31/05/20 SUNDAY SESSION
SCOOP DAY 23 (FINAL DAY)

Got completely wrecked, not real deep runs unfortunately.
Also don't have any real spews
Just this decent triple barrel vs a reg.


May/SCOOP overview

Results wise it wasn't too good, i was happy with the volume i put in. And doing consistent cooldowns i thought was good. Just ended up getting really burned out towards the end and doing very little studying on my study days.

Also goals wise i did decently well.

Actually read this blog post from pads, and it really resonated with me and was a really good read. I do think i put a bit too much emphasis on the series, as i was hoping it could be my opportunity to bounce back from my downswing, but unfortunately it dug me in deeper.

Break
So now i will be taking a little break. I aim for it to be for around 2 weeks, although if i get really bored i might come back sooner. Going to use this time to work on my mental and physical health.
There will be 3 things that i prioritise to do every day:

• Go for a run
• Read 10 pages of 'Power of Habit'
• 10 minute meditate

Hopefully i can start implementing these good habits, and will aim to do most of these in the first hour of my day, as i want to try out the theory of productive first hour in a day sets up for a good day. And with time off after that i can do whatever i want, whether that play games, watch movies/tv shows or go out and see friends.
Also will be fully disconnecting from poker during this break. This mean i'll be muting slack, skype, and all poker discords, including my own server: https://discord.gg/as7d8vH (smooth plug )
I also won't be check my blog/2p2 so if anyone needs to contact me its best to do it through discord as i will still be checking my DMs.
And the final change for when i get back is i plan on uninstalling league of legends since this is just such a big distraction for me. When i think about when i made the most progress in my poker career it was probably when i was living in vietnam and my internet wasn't good enough to play LoL (even though i had korean server account, ping was ~110 which was playable), i was also very isolated here and didn't have many friends, so distractions were quite limited. But i just found myself playing a 'quick' game of league of legends at the end of every grind instead of studying or going to sleep, so this will be an interesting change.

So its adios for a couple weeks. When i get back i will start grinding the low variance schedules, which i am actually very excited for, and i want to get back in the lab consistently and learn lot of new things.

16/06/20 Session

Got this little W, been grinding for a couple days already but this one feels worth flexing.
Played pretty well overall, and ran decent.

Back from break
Incase it wasn't obvious i am back grinding again.
Spent most of my time off playing CoD4 PC, used to play CoD4 on xbox when i was younger (12-14), and was really into sniping and making montages. So just been recording clips and might throw a little montage together. This is my nuttiest clip for anyone who knows what i'm on about.
Also started getting into the routine of exercise/meditating/reading every day.
Going for a run every day, and slowly going for longer runs, only achieving like 5 mins at the moment then i'm totally dead.
Currently reading The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg, which is actually super interesting, wish i started reading it earlier.

And now i'm back i'm grinding out the softer schedule of ipoker/888/unibet/skypoker, which hasn't started off to badly. Still in some makeup, and running low of life funds, but should hopefully all sort out over the next few months. Going to be grinding and studying really hard.

Also been banging this song, wasn't too huge on it first time i listened but its also sick. Also anyone who knows the background of the artist will realise how sad this tune is.

17/06/20 Session


Feels good to ship 2 tourneys today, had quite a few deep runs too.


Went for this pretty psycho bluff HU too.
preflop IP minr, OOP call
flop IP cbet 1/3, OOP x/r, IP call
turn OOP barrel 1/2 pot, IP call
River.
This might be a bit of a shitty bluff since villain was really sticky and didn't like folding pairs. However who sizes river like this with the intention of calling a jam, like its not a trap, and strong hands just jam themselves, also my blockers are pretty legit and i rep some pretty credible hands, like flushes and straights. Luckily it worked out, but it might be bad.

Also played this entire session really sleep deprived, i only slept like 5h, and i'm used to a good 7.5-8h. I feel like i sometimes play better when i'm tired, since it lowers my emotions/arousal levels, since i tend to be quite an emotional player. It also sometimes feels like i become lazer focused on 1 thing, although it can be more autopilot than anything.

Nice score in the Sweat! Congrats man!

I came 8th in it a few weeks back after being like 1/11 with the biggest bounty. Pretty crushing to say the least.

What's SkyPoker like these days? I played it when I first started (10+ years ago) and it had nice tourneys and freerolls (oh the days of free money...) for lower stakes players, but not a great schedule overall.

I'm back on ipoker after playing it intermittently in the past and really like the schedule. Software is largely above average but tilting AF when it freezes or closes altogether!

Thanks mate! Always feels bad to bust so quickly after being big stack ;(

Skypoker is okay, structures are complete shite and there aren't a huge amount of tourneys to chose from. It essentially hasn't changes in any way since 10 years ago.
However it is extremely soft, and there is 1 daily tourney worth playing (33 pko, starts at 8pm UK time) and maybe 1 or 2 decent tourneys per day too. Makes an okay side-site, if you know what i mean Yeah the ipoker client randomly closing down is annoying, especially when you have lots of tables, but i can live with it.

18/06/20 Session

4th here vvv

I was getting pretty destroyed but fortunately had these day savers at the end! Ran pretty pure in the 55 PKO, defo had a few spots that i was unsure of.

Anyways i'll keep it short since i'm really tired. Was feeling very drowsy throughout the session which might have been part of the reason i was getting destoryed. Felt a bit autopilot and not in a good way. Probably because i've underslept on consecutive days which i'm definitely not used to.
Will study all my spots tomorrow.

21/06/20 SUNDAY SESSION

When you spend 6 months getting mainly brutalised on sundays, having a breakeven sunday session feels like a blessing. Will for sure take this W.
Made another small FT but busted 7th for not much.

Will keep it short for today, looking forward to my day off tomorrow, will see my amigos, then will hopefully have another good week!

Only read thru January so far, will catch up with the thread soon ish

gl OP!

New Zealand has been playing this advertisement a bunch, somewhat similar

Loool thanks mate


25/06/20 Session

Nice little 2nd place for a few pennies, been making a bunch of FTs past few days but most of them are very small so not really anything noteworthy.


made this disgusting fold earlier on in the tourney too.

