Although I had initially planned on getting some volume in the last few days, it's been a couple of busy days getting the place all packed and cleaned and ready to ship out tomorrow morning. The moving to-do checklist, no matter how far in advance you plan for things and accomplish things, always seems to be long the last few days leading up to a move: especially when you aren't hiring movers for the first time in years! I can't wait to go back to having other people doing all the work, lol!

Anyway, haven't played a hand since my biggest winning online cash game session ever last weekend, and I don't want to mentally fall into the thought process of, "well I've run well so far this month, I don't want to ruin that" and have it be a road block to putting in solid volume the rest of the month. I am not going to allow that to happen. However, because I have been so busy physically, I have mentally been tired and not in the right frame of mind to put in volume before being settled into the new place in Vegas, so I am at peace with the thought that my volume will suffer this week. I know that the big picture of the month is going to be just fine, and I am already well ahead of my pace for my volume goal anyway, so we should have no issues closing out March strong volume wise, and hopefully the profits will keep flowing right along with!! As I say goodbye to Arizona, and hello to Vegas in less than 24 hours, I leave you with a fun giraffe of the continued rungood right where February left off...

March heater:

Great month so far!

Keep it up!

And yeah struggling to put in volume when up is def a mental leak which I have too and me and Dan worked on it together how to correct it and I always try to get a bit better at it especially when the end of the set is very close. Inchworming is very important in this aspect too as you won't just cut it out completely straight away.

Solid, looks like the hard work and study is paying dividends. Keep at it!

Thanks man! Funny thing is I had no control over lack of volume for the last week as I have been moving and trying to get all the to do checklists done at the new house along with friends visiting Vegas for March Madness so I am going to be playing catch up in my volume the last week of the month. It should give me a decent sample of time grinding while up pretty good to close out the month so I can focus/work on any mental leak that may be there in that regard.

Ty! It's the continuous improvement mindset I have. Kind of like the growth vs fixed mindset discussion I read about in one of my coaches threads too. Very key to finding success in an always evolving poker climate!

So it looks like my live cash game adventures in Vegas are about to begin, and it is going to be a busy first 5 weeks in town.

We are going to make a run at completing the 100 hour promo at South Point by April 30th to qualify for the $145k gtd MTT held in May. Based on some rough estimates from years past, this MTT only gets about 180 qualifiers, and the payouts at the final table are pretty nice, all leading up to a pretty nice top prize of $40,000!

Given that I have 5 weeks to complete this task, I will be setting a new goal for April to hit 20 hours per week online at a minimum, and 20 hours live. The online goal will be slightly less of the priority by the last week of April if my 100 hours hasn't been hit yet. Ultimately I feel I can still do much better volume online than 20 hours a week, but I don't want to put a number in that makes me feel a bit overwhelmed to achieve while working toward the 100 hours live at South Point goal.

I am also aware that the games may not be the best in town, but at first glance from session 1 and 2, the few tables running are definitely full of plenty of soft spots. Also, there will be plenty of 'regs' just grinding super nitty to hit their hours as well, so once I can identify them, I can exploit those tendencies. This will be a great way to get my feet wet in the routine of adding in a solid amount of Vegas live cash grind prior to what should be a busy and incredible summer during WSOP.

The 1/2 at SP can be decent, obviously more locals and less tourists like Red Rock and Orleans but that doesn't mean they aren't beatable for a significant amount.

Welcome to Vegas! I am sure you can knock out the 20/20 hrs goal no prob!

Thanks man! For sure volume will be easily attainable, but remember I am still transitioning into cash in reality, and although I am used to 10-12 hour days and 6 day work weeks in MTT land (and in previous corporate job), grinding 100-200 bb stack cash game pokerz is mentally a bit more draining to me still. I know it will become a lot more second nature when there are less situations that feel difficult, and with just more experience in general. Not to mention, 40 hour work weeks??

(Insert classic Dumb and Dumber lines: "I can't believe there isn't a single job in this town." "Yeah, not unless you wanna work 40 hours!")


I'm not super excited about it being the top of my list for grinding overall based on the fact that there is no strip traffic obviously, but it just makes sense with the rake back added value for this particular freeroll and to just get acclimated to putting in more live hours on the regular in a somewhat low variance game.

That being said, a few more nights like this to kick off the 100 hours will sure make it a bit more fun!



#countdastack
#chipporn

Gl in Vegas, I'm sure we will meet at some point when I'm out there for a couple weeks of the series in June.

Thanks Tyler, and ya for sure look forward to it!

