- What a dumb game.

It's good news, don't worry. I'll stop whining and being a prissy little girl now. Things turned around starting about 3 days ago and have gone well. It's not so much that the beats ended, it's the placement of the beats. I virtually stopped losing all 80/20s once we were down to 4 or less players. Nearly all 70/30s on the bubble and heads-up held up while standard races (66 vs. AQ, etc.) started falling more in my favor. I'm not back to the profit total I was at 5 weeks ago, but at least it's nice to know it's done.

It's also reassuring to know it will happen again. Without a doubt, actually. About a week ago during the swing, I made a comment to a reg while heads-up that I thought I'd just gotten lucky over my first 14000 games and now this was everything readjusting because I was actually not a good player at all. Turns out he has been experiencing a downswing that would make any professional cringe. Now, I'm sure he has flaws and some leaks in his general game (like most people do), but he's certainly not a losing or bad player.

While talking to him a few days ago he showed me some ROI simulations and a ton of graphs that many regs have compiled into a database. It came down to the fact that if you average between 4-5% ROI you are going to experience some MASSIVE downswings. Long-term comparisons of most of the regs indicate that 4-6% is attainable, but if you hold at 6% you're one of the rare fortunate ones (excluding rakeback, obviously). He showed me that it is absolutely possible to run just awful for extended streaks and why (I'll spare the details as I only really grasped about 4 of them). This would explain why there seem to be many temporary regulars in super-turbos. Guys come in, hit the up-side of variance and win. However, the first big downswing hits and they're done. Either they bust out because proper bankroll management isn't followed or they can't handle the game itself. He pointed out that if it wasn't for his "adjusted EV" graph showing him at about 4-5% over 14k games he would've quit looong ago. The guy's not down, but the swift kick of negative variance has hung around for way longer than expected. Over just about 5k games I certainly felt that pain and frustration, but luckily I managed to put a decent amount of volume in to combat it. Yeah, it waned in the last 2 weeks, but a little over a month long downswing isn't awful when coupled with 5k games. Last May I had a terrible month, too, but only played about 1500 games (granted they were different games and limits, but you see the point).

Result of all this frustration - play more games. Math, reasoning, and keeping your head on straight are crucial, but without the volume, none of it will matter. It's coming around at a pretty good time, too. I have a few trips coming up over the next two months and I'm kind of nervous about the playing time dropoff.

My security token finally came in yesterday! Yardle got his about a week ago, but ordered it after me. So, I sent a message to support and they said they'd send it immediately. Maybe the key to improving full tilt's support is to tell them that you requested something a month ago because it came about 5 days after I e-mailed. I know it'd probably be difficult for someone to hack into my account since I'm playing on a mac, but it's a good confidence boost to know my money's protected even better now. I mean, if someone actually did get into that account my life would be in some trouble.

Alright, I'm going to go to work. Yay for the long-term grind.

- Stop it, emo kid.

I watched several videos on Cardrunners site recently - all on the topic of "brain fail." Essentially, the instructor covered a bunch of concepts about how the human mind reacts to various situations/stress. It's incredibly well put together and was exactly what I needed. Unfortunately, a few videos don't translate into jack squat financially. Maybe long-term, but in the short term I'm still getting my face punch-a-sized.

Honestly, it's beginning to really feel like I'm lying to myself. Like I was just lucky before and the results I'm seeing now are the way it should've been all along. I'm constantly checking and re-checking my bust hands to see if I actually did the correct shove/call AND to see if I didn't completely misread the cards and shove something ridiculous (nope, still shoved JJ and lost to 44...again). I know this is just variance. I know it will turn around. I also know that, just like the last 3 weeks, I again lost 11 of my 28 80/20s. I shouldn't have looked b/c I just get more frustrated seeing those results.

The worst of it, though, is that it's definitely having an effect on my mood. When this started, for probably the first 2 to 3 weeks I could shake it off and no one could really tell how the day had gone. Now I find myself not wanting to do anything except sulk or study more hands and late-game scenarios (ok, that's not entirely true...it just takes a lot longer than it should to get my head right again). My sessions are getting shorter b/c I can't seem to take the frustration. My last session tonight lasted 15 minutes (pathetic city) only because I couldn't handle losing KK to AK on two bubbles and QQ to AQ on the last - with the shorty having no more than 150 chips on any of the 3.

Anyway, I'm going to Orange County for the weekend. Yay. Then I'll come back and play again. Maybe Emo kid will go be emo somewhere else by then.

- May's over. Yay.

Even though the last 3 and a half weeks of May sucked completely, I still profited plenty and actually improved a great deal. It won't show on the stat sheet, but at some point the math will even out (maybe this month will be a 4k game upswing...). I really hope it does soon, because I'm leaving near the end of the month for a wedding in Missouri and then getting back just in time to move to a new house! Sweeeeeet! Hello trombone. The excitement is palpable.

I'm still pretty disappointed that the swing affected me as much as it did. I mean, I've gone on some ridiculous swings before, but nothing that lasted 5k games and nearly a month (without playing losing poker for some of it). The real frustrating part is that I took a two day break right at the end of the month to get my head straight. While I definitely liked the time off, I missed two bonus cutoffs by the thinnest of margins. My rakeback provider runs a monthly "rake chase" with the top 25 spots getting a cash bonus for how far on the leaderboard you finish. I finished fourth which is good for $425 bonus. Normally, I'd be happy, but I missed 2nd place by less than $100 in rake paid. That means if I'd played 50 more $50 games in the month I would have gotten an $850 bonus. Sure, I could've lost over that last 50 games, but a $400+ jump would've been nice even if I hadn't won much over that last 50. The other bonus came from full tilt's leaderboard system. By placing on the high limit board, you get a % multiplied by your finishing place's average buy-in. So, I played more $50 games this month than anything which means I would get my finish spot times $50 as a bonus. I missed 5th by less than 1k points (don't know how little that is, but probably could've taken as little as 30 games) and finished in 8th instead.

The goal for this month is just to relax and not worry about when this will turn around. I'm super-rolled to play these and have enough in my bank account to cover the move/bills/rent/food/burritos/pizza parties/monkey bars. Oh, I just got my new matrox dualhead2go system set up so my monitors work perfectly with my laptop now! I know that might not seem like a big deal, but I'm excited.