I'm not planning to update so often, but I'll keep the garfs coming as long as they don't look like trash and I have something positive to update. Night session went very nicely again. Won another 20 BBs. Always nice when the session where you win 20 BBs is the worse of the 2.

August Progress (Goal 150 hours): 14.5/150

First 2 days of August:

That looks more like 2000 BB's day
wp

Oops, meant buyins not BBs. Guess the brain is a bit fried after 11 hours of poker in a day.

What's your setup? Since you travel a bunch do you do the multi monitor or keep it simple on a laptop?

How many tables?

I alway start losing track and timing out on a laptop after 12 but 9 is more ideal and that's NL, i imagine there's more stuff to pay attention to with those two extra cards.

Pretty simple setup. Laptop, keypad, trackman marble

I 8-table or less and can see just enough of the action while tiling 8 that it doesn't bother me.

I've either been losing my ass or winning everything in sight that I forgot what it was like to have a couple fairly normal sessions. Ended up winning 3 buyins over 5 hours for a nice start to the day.

Well on pace to reach my volume goal and so far I've avoided any tilt creeping into my play. Hopefully it stays that way when the cards aren't falling as nicely.

August Progress (Goal 150 hours): 19.5/150

Graph for July/August. August started very near the low point and has been pretty amazing.

I also got off to a nice start in terms of volume and am well on my well to hitting the volume goal for August.

August Progress (Goal 150 hours): 22.5/150

I wanted to write out a quick post with some of my thoughts on the recent pokering. Losing 65 buyins is brutal, especially over such a short period of time. Towards the 2nd half of that downswing I started questioning everything. Am I even a winning player anymore? Are the games too tough now? Am I tilting so badly that I'm playing a D-game? Will I ever get out of this? Is the site rigged?

It's funny how downswings (and for that matter, upswings) can play tricks on our minds. Looking back at my thought patterns, it all seems so ridiculous. Variance is just a part of the game, without it poker would be a vastly different game as we know it and fair less profitable. And yet I still find myself slipping into the same old thought patterns when things aren't going well.

So going forward I'm going to do a bit more writing in personal a "variance journal". I think it will be very helpful to write out my thoughts immediately after a session. That why I can analyze my thought patterns in downswings, upswings, and long breakevens. I can pinpoint some of the flawed thinking and then, at a later moment when I'm calm and thinking more logically, I can write out a rebuttal.

For example, a week ago I might have written:

Thought pattern - Playing a fish HU and he sucked out 3 pots in a row. It just doesn't feel fair as this guy is clueless and I've put in so much work on my game and deserve to win. Towards the end I started playing foolishly aggro trying to get back at him.

Rebuttal - Thinking that you deserve to beat every fish is flawed and egotistical thinking. If that were possible, then poker wouldn't exist as a profitable. From time to time, some fish will get the best of you, it's part of the game. Of course over time you will win the majority of the battles, but by getting frustrated and playing a sub-optimal strategy, you will be winning less than you could be.

I feel like it's a great deal like meditation. When we start out sitting, a million thoughts spring to mind when we're simply trying to follow our breath and be in the moment. At first, we just need to recognize that useless thoughts are popping up "ok I'm thinking about that date I have later, back to my breath", "ok I'm thinking about the date again, back to my breath". After the 100th time doing this, we get better at avoiding these useless thoughts or at least, dwelling on them less.

I think it's the same thing with the poker mental game. After the 50th time telling myself "ok I'm getting annoyed by losing so much to this fish, back to playing this next hand the best I can" that I'll naturally get better at not letting it affect my play, especially if I do the work off the felt to re-enforce why these thought patterns are so faulty.

Anyway, to wrap things up, super happy that the downswing is seemingly over and that I'm back playing more confident poker and less annoyed when a string of beats comes along. I'm hoping that I can learn a bit from this so that the next time it comes along I won't question myself so severely and feel so stressed out.

