Random but sombering thought.

As I lie sleepless (why I'm sleepless I really don't know; I'm tired but can't manage to fall asleep), I think about stuff. Maybe that's why I'm struggling with insomnia, who knows. But I think about stuff. Occasionally, I think about something interesting enough that I have to get out of bed and go look it up, or perform calculations on it, or, as was the case here, run filters in Hold'em Manager on it.

Basically, I've been slamming my head against the problem of "where do I leak money that made April a losing month?" and not really getting anywhere. So I lay in bed thinking about hypotheses for stuff to look for. Like, am I bluffing recklessly? For instance, if I check-raise the flop and get called, am I too "sticky" and bet the turn, shove the river, in spots where I should really just give up?

Or perhaps I don't bet enough rivers for value? Do I check back stuff like top pair on the river when I could have eeked out a little value?

Etc.

So I look through this stuff (this, by the way, is why I'm at the computer at 2am), and I realize, in passing, really, that I lost about $2k last month - not including rakeback and bonuses, which made thankfully breakeven - but that I paid over $5k in rake. This should come as no surprise; when you play 50k hands, you pay a lot of rake. But this realization has a psychologically important feature:

I'm not losing to other players. Even last month, I beat the other players to the tune of 3BB/100; it's just that I'm paying even more in rake.

Does that matter? Not really, in the sense that my net result is none the better from me coming to this, but it does at least put a stopper in this lingering idea that I'm being outplayed. What I learned is that generally, I play better than my opponents - even when the cards I get are as shitty as they were in April. And that will hopefully make me sleep better at night.

Speaking of which...