I really don't want to make this blog post. Especially after the last one, with it's grandiose "I'm going to take on the world, nothing's gonna stand in my way!" sort of tone.

Poker is kicking my ass. I'm pretty sure I'm running bad but I'm getting to a point where I doubt my own judgment. I have now played like 25k hands of 5/10 near breakeven, 30ish hands of 2/4 breakeven. I haven't had a session where I've won five buy-ins or more in over a month. So we all know what that means- less enthusiasm, less motivation to put in hands.

I've spent basically the first week of this month working very hard on my game. I have made certain resources available to me which I didn't have before, and I can say that these unnamed resources have improved my understanding of NLHE by a hell of a lot. So that's good.

But anyway, we all know that when we're struggling, oftentimes the best thing to do is take a break, come back fresh, whatever. I subscribe to that and I'm now on my third or fourth go-round I would say. I don't know if I've ever seen this talked about, but when you take a break, come back all fresh and hungry, and you get ***** slapped AGAIN, it leaves you even less motivated and less enthusiastic than you were before you took the break. At least that's how it works for me. And that's what keeps happening.

I work on my game, I watch videos, I take the time off. I come back ready for action and I just get humbled again and again. It hurts even more to tangibly know that I'm improving, and yet not seeing anything in terms of results.

I need something to break me out of this funk. So I think I'm going to start working on my HU game with a coach. I've had short periods of playing HU and I've always found it really fun. Unfortunately I tilt like a madman when things don't go well. But I'm certain that learning HU is in my best long term interests so what better time than now?

Anyway gl to you all.

So this month has been a little rough. Since I moved back down I've played 23k hands of 2/4 breakeven and 4k hands at 3/6 up like $3k. I mean, I guess 30k hands break even is standard but I haven't had a long break even run in quite a while and coming off such a prodigious downswing at 5/10 it's kind of a bitter pill to swallow. On the bright side, the combination of that experience, my car deal falling through, and thinking over my last blog post has led me to having a really clear head about poker, life, and my goals for the first time in a long time.

People commented on my last blog, which led me to read it over and think through what I was saying a little more. I expressed in that post that I was disappointed in myself for a lot of reasons, but the more I thought, the more disappointed I became. I have made a lot of choices that have slowed down my progress in poker, but that car thing takes the cake.

What the **** was I thinking? Right when I'm trying to move up to the big leagues (or the minors, or AAA, or whatever depending on your point of view I guess), and I need all the confidence I can get, I cash out a significant portion of my roll for a completely unecessary purchase. Makes no sense whatsoever.

And then there's my pathetic inability to put hands in. I don't do anything. I play in a band and have rehearsal twice a week. Sometimes I work out. That's it. I don't run a business, I don't go to school, I'm single, I have no ****ing excuse.

Well that's not going to be the case anymore. I have more motivation right now than I've had in a long time. In the past 5 days I've played over 20k hands, which for me is unprecedented. The money I cashed out for the car is going to sit and collect interest until I'm a winning 5/10 player, and that's that. I'll worry about buying baller **** when I actually deserve it.

Going back to grinding 2/4, I feel like the dude who's in his 7th year of college, just lingering around, clinging to what he's comfortable with because he's afraid to face the challenges of the real world. I don't want to be that guy. From here on out I'm going to do whatever it takes to not be that guy.

Wow, so I haven't done one of these in over two months. That was predictable.

So, this month has been a little bit of a wake up call for me. I've been one of the biggest winners (I think) at 400NL for a while. It took me a few months but I think I've carved out kind of a niche in the games on the site a play at where I make a lot of money taking advantage of my opponents' inability to play effectively in multiway pots among other things. So I was starting to get pretty comfortable with my game.

Well, then I moved up to 5/10, and chomped down on a fresh, delicious slice of humble pie.



Obviously this sample is nowhere near definitive but I think the graph's sort of amusing. The important thing is that within 5k hands I was uncovering leaks I didn't know I had, and running into all kinds of spots I've never encountered at lower stakes. It's been good because it's forced me to reexamine my game and think much more intensely about situations I've taken for granted for months. At the same time, $17k is my biggest downswing ever by a long shot and my confidence was more than a little shaken.