I would like to get back into yoga and meditation, but it's so hard for me to manage several things at once. Like one month I can practice yoga and meditate daily, but then my poker hours go way down. Or I can put in a lot of hours playing poker, but then find it difficult to maintain a daily yoga/meditation practice. I will try to take it one step at a time, but this week, in addition to putting in the hours playing online, I'd like to at least a bit of yoga/meditation every single day, to start building solid habits.

Weekly Poker (Goal: 35 hours): 0/35
Weekly Yoga (Goal: once daily): 0/7
Weekly Meditation (Goal: once daily): 0/7
August Poker (Goal: 150 hours): 22.5/150

We played a fair number of hands against each-other early in the year and then again in June. Your playing style changed a lot in that time and all my notes on you had to be changed. You were far more aggressive during our later sessions.

Nice thread and GL

Thanks for the feedback. I've been tweaking my game a bit in the past few months and looking for more spots where I can ramp up the aggression. I think I can still go a lot farther with it.

Thanks, GL!

Have you ever thought what if you used all of your energy that use for dating into poker, and if you did that, what would the results be?


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if I didn't have a dick I would be a millionaire. 100%

+1

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I think it depends a lot on how you approach it. In the past, I would obsessively check my texts and dating apps for new messages, even while playing poker and I would have 5-6 dates lined up a week. It was definitely a distraction and probably derailed my pokerin'.

Now I approach it in a more balanced manner. I check Tinder/Bumble only 2x a day and I eliminate all distractions when I play poker. I try to avoid mindless activity whether it be 2+2, Youtube, internet, girls, etc. If I do something I want to do it with intention and not just mindlessly waste a few hours.

I also don't date quite as much, just 1-2 new dates a week, if it's someone who seems like a really great prospect, and there 1-2 nights a week I'll see a FWB. I've found it's a fun way to add a bit of spice to life and don't necessarily see it is an impediment to improving in poker.

You could say that almost any activity we do for pure pleasure (girls, drinking, watching TV, etc.) could be preventing us from more success in poker, but at the end of the day, we do need some way to have fun and unwind. The key is in moderation.

Maybe I'm off base, but this graph has to be one of the most absurd things ever, right?

I lost 65 buyins the last week in July. I was really broken mentally and figured I might make it back over a month or 2, possibly 3. It took 5 days.

65 buyin downswing over 7 days followed instantly by 70 buyin upswing over 5 days.

I'm new to this forum and haven't seen a ton of graphs, so maybe it's more common than I think, but to me it seems insane.

Needless to say I'm really happy and confident in my game. Also proud of myself for showing the mental fortitude to fight back when I was pretty broken at the bottom. Now I just wish they would turn off the variance superswitch, can't handle all these swongs.

Played 6.5 hours today and bagged another 20 buyins. Hoping to keep it going tomorrow.

August Poker (Goal: 150 hours): 29/150

I don't have this kind of swing in my sample yet, looks fun! Is it all 6-max? And which site you play if you don't mind saying?

I've often heard rumors of the legendary swings that can happen in PLO

When did you decide to transition? How did you go about it? How long and at what stakes did you finally feel like PLO was for you?

That graph is insane! Never seen one like it.


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I only play 6-max, but I like to start tables so there is some 2-4 handed play in there and occasionally I'll play bots HU for quite awhile since there are a few exploits I can use in my arsenal.

I've been playing poker since 2004 (the year Raymer won, hence Fossilkid). I played NLHE mostly for about 5 years, then played massive amounts of double or nothing SNGs and in 2010 even earned Supernova Elite playing them. Then in 2011 I was dealt the double blow of the DoN format being discontinued followed soon after by Black Friday.

I hadn't played NLHE cash for awhile and felt my game probably wasn't very sharp anymore so I was ready for a change and took up PLO. Don't really remember too much about how I went about the change. Just a normal dose of training videos from the sites at that time. I think I read maybe one book b/c there wasn't much PLO material at that time. And lots and lots of experience.

