What a session! I officially hit $25 on my bankroll from my initial 12! 
This is the first time I've managed to get more than 1k hands in one go as I generally tend to play 2-3 tables for a few hours after a full time job in the weekdays.
It didn't start well at all. Once again I ran into the same problem of losing focus on the tables and playing too loose, within the first 200 hands I had lost about 2 BI's...
I let my first BI loss affect me too much and as a result I loosened up and stopped playing my A game.
I have a shitty tendency to always check my results graph. I know I know, I shouldn't be result oriented, and shouldn't really be paying much attention to it, but I think in this case it helped me.
What I noticed is everytime I start losing focus or slightly tilting my 'won at showdown' line starts dropping gradually and my red line increases as I become to aggressive with marginal hands...
As soon as I spotted it I realised it was the same thing I had done yesterday so I snapped myself back into shape. The difference was instant, I immediately went back to even and eventually ended up with 3 BI's extra! Good stuff.
I think a short term goal here is to stop myself from losing that focus in the first place and play the same game as long as possible.
----------------------
On a different note, something else interesting happened at my last table. As you'll see below on my session graph, I managed to pick up an extra BI or so right at the end of the session.
Basically I was closing my tables when the chat box of the last table I was on caught my eye... There were a couple of players arguing and taunting eachother, both of them with pretty high VPIPs over a fairly good sample size.
Anyways, my thought here was that potentially this could be worked to my advantage, I started goading the bigger fish on and siding with the other player... Slowly but surely everytime I was raising he was calling me so he could 'outplay' me and take the piss. This had the great effect of him not being able to fold AT ALL. Bingo. I started to raise pretty much double my normal range as the table was full of nits who hadn't cottoned on, so as soon as they would show any agression I could safely let the hand go.
Eventually I got him on this hand:
I'm not sure if the check on the flop was the right move, especially with the button having raised preflop, but I took a chance as the fish tended to fold the cbet if he didnt hit anything but bluff as soon as I showed any weakness.
PokerStars - $0.02 NL - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4
SB: 194 BB (VPIP: 15.15, PFR: 6.06, 3Bet Preflop: 8.33, Hands: 33)
Hero (BB): 257 BB
UTG: 102 BB (VPIP: 47.37, PFR: 15.93, 3Bet Preflop: 6.25, Hands: 115)
MP: 97 BB (VPIP: 28.75, PFR: 5.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 80)
CO: 335 BB (VPIP: 9.40, PFR: 4.05, 3Bet Preflop: 1.85, Hands: 152)
BTN: 164.5 BB
SB posts SB 0.5 BB, Hero posts BB 1 BB
Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) Hero has 2♦ 2♠
UTG calls 1 BB, fold, fold, BTN raises to 5 BB, fold, Hero calls 4 BB, UTG calls 4 BB
Flop: (15.5 BB, 3 players) 8♣ 4♥ 2♥
Hero checks, UTG checks, BTN checks
Turn: (15.5 BB, 3 players) 9♣
Hero bets 11 BB, UTG calls 11 BB, fold
River: (37.5 BB, 2 players) 3♦
Hero bets 90 BB, UTG calls 86 BB and is all-in
Spoiler
Hero shows 2♦ 2♠ (Three of a Kind, Twos) (Pre 49%, Flop 92%, Turn 100%)
UTG shows 9♥ T♠ (One Pair, Nines) (Pre 51%, Flop 8%, Turn 0%)
Hero wins 202 BB
Before he called my last raise I sent a message on the chat box. "Call this mate . I went all in and made it look like I was bluffing and trying to scare him away with my message. It worked wonderfully, I was sure he was calling with literally ATC in the last few hands so I was confident I had the best hand here 80% of the time.
I felt guilty after this as I'm not really one to be an arsehole and generally tend to frown upon people talking like this in a poker game... however, it did get me thinking about it all. Is it wrong to be doing this kind of stuff? I mean, any edge you can get counts for something right? These people are coming to the tables with their money and so bar cheating all bets are off.
Something to consider for me in the future... There probably won't be many times where I can use this tactic again but while it lasted I felt like I had found another way to adapt to the opponent and give me a bigger edge.
Anyways, novel over. Here is my session + overall graph.
