Hello everyone, welcome to my SS PLO grind thread!

About me

I'm originally from Hungary but I lived/worked most of the last 8 years abroad. First 4 years in Trinidad & Tobago then three in England. This October I will move back to Trinidad and I plan to at least partially finance my stay there by playing PLO. I am an architect so I hope that after a few months I can get back to work part time or even full time. Until then I will try to make the best of my situation by getting better at PLO while making a humble living and enjoying life in this beautiful country. I will try to keep a rigorous regime and set challenging monthly goals. This and posting here should help both keeping reaching volume goals and climbing up the stakes.

My poker background

I have been playing since about 2006. Depending on how much work I had there have been long periods away from poker and disregarding a really feeble attempt I never played seriously. I started as everyone by playing NL freerolls but quickly changed to PLO with occasionally playing PLO8 and PLO MTTs. I would categorize myself as 'half educated fish' or when playing more a 'bad reg'.
That said I never had many losing months and with rakeback I usually made enough to keep myself happy and playing on.
I am very pumped. It looks like real life work will not be much in the way so these last 3 months of 2014 can be dedicated to omaha.


The plan
I am struggling a bit by setting monthly goals as I never really did play seriously. I think am better off breaking it down to weekly checkups. Since I just got here and there is quite a few things for me to sort out (including a day at the beach) I decided to have a warm up period this Friday to Sunday and start off with the first Weekly Goal Post on Monday.

My September
I finished a project then spent a lot of time with gf and the preparations for the trip. Still I managed to play 48 hours which is above average for me. I played PLO25 and 50 (zoom and regular) on Stars and PLO 20 on iPoker. Ran good and made about 900 (inc.all rakeback - thats an above average result for me) . For now it makes no sense for me to play on PS so I played enough to just reach 40k VPPs for the year and cashed in all the FPPs not bothering with maintaining VIP levels anymore.

The roll, moving up and down
My roll is about 7k. It is separate from my life roll which could last for a while even if I don't make money with poker. I plan to play plo20 on Ipoker for now and move up as I can. Probably should take a shot at plo50 pretty soon. Not sure what is the right approach. Take smaller (4 bi maybe?) shots frequently or play a bit more on plo20 to gather some momentum and move up cold turkey (if that phrase is usable here) and drop back down if I lose 10 Bis? Will have to think about this a bit more, but also any suggestions are welcome.

Other goals:
Well of course this is just as important as the poker part.

Do some exercise every day. Swimming most likely as we have a very small pool in the garden, yoga or even pushups.
Do something bigger every 2-3 days. A walk/jog (very hilly neighborhood) or just running up the steps a few times here on the property (it is surely a challenge), swim in the ocean, football in the park etc.

Finishing the 2 books I started: Mental Game of Poker (I am probably the last one to read it one on this forum) and The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg ( if I recall right tmckendry mentioned it – thanks!)

Spanish. I am on duolingo and I have been maintaining a 100+ days streak however usually that just meat one lesson per day so I am only at level 9. Maybe squeeze in a bit more.

Cook delicious food, that's a new habit of mine, the easiest part of the challenge for sure.

Less TV shows. I used automatically download and watch them while doing other stuff. I didn't even pay attention and most of them suck anyways so why bother. If I get bored I could start Breaking Bad finally or watch a movie.

Coffee. Do I really need it?

Enjoy life.

I would like to give a shout-out to tmckendry thanks for the very informative and inspirational thread!
I read it all and learned a lot from it (hopefully).

GL PLO bro, enjoy on max the hot wheather there

Thanks man!

So it is Monday. I played only 8 hours in the last 3 days. Had to much to do on Fri, and IRL work and no internet Sun evening. Highly annoying. The router I am using is in a neighbors apt. so when my laptop unhooked itself (why??) and tells me to restart the router I have to wait until they come home and do it. Lost at least 2 hours of play because of that I should look around for a backup connection but they are not really cheap over here.

Also I am still a bit jet legged, I am too sleepy in the evening and waking up too early .

On the positive side, I played ok and ran good. No point in graph and stats will add that to the weeks recap post.

I set this weeks target to 30 hours, seems reasonably challenging. Tomorrow I have to do some IRL work again and might have to do a bit more around the end of the week. I said no to another smallish job, I rather focus on poker. I hope I won't regret it later.

Weather is still rainy no beach trip yet.

The view from my pad, rain rolling down the hills in the back.




Some local birds

Nice, glgl I'm in

Thanks man!

Weird day today. I`m down 3 bis which is fine of course, I just didnt like how it went. Had a good week so far (will post graph on Mon) so I couldn't explain why i was tilting from the get go...
I lost my first allin as a favourite and from there way was only down. So yeah not sure why. I did run somewhat bad but I should have just focused on the decisions i was making. I should have finished session but instead i played double the usual time. At the end I caught some run good and got back almost to zero. But then the same happened again in the afternoon. Played my C game for 4 hours altogether.
This tilty mindset can become very expensive if it gets out of control not to mention the rolling bad mood/anger it is causing. I need to train myself to quit and reset myself whenever this happens.
I should come up with a de-tilting ritual of some sort because I cant just abandon grinding days. Or at least not always. It is important to think this through as the weekend is here and two full days of grind is coming.

