Very sexy Monday, sir!

(poolparty) look what happens when you put dat volume in

boomswitch activated obv

vamoo

Thanks guys Definitely felt great.

Haven't updated in a while so here we go. After that sick monday, I had a pretty decent week with a solid sunday session which might have put me at the lowest make up count I had reached in a while. Unfortunately the end of the month wasn't so sweet for me, since I dropped 5-6k from that top again without any meaningful scores. Poker is so funny, I felt super confident after that sunday session and then got demolished for 250 games straight without almost even coming near a final table. Month was still decent overall, but it definitely left me with some sort of bittersweet taste. Topped of at my highest volume month ever though, so very happy to have achieved that (PT4 says 889 tournaments, which is well above the 800 I was aiming for)



Even though I know I should only focus on things that I actually can influence, it sometimes still is hard for me. I especially noticed this last sunday where I felt really bad throughout (think I might have eaten someth bad saturday night) and I was much more annoyed at silly things than usual, even though I didn't even lose that much for a sunday. I really think it was some kind of accumulation tilt where a few things came together including Ipoker being Ipoker and not letting me re-enter the client which caused me to blind down pretty deep in a tournament, and there was nothing I could do against. Combine this with me feeling absolutely freezing even though it was hot af in my room and even shaking, it was not a pleasant experience. Monday I felt much better fortunately, and even though I bricked super hard I felt completely fine with it and could fully accept that's just how it goes sometimes. It's funny how our mind sometimes operates.

This brings me to my next thought. Even though I felt I played really well throughout the month, it absolutely didn't show in my winrate and I just got rekt for 50k+ hands straight in that regard, with me barely having a positive ev bb/100. Sure my approach has changed and I'm lateregging a bunch more, but still quite a remarkable shift coming from reaching almost every time 7bb/100 or more. To be honest, when I check for >bb800 It's mostly in line with previous months, and the sample size is still relatively small so I'm not going to attach too much weight to it for now. To be honest, I felt I ran quite bad overall - except for the binks ofc, but have had multiple sessions where I just bricked everything without having much of a chance - compared to other months, but maybe this is just an exponent of this new approach, I'm not entirely sure yet.

In other news, I finally went to my first concert of the national, and it was everything I expected and more. The National is imho the best and most consistent band of this century, so I was super excited to see them live for the first time and it did not dissapoint at all. They played a great setlist, with a solid mix of new and older numbers, the atmosphere was great, and even though I heard some voices saying this was not their best vocal performance I couldn't care less. The National is not about being that at all imo. To me, the leadsinger constantly sipping from his chardonnay and occasionally forgetting his own lyrics, it just added to the magic the national is to me. The leadsinger also went straight into the public 3 times, with a wired microphone singing/screaming his lungs out during a few of the faster songs. I literally could not have asked for more, and it was without a doubt best concert I've ever seen.

In other other news, on monday I finally had a talk with my promotor about reworking my thesis. Overall, it was a really productive talk (we talked over an hour) and to be honest she surely made some valid points. Unfortunately, I'm also afraid it's going to take more time than I initially had hoped, so I might have to tone down my pokergoals slightly. Basically, I will need to rewrite a pretty big part of my theoritical leg and then will have to add two more cases as well. Especially the latter came quite unexpected, and will cost me more time than I orginally had projected. I am much more familiar with the subject though now, so I believe it's still very achievable to combine this with playing a lot of poker right now. However, if things go slower then I will have to cut down on the poker part a little bit. Plan to start on reworking/doing research from tomorow again.

Finally, I am looking to tweak my grind setup a little bit. I would like to upgrade my RAM from 8GB to 16GB and I'm also looking for a new chair. Even though my current one is not that bad, I believe there are much better options and given I'm spending so much time in a chair, I might as well invest in something really comfortable now. I came across the Dxracer series, and have read a ton of positive feedback on it, so gonna take a look today and perhaps order/buy one in the near future. Are there any of you who have such a chair by any chance?



