No Toadsy! You're splitting your resources!

Ah! You got me there. Holdem focus all the way to 100nl. Then reassess on the turn.

Time to put in a couple thousand hands of the two card game. Leggo.

Somehow played over 4k hands last night, only ended +$5 but it could be worse I guess. Was slightly disheartened last night but I think that was a combination of tired/stressed about the non-poker things I've been constantly putting off in favour of poker (which maybe I'm doing as I write thing). Had a couple of hands I think I maybe could have gotten away from.

(Imagine there are hands here, but for whatever reason none of the hand history converters appear to be working.)

So the first half of today is committed to trying to sort out everything I have to do that isn't poker so that I can play this evening without the nagging sense of dread that I'm putting off other important tasks. All things going well we should be able to put in another decent chunk of volume this evening. GLHF.

Non-poker to do list is looking complete. Should hopefully have a clear mind to put a good combination of study/play tonight, let's get after it.


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Oh also, starting up a Discord study group if anyone is interested. Should be a decent way to keep everyone motivated and share ideas/hands/whatever.

PM me if you want an invite (pref guys with PG&C threads and/or just active posters on 2+2, just so we can see you're motivated to improve/contribute and not just steal a bit of free info).

Benefits of caffeine - Giving you the juice to put in a profitable session.
Downsides of caffeine - Being unable to sleep at 2:44am.

Played a small session earlier in the night but tapped out due to just general hazy tiredness. Tried and failed to nap. Bailed on that and crushed a latte. Ended the night up 5 buy ins. Shout out to Nescafé Dolce Gusto (PM me to sort out sponsorship fees). Also shout out to the Dutch guy at the zoom tables who said he read the blog!

Listened to Joey Ingram talk with limitless during the session, really inspiring and motivating to hear from a guy who made it from the micros to the top in the post Black Friday landscape & get a little peek at how he went about doing it.

Going for the same approach tomorrow, make a to do list before I go to bed, hammer all that non-poker stuff early on, then jump into the poker stuff with a clear head. Also maybe drink the coffee before 10pm (GTO strats revealed ITT).


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If like me you are a caffine fiend try green tea instead of coffee. Less caffine and give me better calmness for poker.

This might be the answer, being up til 4 and then trying to wake up early to be productive is not a good combination.

PokerStars Zoom No-Limit Hold'em, $0.05 BB (6 handed) - Converted at http://www.handhistoryconverter.com/

Button ($3.93)
Hero (SB) ($6.12)
BB ($5.07)
UTG ($6.23)
MP ($15.92)
CO ($5)

Preflop: Hero is SB with A, 9
1 fold, MP raises to $0.12, CO calls $0.12, 1 fold, Hero calls $0.10, 1 fold

Flop: ($0.41) K, 8, 4 (3 players)
Hero checks, MP checks, CO bets $0.20, Hero calls $0.20, 1 fold

Turn: ($0.81) 6 (2 players)
Hero checks, CO bets $0.39, Hero raises to $1.45, CO calls $1.06

River: ($3.71) 6 (2 players)
Hero checks, CO checks

Total pot: $3.71 | Rake: $0.15


Think I should have bet this river unless I'm planning to fold to a shove (I'm not). When I check he gets to check behind everything we beat (Kx,worse flushes) & then shove all his full houses, whereas if we bet we still lose to the houses but get value from those hands he usually checks behind.

^^ Looks like river can be a bet/shove.

Dropped a few buyins this eve, mostly standard spots but not happy with my mindset, got a little tilted towards the end.

Think I'm just getting a little antsy to move up to 10nl, so getting more frustrated than usual when we get further away from it. Dumb thought process I know but it's what we're dealing with.

Tomorrow I'm scheduling in probably 2 or 3 hours of study. Half as a punishment for having a mindset lapse but also to gain a bit of confidence in my game by delving under the hood a little.

Not strictly poker related but I've been finding making a game plan at night of everything you need to get done has really helped me put off tasks less & and minimise time wasted staring at my phone. Down in London Tuesday night til Thursday night so going to struggle to smash volume this week but will be looking to really top up on study time while I'm away (discussing hands, possibly finishing the grinders manual if I'm feeling really motivated) and then hopefully make up for it next weekend.

Gonna fix the technical leaks.
Gonna fix the mental leaks.
Gonna smash these games.


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GL dude! Will be fun following this thread!

Losing way too much value checking nits flush and he is not going to be bluffing too often.

Cheers!

Yeah I think I realised this as soon as it happened, just checking I wasn't being results oriented. Need to keep working on putting villain on ranges street by streets off the table so it becomes more habitual to know how certain cards effect his range while I'm in a session.

Semi-serious thought time to do with sites and I'd really appreciate any feedback.

Probably ~80% of my play lifetime has been on stars, just out of comfort, consistency, etc. Before this latest rewards change to chest the first 10 steps of silver star (which I managed last month despite more than half of my volume being 2nl) were worth 3,500 stars coin ($35), so this month I'd have been reasonably confident about getting to step 15 which was worth 5,400. That alone was pretty solid enough reason for me to play solely on stars as the rewards valued the grind (even getting to the increasing 5th/10th/etc steps as well as higher ranks in general), now with this change I'm not sure the same incentive is there.

If I spent 75% of my time on stars this month would I achieve ~75% of what I would if I was 100% on stars? The whole once daily boost thing makes me think maybe, but I'm not sure?

How do you find the grinders manual? Thinking about buying it, but it's quite expensive (at least for my level).

