Hello.

This will be focused solely on the mental/psychological aspect of grinding poker.

The plan for this blog is simple but radical: After every session I play, I post here about how the session was mentally/emotionally, including details of mental blunders or successes.

Why? I'm a poker pro fallen on tough times. I never thought I'd start a blog here, but had the idea that it might help for my mental game. Doing this would constitute accountability, supporting the building of stronger mental game.

Also, sharing it publicly will let it be something I'm consciously proud of and thus won't come to take for granted and then let slide. (That's how it goes in my experience: Once having made sufficient mental game improvements, one becomes less pro-active and it deteriorates, resulting in unexpected tilt and mental regression somewhere down the line.)
I will also share some specific mental aspects I'm grappling with. For example letting go of the need to play hands perfectly, avoiding even the slightest mistake. A need based in paranoia around other regs pouncing on my every weakness. Or: having the courage to play hands the way I want to play them, as opposed to how I think they should be played.


Some more detail:
Recently I've already been focused primarily on the mental side of grinding instead of focusing on exactly how I should play hands - and I think that this is the way forward. I think mental game is really the foundation required to confidently and freely improve ones technical game. And I don't want to be doing something many hours a week that is unpleasant, boring, painful. I want to be able to grind for hours pleasantly, relaxed, without mental and emotional exhaustion afterwards.

My relationship with poker has been patchy. I've gone through phases of very resilient mental game, but also very rough, painful phases and low-points, exploring the meaning of 'rock-bottom'. I've made promises to myself - for example that I will never again let myself feel so bad playing poker - so bad that, rationally, It really makes no sense for me to continue living off poker instead of getting a job. I've broken those promises, which that feels shameful and unsettling. I've gone through a period of a kind of burnout that wrecked my mental game thoroughly, after which I took a break from serious poker for a couple of years. Reluctantly returning to poker after not finding a good alternative income, I've been faced with painful experiences of really not being the player I remember being - missing the sharpness and the intuition that used to be part of what let me be a confident regular at mid-stakes.
So why am I even doing this - why stick with poker? Three months ago I seriously considered entering the job market after a stint of half-heartedly grinding in my local casino hit rock-bottom. Re-evaluatung my life the next day, I found new motivation to once again truly try to be good at online poker. Realising it would mean that I could stay in the very nice but slighty expensive appartment where I live and could have the time for the things I love in my life, especially rock-climbing -going out for a whole day whenever the weather conditions are good. Plus I realised that I'm curious poker would go if I actually did try again. I realised that the fear that I'm washed up, that I should admit that I just don't have what it takes anymore, really isn't based on anything, as I hadn't really tried yet, and of course if I don't really try I can't expect anything more than ****. So why not at least try and see what happens.
So since then it's been a combination of: on the one hand fresh motivation and indeed quite fast progress in how my game feels, and at the same time the impediments of the years emotional baggage and of the stresses of my really quite dire financial situation. I'm living as a poker pro in a western country with a net-worth hovering around €2-3k. That really would have sounded absurd to me in the past - but then again it may be freeing to find that it's possible to do this.

Saturday and sunday I tilted in a way I hadn't tilted in a long time. I feel guilty about how self-destructive I was.
To give you some idea of what I can do and how insecure I feel about poker and my bankroll afterwards, one of the worst hands involved me open-raising to 125bb with A5o, then when called I shoved the remaining 80bb on a random flop. (and got it in with 10% EQ)

Hello mate, nice to see you started a blog here, update us with your results, wish you best of luck with your games.

Hope this blog will help you control your emotions! GL!

session 1:
short session. quite uneventful, felt OK.

- bit under 500h in just over an hour.

- couple of slightly tricky spots where I decided how I want to play them, prepared myself for the worst case scenario, and then followed through, feeling OK when I lost the hands

- several meh hands where i at least had some kind of plan/idea and stuck with it somewhat calmly despite it not being a very convincing plan/strategy. (some won some lost.)

- no fatigue, OK handle on tables/selection

- no distractions: music in background, spent all time looking through notes and hands.

- slightly underestimated the session result

long session, 1.5k hands in 3h 20 with only 1 short break.

- slightly tired, ok mood. got into an steady rhythm after a while.

- navigated some tricky / uncertain spots fairly well, without getting too caught up in them.

- one hand annoyed me for a few minutes: opponent lost the minimum, which triggers me because I used to be good at preventing that.

- felt like I was playing weak, lacking intuition for ranges and auto-folding a lot. But red-line actually very good. maybe variance, but can't have played way too weak.

- noticed that I didn't have any real confidence in my game vs good regs and instead wanted to avoid them - didn't have the feeling that I could outplay them postflop

low-intensity session, 800 hands in 2 hours including a break.

really quite uneventful/light, felt fine.
Didn't worry too much about any of the spots that came up. Used the mental calm to consider approaches and metagame of some standard spots.

took some spewier lines at the lower limit of the two I mix to find out what's happening in the spot, felt ok when it went wrong.

session 4: 800 hands in 1h:45m

started quite tired, maybe partly because i snacked beforehand. got into an ok rhythm but especially towards the end felt quite fatigued.
- a couple of times found I didn't know what had happened on previous streets. Didn't panic though and just kept the thought process simple.
- easy despite fatigue, maybe because of comfort zone + barely any unpleasant spots + a couple of nice spots.
- not much else to say. Did some minor, simple deliberate/constructive things in some spots in order to learn - possible despite fatigue.

session 5:
easy, light session cut short by RL plans. 700 hands in 1h35m

- session started off with some maybe too lightly taken spewy lines at the lower limit I was mixing, But think my lines were fine if not very good.

