Day 20.




Reading the book "Social" by Matthew D. Lieberman. It's a fascinating read talking about how our brains are shaped by evolution to have a default state - social. This definitely goes in hand with what i've experienced in my life. Even in between two math problems on a test i remember my brain moving away my thoughts in a social direction. It also talks about fundamental conflict between individual and society and how evolution placed its bet on sacrificing one's personal happiness for the benefit of the group. Some of the facts are fascinating such as that having a regular friend that you see everyday is an equivalent of around $10'000 in happiness boost. Being lonely is very hard to cover by making more money. You need to make a lot more. Which is something to think for poker players who make less than $100K/year. It might be an equivalent in happiness to a bum with no job but lots of friends. Anyway, there's lots of great stuff in this book so check it out.

- Ilya N.

Day 21.


Hands:

















































Quote of the day: "The world doesn't respond to need, it responds to seed." -Jim Rohn

- Ilya N.

Days 22-25.
Finding it pretty difficult to find time for posting hands during weekdays. Trying to play 2-3 hours a day according to the plan. That is near the maximum i can achieve with the responsibility of having to work, cook food for myself and exercise. It's tough to balance but it's doable. My day pretty much consists of an early session of 1-1.5 hours just after i wake up and eat breakfast then travel to work 1h 20min when i listen to an audio book, work for 7.5 hours and travel back home when i try to squeeze in an exercise and then a late session of poker of 1 hour max after which i go to sleep just to wake up and start the next day. I cook all food for the day which is somewhat time consuming but i think it's a good choice because i want to eat healthy within reasonable money.
Russian winter is pretty brutal and it's definitely a challenge to survive through. Sometimes you walk down the street in the morning and it's so cold your whole body shrinks in pain trying to resist in everyway possible. Sometimes you have to toughen up and it's the only choice. Later,

- Ilya N.

Days 26-31.


Month Review.
Ok, time to make a review of the month. Overall i'm pretty happy with how it went through. Poker wise, i went from plo2 to plo5 and already took shots at plo10. My goal is to beat 1 stake every 2 month so i'm on pace to my yearly goal. Volume was ok too:



Graph:



Average success rate on my daily goals was



From those daily goals posting hands was probably the least useful, so going make my Feburary goals instead:

- Work
- Play poker
- Study poker
- Holdem manager review after session
- Exercise (on 10 scale)
- Eat healthy
- No porn

Books read for the month:
- Social
- Why beautiful people have more daughters (re-read)
- Total Recall (just started)

- Ilya N.

Days 32-35.


01/02


02/02


03/02


Reading Arnold's book "Total Recall" and loving it very much. One of the good quotes: “From the bodybuilding days on, I learned
that everything is reps and mileage. The more miles you ski, the better a skier you become; the more reps you do, the better your body.”

Other than that things have been going well. Found an english tutor for myself and going to take lessons once a week which is going to both improve my spoken english and my social/communication skills. Pretty interesting guy too which makes it interesting talking about different subjects.

Day 36.




One of the important things i've learned from balancing poker and work is that you have to organize your life around your priority goal. My priority goal is poker. I realize it might sound degenerate to play microstakes instead of trying to get ahead in the real world but this is just what feels right to do. The most massive thing i've changed from the last year is i started to wake up at 3 a.m. to have a session before i go to work. This allows me to not get dragged down by real life responsibilities and not lose a sight of my goal. I think you should always start your day with the priority goal.

- Ilya N.

Days 37-39


05/02


06/02


07/02


Doing pretty well, got good momentum in poker and exercising pretty good too. Staying away from porn has been helpful so far. Really hope those daily habits are gonna make a difference in the long run. As far as success rate, i will mostly use it not as absolute measure but more relatively to mark out the month when i ****ed up. Finished reading "Total Recall", great motivating book. Now moving to "The story of philosophy" by Will Durant. More of an abstract book than the last one but also good to read to get a broader, larger perspective on things.