Today's live grind was back to what many nights are as far as not really getting many value hands/spots. I was in the hole early flopping a set vs a whale and losing to his flush on the river, but overall did not lose any other big pots. Decided to call it a night at the 5 hour mark as I caught a few small post flop mistakes I made and it started to bug me a bit so rather than pushing for a longer than what I've been doing session felt it was best to work on my ability to quit the game when it wasn't great and I wasn't on top of my game.

As we near the end of March, I'm still on pace for a record profit month, but doing my best to grind on and get that volume! Although I would like a nice fat paycheck, I know the important thing is to stick to my goals and processes and let the rest work itself out! I want to really keep amping up the volume to in turn increase my experience in the games I am playing, in hopes of continuing to move up to higher stakes, and a more profitable win rate at my current stakes!

Couple days left to make a push for some volume! Played a decent amount of hands today online including taking a shot in the $162 $200k on Bovada. Unfortunately just missed the money in the MTT and the cash games didn't run so well for me and ended up down another 2 buy ins on top of the MTT buy in. Played pretty good most of the near 5 hour session, but had a few coolers happen that we couldn't recover from.

Playing a session at South Point tonite to notch the hours over the 20 of the 100 total needed by the end of April. We are going to end March ahead of the weekly pace we need, and should have a nice easy weekly hourly goal in place to get the job done next month!

Let's see if we can have another post worthy stack to cash out afterwards!

Just snuck in over the 80 hours goal for the month, and that is with taking a full 8 days off for the moving process start to finish so I'm pretty happy overall with that.

I hit my coaching sessions goal and my HH review goal for the month as well. When you add in the fact that March has now taken over the top spot for me in profit month since starting this cash game journey, I'm pretty excited!

More graphs coming soon!

As of close of day today I am sitting around 33 of my 100 needed hours for my South Point freeroll, and I have a full 4 weeks left to achieve the goal. Not too bad. Staying slightly ahead of my 20 hours a week pace needed to finish in time.

My win rate and profit numbers are a bit high and not sustainable thanks to the monster session in day 2, but I have managed to have 5/6 days of live play be profitable so far, and only 2 losing sessions total in those 6 days played, and neither one was more than a 1 buy in loss. I'll take those types of numbers all day long! I feel like I have a lot to update on how some of the specifics of the live grind are going, both from a technical game and mental game standpoint, but I am going to wait until I have some more hours in before I divulge too far into those thoughts.

I'll just say that getting "reacquainted" with the type of weak passives, short stackers, drunks, live whales, and calling stations that frequent the 1/2 NL game (and no doubt all stakes in town) has been both fun and exciting!

I look forward to diving deeper into the live fish tanks than I ever have before, fully equipped with new and improved scuba gear (thought processes)!

Quick look at final numbers for March. Again with volume below the norm for hands played online and only 20 hours of live, the sample size wasn't huge, but it is a nice heater of a month to still be proud of my processes and results goal accomplishments. Graph on left is March online hands/profit, report on right is March live hours/profit (all played at South Point in Vegas). Combined for my best month since this cash game adventure started 6 months ago!

Had a great coaching/goals review session to discuss some of the updated goals I am working on both for short term and for my yearly overall since things have changed a bit with moving to the new city of new opportunities for me. In the process of going over some schedule process goals, technical game stuff, and mental game stuff, I realized that I have really done a poor job of a few things lately. One of those things is 'be here now'.

This habit is one not to be taken for granted. It is something that if you aren't constantly focused on what it precisely means for you as an individual trying to accomplish something, whether it be a short term task, or a long term objective, it will slow down your growth, and leave you with less than desired results.

What exactly does that phrase mean? Well, to me, it means that I need to be immersed in the moment with my entire mind, body, and soul when I am engaged in a task. It doesn't mean that I have room for my brain to wander onto events that are scheduled to take place later that night, later that week, or next month. It means, while I am playing a session, I can't have any distractions taking me away from the mental zone I wish to be in, in order to achieve the maximum potential of my brain power, to in turn create the highest possible win rate, or lowest amount of poor decisions/mistakes in my game. Some things are not easily cut out of our surrounding distraction list, but some things are. (Smartphones, and a never ending list of apps to browse through, and even play games in, are just 1 type of example of this.)

Of course, it is only natural, and human nature, for our minds to wander. Some people may have more severe daydreaming issues than others (Walter Mitty), but the fact remains that it is a constant struggle to commit ourselves, 100% of ourselves, OUR BEST SELVES, to every single task we attempt to perform on any given day. Just because it is hard, or it goes against so called human nature, doesn't make us exempt from working on this skillset.

