I *literally* had a ~$200 bankroll at the start of this month lol. I took a picture of me 2 tabling 100nl to mark the occasion. There's worse things can happen in life of course, but still pretty much a 'career' lowpoint!
Luckily runbad didn't completely wipe me out, and I likely ran above expectation the rest of the month.
Part of me wants to get a bigger sample at 100 to see how sustainable the 5.12 winrate is, as I'm not overly certain I'd win a 2.6bb at 200nl. A bigger part of me though feels totally unchallenged at 100...... and as I'm finding out from Mental Game of Poker 2 this can cause predictable mental problems with regard to motivation and playing in 'the zone'.
So I'm moving back to 200nl from now. I originally planed to give myself say 5 BIs, but in practice this just lets my brain know I'm playing on a 5BI bankroll and detracts from my A game, so I'm basically going to play there for as long as I'm playing well and am rolled.
I had a few mental problems playing 100 today, so before I start playing I need to write some mental game stuff out to reinforce the good mental habits when faced with challenging situations.
So let's go through a couple of them......
We get the money in good, and get sucked out on - this one isn't usually a big problem for me, 'cos I tend to only care about the EV line anyway, but still some 'logic' to inject will help me here. When it happens VS fish, then 'it's a good thing variance like this happens, otherwise fish would just stop playing!'. When it's VS a reg, then 'just because you got it in as a 90% favourite doesn't mean you win every time. It only means you win 9/10 times. This is one of those 1/10 times, even if they're grouped together'. The thought process above is basically the same for coolers.
We make a technical mistake - Mistake tilt used to be a bad one for me, I'd stew and stew and stew and be all like 'I'll never win at 5bb now'. Some logic though; 'some mistakes are already built into a healthy winrate.... your winrate only takes a big drop if you let it lead to more mistakes'. 'Thinking about the mistake now will only make more mistakes more likely, mark the hand, forget about it now, and review after the session'. Acknowledging that mistakes are often a precursor to learning something also helps me. Also of course, it might not actually have been a mistake.
Most importantly I think is being aware of, and expecting, mistakes to happen before they do happen. Most tilt is caused by surprise or entitlement, so we're cruising along nicely and then out of nowhere comes THE MISTAKE. We expected this sometimes though, it's fine, winrate still healthy, move on....
We make a mental mistake - in a way this can be harder to deal with than a technical mistake, 'cos it feels as if mental stuff is much more within our control. The odd slip will happen though, (a common one is not trusting my instinct on the river in a big pot) and again it's about expecting the occasional slip and not descending into self loathing and hatred at myself for it. Acknowledge the mistake, write it in the mental diary, and consider stopping the session if it seems like a symptom of lost concentration or something.
Winrate - I've talked about this before, but a huge part of my tilt in the past came from not intuatively understanding a good winrate and what it's made up of. So if I made a mistake it was all 'winrates out the window', or got sucked out on 'cant win at fucking 4bb now can I'. LOGIC - if everything went swimmingly, we'd win at 40bb/100. A winrate of 5bb/100 contains some bad play, suckouts, mistakes, and even very small amounts of mental tilt.
Other stuff- part of my problem on occasion has been that I'm still a little bit $ results oritented. I wasn't at first, but after a while and kept winning I thought well whats the harm in indulging and acknowledging my $ results. The problem is that you can't have it both ways, as soon as you say to yourself 'I'm up $800 for the day' then your brain has 'banked' that money and becomes loss averse, resulting in sub optimal play. So yeah, I need to focus heavily on results, but only the results of how well I played a session and how stable I was able to keep my mental game.
Trusting Instinct- This can be bad advice when on any sort of tilt, as the instinct is heavily coloured by loss aversion, need to increase variance, false pattern recognition, etc. When in the zone though, instinct is >>>> any reasoned logic, especially the sort of logic that comes from whatever is supposedly a GTO calling spot.
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Technical stuff - I need to keep up cbetting, especially IP, this has started to drop again and it's taking a heavy dent out of my WWSF. Also important that I keep up a spazzy image, and to this end I need to err on the spewy side of 3bets/ 4bets/ flop raises, floats etc, whilst not ever getting ridiculously spewy out of line. Image will take care of the rest. Mentally though, it's important to remember that the intense style of bluffing loads is an A game style...... if I'm a bit tired but looking to get the hands in, reverting to just a super solid style is what I need to do.
Right, that's it. I wanted to talk about tournaments because I played a load of them and I'm down $400 or so, but I'll talk about that next time.
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