thanks for the kind words guys!

Just finished floor hockey (who knows why they make it so late at night), but here I am trying to stay on my sleep routine while the adrenaline is still flowing. BTW guys would HIGHLY recommend giving this Joe Rogan pod a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig&t=12s

^ I found that episode very eye opening/informative. The episode features a sleep doctor who basically shifted my whole mindset on sleep itself. Your future health will thank you for listening to that episode

A Small Crypto Brag: So the other day I noticed I had like ~20$ sitting in this online crypto casino. I figured, welp, I cashed out of crypto in December, let's try and spin up another roll.

The evening began by taking the 20$ to a hand of blackjack. At first I was dealt 13 and the dealer had 10. I took a card which was the magical 8. Figured, maybe this is some rigged bs so I'd better not **** with it too hard and hit and ran with my now 40$.

My next path of degeneracy was to check the sports betting forums and see what some of the sharper guys were saying about the games last night. I did a little 2 game parlay with the Cavs/Raps game O215 and Pelicans +10.5. Shipped that.

I then proceeded to parlay the roll into another 2 game parlay. Red Sox/KC U10.5 w/ TOR/CLE U9. Shipped that.

Then we brought a good chunk of the roll to parlay TB lightning win w/ SJ sharks win, shipped that.

To finish off the night we dumped a bunch more on Utah Jazz +11, shipped that.

Not that I ever recommend -EV sports betting/gambling but meh I'm pretty happy with that spin up and I wanted to brag about it haha. Will likely cash out the roll tomorrow and maybe buy a few small coins or just keep it in BTC.

Anyways, let's have some real talk. I gotta say my week off poker has been awesome and the weather has been beautiful. Managed to do a bunch of poker study/some meditation/some coaching/while mixing in some life loving activities like hikes/coffee sessions. It will be difficult to resist flicking @ least the Thurs Thrill tomorrow but meh, gonna be grinding so hard the next few weeks I think I should enjoy the break and focus on being fresh for SCOOP.

Here's an extremely GTO quote that I saw tweeted by a poker player, but originally said by Neil Strauss: https://gyazo.com/fd641b4e5c939af6804186bb56f5ba40

I can't get over how great that quote is and it's definitely a realization that I've had as well in the past few years. It's somewhat of a false belief that some day your "perfect match" will just appear out of nowhere if you are doing nothing to work on yourself etc. Opposites do not typically attract (contrary to popular belief) and often getting a high quality dating partner involves being high quality yourself. If you want a girl who takes care of herself/eats healthy/values herself it's so important that you do the same.

I'm a firm believer that if people were searching for relationships from a position of abundance we would not have absurd divorce rates or sub-satisfactory relationships. It's so common (especially for guys) to settle for a relationship out of scarcity. They worry they won't find better partners and "settle" for a girl that is easy for them to obtain. This eventually steam rolls into a bunch of other problems and mutual disrespect/complacency.

Imagine if guys truly exercised a lot of options with dating partners and made sure they mastered themselves along the way? It's only a reality for a small percentage of the population. Anyways, hopefully that makes some sense lol.

Thanks for all the love guys I know the PGC has been a little random and I haven't put much effort in this year. Jus' know I'm out here grindin'!

Good read as always !

Agree on the live poker things, reading that already makes my blood boil. Just call the clock on them, call them out when they tank about bull**** and look at them with disgust and some will stop. Gl

Thanks!

haha its ironic you suggest calling the clock. i'm fairly ruthless on this especially when its guys who are serial tankers or take 15 seconds to fold 93o UTG.

you guys can let me know if I was out of line calling the clock on this hand:

fish (150bb) opens UTG, SB (150bb) 3 bets him, fish 4 bets, reg calls.
FLOP 425r, fish bets 50% pot, sb calls. TURN 4, check check. River 6. Fish is all in and reg tanks for several minutes. I want to add in that this hand took probably at least 5 minutes to get to the river, and the reg was tanking for maybe ~4-5 minutes on river.