Part of the process for me to get back on track with my 'be here now' attitude when I start a session is to complete a proper warm up routine. When I first started playing poker, and specifically during this cash game journey, I was really good at this. But as time passes, and perhaps the game becomes a bit easier for me mentally, it can be difficult to always realize the importance of that warm up routine. Part of why we have goals and goals reviews is to keep our selves in check with how we are doing. Results goals are only part of the story. It is the process goals, and how effectively we are completing them that tell the majority of the story as to how successful we can and will become.

I have already done well to cut out distractions while playing online sessions. No TV or phone calls/texts while I play, and only uplifting and motivating type music, not any with lyrics that can and will lead to emotional responses while playing.

(Note: I still have a final table playlist that has all sorts of rap, rock and emotional response type stuff on it, but that is reserved for keeping me awake and motivated after a long grind to make it deep and at or near a final table of a tournament, aka 6-8 hours minimal, which is a much different scenario than multi tabling cash games for 1-4 hours.)

My warm up routine consists of a proper 5-10 minutes of light meditation and then a few HH reviews from previous sessions to prep the mind for what it is about to do for the next several hours.

While these few things don't magically fix the entirety of 'be here now', they will all help me to achieve a much closer to 100% rating in that department.

The next challenge will be how many of these things and what other sort of things do I incorporate into my routines and processes when I go to play live poker, where TVs are on all around me, my cell phone is in front of me, and I am socially interacting with other players and dealers. Of course it is a much different setting altogether than playing online from home, so I will formulate a completely different set of processes and warm up routines to help with that.

I knew the heater couldn't continue for too long, as my live winrate was pretty unsustainable from the first 40 hours of play at South Point. I have lost 3 buy ins in the last two days now, which really isn't much, but was really hoping to just ride the ridiculous start all the way through April!

The games haven't been tougher per se the last three sessions, but I have been in quite a few new and foreign spots in some pots during that time. I found myself in an incredible game with 2 whales, 4 fish, and myself. Not even 1 grinder in the way!! As it turned out though, one of the whales was a complete maniac and was pushing all the rules to the limit for each dealer and floor person all night long. Dark and out of turn raises preflop, out of turn betting/raising/checking post flop, dark shoves post flop after outright showing the table he hadn't looked at his hand when he would dark raise and we would go to a flop multi way...and so on.

While this was an incredible game to be in, we spent a lot of the time completely card dead. The times we made hands or had hands, somehow we could not fade the "insert any random two cars hand here". I ended up closing out the session down 1 buy in. It was pretty frustrating because it felt like we should have crushed that table and left up several buy ins. Was a great lesson in both humility and also mental stamina to be able to grind it out, accept our losses, and call it a night when we were too tired to continue...(even tho both whales were still in the game)!

The next session we had an interesting spot come up with AKsoooted against a pretty decent but overly aggressive player. He had been opening or iso raising limps with an approximate 50% VPIP 40% PFR in about a 2 hour window to start the game. I am pretty certain he was a decent hand ranger and wasn't overly bad as a LAG or anything, but he was pushing the envelope a bit in spots. He had 3b folded 1x, and had squeezed pre flop 2x with no showdown. All the sorts of things you don't see much of in the 1/2 game at South Point. He was, in fact, on his 3rd bullet and did not handle the first two losses too well, which kind of triggered my thought process to basically label him just sort of an average LAG type that doesn't have a strong mental game.

Here is one hand I played with him:

1 fish limps and LAG isos to $12 from MP. We 3b to $36 from CO. Folds to OR who thinks for a minute then makes it $100. We are $300 effective. I don't really like any of my options.

Folding just seems out of the question to this guy. I would indeed fold to many players in this game in this spot. Right here just doesn't feel like one of those spots. Flatting felt like my worst option, as he will have a PSB left and in my mind he is going to be shoving any flop. This will be a bad decision spot to be in post flop. Shoving feels a bit of a spew in this 1/2 game as we are both 150bbs deep.

Ugh.

I'll leave it here for anyone to share some thoughts on the spot before I spoil the fun. Nit fold. Spew shove. Tough spot post flop when we miss flat. What would you do and why?

To close out my session tonight, I flopped a set and got it in for $300 effective and $200 dead money (3 way all in but the other stack was just terrible and shoving post flop super wide so I termed him dead money the second he shoved) on 358r. This was a single raised 5 way to the flop hand, with all the action happening on the flop. We had 55. Turn was a 3 and river was a Q. I fast rolled my set of 5s for the monster pot, dead money guy mucks and weak passive newish girl to the table pauses then flips up her QQ. Inadvertently slow rolled (I think?) I suffered the 400bb pot loss and called it a night!

