If he had history of posting 6 month long graphs it might be appropriate.

Not a huge deal but does seem a bit insensitive.

Ben

Been reading your blog for a while and wanted to add my thoughts. To be successful at poker these days you really need to love it and be willing to dedicate a lot of time towards it.

For the past 6 months your love for poker seems to be getting less and less, and although you don't state it - your posts seem more and more veered to you being financially motivated to carry on playing this game rather than for your love of the game.

you have a lot going on in your life outside of poker which you are (correctly) prioritising ahead of it. My suggestion would be, take a few months off, do a lot of lab work and decide if this is something you can take very seriously and still love, even if it is only a hobby. If not best to find a new hobby.

I hope this helps

Rob

+1

do your thing, keep us updated as you wish

Tough run you're on, don't blame you for wanting to quit. Hope it picks up Soon.

I admire you for continuing the thread. Good luck

I can understand those feelings you have I mean just by reading the last few pages of this thread makes me wanna quit poker.
Having said that, if there is anyone who can bounce back from this awful run it's you so just hang on and prove to yourself what mastering mental game is all about.
GL

dw ill always run worse

Thank you my friend. We go again

Sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately i don't have enough reads to know!

this

lets dooooo it! gl

I hate how i have no control of this!

meh, i don't wanna raise all my Jx always and i don't defend many worse Jx pre therefore x/c this one seems good to me.

Thanks max. Nope, i don't have any other income. Poker has been my income for the past 7 years. Doing this masters for the next three years is going to be expensive too. I have plenty of money but it would be nice to have some to help set up a private practice once i graduate!

Thanks for the comments. I'm happy to post a graph tbh. Here's the graph from peak or last 85k hands. The other ~300k hands is breakeven from this point.



Hey rob. Thanks a lot for taking the time to post this. I'm not sure i agree that you need to love the game to win at it. I haven't 'loved' poker for quite a few years now. It's my job and it offers me a lot of freedom so i love what it provides, but not the game itself. I don't really have the time to go into the lab for three months although that would be a great way to vastly improve. Tbh if my love for poker is slipping away, im not sure how three months staring at sims will relight that fire

I've got plenty going on in my life and different hobbies but the reality is that poker is the only thing thats going to make me any real money until i can start practising as a therapist.

I'm kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place. I would rather not play poker if i'm losing but as soon as i start winning again (which is surely soon if i keep playing 200z and doing off table work) it'll have it's purpose to me again.

Cheers again!

will do!

Cheers boss, we trying

The bolded bit of this post has given me insane motivation mate! If we wanna offer mental game help to people at some point we gotta overcome the worst of it ourselves. You're spot on

haha, prove it, cus i don't believe!

---

Played a small session today but hadn't played since Thursday when i had my hissy fit. The point i realised that i needed to take a few days off was when i was at the gym and my mates said i looked lost and out of character. This is really out of the ordinary for me; to act noticeably different after playing poker, winning or losing. Definitely the right time to slow things down, take more time off and play when i'm feeling fresh, not because i think i have to play.

I spent the weekend with all the boys and our friend from amsterdam, dccnesquick. We all went out friday and saturday and just spent a lot of time together in bars/getting food/playing thrice etc. Feeling in real good spirits and recouped a lot.

Had a couple hands from today:

vs std reg.



Sick line by rotten reg lmao



vs reg:



Wanted to fold or shove so badly otr here, even though shoving would be terrible. Sizing screams of set:



Will probably play a bit tomorrow. Thanks a lot for all the support as always. Hugely helpful to me

glgl

bleh, that graph... didn't realise it was so bad.

That's a rough fkn downswing, but a lot of it is NL400, right?

But the reality is that if you are not crushing the stakes and are more of smaller winner (no idea actually what is considered crushing and what is considered smaller winner), if you play for many years, you will eventually get a downswing like this. Especially if your game starts to detoriorate after a smaller downswing that lowers your winrate, which is exactly what happened to me earlier this year when all quite literally came crashing down.


On another subject, I'm a big adversary of zoom and think you at your current situation should definitely stay away from it. Winrates are smaller which results in higher variance and at the moment you would absolutely want to avoid that. Instead I think you should focus more on bumhunting hard on eurosites, higher winrates -> less variance -> happy ben.

If you want, I can pm you few good sites.

that's ****ing brutal man. i hope things turn around for you. and in no way did i say to post a graph with any disrespect. im going through something similar myself atm.

how much is the downswing in bb? 1-2 is insanely soft this year compare to previous year from what I see, should turn around soon.

This. Not sure why are you playing a tougher field if your goal is just to make money. Your thoughts and actions seem contradictory.

Good luck.

200z confirmed v tough game

hahaha yeah I mean z200 is prob softer than midstakes reg tables guys, z500 isn't but z200 certainly is

Just because regs are bad, doesn't mean winrates will be high.

seeing that graph i have to say i was incorrect
sry mate, lets turn things around!!

well yeah fishes lose slower cuz they're tighter pre but the reg/fish ratio is pretty sick at 200, it's almost 2 fishes per table on avg

Rooting hard for you to turn this around, Ben!

I will chime in and say the decision to start playing 200zoom is likely partially because Ben felt he needed to change something up to end the rough stretch that's occurring. I feel like what doctor is saying makes a lot of sense and I would assume while 200zoom is a very good game, 200 reg tables will be an incredibly good game by comparison. From a volume/hourly perspective I can see merits to playing zoom but I think it's better to be sticking to regular tables unless you have time constraints.

Maybe once you get some good things going again making zoom more of your regular game would be good, when your sanity is fully intact and you can deal with the higher variance game better

yeah man

I see what you're both saying. Given the limited time i have to grind/having to put in an hour here and an hour there, i need something that i can guarantee my volume. As dg4 said i desperately needed a change of scene and zoom was a solid option. The guys who're coaching/sweating me also all play zoom so that's super helpful with tendencies etc. I'm sure i'll go back to reg tbls at some point, but for now this fits my schedule pretty well.

Yeah man, i know you meant no disrespect - i didn't take any! gl getting out of it

bout 55bi. thanks!

haha

told ya! tyty

cheers bosssss

---

Very sad day of poker. Totally crushed my first session and got absolutely obliterated in the second. Feeling positive nonetheless.



vs reg thing:



Wanted to fold river so bad. Probably should tbh:



Seeing clients tomorrow!

gl

why not c/shove w TT, plenty of bad rivers?

Cant xshove this board


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

im pretty sure you can if you click raise

Jesus that graph was brutal. Feel for you sir.

I think if you call down every time with KQs, JJ/TT, AJs, you're leaving money on the table when villain checks back AK and some missed draws on many rivers. Hero should definitely x-raise flop or turn with straights/sets/2pr at least some of the time.