Glad i was right, but playing poker like this honestly makes me pretty sad. Doesn't feel great folding QQ even if i am right.

I want to get back to posting more strategy related stuff instead of just MTT results, but i have generally been studying a bit less since i returned. And a lot of my studying is just grinding out HRC spots, so its not particularly pretty or interesting.
Also my PT4 didn't pick up the hands from that 20fof that i just came 2nd in, which is a massive ball ache since i cant really study it now -.- hopefully i can fix this somehow.

Anyways will do some studying + socialising tomorrow then hopefully power through the weekend

28/06/20 Sunday Session (and monday for day 2)

Was chipleading 2x 2nd place chips with 4 left, so pretty disappointing to bust 4th.

My nice little day 2, busted AA<AKo which always stings but i won like every flip before that so i cant complain too much.

FT bluff
So first off this was a hand that really bothered me, kept me thinking for hours last night as i wasn't sure if it was good and just unlucky, or pretty bad and a spew.
So here's the hand, its a gif from unibet

So villain is someone who i know, technically my 'mentor' from my stable, so he's analysed a lot of my hands and should know my game pretty well. I think hes a pretty tight player, and seemed to play pretty straight forward so far vs me.
So obviously on FT this is a spot where i want to apply a lot of pressure given stacks, so i'll be raising pretty wide, and certainly dont expect this villain to be defending wide.
So lets for now say that cbet flop and barreling turn is fine as we can start to put a lot of pressure on Tx and Qx.
River I initially thought i could put most Qx and Kx in the bin, especially since villain is tight. I block 66/AJ. And i thought a lot of KQ/KT/QT might jam turn for protection.
However i think bluffing a T river can be really bad. Mainly on the basis that villain doesn't have that many snapfolds anymore (JT/AT), and if we expect a lot of Qx to fold turn then its only really QJ that may now fold. So this bluff only really works if villain folds K5s-K9s at a very high frequency, which might not happen, villain might think i'm overbluffing due to icm (even though i dont have many bluffs, A9, A6 and some Jx). So if these hands dont end up always folding then it feels like i'm torching.
I can also just give up river and still have chiplead, which seems fine. Also just feels a little forced and unnecessary given how bad people play ICM wise, i think there's not that much incentive to play super aggro and try to pressure small stacks as when people dont care about ICM they will end up donating/punting stacks away anyway. I guess the best way to explain this is if you ever run an HRC preflop sim, and adjust villain for calling a jam too wide, this then tightens up the heros jamming range.
I think i discussed this with a friend a couple years back, i believe it was what c. darwin was doing, as a big stack deep in a tourney or on FT, he would just open really wide, and cbet a super high frequency, then just play honest turn and river. Which i think is a pretty effective way to play these FTs especially on softer sites, its just unnecessary to run these big marginal bluffs when people will just donate stacks to you anyway. I was maintaining a really healthy stack throughout FT before this hand.

I guess just to go back to the hand now, it does feel as if we kind of have to triple barrel this hand once we barrel 2 streets. Since it feels kind of bad to barrel turn where we target 6x and weak Qx, when we block the 6x (and beat it), which is a big portion of the folding range, to then just give up river. Sure the river was really bad to bluff, but maybe just take that hand out our bluffing range, and just stick to A9/J6/J8 etc instead.

Closing thoughts
Anyways i was super salty after that FT last night since i busted top boat to quads vs same guy And i think busting or losing big pots to people you know always stings a bit more than vs randoms, but maybe thats moreso my ego and competitive nature.
Think i'm going to take tomorrow off playing, especially since i wasnt able to fully utilise today as a proper day off. Might do some studying or whatnot, i'll decide. Been a pretty sick month overall though. In just the 3 weeks since i started grinding again i'm up like £5.5k, which is pretty nuts. I'm finally going to get a bit of money into my bank account after like an 8 month downswing, so that will feel nice.
I'm a bit worried about how my progression in poker is going to be over the next few months on these v soft sites, also having a lot of issues with PT4 on some of these sites, and a lot of these sites dont track hands, so it definitely makes it a lot tougher to study spots, unless i remember to screenshot them in game. But its quite nice maximising my shortterm $ EV for now, then maybe later i can refocus on trying to become the biggest sicko.

June Recap

Also played about 40 games on unibet and i'm up £2082.31 there.
Then i played a few untracked games on grosvenor, not sure if i'm up or down.
But i ended the month up about £5.5k, which isnt bad considering i only grinded like half the month, but i ran pretty pure which helps.

July Goals
Poker

• 500 games
• Grind 5 days per week
• 2h study per day (1h warm up, 1 hour cooldown)
• Min 5 HRC spots per day
• Become more active in discord server/slack, responding to all HH’s posted.
• 2 HH swaps

Life

• Read 300 pages of a book(s)
• Run 5x per week
• 5 min meditation per day
• Prepping meals at least once per week
• 1 proper day off per week, go outside

Somehow forgot to do goals for last month so not much to reflect on. A lot of the goals just revolve around continuing the good habits that i have already started.

Discord Server
https://discord.gg/as7d8vH
Gonna plug the discord server again as i plan on being more active there an post more hands. Its generally pretty chill so feel free to join!

12/07/20 SUNDAY SESSION

Pretty chuffed with this result

This doesn't show the 167.32 i collected in bounty so was for €541.62 total.
So a pretty solid sunday overall

General update
I'm aware i've been a bit quiet over the past week or so, just been having mainly breakeven sessions, where i come 2nd in some small field tourney to break even for the day, so no Ws to flex about

Also finished reading Power of Habit, and now i've moved onto Atomic Habits by James Clear, which i'm really enjoying so far its a good book to follow up with, and builds upon some of the principles from power of habit.

Been having some emotional swings, and study thoughts, which i've contemplated writing about, but now i've forgotten most of them, they come and go.
Study wise just been grinding out HRC sims like everyday, as i'm making lots of FTs, there are lots of spots to study. I just run every spot no matter how 'obvious'.

