I agree with Spyutastic here and position myself vs the academic status quo, in the sense that strictly focussing on financial EV while not factoring in other equally important factors, is pretty diminutive. Like happiness EV of potential life changing money as opposed to having the overwhelming guilt and having taken a flip that held more EV... I know that I would personally take the EV, but not weighing other factors is pretty binary thinking, me thinks.

Totally agree B is what most people would choose, I do it sometimes too. Like end of a session I'm up and dealt a hand I could play more aggressively to maximize EV, or passively to minimize my losses. Really want to book a win because been BE/downswinging lately, so choose passive (sometimes just folding). A really good PLO pro I admire doesn't like taking risks just before ending a session for the peace of mind.

That AA v. 72 hand (very extreme situation), if 72 4! jammed and had you covered and you were up $5,000 on the session and about to leave, you wanna go for $10k or book the win? If your life roll was $20k? If the win would mean a winning month and a loss would mean you're stuck even more?

Emotions should not impact play but humans have them for a reason. Unlike computers, we have to contend with existential threats and survival. In our society, for whatever reason that means money. Emotions probably keep us from doing really stupid things and surviving longer, which booking the win would achieve. Money in hand=more food/rent/etc. Maybe there is merit to emotions and it's actually better to have a healthy amount of fear of losing?

skimmed but I look forward to reading these comments again when I’m done playing sometime tomorrow

tyvm

I think there’s too much attachment to winning pots, losing pots, booking wins, getting unstuck, upswings, downswings- none of which are truly real in cash game poker.

The way I view it personally is that you can’t “lose” a pot anyways when all-in in cash unless you have zero % equity. And vice versa.

Very important imo although many people think it’s just semantics.

Losing sessions also really aren’t a thing either as, as sqwid says we’re always making money/our expected hourly but if we got technical I suppose if you execute a punt with some serious hang time, play a short session etc it’s reasonable even as a pro

These are all things that I struggle with personally but i view these as weaknesses that are worth investing significant amounts of time, energy, $, heartache, pain to truly overcome rather than something that just comes with the territory of the grind or whatever.

It’s actually the opposite of being robotic/lacking emotions to truly conceptualize the EV being what’s real which is a key point too.

And I think this is all incredibly practical too. EV is practical.

It’s a lot more painful being up 3k in a session and finishing stuck 2k in an amazing game with three recs and two whales after playing all night than it it is rewarding the times one finishes up 10k despite the extra financial gain.

Can replace these numbers with +300, -200, and +1k respectively or +30k, -20k, +100k doesn’t matter too much imo.

When I talk to people though and on here I do prefer just sticking with terms like losing/winning etc as I don’t really want to be that guy and i just find myself hemorrhaging enough brain cells on a daily basis in these casinos to begin with

Great thread man, I admire the work you put in. GL.

Your latter statement is 100% wrong, being human is making decisions that are not always completely rational, but influenced by emotion. Being robotic is to always make decisions in a vaccum (e.g. only look at EV).

You're right that in theory we should always try to look at EV only (assuming there's no RoR concerns); but at the end of the day we're all fallible humans. Even some of the best in the world get frustrated and quit early -- it's not being weak, it's recognizing your weaknesses.

For me, I noticed that a big loss would sometimes effect my mood and require a few days off. Instead of trying to change my mentality (very difficult), I worked with it -- I'd marginally reduce EV in some spots to reduce variance when shot-taking to ensure I was able to put in more hours.

If you can separate your emotions from it completely, that's amazing. But don't feel like you're a failure for having emotions.

For some reason, people tend to assume when I say “EV” or “EV is real”- I’m strictly talking about financially. This is not the case.

I don’t operate on this level of simplicity and yes I do expect people to understand that and give me the benefit of the doubt by this point in the thread.

Everything is incredibly nuanced in my world and I don’t know any other way.

Life EV, happiness EV, it’s all factored in. This requires a less robotic state of mind than thinking the $ is what’s real. As there is significantly *more nuance not just financially, but otherwise, if the EV is what’s real.

Life EV, happiness EV, and countless other forms of EV are rarely ever quantifiable. The $ is. This lends itself to a far less robotic state of mind

What I was saying/or trying to was that those that believe the $ is real can eliminate nuance and just robotically make decisions both on and off the felt (within the construct of their value system) to net them the most $.

As for me being 100% wrong somehow- this is why I struggle to be concise and feel pretty self conscious with sharing my thoughts authentically with zero filter.

Because If I don’t say everything that I’m thinking people will just jump to random and inaccurate assumptions and conclusions based on how they perceive me.

Whatever, I’m used to it.


Thank you for sharing.



