Back in the saddle again - 2x second places in one session
Last several weeks I was on a slight downswing although in terms of BIs it wasn’t anything too crazy, in terms of $ it created a bit of pressure and challenged my mindset during the game. I was getting in a lot of difficult spots, admittedly did some blunders now and then, building a large stack didn’t last too long and deepruns finished too early but there were always plenty of chances just not that much luck in final stages.
One big improvement in my routine that undoubtedly helped was finally creating a habit of regular reflection and journaling. Putting my thoughts on paper just put me in a different perspective with a lot more objectivity. At the end of the day for MTT players it really doesn’t matter what are the results of one session, one week, one month or even several months. But the human mind really likes to take everything personally and put way too much importance on short term results.

During the last couple of sessions I caught myself thinking: ‘Why do I always get to those cooler? Why does this happen to me every day? Why can’t I have at least some luck in a deeprun?’ - recognizing this pattern of victimisation and negative self-talk I tried to reframe it and come up with some self-supportive reframe: ‘It’s okay. The key is to get myself in as many opportunities as possible and sooner or later the luck will show up. I just need to stay focused and play to the best of my ability.’
And hell yeah it was true, yesterday I made a bunch of deepruns and made nice scores of two second places Bounty Hunters Big Game 210$ on GG and Gladiator 55$ on PartyPoker. Really happy to score those, especially the 210$ BH as it is the highest buy-in I play in a week day and the field is getting tougher in the late game.

GLGL

Deja vu - another 2x second places in the very next session
Turning on the heat and managed to finish second twice in one session again - Daily 88 on GG and 109usd on WPN. Both were fun runs with many interesting ICM spots, so the time spent with solvers and reviewing deepruns definitely paid off. Heads-up unfortunately lost again which is always a bit painful but with all humbleness I think I played solid in all of them just without any big mistakes. I’m super happy with the results.
Now I have Saturday and Sunday grind ahead and then on Monday going to Costa Rica for 5 days with my fellow teammates from Poker Detox who live in Playa del Carmen as well as a small retreat before the SCOOP series to unwind and travel around. Then I’ll have one week to finish off all the planning and prep for SCOOP and when it’s finished I’m just going to take one or two days off and continue with my regular schedule. Great to have these scores before the series because my ABI will go up the next month so this will help with mindset in the bigger games for sure.

GLGL

Nice Payday! <3

Great results !

Back from a short vacay
First to complete my collection of second places from this month, here's another nice score from last Sunday on Winamax in Highroller 250eur. In the end I was on a pretty sick heater the second half of this month.



The trip to Costa Rica was great, we spent one day surfing in Santa Teresa (I’m the second left in the picture below), one day visiting a waterfall and beach near there and one day in a rainforest in Monteverde. Overall we had lots of fun with my teammates from Poker Detox and I feel very refreshed and relaxed. Costa Rica is an amazing place and definitely deserves more than 5 days, so I’ll definitely come back one day to explore more - especially the nature which is really beautiful there.




Now the plan is to get ready for Sunday and Monday poker grind and during the next week I’ll do April sum-up and prep for May when there is gonna be the SCOOP series.
Cheers!

April sump-up

April goals:

- Play min 450MTTs - YES - played 577 based on SC

- Study min 60h - NO - my study sheet counted 40h of study, which is still acceptable due to 1 ‘study week’ missed due to my trip to Costa Rica. I wanted to push studying pre-series and this week before series I am to study more or less 10-15h extra which can be counted in. In general I want to stick with 10h/week as an absolute must for study and challenge myself to add some extra hours if possible.

- Review min. 3 deepruns - YES - 2x alone and 1x with my peers from Detox

- Post min 4 hands on HH server of Poker Detox - NO - managed only to post 3 hands, no excuse here

- Spend min 3h on mindset work/reflection - YES - hypnotherapy and revisiting my mindset notes

- Min 2x a week visualisation of my best self handling difficult spots - NO - to be completely honest with myself I did it the first week but then for lack of organisation I might have done it couple more times, but for sure didn’t reach the goal

- Create a time slot for a weekly reflection and follow it - YES - probably the biggest accomplishment of this month! I set a date and time to do my reflection and after that I found myself reflecting and journaling even more often than I had planned. I can feel so much benefit out of that simple habit I believe I just created.




