Allright this is more of a rant/life story than a real psycho thread, but I didn't know where to put it, I guess it does boil down to psycho issues in the end.

I just don't really know how to get my poker "career" back on track, although I'm not doing that bad results wise at the moment.

I started poker about 10 years ago, a couple of years after the poker boom hit the US, I'm in Europe so it came a couple of years later.
Immediately I was pretty good at it and could easily crush all my mates in homegames and even the microstakes online went pretty well.

I started to read just a little about poker at the time, but didn't really concern myself with the technicalities or theory that much.
The style I had at the time was as TAG as it gets, not playing many hands and almost always betting, rarely if ever calling.
This went well enough to make me win at 100nl online cashgames and in the 5/5 live games at the local casinos, never really feeling uncomfortable about my game.

In all I made well over 100k in 2 years of playing, so i wasnt just a fluke or eternal run good.
This was over a large enough online sample (over 500k hands) that I made I think 6bb/100 and of course a lot of live hours at the 5/5 tables.
This doesn't sound like a lot of money, but over here that's over 5 years of working minimum wage.

I ended up quitting for a reason I can't really recall, but I think it stems in getting insecure about my game.
What I do know is that it sort of went together with getting more serious about studying poker and trying to improve my game.
It seems that the more I learned the more insecure I got about my game, but I think I quit before it affected my bottom line.
Constantly thinking about what I might be doing wrong was making me a nervous wreck and made lose the fun I used to have.

Lately I've been thinking about getting back into it and just playing live, because live has always been more fun to me and also the most profitable.

Playing online really isn't an option anymore, because I just don't see myself becoming good enough to beat it :P.

The live games have gotten a lot softer over the years, I guess all the "decent" players just ended up quitting leaving the degenerate gamblers.
This makes me kind of stuck in my post playing well and winning game because I think it's pretty difficult to play against very bad players.
When I used to play everyone was relatively decent which in turn made it very easy to play against.

Although I'm in the positive after about 20 hours I haven't felt good about my game at all.
A mate gave me the advice to practice at online play money games and sure enough, they're very much like the games at the local casino nowadays.

I'm getting totally destroyed in them though, I don't think you can attribute being down about 20 buyins over 3k hands (about 100 hours of live play) completely to variance and running bad :P.

I'm trying to get better by studying up and thinking about playing, but it seems to be counter productive and getting me further away from the relaxed mode of playing I was in when I first started out.

Thanks for listening to my rant, now, how do I unwreck myself :P?

This is quite a detailed thing to get into and I think the most valuable thing to do is ask yourself the following questions:

1) Do I have a clear 'formula' in mind for what it takes to do well at poker off the tables?

Can I go ahead and profile players or player types away from the the tables and come up with general game plans to exploit them?

2) Is there any value in this self-analysis of your poker career? Or another way of putting this is: what value is there at all in this comparative looking at how poker has gone for you?

3) Further: What value is there in carrying over yesterday's experience of winning and losing?

Can I see the urgent necessity to let go of thinking about the winning and losing of poker for my own psychological welfare?

Haha well at least thanks for answering, I have to say it wasn't really a very coherent story to begin with.

Before I started really reading about poker it all came pretty much natural.
I'd just sit down, looked at what guys sucked and what guys I'd better stay away from as much as possible.

Also it's not really that I'm suffering mentally from it in my real life, I just can't feel comfortable at the tables anymore :P.

There is nothing surprising about this at all. Poker is full of people who made big bucks "back in the day" when poker was soft. But the game has changed dramatically. The good ones adapted, studied, and reworked their games. The bad ones flamed out.

Poker now is a very different game from what it was 10 years ago. So I don't know why you would expect to play the same way you played back then and still win. Forget what works for you then, it's irrelevant. You have to learn the game now and develop an approach that works now.

Poker used to be relatively hard compared to now though, at least that's where I live.
During the poker boom there were a lot of people playing pretty sensible poker, at least as far as not playing any 2 nice looking cards goes.
Nowadays it's mostly old gambling guys left and maybe 3 sensible players at a table on average.

