[djshawk]

I appreciate you went to the trouble of typing all this out but I really disagree with almost everything you say. It's like you are teaching yourself to be weak tight because you are afraid of getting stacked. I went through a similar line of thinking, doing everyting I could to not get stacked and I think it's really held me back.

Granted at NL25 and NL50 you aren't going to get played back at all that much, and anybody who is a decent player won't be there for long. But by making rules like this you are playing robot poker and not adapting to situations.

Sneaking in with a premium hand is such an easy way to stack an over aggressive player who assumes you will always reraise AA/KK preflop - situational.

Not 4 betting KK preflop when it looks like you are going to get action is bad, the guy obviously likes his hand so get him to pay as much as possible now while he still likes it. If the flop comes Axx and he has QQ you aren't going to get much more out of him, if he has AK you let him get there cheaply. If you have KK preflop and can get it all in, do. Sometimes you'll see AA and lose a stack, it sucks but there is so much other crap that he could have stacked off with you did the right thing.

When somebody donks into you on the flop you need to look at that player and ask yourself why they donked. Is the board really drawy? If so they may want to ensure it doesn't get checked through to protect their hand. Is the board all low cards? If so he's probably put you on overcards and thinks you can't call a bet. If you've been cbetting a lot and he had a good hand he'd likely check raise, people are greedy like that. If he's gonna call a small cbet then maybe he thinks a donk is better because you might fold. Getting donked into really sucks but sometimes you just have to man up and raise, a lot of the time they will fold.

If you flop a set you should generally be happy to go to showdown with it for your stack, the board would have to be pretty horrible to warrant a fold, unless you are deep. If you've raised pre, bet flop & turn then the river should only be a small bet in relation to the pot and folding to it shouldn't ever cross your mind.

Not slowplaying is good advice, but sometimes it can be the right thing to do, especially if you are in position.

Being obsessed with bankroll & winrate is also something I do and it's really hard to get out of, but you must try! Dropping from $600 to $500 means nothing, if you are constantly checking br then you are going to try and reason that you have done something wrong. You likely havn't but by changing things, ie coming up with these rules, you will make your play worse. Swings are always going to happen, when you hit 30bb/100 over 2k hands you aren't the best poker player in the world even though it feels like you are, you havn't finally cracked it and will never lose again, you are just running well. Likewise when you drop 6bi you don't suck but it's much harder to deal with psychologically because we all associate losing with bad. The best way to deal with this is look at results over a meaningful sample/time period, how much did you win in Jan, Feb, Mar etc, 15k hand samples etc. These are still small samples but should all involve some running good, some running bad and so should overly inflate or deflate your ego.

I hope you get something out of this post, the biggest issue with my game at the moment is I'm too weak tight and nitty, and I'm certain this is because of thinking similar things to what you posted when I was playing at those levels.