About Me:
I am a long time SSNL regular. I have played over 500,000 hands (likely far more, but I found appx 500k in my intact databases) at 100nl/200nl. Before that I played at least as many hands at the micros from 2nl and up. My aggregated win rate over those hands is 5.03bb/100.

I started taking shots at 400nl shortly before Black Friday, but had to move back down when my roll was locked up on FTP. I have recently started shot taking at 400nl again. I has not gone all that well.

The Problem:
I currently have 50,000 hands at 400nl with a win rate of -0.84bb/100. The player pools are relatively similar. I don't believe that I am outclassed by any of the regs. Some of the loss is likely due to variance. But the main reason that I am not winning so far at 400nl is that I tilt. I generally start off most sessions in a good state of mind, but when I lose even a few medium sized pots a 400nl I immediately start to become frustrated and angry. This almost never happens to me at 200nl. Maybe its a mental/emotional attachment to the money. Maybe its an issue of wounded pride. Or some combination of both.

The site I play on has limited table selection so I am often playing 100nl, 200nl, and 400nl in the same session. I can lose several buy ins at 200nl and still continue playing fine on all my tables, but once I lose a small amount at 400nl it affects me. This is pretty crazy because the tilt is often triggered by losses that accumulate to only 1-2 buy ins at 200nl. And the crazier thing is that sometimes I am still winning for the session but those 5 or 6 pots at 400nl that don't even cause me to be a net loser send me into tilt.

I've also found that playing HU can be both a cause of and an outlet for my tilt. HU can cause tilt for me sometimes when I am playing a vastly inferior opponent who is making a lot of hands. Sometimes they never fold to my cbets and every time we get to a showdown they have some type of pair. Sometimes its when they take strange lines with air type hands but back into random 2 pairs. Things of that nature can occasionally set me off. I also use HU as an outlet for tilt that is caused by other things. I think this is because I can somehow subconsciously rationalize defending vs a 3b a little too light or calling a turn barrel too light. At HU these plays seem a little less spewy in a vacuum so I can sort of preemptively forgive myself for these poor plays.

When I am on tilt I never make an actual conscious decision to start playing poorly, but there is always some part of me that knows that I am doing things I should not be doing. But I just continue to do them anyway.

Some people have said that my results at 400nl are probably just some run bad, but I know when I am playing like a jackass and there has been far too much jackassery recently.

My Goals:
1) Learn to recognize the onset of tilt
2) Learn to control tilt
3) Show a profit at 400nl over a 100k hand sample


In the next few posts I'll show some graphs that help to illustrate what I am talking about and then hopefully come up with some type of game plan on how to achieve my goals. Although I think the biggest step is recognizing that its an issue that needs attention.



I also have another PG&C thread Skraper's Quest to Pwn PLO That thread is still going, but it will be slow progress over there bc I have too much to work on here.

GLGL, what sites do you play on?

Goodluck skraper!

Here are my graphs and stats for 100nl and 200nl in my FTP.



Here are my graph and stats from my newer database.



Here is my graph for 400nl.




As you can tell, 400nl has been quit a bit swingier than 100nl and 200nl. These swings are caused almost entirely by my tilt.

Also, if you look closely at the end of the 2nd graph, you can see a rather swingy breakeven stretch of around 20k hands or so. This point in the graph is approximately when I started to play 400nl. So my tiltyness bleeds over to my play at 100nl and 200nl.

I know that grand total we are only talking about 70k hands, and I could easily blame variance and move on. But it is definitely not variance. It's me.

Here is my graph for 100nl HU, both while table starting and at HU tables.



And for 200nl.



In both graphs you can see very large dips. These dips happen over approximately the same time period. This combined downswing was over maybe a dozen or so HU matches. I should have wiped the floor with every one of these opponents, but instead I gave away money.

I often tell my students that poker is the only thing in the world, where when you are angry, the way you deal with it is to hand money to total strangers.

Time to stop donating to strangers.

The following upswings in these graphs starts around the time I started thinking about making this thread. So I think that just by understanding and recognize what I was doing, I've already started to turn the corner.

