Well, I don't wanna post hands and show you how unlucky I have been these first ~70 HUSNGs I've played but I'm really starting to get a little desperate. That's because I can't seem to win the matches due to the fact that I lose around 90% of the preflop all-ins when the blinds are high. Most of the time I'm even a huge favourite... Yeah bla, everybody knows these stories...
Sure, I probably still have a lot of leaks but the frustrating thing is that I'm very often playing my opponents well and have a 2-1 or even bigger chiplead over them. But I can't seem to finish them off because they run lucky in most all-in situations and make a comeback only to run lucky again and defeat me. And we're talking about regular speed games and after all this hard work they defeat me in a few lucky (or unlucky for me) minutes.
So why this thread? I'm looking for some advice on how I can analyze my play the best, find leaks and maybe defeat my opponents earlier (before the blinds are very high). Of course there will always be all-in situations even with lower blinds - when the effective stacks are lower and we are still earlier in the match. I just don't know how I can analyze the match the best way. Usually if there are crucial hands I review them or post them for discussion. But I can't say "in this hand I made that big mistake which led to..." especially since the deep and midblindplay seems to work fine - still I want to find my leaks in these phases and keep looking for spots I could play different and maybe beat my opponents in some different ways (like getting more value when I'm ahead, maybe not folding certain hands, estimate their hand ranges more precisely... - basically mostly improving the overall postflop skills I guess).
When I played fullring SNGs I could only win during the endgame obviously and analyzed my push/fold decisions with the SNG Wizard. That won't help me improve my postflop skills though. Obviously watching videos is always good and I especially like the sessionreview videos the most because I get an deeper insight into the decision making. But maybe you could give me some more advice how to analyze my session in the best possible way. How do you guys do it (or did it) to improve your overall postflop skills?
A lot of the leaks in my own game that I've fixed have been by getting help from other people. It seems that some situations that I take as standard aren't even optimal. For example, I had a big leak on monotone flops (3 to flush) with top pair and deeper stacks because I pretty much always just tried to push my opponents off their flush draws. For some reason I had never even considered slowing down, but in a Croixdawg video I watched I saw him flat call top pair no kicker with ~50BB stacks and it made me rethink my play. Talk to people, watch videos, and just try to constantly think about WHY you are making each play. If you don't have an answer to why you are doing something then you might want to look into it a bit more.
Oh, that's a really good example - I had the same leak as well two months ago on the $30-$50's, I used to play top pair type hands overly aggressively on drawy boards, basically trying to get it in on the flop as quickly as possible to make people pay for chasing their draws, because that's how I learned it.
I used to post in a german forum on a regular basis, and the general tone among the regulars - who are mostly winning low-stakes players - was that you have to get it in because "they may call you with a draw" and that "an edge is an edge", meaning if you're a 55% favorite against their range, then you have to get it in and you're a weak fish if you even think about a different strategy.
This overly aggressive strategy didn't work out at all for me - I dropped from the $100's back to the $20's in march because I was losing all my small 55% favorite coinflips and also run into better hands quite often, so I had 20+ BI downswings on a regular basis.
After that, I seriously reevaluated my entire game, became a husng.com member and started to watch all these cool videos.
One think which really made me rethink was when I watched this video from Croixdawg - it was I think the 3rd hand in the match against an opponent who was aggressive these two first hands, Croix got dealt AQ in the BB, he 3bet and got shoved on. Well, this used to be an insta-snapcall for me "you have AQ, you have the nuts, you can never ever even think about folding" - but I mean, Croix obviously knows what he's doing, so I started to seriously rethink my entire game.
Then I stumbled upon that excellent "Optimizing Growth" article from Skates and watched Cog's video where he plays this different, more limp-based strategy. This all helped me a lot widen my horizon and get a more general understanding of the game.
Another important thing I learned here is patience - I watched many of these high-stames heads-up cash videos before and saw high-stakes players like Krantz and WiltOnTilt play each other, running fancy bluffs all the time - but when I tried some of these moves on $50 husng's, it went horribly wrong, none of my king high hero calls, none of my trying to move him off his flush trying to represent a boat bluffs ever worked.
I've also lost a lot of money to passive fish, because I saw this so often in these high-stakes cash videos that the coaches said "he'll raise you if he has anything that beats you", so I always valuetowned myself with things like middle pair on the river - I completely neglected the fact that these were high-stakes cash videos and that people in low-stakes husng's are a lot more passive, even with big hands.
Before I joined husng.com, I was so convinced that my game was correct and that I was a huge winning player on the $50, though I could never understand why I always lost when I took a shot at the $100's.
After I joined, the first thing I watched was Primo's excellent fundamentals series - and this already helped me plug a lot of leaks in my game, and it also made me realized that I was playing overly aggressive post-flop before, almost like a maniac.
Jack