Online limit player (pre Black Friday) coming back to the game, transitioning to live nl.
Playing nl5 on Ignition as practice. Live 1/2 or 1/3 once a week, on average.
Live bankroll is non existent. One buy in. I add 50 bucks to it every paycheck.
I’m going to try process goals instead of results goals, but I will post results.
My current online and live goals are generally the same:
Play:
1. Stay focused
2. Practice assigning ranges
3. Look for opportunities for smart aggression
4. Identify which hands you think will fold before trying to bluff
Mental game:
1. Sleep, exercise, get my mind in the best shape for success.
2. Dont be too afraid of going busto.
3. Set aside time daily to not think about poker.
Off the live felt:
1. Come up with a source of income to fund my live roll.
2. Read poker strategy 1,2 times per week.
3. Participate in hand discussions 1,2 times per week.
4. Listen to strat podcasts/watch videos as much as possible.
5. At least two 2 hour online sessions per week.
Seems like a lot, but off the felt stuff is more about tweaking and being more intentional. Watching vlogs might have some merit, but breaking down hands is obviously time better spent.
1. Played four hours live
2. Played two hours online.
3. Listened to a strat podcast and a poker mindset podcast
4. Breakfast and getting ready for work, and housework gave me some time to not think about poker.
I decided to stop playing live due to my bankroll situation. I’m adding a more specific objective focusing on saving money.
1. $100 of my monthly weed money will be going to my roll.
2. The $80 I typically save from each pay is also going towards roll.
3. As much s I hate it, I’m going to work some overtime. That should be a couple hundred a month.
I played live on Wednesday and doubled up. Variance was kind, and I was catching cards and hitting flops so much that I had more thinking to do about bet sizing than ranges.
But, I really didn’t do the thinking part of the game too well. My mind races too much t the table, and I’m getting distracted easily.
When I do get back to the felt, I need to start work on ranging, bet sizes, etc., between betting rounds, not when the action gets to me. I’m so much more calm online. Hopefully it’s just a matter of getting comfortable playing live.
I have to make the mental aspect of the game a priority. When I learn to relax, the game will slow down, and I’ll have an edge in a lot more games.
I can’t completely relax until I break my emotional attachment to the money on the table.But, honestly, I AM fine without it. I’m always telling my self when Im down that it’s money I’d allocated to lose playing poker. I don’t rely on poker income for anything, other than br maintenance.
I have ways to recharge, although it would take months before I had a roll big enough before Id start playing again. If I just blew through the conservative br I hope to fund, a few months of practice in nl5 might be a good idea.
So, I’m absolutely fine without the money on the table. But I can’t make myself believe it. Maybe it’s not the money, it’s my ego keeping me from relaxing.
Reviewed some hands from Off the Felt. Will play some online tonight, hopefully two hours.
One thing I learned is I’m pretty lost post flop. Specifically, I’m having trouble understanding some concepts about hand ranging. I feel pretty comfortable putting players on a range preflop, and I’m getting better at remembering to consider how the flop hits in relation to my opponents’ and my range (probably about 90% of the time). Online, I can sometimes think about more specific hands my opponent may have, but it seems haphazard to me, and seems biased towards what I want to do anyway.
But that’s just a lack of experience. Practice will hopefully help with that.
I’m having trouble understanding having a bluff range when I have top pair, top kicker, and it’s checked to me. Am I thinking of the bluff hands my OPPONENT thinks I might have, thus making it more likely they’ll call with a worse hand? If I don’t have a lot of drawing/bluff hands in my range, do I downsize my bet?
And then I need a check range too? How do you assimilate it all during the game?
Anyway...downloaded a breathing app, going to fiddle around with it this week. DGAF uses it before sessions, so it’s good enough for me. Anything I can do to try to calm my nerves live needs to be done. Sure, I’m not a great player, but I can take money out of 1/2 now. I’m going to be EARNING once the game slows down.
Short but good online session. Table was pretty active, a ton of three betting pre-, some silliness post. Good practice for bobbing and weaving, picking spots.
I had pocket fours in the cutoff, ep raises, folds to me, I call. BB calls. Flop comes ten, king, seven rainbow. Checks through. Turn is a ten, it checks through again. Turn is a deuce, no flush draws. I was surprised it checked through twice, I anticipated the flop to hit both opponents pretty hard. I was about to check again, when the Obvious hit me: neither of these jabrons likely have a king or a ten. Usually, that would be enough for me to fire, but...
It was then that I did something I almost never do: I took a second and thought about which hands in their ranges might fold. After a second or two, it was clear bluffing was the right play.
Hit the right thc level last night and just thought about poker. Weed’s really helping me to pull apart some of these concepts and gain some understanding.
I didn’t play well online tonight. I really was too tired, I was trying to focus in but it just wasn’t there.
I was feeling pretty down about this 3.00 loss, so much that it scared me. I’ll never last if I can’t forget about variance like I forget about work at five every day. I should feel the same whether I’m down three or up three.
So that’s going to start now. I don’t get to gloat until I win a thousand in a session, and I don’t get to whine until I’m half way through the second child’s college fund.
I tried to study my hands on the mobile version of ignition. They’re not easy to read. Is there a way to import/export them? Can they be adjusted?
