Hello PG and C.

My name is Phill. I play as bergeroo on Stars and some variation of that on most sites. I've been playing poker for 11-12 year and professionally for 7.5 years. Primarily I play MTTs, I also enjoy several non Holdem variants of poker.

I'm British but a lot of the time I live in Berlin, Germany. Outside of poker I enjoy travel, board games, mini golf and angular guitar music.

My goals this year are to continue to be very happy and to play egoless, smart poker, both during the hand also before and after a hand - things like game selection, bankroll management, shot taking, handling swings and variance and using my intelligence fully.

2015 was the least successful year I've had so far as a poker player. However I feel like I am much better at poker than I was a year ago and continue to work hard at being a better player.

There is no denying that the games are tougher now and as a player I face a war on two fronts, one vs other players and one vs the sites themselves.

I am staggered by the myopic short term thinking of most poker players and most poker operators and aim to show long term thinking and planning and be the best prepared poker player I can.

Maybe I will be successful in poker this year or maybe the smart decision will be to quit playing poker for a living and pursue another avenue.

Let's see what happens. Either way it should be an interesting year.

Let's go!

Subbed, gl mate !

Subbed looking forward to this.

Subbed, gl with your goals!

Facts about me.

I'm 35. For online poker that's very OLD

When I turned pro as a poker player I planned to do this playing Limit Holdem. My first few months of playing for a living I was in California playing at casinos there (I heart Commerce)

I was once a top 20 ranked Mini Golfer in the UK

I am still terrible at speaking German

My biggest poker score is still from in my first year as a pro (fish on a heater?), so perhaps it has been all downhill from there?

Current favourite game - 2-7 Single Draw

Current favourite board game - King of Tokyo

Current favourite non poker card game - Scat (traditional three player German game) and Coup

Favourite travel destinations last year: Estoril/Cascais in Portugal, Tbilisi in Georgia, Split coastline in Croatia, Prague.

Skat, not Scat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skat_%28card_game%29

Started 2016 with a small winning session on New Year's Day. Didn't play very much on Stars, so starting the year as I mean to go on and played a lot of smaller field stuff. Works out well because I had a bunch of final tables and I think ICM awareness and exploitation is one of my strengths as an MTT player. Didn't manage to close anything but feel ok about it. As my bankroll shrank considerably last year, lots of small winning sessions with the lower variance of smaller fields is just what I need to build back up the roll.

I think I will be keeping accurate records this year for the first time. Previously I just had an awareness of winning or losing but nothing concrete and no solid figures. I found it easier that way. I seem to recall reading in one of the Nassim Nicholas Taleb books - Black Swan or Fooled By Randomness about the feeling from winning a bunch of money and losing a bunch of money to go back to break even but this being -ev emotionally despite being break even financially.

I've always been a person where the enjoyment I get from winning a bunch of money is heavily outweighed by the unhappiness and frustration from losing a bunch of money. So if I win 5k and then lose 5k my emotional ev is heavily negative. Compared with also being break even by not playing at all, where my emotional ev would be zero. I am not sure why this is as money doesn't mean that much to me in itself.

So it has suited me to not be able to see concrete wins and losses. In the past I felt I was pretty good at keeping on an emotional even keel irrespective of wins or losses. In fact people often have to prise the information out of me whether I am winning or losing. Last year I felt that slipping a bit, I felt frustration coming in, annoyance at a string of 12th places or missing out on big scores deep in tournaments which then leads to playing bad and making bad decisions.

I'll give myself a mark for each session this year based on how well I thought I played, focus and the overall quality of my session. I will give myself 7.5 for yesterday.

My guess is that keeping exact numbers on one hand might actually relieve some of the emotions attached to playing as the facts are stored somewhere reliably which should free up ones focus, but that is just my rec fish hobby psychologist approach.

BTW Have you watched Tommy Angelos "Bankroll Matters" on RIO? I think you might like it.

gl with your goals!

