Back home

Last week was the first time since the re-focus on $5-$10 that I managed to play well all week and the results were great.

I played just under 11 hours and won $2,740. About a half of this was won in 90 minutes on Monday and after that I had a fairly steady run. On Sunday I took the day off.

The surprising thing about the win was the fact that in the big pots I only managed to break even. This shows that I must have won a lot of small and medium-sized pots without going to showdown: actually a rather unusual occurrence as I have been playing much tighter than I had previously. (In hands contested by 7 or more players my VPIP is down to 15%). Maybe I have been better at picking spots to steal the pot by playing fewer hands out of position: something I had been conscious of doing in the last week or so. (Even in the cut-off seat I was down to 12% VPIP, compared with 19% and 23% respectively in the cut-off and buttons seats).

As usual the biggest winning and losing pots happened when either me or my opponent, or both of us, flopped a set. I just about broke even in these situations, on one hand flopping set over set, but on another hitting top two pair against bottom set.

The only other big loser for me during the week was when I got $684 in pre-flop with AQ against AK. This sounds bad but is partially justified as it was heads-up against a very aggressive player.

Another development for me is my newfound ability to multi-table! If I start out at a short-handed table I am happy to play just that one table, but I have started to play a second table if they are both full. This lead to me playing an average of 1.59 tables during the week and I don’t feel as though my play suffered.

I feel reasonably comfortable back at the $5-$10 level now and am confident that in future weeks I can continue on an upward curve. After 3-4 months moving around it now feels like I am back at my ‘home game.’ Let’s hope my future results prove this correct.