- 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.