Hello again 2p2!

First of all Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to everyone!

As 2015 is coming to a close it's time to evaluate my progress from the previous year and plan for the one upcoming.

About me: I am 23 entering my final semester of University in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. I have played poker semi-professionally for the past 3-4 years to pay for school/life/future. I will have my degree in Business in April/May and would eventually like to explore other avenues and possibly venture away from poker. That being said I still love the game and will do my best to crush this year!

Quick Summary of 2015:
Poker wise this was a pretty good year. (Chopping SM for 165k helped)

2015 Profit Result Graph on PS: (https://gyazo.com/cadbc30f264de898868556e20a185957)

Successful Goals:
-I game selected very well for the first ~1/4 of the year and the last ~1/4
-My focus and mindset was decent for the most part. (Still needs work).
-Emotional control was substantially better throughout the year as I
had some more experience with deep runs.
-Took necessary time off (possibly more than I should have.)
-Accumulated wealth/paid for uni during the year which was the main Poker related goal.
-Read one book per month
-Spend more time with friends/family
-Finish last year of school strong
-Attend all classes
-Win School Business Policy Competition

Failed Goals:
-Play 12 000 MTTs during the year. (Only played ~7k)
-Actively Study Poker Theory for 5 hours per week
-Game selection sucked for a few months after my milly bink
-Did not minimize distractions (in the slightest!)
-Other site grinding was minimal
-Whined about bad beats etc
-Complete P90x
-Barely did any runs
-Healthy Eating Plan
-80 average in uni

As you can probably infer from the above I mostly achieved everything I wanted in school, was mediocre with poker goals, failed @ healthy lifestyle goals.


Goals for a Healthier Lifestyle:
This will be my strongest focus for 2016. I've came to realize that a healthy lifestyle is completely GTO and it would be a huge mistake to not live one. Basically all areas of life are improved by making a few different choices from day to day. Easier said than done but it's gonna happen. It has to happen.

-Hired a personal trainer for 2016.
-Follow workout regiment to a tee.
-Log every single meal/snack in "My Fitness Pal"
-Track results weekly.
-Pre-made healthy meals before sessions.
-1 Cheat day/week within moderation
-100% honesty with myself

In order to hold myself accountable and responsible when I miss certain days and to give myself some extra motivation: For each day I skip a scheduled workout or cheat on more than 1 meal I will donate 20$ CAD to the charity of the most recent poster in the threads' choice. (Only exceptions are if I am too sick or if there is something super substantial or debilitating irl). Starting January 1st.

Poker Goals:

-100k Profit (Not a fan or profit goals but good to set guidelines)
-Actively study 4 hours per week. Not just HH reviews or watching RIO.
(Run 10 hands through ICMizer/week, research/filter database for exploitable tendencies in myself+villains, actively search to spot leaks, stay ahead of the curve, sharkscope as many players as possible when few tables, make 10 player notes per session/colour code when possible.
-Play 800 MTTs per month
-Take 2 days off per week
-Play 1 live cash/tourney session/week
-No bad beat complaints
-20 minutes of meditation before every session
-Grind on 3-4 other sites consistently
-Bring A game as much as possible and do not knowingly spew stacks
-Work on respecting all villains whether they be recs/regs/bad regs etc (huge)

Life Goals:
-Keep trying to improve as a person
-Communicate with my friends/family while I am at school at least once every ~2 weeks
-Remain/strive to be positive
-Buy a house/condo by the end of the year
-Travel to Australia w/ friends in May
-Vegas for World Series in June
-Complete uni degree
-Take good care of my car (reg. oil changes/washes etc.)


I will attempt to update this every Sunday or whenever I see fit. (Results good or bad.) Sorry for the novel!

Let's bring in 2016 with style and get started January 1st.

All the best to everyone! 2016 LFG!


Mike

gl buddy

Good luck Mike !

Subbed sweet bink man congrats! Hopefully bink one ITT!!! Look forward to learning from you.

gl mikey boy, i like the positive outlook on the new year , lets get em

subbed gl!

