Getting away from aggro

Goals:
1. Look for more places to bet rather than call down. Try to understand the difference between betting and calling down
2. Look more for player tendancies in between pots

How do I feel:
Pretty good right now.

Results:
1. Yes, I did a lot more of this. ie in this hand, he likely has a weak pair or strong draw and isn't aggressive enough to just fire away with weak pairs or a missed turn. So raise it up with the intention of getting it in against what would be very unlikely a set given the board.
2. Doing this a little more. Still needs more work, even though I am only two tabling I still slack off too much.


I didn't like my session at all. I pretty much got given 2 pots early and felt like just walking away with the 3/4 BI, but really felt like I needed to get some hands in to be satisfied. Of course that amount went up and down a bit until an aggro sat on my right. This guy was good. He managed to fold every time I had it and raise every time I didn't. I knew to leave, but couldn't. I just wanted to win that one pot on him, but didn't. When I finally left I'd just lost a medium sized pot on my good table, and was down $55 on the bad table, to be almost down a BI, which was depressing as it was mostly from me trying to play back at a bully, which I know not to do. I kept on with my good table and fired up another juicy spot. I regained my profits on the good table, and just went on a 20 hand run on the new table to finish up 1 BI for the session. Nice.

Morale of the story is, if you are feeling uncomfortable on a table for whatever reason, be it aggro opponents, passive opponents, short stacks or even just running bad, then get out. There is almost surely a better spot at another table, so rather than losing 3 BI's to prove how big your balls are, go where the easy money is.

Do you see the theme? Don't play drunk, don't play bad tables, don't play game you aren't good at... Your winrate has a DIRECT correlation to each of these things. If you play average poker but table select well, play when you are in a good mind frame and stick to just games you know, you are going to beat some good players who play drunk, gamble a lot and like to brag about beating up the bully rather than finding better spots. Winrate is key to me now in poker, I can't survive without it. If I find myself having two lousy months and think about how I played drunk or badly causing a big chunk of that lacking winrate, I'll be furious with myself.

On a side note, the link on the side to PSO is why I rejoined the OnGame network. I cleared the 15000 PSO points in about 5000 hands of NL50, or 20 days. That also helped clear $100 worth of deposit bonus. That means I have 19000 PSO points, which is equal to $190 worth of gift certificates, which can be poker $'s. 1 problem is most sites bar Absolute only allow 5000 point = $50 clearances, so it's only $150. So I think I'm going to aim to play the bare minimum at Absolute, which will get me a 9000 point bonus, making it 26,000 points, or $260 worth. I will then cash in that for $260 on Absolute, and in the mean time clear their deposit bonus. So that should be around $300 worth of upcoming bonuses to collect. Add to that the pokerstars $80 which I am about to start clearing from next week, and it's $380. Add to that the rest of the bwin deposit bonus and it's in total around $630. It will take me a few weeks to achieve this, maybe 6 to 8, but I will be very happy to see this much cash flow into my bankroll once it's all finished. All I have to do is win at a marginal rate in the mean time and I'll be on track towards NL100.