Goals for May - the main focus is the series so I will focus mainly on mindset, planning and performance optimization. I will set the goals that I failed last month. And will post a bit more detailed plan for the series in the next few days.

• Study 1x per week doing HH review of the previous week.
• Post min 4 hands on HH server of Poker Detox - as hand review will be the only study I plan to do I should manage to post a hand every week to get some feedback from my teammates
• Min 1x a week visualisation of my best self handling difficult spots - going down from 2x to 1x/week in order to build a habit. The idea is to set exact day and time for that

SCOOP 2022
So here comes the spring series on Stars. GG announced the series too as expected and even Party will bring some special events so there will be plenty of action for the MTT players for the rest of the month. I am very excited to get playing but this turned out to be a somewhat dangerous approach in the past so I spent a bit more time preparing in terms of scheduling, mindset and routine.

Here’s the plan:

• Playing days: 5x/week (Fridays and Wednsedays off)
• Playing hours: Normally starting around 11.30am local time and finishing registering around 5.00pm with Sundays starting 1-2 hours earlier
• Table count: my max table count is 12 tables, the plan is to start with around 10 tables to avoid missing slots for series events that start later. For every session I set time to go down to 9 tables and then to 6 tables
  
• Daily routines - I’m gonna stick to my standard morning, pre-sess and cooldown routines as they are pretty optimised already
• Work-out - my gym routine is going to suffer, which is okay. I’ll stick with light exercise on playing days and optional heavy workout on non-playing days
• Study - only HH review for previous week with my HM3 filters for punts, bluffcatch and 3bet pots

The motto is: THE MORE IS LESS
When there’s lot of action at the tables I always tend to overdo the volume so this time it is non-negotiable to stick to the table count rules and ot my tournaments schedule - after consulting with my hypnotherapist/life coach he made me create a schedule for tournaments that I am going to play incl. series and non-series events for every single day. First I was a bit annoyed as it seemed like a waste of time but actually already after finishing it I could feel determined to stick to the rules and imagine it will be much easier to let go of the voice in my head that says I can still play some more or that I have energy to keep higher table count. On a conscious level I realize this will increase my EV in the course of the whole series and one day or couple of tournaments won’t make much difference. This will also help to relax and maintain energy for the upcoming days.

So I made a very detailed plan, took some days off to relax before, recapped strategies and other technical stuff. Last month was great money results-wise which will help to keep the expectations down and I feel ready to sit down and have some fun at the tables.

I’m gonna start on Saturday with a lighter session to warm up and then go full speed on Sunday. I’m gonna tackle pretty much all the 215usd SCOOP events, some 500usd and the 1k main last Sunday.

LG and GL to everyone who’s gonna play too

First days of the series
After 4 days of grind since the series started I feel pretty good and I’m still very excited to play. I made day 2 in the Sunday Million with an average stack but unfortunately it lasted only 7 minutes until I lost a big flip AKo vs QQ. Next one, please.
Yesterday I managed to finish 2nd in Fifty Stack on GG for around 6k usd which will probably just bounce me back over the zero line on the dollar graph for this month - gotta admit that I was a bit tempted to check the profit so far for this month when I’m playing higher but I resisted in the end and stick to my rules of not checking daily or weekly results.

One nice upgrade I discovered from a podcast is to listen to binaural beats to boost concentration and brain performance and after a 3 day trial I think I’m gonna pay for the subscription. It really feels like I’m able to focus and think more clearly with this music in my headphones and there are other useful types of music that I can use for relaxation, creative work or sleeping - it’s called brain.fm if anyone wants to check it out (no affiliation).

Today I took a first day off to attend short coaching, hit the gym, do hand history review and watch some of my teammates streams. Later I’ll go to the sauna and tomorrow I’ll get back to the tables.

