Time to grinddddddd

I was gonna title this blog 'grind of my life' or similar, but it sounded more like a euphemism for me having a terminal disease or something. This is basically just a self pep talk blog. Cliffs, after this I am fucking DONE with withdrawing money from pokersites.

 Two mediocre months in a row, September 'cos I definitely ran bad, October 'cos I was sick bored of 200nl Zoom and my play reflected that. Nevertheless, I got my bankroll to a respectful SSNL level, and now I have to withdraw virtually all of it to finish this house. $10k is coming out, leaving me with a roll most would consider small for 50nl! Luckily I feel super pumped and super on fire to annihilate 200nl Zoom in November. No more sulking that I'm not playing higher, no more feeling sorry for myself, no more giving the regs too little respect or too much. I'm just going to work hard, concentrate, make a ton of notes, play a ton of hands, and do well.

I've been playing without a HUD the past week or so. It's really helped me get back in the mindset of what's important in poker. Getting in the habit of relying on the HUD is a killer. In November I'm going to play sometimes with it, sometimes without it. I feel like I'm able to bring it back for now to get general reads on unknowns, but as soon as I feel I'm getting lazy and overusing it it's going to go out the window again.

Play goals (you've all heard these before):

• Take time on decisions
• Be crazy aggro IP, be a nit OOP (in general)
• Board texture/ psychology approach (what is he thinking, what does he expect us to do?)
• Always click button corresponding to instinct. Especially on river folds!
• Attack weak ranges/ fold to strong ranges.
• Reverse tilt when we lose.

3 minutes to midnight and I'm excited about playing for the first time in a while. Gogogogogogogogooooooo.

Session Review Blog

In my haste to say how bad everyone at 200nl is, I should probably have mentioned that I'm not winning at it. My hourly this month is -$1.74. I've never been good at playing lots of hands and doing well, and I think I need a few good shorter and thinking sessions to get me on the right track.

So I'm going to play a 45 minute session now and then review all the med+ sized pots.

Goals for the session:

• Attack weak ranges, not strong ones
• Time on close decisions
• Listen to and obey instinct
• Be aggro IP

_________________________________________________________________________________

Most contentious hand was this one. Established that turn should be a turbo fold, these check shoves virtually always are.........

$1/$2 No Limit Holdem • 6 Players • PokerStars

Generated by weaktight.com.

UTG	RobertFripp2	$204
UTG+1	Eleon0re	$213.74
CO	HV71_forever	$234.24
BTN	hero	$248.20
SB	ohh_yeah751	$200
BB	Lur3mus	$204.95

• Pre-Flop ($3, 6 players)Hero is BTN
• 

3 folds, hero raises to $4.50, ohh_yeah751 raises to $16, 1 fold, hero raises to $28, ohh_yeah751 calls $12

• Flop ($58, 2 players)
• 

ohh_yeah751 checks, hero bets $15, ohh_yeah751 calls $15

• Turn ($88, 2 players)
• 

ohh_yeah751 checks, hero bets $32, ohh_yeah751 goes all-in $157

• Final Pot: $152

Played well and happy though. I realise I've just been fighting back VS strong ranges way too much, leading to a spiral of despair and losing and loss of confidence and timidity eventually replaced by swinging too far the other way and bluffing more stacks in 16% UTG raises. Important to remember to quanitify our edge often as preflop VS postflop. If someone is too tight, then they allow us more stealing opportunities and hence our edge there is preflop. When someone is too wide, we flat or 3bet and abuse their weak range postflop. What we should not do is flat VS a wide range and then be too timid postflop, or 3bet bluff tight ranges with any regularity........ and if we do then don't go mental post.

Random Words Blog

I just feel like I have a lot of thoughts in my head at the moment and need somewhere to write them. I'm playing 200nl at the moment and it's boring me to death. So much so that I'm not playing anywhere near my A game...... this attitude has to change of course, but in the meantime there's little fun when people play so completely straightforwardly. And badly, of course, most notably in river spots where they have like zero bluffs but snap bet 3/4 of the pot anyway. Everyone also has absurd bet sizing and raise sizing tells, basically just completely unbalanced in every spot.

