I'm sick of not putting in enough volume as I should be and reverse prop bets do wonders for me. I'm only at 4nl right now because there's something about starting at the lowest stakes to keep moving on up that I like, but for the first week of jan I'm going to start by giving a buyin for each day that I don't play 5k hands to rikakazak. I met him this year and he was really nice and I learned a lot from him just talking over dinner. I also feel really bad about making a very optimistic 4bet against him with 77 and calling his jam and holding against AK. I'll probably do a different coach I like each week and go back around after I hit everyone.

More volume goals can be detrimental but I find after I get the ball rolling it's easy to play more and I'm also more motivated to review and study. I've learned the most from poker usually after I've played a lot in a short amount of time. I can drop tables naturally when I start moving up where my hourly will improve because less fr tables run anyways.

Over 50k hands at 4nl fr this month my c-bets in hu pots are working at least 45% of the time on average almost regardless of flop texture. My btn steal success is always around 50% as well. It doesn't matter if my button steal is 95% or 60%. I almost always cbet 2/3 pot because I've found this works far more often than if I start throwing in half pot or 3/5 pot sized bets. Also some people start calling really light while others won't to half psb or less and it's just easier to stick with 2/3 psb.



So I was thinking hey if my c-bets and button steals are working this much I should be able to steal at least 85% on the button, cbet every flop, and print money. Unfortunately it seems whenever I do this I start losing unless I go back to my normal 60%ish btn steal. I'm not quite sure why this is though.



It could be that I'm not giving up enough after the flop, but this isn't it. It could be that I tend to open more hands from other positions besides btn/co when I start opening more hands there as well, but I've stopped this. The only thing I can think of is that people donk out a lot at 4nl. It's about 33% of the time against me I think, and it's usually always with something that won't fold to a raise. That would explain why my c-bets are working so much. It's really hard for me to float these people and keep track of exactly what's going on because I 18 table and 1 table stack.

I think the problem is I have to be folding the best hand too often on the river. It's nice that I can win a lot of pots on the flop, but they're going to be small pots. I have to be making too many mistakes on the river when the pot is going to be inflated from me c-betting the flop too much and since I'm mostly playing the field c-betting the flop a is not ever going to be optimal.

I really want to find out what's optimal against the field. Maybe people are so spazzy postflop that I can tighten my btn/co ranges even more and I would do better even though people are folding to btn steals and c-bets so much? Playing tighter would make it easier to multitable and keep me from being exploited by the regs who 3-bet me a lot although I'm not worried at all about that yet.



My winrate is 2.5ptbb over 50k hands so far and I'm running slightly under allin-ev in HM, but I also don't think I've had many set over sets or KK into AA. I'm not sure how to go about finding out what's optimal against the field and right now I think I'm going to have to resort back to trial and error. I know poker is played with people and things depend, but if there ever was a place to play the field it would be 4nl fr. I'm really interested to hear your thoughts.

I have to admit I'm pretty pissed I'm only up this much. I'm not playing as well as I know I can be and I need to change it around and finish this last week strong. I think 16bb/100 is more than doable at 4nl fr on merge and I do notice some people are playing back at me and it is tough to get action when everyone has me noted as a reg, but I need to figure out what's fucked up in my thought process and go from there.



One thing that I find really interesting is that I was doing better when I wasn't using a hud. I only use name/hands/vpip/pfr/3bet/af, but man for some reason maybe I'm better off without it and stereotyping people based on stack size screen name and timing. I just keep my eye on the regs and who I think might be playing back at me which I actually can do better without a hud.

I think I started using a hud around dec 10 but I don't remember for sure. I'm sure it's not all of the problem. I picked dec17 because I think this is the day I started trying to use the PT4 hud but it makes the merge tables lag too much on my computer 18 tabling. I stopped using PT4 around where the upswing starts in the graph. At the same time I am still playing worse after dec17 than before so it's not all PT's fault.

With PT4 I get close to timing out which never happens when I use HM1. My decisions are rushed. I'm thinking maybe this is what happens even when I glance at just vpip/pfr stats when I use a hud in general? Well there's an easy way to test this and it's to not use a hud for my next 20k hands and see how it goes. I like playing without a hud more it's more relaxing and it brings the people aspect back into poker for me. It's just hard not to try to overact to people who are only 3betting you 5% or less and you think they're dicking around with you.

Here's before dec17:



Here's after dec17:



One other thing I want to add is that PT4 is awesome and imo it's a no brainer purchase over HM2. I only used HM2 in beta but I couldn't 8 table with it on merge because it was so resource intensive. PT4 has some insanely good features. It's the best program to analyze hands in and I'm only using HM1 at the moment because I'm used to it and for the hud, but if I go hudless I'd only be using PT4.

Almost a week into it and going well so far. Volume is picking back up at 4nl last couple days. I get to look at results dec24.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMAMNYnOgbs

I've been really trying to stay on schedule but there seems to be fewer and fewer fr games going since I joined merge. I'm going back to 6-max today because I don't want to mix limits at fr. I miss stars where I never really had to worry about what time I was playing and if there would be games going.