The reg apologized while he was in the tank saying sorry he just needs to think it through. I gave him an extra ~1-2 minutes and then called the clock.

After folding halfway through his clock time he looks over at me and says "Is there a reason you called the clock?!?! I just want to know is there a reason? It's my main event and I have a tough spot and you called the clock."

I asked the table was I being out of line and everybody said no it was a fair call, and the reg accusing me also said I was NOT being out of line. I'm like dafuq you mad at then?

IDK the clock needs to be called WAY more especially vs. players who play very slowly for no apparent reason.

That very awkward moment when you're 1/3 of the way done 2018 and you made a blog dedicated to "leaving the game at the end of 2018" at the start of the year, and you feel you're no closer to leaving the game now than you were at the start of the year.

There's a few things that fester in my mind from time to time lately and I want to talk a little bit about them.

Back when I was a 20 year old kid in Uni I used to think "I'm just playing poker to fund my education". There was guys in their mid 20's in my stable whom I thought were sort of like "losers" because it seemed like they were a lot older than me, and my immature self figured guys who are 26 should be well established in their careers and have life together already and playing poker for a living is pretty degen at that age. I'd think things such as "wow, this guy has nothing to fall back on after poker, no uni education or job experience".

It's amazing how quickly time passes. It seems like in just a blink of an eye I've become that 26 year old guy that I secretly thought wasn't progressing in the way a 26 year old man should be, ya know, with all his **** together. I know I do have some mild job experience and a uni education but it's difficult to think of a life style other than poker. I'm not used to the feeling of commuting to work 5 days a week @ 7 am every morning, having a boss breathing down my neck to meet deadlines, or even a consistent weekly pay cheque. I've put so much time, effort, and thought into poker that it would feel so weird to just "up and quit". What would it feel like to sleep in on a Sunday morning and not feel some obligation to be 10 tabling Sunday Majors upon waking?

It's weird man. Poker started out as a hobby and later became an obsession, and later became a career, and has at many times felt like it's become a life.

I know that if I'm going to quit poker it will need to be a clean break. Just put the game down entirely and be done with it. I could never do it half-assed. The only thing that could really allow me to do this would be having something that replaces poker. I've thought a lot about what that could possibly be. Maybe starting a business? Maybe learning to trade stocks? Maybe starting a career?

I could probably start looking into those things but as always, poker has just been convenient and motivating. Bleh, my mind tells me that I need to quit poker this year and move onto other things but my heart wants me to stay here grinding like a hamster in a wheel. I've definitely been fortunate to achieve everything I could have ever dreamed of in poker. As soon as I find that thing to move into I will have 0 regrets about leaving poker...it's been an amazing run and I've learned/grown so much. The time is really just beginning to feel right: I've done everything I wanted to, my personal growth and development has somewhat plateaued as far as poker goes, the profession of poker is drying up a lot, and I just simply can't do this for the rest of my life.

****, I really wish I knew what I want to do the rest of my life. I know the type of person I want to be, the people I want to be surrounded by, where I want to live, the type of home I want, everything except what I want to dedicate the rest of my life to. Take it all one day at a time and enjoy the journey I guess?

Sometimes I get into a deep train of thought late at night. Hope there is someone that can relate/maybe give some ideas/thoughts etc

GN

Well, prob online poker wont be here forever + games are getting tougher, so i guess working now as much as u can to make enough $ that u could be able to do things outside of the poker world (like open a business, invest in real estate, stocks etc) its a must imo.

Again, great post, guess its an issue that us the poker player face all the time questioning what next...

Cheers.

Completely agree and that's sort of the philosophy I have atm. Only question we need to ask ourselves is at what point EV of putting our time into other things become > EV of poker. Obviously so many intangibles and not really solvable, but generally I think the difference between the EV of each is growing closer together.

Either way SCOOP starts tomorrow...time to not worry about any of the other BS for a few weeks and make the most of this opportunity!

