If they were, I was playing even worse.

I caught myself slipping into my old habits of playing crappy hands because I could stack the villain if I hit. To counter that mindset (maybe) I played 100 straight hands with a 0 VPIP to finish the night. I have to remind myself folding is the right play much more often than not.

Can't win if you fold Happy New Year and I will be following in 2013.

I was thinking about Tommy Angelo's story about folding aces pre. I'm nor planning on nitting it up too much. I'm just trying to stop my VPIP from creeping past 40 by proving to myself I can fold.

Nice thread

Thanks!

I finally got to play some poker on something other than my phone today. For 37 minutes. I think I covered my Zoom losses from my vacation. And I'm sure my 100 BB/100 winrate is sustainable.

I also managed a couple of videos so far this week. I started off the week a bit off pace, but I should be able to get my remaining 3 hours for this week.

Week 2:

[ ] study 5 hours a week

I got 4.25 hours in, but just couldn't stay awake last night. Real Life conflicted frequently this week.

I will assign myself a penalty hour this week.

Are you having some strict schedule for studying or do you study when you get time? The same is with playing - do you have a schedule?

That would be helpful, but I don't have a fixed schedule for my available time. It's after the kids go to bed and after I've completed the tasks assigned by my wife. Last week I got tripped up because my wife unexpectedly felt like staying up 'late' and watching a movie with me after spending half the week out of town.

This week I have no idea when I can.

The best approach might be an hour of study before I play. I've tried that in the past, but this past week was an aberration. Yesterday, to compensate, I did an hour before and half-hour after.

Looks like I'm pretty much done playing for the week. A surprise work trip has me leaving for the land of the free, home of Black Friday very early Wednesday. I'm too tired to play tonight and have to get ready tomorrow.

That will eat up a lot of potential study time, too, but I should be able to manage my target. I just don't like doing too much theoretical work without a decent amount of practice to reinforce the concepts.

So much for last week.

[ ] 6 hours of study

I got 2.5 hours. Between travel, work and sleep deprivation, I just wasn't able to focus any appreciable time on anything else.

This week I've accumulated a requirement of 8.5 hours. It might take a couple of weeks to burn off the backlog.

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Make that 3.5 hours. I discounted my penalty hour and added it to my requirement.

This week I need to do 7.5 hours of study.

I've been listening to the Small Stakes Edge podcast at Deuces Cracked. In a recent episode, Josh mentions that he thinks river bets are too weighted to value, to the point where you can "exploit" it by folding to river bets without a big hand.

They had also been talking about checking the productivity of certain lines. I decided that I'd look at the simplest one combining the two, and filtered for hands where I had called a river bet.

The results were awful. Since November 1 I'm down $470 in hands where I called a river bet. There were only 400 or so such hands in my database.

I'm not sure how much I would have saved by check/folding. I can do the work on that later. In the meantime, I think I won't be calling quite so much on the river.

Hey. As you are not posting your results anymore, all I can hope is that family as well as poker are going well.

Concerning your last post about calling the river bets I just want to add something and for what it is worth, I may not teach you much, but maybe I will learn something.

Obv. you have to handpick which hands do you call on the river but recently I was kind of encouraged to call river bets on a specific situation. I Cbet often even if I have a weak hand. If I do not improve, I check the turn and normally I would fold the river but I noticed with fishy passive players that a check/check turn, and a check on the river often induces a bluff (as big as half the pot) and by calling even with 2nd pair, 1st pair no kicker I often take down the pot.

Thats all I wanted to add. you may have known this already but if your long-term experience has shown different results, I would really like to know.

Other than that, yeah, folding river bets more often should be more often.

You're definitely correct that inducing a river bet can be profitable with a read vs the right villain.

Another river mistake I make frequently is not betting the river enough. I'm working through "Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'Em" and it points out players are often content to check the river, relieved to make it to showdown, when the villain may call a bet because you might be bluffing. I made more of an effort to do that last night, and it was reasonably effective. Of course I'm playing the micros, but I did get called by bottom pair more than once.

Only 3 hours of study this week. This is getting pretty bad, but my days should slacken (until my 3rd child is born) after this coming week.

My total for next hours is 5+4.5 hours I've accumulated.

I really try to get at least a 2:1 play to study ratio, and I haven't managed that. This week I played a total of 5.5 hours. Some of that time was spent running upstairs to deal with a teething toddler, too, so wasn't actual play time.

Nice thread and good luck in 2013.