Gl Mike

good luck!
will be following.

in, gl

GL this year! Sub

yes

looks good gl

Gl walmart.

Cheers guys. We out here in 2016!

Brought in the new year with a good start last night. Had a blast up at a cottage with some of my closest friends. Essentially all drinking and partying is out of my system now and it is time to get down to business!

I'm officially kicking this off now. So charity bet will be live starting tomorrow. Scheduled workouts are Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

The book that I will read in the month of January is "Awaken The Giant Within" by Tony Robbins.

Checked out a cool webinar the other day themed around goal setting and achieving in 2016 geared towards poker players. I actually learned quite a bit from this and I think understanding ourselves and why we think the way we do is a major key in accomplishing the things we want in life.

I'm basically done my Christmas vacation in Guelph. Will watch Team Canada @ the World Juniors tomorrow morning and then drive back to Sherbrooke to get this started!

I don't really have much to write about at the moment but felt it was important to get this kicked off ASAP. I'll do my best to post a few hands from my sessions this week!


Happy New Year Everyone! Now let's Make 2016 Count!

Nice OP, gl man!

Alright first Sunday update of the year incoming,

As a whole it was a pretty withered day at the tables. Didn't really manage to get any stacks throughout the day. A few cashes etc. but nothing to write home about.

That being said I am very happy with how I maintained a high level of focus all the way through my session and feel I can reflect fairly positively on my performance. Two things that have made a world of difference for my focus/mindset recently:

1) ~15-20 minutes of poker related meditation before every session
2) Stopped listening to music that is overly aggressive/has lots of lyrics. Some of my personal favourites lately are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js_0RW2d0u4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk26FUe38y0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnfj6QCGLyA

I didn't have too many interesting spots today but I guess I will post a few hands:

http://www.boomplayer.com/poker-hand...800_6BCE13298D
This hand in the Big 82 my intention was to call turn and then call river if it bricked. I don't find people lead Kx there on the turn very often. I think my call on the river is bad-ish on the river given his sizing and that it doesn't make sense for him to be bluffing very often given that I am fairly protected when I call the turn. I am obviously
getting a better price than if he jammed but I think with that sizing he has significantly less bluffs than if he jammed. (If that makes sense?)

http://www.boomplayer.com/poker-hand...870_3BECCBB978
Sort of a funny hand. I had 150$ bounty on my head at this point. My standard would be to 3b/c pf here usually. I chose to flat for a few reasons. I sort of like my river jam here because I think when value range is relatively small/when draws miss etc. people tend to call a lot wider obviously. He is a decent reg as far as I know and actually snapped river.

These bounty tourneys are absurd and I need to do a lot more work in them etc as well as skipping some of the bigger buy in ones I think. Not too sure on how most regs are coping in these tournaments, I personally have been ****ting the bed in them. I am not sure if this is because of short term variance/fundamental mistakes in dealing with the structure/or just the structure being very tough to beat in the first place.

http://www.boomplayer.com/poker-hand...667_D77E062179
A very loose reg opened from EP here. Had him opening ~25% from there. Villain is a good reg who appeared to be oi/forcing all ins/very loose. Felt like this can justify a call off here although it is super thin and I sort of hate it. Assuming the villain shoving would be inducing/3 betting with his premium pairs I think makes it an ok call. 88 should probably snap fold, 10 10 snap call, 99 is close.

http://www.boomplayer.com/poker-hand...969_6591D48C66
Last hand villain is a loose reg. I am not sure if flatting is good in this spot vs. a tight range, maybe w/ bounty it is fine. Felt he was pretty strong given the line he took, but don't think I can ever fold here. Felt gross calling for w/e reason.

That's all for now. Best of luck this week!

Guys who might not be superstars but because of their hustle, because of the little things they do, these are the guys who can really mean the difference between winning and losing.

-Dwayne Wade

About 1st hand:
I believe that on the river it should be a fold, because i do not see any bluffs in his range based on how turn and river was played, if he had underpair, he would check, if he had 7x he would check, it's more possible that some more tricky player would take this line with Kx, 77, 33.