I'm really getting value from it. I think it's really good at solidifying your fundamentals, which is something I wouldn't really know how to work on when studying otherwise. If you read it section by section, take a few notes on each and think about hwo you'd apply it to your own game it's great. I'm currently about half way through and I think the second half will look a some slightly more complex stuff but so far even going through the basics has helped.

If you have any sort of ereader/tablet/can put up with reading on your computer screen I'd definitely recommend getting a months trial of kindle unlimited on amazon, it's free on there as long as you make sure you cancel before the month ends!

Great, thanks!

Had a pretty rough couple of days, moved $80 of my roll over to partypoker, just got smashed all over the place on their fastforward tables, had a couple fun player spots but over and over again running into the nuts and never getting action when ahead. Maybe just sample size (1.7k hands) but did not enjoy my experience.

Will be away from the tables til Thursday evening now which is probably a blessing at this point. My brain needs a hard restart. The roll is still ~$220 across both sites, will make a decision whether I even want to continue the party poker experiment while I'm down south.

Gonna try consume as much study as possible the next few days & should be pretty active on here discussing hands. I'm down but not out boys.

Small update as I'm currently waiting on my old laptop to reset before I can go to bed.

Gone through all of the $1+ losing pots from today's **** show and only really managed to find two spots where I confident that I've played them badly, a river shove with a flush on a misread board (4K4Q4, I think that one play alone is going to take some forgetting) & a river raise with JT on a Q933Khhh board, way tooo much beating me but I'd put the guy down as a fish so thought he could hero with two pair (he had 84hh donk barrelled every street to go runner runner flush (.

My play in general wasn't amazing, I don't know whether it was just a bad day or my brain actively decided not to participate on partypoker because I feel like my usual thought processes during a hand just turned off & I was clicking buttons. Also my mental game crumbled towards the end after a 700 hand spell where I barely won a pot, with the 4K4Q4 hand happening at the end of those 700 hands before rage quitting. So come away in decent spirits knowing that I was likely to come away a loser today whether I played well or not.

Had a chat earlier about goal setting and realised I've not really explicitly laid out my plans (in poker or life) and doing that would probably give me a better framework & a finish line to strive towards. I've got a variety of public transport to traverse tomorrow which gives me plenty of time to really flesh out my plans for poker, life, the blog and how we're gonna go about smashing them.

Laptop has finished sounding like it's about to take off, perfect timing.

U got this bro!

Apologies if the formatting for this is crap, copied and pasted from my notes to save that precious precious data. Already met most of my goals for today (most of which were focused on getting on this train without forgetting something). The only one that's left was to read/take notes on the next 10% of the Grinders Manual, currently 5% in with another hour left on this train so should polish it off nicely. Time to set dem goals.

My energy for the next ~10 months is going to be focused on two ultimate goals:

- Putting myself in the best possible position to get the maximum value from travelling around Europe for 6 weeks.
- Creating/facilitating the plan for what comes after that 6 weeks.

So getting there I'm gonna split this up into 4 subsections: Poker, health, work. Gonna have a main set of goals for each & then update along the way with weekly/milestone goals to get us towards our destination.

Poker
We'll start with this as this still a poker blog, I hope. I'm hoping poker can contribute in some way to my travel roll, so the better I get the crazier **** I can get up to on the trip, so the poker goal is a biggie.

- Be a reg at 100nlz in 10 months time.

I feel pretty confident we could reach 50nl in this time (it would give us 3 months for each 5/10/25nl step) so I thought I'd aim a bit higher and worse case we land at 50nl.

Health
This one I think is sneaky important. The better shape I can be in the more self confidence, girls, dumb **** I can do. Goal setting for this is a weird one cos I'm not particularly overweight so a weight loss thing wouldn't be that dramatic, 'lose 10lbs in 10 months, click here to find out how'. So the goal here is TBC, might be a combination of a bit of weight loss goal, mixed with bit of a fitness/gym goal and maybe a body measurements thing? Advice welcome. But most of it gonna have to wait til I'm home on Thursday so I've got time to plan. Basically, get fit, ggez.

Work
Probably the least exciting one. Currently doing a few hours here & there tutoring maths but that's gonna be drying up at summer approaches until September. So need to find something to earn a few quid & hopefully not interfere too much with the poker & health goals.

- Find a job which should be able to fund the Europe trip even if the poker dream was to go tits up.
- Pick up/seek tutoring opportunities once the academic year starts up again.

Really going to focus on making sure the ways I spend my time in the next 10 months are contributing to the overall goals and if not why not? This probably should have been post one of this blog but the true blog experts know you've gotta drop the real plan deep into page 2. Have a whole journey home on Thursday to map out some of the short term goals that are gonna put us on our way to the long term ones.

We're back from the south, public transport has me drained but hopefully can shake that off before putting in some big numbers this evening. Didn't quite read as much of the Grinders Manual as I had planned but still managed about 12-13%.

Minor long term goals update, I didn't put anything on learning languages, but that is something I'm putting aside a little time for each day. Goals-wise I'm not trying to become fluent in anything in particular but it's just a sub-goal towards the "Putting myself in the best possible position to get the maximum value from travelling around Europe for 6 weeks". Currently trying to learn a bit of Danish so if we've got any Danish folks creeping ITT who want to share their wisdom with me then hit me up.

Gonna set some weekly and/or monthly goals for stuff at some point but at the minute I just need to go get some of that sweet sweet volume.

Hey, I lurk far too much but thought I'd say hello from the north of the UK. Got 10/15 hands on you at both 2nl/5nl. Have you down 1.35.

Gl and see you around 5nlz I guess.

Hey, thanks!

Yeah can confirm that winrate sounds about right