- Ilya N.

Days 40-41.



Doing ok last couple of days. At first a shot at plo10 went well and i thought i moved up but then i hit a really bad run at deep tables and lost 1000bb in like 15 minutes. So will have to move down and play lower for now.

Been thinking about agression today. Could agression and violence be justified? We all have agressive instincts within us, but part of being civilized man is being able to control them and supress them. But wouldn't you be happier if you lived a wild life? It's like those monkeys at a zoo that have been proven to have lower level of happiness than wild monkeys. Because of this supression of instincts they are depressed, it's called learned helplessness. Are we also learned helpless when socially conditioned by society? Or is it a good thing to be civilized and a part of society?

Days 42-43.


Last couple of days i've been doing pretty badly. Lost a ton and played really bad, making a lot of mistakes, etc. Need to comeback and show good poker again which is not that hard to win at the micro levels that i play.



Some of the bad hands i've played:



























Those ones i'm not sure about:
























That book "The story of philosophy" is very dense and hard to read. Will have to to read it several times to understand something out of it.

Regards,

Ilya N

Day 44.




Things are still going bad in poker. Need to do something to turn this around. Technically i still got time but don't wanna lose. Possibly move back to plo2 if continue to lose. Also need to review HM to look for most common spots and how average player plays them to adjust my counter-strategy. I was also doing some real-life things like buying a new desk, keyboard. It makes my grind spot a more enjoyable place and sometimes it's good to go shopping even if it's -EV but humanizes you more. Not too much though.

Regards,

Ilya N.

Days 45-46.


A good day followed by a bad day. Roller-coaster. Need to keep momentum and go go go.

14/02


15/02


Some good quote from "Thee story of philosophy" i'm currently reading:
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; "these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions"; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit;”

Regards,

Ilya N.

Days 47-51.


Been busy doing my thing and couldn't post any update. It's kinda difficult to be honest. My lifestyle is pretty intense at the moment both physically and mentally. Physically cause i need to travel long distance with my back pack every day and cope with cold russian winter and mentally because i need to adjust my mental state between poker and work.

Poker is also going very slow. My current goal is get to plo10 at the end of March which i think is still doable but it's very hard to stay positive when it's going so slow. You look at these people who win big at plo and you imagine how they would crush if were put in your position, but at the end of the day you can only do so much bb/100 so you probably need to calm down and take your time. It might take 2 months to get from plo5 to plo10 of hard grind. So be it. The harder it is, the better.

This week i've put main focus to poker and didn't exercise well which is think is good but next week need to exercise a bit more probably.

16-18/02


19-20/02


Regards,

Ilya N.

Days 52-54.


Did ok volume wise the last 3 days but absolutely terrible results wise. Very frustrating but nothing i can do at the moment but to power through. Maybe should stop playing zoom, really always have had bad results there.

21/02


22/02


23/02


Happened to watch a documentary on World War 2 on National Georgraphic with some raw footage from battle fields, air bombers, death camps, ruined cities etc. Pretty sick that so many people were actually taping and were then shot to death a couple moments later.

I think we need to understand that it's much easier to conquer the HS PLO than survive in a warfare such as 1943 Battle of Kursk and like.

Regards,

Ilya N.

Days 55-59.


24/02


25/02


26/02


27/02


Ok, time to review another month. The average success rate on my daily goals was 0.625 which is lower than on a previous month. I think i concentrated more on poker this month which made sacrifice for other goals. I went skiing much less and exercised much less in general. This is probably due to the fact that i lost money this month and was chasing losses.



Graph:


I also had a much worse mood this month which means that my general happiness is affected by whether i'm winning or losing. For example, at the end of last month i was imagining how i'm going to beat one stake at a time and move up gradually but at the end of this month i wanted to quit just because it was so unpleasant to lose it all back.