Don't worry so much about studying. For one, life is bound to catch up, especially when you are a parent. Almost 3 times

But most importantly, I read that it is enough to divide study to play by 1 to 4. And moreover, it is always better to spend longer for new concepts to sink in. I do understand how important it is to stay on the schedule but this is life. Unless you are a poker pro, you are going to have other things to do over poker.

I think you're right, and I may have approached this from the wrong angle. I still want to get in that much study, but time is very tight right now, and may loosen up a bit later.

Rather than a weekly volume (of study) goal, I'll set my annual goal and track my progress vs that. Obviously I'm off-pace at the moment, but I should be able to manage over the entirety of the year.

52x5=260 hours of study this year.

So far, I have done (including this past week) 18.75 of 260 hours.


My play time is dominated by Zoom at the moment, as I am not getting to my computer as often as I would like, or for as long. My preference long term is to play regular tables, but I think I need a number of hands more than I need to ensure position on the fish at the moment, as my goal is to get better, not make the maximum profit.

Another 3 hours. Not great, but I'll take it.

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For the time being, I will be suspending my participation in this thread.

More is being demanded of me at work. This is very good career-wise, and will definitely be financially beneficial, but any time I had for poker needs to be repurposed towards shaking the rust off some old skills and developing new ones.

This is probably bad news for the remainder of my bankroll on Pokerstars.

If circumstances change, I will fire this thread back up.

I think I'm back. Work is getting less busy again, and the kids are getting to bed at a reasonable time. Weekends have been getting a lot less demanding as well, and my wife and I have figured out how to organize our time to give each other time to do the things we want to do.

I've redeposited a few dollars and am starting at .02NL to shake some of the rust off. Deuces Cracked has an "Introduction to NLHE" playlist that I will be working through, in order, to make sure I've got the basics locked in. I think 5 hours a week of study is feasible, so will be aiming for that.

Outside poker, my wife and I have taken up running to get fit. She was a star athlete in high school and university, so very quickly got up to running 6-10k three times a week. Never having been remotely fit, I've slowly completed Couch to 5k, using the time method. I now run 30 minutes at least twice a week, and have walked/run 1 5k and run two more in the last couple of months. They say there is a link between physical fitness and mental acuity. I believe that's the case, and hope to improve in that realm as well.

It took two hour-long sessions to get through episode 1 of "The Math of NL Holdem." I took notes, stopped and worked out some of the examples before the instructor, and tried to focus. Feels good so far.

Locking down the basics.

So far so good. 2NL results have been fine since starting back. A limited amount of playtime has kept my sample size small but looking good: 900 hands of 6max at 50bb/100 and 1200 hands of Zoom 2NL at 22bb/100.

I can see a lot of my mistakes, but I think that my increased thoughtfulness in the moment is improving my play.

Encouraged by these results, I decided to play some 5NL, to get some hands against tougher opponents (and maybe make more money). A Saturday night seems like a good time to do that. My results were mixed, but I'm happy: I'm down about 22 bb over 500 hands, playing between 3 and 4 tables, but I'm also running 7 buyins below EV over that same span.

As Tommy Angelo has pointed out, being below EV is meaningless if you would have played the same way as your opponent and he would have played like you: Tommy Angelo & Reciprocity. I thought about the two biggest hands resulting in that EV difference, and I believe if I had been my opponent, I would not have played the same way, suggesting to me that in theory, I had a profitable night. I was proud of myself for coming so close to breakeven.

One factor helping with my renewed effort is I am working harder at focus. I don't have the TV running in the background, and I try to limit my poker-related browsing and busywork while I'm actually playing. When I am watching a video, I am taking notes, pausing to work out examples before the instructor, and avoiding other distractions while I go.

After finishing up the second episode of Mathematics of NL Holdem, I'll do more than the cursory review of hands I've done so far this week and come up with some to post in the forums. Hand discussions really are helpful to the process as well if you can get a conversation going beyond "fold pre" and "the standard moves".

4 hours 15 minutes of study so far, so the other 45 minutes should be easy to make Sunday. My reentry to this thread was Monday so that will be the beginning of the week, for study purposes.

My increased focus is really showing results, both in my EV results and my actual results. I was able to quickly blast through 5NL and take a shot at 10NL. My first 10NL session was relatively breakeven, my second session was terrible. Reviewing my worst hands from that session before tonight's session allowed me to recognize some glaring mistakes I made and avoid them again.

Last night's session was going well until I decided to play another half hour or so even though I was feeling tired. I dropped four buyins in about 15 minutes, and so much of it was easily avoidable. That's a lesson I shouldn't have to keep learning.