Vamooo ! see u at the tables

Have a fun scoop! Hopefully a highly profitable one too

thanks boys glgl let's get it
---------------------------------------------

Sitting here drinking a nice cold Sleeman to cap off my "vacation". Feeling quite rejuvenated and ready to punish some souls during SCOOP. The hunger for poker is restored and I'm PUMPED to go the distance in some of these comps.

Although everyone gets all pumped up for SCOOP etc I think it's important in a way to just treat these like every day business and stay calm. These are just poker tournaments and this is what we do day in and day out all year. Just like any other tourney we need to stay focused and professional, and make good decisions using logic and deduction. It's obviously great to be excited to play glory filled events with nice structures and big prize pools but the game plan really shouldn't change: find favourable EV games, play them with your best ability, mitigate variance, enjoy the game...just like any other day.

Here's some goals for myself during the series:
-Shot taking is fine within reason and if EV is high
-Sell pieces accordingly
-Feel no obligation to grind on a day that I'm not playing just because its SCOOP
-Keep table counts within reason
-Take 1-2 days off per week
-Keep up with meal prep and work outs
-Give it my best effort
-Don't get demotivated/tilted if not building stacks early or running poor early in sesh
-Get 8 hours sleep no exceptions
-Keep calm, put that organic feelin' back in the game


I'll re-evaluate how I do on all that **** after the series guys. Hopefully you can take some value from those tips (or maybe you don't agree with some of them). Either way best of luck and enjoy!

"The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights."

-Muhammad Ali

We're 2 sessions into SCOOP boys and I feel I've got nothing left in the tank already. Just grinded all day and went for a post-session walk to detach from the session but was walking around the streets feeling like one of the walkers from the walking dead. It's pretty tough to keep my blood shot eyes open atm. Oh well, feels like I didn't really leave anything on the battle field and I'll live to fight another day...just the day after tomorrow

What went wrong today? Literally just about everything. Was chip leading satellite with 43 left and 40 seats, jammed A9o into about 4 people with only 1 person that could corrupt my stack (yeah this was prob a mistake, just figured regs who were guaranteed seats would be folding). I was shocked to see gusmaa snap off my jam and assumed he could only have AA if calling here when guaranteed the seat...he had KK and if there was any justice i would just spike an A and bubble him. Out of respect for him I'm just going to "assume" he wasn't paying attention because it was a satellite and just clicked call as soon as he saw KK. Bubbling the satellite set the precedent for the rest of the day, FT bubbled the marathon, close to bubbled the 1k ST etc etc. No matter what I did today it just didn't work and it was painful af. There's my whine.

Anyways, **** poker. Let's talk about something other than poker.

So during the winter my parents purchased a cottage up North. Decided for my day off yesterday I'd go up there and just take in some sun and enjoy the lake. Here is the setting I was working with:
https://gyazo.com/ea0064cfb6f5036fcfa16d491809feb2

Aside from enjoying the smell of the fresh pine and my first few breaths in the clean air, it really hit me how quiet things were there. The only audible sounds were chipmunks thrashing through the leaves and some tiny waves washing up on the shoreline.

You quickly realize/remember how fast the normal world moves and how much bs is going on in it. There's basically always noise: cars, music, tv, people, and phones. It seems like the world is moving a million miles a minute and it's tough to stay sane trying to keep up with it all.

After just turning my phone off for a few hours and raking some leaves followed by sitting by the water I couldn't help but realize how much better I felt. So many of the problems that were festering in my mind on the drive up just didn't really bother me for the rest of the day.

Over the past little while I've developed this philosophy that people are meant to do things that people are meant to do (for the most part). I'm no scientist but if people ate clean diets of foods that are natural, stayed active, and visited nature somewhat often their bodies would reset to their natural state and they would feel a million times better.

I wish I could say that staring at a computer screen for 12 hours whilst solving several small problems per minute was natural, not to mention doing it with the pressure of up to 6 figures in $. Let's not add in the processed foods, the sedentary behaviour, the drama in personal life with friends, the Raptors getting swept by the Cavs, the bills that are due, the gym routine, the phone buzzing off the hook from telemarketers, the guy grinding with me having his "sounds" turned on all day, and all of the other pressures that are involved with making a living out of card game.