Today:

Looking forward to be reading more from you. T&T looks awesome.

Thanks! I keep an eye on your thread too, it's very inspirational!

Ok so its Monday again, my first week as a (semi) pro is over. I am 0.5 hour short of my 30 hour goal which I think is fine. I had some days (3 actually) when I lost about a half a day because of work or errands.
The week started off like a dream then it turned around and the last three days sucked. The runbad was not as obvious as the run good I just run into the top of peoples range. It sucked non the less. I think I didn't tilt much but I will do some checking and comparing to make sure. Surely it is much easier to play good if you run good, what a discovery lol.



Results (inc. the weekend of 4-5th) 37hours, 8858 hands.

One thing that is a tell-tale sign of at least some tilting and sub-optimal play is the complete lack of studying. I tried to watch a video but could not focus for 5 mins, I just wanted to get back to grind. At least I was able to keep my sessions short and mostly limited myself to 4 tables which is sadly my optimal number at the moment (note to myself, increase number of tables)

Besides that the only thing to report is that I lost my 146 day streak with Duolingo
The reason was that DL`s clock is fixed you cant change it when you move through time zones you are stuck with the original. I didn’t know that and screwed up. I was so depressed, I didn't feel like touching it for days. I will start it up again now and add it back to my daily rituals.

The volumes goal for this week is 30 hours again. Less errands expected this week but surely some more beach time would be nice. (so far i had none, friends are all busy and i decided to grind but soon some break will be necessary for sure)

This is completely off topic and actually very counter productive but today i bought Legend of Grimrock 2. It is an old school dungeon crawling type of game if you are into that kind of stuff you will like it. If I am not mistaken it was created by a small independent studio so dont expect expect spectacular 3d graphics and stuff but if it is as good as the first one it will be rather enjoyable and addictive.
You can buy it here: Grimrock
although if you want to buy the first part too go to steam as they have them as a bundle sale for just 26$ ! (thats almost buy one get one free price)

The last few days have been interesting.
It looks like (as often before) that putting in volume impacts the quality of my game in a bad way. This Wednesday I had to do some RL work so I was out for most of the day. After getting home I played 2 really good sessions of poker. Compared to the days before I was calmer, played much less hands (cutting it back mostly in the early position and the blinds) and the result was an all round rewarding couple of sessions.

Looking back it all started with a bad day (Friday) that wasn't even bad in PLO terms just hit me unexpected after a series of winning days. My response was putting in more hours during the weekend and on the two days after but the way I did it was surely was not right. I felt irritable and unhappy with both my results and play. At that point I played 9 days in a row witch was way too much with my history and background and clearly not the right way to approach this challenge.

So for now what I can take away from this little incident is that volume goals are very important but moderation and balance is even more so. There is no fulfilment in reaching my volume goal if I went through an unhappy and unfruitful process for it.

That said, setting challenging goals is very important, but I need find ways to train myself getting done more without any kind of quality loss while doing it.
I believe this might not be too interesting for you, this post is more for myself as thinking this through and writing it down should help to understand the 'to do's and the don't'...

If you dont frequent the PLO sub forums you might have missed this:
I poker colluding and/or `bot` thread.
As i play there too now, this is slightly concerning, i hope we will hear good news soon.

GL!

OP, nice crib you have there!

Thanks man! It is surely part of the motivation

Week 2

I am not sure how I feel about my performance this week. I failed the volume goal big time. I think I spent too much time emo-ing over imaginary downswings and run bad. HM tells me I am up 10 bi and almost all of it over EV. That does not make sense to me, I ran good (in all is at least) when I felt I ran terrible. I decided not to bother with the EV line anymore, I will look at it again when I have a proper sample size. I increased the number of tables so the hands I played is not that far from last weeks' but that made me play much tighter and I am not sure if I like that.
On the plus side I did study, however that does not explain the missing hours.

Here are the numbers: 22.6 hours / 30, 6320 hands. Need to try harder.
Next weeks goal is 30 hours again, will see.

GL man,
playing IPoker PLO20 & PLO50 too atm, w/ ca. 8K hands per week, so wurely we have played some together :-)

I know no one else playing there actively, so if you want to chat some, screenname, etc., just send me a PM, would be happy know someone from my games.

Cheers,
Elucius.

PM sent, I am curious. I hope you are not one of those guys who i really hate

Played record hours and hands today and booked record losses.
All is good though, i think i played ok.

Ipoker was down several times today but between two crashes i managed to win the biggest pot of the challenge so far - and as i usually don't play deep it will stay a record for a while no doubt.
I guess everybody just wanted to get their stacks in and win before the next crash...