This song bangs too

Anyways looking forward to seeing my friends tomorrow. Have like 20-30 ICM spots to run from today, but i need to sleep as well, so i will get around to them on tuesday!

That's how low variance small field schedule is, not much glory but steady income. What are your thoughts so far about this switch? glgl and keep crushing

Thanks mate, schedules has been good so far, for sure its more consistent. I find it a little bit boring at times, there's nothing too exciting in the schedule. But maybe thats fine, just making consistent FTs and being able to study lots of ICM spots alongside more consistent earnings is good, then slowly get to move up, similar to cashgames in that sense.

Gameplay concerns
So yesterday i got really battered in my session, and i wasn't really able to identify what went wrong, just felt like my stack would dwindle down and then i'd lose a flip.
Then i came across this hand and it felt like it opened a bit of a pandoras box:

I thought this might be close as to whether we defend or not, so i decided to run it in PIO.
Given IP bets 1/3 with almost range (which seems realistic), here is OOP response:

First off i understand that BB should jam a significant amount preflop and also have some 3b bluffs, but i did it realistically to how my range looks in game.
So as you can see A6ss is a very clear call, but more than that there's a lot of hands here that are just a clear call that i would never even imagine defending, QJs, A8o, J9s with bdfd. Even some wild x/r like 84s, and A5 for protection/value.
For IP when they face a x/r ATo is made indifferent, and is always defending QJs/QTs/76s, which doesn't really happen in game, so x/r aggressively is definitely a viable strategy.
You could say that some of these defends are on the fringe but i calculated that my defending range (pairs+draws), would be at most 42.8% (inc x/r), which means i'm folding 57.2% of the time. Which means i'm hugely overfolding, and A6s makes a good amount defending, along with some of the other hands i mentioned, and the EV of calling and raising these combos is very similar, but i should never be folding.

So this hand got me thinking, how much am i overfolding?
So before i looked at the stats i know that fold to cbet should be around 45%-50%
This year: Since switching schedule in june:
Seeing this 58% is pretty embarrassing, its ridiculously high. And i don't think this me 'exploiting' the player pool, since the regs are cbet machines, so i should still be defending aggressively. Also this light floats will become a lot of my river bluffs, and will naturally lead to me playing more aggressively, since my issue currently is i'm reverting back to my nitty ways.
Also my flop x/r is quite low (8.7% total, 10.2% from blinds), it should be around 10% total, and 11-12% from BB (It might be more), just another area that i'm potentially too tight in.

Honestly i'm pretty annoyed that my stable didn't bring this up with me, as they very recently did an 'in-depth' database analysis for me, and this should be an obvious area of weakness. Like they bought up that i was a bit tight and wasn't winning enough pots, but this is really unhelpful if they don't then point out where a lot of these pots are being lost, and flop defence frequencies is an easy area to identify.
I guess i'm frustrated since if i'm giving away half my action, and have someone to work with me on my game, I shouldn't be the one identifying leaks this big and obvious. Maybe i'm wrong here, but its not like im resistant to playing more aggro, i want to, hence Psycho Swann, but its just that i literally wasn't told about this.

The trap of playing soft schedules
So i was having this revelation last night, and i mentioned it to a friend of mine. And he said something along the lines on "but you've been killing it recently which is definitely an important thing to think about." So basically because i've been doing well, means i must be doing something right? No, i think this is the trap that's really easy to fall into when you are crushing. When you're getting destroyed for months on end its much easier to accept that you could have some major issues in your game, even if variance is a big part of it. But when you're consistently making 3-5k/month its far easier to become complacent on the basis that you are consistently winning so you think that you must be doing things right, without realising that you could be making twice as much if you consistently held yourself to a higher standard and put effort into improving your game.
Like sure i did well last month, but i did run pretty good at most FTs i made, and i'm obviously playing way too tight and it feels really bad, as i think playing aggro is the way to go, and i'm willing to lose some EV short term for it, i'm happy to be wrong but at least try to switch. I just see so many regs on these soft sites, and they play pretty poorly, and its obvious that their game just hasn't really progressed that much over the last 5-10 years that they've spent as a pro, and they're just playing the exact same stakes or even a bit lower, their graph (or progression) just looks like a logarithmic graph, and as i pro i can't understand how you can be so content with being average and being in the same place and just bumhunting the softest sites longterm.
I want to be like an exponential graph, i'm worried that if i don't put enough effort into my game i will first off never get to the point i want to achieve, and secondly i worry that my game will just fall off and i wont be good enough anymore to play the games i currently play. So i just seek to actively improve until i'm as good as i can possibly be, but i don't think that point will arrive for a while, if ever.

Seems like laziness from your stable with such overly simplistic advice and lack of hard, detailed work. With this industry often so expensive it can attract so many mediocre people looking for easy money. They might be leading poker minds but that doesn't make them leading professionals. The comfort of a regular income from coaching surely has a negative effect on levels of effort/input from some stables (I've never been backed FWIW but believe my points are fair).

This is one reason exactly why you see such a divide in pro/anti stable views. Sure, you see some great instructors who can help your game significantly, but there are countless people out there just looking for a relatively easy living while putting in the minimum requirement of work to get some sort of passable result, while you put in most of the work for them. They could push themselves with you and get a few % higher on your ROI, making you both more money, but take the easier approach of partially improving several people (perhaps they make more money that way, at a cost of a lower level of service).

If this is the level of work ethic and professionalism they're putting in, I wouldn't be jumping to keep any arrangement I had with them where they're profiting from me. Stables often love to market themselves as these massive companies when in reality some are just a bunch of mates sitting around on their laptops looking for an easy living (I highly doubt most are even registered as companies, paying taxes, etc). If people were working at this vague and seemingly uninterested level in a proper company working a 9-5 for example, wouldn't they be held accountable for it?

I'm not sure who your coaches are so am speaking rather generally here, but as with all sorts of jobs, being at a leading/elite skill level doesn't make you a leading/elite professional, in terms of professionalism, thoroughness, work ethic, ability to teach effectively, and so on. Those above items are prerequisites, irrespective of poker ability.

