Turning corners and plugging leaks

Internet Poker / Matthew Pitt / 13 January 2010 / Leave a Comment

Do any of you remember the old Yorkshire Pudding? The one who used to say he was going to play XXX hands of XXX and then within a week or two had completely changed his mind and moved onto the next challenge? Well he's dead and a new Yorky Puds has taken his place.

At the turn of the year I promised myself I would learn Pot-limit Omaha and stick to it even if it killed me, or even worse I went bust. Things started really well with me winning seven of my first ten sessions for an unsustainable rate of about 30bb/100.

However, things quickly turned, as they can in Omaha, and I lost four of my next five sessions to wipe out nearly all of my profit. Now in times gone by I would have jacked it in and gone back to playing Hold'em or something else, and believe me I was close to deleting my database and doing this, but something stopped me and I have carried on.

Instead of crying to myself I decided to analyse my hand histories to see if there were any glaring leaks in my game and found that there were (and still is to be honest) and made some changes and tweaks accordingly. I then lost my next session by a whopping 2.5bb but in the early hours of this morning it all seemed to come together at once and I won over four buy-ins in 270 hands!

Although I still have a lot to learn and I need to stop making two or three big mistakes per session, I really feel like I have turned a corner in my poker career. My volume isn't massive but I've so far played 2,831 hands and should log 10,000 by the end of the month. I so pleased I didn't delete my database and simply stuck at the task in hand because it proved top myself I can endure a blip in variance. Maybe my meds are kicking in or something?

Hopefully by the time I update next I will have made it past the 4k hand mark and still be in the black. I've a lot to learn and it is very early days but I think I might have finally found my game, at long last. Despite the variance being higher a lot of decisions are far more straight-forward, IMO, than in Hold'em which must suit me on one level or other.

Well I'll leave it there for now, lots to do and not enough time. BTW, the comments are fixed so please say hello or call me a fish or something!

Thanks for reading and best of luck at the tables!