Unfortunately I've been a bit complacent with my game. Once I reached .50/1 and 1/2 and could 6-8 table with a consistent profit, I kinda plateaud there. I think with more studying and maybe some coaching that I could be a consistent winner in 2/5 and 5/10. So one of my longer term goals is to work in a lot more study time and try and make the move sometime in late 2019/early 2020.

Fossil, nice thread /subbed.

Can you share any insight on detecting bots and even an exploit or two for a layman such as myself? Not sure that I would want to challenge them heads up, but just to help edify my poker knowledge base

Glad to see you started a poker thread. I was wondering what online poker pros who have been around a while still played when you were mentioning it in the Online Dating thread.

Very cool to see this type of CBT stuff. I first learned about it pre Black Friday through Tommy Angelo's material.

For anyone interested, the book Feeling Good has some good chapters on harmful thought patterns we have like Mind Reading, All or Nothing Thinking, and Catastrophizing. Solicited Advice podcast with 2+2er DGAF talks about this stuff a lot when they do their "bro therapy" segment each episode.

The bots usually have very similar stats, and play a style that almost no human replicates, so that's the first clue. They mostly play 3-4 tables, play around 7-8 hours almost every day. Usually from all those clues I'm able to figure out the bots with great certainty.

If I am pretty sure, but not quite 100%, then I will try some unorthodox plays on the river that I know the bots won't be able to handle well. Once I know who the bots are, there are some pretty big exploits. They have very, very predictable patterns of aggression, so it's easy to use these against them. On the river, I love being out of position b/c the bots are set up so that I can play almost perfectly against them.

I don't want to give away too much info, but bots are quite prevalent so being able to detect them, then studying them intensely and figuring out how to neutralize them is a pretty big part of online poker these days. Unfortunately they still slaughter the non-regs (and even some regs), but they seem to be about breakeven as a group when I'm at the table.

I've found that it's very helpful for me to put my thoughts out in writing, as close to the end of a session as possible so they're fresh in mind. Then inject a bit more logic into my thought processes and then refer back to it several times for a refresher.

Thanks for the recs. Sounds like a good read, but I've got a million books queue'd up to read. The podcast sounds like something I could give a listen to.


As for poker, won another grand, but I was up like 6 buyins at PLO200 and down 6 at PLO50, so my graph showing buyins doesn't look as interesting. Will probably just post the $$$ graph at a later date. I probably only have about 1k hands lifetime at PLO500, but I've been running quite well at PLO 50-200 lately, so I might give it a shot this weekend if I keep running well. I'm battling for the top spots in a weekly rake race, and the extra points from PLO500 might be worth it.

August Poker (Goal: 150 hours): 34/150

Got a date tonight scheduled for 7PM, but the girl is already texting that she's being held up at work. My mind is in poker mode this week so I'm hoping that it doesn't waste too much of my time b/c I'd like to get back to the tables before 10PM.

I'm excited to meet this girl though. One of my better first date prospects I've had. We're very compatible in a lot of ways and she comes across as cheerful and smart in her messages. I'm also way into girls on the slender side and as an added bonus, she has a great sirsasana! I've found that even if the convo is flowing nicely on Tinder, you never really know until that first meeting.

Cool thread! Amazing graph, nice work getting out of it so quickly! Its motivating to see. Good luck with the girl, Tinder dates can be so awkward even if the online chatting is going well, but after getting the girl in bed, everything gets so more natural after.

Mexico is just Mexico city... It's an amazing city for adventures, businesses, friends, and much more. Actually, read here that it's legal to open a shop and become a bookie. I personally, would love to visit Mexico again, enjoy the nature and maybe play some poker at night. Why not having fun in Mexico, when it's all about entertainment.

What's your end game? Are you putting aside money for retirement? Healthcare? What will happen if the sites you play on shut down or the game gets too tough?

These are the questions I couldn't answer myself over a decade ago that ultimately led to me finding an early exit. It's something I often wonder about when I see others who followed the other path.

If this is too forward, I apologize for overstepping and please just ignore this comment.

Love the thread, thanks for doing this!

People mentioned a podcast with dgaf and a pgc thread from otb, can anyone help me with Links to those?