I'm currently on Yatahay.

Thanks!

A friend of mine recommended that I read The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler. Interestingly, he wasn't aware of some of my recent tilt struggles but merely mentioned in a conversation about other things. I'm very glad he did tho.

I'm barely through the 2nd Chapter and I already feel it was way worth the $10 I spent on Amazon for the ebook version.

As I am doing with my PLO thread, I will try to take notes and post them here as I assimilate new information from books, videos, coaches, my own experience, etc I am doing this because the act of taking the hand written notes, and then retyping them really forces me to digest the information. If others read this thread and benefit from my notes, then that will make me happy too. (But its completely selfish in motive I assure you)


The notes I will be compiling about this book will be partially a regurgitation of information in the book and partially my interpretation of how this info may be applied to and by me.

The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler
Chapter 1

-I am a Mental Game Fish. This is OK. I was a poker fish only a few years ago and now I have hundreds of thousands of hands of winning poker under my belt. In the same way I can become a Mental Game Shark if I put in the work.

Many, many, more notes to follow in the coming days, but this realization was a big deal for me so I felt it was worth getting it down tonight.

will be following, gl op

Mental Game is an excellent book and I couldn't recommend it highly enough. IT should definitely help with your tilt issues etc

GL, following

GL Sean, actually pretty shocked that you're a self confessed tilter and never would have imagined that because you always come across as so level headed.

imo i believe its crucial to play on a limits where you can handle a full buy in "spew" , like total bluff in supergood spots..

i tilt too easy on higher limits, but i stay where i am not freaking out if i lose a buy in in a stupid way

GL fish !!

This is a very recent development for me. I've generally considered by ability not to tilt one of my greater strengths in poker. But for some reason it's been one of my biggest weaknesses lately.

It's definitely not a bankroll issue. It's a mental issue that triggered easier at 400nl than smaller stakes. But it certainly not just the fact that I lose $400 when I lose a flip. Bc I play fine after losing significantly more at 200nl.

I'm about to be typing up some notes. It will take some time to type up everything from the first few chapters. It's a load of good information though.

- Notes written in BLACK are summarizations or direct quotes from the book
- Notes written in RED are my own thoughts that are derived from or related to this portion of the book
- Other colors may be used to highlight or differentiate certain words or phrases but don't have a specific meaning

The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler
Chapter 1: Introduction

-I am a Mental Game Fish. This is OK. I was a poker fish only a few years ago and now I have hundreds of thousands of hands of winning poker under my belt. In the same way I can become a Mental Game Shark if I put in the work.

- A Mental Game Fish:

- Changes a proven winning strategy because they are running hot or running badly
- Believes that everyone they lose to is getting lucky. When I am tilty I often say things (sometimes outloud) like "I run so bad" or "This guy is so lucky". Then when I look back at hands I realize that even though the villain may have gotten lucky to hit his two pair on the river (or whatever hand he may have), my river call is -EV. So the correct (and often times very obvious) play was to fold. But I allow my frustration to get the best of me and I click call only to see the exact type of hnad that is mostly likely for his line
- Try to win every hand
- Gets frustrated when a bad player plays bad and even 'educates' them on how bad they are. I almost never do this, but I constantly see people in live and online games berate poor players for playing exactly the way everyone should expect them to play!
- Plays more hands because they are winning or losing
- Plays fewer hands because they are winning or losing. I manage to play fewer hands when I running poorly AND when I am running well. I only put in a lot of volume when its somewhere in the middle.
- Tells (posts) bad beat stories while doing nothing to improve how they react to the bad beats.
- Allows things to get personal with other regulars

- Winning the mental game is fundamentally the same as winning at poker. You need:

- Talent
- Hard Work
- Correct Information

- Mental Game Myths

- Emotions are the problem. You must turn them off. This comes up in a later chapter. Emotions are the symptoms and we can use them to help up find the problems.
- Changing a habit is as simple as saying "Don't do it" and then NOT doing it.
- The key to surviving a downswing is to take breaks and move down in stakes. I'm interested to see if this comes back up later bc this is a method I have used before.