I know exactly what you're talking about . I also have played for over 10 years (tho I never stopped ) and I've experienced the same thing . I actually studied rly hard for a time and I had the worst 2 years of my poker career
For me , Ive realised its something to do with my natural subconscious wanting to do what it knows "works" in reality , contrasting with what I've "learned" and my conscious brain trying to do what I have learnt is "correct". I had this battle going on for a long time and exactly like you say it made me stressed ,over analytical and I didn't enjoy playing at all . It really was a dead end for me
So what I did was try and make poker fun again. I started doing what I wanted or maybe what I had an urge to do even if it felt like it might be nitty or spewy , rather than what I had read or seen or studied . Sometimes it was spew but often I had a surprising result and I realised I'd been missing out on some ways to make chips and outplay people like I used to . I started thinking for myself more at the tables , trying things out , seeing what worked , learning and unlearning by trial and error . There's a lot of ways to win at this game because your opponents a) play very far from optimal and b) are human and reactive . You don't have to try to play like some perfect gto robot (great if you can manage it but for me its a non starter)

So this year has been pretty decent so far , certainly much much better than the 2 years previous . And I haven't studied at all. I even stopped using my hud because I find it more enjoyable to play without . Maybe I will never be a top player doing things like Im doing but if I can make decent money and enjoy it at the same time then it's a win imo . If I really wanted to spend all day studying charts etc then I may as well be a stockbroker or something rather than a poker player
That's how I see it anyway . Relax , try to forget about what you've studied and focus on enjoying playing , start doing some stuff that maybe you've stopped yourself doing like betting a lot rather than calling like you mentioned . See where it takes you . Sure you might have to play differently than you used to in order to win but theres no reason why you can't discover those new strats at the poker tables whilst playing and using trial and error and a bit of independent thinking

Additionally having reread your post I think always worrying about not making errors can lead to a sort of paralysis . Forget about worrying about doing things wrong - start trying to do positive things - plays , folds , bluffs etc . It's more fun and sure you might do some dumb stuff but from that you most likely find some stuff that rly works and it's a positive frame of mind rather than the negative one

Yeah I think I may just have to let go of the "I have to do this right or else I'm a donk" mentality.
To "train" for my local live games I've been playing a lot of playmoney games. Although I know it sounds kind of silly, it's almost exactly how the game plays in my local casino.
Maybe except for people open shoving 100bb now and then, although I've seen tilting people do this live as well :P.
It went badly at first, but I decided to just kind of start over.
Instead of doing it right and really thinking about it, I'm just going by feel and it's going a lot better.
No huge sample size, but about 3k hands of losing big time and getting it in in stupid spots with my "right" play vs now winning over the next 3k hands after reverting to my "feel good" play.

I guess having a good mindset is better than good technical play, especially if your technical play may not actually be good :P.

Only thing you’ll need to worry about strat-wise in the future of this game is...software.

Have fun, rely on your instincts, and think bigger picture.

Big picture is key. Execution is key.

yeh the trouble with theory/technical play is it assumes the opponent has a balanced range but in reality most players use certain bets and sizings when they have a strong hand and they use different sizings and lines when they have a bluff and then they might have a weak looking bet for when they have a weak/medium hand or they just want to stop you bluffing or betting big.. like most players telegraph the strength of their hand with their line and sizings basically so you'd be stupid not to take advantage of that info
And then there's population tendencies . If they only ever 4bet KK+ then obv you just 5b shove AA and fold the rest unless they are giving you great odds to setmine or something .. extreme example but not that unrealistic in some games
Plus , your interpretation of good technical play probably isn't accurate anyway . Unless you've spent 1000s of hours studying every situation possible then most poker hands will still be somewhat of a mystery . So go with what your instincts tell you and be aware of what's happening in the hand and if your instinct is wrong this time then add that to your info . Maybe that play doesn't work so well anymore etc you can learn and adjust . But don't think you need to reinvent the wheel . I'm sure your game is good enough as a base if you just let go of the learned stuff which is hampering you

Remember when I said I didn't know why I quit poker?
It's all coming back to me now.
Losing a couple of K$ on stars from getting disconnected in real money games put me on life tilt (and a couple of smashed knuckles/doors).