Naturally I responded by tilt cashing out a bunch of money to buy a (sort of) fancy car. It's amazing how easy it can be to rationalize spending large sums of money on superficial crap when you start to encounter swings like this. I mean, on one hand, I feel like kind of a moron, but then again to this point in my "career" (and my life, honestly) I've never bought myself anything nice ever. So I mean, I'm not proud of it necessarily but hopefully by doing this I've gotten it out of my system. A great example of my approach to life- complete ambivalence towards practically everything. Healthy.

Anyway. Confidence destroyed, I did a HH review with SEABEAST last night, which I haven't done since like April. Basically served as a reassurance that I'm not getting run over as much as I'd thought, but also brought into focus the fact that I really need to work on building reads and making read-based plays. Which sounds completely trite, but becomes really meaningful at 5/10+ in a way that simply doesn't apply nearly as much to lower stakes. I believe I remember a 2p2 post by irockhoes to that effect, which I didn't understand at the time, but now I do. Sort of.

But man, I really am amazed by my own complacency. In July of last year I had $5k to my name and was a rakeback pro at .5/1. I was hungry, determined to make something of myself. Now I talk blithely about making $20k in a weekend and buying a car on impulse like some ****ing trustfund brat. I mean I'm no aejones by any stretch but it's still crazy to think about, not only the way that poker has changed me financially, but personally as well.

I guess I'm going off on a tangent now but I feel myself incrementally turning into kind of a douchebag. That was certainly not my goal when I started this, but all of a sudden I find myself going out with friends, making a point to drop a grand on strippers in two hours just because I can, all the while acting like an *******. I haven't earned the right to display this kind of braggadocio. I'm a midstakes grinder with an extremely modest amount of success, albeit complemented by a highly immodest vocabulary (see last sentence). I mean I'm not saying there's some threshold of success which grants you special douchebag privileges, just in my case especially I have done nothing to warrant it. I feel like I've slipped into this trap where I've gotten more and more of this sense of entitlement and lack of appreciation for the gifts poker has given me, and it's seeped into my approach to the game as well. A good example of this lapse in focus is this hand I included in the HH review with SEABEAST, which if I had taken two seconds to really think it through, I would have realized was embarrassingly trivial, both on the table and off. I need to remember that my goal in poker is not to buy flashy **** and wave my cock at people, but to capitalize on a rare opportunity to achieve some degree of financial independence at a young age.

So to that end my immediate goal is to drop down to 2/4 for a while and just get some confidence back and sharpen my focus. Then I guess the plan is to do a sweat session with SEABEAST at 5/10 and try to really focus on making solid reads and adjusting, and make another serious run at it after I make $10k or so at 2/4.

GL to you all.

So, I hit my August goal before the end of June thanks to a very enjoyable heater at 3/6. So I was chuffed as nuts for a few days, and then a strange thing happened.

Seems like I've had that milestone in my head for so long that now that I've hit it, my motivation to move up has just evaporated. I look at the 5/10 games and I just think to myself, "man these games suck why bother?" Because the truth is that quite often the games do suck. It's like 5 good regs at every table and maybe a 30/15 type that's the donk. And by good I don't mean like "ok TAG with obvious leaks" good I mean like "top 5 2/4 player" good. The fact that I've run pretty bad there in a small sample doesn't help.

But lately I've really been struggling with myself to decide what my next move is. A lot of people advocate mixing limits and easing into new limits like that. Personally I don't really like doing that, I mean how the hell am I supposed to care what happens on a 2/4 table when I'm flipping for a $1600 stack preflop at a 5/10 table? Obviously this is a matter of mental discipline but what can I say, mine is limited.

I dunno, it's strange but I feel like I haven't earned 5/10 yet. Like, I've been beating 2/4 and 3/6 very handily in the past few months but for some reason I just don't feel like I've proven myself to my satisfaction. There are too many little spots I'm not sure about, too many areas where my thought process is sort of cloudy. There are definitely spots where I'm leaking to the regs and that irritates me but these things can be difficult to really nail down.

So after pondering and pondering for the past week or so, I've decided to juice my motivation by paying off my whole student loan balance. It's obviously a smart financial move in itself, and if I can maintain my results at 2/4 and 3/6 it shouldn't take me more than two months to recover entirely. Maybe then I'll feel like I've earned my shot at 5/10 and I can really start taking the necessary steps to get there, like getting a working bankroll on some other sites. But I mean, in a way it's nice to just take a deep breath and realize that I'm at a very comfortable place in my poker career and I can live very well without putting all kinds of pressure on myself to move up as quickly as possible. Only a small percentage of players make it to 5/10, and a minuscule percentage succeed higher than that. There's no shame in taking a couple months to take it easy, play some relatively stress free poker, and post a couple more nice months before entering the gauntlet.