————
See this post by benabadbeat who I believe won 200k last year playing cards (IDK iirc)

This adds to my point. I would write more words but I don’t really want to have what I say be taken out of context

Thank you, sir! I appreciate it

Will probably post far less as I don’t get the sense many people feel the same way you do so not really worth the time and energy

RtP, I think the last few posts show a great deal of thoughtful emotional maturity and security on your part. You may well not consider yourself the full package in this department - or you maybe you never will - but it's a journey and you're well down the road.

PS And in EV terms you don't have to be the full emotional package anyhoo - just have the emotional edge on your chosen villains at any given moment

Obviously you spend vast majority of your time going towards poker success so I try give some thoughts on that.

I think you need to somehow figure out the answer to what are the limitations of not playing higher.

Lets say the very long-term goal in this live-poker context is private games / 25/50 - 50/100 high-stakes live games.

So thinking going to 10/20 from mainly 2/5, 5/10 is realistic .

So I believe its a lot of grind to get the bankroll but I assume fundamentals have to also improve for that or at least it would be in the long run beneficial to improve them.

I think you should play online poker at ACR for practice , get a real online poker sample , work heavily on fundamentals .

Look to understand stuff like Toy-Games very well ..

Only live-poker / soft sites online feels like not best . Why not play 0.25/0.5 on ACR fast-fold for example. You get sample in a week, then move up . This should help to develop real understanding and confidence in terms of skill level and give tons of thought and insight to what to work on with if you pay attention to what you don't understand. In terms of money it likely wont be short term best EV but in the longer run I think many of the hands you are thinking about you would perceive very differently after working more on fundamentals and it should benefit you a lot therefore.

I like your thread and I think a lot of people like reading it . Keep working towards what you want and its always enough.

Seems like there are two basic approaches to the emotional and mental volatility of dealing with poker swings.

1- Change your approach so the variance affects you less

2- Understand the variance so that it affects you less

1-Changing your approach can help temporarily so that you can continue playing. But you will always be adjusting and reacting to variance to some degree beyond your liking. This is like taking medication for pain. It can help you to continue to work that day or week, but is not sustainable in the long term.

2-Understanding variance and embracing it is the only long term solution. Knowing that the bad beats, and emotional turmoil of the game is what makes it so profitable, radically changes your relationship to the variance. It becomes your friend. If poker wasn't so tough emotionally and mentally, the average skill level would be much much higher, and there would be as much money to be made at the game as there is in chess.

If you are a winning player, every single time you get a bad beat or variance hits you negatively, you can rest assured that if that didn't happen, you would not be making money at this game at all.

Having said that, I love to short stack PLO

^^^great post

Have to be very good in order to really understand variance . I don't think its something you think through change perception and master. Its long journey of millions of hands of getting disappointed over and over again because of also getting constantly happy of all the wrong reasons.

Some eliminate their emotions. Some say its not healthy to do that. I think we all do it at times and have to . Entering games with some mantra "I am indifferent to whatever is going to happen" seems like not really best imo . even recommend by some.

Having strong fundamentals leads to understanding bit better variance. Without having strong fundamentals you cant understand variance bcz not understanding the spots too well / what is the amount of money supposed to go in for each player in each spot and where did the mistake happen .

uhh. yah. I have no idea what I was looking at. I am very bad at paying attention to what I`'m doing while browsin' the web, and think I somehow went down a rabbit hole in your thread and thought it was the present, and that also since I didn`t find it anymore that it was deleted. you also anticipated getting flamed for posting the hands. it`s buried somewhere in the thread.

So, uhhh...good job for not doing that thing...anymore...that occured in the past.

also gl on owning livenoobs generally

Fair enough, I apologize for being presumptuous and/or not looking too deeply into the conversation before being so matter-of-fact in my response.

Idk if this is good advice necessarily lol, but what works for me is realizing that most people are dumbasses and I don't respect their opinion. When you read something negative it's a lot easier to brush it off if you make a mental note of "hah, this guys a ****ing clown".

I appreciate the comments, I haven’t read them yet as I prefer not to think about that stuff for now.

a lot of my mental game work is centered around journaling and thinking about stuff like what you see in recent posts. I spend a ton of time on mental game work. More than many people spend actually playing cards at the tables.

My total productive hours for poker is over 100/week in November for sure and I couldn’t be happier.

I don’t talk to very many people anymore especially outside of poker except for this lovely girl who’s way out of my league and super intelligent.

Anyways, I’m going to share some edited excerpts from my journal from different days across the month. No complaints just journaling~.

have a had lots of super tilting moments recently. I’ll just leave the poker ones here and cut the life ones out bc no one cards about the life stuff.

