Hey everybody, it has been a while Since black Friday I have not played much poker. What I have been doing is focusing on school. In one of my classes, Psyc 360 Cog Processes, We had an assignment to complete on improving our test taking process. I figured now that finals are over, I would share a little bit of what I learned and apply it to playing poker.
-Before you are going to play, diet is very important. You want to be eating foods filled more with complex carbs and proteins. When you eat foods higher in fats and simple sugars, the stomach requires more blood and oxygen in the stomach to break it all down. This ultimately pulls blood and oxygen away from your brain and lowers thought performance. I can’t recommend a lot of various foods, but the obvious fruits, vegetables, and whole grain foods come to mind.
-Caffeine is a very touchy subject. Caffeine has been shown to have very few physiologically harmful effects when consumed in small doses, even over a long period of time. Studies have shown caffeine increases the speed of your thought process on material you know very well. This is why caffeine improves performance on various competitive video games, but caffeine has shown to degrade performance on tasks that require more complex and logical thinking. Thusly, if I were to recommend it, it would be to the tired 1-2 live player who does not have a lot of tough decisions, but would not recommend it for the online 1-2 player. However, if you have a normal level of caffeine consumption every day, do not deviate from that. It will degrade your performance more than if you were to have it.
-Have a normal wake cycle and routine of poker playing if you can. One study, which sadly I can’t find the citation for, found that test performance improved if students studied in the same environment at the same time in which they took their test. This means if you play online daily at the same time, your body will become accustomed to increasing performance at that certain time. If you are not accustomed to doing this, it typically takes about a week to establish a cycle. As a side note, those of you that have trouble with sleeping, this is the key to obtaining a normal sleep cycle. It is a little more info so I won’t write it all here, but if you would like to know, PM me or ask in a comment below.
-NO DISTRACTIONS. As much as humans want to think they are capable of multi-tasking, they are not. One study in particular exhibited this effect. Participants wore headphones and were played two audio tracks of people talking, one in each headphone. They were told to focus on one voice. After the test, subjects were asked what the other person was saying during the experiment. None of them could answer the question. However, almost none of them recognized the person was speaking a different language! The best performance you can exhibit while playing is 60% of what you would normally perform if you were focusing your attention solely on the task at hand. However, this %age goes up with familiarity. So I would recommend against listening to music, but if I had to, I would recommend music you are familiar with. However, no TV, no podcast, no AIM/MSN chat.
-Exercising is great for the body and mind, but it has small time-frame drawbacks. When you exercise and are going to do something cognitively demanding, leave yourself a buffer time in-between. I would recommend waiting at least 30 minutes before playing poker.
Finals start at 11:00AM PST, going to be an amazing series imo.
Thorzain, the dark horse terran of the tournament vs. Naniwa, the current dominating foreigner protoss. I would strongly suggest everyone, even you BW lovers, support teamliquid and check it out today
So I was listening to the 2+2 pokercast last week, and they had an interview with an online guy whom I had never heard of. His name was Foucault82, and apparently he has a pretty popular blog. One part of the interview caught me and made me think about LP and its blogs. Something so glaringly obvious, yet I would be amazed if more than a few people think it normally at our site.
When you make a blog, you have to remember you are not writing a blog as a way you can read about yourself. You are writing a blog in which OTHER people want to read. People generally don't want to read about your sick downswing, sick new item you bought, sick amount of VPP's you earned, etc.
Thus, I have decided that every time I make a blog from now on, I have to have a reason to do so. There has to be something entertaining that YOU READERS will be interested about. No more whine blogs(hopefully) about how bad I run, brag posts about how good I run, etc. etc.
I will start off giving a little update about myself, but since I am still relatively unknown around LP, I am going to put it in a spoiler and those that wish to read it can, and those that do not can pass on by.
It may be a huge coincidence, it may be a super sick heater, it could be a lot of things, but from what I can tell FTP is just amazingly softer than PS.
Here has been my start so far at NL50. Running good and bad, but I feel like I am playing well enough to beat the stake so far. Need to put in more volume to see how well I am playing, so lets hope I can keep playing well enough to keep the BR going up.
Not as good as the previous two, but still very good in my opinion. This series is really starting to become something I look forward to. So many quality poker references, a fresh story line, well developed comedy, etc. I can go on for days with the compliments. If you have not seen The Micros yet, I recommend watching it from the beginning. Each episode is about 10 minutes, so it won't take you too long to catch up. I promise you that you will not regret watching them.
