and made about $700 live. This week...LOL...cold deck city. I am definitely paying for it now. I think I have only logged 1 winning session this week and that was live, online is dead. So yes, good runs are followed by bad ones and we just have to deal with it.
As for the AK cracked 3 times in 30 minutes...I can beat that. About 3 or 4 weeks ago I had a session where I got AK 5 times in one hour...cracked every time. I lost 30 BB in 3 hours. Ah yes, nothing like driving 1 hour and 40 minutes each way to play for 3 hours and hit your loss limit (I have one).
As for buying toys out of your bankroll, you should know better than that . That's poker money man, not impress the honeys with my new car money LOL.
As for praying to the gods, I gave that up a long time ago. I deduced they all hated me so now I just hate them back.
What I will recommend is dropping down in limits. This is hard for most people to do. Without knowing your standard deviation and win rate, I can't calculate what type of a bankroll you need. But, by the sounds of it, if you stay at 10/20, you run a high risk of going broke in the future. Mason Malmuth suggests that if you are capable of dropping back a limit when you have depleated 1/2 of your bankroll, you can reduce your starting bankroll req'ts by 40%.
I plan on posting the details of figuring bankroll req'ts in the near future. In the meantime, a good rule of thumb is 300 BB. But even this may be too small once you see the math.
I was real cold decked late last-month and early this month, and my limit game has not really seen good cards since then. One thing that has helped me, albeit on the net and not live, is tourney play. My favorite is the $15 NL nightly at Pacific, with $10K guaranteed payout. I won $1500 for 2nd place ( lost 1st on a bad beat:( ), and have made the money a few other times.
TJ says tourneys with a 50-1 or greater payout ratio are the best moneymakers. Well, $2500 for 1st place makes these ~150-1.