- some bodily issues causing non-constant focus - at least 2 hands where I failed to notice the third player in the hand and made a slight mistakes because of that.
Did a mediocre job of relaxing my upper body, need to keep working on that.

played very short breakfast session earlier.

just 420 hands, didn't play well but didn't make any big avoidable mistakes and felt fine though a bit distracted by physical issues - so that's fine (at this level).

friday night grind to come.

very long session, very tired.

started the session tired from training. slightly the phenomenon of my mind/intuition being one step behind events: not in time for the decision/click, but then straight after the click I know what would have been better to think/do. This has often tilted me in the past, especially when it goes on consistently during a session.

Also a stretch of confidence-shaking misplays against recs. Stayed calm though and ended up getting into an ok groove for quite a while.

Some very weak/mindless play but no tilty decisions despite 2.5k hands over 5+ hours.

yesterday only played quite briefly for a saturday, 2.5 hours.

low intensity, kind of fun session. Pulled the trigger on 2 large riverbluffs where I wasn't confident about them working but felt, somewhat vaguely, they were correct, and I felt OK with that risk. They worked, so I suppose it's hard to say how I would have felt if they'd failed.

All good except for one hand that exemplified a recurring issue: A setup against a bad nitreg where I feel, during the hand and then especially after the hand, that it's a fold. This time it was 2nd nutflush vs Nutflush, as is often the case with these players. Strangely, when I hit the flush on the turn after making a small flopbet and getting called by 2 players, I had this sudden sensation, almost a kind of cessation or rushing, focused on that board. Very strange. Then the reg's action on the turn was slightly weird, not making much sense with anything. I felt they usually have the nuts but maybe could have a semibluff or very rarely 3rd-4th nuts. I semi-decided to randomize and fold some%, but wasn't clear on how small a percentage, and ended up calling both the tiny turnraise and the tiny river jam despite rolling a number that didn't clearly say I should call. ...so kind of a mess. I was a bit annoyed afterwards for a few minutes, and maybe it slowed down the momentum or flow of the session.


Maybe the next time I'll just clearly decide to fold 30% or something and stick to it.

(maybe too much strat... But not sure how to describe the mental situation otherwise)

Yesterday evening, exhausted from a whole day outdoors, I was too focused on recovering and relaxing to do any more than table-select carefully for 2 hours, playing just 400 hands - easy session and definitely better than not playing at all.

GL OP subbed.In our days edges get smaller and smaller.What will make someone to be above average is gonna be a strong mental game.

Didn't feel really like playing today - natural rest-day after weekends.

Late evening though I felt some motivation to play a bit - but only at a low intensity, and after an hour or so I felt the motivation running out.

Combined with a major mistake, missing some basic EV in a river spot, I felt that I couldn't muster the effort to pull my focus back into the tables, so I left, having played about 700 hands.

Also, something I've noticed is that when I hit a lot of hands and some big river value raises or bets just get folds, then I become apprehensive about pulling the trigger on big bluffs - it being somehow a very bad feeling when you first shove for value, get a fold, and then shove as a bluff and get called. Forcing myself to calmly face this possibility also requires some motivation/energy, which I didn't have.

And even if the tables are great, I think I want the general habit to be to only keep playing if I feel like it.

Using randomizer is like intentionally having sex with condoms, despite the fact that you dont need them, imho...

Might add that im just talking about guaranteed clean/healthy/loyal... Females... If those still exist...

yesterday very short session, exhausted from another full day outdoors, played at lower limit for an hour

was fine except for slight winning-tilt:
making a lot of huge hands in good spots but only sometimes getting paid off, other times getting a fold where it looked likely to win a huge pot - feeling that maybe i wasn't capitalising on the good run and that a slight bad run would decimate the winnings in an annoying way.
also longer-term: worried about ability to handle a tough session after a stretch of only easy sessions.

ended the session despite running very good - but eyes falling shut right after, so it must have been a good time to quit.

1k hands in just over 2 hours.

- very calm and centered, tricky spots and bad outcomes surprisingly didn't shake me at all. fairly good decisions despite very low effort/intensity

- serious fatigue etc started setting in after about one and a half hours

Subbed.

Just wondering Keruli if you have considered making your posts more structured? I like the focus on your mental game and the journal format.
But have you been able to identify some recurring faults? Maybe a summary of your progress thus far would help.

It seems to me an organising principle could be "playing hands how you want to play them rather than how you believe they should be played". In addition to this key strat-related/perfectionist issue, then seems to be a deal of entries about mood/motivation/fatigue/concentration.

Anyway, best of luck.

Thanks and yeah, I'm open to suggestions. I'm sure some recurring themes will emerge - there are some that just haven't yet been present in my mind since starting this.

(So far themes have just been determined by what I notice during the session.)

I don't want to try do gauge and summarise progress, at least not yet - I want to stay more concrete and keep going until the much longer term. At the same time, any additional day without self-destructive tilt is progress in the most basic sense...

1k hands of 8-tabling at the higher limit

a bit tired. slightly challenging session.

several negative/ aspects:
- some streaks of unlucky hands, slight doom-switch feeling
- some stackoffs where maaaaybe I should have gone with my feeling and folded at least some of the time
- some hands where I seemed to spew, all in one part of the gametree where I've been feeling unsettlingly lost recently
- a reg playing better than expected at this limit
- a costly hand where I folded the best hand on a 3way river - making what I thought was an easy laydown only to see them both somehow have worse

not totally sure that I wasn't a bit tilted, but didn't do anything obviously tilty.

900 hands in 2h40

had been considering just quitting for the night, but opened up some tables and caught a second wind - easy until I felt I just didn't want to play anwmore, too tired and had made some slight spews that pulled me out of the rhythm.