€0.10/€0.20 Pot Limit Omaha Hi
6 Players
Hand Conversion Powered by weaktight.com

Stacks:
UTG (€13.92) 70bb
Hero (UTG+1) (€32.76) 164bb
CO (€28.20) 141bb
BTN (€7.90) 40bb
SB (€7.30) 37bb
BB (€18.61) 93bb

Pre-Flop: (€0.30, 6 players) Hero is UTG+1 A 7 A 4
UTG raises to €0.40, Hero raises to €1.20, CO raises to €4, 1 fold, SB calls €3.90, BB calls €3.80, UTG calls €3.60, Hero raises to €24, CO calls €20, SB goes all-in €3.30, BB goes all-in €14.61, UTG goes all-in €9.92

Flop: 8 A 3 (€87.83, 5 players, 3 all-in)
Hero bets €8.76, CO goes all-in €4.20

Turn: J (€100.79, 5 players, 4 all-in)

River: 5 (€100.79, 5 players, 4 all-in)

Final Pot: €100.79
SB shows
A 9 4 7
BB shows
10 Q J J
UTG shows
9 8 6 6
Hero shows
A 7 A 4
CO shows
5 5 K K

Hero wins €97.79 (net +€65.03)

SB lost €7.40
BB lost €18.81
UTG lost €13.92
CO lost €28.20

I had the second worst equity preflop, only 17%, partly because 7 of my flush cards were held by the opponents and partly because my side cards were blocked for bot trips or straight draws...
This game is crazy.

Bunch of good things happened yesterday.

Finally I got my desktop up and running which is a relief because A I was worried if it got damaged while travelling across the ocean and B my laptop is not really up to the task anymore.

I also got my local bank account sorted out finally. After weeks of trying to get all kinds of ref letters from my other banks and all the other docs they just reopened my old account that was terminated in 2010 when I left – if only I had known that... Anyway I can finally retire my european cc and use a local one, at least after I received my first salary here.

Later in the evening I made a somewhat unexpected progress on the enjoying life monthly goal. As a result today I hardly played any, I spent time instead of setting up everything on my desktop including a pair of nice Bose speakers.

I will season some chicken now for tomorrows lunch and maybe play a session too. Tomorrow I will try to grind properly and report back on Monday as another week is over soon.

Week 3

A poker wise not an interesting week. I kept losing slowly then was up a bit then lost back the little I had. I was hoping for more hours and hands but then was running errands on Friday and the party later that night turned out to be so much fun that I was pretty wasted on Saturday too. I need to learn to put in the hours on the days when I can and prepare for a scheduled or unscheduled day off later in the week. Specially that the games are not as good on the weekend as expected.

This weeks results: 26.75 hours instead of 30.
7055 hands, -118bb



Next week I will try to do 30 hours - again.

Week 4

Finally I did it!
Played 31 hours this week one more then the goal I had and missed the last 3 weeks. I have to admit though that this is plenty work for me. I am getting better with longer sessions but often I look at the clock after just 30 mins. I keep have to remind myself that:
a. this is a pretty awesome job that keeps my bills paid and
b. as fragile the online poker scene looks these it might end anytime (not to mention other life stuff that might occur)

So yeah, I have to keep on trucking!

This weeks results: 31 hours, 8800 hands 1833bb
This also includes 500 hands (1 hour) of plo25 zoom on PS, I did that to participate in their mission week promo. I have mixed feelings about PS, I love to play there but their poor rakeback system for the micros keeps me from play there for now.

Bah the first 4 BI mini shot at plo50 did not go well, i lost all all-ins which is fine but one hand really unhinged me
Why didnt i just shove flop? If then i lose to a runner-runner that is fine but this way i would like to kick myself.

Tilt day

The shot mentioned above did not go well and it also pushed in a mental state that we can call tilting.
When I tilt I do not rage or break mice I just fire up more tables and play longer hours. So instead of the usual 5 tables I played 6,7 and for a short while even 8 tables stacked on one screen. This of course resulted in an auto play where I mad some(?) bad decision.
I noticed that I was like and addict looking for big hands that I could raise and rereaise preflop and shovel in the rest on flop and ignored lots of smaller but profitable spot.
I knew or at least sensed what is going on and still did not manage to break away from the table and maybe quit for the day. Now I regret still not finishing Jared Tendlers book, maybe the solution for situations like this is right there, I should really get into it.

It is some consolation that I did not do that bad overall but of course the failed shot set me back 7-8 bi of my current level. I am faced with the common dilemma that while I should take shots I really would need all the money I could grind out (inc. rakeback) to cover my expenses. Which on the other hand would be much easier if I could successfully make the jump to plo50.
I decided to not to take out money from poker until the end of the year and just live off the money I am paid for a previous RL project. That should give me the chance at few more shots before January and hopefully they will work out better.

If I am still stuck at plo20 in January I will just increase the number of hands played while hopefully retaining the quality a play and that shall still allow me a shot here and there. But that is the worst case scenario I am confident that I will play plo50 by 2015. (fingers crossed)

Yesterday plo20 only:


Yesterday with plo50 shot in the morning - maybe i shouldn't have started the day with a shot? Yeah next time i start with a normal session to warm up, although that still does not help winning all-ins...