Given I'll be going to a few live trips in the second part of the month I'll settle for 400/450 games this month, with almost all of them being in the first half of the month, so plenty of poker ahead for now. Holla

i have exactly same chair as in pic (different colour obv) for 6 months now. im kind of a bigger person (187 95) so in few specific positions it's kind of smallish/umcomfortable but in 90% of positions it's totally cool. i had some back issues from playing 10h+ sessions on 40eu ikea chair, but they're kind of gone now (except when i sit on half of the chair for 3 hours while mind is in donkaments parallel world completly forgetting about the sitting position).

if u re used to soft chairs, man, gotta tell you, it will be hard for first 10 15 days sitting on this one. it can def get uncomfortable after 6h+ but i think that's irrelevant since there is no chair in which you can sit for 6h+ and feel comfortable all the time. i actually wanted something to dont get me too comfortable so i be focused on the tables more and i think that i got what i wanted. it also makes me take a small walks during breaks which is good. ask any specifics if u have em in mind.

wp month, keep your head up and gl

Would personally recommend a Herman Miller Embody or Aeron over the DXRacer. Used a DXRacer Iron Series for 1.5years and while it was a lot more comfortable than the generic office chair I used before, its lumbar support still sucks compared to high-end ergonomic chairs and I started experiencing back pains from grinding 10 hour sessions 4-5 days a week after a period of use. This was probably partly due to me not having the greatest of posture throughout my sessions, but it's much easier keeping proper posture when your lower back is well-supported.

I switched to a Herman Miller Embody about 3 months ago and it's a night and day difference. I've had 0 back problems since while grinding a relatively high-volume schedule.

Agree! Buying the embody was one of the best purchases so far. Totally worth it if you sit in it for 60+ hours per week

Sick Monday lad! Wpwpwp

Thanks for all the feedback. Decided to buy the dxracer from the picture since I felt like the price/quality value was the biggest there. Absolutely loving the chair so far, grinding has been much more comfortable and back support is amazing compared to my old chair. I can even lean so far back that I could fall asleep in it if I wanted to, so that's a cool feature if I want to relax and watch movie/series too.

Thanks bud <3

It has been quite hectic lately, since I've been busy with a lot of different things this month. To begin, I've been reading a **** ton of papers for my thesis again. I set myself a goal of having rewritten most of the theoretical part of my thesis by saturday night, so devoted quite some time to that. Unfortunately but not surprisingly this has come at the expense of playing poker, which resulted in me only having played 3 sessions so far. I set myself another goal of not looking at my alias until the month is done, so i'm just trying to focus on playing as good as possible and not being biased by meaningless ev bb/100 samples or results. Actually had quite an interesting hand last night at the final table of party's 55 brawl (bounty builder).

partypoker - 17500/35000 NL (8 max) - Holdem - 8 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

UTG+1: 369,382 (VPIP: 21.63, PFR: 17.38, 3Bet Preflop: 8.70, Hands: 361)
MP: 1,441,767 (VPIP: 31.21, PFR: 25.00, 3Bet Preflop: 9.23, Hands: 161)
MP+1: 1,911,752 (VPIP: 22.41, PFR: 14.51, 3Bet Preflop: 7.44, Hands: 846)
CO: 949,112 (VPIP: 23.58, PFR: 16.67, 3Bet Preflop: 8.36, Hands: 1,350)
BTN: 389,570 (VPIP: 27.97, PFR: 23.84, 3Bet Preflop: 16.95, Hands: 288)
SB: 705,004 (VPIP: 19.67, PFR: 13.34, 3Bet Preflop: 6.57, Hands: 678)
Hero (BB): 924,204
UTG: 989,209 (VPIP: 22.82, PFR: 19.12, 3Bet Preflop: 13.33, Hands: 208)

8 players post ante of 3,500, SB posts SB 17,500, Hero posts BB 35,000

Pre Flop: (pot: 80,500) Hero has 8 K

fold, fold, MP raises to 70,000, fold, fold, fold, fold, Hero calls 35,000

Flop: (185,500, 2 players) 7 8 2
Hero checks, MP bets 75,250, Hero calls 75,250

Turn: (336,000, 2 players) 3
Hero checks, MP bets 185,500, Hero raises to 775,454 and is all-in

