I lost 5 full days so didn't really have a chance. But I'm fine with that, they were spent with the people I love and I didn't expect to have the opportunity to be with them. Sometimes real people are more important than challenges.
In last 18 days (last 2 days going for new year's party. Felt weird before as I didn't know anyone there, but then met the people and will know most of them and they are pretty cool guys so decided to go)
Played 80hrs
went to gym fourteen times
drank alcohol just once at the lady's family dinner - a toast so I don't look like a weirdo.
No dirty movies of any kind whatsoever
I will ship $20 to Devon, and now taking a couple days off for New Year's.
I am happy with how I played except last couple days where the variance just got to me. I cut tables this month played attentive, but ran bad AIEV and normal pots too.
I watched vids quite a bit, love Paul "internet" Otto ones'. Worked on preflop ranges, had a sesh with one of you awesome liquidpoker crushers that opened my eyes to how much more I need to work with my solid game, especially if I ever want to get back to Zoom games.
Points learned/going forward: 1) turning off skype/phone/internet is huge
- The days where I had just poker and the gym and my head was clear were the best ones.
- I need to be able to clear my head, and turn off skype/phone/net and just grind. It's more fun too when I do that I even had a couple 4hour A-/B+ game session. Awesome!
I put on this http://www.internet-radio.com/station/ambientradio/ and want to find background hypnosis music to calm myself down and think more as an alternative.
2)reciprocality
- It's not about what you do, or what they do. It's both. When I managed to believe that my long term winrate is not how I run but how I react to the bad run compared to how other people would, I kept a healthy mindset. When I gave in, opened more tables than I should, opened a video while grinding I reverted to the animalistic immediate results oriented mindset I felt bad and played worse. The very fact that I posted that graph proves that. I managed to stay on track until the very last few days.
It'a about everything really - all I have to do is focus more, sleep better, eat better, exercise more, work on my game more than others and focus on that and I will do well. When I focus on events instead of my reactions to the events I start to get tilted and my mood and motivation drops and procrastination increases.
More on this here: http://tommyangelo.com/articles/reciprocality/
It's not at the tables that counts, but off them too
This is really big as well. There were days where I was working for literally 24 hours.
- poker
- naps (with hyonosis at times)
- gym
- work on ranges
- listening to motivational audio
- just sitting in quiet
- quality sleep.
and those days I felt my fucking best. I want to carry this over not only to poker, but my entire life going forward. Basically do things that are good for me, live my life by the clock most of the time and find the time for the good stuff like quality time with people I love, sleep, relaxation - and see it all as part of the greater picture that is effectiveness and happiness in life.
And the days where I felt the best is those that felt the most simple too. When I play poker, I play poker. When I meditate, I meditate, when I relax, I relax and enjoy it to the max, when I am with the people I love, I am with them and all other worries are gone. I always feel the more I do this, the better I am and that has more to do with life than poker.
Now I want to delete that graph but I'll leave it here - until I looked at it a couple days back I played well and felt good. It's just a past result that has no meaning in the present, especially not in the hand in progress that I have to play my best at and nothing else matters.
Mindset
- I listened to Paul McKenna, Jack canfield, Zig Ziglar every day. Especially Paul Mckenna shows you how stupid the brain is and you can feel however the hell you want, and it almost makes me dumb for ever feeling bad :D Today I feel shitty and yeah - I didn't listen to any of that stuff. It works, it shows you practices on how to increase confidence instantly but as you all know when you feel bad you tend to gravitate towards negativity or distractions and this positive stuff that helps a ton is the last thing you jump to do.
- I failed in relaxing, and overloaded my brain for sure. The more sessions I play, the more relaxation I need to put in, and the EV of meditation/naps/breaks increases dramatically. I am yet to get this and it's really hard when I play longer hours more hands I tend to need more stimuli in the brain.
Scheduling
It was good to keep track of my progress http://i.gyazo.com/435baa4df8b2c3836bb182bd98c71ac7.png
although at times I definitely should have taken breaks as my mindset was bad in very bad sessions and instead I kept going focusing on hours too much which hurt my EV. When all I had to do is take a 5 minute break. Gym/no alcohol/no P goals are great though no drawbacks of keeping track. I might keep having hour targets but just have forced breaks even when it's 5 minutes.