[see below]

i think this means im bound to rip off another super healthy month soon if I keep playing 75+ hours every week of A game poker for the foreseeable future

i feel the heat coming

YOu can get rid of your emotions but you have to grind a ton. When i decided to play 200k hands a month and put in over 2m hands a year I no longer tilted, i no longer had to think about the spots. It got to the point i hardly had a losing day. Breaking even was like losing day for me. I just knew what to do in each spot over time. And knowing what to do even if i was wrong the outcome didn't bother me cause I knew in a vacuum in that particular spot I am making money. I think thats biggest problem I see with players today. They don't put enough hrs and volume like people did back in the day. There is no more popular mass table players to promote like leatherass, nanonoko and i forgot the other guys name bodu or boku. Sites dont really teach it. so players play less volume get a lot more emotional in these marginal spots and don't really know what to do a lot of the times cause they don't grind enough.

Imo if you want to lose emotion just grind 6-8 hrs a day and at least 7k hands a day. Its really not that hard to do once you get used to it. I started with 6 tables, worked my way up to 20 over time. Just like anything else you brain adapts and learns to make fast decisions if you practice at it. Its the only way to get rid of tilt and emotion. But to put in this mass volume u are going to tilt and get upset at first. You have to play through it and you will be a +ev machine. It does get very boring but your making al lot of money cause your beating your biggest enemy which is variance. If you play enough to beat variance you will be very wealthy person playing poker.

Stop putting that personality on a pedestal, RtP!

You're a great guy with lots going for you. If you want that beautiful baby then go after her with all of you've got!

Unfortunately this doesn't really work in the same way it used to. I came up in the era where we were all playing tons of tables and I loved it but it's much harder to get away with these days. Back in the day you could just choose between full tilt or pokerstars and load up your 15-20 tables and cascade them. Now you have to be on a few different sites, things mostly have to be tiled because the softwares are **** and tables won't correctly pop to front. And with it being multiple sites it's even more difficult to have an optimal layout. Many sites have quicker actions clocks/no auto time bank/no wait lists etc. You could do it on just ACR probably but then you're just passing up softer games and a higher hourly for volume and simplicity and the software is still pretty buggy and shitty a lot. Players are also stronger in general and games worse on average so pushing tables and volume too hard is going to hurt your winrate a lot. Lower winrate means more volume to realize your EV. So it really comes down to trying to find the number of tables where you can still play with a high winrate while getting decent volume. I still play too many tables most of the time because old habits die hard, but I try and tailor my table count to the type of grind I'm doing. If I'm in bigger/tougher games and need to think through spots more deeply I need to play less tables. If I'm playing a bunch of 1/2 games with weaker regs and more fish than I can auto pilot more and push more volume even if it sacrifices a bit of winrate and still have a higher hourly. Definitely a very nuanced thing that will vary greatly from person to person and situation to situation. I think in RTP's case he is mostly focused on improving/moving up and grinding live games. So don't think his main goal should ever be pushing volume tbh.

GL RTP, enjoying the recent discussions. I find strategy discussing boring at this point but the soft skills/how to think about the game discussions are still very fun to read. Hopefully you have some heat around the corner at the tables but ultimately if you are getting in the volume you should at least have achieve a decent return for your time by the end of the year!

Wow that's some pretty brutal stuff man. Respect for being able to go right back at the grind. I for one would be taking a long break after those beats.

Hope it turns around.

i can’t help it

i suppose

thanks



As fun as this sounds my intuition tells me it’s more prudent to wait until I accomplish everything I want to first


Thanks for the quality insight as usual

I could win zero more pennies and make zero more progress to close out the year and it would still have exceeded my (very high) expectations

I spent the entire year exclusively on poker and don’t have any plans to change this

I personally think it’s super important to keep pushing extremely hard every hard regardless of what direction I’m swinging in both on and off the felt though

wants my progress to be exponential, with zero plateaus throughout my entire career.

So I have no choice.


tyty sir means a lot for you to drop in and type that

doesn’t come naturally to me, just a function of the daily mental game work, meditation, journaling

As for the running quads i suppose it’s a good thing these guys always think I have AK regardless of the configuration and action

The bad beat jackpot one was kind of annoying bc I could have lived the rest of my life without knowing that but this mfer who table shared thought it was necessary to lmk the next time he saw me

so here we are

lol

RtP,

You’re welcome.

Confidence is a preference.

And beautiful babies who are great catches aren’t available for long. As the saying goes you need to strike while the iron is hot!

this, otherwise you need to wait until they are divorced with 3 kids,

I could be off but I believed I played over 100 hours this week. *That’s actually not including warmup/cool down/study (which there obviously wasn’t very much of).

Definitely the most hours I’ve ever played in a week so somewhat noteworthy to me

Ended the week poorly with one of those death (online) sessions where I was up 3k+ total or thereabouts at peak and finished stuck 2k+ mostly by virtue of boat under boat (got rivered) vs a mega whale for piles in the biggest game

seeing that particular showdown was definitely a sinking feeling ngl

easy to forget about all those times I cooler someone too, not sweating it.

looking forward to crushing it next week!