The human body and mind is just simply not meant to do this and if you aren't careful it can really creep up on you. Work hard and everything but I'm just saying if you aren't feeling well just look at the bigger picture...are you doing most of the things a human is meant to do?

Anyways, this post is getting a little bit weird and preachy for my liking lol...gonna bail on it now. Jus' sayin life moves so fkn fast sometimes it's important to take a step back and relax/enjoy it


Taking tomorrow off and I'm gonna sleep until I feel rested and feel 0 guilt about it. Then gonna get a workout in, twiddle my thumbs to find something to do for the day, and then hit up floor hockey in the evening. I'll be back and hopefully recharged for Thursday. GL to the homeys who have the heart to grind this bs series every day haha. Ezzzz

Just stumbled upon this thread. Loved last years thread, so look forward to following!

What are we meant to do ? we used to hunt eat and sleep all day, time is changing and we developed with it but obv if it feels like bad influence we shld stop and think.

Any way, wish u the best !

Try some mediation on daily basis.

Parents cottage view looks terrific. Enjoy! GL with SCOOPaments

chilling a day in nature w/o phone/internet is very recharching indeed. i've just recently (in past 6 months or so) started to appreciate those moments and I'm going to try to put em in my 'regular' life schedule

Good to have some OG followers on board still

You are definitely right in a way. The world has advanced so quick and we really don't have much of a choice but to cope/adjust to it. Unfortunately, our world has advanced so much faster than we have and now being sleep deprived, phones blowing up, sitting in traffic for 3 hours a day, a big portion of our social interactions are digital etc has not only become the norm, but it's almost become necessary and encouraged. Not saying to be a hermit and go live in a cabin in the woods, but just saying to set things aside and take care of your most basic human needs once in a while haha.

What are some natural things we're losing touch of (imo)?
-We're social creatures and meant to have many interactions and have a close nit community/tribe. It's easy to become a hermit which deprives you of one of the biggest necessities for our happiness.
-Have a sleep/wake cycle/circadian rhythm. This gets tossed aside and many people sleep on avg. 5 hours a night and melatonin production gets ****ed because of looking at all the screens all the time late at night.
-Instead of hunting and gathering our food that is natural to the earth many people are piling processed carbohydrates/sugars/fats onto their plates and drinking sodas with the amount of sugar in one serving as our ancestors might have had in a month.

Sorry for going on a bit of a tangent there haha, it's just something that I have starting thinking will become an epidemic in coming years and it's still too early to see some of the long term side-effects. Thanks for the post!

Thanks d00d I appreciate dat


100%! I've started doing an "unplug" from electronics for an hour every day. Go outside and leave the phone behind etc etc. I'll do my best to start putting more pics in this thread as I do realize a massive wall of text can sometimes be ugly and hard to read. Hell, I wouldn't be able to read all this nonsense if I didn't write it

Feels pretty redundant to be posting routinely on the same few subjects all of the time: poker, fitness, nutrition, societal issues etc but in a way these things take up so much of my everyday life that I do need to talk about them a lot for reassurance and to gather my overall perspective, and hopefully gain some from the readers

So many times I question myself along this journey as to "am I making the right decisions?" Did I make the right choice to more or less cut ties with certain people? Is poker the best place for me in terms of mental and physical health? Am I happy?

My personal answers to those question varies quite a bit from day to day and often are very short-term results oriented. For example if I had a winning session in poker+ate healthy+worked out in the morning, I would answer yes to all of the above questions. Whereas, if I lost a heap of $, ate 3 meals of fast food, sat on my ass all day, I would likely answer no to all of the above.