Another great experience for me to gain humility and mental game skills while playing in pretty soft and overly weak opponent filled games.

Did you have AK that hand?

Glad to see you're settling into Vegas nicely. We'll have to catch up this summer man!

Haha oh man. I wrote out this HH for some strat talk a bunch of times, but forgot to include the hand here, ya. We had AKhh.

Yeah it's going well so far, and counting down the days to the WSOP yep! See ya out here this summer!

On a pretty good pace for volume this month so far. 56+ hours going into today of combined live and online. Going to be playing the WPN $1Million GTD tournament today so not sure how much cash I'll actually play but should get some hands in alongside the MTT grind. Had some friends staying with us for the weekend so overall volume limited the last few days, and my brother is coming in tonite for a few days with his wife so may fall off pace a bit, but will make it up at the end of the week for sure!

The South Point grind is going well. We have slowed our win rate down a bit but still over $22/hour for the first 64 hours of the 100 needed to qualify for the freeroll in May. Hoping to get those hours closed out so I can start game selecting a bit more around town.

There are some other good promos going on that I plan on taking advantage of. Station casino freeroll qualifying hours is 75 hours before June 15th so will probably shoot for that. (Red Rock and Green Valley Ranch should provide enough decent action and game selection for me to achieve a profitable grind). The Orleans has a $3 max rake on all games combined with its normal high hand of the hour payouts on the weekends and its usually big Bad Beat Jackpot promos running in April as well.

Perhaps with some run good and a final table today, we can have a nice bankroll booster Sunday Funday! Time to do work!

Up to 75 hours of our 100 goal by April 30th at South Point after a couple sessions the last two days!

Unfortunately we have taken a few tough losses in those sessions to keep our win rate right around 10bb/hr for the stretch. (We were up to 30bb/hr at one point which definitely was not sustainable).

One of our big swing pots was flopping top set of KKs in a 5 way pot where we ISOd a table target and got 4 other callers. After a flop of K57hh, the target donk lead $40 into the field and hero raised to $120 with still $150 behind. One of the blinds took a few minutes to make his decision, and in the process the target who donked out shoved all in out of turn. Eventually the sb put his chips in, and hero called both shoves. Turn was a blank and river paired the board with a 5. As quickly as I showed my hand the sb showed his pocket 5s which in a snap moment became quad 5s. The fish mucked showing TT and drawing near dead on the flop. This hand concludes my first one outer of this years journey!

We also lost a medium sized pot with AA in the same orbit and took a short break to be sure we were going to be mentally ok to continue. I felt fine and actually the game was a good one, so we reloaded and went back to work. After a few more hours, we found ourselves almost back to break even! Happy to have been mentally strong enough to stay focused on the grind and recover from the loss of the 95% equity spot for +2 buy ins.

Today's session started out pretty similar, and we ended up barreling in a pot with a combo draw where we turned the nut straight. We ended up shoving the river with some unfortunate results as the villain had called the sizable raise on the turn on a back door flush draw that did get there. It was the correct value shove against villains range once he bet/called very fast on the turn after check/calling my flop bet. His line was pretty odd, and as soon as he checked the river we had $150 with a pot of about $270. Was an easy shove.

Again, after several hours and some roller coaster results, we were able to grind out a small win!

I have some work to do to get some good online volume in yet for the month as I feel I'm a little behind on my goal there, but overall I'm very pleased with how I've settled into the live 1/2 game at South Point. I am extremely confident that at some point in the near future I will be able to take some shots at 2/5 in town, and continue to build on my abilities as both a live and online cash game player.

Getting close to the home stretch for the South Point freeroll! Just a few more sessions and we will be qualified!

I finally got around to putting together my package for some 2015 WSOP action here in Vegas starting at the end of May. Thanks for taking a look for anyone interested in a sweat and to have a piece of the action:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/18.../#post46706299

Grind is going pretty good with a week left to go in the month. I am just 6 hours shy for my South Point freeroll, so I'll get that done any day now. As far as overall volume goes, I am at 90% of my monthly goal of 120 hours I set for April. The number of hours live vs online is skewed a bit more than I'd like toward live, but it is ok for now as I get settled into Vegas living, and also due to the added value of the rakeback based on my 100 hours of South Point grind. There will definitely be months where I am skewed heavier on live because of exactly that, and there will be slower months where we will reach a better balance of our online:live hour ratio. I am truly ok with it, even if long term win rates will be much higher online.