GL

My second biggest lifetime win
I officially broke my bad luck on PokerStars by shipping the Mini BB HR 55usd on Stars and left behind 4 thousand players and won little over 20k usd. I also finally broke the series of lost heads-ups which were at number 6 already, so finally I enjoyed the sweet taste of winning.
It was a sick run where pretty much everything went my way. I won the important flips and went to the final table as a close chip leader. I was lucky to have a position on the second biggest stack which was a good Brazilian reg, then when down to 5 players I lost most of my stack and went down to 7bb stack but managed to bounce back. With last three I shoved A3 of spades blind vs blind for 12bb, ran into pocket kings, turned an Ace and went to the heads up with equal stacks and preserved my good luck so it was done in half an hour.
I’ve always dreamed of shipping this tourney so I'm very happy it came through.



Friday is a deserved day off because there are no SCOOP events going on. I’m looking forward to the weekend - made a day to in 33usd rebuy SCOOP with average stack coming 100/250 left with 30k up top and also a first time playing a mystery bounty 25usd on GG where I qualified with 80bb stack so there should be some opportunities to bust others and win the mystery bounty. On Sunday we’ll have the 500usd Sunday Million on Stars and 525 BB HR 1.25m GTD on GG.

LFG

Very nicely done!

Mindset reflections and FOMO
Every day when I play a session it always reminds me in one way or another how mindset is an absolutely crucial thing for success in poker. Even a player with very good GTO knowledge and exploitative understanding can end up being a losing player over the long term just because of mindset issues and nothing else. Since I implemented a reflection and journaling I end up investigating more and more my mind and behavior and here are two observations I made after last few sessions:

1.Self compassion and self support

• I used to be a big time hot head and was terrible at losing as a child. I also grew up in an environment where getting angry, screaming and learning things the harsh way was considered pretty normal (although I had a very nice childhood) and all this obviously reflected in my behavior today especially in the poker world
• Here’s what I discovered: when I get tilted for whatever reason I tend to see red - this is not a new thing and it’s a work in progress for some time. The improvement there I already made is that I am able to gain awareness over my feeling in that situation BUT I am being very urgent for it to go away and fighting with myself - this is very counterproductive and to overcome those tough emotional moments and not let them affect the session as a whole it is important to build a up a legit honest self compassion and be able to accept and support the inner child in those moments. Only this way I believe I can get back to my A-game.

2.FOMO - Fear of missing out

• This is something I have struggled with for almost two years. I have the tendency to play every single tournament in the schedule and whenever I have a full table count I find myself thinking how many tournaments there are yet to catch up on and how much time for late reg is left. When I'm downsizing this feeling intensifies and I may spend too much of my focus on the lobbies instead of the tournaments I am actually playing.
• Two ways to go about it: First is a technical one which is simply scheduling and creating rules for table count and registering times and being strict with that. Second is a mental one which is to reframe the EV and ROI of playing a specific table count and focusing more on games I have vs on starting to play new tournaments. As an example for the current series: yesterday after quite an expensive session I registered 3 tournaments outside my planned schedule at the end which caused me to lower my table count 1 hour later than I intended too. This arguably hurt my EV in that session as I would focus less on each tournament in progress and in the whole month as it wouldn’t let me finish earlier and recharge

Small details can sometimes make a big difference. Going ahead the aim is to be more supportive in difficult emotional moments and just accept it is understandable I sometimes react ‘inappropriately’ giving my childhood and personality and to realise on the consciousness level that to miss a tournament is totally fine and will not make literally any difference whatsoever.

Gl everyone.

Ready for the weekend
Feeling fresh and ready for another juicy weekend after Friday completely off poker, which became a rarity over the last few months.
Just finished a short deeprun of my final table of Battle Royal 200eur from Thursday where I encountered many tricky spots because bounties were often bigger than the payjumps. Studying ICM PKO spots with HRC is probably my favourite way of studying. I found out I made some mistakes and shoving too wide in some spots (A2o as a shortstack from BTN with 8bb but very little fold equity due to huge bounty) and folding too tight in other spots (76o vs 6bb shove from BB vs SB with 20bb stack). And a couple more interesting spots. Finished 4th in this one and excited for next deepruns.

