Month thus far, running well.........


A hand from today, villain is 18/16 regular. Preflop is meh to mix it up... who likes my river raise? What if he shoves?

Party Poker, $3/$6 NL Hold'em Cash Game, 5 Players
LeggoPoker.com - Hand History Converter

UTG: $1,011.05
CO: $790.15
BTN: $1,345
SB: $372
Hero (BB): $955.95

Pre-Flop: A K dealt to Hero (BB)
2 folds, BTN raises to $21, SB folds, Hero calls $15

Flop: ($45) 3 5 5 (2 Players)
Hero checks, BTN bets $30, Hero calls $30

Turn: ($105) A (2 Players)
Hero checks, BTN bets $75, Hero calls $75

River: ($255) 2 (2 Players)
Hero checks, BTN bets $100, Hero raises to $250

I finally got sorted and settled in my new place, took me the first eight days of Feb though so I didn't play in all that time. Since then I've had a good start, $6k up in 11k hands or so (graph).

Not thrilled with how I've played though, results are a bit scewed by winning $3k in short sample sizes playing 5-10 and 10-20. Whatever, spends the same.



Dan

I was flicking through some of my old poker books today, ie the ones I was reading about a year ago trying to get good at poker. One, entitled 'Killer Online Poker 2', by Jon Vorhouse, had a cash game section which explained to me thus:

'The reason that cash games have a maximum buy in is to stop players buying in huge and swamping the game. For example, in a $1-$2 game, a player could just buy in for $10,000 and the other players would have no chance. He could go all in every hand and eventually he'd have all the money at the table.'

No wonder I was terrible for so long.

OMFG Nosebleeds!

I followed a huge fish to 10-20 today, which with an online roll of 12k isn't always the greatest idea. Luckily I stacked him tiwice (50bbs) in around 30 hands, the first being this:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3802369 sweating hard on the old ace hi call down.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3802371 standard set vs his junk.

So, $2k start to the month. can't be bad.

found a place to live today- I couldn't get past the whole question of employment references blah de blah so in the end I'm paying 6 months rent up front, which at least means I have a roof over my head for the next 1/2 year.

dan

So, today I had to move out of my flat. Some time ago my landlord (who I have never met) got in financial difficulties and so baliff type people turned up to repossess the flat. It was agreed that I keep living there so long as I pay my rent directly to them and not to my estate agent who would in turn pass it on to the broke (possibly degen) property owner.

The estate agent who i have the contract with still wants me to pay rent to him however, and to cut a long story short, he today rang up and threatened to send someone round to 'sort me out' if I didn't pay up. This got me absolutely livid, so I went round to his office, and after a ten minute wait I got irate and asked him to hurry the **** up, at which point he reached and got a baseball bat from behind his desk and came at me. I was just like WTF, and my GF (who henceforth will be known as Nicola) freaked out and tried to ring the police- he grabbed her hand and dug his nails into her wrist causing it to bleed, and by brandishing his baseball bat eventually convinced us to leave his office.

(I don't know if merely having a baseball bat is considered so downright scary over in the States, but here in England Baseball just isn't played, and hence there can only be one reason for owning one).

Just great, so I reported it to the Police obv, but now I can't stay in a flat to which this lunatic has the keys to, so everythings shipped out and I'm back at my folks house. Q flat hunting day tomorrow.

Poker- month end result. Happy enough with it, I ran horribly EV wise so pretty solid. Hoping to clear $15k next month with more application, more hands, and running better. Dan

I make too many blog posts, I mean, its only me and Pureklas reads them. But anyway, I have to enshrine my best ever day somewhere don't i?



Halfy halfy 200NL and 400NL. That one's going in 'the bank', I'm off to bed.

Dan

My 6 tabling 200NL to end the month has been going well, yesterday turned into a $1.5k day, and this morning I made another $1k; thanks in large part to a huge suckout though in a 500bb pot

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3774828 (villain was a fish)

I was actually so happy to see myself suck out for once. I'm sick of trying to explain to my GF how I spent the day winning lots of theoretical EV money (I'm $6k below EV for the month) while ending up with less actual money than I started the day with. Her typical response is 'well thats great, but all this "fantasy" money isn't going to put food on the table is it!'



I keep being stuck with this satanic amount of money at the table. I'm very superstitious sometimes, and when it happens I just have to play the next hand to get off it regardless of the action. Then I look on another table and it happened again. Scary.