Other than that my experiment is going pretty well, apart from the sick run of coolers/suckouts that have left me pretty much break even in the local casino games.
At least I got it in good or aa vs kk and set over set crap, so I'm feeling pretty good about the game myself.

Now why in gods name does stars disconnect me only from real money games?
I've been practicing/testing playmoney for the local casino games and haven't disconnected a single time, easily 10k hands, probably closer to 20.
Played about 100 hands (if that) 2nl and Bam, there goes half a buy in too a disconnect.

This rages me so much that I'm having a pretty hard time not going on poker hating tilt again.

Oh well, at least it didn't happen at 100 or 200nl this time...

Small update.

I guess getting back into poker is pretty difficult once you've lost your confidence.
Since starting I've logged about 100 live hours and althoug I'm not really down much (about 10bb) I feel pretty gutted about it.
I'm definitely not good enough for full stack poker anymore, so I've been shortstacking and altough I can identify the bad players and they pay me off I have 0 confidence about the better players.
As it stands now I'm pretty mch only playing TT+ and AQ+ and I kind of want to drop the aq and ak out of my range as well if there's any chance of getting oop against a better player.
Postflop I can't muster the courage anymore to try to bluff at missed aq/ak flops or when an overcard to tt+ appears.
I'd fold my bb only of it didn't look insane and even bad players might catch on to my insane rock play style.

So that's about that, I guess I'll go on the short stack rock path for a while to see if it makes money, but if I blow my alotted bankroll I think I'll have to close the book on poker forever :P.

winning 100k online is a great accomplishment. it would take 5,000 hours to replicate this playing live, so even though it's a huge buzzkill it's not like you're missing out on much.

I used to beat live for a decent about 10bb/hour winrate as well, but I just can't keep myself disciplined anymore.
Today i went through my 5 buying bankroll that I allowed myself to get into poker again.
Not from really playing like a donk, but more from just not being able to get up and leave after a double up like planned.
If I'd stuck to my plan I'd have been 5 buyins up now instead of down, so I guess that means I'm not fit to play poker for a living anymore.

I started because my brother used to play texas hold'em. As a younger one I would watch him play and really liked it, he always did good, it was strange. Or maybe he wouldn't tell me when he lost, but I will never know now, anyway. That got me started into poker and then blackjack and video poker. Poker and blackjack were hard for me to understand, I read a lot of articles and books. Mostly internet ones, because it was free, but later tried to invest in books. Articles were always about poker and I would try Wikipedia and other casino sites with articles + youtube videos. I remember how the combinations took me a long time to understand. Then I played with my brother and would always lose, tried the internet poker and poker with friends. After some time when I won against my brother, which was a big thing to me, I realized I could play in Casino. So I went for the first time and lost a sh.t ton of money. Couldn't stop playing even tho I was horrible. So players took advantage of that and stripped me out of my money. Went home and cried, told my brother. He was mad, but I described everything I did and what they did, he then explained to me the vocabulary in poker, which I have never used before, told me what I did wrong and what could have been better. After some time I finally went back to the casino. guess what? Lost again and never went back. I had to stop going to the casinos because the atmosphere made me anxious and I couldn't focus on playing, made huge mistakes which I had regretted later. Since then I only played poker with my brother and friends for fake money. Now all I play is blackjack through online casinos and video poker, which is great - my opinion. I have read articles about that and books also, it's not that easy, but not that hard. All I have to do is know when to stop, which is hard of course, but its the key to success.


I will insert some links if you want to check out the articles, If I still had the books, I would write them down, but I feel like I only own one because I had sold them all.

book - David Sklansky - The theory of poker - classics, but very good. You can find it probably in every library, so NO link here

Poker basic poker strategy
Black jack very good one
Texas Hold'em here's wiki site, because I can't find the game my brother used to play, sorry.
Videopoker strategies, because they are important
Moral of the story - the biggest success is to know when to stop playing. I learned the hard way, please learn from my mistakes, not yours.