Ups and downs

I guess it is always like this when you play poker: you win some, you lose some!

In my latest SNG, I managed to some in second, and I would have done better if it hadn't been for a rivered flush. We reached the heads-up phase relatively early, so that I couldn't play SAGE yet. Left to my own devices, my stack remained mostly constant but started dropping off towards the end - I was relieved to be able to switch to SAGE and let the cards determine the outcome.

I learned only recently (finished Vol.II now) that you should never fold preflop as SB in a heads-up situation, at least not as long as your opponent doesn't make a habit of raising your calls. So it was nice to see my opponent fold in several situations - always good to know you know something about the game your opponent doesn't. Not that it helped me so much in the end!

I also played in the 10 cent tournament that Pacific offers every night. Of course it can never bring you any kind of significant winnings, but it is just fun to play and see how far I can get. I hope the experience does help me to play better in future MTTs, even if the opposition there will of course be much tougher. This time I actually managed to finish in the money, went out in 13th place out of 597. I probably could have finished higher too, but started playing a bit reckless when I found myself with 67000 chips when the average chip stack was 12000. It is hard to play conservative at such a point! Anyway so I won $1 with that, which is a nice return on investment ;-)

So I feel that I am again playing better, more measured poker, cashing in my last three tournaments (two SNGs and this one). It really helped me to go over the SNGs I described in my last post in more detail, to see that I was not playing so badly after all. An unfortunate side effect (at least for me) of bad results is that I start to play worse, trying to force things to happen. Also, I tend to focus on the things that went wrong and forget about all the hands where I played well or got lucky. Bad luck seems to make more of an impression on me.