... in honor of the rivered straight flush I stacked off to earlier. Just needed some kind of title for this.

So I think I more or less broke out of the rut I started this blog to get out of in this first place. At this point I'm winning a half decent amount on the month, and for the past couple days I feel like I've been playing much better. Took a shot at some 5/10 tables over the weekend and it went well over a meaningless sample. Surprisingly I didn't feel intimidated or outclassed at all. Which is not to say I don't think any 5/10 regs have an edge over me, I'm quite positive some of them do. But aside from sweating the big hands a little bit more usual, I was pleased to see that I was psychologically unaffected. So that was good and a nice confidence booster.

On the bad side, last night I played one of those terrible sessions where everything goes wrong in the course of like 45 minutes. Those are the absolute worst and tilt the **** out of me. Usually I'm very good about tilt and am pretty unflappable both in life and in poker, but for some reason getting coolered repeatedly in a short period of time sets me off on insano mode, screaming obscenities, punching my desk, and occasionally throwing random **** at the walls. Which I guess is better than open-shoving across eight tables but still, I wish I had better control of my emotions when this happens but it's just like another person takes over.

I was gonna write a little rumination on my psychological issues that don't involve tilt but honestly I'm about to pass out so that'll have to wait. So all in all a pretty pointless post, but I wanted to force myself to do another one before I get in the habit of not doing them and the whole thing falls by the wayside.

Hopefully no one ever reads this thing because I expect it to be boring as **** and completely uninteresting to anyone. Anyway, I don't really have the natural inclination to share trivial events in my poker career with people, I'm just forcing myself to do this because my play and focus has slipped dramatically in the past two weeks or so and it'll help me keep me accountable.

Last month I had my best month ever, something like 80/20 2/4 and 3/6. Totally exceeded any reasonable expectations I had. (Another thing which will render this blog virtually unreadable is that I don't plan to lay out my long term results or put up any flashy graphs, just don't see how any good can come of it.) It seems pretty common for poker players to have really ****ty months following really good ones, so naturally June is sucking balls. So far I'm down roughly ten buy-ins at 2/4 and up one at 3/6, rapidly approaching the 30k hand mark. So what the **** went wrong you ask?

Well part of it is just running bad for sure. My W$SD over this sample has been way below where it's supposed to be, and it certainly feels like I'm running pretty bad. But I've been reviewing my sessions and truthfully I'm just playing like crap, like really, embarrassingly bad at times. Running good last month has made me way overconfident and I've just been spewing uncontrollably. C/r bluffing way too much, as a result of taking way too many flops OOP when I should be folding or 3betting. WAY too many FPSy spews where I'm just like, "he's repping such a narrow range, ALL IN !!!!" and bam he's got top two and I've got like 2% equity. Which of course doesn't do much to boost my aforementioned W$SD stat. I've basically just been putting myself into too many ridiculously marginal spots and overextending myself, and when you play that way against halfway competent opponents and run poorly it can't end well.

So for the rest of the month I've got to hunker down and play some solid, SEABEAST-style poker, just focus on doing the things I do well and stop rationalizing all kinds of ridiculously thin, probably -EV plays. I need to stop overthinking metagame and range balancing and all that ****, because 95% of the other regs are playing a million tables and aren't thinking like that at all. The truth is that while their forum posts would have you believe they have very elastic ranges and are capable of showing up with all kinds of crazy stuff, I can think of maybe five regs who have actually showed down evidence of this in all my time at midstakes. So I think for the first time in my career, I need to focus on playing more straightforward, which is sorta weird considering I started out as a nitty TAGfish, but I guess it's kind of a natural progression. I think I'll cut out a couple tables as well until I pull myself out of this so I can really focus on not doing anything stupid.

I want to be playing 5/10, or at least be comfortably rolled for it by my standards, by August. All I really have to do to get there is to achieve a halfway decent result for the next month in a half. So I just need to ****ing focus on not sucking, keep my fundamentals in order and that's it. GL to you all.