Kilay

Well, not quite but I took quite a hit the last 3 days playing and feel miserable about and need your help with some of my hands.

I've lost like 10 buy-ins in my last 2 sessions - 2k hands, 4 this Friday and almost 6 today and I feel like absolute shit, those 2 gruesome days result me in breaking even for the last 11k hands which feels like a sin to me on a limit as 25NL... whatever, I guess most will tell me it's completely standard (either that or that I can't beat 25NL... I hope it's the first one most frankly...). Like half those buy-ins are proven coolers/bad beats looking at them through HEM but the other half was because of some gruesome spots and I was wondering if there were any people around that would care to help me comment these spots...

Spot #1:

The guy in this hand was playing 45/20 over 20 hands and seemed to be mostly a calling station. His overall aggression frequency was 21% but that doesn't say much over such a small sample size.

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Spot #2:

The guy in this hand was playing 43/17 over 23 hands and was pretty aggro, his aggro frequency was 42% and he didn't seem to like folding so far. Not sure if it helps any way, I guess it does constructing his preflop range, his preflop 3-bet percentage was 25%, obviously a small sample size but that's a lot of 3-bets nontheless.

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Spot #3:

The guy in this hand was playing 19/3 over 36 hands and had a aggro frequency of 14% and didn't seem to like folding post flop once he was in the flop. The hand before this one I saw him minraising and 4-betting the flop quite small with JTo on a KQ9 flop with a flushdraw on it, naturally I took some weight off nut hands in his range but nontheless, the overbet shove really threw me off.

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Spot #4:

The guy in this hand turned out to be playing 41/19 over 54 hands but I think was playing around 70/55 or so for over 20 hands when this hand occured. His aggro frequency turned out to be around 45% over those 54 hands and he was generally acting like your standard aggrodonk. Btw, his raise here is a shove.

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Spot #5:

The guy in this hand turned out to be playing 54/13 over 113 hands and was extremely aggressive postflop, his aggro frequency over those 113 hands turned out to be 72 so that's pretty damn high. Preflop though he seemed reasonably stationy and just trying to see flops so he could go nuts postflop. I hadn't seen him limp/3-bet so I wasn't sure how to act on that one but didn't feel quite good to get it in preflop because of his overall nitty preflop opening stat.

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Anyways, apart from these hands I am really struggling with my mindset for poker and that has been going on for quite a long time now. It seems that I know the fundamentals quite well overall, understand the nature of the game and are pretty reasonable at figuring out most spots but I have a hard time getting my grinding mindset right. I don't grind enough because I am afraid of losing sessions, call me an idiot about it, I know it's insane and I feel kind of ashamed about it but that's the way it is. I also have small tilt problems, half-way my losing session today I started tilting again and tilted off exactly 1 buy-in directly after losing a pot, it ain't much with how I'd use to tilt (I used to tilt from losing 3 buy-ins already and my max buy-ins lost on tilt is about 4, I know, really bad but I worked on it quite a bit and I got most of it out of me) but it's still 1 buy-in unnecessary lost.

I also seem to be really bad at not thinking about my results in hands that I lost... I understand that a set over set is a cooler you probably won't get away from unless the flop is super, super bad (like 876 monotone) but I guess some or maybe even most hands I posted above are coolers but I like to believe I could have made a different move and shit like that. Thing is, my confidence is really low and I constantly doubt if I understand things good enough to be even considered a winner in poker in general so I tend to feel all this insecurity whenever I lose a hand and wonder if I misplayed it.

Anyways, long post, blah, blah, blah, I would like to thank everybody in advance that was willing to take a look here and help me out, later, Kilay

So I got back to playing on Pokerstars and been doing ok, didn't have great run yesterday but I am done whining over beats so let's not get over that.

The thing is, I want to boost my bankroll as fast as possible but there isn't rakeback at Pokerstars. Now you do get these FPP's and I don't really need them to buy anything at the moment and would rather use them to boost my bankroll to be able to play higher in a faster pace. Now I can buy the 50$ bonus but I've heard that the bonusses aren't amazing value and you should wait for the higher ones if you do want to take them up but I don't think waiting for the 285$ one (the next step) is going to be that good for me since I'd rather boost my bankroll a little more short-term (playing 25NL and 50NL at the moment and I really want to get to 100NL before the end of the year).

Now I was wondering, are there any other ways to easily turn your FPP's into money for your Pokerstars account since I could do that to give it a nice boost. I guess that if there are any better possibilities for around 10k-12k FPP's, they may even be better value based on $ per FPP ratio.

If anyone knows any good ways to use your FPP's to boost your bankroll on a relative short-term (for a 25NL / 50NL player) please let me know.

Random pics:







Later, Kilay

Ok, so I took like 4-5 days off from poker because I was on some annoying break-even stretch and also because, quite honestly... the iPoker software totally tilted my ass off (partially because the software sometimes acts weird when typing in bet amounts, made me shove when I ment to c-bet because it forgot the dot a couple times) so, I went shopping with some mates this week and I stepped into a gameshop and I saw Saints Row 2 laying there for the Xbox 360 and I kind of was waiting for that game for almost 2 months becauwe well... it may not be as complex as Starcraft and other RTS or other kind of games, but SHIT, it sure is a whole lot of fun.

And what I found out is, that it is the best de-tilting tour EVER !!! You can put out all sorts of crazy over the top violence and the best thing is, the game isn't even bad without the violence, the storyline is quite good, doesn't look great but not bad either but it's so fucking diverse, name some crazy shit and you can probably do it in that game.

Destruction derby's, cage fights, beating people up dressed as a cop for some TV-show, drive around in a septic truck and spray shit all over the people and buildings around, just performing drive-by's or fly this big-ass Apache-like helicopter and just cause pure mayhem shooting around with rockets and a mini gun and a lot more crap, and all this is apart of the storyline which basically involves some nice, funny and bad-ass cutscenes and after that you performing a lot and I mean A LOT of awesome and chaotic shoot-outs.

Anyways, that was it, call me addicted (I probably am...) but I finished the game in 4 days playing a little more than 35 hours over like 3.5-4 days and I thought it might as well write something about and recommend it to anyone out there with tilt problems...

Well, that would probably be all, hope all of you a lot of luck on the tables and I hope I can do better now since I am starting poker again after a 5 or so day break. And I hope I helped anyone out with fixing their tiltproblems this way.

Greetings, Kilay