- Four Central Areas of the Mental Game

- Tilt
- Fear
- Motivation
- Confidence
- These issues are interrelated. Motivation issues can be caused by Tilt. Confidence issues can be caused by Fear. etc.

- Prioritize your work on the mental game

- Smaller problems are often the easiest to fix
- Fix problems that are the most costly
- Fix problems that occur the most often
- Fix problems that cause the most emotional turmoil

Good luck skraper

Subbed GL!

Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler
Chapter 2: Foundation

- The 3 Foundational Theories

- The Adult Learning Model
- Inchworm
- The Process Model

- The Adult Learning Model, the ALM

- There are four distinct levels of learning

1. Unconscious Incompetence- You don't know that you don't know.
2. Conscious Incompetence - You know that you don't know.
3. Conscious Competence - You have gained some knowledge and skills but you must think while acting to perform well.
4. Unconscious Competence - You have learned something so well that it is automatic.

- Flaws/Leaks are the same as skills in the ALM. They have been trained into Unconscious Competence by repetition. This made immediate sense to me but was still pretty eye opening.

- "Within your Unconscious Competence are also flaws or old habits in your technical poker game as well as your mental game. Basically, you're really good at these bad habits, but you no longer want to be."

- A good example of the ALM in poker is starting hand selection. When you first started you played every hand because you didn't know any better. Then you saw or read somewhere that we should play tighter. Then you memorized a hand chart, but had to constantly think "OK, I'm utg and I have AJs so this is a raise." Now you don't need the chart, and can easily deviate from it based on table conditions with little thought.

This particular concept was pretty cool so I gave it its own post

- Inchworm

- This wasn't at all what I expected. I thought it would be something cheesy about making small improvements over time. "Inching" along. "Every journey begins with a single step" Some BS along those lines. It actually turned out to be something much more interesting and helpful.
- Inchworm is a concept based on the way an inchworm moves. Not one inch at a time, but the actual motion it performs.



- The inchworm creates a bell curve. If we were to plot every poker decision we make on a graph where the x axis represents the quality of the decision and the y axis represents the frequency with which we make decisions of that quality, the graph would also show a bell curve.



- The right side of the curve is when we are making our highest quality decisions (A-Game) the left side of the curve is when we make our lowest quality decisions (C-Game).
- When you reach a new peak in your game you move the right side of the graph forward. Your best game is better than it ever was before.

- But the worst part of your game hasn't improved yet. So you simply elongate the curve.

- By then improving the back end of the curve (your C-Game) you move your entire game forward

- Which in turn makes it easier to move the front end forward again

- So this all made sense to me and was pretty neat on it's own, but then I started to think about this idea in context.
- Let's say that we had a way to rate every poker decision of every player on one graph. Now let's just take a few known players. Me, Phil Galfond, and Irunthisbxtch. Irunthisbxtch is one of the best 400nl regs on my site.

- I think that when I play my best game, my play is as good as (or nearly as good as) his game.
- When I play my worst game I am miles behind his game.
- By not working on my worst game I've achieved a range of play that is extremely wide and lies mostly behind his game. The graph below illustrates this concept.



- As you can see, even tho my best game is very close to his, the frequency with which I make decisions of that caliber is much lower than the frequency with which I make decisions that are worse than his entire range.
- If I worked on improving the bottom of my decision making range, my curve would be much more closely aligned with his and my decision making would be on par with his much more often.
- As you can see, Phil Galfond is way over on the right pwning us both.



- This concept is the exact answer to why I often say to myself "I know I'm as good as this player. Why does he beat my ass all the time??" I AM as good as him, but i'm letting my C-Game drag down the rest of my game!

- Consequences of not improving the bottom/back of your range

- Having a worse C-Game means that your decisions, will on average be poorer.
- Basic mistakes occur more often
- You game may plateau

- This concept was completely eye opening for me. I think the few pages in the book about this were worth the the price just by themselves.

One more concept to cover from Ch2, but I think I'll type it up tomorrow. I'm tired.

Beating Tiltz?

GL

Good read so far, some interesting concepts

GL.

Subbed, GLGL!