Whoa!  Did not realize it had been 2 weeks since my last post.  TBH, I had been kind of disgusted with poker, so writing about it was the last thing I wanted to do.  I was on like a 30K hand break-even.  The old grinders like out there are going to say "WTF @ 30K?!?  That's only like 3 bad DAYS for anyone who is hard core.  I find chunks of 30K hand breakevens in my stool."  Yeah...  but sometimes, it's not how *much* or how *long* you lose, it just *how* you lose.  And some ways of losing are just a lot more aggravating than others.

So that was the start of my month (of course running under ev as usual).  Some people would have just kept plodding along, but after I took a day off, I looked at those hands and right away, I could tell something was wrong with my CO and BU win rates.  So a few filters later, I figured out what the problem was...

So back in the old FT days, I was the standard 15/11 full ring nit.  Some people may even claim I was closer to 13/10.  So I would open like 30+% from the button (as most full ring nits did at the time), and fold like 60+% when facing a 3bet.  So whenever I flatted a 3bet from a resteal position, if I just breathed on the pot, the villains would fold, fearing that the Great Nit showed some interest in a large pot.  As a result, many months, I showed a PROFIT when facing a 3bet, even with the high fold to 3bet.  It was collecting free money taking down every pot that people didn't show an interest in. 

Fast forward to 2012... and I am now min-raising almost 50% of buttons.  And playing fewer tables, I have more free time and I start defending wide without realize *how* wide.  Really wide...  like only folding a little over half my opens.  So now, everyone starts 3 barreling me more often than I'm used to.  And whenever I breathe on the pot, I get shoved on.  Losing over half your stack with 54s in a 3bet pot is pretty gross.  Anyway, it turns out that I had been losing almost 3bb whever I faced a 3bet on the CO and BU.  That's pretty gross when I would have only lost 2bb had I just folded 100% of the time.  LOL.  What a Fish!

Anyway, it only took me 30K hands to figure that out, so now that I've adjusted, I'm winning at 26bb/100 over my last 5K hands.  Probably everyone is epecting me to defend wide, and now that I've tightened up, I'm in Valuetown - tied with Paris as my favorite city in the world.  Small sample, I know.  But just like you should know a little first aid in case of emergencies, you should know how to figure out if something is wrong with your game, and how you should go about fixing it.  Because sometimes, as you're trying out new things, other things will get out-of-whack, and you need to be able to fix it.

At some point I may write more about the complexities of changing one part of your game.  Because changing one little thing will most likely affect other areas.