Keep strong pal, think long term and your ultimate goal. weather ur up this week or down this week, only thing that matters is that you take the REAL fish to the cleaners in the long term. Still rooting for you mate.

-Hertz-

Cheers for the support. Going to play a half hour session before bed, 2 tables - I'm aiming to play perfectly...

Week 5



Not a good week. I feel I played really well in some sessions but really poorly in others. I managed to put in the hours playing but at some points do not feel that I was even a profitable player due to how poorly I was playing. I usually managed to quit fairly soon after I realised this, a plus I suppose. Out of my seven sessions, six were losers. A combination of tilt, running under all-in EV and getting murdered in non-showdown pots:



I'm not quite sure my non-showdown profits have been so poor. I don't think it is lack of value betting of my hands - I do this quite aggressively - and my c-betting I think is ok. I just kept geting pushed off my hands. I've been getting 3bet a fairly bit preflop, so have to fold a ton money there, and I kept getting raised off hands repeatedly postflop. Again and again and again. So I would generally fold, fold, fold. When I did choose to make stands with top pair type hands or reasonable draws, invariably I would get called and be in really bad shape. Or when I would raise/shove light over the people I think are lightly 3/4-betting me I would get called and be dominated (Also, several big bluffs I tried failed miserably and I had to fold a lot of money there.... more things to consider) I've stopped calling on the river with so many bluff catchers too - I think this is an improvement over how I was playing two or three weeks ago, but obviously this will change some showdown loses to (hopefulyl smaller!) non-showdown losses. It has felt like this the last 5k hands or so. I wonder if it is just variance or whether I have deeper issues

I shall keep plugging away however. I have not been focussing on studying poker recently - been reading a MATLAB intro book and climate change material for my course - but shall concentrate on studying some videos this week.

On a brighter note, off to spend the weekend with my girlfriend again. So no time to think about poker until Monday now


Profit this week:-$392
Bonus/rakeback: $274
Total Profit: $1517

I am now officially retired! Yesterday was my last day teaching. Got a really nice cheer and round of applause from the students when the Head said various farewells at the end of the term assembly. One of the nice bits of being a teacher that I will miss

Not played much this week but have a decision tonight - do I play in the £10 rebuy donkament at the nearby casino and £1/£2 Nl cash game that plays there, or I do grind the weekend fish online? The second option is more profitable after petrol/food/drink costs but the fish at the casino are just so grossly bad, that might be fun for a change. Its the Gala casino in Leeds - anyone know it here?

Week 6

Tilt Monkey. Played some dreadful poker recently. Fortunately I used to be a maths teacher so I like symmetry and can enjoy the graph:



Not much much to say except that I have been tilting a lot recently - I have definitely gone backwards in this respect. Going to re-evaluate things this week - I have in fact gone backwards in a lot of respects since I started this challenge. I am still fairly optimistic about things though, I just need to get into a nice routine and relax a little while I am playing. And watch a ton of videos

Bad things:

• I am no longer studying
• I am rarely evaluating hands
• I am too attached to my bankroll and this is affecting my decision adversely.

Profit this week:-$20
Bonus/rakeback: $150
Total Profit: $1647 <----- almost entirely rakeback/bonus!

One word.........

Volume

You cant evaluate your play in a week by only playing 2k hands..... I mean i play that amount everyday.

I've played about 22k since I started this. And you can definitely evaluate your play from 2k hands. It is a myth that people on Two plus Two perpetuate that you can't tell if someone is a winning player without a sample of 100k+ hands. All you need to do is look closely at a few hundred hands to have a very good idea.

22k in 6 weeks is not good volume..... No more to say on the matter tbh, good luck though no hating on me

I understand your point about volume being important to overcome variance. But the fact is that I am playing 100NL with an effective bankroll of around $20,000 so I am not especially interested in putting in 8k hands per day in order to allow me to move up - I could play 400NL comfortably on my current roll. What I am interested in is improving my play to the level where I am capable of beating 200NL or 400NL comfortably. At that stage I will start thinking about serious volume to hit my monetary goals.

I refuse to become one of the sad barely break-even 16 table nits who somehow feel entitled to beat the game because they are "pro" and have watched a few videos but who, in reality, have little to no chance of beating the game at any higher level because they don't improve...

keep it up. definitely will follow this thread.

From one math teacher to an ex math teacher

Thanks! Out of interest, do you ever get tempted to teach your kids how to gamble well? Seeing how many people are addicted losers in later life, you may be doing them a favour...

Great thread WAtR. This opened my eyes to the concept of having a real long term goal for poker rather than just grind grind grind. I think I'll do a similar thing and keep some kind of a journal in a word document then post on here when I think I am in need of a line check or flaming .

Best of luck with it and thanks for the inspiration.
I'll be looking forward to the updates.

http://www.evplusplus.com/poker_tool...nce_simulator/
http://www.evplusplus.com/poker_tool...te_confidence/

Are you trying to tell me you cannot tell who the best players are and the weaker players are on High Stakes Poker? You can only see each player play fewer than 100 hands a series yet it is fairly easy to see who the good players are and the weaker players are. You do not need to watch 100k hands to know that Dwan is better than Negreanu and that the amateur celebrities are losing players in that game.

You can tell if someone has a good knowledge of Poker by watching him play a few hands but there is no way you can determine his winrate.

100k+ hands is a must in order to determine his "true" winrate.

Playing on the new Betfair software - they have just switched over to Ongame. In one hand I held 86 but the dealer button covered the top left of the 8 so I thought I held 66. Called a smallish 3bet in position and proceeded to stack off when I "hit" my set. Sigh...

I am super tilted right now. Basically been tilting off stack after stack - I need to stop playing for a while! Total profit so far down to about $600. Got all summer to fix it though. Positive thoughts!

I never said anything about determining win rate, only about evaluating the level of play.

Then I agree with what you're saying.

Im tempted to teach my own kid when hes like 15-16 to get competent at poker, although i dont want him sitting in the house all day..... Poker can teach you so many things if you put your mind too it.

With a few thousand hands you can determine how well somebody has played over those hands or one session, you cannot say how they generally play all things considered. How good you are depends on things like game selection and how often you play your A game. You may be extrememly competent when it comes to theory, reading players etc but how often you play that A game and how often you play well below it are huge contributing factors.

Came fourth in a live 70 player £10 rebuy event for £140 - made a really nice change to playing online. The play was just gross; for the rebuy period nobody folded anything, and when the blinds got higher later I was shoving every other hand and nobody would call. The whole table were calling me a fish for shoving like that rather than playing their weak/tight crap but the blind structure was so fast that I rarely had more than 10bb and doing anything else was grossly bad. I didn't make a single postflop hand all evening!

Lol, live poker

Didn't make a conclusion on that, but I think that is why so many people on 2+2 say you can't be sure until you have volume like 100k hands+ sample. Obviously agreed that you can get a feel of style and level of play after a few hundred though.

Good work on the live cash

Oh the shame! The shame! Just finished a 6 hour session ending at 5am. Whoooopsy

Been really busy moving house and doing various oddjobs so have not updated for a while. The times I have played have been really bitty and I have really lacked the patience to play properly. Also, Betfair has moved to Ongame and I have yet to figure out how to import hand histories, so can't really post a graph.

Been thinking a bit about how I am going to progress and I have decided to 2-table for about 6 weeks and really blitz through some DC videos.

I really do feel shamed about my all nighter - only done that once before. It was 200NL as well... managed to break about even, but only due to a mega-fish at the table.

GL with this man. Its gonna be interesting to follow this thread.

"and stroppy twelve year old girls"

ahahaha gas