Keep on changing.

Interestingly enough, I didn't run too good last couple of nights. However, this is it for complaints. I looked over the plays I made, and all but two were good, and all but one saw me mostly getting my money in good, or what would be good a lot. That one was a brain fade shipping it in with 99 PF against a guy who I thought was raising over 30%, but after figures settled down it turns out he was more like 20/16, lol. Either way, 99 AIPF is not a good thing at these stakes, almost ever.

Instead of bitch about how the pots shifted from me being heavy favourite to villains collecting them, I will mention a couple of interesting things. Firstly, after a while at the table, and down a few blinds, mainly from raising one too many hands and having to fold on the flop or after, I got AA in the CO. Raise, 3 folds, steal, YES!!! OK, so what happened there? I'm raising 30% so far on this table, yet when I get dealt AA, get no action. What's happening is people are still looking directly at their cards. They aren't saying "well, this guy is raising too much, I might try to exploit him" or "I wonder if I can 3 bet him lightly here" they are literally saying "I have J4o, I'm folding." So what you say, J4o is a perfectly normally fold. Well, it's just that you feel if you'd raised 12% of hands, that AA should never be called/raised, and that raising 30% gives you the right to get more calls/raises with AA. It does. However, it's not that much more often. Someone calls with 55 on the button, regardless of what you hold, because they want to hit a set. They might however, play a hand like A9 or 76s differently depending on the raiser and position. But it's still literally a handful of hands they might play differently depending on villain and positions, and the rest are all simple folds, raises and calls. Bad players may give you more or less credit postflop based on your PF stats, but to be honest, they are still looking at their hands a lot, and sometimes at the board textures.

So where am I going? Nowhere really. I guess the point might be that if you open Q7s on the CO, you need to realise what it's going to do for you. In higher stakes, it might help disguise your otherwise good starting hands, but in lower stakes, this isn't necessary, as people aren't putting you strongly on a range anyway. So waiting for the bigger hands is not a horrible play.

As for my read of other players, it's getting pretty good. I still have stacks of ideas off the tables, that don't always make it into my decisions at the time, but it's coming. I can now quite easily factor in some things, have an idea about possible scare cards, and thanks to Joseph, also think about not only what people would do with different made hands and drawing hands, but also how they would bluff.

I might set this as a short term goal. Try to work out what things I'm not thinking about enough at the tables and add those decisions in one by one, until they become natural. Like for now I might focus on putting people on a range on each flop, and see where that gets me.

As for where and what I play, I have no idea. I'm contemplating moving from OnGame for a while, and trying something different. If it means I get my game in a better place, then that's a good thing overall. I "might" get onto FTP again, but it's really quite hard to say. Time will tell, I haven't made up my mind yet, but at least it's never permanent.