I've read following books this month:

1) Total Recall (finished)
2) The story of Philosophy
3) Quiet

I've really enjoyed all of them and was really helpful to read them to get my mind off poker.

Going to adjust my next short-term goal a little bit: plo10 by May, 10th.

Regards,

Ilya N.

Days 60-66.


Been doing pretty good last days. Managed to get momentum and started winning again. I need to be careful though just making my conclusions based on such short-term results as one week. An idea i've picked up from just read book "Mental Game of Poker" is it's very important to make an effort to understand how variance impacted your results on a daily basis. Need to make it a daily goal after each session. Then at the end of the month it would be much easier to see whether results are an accurate representation of your skill/lack of relative to the opposition or just a deviation. And as noted in the book i don't just mean all-in EV but variance as a whole. Without scrolling through every hand and noting whether you got lucky or not v their range is it possible to just use standard deviation in bb/100? What's normal std.dev. in bb/100 for plo6max? Mine is around 200 bb/100. Why is it such sick number?

Also, adding 20 minutes of meditation as a pre-game routine. Never done it before, always seemed like a waste of time but i think it's foolish to deny the obvious benefits. Gonna try.

28/02


01/03


02/03


03/03


04/03


05/03


06/03


Good luck to all who are reading this.

Regards,

Ilya N.

200 SD is quite typical for plo. Yeah it's hard to find a true winrate for a measly 100k hands...

Thanks, what would be considered a high SD? If my SD is 250 today may i think today variance was a big factor? And same with lower SD?

Days 67-69.


Been playing my average game the last few days. Emotional control was average too, sometimes i was frustrated especially when my HM2 was freezing the action. Variance impact was average, although all-in EV difference was big.

07/03


08/03


09/03


If run good i will be able to take a shot at plo10 in about 14 days:


If i run standard (how i ran this year) then i'm going to take a shot in 20 days.


Let's see what happens.

Regards,

Ilya N.

Not sure. I think <150 is consider low. 150-200 is pretty average, 200+ is high. This is only based on a few posts I've read in various threads though. Not much statistical evidence.

PLO is a crazy game, I don't think it's really possible to perfectly predict when you can shot-take lol. You could run good and be like a couple BI away from taking a shot, then all of a sudden go on a sick 20+BI downswing and have to rebuild lol.

Yeh anyways, good luck

Days 70-72.


The quality of play was from bad-to-good, so average overall. The emotional control was good which is due to the fact i'm reasonably rolled for the stakes i play and pretty confident about beating them. As long as i stick to my BRM rules i should always have good control over my emotions imo. The variance was high in my opinion but i'm looking to improve at better understanding variance.

10/03


11/03


Regards,

Ilya N.

Days 72-87.


Been too busy to update the blog in the past 2 weeks. Honestly i also don't see a point anymore to post frequent updates. It just doesn't look like it helps very much. Maybe i'm sort of burned out from being in a results oriented mode for 3 months but i think it's more that it just takes time out of my schedule and since i don't have that much free time it just becomes overwhelming. My main goal is to play poker every day and i continue to do so and as long as i do i'm fine even if i update the blog only once a week.

As far as moving to plo10 it turned out that yes, i built my roll for taking a shot in 6 days (much quicker than i expected) but yes, it's just too much variance in the game to calculate those things and expect it to work out in the short term. Since i moved up to plo10 i won 3000 bbs in the first 3 days and then i lost it back very quickly and now i'm playing plo5 again.

Here's the recap of the month.


The quality of play was average this month. I had some good days and some bad days. Bad days were possibly a result of a burn out or a "hate-losing tilt". Emotional control was average too, sometimes tilting becuase of a series of decisions that went wrong or a mistake tilt when i make a play kinda knowing it's a bad play and then i tilt for some # of hands afterwars and it can be costly since i play many tables and is likely to face another big decisaion shortly afterwards. The key here is to not start to analyze your decision after it went wrong and quickly reset for the next action to not allow a series of bad decisions to affect your next decision. The variance impact was average if i can trust myself on estimating it correctly. That means the results should correlate pretty well with the actual win-rate that i have. Now the actual results:



Pretty happy with the fact that i won again after losing in Feburary.