News article of the day: Creepy story about man being eaten by spiders, termites, and other various creatures
Seriously, how can shit like this happen? This is something that would be straight out of a horror movie. The line “They were coming out of his nose and his mouth.” really got my skin crawling.
For those of you SC1 purists that feel SC2 can't hold a candle to BW, I beg of you to make the transition. I admit that SC2 does not have as high of a skill cap as the original, but the opportunities, tournaments, and community additions to SC2 are what people that played BW dreamed of.
Let me start by recommending a podcast to you. It is hosted by a guy named JP that works with Major League Gaming, along with 3 old SC1 pros: Nony, Incontrol, and Day9. The podcast is well done in my opinion, and the 3 of them together produces an amazing amount of hilarity. Here is a quick snippet for you. I hope you enjoy and check them out
For those of you that have not heard, there will be a SC2 tournament beginning in a month or two called the NASL. The prize pool is currently $400,000 USD, and will be spread over 4 tournaments. There will be daily casts of the games, which will be hosted in a studio in Los Angeles, capped off by a live 16 player finals for each tournament. This really is going to be huge, and may branch off into more opportunities for SC2 pros to make legitimate jobs out of playing the game they love. If you want to learn more, here is a thread to check out and read up on.
I think title should be that I am looking to sell 50% of my action, but steaks sounds cooler. Playing in 5 different tourneys next week at a local live casino I frequent, and the cost is around 410 total. I can afford this myself, but I do not want to dip as far into my spending money (my poker money is seperate)
The calendar for the tournaments can be found at the bottom of this page
I will be playing in 5 tournaments. 4 will be 70 dollar entry FR NLH events, and one will be a $130 6 max NLH event. I am looking to sell 50% of my action in each tournament. I play at this casino fairly frequently when they hold decently structured tournaments, and I cash in a little over 33% of them from what I can estimate(they almost always end up chopping when the blinds get too big). I have gotten to know many of the people that frequent the poker room. These tourneys are sure to be VERY soft, and I feel my edge is significant. The typical turnout of last year when they held this event was around 7-8 tables (10 players per table at this particular casino). I will be prepared to phone you of the size of the room beforehand and ask if you are still interested if you feel the size of the field is not warranted enough to your risk, as from what I can see they do not have guarantees on any of the tournaments except for the main.
I'm currently in the transition from NL25 to NL50. Here is a graph from my last month of play
If you would me to answer any questions, feel free to PM me or ask in this thread. Forgive me if I have missed anything blatantly obvious about staking, but I have never done this before
As I am sure there are quite a few LP'ers from So Cal, I figured I would make a blog post about it.
At the casino I normally go to, there is going to be a tournament series I will be playing in in a week or two. Smaller buy-ins, but that is not the reason for the blog post.
On the 19th of February, there is going to be a 10-25 NL cash game hosted by the casino to promote Mike Mizrachi being there. I have been the casino a fair bit, and the players there are INSANELY soft. You will be playing with grinder, but it is most likely going to be a 10 seat table (this casino has 10 seats in FR), so I am sure there will be plenty of fish.
Game is on the 19th of February, and I think if you want a seat, you have to call and arrange to be in the game. It is at the Pala Casino in Pala, an indian reservation off of the 15 just south of Temecula. I think it is 1k min and 10k max, so you may get some really deep play going depending on who shows up. Expect to see a few old man grinders that think they are decent, but their handreading skills are laughably awful.
I could be posting something that a lot of you already know about, but for any of you that play at the Palomar or something similar, this might be a pretty juicy game for you guys. For anyone that shows up, good luck!
Oh yeah, and wish me good luck as Im gonna be playing a lot of the small tourneys
NL25 Graph. Kinda wondering why I ever played on stars. Pretty nice playing on FTP and not having to find the 3 fish that exist at the 6 max tables.
Getting ready to move up to NL50 soon. I'm a little over 30BI atm, but I want to make sure my NL25 game is solid enough and is not short term variance. Any suggestions on the differences and adjustments I may need to look for would be appreciated
Expect my next blog to be something along the line of "Nl50 runbad," cause my first shots never seem to go well
Anyways, now that you read the ramblings of some micro scrub (Thanks btw!), heres the promised laughs. Enjoy!
Dave Chappelle put this on his twitter. Caption said "Can I get a mathematician to help a nigga name this shape"
And finally, a little story I feel we can all learn a little bit from (small NSFW pics)
Since black Friday I have not played much poker. What I have been doing is focusing on school. In one of my classes, Psyc 360 Cog Processes, We had an assignment to complete on improving our test taking process. I figured now that finals are over, I would share a little bit of what I learned and apply it to playing poker. 