This is sort of a weird way to tie this into poker strategy but I believe the "self-evaluation" dilemma is often very results oriented in poker as it is in life. Let me explain:

So this previous week or two has been extremely difficult for me in poker. It's the most important time of the year in online poker and not only have I been running ATROCIOUS, I need to be honest with myself that I've been underperforming. I've been finding myself at the bottom of my range in 95% of hands it seems, and have always been seeming to run into opponents when they are at the top of their range. Nothing going right would be an understatement. Every time I trap with kings the magical ace comes on the flop, whenever I bluff catch my opponent has the nuts, whenever I bluff my opponent is trapping, whenever I 3 bet light they have AA, whenever I 3 bet nuts they snap fold, always find myself bluff catching rivers on bad runouts for my range etc.

You know when you win a poker tournament and you feel like a god? You hear guys saying things like "I played perfectly" (btw if you ever hear someone saying those words you should stay FAR away from them in poker, I learned that one the hard way), or I played my A game.

The thing is, would you have played your A game if you were bottom range all tournament? It's easy when you are top range all the time and your decisions are as easy as calling down with 66 on 633r10,8,7, or 3 betting AA, or bluffing 2 streets with a gutshot and hitting it on the river and having the easy jam for value.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that it's so much tougher to play your A game when things aren't going well and you are running worse than Matt Affleck in that main event hand against Duhamel.

The thing that separates the good players from the elite players is often that ability to stay mentally strong and still make sound decisions among a bunch of negative stimuli.

After taking tomorrow to refocus myself I'm using this as a vow to myself to: stop worrying about the card distribution and just focus on making good decisions, stop losing focus on my grind when running bad and not getting deeps, and to start playing the A game I know I'm capable of.

Anyways, I'm tired and tilted it's time for a nice long sleep I'll be bouncing back by Sunday LFG

Those sessions that u explained are the worst ! BUT as a pro you need to get better from each of one of them, try to find where u could play different where did u lost ur A game and why.

Once u spot those situations things will become much easier, Dont let it get into ur head (once its there... u know..), from what i know ur a great player and things will change, u just need to keep grinding

gl on Sunday

glgl on a big sunday, make positive choices and let the cards do whatever they want to do

I said hi to you on bounty $33 other day and instantly got owned from your A4o > AKs haha

thanks bud! i agree 100%

haha thanks man. what is your stars sn? I vaguely recall the hand but not really lol.

Yo guys, things were a little bit better yesterday. I cashed a tonne of stuff and had a lot of deep runs but still only a marginal winning day. I had to take a step back and re-evaluate my game from an outside perspective. Pretty sure I've just been running really bad and maybe made a couple big mistakes deep in tourneys but I'm feeling really good and confident I can close out this series nicely (in sklansky $ if not real $)


These series only come around once in a while and it's rare we get to play in these nice structures with a lot of $ up top w/ soft fields it's quite easy to get super excited and over-do things (lose sleep, play too many tables, play too many hands etc). For this week I'm gonna grind hard tonight, Tuesday, Thursday, and then Friday/Saturday I'm going up for some family vacation time at the cottage. I'll come back Sunday and close out this *****.

For now, it's about keeping calm and putting that organic feelin' back in the game and having faith in myself and the work I've put in up to this point. LEGO

Good Luck Man still loving this thread

I'm only a rec player but yeah can understand all you say. It's hard to deal with the variance of mtt poker. I would like to see you write a piece on extracting river value from hands (maybe you have already done one)/ It's definitely an area I struggle with, and prob the reason I have never progressed beyond $20 MTTs. GL for the rest of SCOOP.

Been away from the forums lately, due to having my birthday etc.

Happy to see you up and running and best of luck on the remaining scoopaments!!

Cheers amigo!

hey guys last few sessions were a lot better. had a bunch of deep runs and shipped a few bowl tourneys+ft'd big 22, and also ft bubbled the marathon twice lol. Today's bad beat was losing AA to 88. I may have screwed up the ft of big 22 pretty bad but w/e at no point have i played perfect+at no point will i play perfect. Im working hard and putting in the time and volume and I know in the long run that will be rewarded.