Went to my local weedery and picked up some...weed, obvs.
I’ve heard the terpene pinene helps with alertness and memory retention, so I picked a strain heavy in that chemical. It certainly got me high, but I didn’t notice anything special until I went to bed. Alert and clear headed definitely described my mental state as I was trying to go to sleep.
I’ll give it a try on an online session, see what it’s like. I think cannabis helps me think about the game and gain understanding, which I’ve said earlier, but I’m not convinced it’s helpful for me while playing. If it is helpful, I don’t want to be dependent on it. Unless I can vape at the casino.
I might need to set up an objective to stay off two plus two unless I’m studying. I quit social media at the beginning of the year and I forgot how much of a time suck it is.
It and all the non strat heavy podcasts are using up my poker interest, if that makes sense. I’ll hit the frustration/over saturation/sick of it stage sooner. Anyway 2+2 isn’t the way it was back in the 2000s, no point in hitting refresh more than once a day.
Buying PokerCruncher for the iPad today- no more excuses not to get serious with studying. I mean really, if I would just put a solid 2hrs in a week I’ll run over my local 1/2 game
Played live for about six hours last night, lost exactly $25. Had been up a smidge over a buy-in but I punted it on one hand after reverse triple leveling myself. Added on a bit and got myself back above water, mostly on a hero call that I’m not sure was a sound decision.
I ran like god early on, I think I had kings three times in the first hour or two, including my very first hand. The game played much slower, and I was able to keep the pot size in my head, think about ranges generally, and consider bet sizes. I had heart, I squeezed about three times- including with KQo in the small blind and got the CO to fold AK pre flop for the pot. I tried not to be too “fit or fold” on the flop and turn, and some of my second pairs paid off. TBH, I used a very standard, one might say cookie cutter, strategy but it’s one I need to have on my utility belt, so progress there. You know poker’s a tough game when you have to stand by a weak hand to be profitable. I got a bluff on the river through- I have vague memories of thinking the bluff jibed with the line I’d taken, can’t remember if I ID’d a hand I was targeting to fold. I even put the straddle on, DGAF.
My bet sizing is one of the big successes of the session, though. I didn’t blow people off hands with overzealous value bets nearly as much as last session, and I was able to push people out when I wanted too.
The other success was my mental state, at least in the first half of the night. I did some breathing in the parking lot, and I had to wait for a table to open up, and I think both helped. I was mentally calm, even though physically I was a jittery mess. I had heart and was thinking clearly.
That all changed after the two hour mark. I got something to eat ($10 cold ‘artisinal’ sandwich with Tyson grilled chicken strips and mozzarella. No food comps for poker players) came back and punted off the nights work. That took the heart out of me. Suddenly I was tired and back to playing by feel. Most disappointing is that I was thinking I needed to leave showing a profit, and knowing my A game was gone. I fell into the rec player mindset of not leaving because this was my poker night, blah blah. Look, it’s not the end of the world, but still. The point is to make money.
I could be unhappy that I could only focus for a couple hours, but I’m going to be happy that I focused that long instead. I need to exercise more, make sure my online practice sessions are at least two hours long, and get more sleep this week. I think that will help my stamina.
Just bought the PokerCruncher app. It’s going to take me days just to learn how to use the durn thing.
Bankroll management question: should I be buying study aids etc from my roll? Seems to be the right move if I’m looking at poker as a side job or private enterprise
Too tired to read or study. Listened to Carrot Poker’s pod- I get a lot out of how he explains concepts.
Did my breathing and had a quick hour session. Had my head on straight and was alert, but didn’t hav the energy to do more than general hand ranging. Still, no major hiccups. Had some difficulty with my own ranges- limped in with 98o in the cutoff when it was folded to me. Should’ve bet.
I’m not doing so hot on my studying goals. I’ve looked over some strat threads, I’ve done some (not much) reading, and listened to some strat heavy podcasts, but I’ve not really gotten serious.
And that’s okay. This is a hobby. If I force myself to do things I don’t want to do, I’ll walk away from poker. I’ve done it before with other hobbies.
HOWEVER...I will be on vacation for the next ten days and I’ll have a ton of down time. I’m planning to read, figure out how to use my solver app, and have a couple high quality online sessions.
I’m also going to play live tomorrow, which I’m more excited about than my vacation, tbh. Let’s hope the run good continues and I don’t go insane during the wrong thirty seconds and I dust off my stack like last week.
I’m going to be super active today so I’ll feel like I’ve earned some table time. Feeling guilty about playing is the same as throwing money into a river.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how personality flaws are so influential in poker. For a lot of people, their flaws are almost literally another adversary at the table. Tilt, addiction, fear, ego, degeneracy.
Not that people in other activities don’t have flaws, but they’re not so front and center like in poker. Most beach volleyball players aren’t exploiting their opponents’ feelings of inadequacy, like some stranger at MD Live might try to do to me today.
Poker may be uniques in that it’s likely the only card game that drives so many serious players to improve themselves holistically. Probably no surprise I was drawn back to this sick game after a year of trying to be healthier in all ways.
Anyhoo, I’m going to stick to ABC poker today and def lock in a win if I get ahead.
