Termi8r's Road Continues

This week has been the best week concerning his poker education but the worst ever concerning his bankroll. Termi8r learned that beginners lose money due to bad play rather than bad luck.

by Termi8r

This week has been the best week as concerns my poker
education but the worst ever as concerns my bankroll. I moved up to NL50 SSS and
had a terrible run there. Then I went down to NL25 and the trend continued. Overall I
lost $150 of my bankroll this week playing 4.6k hands. The weird thing is that
I can't remember being overly on tilt and I tried my best to stick to the
strategy. It was really difficult for me to write this article at first. I want
to be successful at poker and after only one week my bankroll is knocked down by 37%!
I was looking for ways to justify the "downswing" in this update. Then I read
the articles about professional attitude and the downswing excuse. These
articles get neglected, I think, because they don't give you a strategy on how
to play poker, but they are as important as the strategy articles.

I learned that beginners lose money due to bad play rather
than bad luck. The first thing I did was to stop playing and instead start analyzing my game. I
looked over all the hands I had lost and I grouped them into bad luck and mistakes
for the two limits I played. I posted 20 questionable hands in the forum which did not include the coolers and bad beats I had suffered.

 

NL50 SSS:

Mistakes: 11 out of 1,856 hands costing me a total of $58
(6bb/100)

Bad luck: -$219

Winnings: $106

Net profit: -$171 which should have been -$113

NL25 SSS:

Mistakes: 8 out of 2,837 costing me a total of $23 (3bb/100)

Bad luck: -$112

Winnings: $155

Net profit: $20 which should have been $43

I made 19 mistakes over the 4,600 hands or so I played and they
cost me $80. This means that I made a mistake every 240 hands or so and
considering that I play four tables at a time it works out to only
one mistake every hour! Some of the most common mistakes I made were
calling re-raises with TT and AJ preflop, second barrel continuation bets with
AK and calling re-raises with pocket pairs and overcards on the board after
making a continuation bet. At the end of this week, my bankroll is down by $150
and $80 is due to mistakes that I shouldn't have made. I have been making these
mistakes since I started playing and it has cost me a lot of money. This bad run
motivated me to look at my mistakes and then correct them.

Conclusion: 50%
downswing and 50% bad luck

Goals for this week:

• Play 7,000 hands
• Make ZERO
  mistakes
• Organize my poker literature

Cheers and good luck!

Termi8r