Thanks Dos

In response to my last blog post Dos left a comment. To be honest I didn't even know he read my blog, but as I'm finding out more and more a lot more people read than I think. Anyway, here's the comment:

You run good at the ***** and bad at Commerce. It's a bit silly and hypocritical to think about things like not playing the Commerce 40 because you get crushed. Remember that whole post about the guy who PMed you down below? It's one long game and I'm sure you're still ahead when looking at your total results. Go play Commerce 40 it's almost invariably a better game.

Finally, your game selection skills are almost so nitty to be detrimental. This is very much related to the driving issue. Sometimes your overall $$/hour would be higher by sitting in a crappy game than driving somewhere else to play and losing an hour or more by driving/parking/waiting to sit in a better game for 3 hours.

And it's pretty much spot on. Regarding the first section, the weird part is that I completely understand that he's completely correct, but that doesn't really change the fact that the Commerce 40 is in my head. It feels like I've played it a lot (which really isn't true, I checked, I have something like 100 hours life time, but that's probably because I've played it for a short time on a lot of days I played at Commerce for a full shift), and every time I sit I catch myself stealing myself mentally for a big loss. This is obviously horrible, and I even asked Mike about it and his advice was "well you can't play in a game where you feel like that, so either don't play it or don't feel like that." I think he's right, but not playing isn't really a viable plan. I've known for a very long time now that if you want to play LHE for a living in the LA area you need to be very comfortable in the Commerce 40. That's just the way it is, and I need to get over a little 200 bet downer grind my way back to being confident in the game. One thing I will say is that I think I have run extremely bad in terms of getting into good games over there, because I can think of a half dozen times where I sat in the must move and it was just awful and I quit and played 20 instead. But that aside, Dos is right that I just need to play the game and stop pretending I've taken a shot at it when I have like 100 hours in it lifetime.

Regarding the game selection nittery, I will cop to being quite selective about what 40 games I sit in off shift, but also offer a few reasons beyond pure nittery that I do it. First of all by the time my shift ends I am usually tired and having trouble concentrating, and taking a break to drive somewhere else is practically something I want and need to do. I'm not really sure how everyone else does it, but I'm a morning person and I function best mentally 30 minutes after I wake up and go downhill from there. Danielle is almost the complete opposite, routinely getting her best work done at 7pm, but that's just not something I can do. Second, I believe Dos and I have a rather different system for evaluating win rate in a given game. It's possible that he's correct and I'm wrong, but when I look at a game with 4 professional and 2 fish I don't see a real profit source. His argument (I think) is that I will break even against the 4 pros and take money from the fish, and that it's still possible that the fish are losing so much money that all 5 (if I sit) pros are winning something like $60/hour. The more I think about it he may be correct on this one, but my third issue interacts with this one in some complicated ways. It's hard to go from from a 9 handed soft game with lots of open limping and 5 way pots to a 6 or 7 handed game with 4 other guys who play super well. You have to completely change your thought process for most hands, thinking about your range and being combative instead of (often) just determining if you're ahead and if not if you have odds to draw. And finally, it's just kind of awkward to stay and play the 20, because it just feels, you know, weird and wimpy. On top of that a few times I've been asked to come back into the 40 game to "help out" and obviously I'm not going to say no but obviously I already chose not to be in that game and going back into it gets me a little out of whack mentally and well it's just not great.

But in general yes Dos you're completely correct and I am very grateful for your opinions. I need to play the Commerce 40 because I've tricked myself into believing that I'm cursed over there and that's just not the case, and I need to be more aggressive in sitting in games with experts, not only because it's probably often correct from a $$$ point of view, but also because doing so will make me a better player in the long term. So in short, thanks :)