A quote for this weekend:

“Nothing is as important as you think it is, the moment when you’re thinking about it.”

Bad beats or mistakes in big tournaments may feel like the end of the world but hey, after another 100k hands played that one bad beat or mistake will be most likely forgotten anyways. Staying relaxed and balanced throughout the whole sessions is still one of the biggest challenges for me although I realise how important it is in order to access my A game in the deepruns and preserve energy for upcoming sessions.
GL

Really enjoying your blog and progress, keep up both.

We have some traits in common .

Nice thread , best of luck!

Awesome thread...subbed!

Are there any must read books for tournament play (beginner) that you would suggest to a cash game player?

Removing decision fatigue by scheduling
Decision fatigue is in my opinion something worth paying attention to as a MTT poker pro. I am able to play 20-30 tournaments during one session which could be approximately 2000 hands therefore I must make more than 2000 decisions over 8 hours (some of them will be trivial but often one hand will require more than one decision). It is a hell of a lot of decisions to make and the tricky part comes at the end of the session where each decision becomes worth much more in $ terms and obviously the brain would be more tired.
How many decisions I make during a session is out of my control, however there are many more decisions to be made outside the poker tables which I can control - this brings me to scheduling. I have a friend who is an absolut hater of scheduling and planning - he’s also a MTT pro and he loves his freedom and refuses to schedule and plan. I see it the other way - when I schedule and plan everything I gain more freedom, because it removes all the decisions I would have to make which takes time, therefore makes me more efficient and obviously when I plan something it doesn’t mean I cannot change the plan so I feel more free and I strongly believe it creates more time in my day as it minimises the time between tasks and keeps me more relaxed by removing the decision fatigue. The caveat here is not to become slave of my own schedule and still be able to be flexible and rational about the planning and later changes in that.
Few examples that I focused on during this SCOOP to remove as much decision fatigue as possible:
-Hour by hour plan for each day (e.g. when to start playing, when to shop, cook,…)
-Meal plan - prepare meals for playing weekend, have some back up meals in the freezer, knowing exactly what I’ll eat before I start playing
-Tournament schedule - knowing beforehand which tournaments I’ll play so I don’t have to scan the lobbies all the time

Remove all decisions from the 5min break I have each hour of my grind is absolutely crucial. Running in the kitchen and preparing something to eat real fast in the only 5min I have to let my mind relax is the last thing I want to do (and I was guilty of doing exactly this many many times).

Good luck for the last weekend of SCOOP!
LFG

SCOOP 2022 sum-up
Very challenging four weeks of poker are now over and it’s time to get back to the regular schedule of playing and studying. Overall I had lots of fun playing higher ABI with huge fields and guarantees, encountering some crazy lines and plays by recreational and battling some world class players as well. Besides the 20k score I made a few final tables, a couple juicy deepruns, but unfortunately busted those with 3-4 tables left. To be honest I am happy it’s over now as at the end of the series I felt more and more frustration, likely caused by huge expectations which did not come true. Let’s sum it up from few different perspectives:

-Playing schedule
- one of the most problematic areas over time for me as I mentioned a few time here I tend to overdo the volume and get close to burn out as a result of that
- proper preparation and scheduling all the tournaments was very helpful in this regard and I am satisfied how I managed this issue
- I felt sufficient energy each session and even though it wasn’t perfect I finally sticked with the rule more is less (maybe that’s one of the reasons why I finally had a profitable series)

-Social life and studying
- I feel I preserved great balance between playing, studying and socializing, I did a hand review 1x a week, rested well on my days of and still had a social life with my girlfriend and friends

