Sigh.

You don't hear much about guys who take their shot and miss. But I'll tell you what happens to 'em. They wind up humping crappy jobs on graveyard shifts trying to figure out how they came up short.
-Mike McDermott

Mired in a losing funk and somewhat convinced that I'm costing myself money by sitting in the rockfest $10/20 games instead of the milk and honey $15/30 games I decided to move up and take a shot tonight.

I got clobbered pretty bad, losing $947 in almost 4 hours of play. My W$WSF (percentage of the time I won money when seeing flop) for the 500 hands was at under 28%. In my ~90,000 hands of from 3/6 to 10/20, this stat is more like 38%. Given a VP$IP (percentage of the time I voluntarily put money into the pot) of about 20%, I played about 100 hands and won 10% fewer of these than I could expect to win in the longrun, if my other stats are a fair comparison. The average pot was $170, so by this method, I figure I experienced $1700 of bad luck tonight. So I can credit myself with an imaginary $753 win and make an imaginary mortgage payment.

Attempting to quantify my bad luck isn't meant to suggest my game was spotless by any means. I misjudged how much players would adjust to the image I created and missed a couple value bets. There were times when I felt totally lost figuring out how to play against the 2/3 blind structure and the more aggressive opponents, although you tend to feel lost a lot when you miss every flop. So generally, this session really just felt like I played fairly well but got unlucky.

Even though a loss like this hurts, especially when I haven't been running well, I still think this was a shot worth taking. The $15/30 game looks like it has a lot more selection available and more pure maniacs. Still, the swings are going to be pretty severe, so coming in under-bankrolled is highly risky. The difference between $10/20 and $15/30 might not seem like a big one, but in addition to the 50% higher stakes, players are much more aggressive, which makes a bigger bankroll even more important.

In spite of this, I'll probably take another shot at this game some evening soon. Aside from the way the game felt, my track record of consistently winning at every level I've tried and the 28% W$WSF in this session are enough to convince me that this loss doesn't mean I'm outclassed at this level. $947 is a lot of money for me, but this was only a 32BB loss, which isn't really very severe in the world of online limit hold'em.

If I get spanked again, I'll whimper softly and retreat back to the relative safety of lower limits, muttering that I could beat those games if I only had a bigger roll...

... sounds pretty lame.

Sigh.