In Vegas

Let's see if live poker is fun again (!!!) (???)

Yo, welcome to LV dude. We definitely have to catch up!

Tyty ya

Poker seems fun when you aren't losing repeatedly

The 1/1 PLO game at Flamingo is fun

I always feel like if I don't update for awhile, my next update should be FIRE, but then I never get around to making a really nice one, oh well whatever something is better than nothing so here goes:

*reads back at what I wrote last* wow! I didn't write anything about Vegas at all! Um let's see I focused on live poker when I was there to mix it up from online, which I had been focusing on maximizing $$$ table selecting. Some of the funnier hands from online played in April/May (sorry not in the mood for any NLHE strategy/interesting hands):

Hand 1: villain traps strong hand preflop, flops trips and traps flop/turn to jam river

Hand 2: ehhh, it works most of the time, villain got unlucky

Hand 3: villain peels flop light and hits the best possible turn card for his hand

Hand 4: pretty ambitious river shove on this texture

Hand 5: this was kinda a light AIPF call from the BTN

Hand 6: button clickers usually don't click THAT one

Hand 7: this hand is (relatively) tame but it's my biggest online pot. I don't usually dabble with 10/20 but couldn't resist jesus seating this guy

Anyway in Vegas I ran good in cash there, but lost lots back in MTTs. I had an extremely tilting experience where I minraise/called off with QQ for ~10bb then bubbled a $2k satellite to the main when I could have folded to the money, although it wasn't clear at the time. Oh the reason it was tilting is I should have just jammed (prob woulda gotten called by AK anyway), and also that every single hand took ~10 minutes from people tanking. I was even the main beneficiary being shortstacked after that hand and I was still annoyed at the pace. Busted main on Day 3.

I shared a room with Sol Reader who convinced me to grind online PLO, I mean, ehhh, OK. I feel like I just invested a ridiculous amount of study in online NLHE and was finally starting to reap the benefits so it kinda "doesn't make sense" to ditch that (oh by the way, no one does this but it'd probably make more sense for poker players to include study time in their hourly). But I still try my best to follow the ideals a younger me was impassioned by, to do what you love, do what you want to in the moment and don't worry about the $$. I'm still a believer but faith requires more effort these days

After Vegas I traveled back to LA to hang out with my Riot friends while I was still on the west coast, then visited and stayed with a friend in Denver for 3 weeks (with a really weird day of travel where I had a tire blowout at 90mph then stayed in a nearby hotel, got high and was pretty sure I was hallucinating but nope, there was a fk'ing CAT in my room), went on another painful $15k downswing that demoralized me and sent me back to recharge in Little Rock where I've been for the past few days. I suck at dealing with downswings, I feel like with how long I've been playing poker I should be better at shrugging them off, oh well. I also get super high emotions from poker I guess so it balances out, a big winning day often feels better than sex.

Single again now too, unfortunately, possibly related to previous sentence? Ah well.

But yeah recently been studying/grinding PLO hard. I kind of regret not starting off my career with online because damn I could have been so much better at poker, but oh well better late than never, and actually who knows if I even would have enjoyed it back then which again is more important than $$$ ("I LOVE PEOPLE. All kinds of table chat I find interesting."- 2012 me).

Right now I guess with a live background my biggest leaks I'm struggling with are tending towards being too loose in all situations, and also find that I'm still approaching spots with a very vacuum/exploitative mindset instead of developing a solid fundamental strategy despite my best efforts. But ehhh I mean I guess another big leak as a professional is that I'm afraid I'll just get bored and lose motivation to play after I finally get good. But right now I'm enjoying the grind/study.

Hand 8: Most of my volume is at 1/2 but as always not afraid to shoot when certain players show up.

Hand 9: Optimal river sizing to tilt villain for the rest of their session

Botanical gardens in Denver:

Gonna attempt to reboot the PG&C. Not like, making my sporadic updates/posts about what I'm doing less sporadic, but like an actual poker goals and challenges which I haven't really done since I first started this thread. I haven't had a ton of motivation recently and I realized something I loved about my poker journey was sharing it, so why not try that again? Historically I've not been good at sticking to goals so we'll see how this goes. I guess that makes sense as my life philosophy has always trended towards enjoying the journey rather than trying to reach the destination, but ehhh we'll give it another try.

So in July I started dabbling in online PLO but never did a serious grind. Thus right now the focus will be on grinding/improving my online PLO game.