I'm still not looking at results until dec24. Hopefully it's going well. I did get pretty aggro against the regs on fri-sat maybe out of boredom and just to see what I could get away with but I started playing normally again and hopefully winning on sun.

I was going to play 10nl fr today but there's only ever like 9 games of it going so I decided to try 12 tabling 6-max. It went pretty horribly the first session and I dropped $45 in allin-ev. I played 18/15 the first session. The second session I decided to steal way more based on analyzing the first session in hem. I played 32/27 and it went pretty horribly but at least I was only $-7 allin-ev that session.

6-max is way different than fr. I think this shows for sure now that there's no way I personally can play a cookie cutter game at 6max and I only have a decent win rate when I 4 or less table and really pay attention. It's really weird because a lot of the stats like my steal success, c-bet %, and c-bet success on flop and turn are similar at 10nl 6-max and 4nl fr. I guess it shows that the game isn't played by stats unless you're a bot. Or maybe I'm analyzing stats wrong in hm or my technical game still has leaks or something.

Of course it could all be variance, but I think it's unlikely. I actually feel like I ran pretty well even allin-ev wise to only be down this much. It just seemed like nothing would go how I would want it to but I'm pretty sure it's because people were playing well against me.

Back on the grind today after doing only 100 hands on merge yesterday. I decided to one table 25nl for 1.5 hrs when I wokeup. Took a break then decided to 18 table 4nl fr since I read that's the most tables you can play and I just wanted to test it out. I played for a little over 2 hours. It went pretty well and every decision was really easy so at least I can always fall back here if things go really bad. I think I'm going to stick to 4nl for a bit because it's fun just mindlessly mass tabling. I kind of want the low variance steady winnings atm too especially since I'll have to deal with longer cashout times on merge and my roll is small.





<edit>

End of day graph. Was about 6.5 hours all together. I guess I only end up making about 8.60/hr allin-ev wise at 4nl and I think I'm running hot so I probably need to move up to 10nl tomorrow. I guess I'll keep slowly moving up to keep confidence going and so I don't spew off a ton of money because I only deposited 500 on merge.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...s-too-1134286/



tl;dr version: "To maintain healthy player and financial balances within the cardroom, players with weekly winnings of 750 Euros(or equivalent of) on our cash tables will see their access limited to certain tables. The status of each player will be reset at 00:00 every Sunday at which point all the tables will be made available again.This restriction does not apply to any tournaments."

I dropped 4bi in allin-ev today and was wondering why the games were so tough for a saturday. I got this popup on a number of tables table. It will make it impossible for me to 8 table during non peak hours now. Also I think I'm only up about 100 euro since Nov 1.

Fish are getting warned too: "so I just got the popup that donkeys will get when they sit cause I'm currently 2 * (which obv has no baring on skill) it say's:
"the rating of the table is higher than yours, do you really want to play on this table?"

Jared Poker is doing a contest to win an hr of coaching with him if you talk about mental game of poker in blog, so here I go!

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=270

This is by far the best book I've read on dealing with the mental game of something. I've read inner game of tennis, josh waitzin's art of learning, and tommy angelo's elements of poker. The other books are good reads but this is in a class of its own and I'm not just saying that because it's his contest. I gave the book a good review in the micro forum a while ago.

Anyways on to my personal struggles with the mental game. I have many but one is that I freak out whenever my winrate isn't around 8bb. It's kind of dumb but for some reason that's what winrate I got into my head as being acceptable preuigea and it just always kind of stuck with me. I feel like I've spent so much time on the game that it's where I should be at, but at the same time I feel like I'm not playing optimally and I wonder how the 200nl or higher people would play. I know they generally play looser but I feel like I just lose a lot when I do that and I'm not sure why. When I tighten up my range from the button and co the game seems easier.

Lately I feel like I'm kind of stuck. I feel like I'm playing an insanely stupid tight tag style and it's probably optimal for me, but at the same time I don't learn much and I'm not sure if it's optimal overall. It feels like I'm only winning money when I get big hands in good spots and other than that I just kind of slightly lose or breakeven. I think there's definitely some things a good 200nl player would do differently that I'm not doing but it's so hard to catch every little spot and videos only cover so much.

Maybe everything will start clicking if I just keep putting 3k hands in a day and learning how these weird 20nl people play. I have about 6k hands so far in december and I feel great playing on a schedule. I'm about breakeven so far which is kind of disappointing because I feel like I'm playing pretty well overall and today is a friday. I know everyone who has played any decent amount of poker has had a million 6k breakeven stretches, but I'm kind of afraid that I'll just be making most of my winnings from rb again at the end of the month. I hope I'm actually learning useful things and getting better.

I'm always super motivated to grind while down and then not so much when I get ahead. I need to reread mental game of poker probably. Today was constantly having people hit flushes and runner runnering things and I was confused when they would check raise river when they called twice with bottom pair but I think I did run hot towards the end. There were only 4 tables going which helped me really zone in on the bad tags, maniacs, and nittier tags. I'm always scared to play I feel like I suck or something. Anyone have anything to help them get over this? I feel like such a nit because I freak out when I'm about to have a losing day now. =[[