As far as my daily goals, i did more exercising and some studying of plo but failed on my villain analysis after each session. Just couldn't fit it into my schedule.



So for the next month i'm gonna focus on:



Books read this month:

1. Why evolution is true (***)

Good book on collecting the evidence of evolutional theory of the origin of life on the planet Earth. Focuses more on plants and animals but some clear evidence for the the common ancestors of humans and primates. Couldn't really follow all the technical terms and be 100% convinced but pretty convincing nevertheless.

2. Mental game of poker (*****)

Very good. Found explanation for my failiure in poker. Eplains very well some of the problems poker players go through. I related the most to things like "hate-losing" tilt and being protective of your ego being formed around being a winner and not taking risks. Basically not growing as a player or learning.

3. Social (*****) (re-read 1/2)

I like very much how he shows correlation between happiness and the quality of social life. It's easy to get caught in the pursuit of the money but it's really nice to see the evidence that having friends, girlfriend, wife etc. is as important as banking $100K/year. For me personally, my social life always sucked but previously i didn't take a lot of proactive steps to imrove that and now i might take more of those steps.

4. The sports gene (***) (re-read 1/4)

Here i found nice to see that genes are just as important as the amount practise which i previously thought otherwise. Like the NBA research that shows chances to make it increase exponentially with the increase of height. Like if you're very tall the chance is around 3-4% and if you're very short the chance is 1 in 10 million. So you basically only want to pursue things where you have this 3-4% chance to make it otherwise it's just silly. You don't have 10 million lives to live to see if you can make it or not.

5. The lessons of history (*****) (re-read 2/3)

Here i found nice thoughts about war being constant throughout history and some conflicts being to fundamental to be resolved by gentlement's agreement. "Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power."

6. The story of philosophy (***) (re-read 1/5)

Some nice greek philosophy by Plato and Socrates about the ideal state and how it should have kids taken away from families at an early age and how every procreation should be done under the supervision of the state. Obviously unattainable given the maternal instincts and human greed and desire to always get more and things like that but nice to see that you have a lot more freeedom than you think you do.


Regards,

Ilya N.

Days 88-94.


Hit a really bad stretch the last 7 days. Variance impact was fairly low, quality of play was fairly bad all around. Definitely played below my standard. Emotional control was average, nothing too crazy. PLO5 is really taking some time to beat, can't move up from here for ages now it seems.

Put some time into studying the game, been going to work and exercising everyday as planned. Been eating as healthy as my budget can afford, watched porn only 2 times this week just to break the tension. Didn't do my conversational english lessons but going to resume from now on once a week.

Need to think about getting back to playing soccer as the weather gets better here as winter goes away. Maybe should join some kind of team but the problem is obviously lack of connections and not such great playing skills. So far only table tennis once a day as spoting activities for me.

Regards,

Ilya N.

Days 95-109.



Didn't update the blog for almost 3 weeks and now it feels like a good time to do it. Been doing pretty well overall. It looks like the momentum starts to work in my favour a little bit and i have a little bit more time on other things like socializing etc. I definitely didn't push very hard during that time stretch in poker and the volume slipped significantly. I also decreased the number of tables and was experimenting with a new strategy a little bit. The quality of play is hard to estimate over such long time span since i didn't keep track of it but it wasn't great for sure. I generally need to work a lot on my game.

April graph:



Hopefully my next shot to plo10 will go better and i will be playing plo10 by the mid of May otherwise my goal of playing plo100 by the end of the year will become unattainable.

As i said i did a lot more socializing during that time stretch, a lot more exercising and feeling much better. Also read some nice books, did conversational english one time. Trying to find a balance.