So, let's set some goals:
1. Stream schedule. Stream every weekday from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM central time + review/discuss at least 1 hand from the day before in this thread. 10 hours a week doesn't sound like much but it's more suitable for the level of discipline I'm at now than trying to shoot for the moon with some 250-hours-this-month-type-deal. Besides I expect to do more anyway. OK so on the stream I will play either $.50/1 or $1/2 on Ignition (no exceptions!), may play higher on Global if the games are good.
2. While streaming, sit out every hour to do some push-ups, hydrate, etc.
3. During these breaks, identify whether I'm on A/B/C/D game. Don't be afraid to work out the C game muscle! The goal- and challenge- for D though is to quit. Gambling feels so good in those moments, if poker was sex a tilted gambling session is definitely the climax. Discipline has always been one of my biggest weaknesses.
4. Keep a notepad open and record any spots/hands I want to review.
5. Accountability. Share daily graph in this thread every day.

OK let's kick it off by starting the stream now: https://www.twitch.tv/AAesah

Hmm first day streamed 6 hours (maybe more later), was reasonably successful except the part where I lost 9 buyins. Ignition's hand histories become available 24 hours later so will be waiting on that for graph + hand history review.

Live on twitch again 4 table PLO200.

GL with your new goals dude!

Goodluck! subbed.

Streaming for next few hours

AHHHHHHHHHHH CALLED IT

I feel like I was trying to reboot my PG&C for the wrong reasons. The right reason should be "I <3 poker, let's go!". Instead, my reason was "I cannot make myself grind for the life of me, maybe if I tell a bunch of people that I'm gonna do it then it'll force me to stick to it because I'd be too prideful to quit". Well my pride is certainly wounded, and it's hilariously embarrassing/shameful to admit defeat in 2 days, but that's where I'm at. I hate to say it, I just don't have the heart to grind poker right now.

Is this results oriented? Yes. 100%. If I was winning then I am literally 100% sure I would be grinding hella hard right now, and the thought of "rebooting the PG&C for the wrong reasons" would have never crossed my mind. Instead I would be thinking, "I'm so glad I did this!". You might think this sounds pretty absurd and I completely agree- how the fk did I ever expect to succeed if I can't handle merely 2 days of losing (while the reason I was lacking motivation to begin with at the start of my attempted PG&C reboot was due to a large downswing so this is actually much more than just 2 days of losing, that's no excuse either). I guess my point is, even if I were crushing right now, this was an inevitability.

One thing I told viewers while I was streaming was that if money wasn't an issue, I would want to stream video games on twitch and probably not play poker at all. I expect it'll certainly be more challenging to make a livable wage but that is my current plan- it's something I've wanted to do for a very long time but have never made a serious effort. Perhaps I'll have the same motivation issues with that, but hey we'll see

I will be sharing graphs from this short-lived adventure in the past 2 days, and perhaps more of my thoughts about it once I've calmed down. I know I'm currently in a high emotional state, but I want to share it either way as IMO these feelings are pure.

So TLDR is I gave up, I'm very embarrassed but not unhappy with how things turned out. I feel like while I definitely didn't find what I was looking for with this project, perhaps I found what I needed. Sorry to let anyone who was excited for this down

That was unexpected. Gl with the video game streaming though! Will you play some poker here and there or are you pretty much over poker for the moment? Idk much about video games but fortnite obv has been a big boom to some twitch people, is that type of return possible for the best streamers of other games too?

