I keep my watch on stop watch mode when I play. I basically let myself look at my phone every hour I play for about 5 minutes then I put my phone back in my pocket. Also turn off all notifications while you play so you don't even feel it vibrate.

I tend to try to have a soft focus while I play. Relaxed and willing to talk with my neighbors. GL!

EDIT: I have tried being super strict with myself and not take my phone out at all but I think that causes me more problems. If I'm in a tournament I won't take it out until break though.

My method is to basically not pay too much attention to small limped pots as well. It's not worth even the slight use of mental energy to focus on minutia - especially if you already have a decent read on players.

I'm not going cold turkey or anything, but sometimes I realize I barely have reads on the players I'm not already familiar with from past sessions. Maybe somewhat complacent in expecting to win.

I also play a fair bit of mixed limit games in which case you can learn a lot about their hand selection and aggression level with draws... but sometimes I'm just not engaged enough. Until now!

I'm 98% sure as their variance increases so does yours. And when they short stack you are effectively short stacked as well so your variance is higher right along with theirs.

Having said that most people who buy in short are worse than their average competition.
Otherwise they'd be buying in deeper to allow them selves the full range of options at any point.

Phone derail is interesting, but not on topic for this thread. Please take it to the chat thread.

I know this has been discussed before -- but whats the best tracking apps for android?

I used poker income, but the graphs kinda suck and exporting the data is near impossible.

Excel or Google sheets.

OK let me add that I'm a lazy piece of **** and would not like to do work, due to the prior statement of me being a lazy piece of ****

At 1/2, in sessions am 63% win, 37% loss over 1300 hours.

if you export from PokerIncome using comma separated values (CSV), you can paste that output into a text file and then import that into Excel. Personally i don’t know how to get nice graphs after that, maybe Angrist can help past that step

Poker Agent AINEC.

-1

Poker Bankroll Tracker is pretty awesome IMO.

(deleted - just saw G's post on this derail)

GcluelessderailnoobG

Every serious player knows a "session" is a fairly arbitrary unit... or is it? A new session resets your stack to be limited by the max, resets your table image, and resets any reads you have except for players you've seen before. With that in mind, ending a session as a winner could actually be a huge leak! An above max stack should have higher expected return, combined with a winning or otherwise good image and accumulated knowledge of the players / dynamic means your expectation is actually growing along with your stack. Your expectation at the beginning of a session is way worse.

The desire to rack up and "book a big win" will actually hurt your long term win rate. Maybe obvious to some but I someteimes get complacent when I have a large stack (say 3x the max or more). "Do I really want to keep playing and try to win 1300 instead of 1000? I'd be so pissed if I blow it..." In reality it's like you are destroying your own sand castle before the tide comes in, rather than making it even better and letting the tide (aka game conditions) dictate when you're done adding towers.

I need to mentally override the risk aversion / win complacency that can creep in to a session narrative, "Ignoring" the variance as long as we maintain +EV is pretty much the mark of a winning player, but I suspect a lot of otherwise excellent players still let it influence their session length even if it doesn't impact in-hand decisions. At least it does for me...

The above assumes (a) you're playing in a completely different environment each time regarding table image and reads (ex. doesn't apply to those who play in reg infested environments with the same player pool) and (b) that you're better at deepstack than your opponents (or at the very least might not apply to those whose wheelhouse is shorterstacked play and who feel a little uncomfortable with deepstack play).

Gitdepends,imoG

Fair points... but even in a reggy room your heater / big stack image is probably going to be better than your default image.

But yeah if the other deep stacks are tough players or you're not experienced playing deep then it could erode the implicit edge that comes with a hot session.

I guess my main point is, everyone knows you shouldn't leave a great game just because you are running bad as long as you keep your head on straight. But I find myself too willing to leave a good game just because I am running good and think the win is "big enough".

Do you use the Pro version?

A large chunk of my net comes from big winning sessions

When I was first starting out I would certainly lock up wins because I was bad at deepstacked and didn't want to lose 5 buyins in a single hand.

So, yes, "locking up wins" is absolutely a huge leak, but not one so easy to fix. The "fix" requires being over-rolled for your game and also being and an excellent deep stack player. However, if you obtain those two attributes your WR can easily skyrocket by being able to catapult decent wins into huge wins. The momentum is real

yup

It would be very interesting to break down those big wins though. Were they really all just table image / big stack related? Or simply ran good in a bunch of medium sized pots (that could have just as easily been accomplished hit-and-run shortstacking)?

I really have zero recollection of how my biggest winning sessions went (say, for example, all my $1K+ wins at 1/3 NL), but my overall best guess would be they were of the latter type (i.e. just a bunch of run good medium sized pots hit multiple times over a bunch of hours that really had little to do with table image or stack sizes). I mean, my memory is completely shot regarding this, but I'm fairly positive I would have remembered something along the lines of "oh yeah, I had a really awesome image going and that guy got in $700 against me when I had the nuts" (which I'm fairly sure has like literally never happened).

Gitmightjustbeamirage,imoG

The leak of quitting too early when you're deep is probably smaller than not quitting soon enough and punting a 4BI stack.

When I think about my big winning sessions it's usually a combination of two factors:

1) A juicy game. Often where people are willing to get into pots for decent amounts with marginal (or trash) hands, and then rebuy. Sometimes just because they're bad all around.

2) Hitting a spot to get paid. Spiking top set in a raised pot with $500 behind type of situation.

Condition 1 alone will get you a lot of good solid 2-3 BI win.

Condition 2 alone gets you a double up and a BI or two win.

Have to get both conditions to score a really big win IME. Here I'm thinking of sessions in the 4-6 hour range. Not the 16 hour grind fest to end up $1k at a $1/2 game.

I'm at 300 hours for the year so far the majority being at 2/5. 50 of the hours are at 1/2 and 1/3, 9 hours at 5/10, and the rest is 2/5.

300.7 hours / $37.41/hr / $11,248

My app also lets me look at my top 5 winning and losing games. Is there any take aways we can get from that info.

Top 5 games

$3760
$3100
$2420
$2300
$1600

Bottom 5 games
-$1500
-$1085
-$1080
-$990
-$925

I'm worried because it seems like my top games makes up almost all my profit. Is that just how live poker goes or am I just running really hot?

Also I usually only bring $2100 with me to the casino and I buy in for $700 (on a $1000 cap game). Usually if I'm losing I will leave after 4 or 5 hours. I admittedly start playing way to passive when I'm losing.

A couple of years ago (you could probably track down the exact post in here if you wanted to) I posted something along the lines of how 80% of my winnings for the year came in like 10% of my sessions. The next year I don't think I posted a single big win (if I recall correctly without being forced to look at my stats), and surprise surprise I had sucky results overall.

But I also thing there's a good chance that's just meaningless randomness variance too. Pretty sure it's possible to have a killer year just by posting a lot of very mediocre wins with no big losses.

Gwhoknows,imoG

Probably meaningless randomness. I know 300 hours is nothing when it comes to sample size.

If you think u can beat it, def shot take just to get away from the bigger rake affect at 1/2 If nothing else