Ofcouse x/c is the default but I think given my assumptions (villain had high cbet flop & turn and rfi 43) I think protecting my equity and unblocking all the hearts and t9 jt qt type of hands my shove is fine. I sometimes get called by worse because of the bounty builder effect, and have like 27-29% equity vs his callingrange which is not the worst and then it just comes down to how much he b/f's. Given he can "only" call with 40'ish combo's, he doesn't have to b/f very often I think. I also think that ICM in bounty builders is nowhere as big as in regular tournaments and we should pbb take some risks when the payjumps are small since finishing 5th or 8th is not that important. Anyway, let me know your thoughts on this one.

As a lot of you might already know, I've been quite involved with partypoker lately, and even though they sometimes mess up or the execution is not immediately as I'd like it to see, their heart genuinely is in the right place and they are really trying to actively grow poker and listen to customers, so I'm happy to be a part of that.

Hmm what else, I've been trying to pick up a better morning (well wake up rather bc 2pm is not morning anymore) routine the last couple of days. Even though I'm still browsing like half an hour on my phone before that, I've been trying to get in some intense exercises (it's called like 7 min scienfitic workout or w/e, including push ups, jumping jacks, squats, wall sitting, planking and what not) and then immediately shower after that, then have breakfast. I've been feeling much more energized since, so I'll try to keep that up.

Plan to play 4 more sessions before leaving for punta cana festival, and then immediately after that going to namur for belgian poker championships too. hopefully not too jetlagged for that one.

Bonus gif hand, totally meaningless pot early in 33bb but still

PokerStars - 80/160 Ante 24 NL - Holdem - 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

MP+1: 12,773 (VPIP: 22.22, PFR: 16.67, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 18)
MP+2: 8,675 (VPIP: 25.53, PFR: 4.26, 3Bet Preflop: 4.35, Hands: 47)
CO: 5,574 (VPIP: 23.33, PFR: 6.67, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 31)
BTN: 11,801 (VPIP: 16.01, PFR: 12.78, 3Bet Preflop: 7.08, Hands: 284)
SB: 4,527 (VPIP: 35.71, PFR: 19.05, 3Bet Preflop: 9.09, Hands: 42)
BB: 12,720 (VPIP: 36.96, PFR: 32.61, 3Bet Preflop: 6.25, Hands: 46)
UTG: 2,041 (VPIP: 17.36, PFR: 12.66, 3Bet Preflop: 5.45, Hands: 391)
UTG+1: 4,934 (VPIP: 22.85, PFR: 16.25, 3Bet Preflop: 5.51, Hands: 889)
Hero (MP): 3,127

9 players post ante of 24, SB posts SB 80, BB posts BB 160

Pre Flop: (pot: 456) Hero has Q Q



fold, fold, Hero raises to 328, fold, fold, CO calls 328, fold, fold, fold

Flop: (1,112, 2 players) T Q 9



Hero checks, CO bets 1,112, Hero raises to 2,775 and is all-in, CO calls 1,663

Turn: (6,662, 2 players) 9



River: (6,662, 2 players) 9



Hero shows Q Q (Full House, Queens full of Nines)




CO shows J 9 (Four of a Kind, Nines)




CO wins 6,662

i really dont like that x shove ott. my expirence says that ppl with that high of a cbetting frequencies dont barrel as frequent on blank/not-improving-their-range turn cards. vs RFI of 43 he for sure has T8s etc so def x shoving here is overreaching as it might make him mb fold some of those hands. i would call him down 3 streets and be happy about it in most of the time. i dont think we need much protection in this spot actually.

im doing same 7min sheit workout btw, cool thing for procrastrinators

gl

Disagree :/

Turn shove is totally fine for a variety of reasons, but you should really be raising flop.

mainly disagree with the fact that its a turn shove

why. explain why and how is raising flop better than calling in any way

Agree in a purely chip ev spot, thought at ft it was close but I def comtemplated it ye.