So if you average 300 concurrent viewers which I hope to build up to after about a year you make like $10/hr. Definitely a massive step down from poker but my financial goals have always been more in the realm of "do what you love, don't be broke". I'm planning to start building a community with a smaller browser-based battle royale game that you can play at surviv.io before moving into other games.

~~~~~~

Regarding will I still play poker, AHHHHHHHH WTFWTFWTF I definitely feel pretty mentally unstable as just a few hours after I made that post I had the urge to grind poker. I just wanted to get back into the green, which of course always inevitably happens for me, but sometimes it just feels so distant in the midst of a downswing. I still can't believe how I have such irrational views and strong emotions- both good and bad- associated with this game, it's crazy. I feel like I should have made more progress in that department by now but wow, it's a struggle for me!

I think in the past I never felt guilty about not doing enough, but these days I oftentimes do- which is what prompted me to give myself an additional push with the attempted PG&C reboot. So I guess even this many years into my poker career, I'm still learning how to manage it properly I will say there have been several times this year where I was super motivated and spent 50+ hours a week playing/studying, so perhaps I just have to come to terms that my style isn't the same as others who work well with schedules/volume goals.

Ummm SO I don't know. I think, I'm glad I posted the above when I did because it certainly conveys a mental state I have frequently, but right now I feel like I might just play a bunch tomorrow. But at the same time I also feel like I need to make an honest effort attempting streaming (less than 1% make it- much worse odds than becoming a poker pro, but as you guys know I like to BELIEVE), otherwise I'll always have the "what if" in the back of my mind.

I always ask myself, why. Why is it that after thousands of hours can I not still not handle medium-sized downswings in poker. Of course my peers (poker veterans) struggle with downswings too, but for most of them, nowhere remotely close to the extent that I do.

So I've been also constantly asking myself, how. How do I remedy this situation. I thought that maybe trying to commit to a schedule + grinding heavy volume would help. But I am just not capable of doing it at this point in my life.

Hang in there man, too early to wave the white flag after a couple bad sessions. Take a break, destress and hop back on the horse when ready. No need to force volume if you really aren't feeling it, just play when you are in the right headspace.

Thank you for the words of encouragement I am confident I will be OK! To be honest, a mentality I've adopted over the past couple years is to savor the "bad" emotions in life. Simply view it as a different experience. Kind of in the sense of if you had to choose between [perfect weather 100% of the time] vs. [perfect weather 95%/rain 5%], you'd probably choose the latter, right? Keep things spicy. Especially for me, as I think- as far as I can perceive- they are overall much more rare for me than for others, and I feel blessed for it. So, I'm just enjoying my trainwreck. Even though this it's not the kind of entertainment that I thought I would be providing, it's kinda fun.

I'm shocked 300 viewers makes you $10/hr, seems like more then I thought. Isn't Twitch money all based on Subscriptions or do you make $$ in other areas as well?

Ad revenue (once you make partner) and donations as well.

Variance is a mind **** man. I think the ones who care least about the swings tend to be the ones who aren't responsible with money in general which is why there's plenty of people who are solid at poker but don't succeed long term as professionals. It is extremely deflating to be able to work hard for a month and have nothing or even a net negative result to show for all that hard work. I don't know what your current financial situation is but imo the only real way for the swings to not hurt as bad is to be super comfortable financially. Even with a large amount of money saved up though that feeling is never going to completely go away. Game conditions are always changing, rake is going up, rewards are going down, and when downswinging it can be easy to think "maybe I don't have what it takes to beat the game anymore". Playing plo prob not the best game choice when looking to not have to deal with insane variance as well, but it's understandable if you are too burnt out on nlhe at this point. I think burnout plays a big role in not wanting to deal with variance as well.

Stick in there OP!

How are the PLO100 games on ignition?

I'll agree with Tyman, but I do still struggle with it.
In spite of doing tons of work over many years working on "human adulthood" and emotional maturity, to a pretty high degree of success, the only thing I've worked on more than poker.

Poker variance just strikes a specific cord that can play hell with the mind, especially the mind that has spent countless hours attempting to perfect to game.

You've got to pull your self up and out of your current swing whether it be up or down and take the 10k ft. View.

Your graph doesnt go straight up, that's just not how it works. Your playing for the next upswing, you may even be one of the unlucky bastards who has to work thier way thru an outlier, something most peeps in this forum are in denial of, especially if you want to tempt fate and grind PLO lol.

Even tho we may understand the concept of sample size n variance, knowing and grasping it is a whole nother deal.

Interestingly, I always thought the more poker I played + the more money I had I would be less affected by variance, I don't feel like this is the case though. I was least affected when I was the poorest (at the start of my poker career), however I don't think there is a negative direct correlation- I'm sure there is some positive one actually. The primary cause for me is that they just both are correlated with age.

Apparently, completely unbeatable they seem good? OK it's a bit ironic for me to say this given that I'm getting wrecked by online poker but I can never understand anyone who thinks poker is too hard in 2018, at least in America.

Yeah I mean I've experienced quite a few downswings equal/larger to this in terms in money. I'm about at $15k, which I just pulled myself out of one a couple months ago. I'm always inevitably out after a bit. It just feels so bad lol, my brain is not equipped to handle it.

I speculate a lot about it, but it seems like a pretty 1st world problem TBH (what!? your graph doesn't go straight up!?) and I wonder if the fact that I've had probably a top 5 percentile life in terms of not experiencing hardships is a big factor here too.

The age thing makes sense. Money naturally becomes more important to us as we take on more responsibility for caring for ourselves and have increasing financial obligations to a certain extent. When I was in college a couple thousand was way more meaningful but I had very little expenses/responsibility, whereas now at 29 I have to be able to pay the mortgage/varying insurance plans/save to have kids/save for retirement/etc. Age may play a role in other factors as well.

Do you think part of the reason you were least bothered at the start of your career was because you didn't really actually understand the negative variance that is possible? Early on you might not have been as phased because when you took a beat you thought, "that's okay next time they'll get it in bad again and i'll hold, can't run bad for long". Whereas now having ridden the ups and downs for the last chunk of years you have a much better understanding of how frustrating the swings can be and therefore are constantly on some level fearing a downswing because you know eventually it will def happen again.

I think when I started I definitely underestimated how long you could run bad for, yeah. I think almost everyone does so if there's anyone out there reading this who hasn't experienced it yet, you've probably already been warned plenty of times but I'm throwing in an additional one. Update on PLO sessions soon.