Well, it has been going extremely well lately.  I still don’t play enough volume to earn some truly sick profit, but I am very happy with how I’ve been playing.  For reference, here is a graph of my last 187k HU hands ranging from 1/2 to 5/10.  You can see my 60whatever buyin downswing around hand 36k and the subsequent recovery.

When I think about how much money I used to make in the golden days of Cake, it’s scary to realize how bad I really was and how little I understood how to truly play good poker.  While there are a number of little things to attribute to my improvement, I am going to paraphrase a quote I read in one of the HSNL threads a while back which really sums it all up.  It went something like “estimating your own hand range is harder than estimating your opponent’s” and this is probably one of the more profound things I’ve read which really crystallized my own improvement.  Once I shifted my focus away from my opponent’s range and began to frame my thinking around what I represented and my opponent’s actions within that context, it just clicked.  That isn’t to say I never thought about it before, but now it dominates the way I think about hands and my overall strategy.

However, I am a little discouraged by the state of HU games nowadays.  PokerStars in particular seems to have gone to shit ever since FTP implemented their new open table policy.  I routinely sit at anywhere from 4-6 tables across 2/4 to 5/10 on Stars for an hour or longer without a single person sitting.  FTP is a little bit better and it seems the number of mediocre regs is much higher so spreading action across those two sites is working alright for now.  The dead time inbetween action really kills the hourly though, especially when compared with 6max.  It’s a shame too, because 6max is such a god damn boring game and it hurts me deep inside to even consider playing it for an extended period of time.  Whoever made 6max the standard anyway?  Maybe it’s time to roll out some 4max tables and break the stagnation that has become online poker.  I guess I could always take up PLO too, but that game has never excited me.