For me it will be all about evolving into what type of lifestyle I prefer. It is not always about maximizing our bottom line, when it comes at the cost of life balance. This is a tough lesson that I have learned time and time again in life. The corporate world helped teach me a thing or two about this. A happy medium is where I choose to be. That being said, there will be months that I will absolutely go for maximizing earning potential, and then there will be months where life balance takes over. Vacations, social interactions, spending time with the girlfriend, all will have their moments of priority. None of this is anything new for me, or for this thread really for that matter as I have already touched on the topic a bunch. It is more just about me writing out my thoughts and expectations as I go, and understanding the evolution that we undergo as people in terms of our goals and objectives in life. If I was in my 20's still, this would be shaped completely different. End thought.

I am overall down a few buy ins for April live, but up a bunch of them online, so pretty balanced out into an OK but not great profit month so far. With over a full week left of grind time, I anticipate building on that profit number a bit so that as April comes to a close, I can be happy with the efforts, and hopefully happy with the results as well. It has been a busy first full month for sure, and I have had a lot on my plate all things considered, so really, no matter what the results shape up to be, the processes used to get there have been solid, and acceptable to me. In the end, this also is what is most important to me.

I think a lot of people forget this. Not everyone is so lucky that their job acts as both a means towards financial independence, AND some sort of social/emotional/whatever satisfaction. I always try to remind myself that a job is a means to an end: the end being doing what you want, when you want. If you can use your job as a tool to make the rest of your life better, you're way ahead of the curve. Balance is about how you feel as much as anything else.

Anyways, sorry for the rant. You're obviously already there, just wanted to echo your sentiment. Either way, I'm following, nice job. Curious how the live grind goes.

Thanks man!

Yes it is an ongoing effort to maintain this balance, and sometimes even when it is heavy on our mind and we think we are balanced, we subconsciously can still be off a good bit. That is why regularly scheduled time away (vacations to recharge the battery, or just a weekend or a day spent doing something fun, new, and different that doesn't involve work in any way) is so key!

I am a firm follower of and believer in the "work hard, play hard" philosophy!

As far as the live grind goes, I am about 4 hours away from hitting my goal at South Point 100 hours. I have mixed in a few other 1/2 and 1/3 games from MGM and The Wynn, but super small samples thus far. My combined all locations win rate is slightly below $20/hour, but I have hit a couple buy in downer the last week. This of course also does NOT include the value of the 'rakeback' that I am getting via the South Point $145k MTT freeroll. My expected ROI in that field is going to be around 100%, so hopefully I can realize that ROI the first go around, and perhaps even just final table and bink off the $35,000 first place prize!!

Overall I have settled into the NO LIMIT live grind just fine. Of course I have a very long background of live poker, but it's mostly in spread limit and fixed limit as far as cash games are concerned, along with, of course, 100s of live MTTs. I've been coming to Vegas for the WSOP since 2007 (only missed 2008 since then), so my Vegas experience is also nothing brand new or anything. This is all very helpful to my transition into the full time no limit cash games grind this year. Having played at many of the venues in the past makes it easier for me to visualize the game with confidence much easier than if it was my first time in any of the rooms.

Finished off the 100 hours for the South Point freeroll, next step is to shipppit in two weeks!!

Going to put in some hours at The Orleans until it quiets down from the jackpot frenzy since it's over $75,000 now. Room should be hopping with all sorts of juicy action while everyone chases the dream. Also going to check out Red Rock and Green Valley Ranch and see if it makes sense to put in my 75 hours for their freeroll in June. Not 100% sure just because it is a bit further out of the way for me. I'll prob just put in a few sessions and see if it makes sense to push for it to to just keep table/game selection as the bigger priority for May. We have also hit the overall hourly goal of 120 already for April, with a few days to go. The hourly is ok, but not great as we near the close out for the month, but a pretty long break even stretch in the month has kept the numbers at bay a bit. Still have a decent profit going into the last few sessions, so will have to be mindful of my mental game to fight the urge to lock up wins for no good reason other than to "protect" my pay check.

Did a practice in some A game and C game mental zone evaluations thanks to the latest coaching session from Skraper this month. Definitely helped to keep me mindful of habits I know can and will creep into my sessions when I feel like I am perhaps "running bad" or just not getting the win rate and profitability results I have come to "expect" of myself. One thing I know for sure is my warm up and cool down routines can always be improved, especially when I start my day with a live session. It is waaaaaay to easy to be distracted by the multitude of things that jump into our peripheral immediately upon sitting down in the socially charged atmosphere of Las Vegas!

congrats on hitting the 100 hrs at South Point! I try to hit vegas at least once or twice a year so I'm curious about your views on different casinos for 1/2 & 1/3 grinding. I pretty exclusively play on the strip, but that's only because of convenience. Thoughts?