The fact that you're questioning the value of giving up a % for this level of service should be an alarm bell. It seems like you're working well on your game so why not consider going alone again? This doesn't have to be immediately, but once you've got enough saved up, or at a slightly lower ABI.

I realise this is a bit lengthy and I'm rambling somewhat. I've been following for a while now and see you on ipoker most sessions, so wish you luck!

I recently saw a Jared Tendler's online class where he talks about a lot of stuff regarding mental game and it was a nice refreshment of the content from his books (that I strongly recommend any poker pro to read).

One of the points that stick with me the most was this graph about performance and stress level. If you're playing 5 and 10ks daily you're gonna be so stressed out and lost that you'll be underperforming, same would apply if you're playing $1 500gtds on stars with 10k runners as they wont matter to you. So is very important to find where you feel you enjoy and play the best is and grind hard there.



Personally, if prize for 1st is less than 350-400usd (that's between 1-1,2k gtd) I dont care enough to play my A game on those. So maybe if you're lacking excitement you gotta fire slightly more expensive games with better prizepools or find other ways to make your sessions more exciting, for example, trying to watch most hands you dont play and take a bunch of notes on villains.

This issue is very easy to fix, and it depends 100% on you. My motto has always been "learn from the best, play against the worst". In my case, living alone abroad and paying for everything myself, I can't afford to go many months without income, and that's probably the case for many of the regs you kinda look down to for not improving their game over the years (imagine how hard it must be if they have families with children and everything ).

And dont get me wrong, I also look down on regs that dont want to improve anymore, that's one of the best things poker has as a profession imo: the possiblity to learn something new every day. I have many poker friends that kinda gave up on studying and just bumhunt on chinese apps or shitty websites and I fear for them as I think that if you dont move forward in poker your inevitably moving backwards, as there's a bunch of people studying daily to beat you and take your money.

But game selection and studying are two completely different things and I dont think they should be linked one to another.

Putting yourself in games and sites where your edge is smaller seems bad to me. If we were talking about a game we play just for fun I could understand it, but giving up edge (and hence, money) for playing against better regs that will "destroy" you and strip down your leaks seems a -EV decision. I'd rather use the money I win playing vs worse players to pay a better reg to do a DB review and show me my leaks over a Skype call, might be cheaper that way lol.

Not long ago when you were playing on the more reg heavy schedule your posts were very gloomy and you mentioned sometimes how you were not motivated to study nor grind as much anymore (and even considered quitting after the series iirc). So that edge you think you'd be gaining for playing against better regulars will be lost as you'll put less time into studying for feeling down or demotivated.

I remember watching a video a while ago (almost sure it was a Joe Rogan's guest) where this guy said how going extremely hard on every workout can be detrimental as long term you'll put less volume in your training. Let's say you go to the gym on monday and workout legs for about two hours at extremely hard intesity, but next day you're so sore you can't go for the run you had planned, so you lose one day of workout. The next day you're feeling better but still somewhat tired so you go to the gym again but train for 45' at medium intesity. Fourth day you go very hard again, so hard that you have to skip another session due to an injury or extreme tiredeness, so at the end of the week you only trained for 4-5 hours, whereas if you had trained at a normal intensity you would've put in 6-7 hours of training, increasing your total training volume.

This is comparable to your situation as before you were demotivated to study after getting destroyed day after day. Now with all these FTs and deep runs you can review daily ICM spots and do HH reviews, watch videos, etc and your study volume will increase that way in the long run.

Also, you'll have more money so you wont be forced to grind marathon sessions if you dont want to and you'll be able to study more and play with less pressure, giving yourself a better chance to give your A game daily, without being money scared.

Maybe my point was lost in this eternal rant but basically it is: you'll only get worse and stop improving if you get lazy and slack on studying. This is 100% up to you and the schedule you play should be pretty much irrelevant. Stay hungry and eager to improve and you'll eventually get better, richer and happier

Yeah absolutely, I wasn't targeting your stable in particular - my comments were more general. The instances of poor service (e.g. slow/inadequate responses) you highlighted seem quite commonplace in the industry. On the whole, it's just a lot easier for stables to get away with a low level of accountability or effort relative to other jobs.

As for the screen-name, I'm enjoying the anonymity at the moment but will share it if I manage to put in some more volume. I'm also on the Grosvenor skin - have you been playing any of the GUKPT, Deepstack or 25/25 events they run (either on or off stake)?

Following, gl in your journey man, i like how you being honest with yourself.

I'm a fan of Jared Tendler! Have read MGoP twice now, and i actually started the 2nd one but didn't get too far through it. Now i'm reading a lot more it is likely that i will read both those books once again at some point. But sometimes after a long day of grinding poker i don't really want to read a poker related book. Would rather learn about real life things, that i can then apply to poker (not the other way around). So it maybe some time before i get around to reading these books again, but i do enjoy them.

Also as a league of legends fan it was really cool seeing him join team liquid. I always like seeing a cross over of 2 people from different industries that i like.

I definitely agree. Like the main issue i will run into is complacency, not the games themselves. And i for sure have aspirations to move back to the bigger sites, but maybe first to become the best of the 'softer' sites.

I was playing some of the 25/25 events. Well as you won't tell me your screenname, if you do anything slightly unconventional vs me that works out, then you may get a msg from me in the chat

Thanks mate, I try to pride myself in being honest, even if its not what people want to hear. Sometimes this can backfire as it can come off as overly critical, and generally just saying unneeded things, but working on finding a balance.

Update
So I decided to leave my stable after a little incident had occurred. A few days ago i made a post in this blog about my stable, in which i brought up some of the issues i had, and some of the stuff i said was pretty slanderous and i think i should've just brought up these issues with the stable first instead of just writing them in my blog. This post has now been deleted. The initial intent of the post was actually to defend my stable, since after a realisation i made about my game, i said stable should've picked up on it (honest mistake), then a lot of people we're heavily criticising the stable and saying i should leave. So i decided to try to defend them and said that they had supported me a lot, however they weren't devoid of criticism, and this is where i made the biggest mistake of then listing all of those criticisms and concerns. So whilst i don't think it was malicious on my part, i certainly think it was super naive of me and i take full responsibility for that mistake, there not exactly anyone else i can blame. So the staff obviously weren't too happy about this which is very fair, and i had a talk with them where they said i should obviously have a think about my options. I was surprised i wasn't kicked, i probably should've been, but they are clearly more forgiving than i would be. So i thought about it for a day or so, and what my long term goals are, which do not consist of me being with the stable, and for that reason i decided to leave, which was probably best for all parties.

