Hello.

This will be focused solely on the mental/psychological aspect of grinding poker.

The plan for this blog is simple but radical: After every session I play, I post here about how the session was mentally/emotionally, including details of mental blunders or successes.

Why? I'm a poker pro fallen on tough times. I never thought I'd start a blog here, but had the idea that it might help for my mental game. Doing this would constitute accountability, supporting the building of stronger mental game.

Also, sharing it publicly will let it be something I'm consciously proud of and thus won't come to take for granted and then let slide. (That's how it goes in my experience: Once having made sufficient mental game improvements, one becomes less pro-active and it deteriorates, resulting in unexpected tilt and mental regression somewhere down the line.)
I will also share some specific mental aspects I'm grappling with. For example letting go of the need to play hands perfectly, avoiding even the slightest mistake. A need based in paranoia around other regs pouncing on my every weakness. Or: having the courage to play hands the way I want to play them, as opposed to how I think they should be played.


Some more detail:
Recently I've already been focused primarily on the mental side of grinding instead of focusing on exactly how I should play hands - and I think that this is the way forward. I think mental game is really the foundation required to confidently and freely improve ones technical game. And I don't want to be doing something many hours a week that is unpleasant, boring, painful. I want to be able to grind for hours pleasantly, relaxed, without mental and emotional exhaustion afterwards.

My relationship with poker has been patchy. I've gone through phases of very resilient mental game, but also very rough, painful phases and low-points, exploring the meaning of 'rock-bottom'. I've made promises to myself - for example that I will never again let myself feel so bad playing poker - so bad that, rationally, It really makes no sense for me to continue living off poker instead of getting a job. I've broken those promises, which that feels shameful and unsettling. I've gone through a period of a kind of burnout that wrecked my mental game thoroughly, after which I took a break from serious poker for a couple of years. Reluctantly returning to poker after not finding a good alternative income, I've been faced with painful experiences of really not being the player I remember being - missing the sharpness and the intuition that used to be part of what let me be a confident regular at mid-stakes.
So why am I even doing this - why stick with poker? Three months ago I seriously considered entering the job market after a stint of half-heartedly grinding in my local casino hit rock-bottom. Re-evaluatung my life the next day, I found new motivation to once again truly try to be good at online poker. Realising it would mean that I could stay in the very nice but slighty expensive appartment where I live and could have the time for the things I love in my life, especially rock-climbing -going out for a whole day whenever the weather conditions are good. Plus I realised that I'm curious poker would go if I actually did try again. I realised that the fear that I'm washed up, that I should admit that I just don't have what it takes anymore, really isn't based on anything, as I hadn't really tried yet, and of course if I don't really try I can't expect anything more than ****. So why not at least try and see what happens.
So since then it's been a combination of: on the one hand fresh motivation and indeed quite fast progress in how my game feels, and at the same time the impediments of the years emotional baggage and of the stresses of my really quite dire financial situation. I'm living as a poker pro in a western country with a net-worth hovering around €2-3k. That really would have sounded absurd to me in the past - but then again it may be freeing to find that it's possible to do this.

Saturday and sunday I tilted in a way I hadn't tilted in a long time. I feel guilty about how self-destructive I was.
To give you some idea of what I can do and how insecure I feel about poker and my bankroll afterwards, one of the worst hands involved me open-raising to 125bb with A5o, then when called I shoved the remaining 80bb on a random flop. (and got it in with 10% EQ)

Hello mate, nice to see you started a blog here, update us with your results, wish you best of luck with your games.

Hope this blog will help you control your emotions! GL!

session 1:
short session. quite uneventful, felt OK.

- bit under 500h in just over an hour.

- couple of slightly tricky spots where I decided how I want to play them, prepared myself for the worst case scenario, and then followed through, feeling OK when I lost the hands

- several meh hands where i at least had some kind of plan/idea and stuck with it somewhat calmly despite it not being a very convincing plan/strategy. (some won some lost.)

- no fatigue, OK handle on tables/selection

- no distractions: music in background, spent all time looking through notes and hands.

- slightly underestimated the session result

long session, 1.5k hands in 3h 20 with only 1 short break.

- slightly tired, ok mood. got into an steady rhythm after a while.

- navigated some tricky / uncertain spots fairly well, without getting too caught up in them.

- one hand annoyed me for a few minutes: opponent lost the minimum, which triggers me because I used to be good at preventing that.

- felt like I was playing weak, lacking intuition for ranges and auto-folding a lot. But red-line actually very good. maybe variance, but can't have played way too weak.

- noticed that I didn't have any real confidence in my game vs good regs and instead wanted to avoid them - didn't have the feeling that I could outplay them postflop

low-intensity session, 800 hands in 2 hours including a break.

really quite uneventful/light, felt fine.
Didn't worry too much about any of the spots that came up. Used the mental calm to consider approaches and metagame of some standard spots.

took some spewier lines at the lower limit of the two I mix to find out what's happening in the spot, felt ok when it went wrong.

session 4: 800 hands in 1h:45m

started quite tired, maybe partly because i snacked beforehand. got into an ok rhythm but especially towards the end felt quite fatigued.
- a couple of times found I didn't know what had happened on previous streets. Didn't panic though and just kept the thought process simple.
- easy despite fatigue, maybe because of comfort zone + barely any unpleasant spots + a couple of nice spots.
- not much else to say. Did some minor, simple deliberate/constructive things in some spots in order to learn - possible despite fatigue.