I decided to grind the night shift yesterday to lower variance and stress a little bit+work on some stuff in smaller games. Shipped some 11$ bowl and didn't sleep until super late. This morning was woken up by my friend banging on my door at 9 am saying its time to grind lol. So yeah, rolled out of bed and grinded all day, doesnt feel great now. Happy that tomorrow I got the day off for some personal time and healthy stuff because I need it

@scarecrow: happy birthday man hope everythings going well. GLGL!

@colin: I'm sometimes pretty bad at explaining stuff and this is obviously a very broad and complex topic. There are so many different facets of river value betting that it's tough to make a concise post about it.

I also think that river value betting and bluffing are topics intertwined with each other. For example you can't have a deep understanding of value betting strategy without having a similar understanding of bluff strategy. On the river you'll often need to understand how the villain perceives your range to dictate what hands you value bet/bluff with/sizings.

Maybe I'll talk about a few mistakes that I think are common:

1) A correct value betting strategy implies that you will value cut yourself once in a while. If you never find yourself getting called by a better hand you are very likely not value betting enough and I believe that is one of the biggest/most common mistakes.

2) When out of position a lot of guys tend to go into check call mode on the rivers because they fear getting bluff raised or fear getting called by a better hand. First of all it's important to know that the population in general is just stationing way too hard on rivers and not bluff raising NEARLY enough. We can exploit this by value betting thinner and more often.

3) Using sizings that are based on their hand strength that often make their hands very face up+they don't balance with bluffs, specifically with smaller sizings. So often you will see guys betting like 1/4 pot on rivers with say 2nd or 3rd pair type holdings/A high on dry boards and they are soo weighted towards thin value. This is obviously fine but imo it's important to understand that you should bluff with this sizing as well occasionally.

4) Not bluffing enough. This isn't value betting but it's directly tied in with it. Long story short if you don't have bluff ranges in spots your value range will never get paid and vice versa. It's important to understand what value bets/bluffs you will have and making sure that you are somewhat balanced.

So yeah, a lot of it really just comes down to hand reading and range awareness. In places you know where the villain knows you can have a tonne of bluffs it's important to use bigger sizings and go thinner for value. In places where you know the villain does not give you credit for bluffing enough it's important to use smaller sizings and work in more bluffs.

That being said there are a lot more facets such as: timing tells, villain stats/reads, dynamics, history, ICM, blockers, stack sizes etc etc...it's a complex topic hope that helps.

sup fam,

I'm gonna head to my cottage later today until tomorrow evening and get mentally prepared for one of the biggest Sundays of the year. I'll try to get some nice meditation and hiking in up there tomorrow. For now I'll leave you guys with a few hands of interest:

https://www.boomplayer.com/27817357_4D00C0883D
villain is fishy from one of the fish countries, maybe like azerbaijan or something. I think given the table and players behind this open is fine...maybe fold on a tougher table or can we always open this? We have to barrel turn right? Felt gross to give up river and also felt gross to bluff river when this is likely just a station (and idiots are always so horny to bluff catch when obvious flush draws/straight draws miss), although I will say I think barreling turn might be pretty bad if we aren't at least bluffing some rivers. This is a weird card because it is quite good for my value range and I likely can jam it safely: 77/99/TT/JJ/QQ/KK/AA/QJ/QTs/KQ/AQ. So yeah, I have a fair heap of hands I can jam river for value...what are the best bluff candidates? Maybe holding a J in my hand isn't ideal as it blocks some of his floats/draws but I really don't see blockers being overly relevant here. Maybe river is just such an obvious brick that we can just exploitatively be value heavy against a fish. What do you guys think?

https://www.boomplayer.com/27813145_995C636615
seems std?

https://www.boomplayer.com/27796654_961DB49588
favourable turn. These spots are interesting because I think guys are limping so much more in the SB and like to think that BB assumes they just rarely have Ax and are gonna go crazy on A high boards which is maybe true and maybe isnt.

Anyways, I'll leave those ones with you guys, would appreciate any thoughts you may or may not have.

Hopefully see you guys deep on Sunday with me