I definitely made a lot of mistakes throughout my time on this stable, and learned a lot about myself. I just had a really hard time fitting in whilst i was there, this is obviously a fault of mine since i often don't mesh with new people right away and it does take me time to get comfortable around new people, but even so after 5 months i only got along with maybe 2-3 people and even then i probably only spoke to 1 person daily and that was my mentor who was assigned to help me. I need to work on my networking skills and ability it just reach out to new people, as this is a really good skill to have in poker especially if you want to improve.
I also think my failures we're a result of my arrogance. From day 1 i thought i was a lot better (at poker) than most of the players in the stable. This was on the premise that i had some of the highest volume but simultaneously on the higher end of studying hours too, if not studying the most (can't technically prove this). And because i have a tendency to be quite stubborn the only way to get around this by having my considering the individual in high regard, hence why i never had this issue in bitb. So it can be really hard for me to improve in this environment if i think i'm a better player than someone. And this is just something that i need to work on, just being more open minded and being able to take good things from those that i consider worse than me, not just from those that i consider better.

As for my plans now, i've got a deal with a close friend of mine. I won't go into the specifics but essentially i'll be much lower stakes with the intention of being selfrolled within the space of a few months, if i'm lucky by like october, then i can work on spinning my roll back up and progressing through the stakes once again. Its frustrating to hit this $30ABI barrier twice, since both times i though i was making good progress and doing well in these games, just to have unfortunate circumstances send me back down again. So the next few months probably won't be too exciting because i'll be playing low stakes + small fields, but i will try to make it a priority to turn up to every session and play it out, since thats the only way i'll truly realise my EV. And hopefully within 6 months i'll be back to my peak in terms of games i'm playing, and in a much better position. Its been a pretty rough past 9-10 months, i just hope that if i keep grinding that things will come to fruition.

I guess just to round out i read a quote yesterday, which could've done me some good a few months ago.

Goodharts law:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Maybe i'm utilising this law incorrectly, but maybe to ignore $ earned, or bb/100, or ROI%, and not let them become a goal to increase. And to focus on more gameplay related things to improve. But i was going to say that with that old 100k goal i had set, Its pretty common that a player struggles for a long while, then from 1 year to the next their plan comes to fruition and they crush and start to make infinites. So instead of their yearly earnings being 20/25/30/35/40, it can often be 15/20/15/25/100. And this is why you can't focus on it, since if you expect it to be gradual raise, it likely won't be, and by year 3 you will feel as if you will never get there, so you have to find a different motivator, or at least a different way of measuring your success.

22/07/20 Session

I am the skypoker champion!!!

I have to win one of these small tourneys to breakeven for the day as my buyins are around £300, then all my mincashes and whatnot are the profit. But always got to post the W screenshot

July Recap

Up about €300 on unibet aswell with 80-100 games played, so around +$1600 or so for the month. Not a bad month, but certainly felt a bit slow, just had a few breakeven stages, but a couple nice results too.
And for results before/after leaving stable:

Almost all my unibet profits were post leaving. So my final profit after leaving was £676=$885.
You can see i've significantly dropped down in stakes, but i get a much higher % of my profits, and will hopefully be selfrolling within a couple months. New schedule as been okay, ran really atrocious the last 3 days, and before that i had a lot of FTs but was struggling to convert. Overall since the switch i feel like i've ran pretty badly even though results don't reflect that, as i'll usually end up having 1 or 2 decent cashes on the night. But hopefully i can do much better going into next month.

My goals we're pretty split in terms of success, poker went quite poorly, and life stuff went very well. I couldn't actually remember what any of the goals i set were, which kind of takes away the point. It also explains why the life ones went so well, as these are already established habits that i had coming into the month, whilst the poker stuff was more pushing myself to do things i wasn't before (HRC stuff, HH swaps). But thats no excuse for the Volume/study numbers being below par, really unsure how my volume was so low, i'm trying to figure out if i missed many grind days, and i must have if its below 400.
I'll draw up my goals for August at some point tomorrow, but realistically i need to find a way to keep focused on them, since its pointless to write up goals to then just forget about them.

I guess i'll break up the rest of this blog post into poker thoughts that i've had and then life thoughts (but still usually relating to poker Just less in game specific).

Poker
Testing new strategies
When i first started playing full time, i used to try out a bunch of random things to see how well they worked or not. But i haven't done that as much in recent years, as especially since i was backed, i could just get feedback on what i need to improve, and focus on those areas specifically, or if i was told a good strat or something in a session and i liked it, then i could just apply that to my game (which is kind of testing but whatever). But now i am not getting regular coaching, i have to take more initiative when it comes to improving my game, and i feel like i have a lot more freedom to test stuff out and not just 'max my EV' when i'm playing.
So the 2 strategies i'm looking into are

1. Block barrel turn, big bet barrel river aggressively. This will most commonly be done when its IPvsBB, and the situations where we often block turn are when equities are locked (e.g flush draw comes in on the turn). So on the turn we can keep villains range wide when they are pretty much dead with 1 pairs, then on river we can barrel really aggressively vs a weak range and expect a lot of folds. This should be pretty effective at lower stakes since people will always x/r strong hands on the turn when they face a small bet, so this makes their river range even weaker, and they might even end up overfolding. With this one you do have to be a little bit more selective, and the opportunities don't come up as much, but i think it will work well. I first heard about this small bet on turn with the intention of bluffing them off river when i was in bitb, it was something that Romeopro was a big fan of. He would bet turn small with the intention of 2x potting river so he'd essentially get value from villain before he folds, its so sick.
2. Donking for value. I made a post earlier in the year about how effective this could be when flush draws come in as OOP. Welp now i've decided that this would be useful in a lot more spots. Mainly on the basis that fish do not like folding, but simultaneously they don't go thin enough for value and often miss bets, so the EV of trapping and going for x/r is often decreased. So leading in many spots can be very effective, usually when you river (or turn) a flush or hit trips, just any spot where they are likely to check back really. Usually in low stakes its obvious that villain is weak and/or will check back river since they'll bet turn like 1/2 pot or less, so when we improve on river we should lead here too.