GLGL!!

Subbed

Let's get it Walmart!!!

I feel the opposite for bounty tournaments. I think more recreational players play these things and make them relatively softer. From my experience, people go apesh@#t over bounty and love calling off with hands they normally wouldn't in non-bounty structure tournaments.

I agree 100%. Given sizing on river I would say his bluffing frequency is fairly close to 0%. Although, it would possibly be cool to bluff with that sizing vs. a good player as they possibly would fold more to this sizing than a jam for instance.

100% agree with this as well. I definitely believe the average player pool in these tournaments is far softer than a regular freezeout and players don't have a great understanding of how to play these properly. That being said I need to do tonnes of work on this format as well Arguments could be presented as well for smaller variance because mosts tournaments players will receive some type of bounty meaning they will cash more.

In a negative light I will say that I think the vast majority of regs have their highest EV in Freezeout tournaments (by far) and likely their smallest variance. If more fish are leaving freezeouts for things such as Bounty Builders it means FOs are becoming more saturated with regs, who are also forced to play BBs where we have a much smaller ROI (imo). The rake is also substantially higher in progs which hurts our $/game drastically.

So yeah, I am somewhat on the fence about these games. My opinion will likely change after I study these some more and work out some of the maths

Best of luck fine sir, godspeed!

Quick update:

First, I missed my workout today so will be donating 20$ to charity on behalf of Jaylee18 (most recent poster in thread). Let me know where you would like it to go ^

I've played some small sessions past few days. Managed to build some nice stacks but could not pull the trigger on anything unfortunately. Been inquiring to a few people looking for a good coach for the year in exchange for a chunk of my profits. Had a few hits thus far but would like to see what type of options are out there. (If anyone has some suggestions lmk).

In a decently sized downswing atm (2nd largest of my career). I can not blame this all on run bad as game selection has been relatively poor and my head was not fully in the game the last few months. I notice when I start running bad or hit downswings sometimes it gets to my head without even realizing it. For example I have felt super solid recently when grinding and in a very good mental state. I felt like I was playing the same but just running bad. I looked over a bunch of hand histories from when I was on a heater in 2015 and noticed a completely different player and a much higher quality of play. Many things that I was doing extremely well when on a heater basically disappeared: making big folds in game, post flop aggression on textures where I have a big range advantage, general lack of aggression lately (not firing multiple barrels enough, pre flop game has been weak etc)

I've been doing tonnes of thinking about playing from the big blind and considering many different styles. It's tough to decide which style is the best and maths are very complex w/ several different factors that it is tough to calculate. For example most people are defending close to ATC to min raises. If you consider immediate odds it appears that this ravages. Although I notice when I defend too wide I am left in some very gross spots and variance is much higher. ie guy opens UTG and i have 67o in the BB... flop comes Q69r..it's very tough OOP in these spots because villains will either get me to showdown when they have the best hand/take me to value town/bluff me off on several runouts that favour them. (Yeah sorry for rambling.)

Anyways here is a few hands from recently:

http://www.boomplayer.com/poker-hand...161_B61263E8AB
I don't hate my river call here but I am not in love with it either. Recreational players just always seem to be super nutted in these spots. I didn't want to stack off on the flop given that he should be relatively strong here and I think I'm deep enough to turn this into a bluff if I miss on later streets. I guess once in a while he will show up with random air balls.

http://www.boomplayer.com/poker-hand...868_95E878FFBD
This hand happened final 18 of the N55... Sort of gross here, I had been opening the past few buttons and villain was relatively flat happy. I think flop and turn sizing are pretty good based on this. He froze for a few extra seconds on the turn which was leading me to believe he probably had 7x or some type of pocket pair. Honestly I did not account for much Kx to be in his range nor 4x. That being said I think this spot warrants a small bet on the river because he will probably have a difficult time calling off with a marginal holding. After running a bunch of numbers on this vs a reasonable range it's sort of bad to be value jamming river here. I will say I have seen people make some absurd hero calls on these types of runouts, perhaps not with the river heart tho.


Til next time