My gameplan has basically been to avoid variance preflop, play crazy in position, be a nit out of position, apply gazillions of pressure to capped and otherwise weak ranges by overbetting, being aware enough not to value bet when I have no bluffs and not to bluff when I have no value, and just trying to soul read hands as early in the hand as possible.

My house still needs another $10k of work doing to it. The builders are coming back in 13 days, and in those 13 days I need to play 60k hands and win at 2bb/100 to be able to finish the house and still have a (at a stretch) roll to play 200nl and grrrrind my way to higher stakes that I know I'm capable of playing and winning well at.

This equates to around 60 hours of play between today and the 29th October. I set a timer on my desktop to count down the time, and after a whole day's play it looks like this:

It's 10 minutes to midnight and I apparently have to play another 3 hours 46 minutes. I'm tired. 9 hours tomorrow then!

Clearing Mind Blog

I haven't played or done too well in the past few days. I took a few days off to play footy, watch footy, get drunk and eat Thai food, and coming back to poker it's clear that some leaks have crept in. For one thing, my VPIP and PFR have shot up and I don't really know why which can't be an amazing thing.

So for this blog I'm just gonna think out loud and work out what I need to concentrate on going forward.

Comparing the stats over the past 3 calendar months doesn't yield too much difference. I'm opening much wider on the button, but arguably this is better (jump from 39% to 51% which is still on the lowish side). If I were to pick up on one leak just purely looking at the stats it would be the amount of cold calling VS 3betting I'm doing from each position, particularly CO and MP but also BTN.

So the spots are probably those like, UTG+1 opens and I flat A5s in co. Or 87s and the like. This is probably in fact where my extra raw VPIP has come from, just too many loose calls in positions where I expect to get credit postflop (this is no doubt a remnant of playing 500nl) but where I'm just facing too many BTN and blinds squeezes along with confusing auto cbets in spots where I'm thinking 'I look strong here, he's not cbetting *nothing*' but in fact many probably are and just confusing me. Actually on that note it's crazy how little respect my flop raises IP have been getting. Just crazy flop 3bets and turn barrels with nothing......

So anyway- Leak #1 - I'm being too loose with my cold calls in MP and CO.

Leak 2 is quite a big one and needs addressing ASAP. It's one of execution, namely I'm not clicking the button that my mind is telling me to click! This is basically the first leak to creep in when I lose a bit of confidence........ quick example.

http://weaktight.com/5069084 - flop and turn are OK vs this guy, CRs all the time in spots where he doesn't rep a lot, and the turn call is me saying 'ok you think this turn is scurry'. River call though drove me wild cos it was obviously a super snap fold for reasons I had ages to formulate in my head. In a nutshell, we have spades a lot. The way villain views this spot is 'the times he doesnt have spades he is folding, the times he does have spades he is calling'. What this means is that villain is without doubt utterly unbalanced and will bluff small, and value bet big.

I actually had 30 seconds to think of this spot before he bet, which obv only added to my certainty that we should fold should the bet be big. Then it comes and I'm lacking a bit of confidence and I call because maybe he's tricking us. Dan, no1 is actually tricking you at 200nl, they're just doing *exactly* what you think they're going to do. (Sorry if speaking in the 3rd person makes me a wanker.)

I'll start listing these things as goals rather than leaks (more positive, Jared would probably say).

Goal # 1- Be tighter with cold calls in MP and CO.
Goal # 2 - Take your time, and click the right button.

That'll do for now. No doubt some more leaks will become apparent if I don't start winning. That sounds silly, but there's a part of me that doesn't really believe that much in variance. I kinda feel playing well = making money, and the variance associated with people's winrates over time is simply down to them not playing very well during those stretches, and the fact that people are simply unable to maintain a high winrate consistently. The corollary of what I'm saying is that I think those people with long term winrates of say 3bb probably have an A game expected bb/100 of more like 10 but are simply unable to sustain it because of things like loss of confidence/ leaks creeping in etc. So yeah, if I start playing well then I'll start winning probably. That could all be bollocks obviously, but at least one other good player shares this view with me.

bye !