7BI down..... going to take it easy now

So April has not been treating me well so far.... I did ok for about 500 hands, and then in 2 days I dropped 7BI. Going through my hand histories, in the past 1700 hands I have had the following:

QQ < AA vs a 35/30 BB vs SB
AK < AA vs a LAG
KK < AA
55 < 99 on a 594 flop
TT < J9 on a 259 flop (river is a 9)
KQ < AQ on a 48Q flop (villain limp-called preflop and I stacked off for 60BBs)
TQ < 88 on a 8Q6 flop (lost about 60BBs on this one.... might have been tilting a bit)
and finally 55 this hand vs an aggro lag


So basically have not been running that well :-( but thats poker :-)

I have some important exams coming up in 4 weeks and lots of revision to do, so I have decided to move down to 25NL until after my exams are over because I don't want to go on life tilt and let it affect my revision. So for the rest of the month (and some of next month) I am going stick to playing 25NL and play a few low BI tourneys.... and basically just play poker for fun of it and to de-stress. Once exams are over I will move back up to 50NL and hopefully run good like Mr Rahl!

I know I said I would stick to 25NL.... but decided to play some of the 15c/30c deepstacked tables on full tilt last night, but only brought in for $30, so my relative stack was only 100BBs. The games were pretty good, and I think I played fairly solid poker, and managed to end up only slightly down after I lost with set under set again.


Having run into aces so many times in the last few days, I remembered a discussion I had a long time ago with some members on the uni poker society about shoving AK preflop and so I did a few calculations.

I think that a lot of people don't realise quite how much difference having an A and a K makes to the probability of your opponent holding AA or KK. For example, if I hold QQ in the BB, its folded to the SB who openshoves (unlikely but whatever), what is the probability that he has AA or KK: ((4/50)*(3/49))+((4/50)*(3/49)) = 1/102 So, every time you are HU with QQ, there is a 1 in 102 chance that you are up against AA or KK (based purely on probability). Now if we repeat the calculation, but we have AK: ((3/50)*(2/49))+(3/50)*(2/49)) = 1/204 So, if we hold AK, it makes the probability that our opponent has AA or KK half as likely, which I think is pretty significant.

Obviously other factors need to be taken into account such as stats, reads, number of opponents going AI etc.... and I am not saying that it is correct or not to shove AK preflop... but I just thought it was interesting that having the A and K 'blockers' makes it twice as unlikely for your opponent to have AA or KK.