No drinking challenge
I have literally never in my life went out with people and was sober. Until now - I went to party 2x and 2x didnt drink a drop. it's great for the gym, and gym's great for no drinking as I have more energy. It's also fucking bizarre seeing how people change after alcohol, that you remember everything and the 3am ride in tram with all the bloodshot eyed people, people arguing like retards for no reason (I've witnessed an argument for 40 minutes about smn eating a slice of pizza on the tram, and almost everyone got involved :D)
I will do this more often, it's fun. Somehow hangovers were simmilar, I substituted booze for caffeine tho
Gym
if I didn't go away from home cause of holidays and new years the 20/20 is totally realistic when you count light cardio sessions and keep variety. I will keep this up for sure.
Caffeine
sucks.
it's cheating
that makes me more stressed.
pretty sure it has negative impacts on serotonin levels
I am off it completely now, lesson learned.
poker game
implemented rigorous color coding. dark green small fish, light green whale. if one of em is behind me I 3x all positons, if none are I 2.2X BU, 2.5X CO and I might lower UTG MP sizes too now. I did it all month and it works well and you can to it automatically not think about it conciously when you do it enough.
Vs aggro regs I have default preflop ranges I stick to. I revert to them when I want to play back at someone/small samples/when someone pisses me off http://i.gyazo.com/db7a3014105c64cd8f0a90a473452cc6.png
Need to do a 3bet/call 3bet for HU too
and vs 4bet in SB v BU, that shit's hard as fuck tho.
Against regs without blatant leaks that seem like they can hand read some I always look at what value combos I have and decide how many bluff combos I should add and if my hand should be one of them to control my game.
JANUARY
No 2015 goals. Survival mode ftw. This is a hardcore challenge and I don't even have to make an official challenge. I have to do well pretty much, I will give it my all as last couple months have been very tough, spent money on Xmas, ran bad etc.
I have another podcast coming up I need to prepare for. I will play a lot more on the stake, I will keep up with the gym and I will run my life by the clock more, and make sure I make room for plenty of fun, socialising and quality relaxation instead of zombie watching dota/facebook/random chat convos
Well, thanks for reading LP, was a long rant, but a great experience for me. I'm off for a 2 day retreat to a cottage in the woods for New Year's with 7 other people including the best girl in the world
Mix games fail / poker doldrumsby hiems, December 27
I just played 9/18 mix and I got crushed really hard. Played a really long session and am stuck 50 Bbs. Been trying to learn bit by bit but also jumped into it against regulars. Really torturous, experience. I got owned and have no idea what happened.
Mix was badugi, baducy, badacey, holdem, pineapple razz, pineapple stud8, 5 card o8, triple draw, two flop Omaha, pineapple stud Hilo standard.
I'm not sure how to feel about the session. I've been playing some o8, limit holdem,, and mix somewhat often like this to learn and mix up my routine. Overall I am down not insanely down but down a decent amount in my limit/mix sessions. I had a bad 20/40 limit holdem session and this mix session both really bad. I have read a bit but for the most part have not studied these games a ton and I guess I could do things but I'm not sure how worth it it'll be.
I have been doing ok at 2/5NL the past few months I think averaging 4-5k a month with ok volume. But I ventured into limit/mix because I feel like just grinding 2/5 is really not an end game sort of thing. I am not sure how I will fare being a regular at 5/10 nl, and I guess the 40/80 mix game/playing mix games&o8 on pokerstars kind of was this exotic backup type of idea that would make me feel better about myself and my options to move up in the food chain, but right now I feel naive about the whole thing and somehow feel like I am the lemon type that will never be able to beat the big (5/10nl and 40/80 as "big" ) games at all, never get the courage, talent etc.
