Hi everyone!

To give some background, I used to play poker seriously back in 2013-2014 (mostly 200NL). I quit playing full time and went back to school to study psychology. I also spent a bunch of that time studying and practicing meditation. I still played some poker throughout the years, but it was mostly casual grinding

I recently decided that I would really enjoy being a mental game coach and use the knowledge I have gained over those years. Before taking on any students I wanted to give myself some time to refresh some concepts, so I started playing a little bit of poker last week.
I deposited 1K on Stars and started playing 25NL, with plans of moving up through the stakes, eventually getting to 200NL and high stakes mtts. I'll be posting about the mental game aspects that I’ll be working on and also sharing a lot of the stupid **** that I’m bound to do- like trying to overbet bluff at 25NL (see below )

I think this challenge will be a little bit different because I'll be almost exclusively working on my mental game. Even with all the information out there I think it's still an undervalued aspect in the game and a lot of people still neglect it. I want to show that you can move up drastically by primarily working on these concepts.


Road ahead:

• Define mental game concepts to be working on and how to work on them
• I’ll move up: to 50NL at 30 BI, to 100 NL at 45 BI and to 200 NL at 50 BI. I will move down in stakes when we punt off 5 BI below that entry level.
• As for mtts, I will require 100 BI’s for the stakes I’m playing, unless it’s 3-6 handed tourney where I think my edge is much larger and will only require 50 BIs.

Anyway, I’ll write some more details in my next post before this gets too long. In the meantime here is a quick how to guide on burning money at 25 NL:






And,

So, I’ve been playing for the past week and a bit, you can see results below. They are definitely underwhelming, but I feel like I’m starting to get into the rhythm of thinking about poker and getting a hang of the stakes. One thing I can be pretty sure of is that it’s probably better to underbluff in general at 25NL, people have been owning me by snap calling bottom of their range a lot. It also seems like it’s better to over fold as well...

I have also been working on getting a proper warm up routine going and proper cooldown, and already notice some good results in my focus and attention during the sessions.This is something I never used to do, but it makes such huge a difference in awareness. For anyone interested: I’ve been starting by writing what my mental game goals for the session, this is usually tailored to improving some of leak in my thinking like getting annoyed at bad turns, or getting annoyed when I fish does something "wrong" and sucks out. I then meditate for 5 minutes with those goals in mind and fire up a session. I have also experimented with Elliot Roes, pregame warm up, which is really good.

Wish you all the best man, glgl!

in gl man!

Thanks!

It’s been a little while since I have given an update, but I haven’t played too much in the last week. I only played ~6.5K hands. Luckily, I’ve been running pretty well and feel like I got a good read on the player pool at 25NL.Cash game results since last post are below. Add a couple of deep tourney runs totaling +550 and it brings the BR to ~$2200. Pretty excited to check off the first goal.



I’ve also been working a lot on my mental game. One thing that I’ve always been particularly weak at is noticing good plays by my opponents. It’s always been easier to call them a fish-donkey-punter that probably doesn’t even know how to play poker and then spite label them as fish. This has a lot of negative aspects though:

1. It makes it impossible to look at the situation objectively.
2. If we assume that we are just better and they are fish, then what is the point of actually analyzing a hand that you lost? There isn’t. We were just unlucky.
3. You can’t properly assess your skill level
4. Dismiss learning good lines form opponents
5. Can’t notice the ways they are likely exploiting you, etc

Given that, I’ve been going out of my way to find spots where opponents played hands well against me and have noticed some surprisingly good plays for 25NL. And it has actually helped a ton identifying some of my analytical weak points.

Some goals for this coming week:

• Play 12K hands
• Identify at least 2 other major leaks
• Gym 5x
• Finish Reading Positive Poker (solid mental game book)
• Post at least 2 updates

I played a decent amount this weekend and took some shots at 50NL. In typical poker fashion, running good at a new stake is not something that is possible. You first have to get slapped around and be put in your place

Not to say that it was all run bad, because it wasn’t. I also made the mistake of playing on little sleep and no prep for this session. Not the brightest move. However, I did realize a leak in my game: when I don’t prep properly (good sleep, pregame warm up, etc), I play longer than I should and autopilot, especially if I’m down on the session. This happened on both down swings that you see.

I need to remind myself that it is okay to just book a losing session and it’s unrealistic win every time, especially when you feel your game is off. There is value in learning to be aware and quitting in these states of mind. Obviously the ultimate goal is to not autopilot and maintain your A/B game when you feel the tilt coming, but while that is not possible an important skill is to know how to quit. Tommy Angelo talks a lot about this concept in his book and I remember watching a RIO video about it a while back. Anyway, despite the massive down swing in cash the BR is still stable because of decent cashes in tourneys. Still no wins but 5-20th place, so can’t complain.