Think you are among the better regs on eurosites, I also never have seen you making ridicilous punts gl in 2k16 subbed

GL <3

Thanks for the kind words. Obv the punts have all been when you weren't at my table

Didn't see that one yet. I hope he plays the banjo again!

i felt as if i was reading everything you wrote in my own voice.

best of luck man

"227 Lears... 227 performances of King Lear and I can't remember the first line."
Albert Finney - The Dresser

Finney plays an aging, deteriorating theatre actor on the British circuit during WW2. Despite performing Shakespeare for most of his life, he is falling apart and in not much of a fit state to perform. He is dependent on his 'dresser' Tom Courtenay to get him on stage each night.*

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085461/

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When I make a very simple basic mistake in the a poker hand I think of this line. These are situations that I've been in many times before and know the correct/ideal way to approach, yet still I find myself making an error (as Snowie) would term it. The funny thing is I know almost straight away when I do it, its kind of a brain freeze. I wonder how I could have played so many hands and got so far and still made a trivial error.

The other interesting thing is it doesn't matter too much how many tables I am playing, although I'm sure I do it a little bit more with more tables. It is like a fog descends and I can't identify the precise situation and action required and with the action time ticking down I make a choice.

Every session of online poker requires thousands of decisions. Of course the majority of these decisions are automatic. If for example you can increase the number of automatic decisions from 98% to 99% then not only are you going to make less mistakes, you will be retaining your brain space and timebanks for those crucial close decisions which aren't so clearcut.

I will be trying to make less stupid mistakes this week when I play and focus on using my brain/focus to make the close/tough decisions as best as I can.

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*The parallels with poker are there if you look for them. Substitute the theatre dressing room for the poker table and have the poker player reliant oh his/her HUD, backer, riding positive variance but still putting on a show on stage each night (insert the name of your favourite TV poker livepro here)...

Sidenote
Both Finney and Courtenay were nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars and I've made my biggest bet for some time on Leo Di Caprio to win Best Actor at the Golden Globes and Oscars. I think he is a lock and this is printing money but let's see if I am right.

Thanks man, I appreciate it. Respect your grind ethic a lot. If I can grind half as much this year I will be happy!

Subbed! Best of luck for this yeear!

To steal/paraphrase the Twitter bio of Neil Channing - I am a professional poker player. I'm certainly not the best poker player but I can strive to be the most professional.

How can I do that?

Be organised!
-Be prepared for sessions.
-Have a good solid set up.
-Be well fed and hydrated when playing.
-Manage money over various sites so not left short somewhere and are able to play the best value games that day.
-Take advantage of deposit offers/bonues, special promotions and tournaments
-Have a plan of what tournaments to play that day, don't just reg the next thing you see. Save screenspace for the best value stuff. Conserve energy at start of session and plan for session to peak and end at a set time so you aren't just left onetabling a small comp.

Have healthy poker/life balance
-Have a happy and stable homelife which enables you to play well and without distraction.
-Don't play too much, take regular days off to lessen the chance of burnt out.
-Mix up live and online to give variety and prevent boredom/stagnation.
-You can't play every tournament every single day.. If you are constantly turning down what could be interesting social invitations to play online poker then you are doing something wrong.

Personal
-Eliminate all arrogance and sense of privilege. The game owes you nothing, you need to earn a living and prove you still can year after year.
-Treat people with kindness and friendliness regardless of their ability as a poker player.
-If you can help a fellow reg with a small favour with no risk or effort then do it. The more allies/friends you can have in poker the better.
-Accept criticism and take advice from those you like and respect with grace and humility
-Enjoy the freedom that you gain from playing cards for a living and don't take it for granted.

Money
-Do not waste money when you are running good, you might need it when you are running bad.
-Be organised and prepared when travelling to live tournaments. Plan accomodation, currency exchange, travel in advance so you are not paying a high premium to do it at the last minute.
-Attempt to pay as little vig for deposits/cashouts and currency exchange as possible.

Focus
-Eliminate distractions whilst playing. No web browser open while playing online. No head buried in phone/tablet when playing live.
-If you don't feel like playing then don't play or play a shorter session or one with a lower abi.

Kind of want to print this off and put it on my wall. If anyone has any more bullet points to add then write them below.

Feel like I have been doing a lot of things right in most of my online sessions but haven't been managing to get consistent results and am a small loser on the year so far. Will be playing a few more sessions online before I go to Bratislava and Vienna next week.