Long term i know i need something outside of poker, but right now I could use the money. If i can manage to increase my earnings it would help me immensely. Sustaining current winning is also important. So, Not really sure where to go from here. It would be nice to be a winner in the 5/10 games at Bellagio as a start, but it's hard to muster up the courage to change something that has been working ok. I took a shot a few months ago but was playing short and won a half buyin in 2 sessions and then got nervous and lost a full buyin the third. I've ben playing the softest 2/5 in town which is the Bellagio and it is a big jump from a 500cap to 1500cap and i would be curious about the difference in play. I could move up to the deeper 2/5s in town at aria/Wynn. I could also just stick with where I'm "winning" right now, swallow my pride/ego and just try my best to be a lame 2/5 grinder guy.
>be me
>go play live poker
>act socially awkward
>this puts people on massive tilt
>especially when i win
>be one of ten players
>the other nine are playing to specifically stack me
>mfw i steamroll the SHIT out of them
Hi guys, I'm selling action for the PCA and LAPT Main Events. It'll be a 10.3k and a 3k+r events (playing a sat for the 25k w/ the rebuy if I don't use it) at 1.2:1 markup
Thought about doing an update on the latter part of the year but I played very little volume, some MTTs on sundays basically, most of my time these days goes into coaching and taking care of my new team that I started around the end of July. It's going pretty well though, first 5 months: + Show Spoiler +
>10 day forecast
>temps no lower than 50
>could get as high as 80 for a couple of days
other than that, i saved myself quite a bit of money at the tables tonight, jesus. omaha 1/3 - button, 5 limps i have qqjj double suited, i pot. 7 callers. flop comes out kxx two hearts, 4th to act pots, i end up folding cause no draws. him and another get it in. aaqq double suited v aakk double suited. still up a couple of buyins for the month with the low volume i have. next year, i want to hit up the wsop circuits in the south, though, i'd try to sell some action to some regs around town.
About a month ago I got back into poker after playing a live game at a friends house (20$ buy in, 10$ rebuy). Didn't do as good as previous games and lost out at 6th out of 16. That game though made me realize how much I missed poker (fuck you black friday) but after searching found bovada.
I don't care for the anonymous tables because I never used that software and I had a lot of learning to do. Before black friday I was never really good, but I would play the poker stars 2.20 180 man sit n go's a lot and place top 3 about half the time (I see a lot of people think I am doing a subtle brag, I didn't play this very much lol 10-15 times at the most, placed top 3 in 6 of them iirc correctly). Looking back at it though I always knew I was bad, but with what I know now my god I was super terrible and I have no idea how I won those 180 man sng's at all.
I'm still bad and I know it. I am not playing Poker for a living just a mix of fun and maybe a little bit of a side income. I am watching streams (jcarver mainly), reading and all that fun stuff. I have invested 60$ into it and on Saturday I played a 2.20 1k guaranteed tournament and placed 2nd taking a nice 240$. The most I had ever won previous to this in 1 tournament/sng was 108$ for first on the 180 mans. The ending hand I had QC9S and he had K7o. Flop came with Q, 9, 2. We both had about the same amount of chips I had 1.3 million chips and he had 1.45 or something like that. I check, he shoves and I call. Looks great and I thought I had it won easy. Turn is a 7. Ok whatever odds of him hitting another 7 or K on the river is unlikely. Well he flops another 7 and takes me out.
I was sort of annoyed, but was more happy at my progress in poker lately in both cash and tournament poker. I am making a lot more deep runs and I played a 1$/50cent cash game and ended up going from 30$ to 90$ in about 30 minutes (Got AA, KK back to back and won each one for most of my profit).
Bankroll wise I shouldn't be playing that kind of cash game, but I don't care I do what I want . I don't have as much time to play poker during the week due to work, play for maybe 2 hours or more depending how I do in a tournament or if I am playing cash that. In general fun stuff and keep learning a lot and hoping to keep going up instead of down, but only time will tell .
Also going to be playing my first live poker tournament next month as I am going to Florida for a vacation with family. I googled and saw there are some poker places that run 55$ tournaments and my brother and I are going to play it just for fun. Going to try my best, but not expecting much considering I have never played live poker like that, but going to try and be as prepared as possible!
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Happy New Year all!! 
) games at all, never get the courage, talent etc. 
. I don't have as much time to play poker during the week due to work, play for maybe 2 hours or more depending how I do in a tournament or if I am playing cash that. In general fun stuff and keep learning a lot and hoping to keep going up instead of down, but only time will tell 
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