Questioning the Reasonableness of my Goal

After a weekend of playing online poker I am beginning to question my sanity as well as the reasonableness of my goals. I spent many hours playing poker and ended up down approximately $2. I was down almost $4 in cash games (even with my newly discovered strategy involving a tighter range of opening hands and more aggressive raising). The tournaments don’t seem to be going as bad and I have made marginal cashes in some of the 5 FTP point tournaments.

In post session review I am finding that I am stacking people off when they have a better hand than my perceived monster. Over the weekend my biggest losing hands were as follows:

JJ ($-1.28)
AKo ($-0.97)
AKs (-$-0.38)
KK ($-0.36)
KK ($-1.12)
KQo ($-1.00)
JJ ($-0.36)
ATo ($-2.03 – flopped 2 pair – villain had case Aces for set)

These 8 hands add up to $7.50 in losses. ARGH! I guess I need to learn to get away from great starting hands if either a) someone is betting like they have a better hand or b) the board is textured such that my hand has lost value. I need to research it but I assume that I should not be shipping my stack in unless I have the nuts or 2nd nuts at a minimum (regardless of the villain and his/her stats).

Although I wanted to move towards multi-tabling more than 2 cash games this week, I think I will hold out another week and see if I can’t log some winning sessions. Also, other than the Daily Dollar, I think I will take a break from the SNGs and MTTs and try and improve the cash game skills this week.