ICM spot

Had this interesting spot where i was wondering how wide i could jam.
Villain wasn't loose by any means, so i gave this opening range:

And we can jam as such:

I'm already surprised by how close AQo is. And this is considering that AKo is bordlerline for players behind if i jam.
So i adjusted to make all the calling ranges (SB,BB and LJ) AQs+, AKo, TT+, as in game i don't think these hands ever fold:

Its actually absurd how tight we have to be in this spot. But i guess flatting is the play. Even when i see these results theres a part of me that would still jam AQo. I thought it was an interesting spot worth sharing though.

Life
Atomic Habits
So i finished reading atomic habits a couple days ago, and i really enjoyed it. Throughout the book there were snippets that i wanted to post in here, but then i realised that i'd just end up posting half the book, so for that reason i would just recommend for people to read it. One thing that really stuck with me though was when it was speaking about motivation and people who become the best at things.
I'll quote my favourite part up there's actually a full excerpt from the book on his website here: https://jamesclear.com/stay-focused

"On this particular day in the gym, there was a coach visiting who had worked with thousands of athletes over his long career, including some nationally-ranked athletes and Olympians.
I introduced myself and we began talking about the process of improvement.
“What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?” I asked. “What do the really successful people do that most don’t?”
He mentioned the factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”
His answer surprised me because it’s a different way of thinking about work ethic. People talk about getting “amped up” to work on their goals. Whether it’s business or sports or art, you hear people say things like, “It all comes down to passion.” Or, “You have to really want it.” As a result, many of us get depressed when we lose focus or motivation because we think that successful people have some bottomless reserve of passion. But this coach was saying that really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.
According to him, it’s this ability to do the work when it’s not easy that separates the top performers from everyone else. That's the difference between professionals and amateurs."

I just really liked this quote, i found it weirdly motivating, like knowing that you don't need unlimited passion to succeed at something, you just need a keep working and pushing on even through the boring/hard times. This is also something i put great importance on at the start of the year, turn up every day, there's a reason i set a goal to not take random days off, because i know these days add up, and consistency is key. Get 1% better every day.

Also now i've finished the book i need to take an hour to actually start implementing what i've learned and applying it to my life, first off by creating a list of all the habits i do in my day including what comes before/after it. This will be easier for me as i have a pretty set routine from the moment i wake up to the moment i have breakfast which is usually about a 1.5/2h gap. Then from there i can decide what habits i want to change/add/remove, and utilise the book to help me try to achieve those changes.
One of the main challenges i have is my plan is i have breakfast and then study, but sometimes i can struggle to make this transition and i find it happens much easier if i do review with a friend, as it forces me to start. I find a similar issue is after i each lunch on my study day too. So i will work on this.

I'm deciding what book to read next, the one that takes my fancy is 'Think and grow rich - Napoleon Hill'. I'm just consulting with a friend who's read it, to get his opinion before purchasing it. I might have to make a book list or something soon, although there are a few potential books in the queue, and can reread some too.

I also started watching The Last Dance on netflix, never really been into basketball, but i do really like sport related history i guess is the best way to put it, like i thought moneyball was a really good movie too, and i've always been into more history related stuff when it comes to movies/series.

I think that's it for now really. I like doing less regular blog updates but having it be a lot more content heavy, to just include everything that was on my mind in more recent times, i think its more interesting than just me having X result, especially now i'm playing a much less exciting schedule.

Also just to round out if you're in the discord server (https://discord.gg/3xqJP4Z ;DDDDD) please feel free to post hands, i really like reviewing and going over hands, and i don't really want it to just be me posting hands and having others review, i want it to be a bit more 2 ways. I'll also try to be more active as well, as it hasn't had the same spark since i took my break, but then again i am just often busy studying in study groups and whatnot.

Anyways adios cba to reread so hopefully not too many spelling mistakes

There's a book called Science of getting rich. The woman who wrote the secret read that book and that inspired her to write another law of attraction book and then the movie also came out.

It's shorter than think and grow rich. Might be worth a read. I have the 3 in 1 book where it has think and grow rich, science of getting rich and the masterkey system.

IMO none of them guarantee riches like they do but may put you in the right direction when you put in the work. Even Napoleon hill went broke I believe.

Not a bad July!

Your volume seems quite low for full-time - getting in nearly 400 games at your stakes suggests you're missing a lot of MTTs available across sites. Are you playing on ipoker, Unibet and Sky now, or elsewhere as well?

You are missing so much value not playing on site like Ignition and ACR so many soft tourneys you could fit in your schedule. Ignition especially such a soft site for mtt's even the high stakes tourneys are lol bad.. Been following you on and off from the start of the thread good luck man hope you get that massive score you deserve...

I can defo take a look into that book. I just started think and grow rich, but i'm defo more of a sceptical person so i understand that it'll mainly be pointers and that i will still have to apply the concepts where it fits.
Thanks for the suggestion.

Its nice that things are starting to turn around! The volume did for sure concern me too, as usually i aim for 500 games per month so to be off by 20% is a bit of an issue. Not to sure where it was that i missed out though, i might have just taken too many 'days off', and these really build up if i'm grinding 20-25 MTTs per session. But with my current approach i'd much rather have 400 games per month of high quality games (in terms of my performance), than 800 per month with B or C game (which was happening at the start of this year).