-Mindset
- the beauty of playing poker for living is you are constantly challenged and you learn a whole lot of new things about yourself and I’m truly fascinated of the psychology and mental part.
- by reflecting back on this series I observed and noted couple of areas of the mental game I want to focus on going on:
- expectations and disappointment - this was a big one the last month, obviously all the major events created a big expectations for me and anything that went wrong there was pretty painful and triggering to me, besides that I noted that this happens with single hands as well - i.e. when I flop the nuts with lto of chips in the middle my mind is filled with joy and I expect to win lot of chips just to face some awful run outs which cause me to either loose or not extract value - those situations triggered me a lot and my EV in all tournaments likely suffered as it led to mind distortion, loss of concentration and therefore mistakes
- the story narrative - this is something very fascinating because I am consciously aware of that and realise that it hurts my game in both short and long term but still there were parts or even whole sessions when I got trapped in my mind playing the victim with negative self talk going on, besides the EV loss it took lot of my energy and overall optimism and good mood. In those moments it seems impossible to take a step back and see the bigger picture. On the other hand I had sessions where I would comment to myself on a bad beat in a supportive way, acknowledge and accept my mistakes as an opportunity to learn and calmly continue to solve every spot

I believe the difference between those two types of self talk are the key to my success. With the negative self talk I end up making fast, subjective, usually over aggressive decisions and blaming everything outside my control leading to hatred and negativity while with self supportive positive self talk I am able to make objective, profitable decisions and learn and grow as a player at the same time.

June goals
- Play min 400MTTs

- Study min 30h

- Review min. 2 deepruns

- Post min 2 hands on HH server of Poker Detox

- Catch up on posted hands in HH server of Poker Detox

- Mindset work min 1h

-Investigate and work on self talk during the game by using visualisation, meditation and proper preparation for the grind


This month my goals are on the lower spectrum, that’s because first 4 days of the month were used to revamp after the series and the last week I will be leaving Mexico and travelling back home to Czech republic for a month, then going to Poker Detox team trip in Barcelona combined with playing the EPT Barcelona in August.

June goals
- Play min 400MTTs

- Study min 30h

- Review min. 2 deepruns

- Post min 2 hands on HH server of Poker Detox

- Catch up on posted hands in HH server of Poker Detox

- Mindset work min 1h

-Investigate and work on self talk during the game by using visualisation, meditation and proper preparation for the grind


This month my goals are on the lower spectrum, that’s because first 4 days of the month were used to revamp after the series and the last week I will be leaving Mexico and travelling back home to Czech republic for a month, then going to Poker Detox team trip in Barcelona combined with playing the EPT Barcelona in August.

Antidote to Ego
Ego is the number one enemy of personal growth. I think every poker player - live or online - has seen someone making plays driven by ego and most likely has made them himself. One might argue that it is a part of poker and maybe the beauty of the game to bluff someone in an insane spot for tons of chips and be ‘the table captain’. I am no exception to this and many times found myself in such spots. Honestly in my puberty and some years after I was a very egoistic person in general. In the poker example it can feel very good with all the endorphin releases but I’m sure it’s not profitable in the longterm. That’s not to say that coming up with big bluffs is a bad strategy, just the motivation for doing that should be based on objective data points rather than trying to prove something. These are some examples when my ego takes over and what it causes to my game:

• -Makes me to win all the lost chips back and play suboptimally, usually becoming overaggressive with preflop ranges (RFI, 3B, 4B) and postflop lines
• -Makes me to act fast without allowing me to think carefully about important spots
• -Makes me to justify bad plays, blame others and refuse to admit that I made a mistake, which stops me from further development

In practical terms one advice from a high stakes crusher from PD was to actually tighten up from baseline ranges and in postflop play when I become aware of this behaviour.

It’d take more than one blog post to break down ego, it’s tendencies and impacts on my life but I’d like to share an idea which is simply practise something that is the biggest enemy of the ego - that is gratitude. If you think about it then being grateful for simple things that we have just don’t let the ego take over. When you’re honestly grateful for something, you can’t act from your ego. Daily gratitude practice - either in the morning or evening or both for that matter helped me not to let the ego enter my game that often. Sometimes the reality can be harsh in our eyes (at poker tables but also in everyday life) yet still there are many things that we have and should be grateful for - friends, family, hot shower, food to eat, and so on - that we often take for granted.
Let’s be grateful. Peace