Ran out of time to edit. Final few:

Decision making/growth
-Use the most time to make the most important decisions, think them through and make the best choice based on the information you have.
-Do not autopilot whilst playing. Be present and involved in the game.
-Don't wallow in mistakes during a session. The time to beat yourself up (if at all) is after you finish playing. If you still have chips then there are still decisions to be made. Don't tilt.
-When you make mistakes, learn from them and use the experience to do things better in future.
-Review, practice, seek advice from people who are better than you and you will surely improve.

Super good advice for the novice rec all the way up to the dedicated pro.

Gold ITT!

Great stuff - Subbed!

Also - in regards to the third bullet under Decision making/growth, I agree with the parentheses. There's never a time to beat yourself up. There is definitely a time to constructively reflect and review your performance after a session(s). And from that, make inferences and note parallels between prior sessions especially in regards to perceived mistakes that you made.

Looking forward to following your progress. Always had respect for your game.
GL this year!

yeah I think I wrote the last bit too fast and didn't use the correct words to infer exactly what I meant. I guess what I mean is, it is natural to get down on yourself if you think you have made errors and it is perhaps even healthy to get this out and externalise it rather than stew and brood over it, but the time to do this is after the session and yes I agree, to try and do this constructively and positively.

Momentum
[moh-men-tuh m]
Force or speed of movement; impetus, as of a physical object or course of events.

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It is interesting that when playing online MTTs that occasionally you have those lovely sessions of poker when you just don't bust anything. You end up missing a bunch of tournaments that you often play, simply because you don't have space on your screen. I had such a session on Thursday where I accumulated stacks in a variety of tournaments including Big 109, Big 82 and Hot 55 (these being tournaments that I've been skipping sometimes recently in favour of other similar buy in tournaments with smaller fields in a bid to reduce variance). I ended up with a selection of really nice scores for a great winning day and a big green number in the spreadsheet.

Contrast with today where I could not win an all in to save my life and ran so far below ev. I was busting tournaments left, right and centre and desperately scanning lobbies to find new tournies to jump into to fill my screen. Ended up an ugly losing number to bring me back down to earth after Thursday.

Both days I give myself a 9/10 for focus but I feel like I played much better on the winning day. Either yes I did play better, because building stacks by winning all ins and outflopping people gave me confidence to trust my judgements and instincts and therefore make better decisions.

Or instead I played about the same, but my opinions are clouded by the stacks I ran up on the winning day, many of which were by coolers, flips, suckouts on the winning day and the reverse of that ending several promising runs on the losing day.

What's clear of course is that for an MTT player, how you run when deep in large field tournaments towards the top of your buy in range will impact greatly on your overall results. Personally I feel like I've ran very badly in these spots in the past 18 months, but undoubtedly very well in the period before that.

Still I am in profit for the year and feeling pretty ok for Sunday. I don't usually play on a Saturday so I might start later and miss the Kick Off. I will see how I feel in the morning.


"Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck." - Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal

"Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best." - Branch Rickey (baseball player and manager)

GL, will follow !

Cool post. To me it's insane how much momentum influences your sessions. It def can make the difference between playing A game and B game. You tend to take some good squueze spots you wouldn't, creative lines, herocalls are right etc and everything seems to work. Obv you gain a lot of confidence then. I always compare it like this: it's much more easier to 4b rip light deep in a tournament, if you think the guy is overbluffing, when you've had great succes lately. But let's say you are deep in a tournament with a first which potentially could clear make up. Imagine being wrong, and guy snaps you off and you bust the tournament in 11th or whatever, then you pbb still think about that hand for a couple months and actually regret the shove, even though it pbb was a good 4b shove based on villains tendencies. Imho, that's why a lot of regs who went on to bink something quite large early in their career, are where they are today. Because of their ability to play fearless, because they have been there before, because they didn't have to worry about the money as much. The variance in endgames is sooo ridicilous in mtt's. I, myself, have been very unfortunate in these high variance spots. Like last year, I lost almost all of my high equity showdowns. It's ridicilous that these 5-10 showdowns a year (whereas you play hundreds of thousands of hands a year) mainly decide the outcome of your year.