I've definitely thought about playing on ACR as it does have a really nice schedule, and corona has been really good for the site, so the fact its still going on in the US is a bit of a bonus. Haven't looked into ignition too much to be totally honest. I did once have an idea to test out an ACR/GG based schedule for a couple weeks.
I think i'm just happy with my current schedule though, i can't play infinite tables, and i feel somewhat capped out on table count with what i play at the moment (11-12 at peak), so in this sense i'm always going to be missing out on good value games but i just don't have the space to play them.
I guess one other small issue is the US schedule runs very late for me considering i'm from the UK, and i'm not really interested in finishing my grinds at like 4-6am, and i've done similar before and its quite unpleasant.
But i've played a bit on ACR and i'm aware that it is very soft, i may find a couple games to include from it at some point in the future. Thanks for the kind words, with my current schedule i don't think there are any big scores on the horizon, just going to have to grind it out

Motivation
So i was speaking to a friend of mine the other day and he was talking about how he didn't feel motivated to do anything in life. And this is a guy who has struggled with things like anxiety and depression but he said he wasn't feeling these things currently, just that he didn't feel motivated to do anything, and that nothing brought him much joy. And to be honest i'm not really the most sensitive or empathetic person, and thats probably partially because i've never really struggled with mental health, besides being super stressed or sometimes feeling very anxious and certain social situations. So when people bring up their issues to me i don't tend to rub their back and tell them what the want to hear, i tend to just tell them exactly what i think even if they don't want to hear it, which can certainly be the wrong approach and i can for sure be saying the wrong things within that.
But talking about motivation got me thinking, and i straight up told him thats motivation is essentially BS and that he's never going to feel motivated. He's not going to randomly wake up one day and just feel motivated, that's not how it works. The most successful people in the world aren't just born motivated, they often have a very specific goal(s) that they are trying to attain, and often build a system designed to achieve that. When you are trying to achieve a goal, the steps to reach said goal are often things that we don't particularly want to do (e.g when losing weight, you have to do exercise which often isn't fun, and eat healthy food which doesn't taste as nice as the unhealthy food that we are used to eating). Doing things that are easy and comfortable to us do not lead to progress and success, and we often do not have motivation to do things that we don't want to do, and willpower will often not carry us enough to plow through it. You have to make small changes everyday and create a system that makes us do these things, until they become automatic (habits books are coming in useful here ).

So i'll give a personal example of a habit i picked up recently, and something i changed. So as you know i'm trying to become more healthy, one of the things i've started doing is running every day. I don't particularly enjoy running, and i feel like **** after because i'm knackered, but i have a goal which is to run 5 miles by the end of the year, and thus be able to play other sports (which i enjoy) without getting tired out quickly. So whilst running itself may seem like habit, it kind of isn't, i have a very set routine that i do every morning in which running is a part of that. As soon as i put on my running clothes i know that i'm going for a run. So the first thing i do when i get out of bed is put on my running clothes which i leave next to my bed, and this essentially forces me to go for my run, i then reward myself after the run by taking a cool shower, and this was easy for me to implement since taking a daily shower as soon as i woke up was basically a ritual for me, i felt dirty and unprepared for the day if i didn't do it.
I basically used a strategy called habit stacking to go for a run even though i didn't want to, with a reward at the end.
So my morning routine looks like this:

1. Wake up
2. Stay in bed for 30m-1h (need to work on this one)
3. Put on running clothes
4. Go to the toilet
5. Drink water
6. Go for a run
7. Post run stretch
8. Shower
9. Turn on PC
10. Meditate
11. Prepare breakfast
12. Eat breakfast

I do this pretty much every morning without failure (besides monday where i don't run). The whole routine finishes about 1.5-2h after i wake up (45m-1h if i dont roll around in bed), and its just so natural to do each one now because i know what comes next, and i don't really have to think about it. And now i can work and how to maximise individual things and make them easier going forward. And now i need to start working on after breakfast as thats usually when i do my warmup and study poker, but this isn't always as regimented.
Then 1 thing i changed was to do with my diet, earlier this week I had a friend look over my weekly food plan and he basically point out that my breakfast was really unhealthy (nutella sandwich, embarrassing to admit ) and that my run and breakfast essentially cancel eachother out, which isn't exactly making progress. So the day after i literally just switched to eating porridge with fruit (and honey pls forgive me), which is far healthier and will hopefully lead to me making progress. I don't really enjoy eating porridge that much but i understand the long term benefits.
Having quite a set schedule is nice because it easily allows me to make these 1% improvements in my life, whether thats making my runs longer, changing 1 meal in my diet plan to be healthier and hopefully next spending less time in bed when i wake up. And its really important not to change everything at once as it can easily become overwhelming, but to just make step by step progress.
And i guess to round out i remember my friend saying to me that if he did X thing that he enjoyed first, then maybe he would be motivated for Y thing that he didn't want to do. And this can actually be a strategy but only if X and Y are preplanned, which they weren't in this case (X was going out with friends, Y he didn't know yet). And this reminded me of an old mindset i had which was that i wanted to get really good at poker and reach high stakes before i focused on my health, as i felt that could wait, and i thought these guys who focused too much on their health/meditating would never make it in poker and they weren't focused enough on poker (go figure you can easily do both). Essentially what this means though is that i was indulging in my comforts and waiting for success and my life situation to improve before i was going to push myself out of my comfort zone. Which is a pretty bad approach when you realise that pushing yourself out of your comfort zone is usually how you make the most progress. And in a sense things have to get worse before they get better, you have to take out those comforts and easy things (and suffer in that sense), before you can make the real progress in what you want to achieve.