It's pretty elementary theory stuff at this point, I'd have to start writing half a page of explanations and I cba. The short of it is that when OOP with strong, but vulnerable hands such as K8 on 872 you best maximize your ev by playing very aggressively in order to protect equity and destroy positional advantage. I can recommend Janda's new book if you want more in depth explanations.

ye i could figure out that is the case, and i would definitly agree if the hand was played in vacuum vs unknown opponent, and i really dont want to derail the thread/start balancing discussion but having all good hands in the x/r range will leave our x/c range in ruins. i agree that that might be slightly higher +ev line but in that in that way our overall strategy is in tough place. if we defend 60%+ bb and do that we gotta have hands that need to call down.. in this specific case vs villains rfi 42 it could be applyble and possibly best explo play,but def not so cool as a general strategy.

Who said anything about raising all your good hands? What makes you think that you need to call nutted hands to be "balanced"? Why do you think raising K8 on 872 off 27bb is an "exploit"?

I'm sorry but there's just too many concepts here that you are severely misinformed about and I don't have the time to explain them all to you.

i havent said any of those things actually

meh, was able to resist to check results for the month, but now i'm wrapping up the month online I finally did so, and boy it wasn't pretty. Didn't manage to put in as much sessions as I had liked, mainly because this **** thesis is taking much more time than I hoped. Still haven't fully wrapped up the theoritical leg of it, so hoping to do that tmrw. also had a small eye injury (eyelid kind of swollen) earlier this week so that basically made me skip yday's session, since I really didn't feel comfortable grinding for 10hrs str8 when my eye is hurting. Got some sort of medicine yday, and felt much better today already, so decided to fire my last session of the month but ye it was another trainwreck of a session unfortunately to wrap things up

Month results



Happy with the volume each sessions, esp the last 4 sessions really good, happy with how I played as well I think? it's tough to say that when you basically got slaughtered every session without really coming close to any big scores at all and just dwindling down 4 figs each session. Not gonna lie feel pretty gutted since all the momentum I had build up in october has vanished once again, and mu is again at a considerable big amount but oh well, what can you really do at this point eh

Whatever, leaving for punta cana on saturday for hopefully a nice relaxing holiday with some live poker as well. Hopefully fully recharge the batteries and then I'll see you back in december boys. peace

Big Punta Cana score incoming...

Have fun mate. Keep us updated

wanted to quickly come back at this. It's amazing how a bad streak can totally crush your confidence. I remember I felt at the top of my game after I caught some heat last month, and then you basically brick for 500 games straight again and you wonder again if you were ever good at this game in the first place. Everything is so stupidly relative in this game, especially this silly ev bb/100 metric over meaningless samples. My winrate has been totally rekt for last 80k hands, while my stats have remained the same and even improved in quite some departments. So yeah, I still feel like I played really great poker this month, kept a very good mindset throughout all my sessions but it's so hard to actually believe that when results (both in terms of net profit and ev bb/100) tell you otherwise. I think this is something where a lot of us mortal mtt grinders struggle with, and even though I've played poker for so long, I still do sometimes. Even though I was struggling at first, I really liked the approach of not reviewing results/stats/ev bb/100 metrics before the end of the month, and will definitely continue doing this in the future.

I actually created a few non-result oriented poker goals and one which I really like is 'remember there is no such thing as one session. it rather is one big session and daily/weekly/monthly results do not matter AT ALL.' I think creating goals like this and reviewing/looking at those before sessions can really help to implement this idea in your head. Along with a few others I also have (in caps): 'NOBODY CARES IF YOU THINK YOU ARE RUNNING BAD'. Well still working on that one, however I think i'm progressing in that one as well. I think I can count the amount of silly showdowns/berating regs because they got lucky hh's on one hand for this month (on skype). Even though I didn't fully agree with his point of view, I still liked the logic of a friend of mine on skype when we were discussing coolers. basically his pov was that it does not matter at all whether you lose or win them, because you got lucky/unlucky first to get dealt this cooler in the first place, so results of such hands shouldn't matter anyway. this has become quite a rambling post at this point. Oh well, I like writing down my exact thoughts during tough times and then reviewing on them later, and perhaps some of you got something out of it as well.

Thanks guys.