Definitely, even when you know it, you will experience almost everyday (at least i do) so many big signs of ego. Instead of recognizing some plays as a mistake of someone or my own i tend more often to see it as an attack on my person instead to see it as what it is. Ego just leads to connection where is no one, but its also important to know what ego is, i think there are also a lot of people outside, who want to get rid of their of their ego or at least say so, paradoxical because of a huge ego, like im better than other people because i have no ego and so on, experienced this a lot, especially in the pokercommunity.
The more confident you are in your game or in general the more you are able to see and to point out your mistakes, because your ego doesnt block it.
I see it on myself, when i didnt study as much i just blame like everyone except myself and let my ego take over and when someone criticize my game im just not listening.
To study and play makes so much more fun, when you just see the game and the ev of what you are doing itself instead of making connections between all this stuff.
Keep us up to date, how its working and how your progress is, i like to see more of this challenging task.
Btw, did you consider visiting vegas this year?

Incredible thread! Best of luck OP. Excited to see where your journey takes you.

Great points, regrading 'getting rid of ego' I believe that in general this approach or framing it this way is not necessarily effective way to go about it. Imo we should try to erase or get rid of a parts of ourselves but rather befriend it, make peace within. I think once there's enough acceptance and balance the process of ego dissolution will naturally happen. Like you said if I wanted to get rid of my ego and after some practice or whatever would be walking around and claiming I got rid of the ego it would be mostly likely just the ego still talking. It's very similar with my investigation of negative self talk - there's a part of myself - the inner child - that is complaining, feeling frustrated, angry, unfair and so on but by trying ot get rid of it I'd only create an inner conflict. Much better strategy seems to be to accept this part, acknowledge it has actually right to be angry and provide the emotional support it needs (and perhaps didn't receive in the past), this way I believe I can arrive to the point one day when the negative self talk will just disappear.

No, not this year. I've already planned pretty much the rest of the year and Vegas doesn't fit. A thought I'm playing with on my mind is to go for the WSOP next year. Even it's very likely not gonna be more EV comparing to playing online (because of taxes, travel expenses, volume missing form online and variance/not enough volume in live poker) it is still my poker dream to play the WSOP Main so I might go for it next year and make it a poker holiday in Vegas

Working on the negative self-talk
So the investigation is on. The plan regarding mindset work for the next several weeks or months is the negative self-talk and victimisation.

CONSCIOUS
Challenge yourself whenever you use harsh language to yourself.
What would you say as a coach?


SUBCONSCIOUS
By reflecting back I realised the talk I tend to use is very often repetitive, illogical to my conscious self and interestingly I would use wording and even the same voice as my father did in the past when he was angry (often about things he had no control over).
So i wrote down three sentences I use the most during the game with the goal to reframe them into mature and positive sentences:

1. ‘It’s impossible to win.’
- after series of bad beats, coolers and lost spots I start saying this., that’s the point where I often start seeing a bit red and tend to act fast and overaggressive
Reframe: ‘Short-term and current results are not important, because I know that in the long-term I’m a winning player.’

2. ‘It always scr*ws me.’
-this comes up often during deepruns when I suffer a bad beat and lose a big stack.
Reframe: ‘Sometimes I lose when I’m ahead, sometimes the opposite. The way I will handle these situations can give me extra edge.’

3. ‘I hate it.’
-strong words which alarms that I’m possibly in very bad mindset state and comes up after series of bad outcomes and bizarre spots and/or big mistakes
Reframe: ‘I love poker for its unpredictability and the challenge it gives me.’

To build this into my subconscious I practice this every day during my morning meditation, when I visualise challenging situations in poker where I’d use the undesired language and see myself actually saying the reframes of the negative talk. Then whenever I catch myself going that way during the grind and focus on actually saying the reframes. It is very interesting practice, what I found out the first couple of days is that as easy as it might seem it is actually damn hard. I often literally feel resistance to say those things and it’s almost like part of my just wanna scream ‘Shut up, what a bullsh*t!’ but with more and more practice this will happen more naturally and become more legit.
The skill of mastering one’s own mind is not something that can be just learnt and solved once and forever. It is hours and hours of continuous practice and self awareness and that’s why I believe it can become a huge edge for crushing online poker.