Poker - Turn barrelling
Alright enough of the real life stuff, time to get back to poker
So the other day someone posted a hand in the study group which i'll post here:

I'm not sure what flop sizing was.
150% turn barrel.
Then this ~75% river barrel.
My comments at the time were essentially that the 150% river barrel is completely pointless, and that i'd much prefer to use a 2/3 sizing as we're targetting 6x and some 8x, which i don't think 150% gives us many extra folds besides the rest of 8x and maybe some Jx. Then on the river i said that this call down from villain might not actually be terrible given that 83hh unblocks most bluffs, as well as block 88 which will be one of our main value hands, plus if we barrel off QTo here, we can also have T9o/T9s/97s then potentially even 75s/Q9s/Q9o/T7s and maybe even AT/AQ, which means that on river we could accidentally end up having a tonne of bluffs and not much value to back it. I should've also mentioned that once we got 150% on turn and villain calls, his range will be very strong so we should always be more cautious when firing off rivers.
Anyways his response was trying to tell me that in theory 150% turn is the play here. Now i've done my fair share of theory work and i even spent some time looking into turn barrels on different cards, and i'll give my general rule of thumb later, but overbetting here didn't align with what i had researched already so i strongly disagreed. So i decided to run it and take a look.
Tree set-up:

So my tree set up is pretty simple. I opted to just use a 110% sizing on turn and this is what i usually use, and i don't think the EV difference between 110 and 150 should be too big, and i think slightly more overbets will be used at 110 anyway compared to 150 so its more likely to prove me wrong if anything. Also i reduced river sizings to just 2 since i wanted to decrease the size of the tree.
OOP range + IP range are as such, they might not be perfect but i think its pretty close.
Flop

I think 2/3 is a pretty nautral sizing here given how deep we are aswell as the fact that this is quite a connected board, so 2/3 allows us to start putting gutshots and stuff in a pretty tough spot. However i don't know in game what sizing was used, so i can just show turn results for both sizings.
Turn
Vs 2/3 flop

Vs 1/3 flop

So when we cbet 2/3 we just go 2/3 on turn, and when we cbet 1/3 we can overbet turn. If we look at the response to overbetting turn you can see that even hands as weak as 76o are indifferent, and a lot of 8x is made indifferent so you could say that overbetting might be more effective. However if we look at the response to 2/3 aswell (after going 1/3 flop) you can see that hands as weak as 64 are calling, which i think very rarely happens in game, and a very high % of 8x is calling which i also don't think happens. So you can then argue that going 2/3 is also very effective aswell. Maybe the trend should just be to barrel these overcard turns aggressively! Especially given villain may not even float enough Kx hands on flop vs 1/3 so he has even less in his range.
Now focusing back on the 2/3 flop, then 2/3 turn response you can see we get more folds from pairs, but less folds from straight draws (which i guess is decent when we have QTo).
But when we look at the turn barrel hotness you can see that with higher cards we often just go 2/3, but with lower/more bricky cards we often overbet.

River

This is after 1/3 flop, overbet turn. I'll keep river brief but just want to illustrate that after overbetting turn we have to be really selective with our river bluffs given how condensed our range usually is, as well as how strong villains range is. Since when we overbet turn we fold out a lot of villains straight draws and weaker hands, so his range is usually very strong.

My personal conclusion maybe a bit bias but i still think overbetting turn here is very unnecessary and 2/3 achieves what we are trying to do much more effectively.

Rule of thumb for turn sizings
This applies mainly to IPvsBB spots
1/3: When equities are locked (flush draw comes in, 4 to a straight, double paired board, etc)
2/3: When overcard hits the board, mainly broadways (T-A) and can barrel at a high frequency.
Overbet: On a draw heavy/connected flop where the turn bricks. So villain doesn't pick up or complete any extra draws.

This rule may not be perfect, but i think its not a bad way to simplify.

Update
So i'm taking this week off, i'll likely not be very active in any of the poker related groups i'm in, and this is the reason why, i'll be back grinding on Sunday.
I've gone down to see my dad who lives in Cornwall, which is basically countryside and some beaches. I haven't seen him since January so i thought now might not be a bad time as lockdown stuff is getting eased. Also taking a preplanned break is never too bad, can just chill in nature for a bit and hopefully come back refreshed and reset. Maybe i'll try to take a couple photos even though my camera sucks.
So i live on a 6th floor in Bristol, and i live next to a huge grass area, and sometimes when the weather is really nice and i see large groups of people out and enjoying themselves, it can feel a bit shitty since i'm inside as i have to grind when i could just go out with my friends instead. I think it feels even worse when i go on to have a bad session as it can feel like a 'waste' of time. Maybe this is a weird thing to complain about given how fortunate i am to do what i do.

GTO apps
Recently GTO based apps like DTO and Pairrd have become a lot more popular, and honestly i'm not really sold by them. I will say i haven't actually used them so maybe i should first, but i'm aware of what they are and have seen them being used. As a fun little app just to play around i think its actually really good. As a studying tool and for learning however i think its pretty bad, firstly when trying to learn and understand theoretical concepts i think the best way to do through when using a program like PIO is to either look into the specific sims incredibly in depth to understand how our range is constructed and why the solver does what it chooses, then you can look at things like turn hotness and understand patterns of what we do on every turn, etc. Or you look at a speadsheet based off PIO scripts to see patterns in how we play our range (usually when it comes to betting frequencies, sizings, equities etc). So in a sense you're often looking for patterns where you can take entire concepts from rather than just how to play X hand on Y board. And maybe i misunderstand the apps and am totally wrong with this, but i feel that these apps don't really allow you to do any of these things. You're essentially just learning how to play Y hand on X board with Z stack size from V positions. Because of this you're never going to learn the intricacies of every single spot which is the reason we try to find patterns to learn from, which is much harder to do when you're playing 1 specific hand at a time. Secondly i think i've said before its really important that when learning theory or theoretical concepts that you can deviate and adjust appropriately for population. Otherwise this information can be more detrimental than helpful. And you have to realise that PIO is just maxing EV against a theoretically perfect solver, you need to maximise EV against a fish or a bad reg, so often just playing big hand big bet small hand small bet will be more effective than trying to be theoretically solid or 'balanced'.
So you can definitely use them for fun to test your theory knowledge, but if you want to learn or actually understand theory then you should definitely invest in PIO and work with people to come up with appropriate strategies for the stakes you play, as playing c+p from solver is generally not very good.
This is quite an outspoken opinion and like i said i don't have really any experience with these apps so i'm defo open to the idea of being wrong and they might have more effective ways to learn the concepts.

Also to add to the last post i was speaking to a cash game friend of mine and he mentioned that if we're 100+bbs deep, if we go for an overbet sizing on the turn we should go for 150%, then if we're around 60 or so we go for 110%, and whenever he gives me advice on deepstack poker or theoretical concepts i usually implement them since i respect his game and opinion and i know he's done the work to back it.