Dan

There was a football coach, I think it was Sven Goran Erikson, who before a big cup final (that could eventually go to penalty kicks) got his players practicing penalties in a goal half the size of a regular goal. The plan of course is to condition the players to getting used to this tiny goal, so that on the actual night they'd be like 'omg, this goal is huge, this is easy!'.

So, that's what I felt like today going back to 200NL. From playing 2-4 and 5-10, I was like 'OMG, this feels so liberating, I've not been 3bet yet in 100 hands!'

400 hands and $1.1k later, I'm happy.

Of course, the reverse will apply, that spending too long down there will leave me unpreprared for the 2-4 sharks on my return, so hopefully I can rebuild my bankroll quickly after my $7k withdrawal (I hadn't paid rent in a loooong time) and get back to midstakes.

And what is this myth that gets perpetuated about 'oh at the lower levels you don't wanna bluff as much, they don't fold'. People at 200NL fold way too much! Whereas suspicious regs at 2-4 it's hard to get them off 3rd pair sometimes.

that's all. I think I just made this post so that HEM would 'bank' my session and I can start a new one.

Dan

After yesterday's sad sad blog post, a decent 2k day is just the pickup I need.



I think it's called variance.

Some hands....

Hand 1: http://www.pokerhand.org/?3758814
I plan to call everything all day 'cos he reps nothing preflop and in my opinion nothing on flop. People just don't (although, of course, never say never) pot overpairs on high paired boards like this.

Hand 2: http://www.pokerhand.org/?3758820
Fairly happy with this one, perhaps pretty thin but against this thinking villain I manage to rep very very little while in fact having TPTK. I like repping nothing with good hands.

Hand 3: http://www.pokerhand.org/?3758829
Just a good example of why I don't follow Baluga theorem too closely...

Oh, and on the non poker front, meet God:


y'all Premiership watchers will understand

laters, Dan

Tilt: I've been playing poker seriously now for around 12 months, and for much of that time I've been completely convinced that the single most important skill in poker is tilt control, concentration, and playing to your best at all times: essentially the mental side of the game.

I was half correct- this unrelenting focus on the mental side of the game caused me to neglect the technical side of the game; equity, pot odds, board textures, hand ranges and so on. Poker is the kind of game where you can feel that you know a great deal about it, but in fact you know very little.

Around 3 months ago, I started to feel like I had completely conquered the mental side of the game, I was untiltable- and my unrelenting drive for mental perfection and hatred for any spewy hands had all but eliminated them. There was one problem: my results had barely improved.

I had for a long time hovered around 0.70 bb/100 at 200NL (according to table ratings, over 250k hands). Ready for my best month ever, I went into September untiltable and ready to crush. I played 50k hands, and won about $1.5k - an abysmal effort at 200NL.

At this point I started to realise there was much I didn't know about the finer points of the game. I moved my unrelenting focus from mental perfection to learning the finer points of NLH. I've had 2 coaches, paid $750 for a book! (you know who you are, highly recomended actually), fixed a ton of leaks and learned a lot about different lines in different postflop situations- in particular a newfound hatred of the fold button.

Thus, until today and yesterday, I managed to combine my mental coolness with my new found technical knowledge to be having a $9k month in 20k hands at 400NL. Of course, this is a small sample size, but while playing you can often tell if you are playing well enough to be beating the game- I felt like I was certainly crushing it.

What all the above essay (book?) has been leading to, is that my recent focus on learning the technical side of the game has made me forget my original theory about the mental side of the game. Knowing yourself is important, and I know that for me stopping tilt requires unrelenting focus on the issue. It has to be thought about long and hard before, during, and after a session. My whole focus while playing a hand should be on making clear minded decisions in the big hands, and I need to get back to hating myself when I make a play that in the moment I probably knew was going to be pretty spewy.

I don't think that keeping the technical side of the game present requires the same focus. Certainly, learning it does- but once learned the concepts stay there and are readily accessible with a few simple rememberances and brain queries.

Thus- I am now rebalancing my mental efforts towards tilt control again. I lost $1.5k today, and $1.3k yesterday, and the old spew demons have returned. Certainly many of the big hands cannot be at all justifed in a technical sense, and were simple mind losing moments.

Congrats and thanks to anyone who got to the bottom of this, I'm writing my thoughts down mainly to organise them within my own mind and attempt to rationalise them; and my intention is thus not to bore anyone.

Cliffnotes: Dan- FFS sake just stop tilting, you're better than that.

Dan