Poker
has the unique ability to turn confident people into quivering wrecks.
About every six months or so I tend to have a mini breakdown where I
grab a large, stiff drink and talk at my girlfriend for a few hours
about how poker is getting me down. She in turn mutes the TV and pats my
shoulder at points when it seems appropriate.
The latest of these sporadic blips occurred towards the end of March when my online game was really suffering. I don't tend to have many losing months and so it still affects me whenever one crops up. Last month wasn't too bad numbers-wise; I lost $4K but that's just a day or two's natural swings when you're regularly multi-tabling $400NL.
I could rationalise it even further when I really looked at the details of my play in Hold'em Manager. At the start of March I had a coaching session with Black Belt Nik Persaud on six-max Pot Limit Omaha. I already felt my PLO game was competent enough to do well in softer $200NL games, and after a really productive session with Nik I was excited to start playing a lot more PLO.
While I may technically be a decent PLO player, I am an absolute fish in terms of appreciating the variance involved. Over just 4,000 hands I dropped $6,000 - a pretty impressive reverse win rate. I'm still not even sure if I was playing poorly or just getting unlucky. However, I definitely wasn't enjoying this scale of losing to find out the answer so PLO quickly got put on the 'ban list'.
Anyway, that $6K loss meant I was never going to make a profit in March, despite clawing a bit back from some mid-stakes NL games. No, the main reason why I was frustrated - and worried - last month was because I no longer felt I had a huge edge on the competition. There were certain regs I had always found incredibly easy to play against in the past that were now routinely outplaying me. I was also making errors against the fish, overestimating how loosely they'd be happy to get all-in preflop and so on. As you can imagine, this is a much more serious problem for a poker player than anything to do with variance.
A load of my poker friends are always surprised and impressed when I tell them how much volume I put in each month. I routinely play 70-100,000 hands, a lot of those on a network where it's tough to get much volume in. Playing that amount takes a hell of a lot of time. Motivation for poker (or work, as it is) definitely isn't the issue - but I do feel as though I'm not making the most efficient use of my time.
I hardly ever watch training videos, no longer get regular coaching and don't often look at stats through my HEM. To be honest, I find all of this stuff pretty dull, especially when compared to the ease of just sitting down and grinding. Fellow Blue Belt Jamie Burland recently posted a very interesting link on the Black Belt Poker forum about this topic. Here's the link again: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/61/mtt-community/theory-grinding-tl-dr-822668/
It's a long article but basically MTT supremo Tony 'Bond18' Dunst is explaining how time is a poker player (or anyone's) greatest resource and how it is vital that we make the best use of time. In a poker context he goes on to discuss the importance of finding a good balance between playing poker and improving as a player - from activities which often occur away from the table.
My mini breakdown occurred because I suddenly realised that I had stopped improving at poker. I was so obsessed with playing a lot of volume and earning a monthly wage to satisfy the short-term that I was putting my long-term future as a winning player at risk. From now on I'm going to make a big effort to rejuvenate everything I do to get my game back on track. If anyone has any ideas on what they have done to improve as players please, please let me know.
The WSOP is nearly here and I don't really have an idea what I am doing yet. Twice last month I bubbled WSOP satellites worth $4K each, which was quite frustrating. I'm sure I can't stomach more than two weeks out in Vegas so I'm probably going to go out around the time of the Main Event and just play that - so long as I can get backing obviously! Besides that I'm very content to just grind out the live cash games and eat in nice restaurants. Also, around that time there's a very big UFC happening in Vegas which I need to go to. Is it wrong that I'm probably more excited about that than the poker?!
The month was pretty low-key besides poker. I just returned from a wedding in Belfast which was good fun. I'd definitely recommend the city to anyone - make sure you take a taxi tour around the outskirts where you get taught about the troubled history of the city. It's really fascinating stuff. There's also some great bars of course.
While March wasn't great for me I'm hopeful that long-term it could be a real turning point in my poker career. Good luck to everyone at the tables and I hope to be reporting from a more positive position next time out.
The latest of these sporadic blips occurred towards the end of March when my online game was really suffering. I don't tend to have many losing months and so it still affects me whenever one crops up. Last month wasn't too bad numbers-wise; I lost $4K but that's just a day or two's natural swings when you're regularly multi-tabling $400NL.
I could rationalise it even further when I really looked at the details of my play in Hold'em Manager. At the start of March I had a coaching session with Black Belt Nik Persaud on six-max Pot Limit Omaha. I already felt my PLO game was competent enough to do well in softer $200NL games, and after a really productive session with Nik I was excited to start playing a lot more PLO.
While I may technically be a decent PLO player, I am an absolute fish in terms of appreciating the variance involved. Over just 4,000 hands I dropped $6,000 - a pretty impressive reverse win rate. I'm still not even sure if I was playing poorly or just getting unlucky. However, I definitely wasn't enjoying this scale of losing to find out the answer so PLO quickly got put on the 'ban list'.
Anyway, that $6K loss meant I was never going to make a profit in March, despite clawing a bit back from some mid-stakes NL games. No, the main reason why I was frustrated - and worried - last month was because I no longer felt I had a huge edge on the competition. There were certain regs I had always found incredibly easy to play against in the past that were now routinely outplaying me. I was also making errors against the fish, overestimating how loosely they'd be happy to get all-in preflop and so on. As you can imagine, this is a much more serious problem for a poker player than anything to do with variance.
A load of my poker friends are always surprised and impressed when I tell them how much volume I put in each month. I routinely play 70-100,000 hands, a lot of those on a network where it's tough to get much volume in. Playing that amount takes a hell of a lot of time. Motivation for poker (or work, as it is) definitely isn't the issue - but I do feel as though I'm not making the most efficient use of my time.
I hardly ever watch training videos, no longer get regular coaching and don't often look at stats through my HEM. To be honest, I find all of this stuff pretty dull, especially when compared to the ease of just sitting down and grinding. Fellow Blue Belt Jamie Burland recently posted a very interesting link on the Black Belt Poker forum about this topic. Here's the link again: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/61/mtt-community/theory-grinding-tl-dr-822668/
It's a long article but basically MTT supremo Tony 'Bond18' Dunst is explaining how time is a poker player (or anyone's) greatest resource and how it is vital that we make the best use of time. In a poker context he goes on to discuss the importance of finding a good balance between playing poker and improving as a player - from activities which often occur away from the table.
My mini breakdown occurred because I suddenly realised that I had stopped improving at poker. I was so obsessed with playing a lot of volume and earning a monthly wage to satisfy the short-term that I was putting my long-term future as a winning player at risk. From now on I'm going to make a big effort to rejuvenate everything I do to get my game back on track. If anyone has any ideas on what they have done to improve as players please, please let me know.
The WSOP is nearly here and I don't really have an idea what I am doing yet. Twice last month I bubbled WSOP satellites worth $4K each, which was quite frustrating. I'm sure I can't stomach more than two weeks out in Vegas so I'm probably going to go out around the time of the Main Event and just play that - so long as I can get backing obviously! Besides that I'm very content to just grind out the live cash games and eat in nice restaurants. Also, around that time there's a very big UFC happening in Vegas which I need to go to. Is it wrong that I'm probably more excited about that than the poker?!
The month was pretty low-key besides poker. I just returned from a wedding in Belfast which was good fun. I'd definitely recommend the city to anyone - make sure you take a taxi tour around the outskirts where you get taught about the troubled history of the city. It's really fascinating stuff. There's also some great bars of course.
While March wasn't great for me I'm hopeful that long-term it could be a real turning point in my poker career. Good luck to everyone at the tables and I hope to be reporting from a more positive position next time out.
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