Played a lil 200NL today

I had two sessions of $1/2 NL today for two different reasons. My first session I played was at UB where my roll is pretty low because I traded off a bunch to one of my friends. I made $500 in that session and built up my roll enough on there so now I can play $2/4 NL on there.

My second session was on FTP at $1/2 NL because I was making a vid for one of my students, Rob. He wanted to see how I played and requested that I play on FTP because that's where he plays. During the video, I made a few errors but got into a lot of interesting spots. It should make for some great discussion. I actually finished down $ in the one hour vid but I played a bit longer after I finished recording and ended up making $500 on that session as well.

So I finished up about $1k over 800 hands or so for the day. I played pretty solid aside from a few mishaps when I was recording. Here's the HEM stats:


As a side note, I've decided to take the EV stat off my holdem manager stats. We had a discussion today in our Destined2pwn meeting tonight about this EV stat. We pretty much came to the conclusion that it doesn't do a whole lot of good to worry about it and at the end of the day, all that really matters is $$$ won or lost. Questions were brought up about the stat's accuracy because it seems like everyone is always running below expecation... well, I believe the stat is accurate and the reason you hear that everyone is running below EV is because no one bitches about running above expecation.

Also, Noel pointed out a few situations where the EV stat can just be totally misleading... Example: you have KK and get 90% of the money in on the flop QXT then the villain turns two pair with QJ and you get in the last 10% of the money bad... and suck out on a T river... it seems like you're running way above EV when that really isn't the case because you got most of the money in good on the flop.

But anyways, I've decided that looking at that stat is wasted mental energy and I'm not going to look at it anymore. I'd encourage all my students to just get rid of that stat from their HEM display and just focus on things that you can improve with your game. We can't do anything when we're running below EV to make us run better in the future, so there's no point in worrying about it.

The only time you should really look at it is if you are getting really depressed or discouraged about your results. Then I think it's ok to take a peek just to help figure out why you are losing. If you see that you are just running terrible then it might be a boost of confidence that could help you in future sessions... otherwise you may assume that you're just not playing well whereas that may not be the case.