Update

I'm here to talk about a small downswing, and stuff to take out from it. The downswing was caused/ influenced by a few things, but least of all variance and most of all my attitude. In a word, complacency, which is absolutely scandalous really.

I think it all started when I was taking advice on how to improve my overall happiness........ essentially I tried to look at all things in a more positive light and take the good out of situations. I also had to stop beating myself up for misplayed sessions or whatever.

I think it's sound advice when applied to life, but it seems irreconcilable to me with striving for perfection in a discipline such as poker. Especially when being just short 'perfection' (meaning playing to the best of our ability) is increasingly the difference between winning a small amount and losing a ton. Reading my 2009 blogs brought home to me how much of a perfectionist I was at that time........ constant 4 figure winning sessions where I was going crazy at myself over a slightly misplayed hand.

These days, it's been more like 'oh lost 3 BIs at a table of the worst players on the internet, shouldn't have shoved that AJo PF I suppose, oh well Dan A for effort here's a nice pat on the back'. Surprise surprise, rinse repeat some other stupid time. Wonder why my winrate barely touches 1bb the last 200k hands.

Anyway, step 1 to improving means beating myself up a hell of a lot more than I have been doing. Or at least, have the implied threat of beating myself up in order to stop me being so ridiculous in the first place. In terms of overall happiness......... I need some separation basically, or maybe I'll just only be happy if doing well, which is fine by me.

Step 2 of my plan is play much less, and work much more. I just did an hour & half with Flippety from Leggo, looking at some stuff on CREV, and it's actually scary just how much better he thinks about poker than I do. (He also make me laugh, saying he always leaves tables when fish sit 'cos he finds it boring playing them- love that attitude).

My long term winrate over 900k hands is 1.9bb at 200nl Zoom, some 500 and some 100. Given decent sample graphs I've seen, I don't see any reason why I can't half the number of hands I play, but treble my winrate, through increased work and a better attitude. I can see soooooo much room for improvement that I'm also certain of it.

Some session reviews, and then a ton of CREV sims is the formula for improvement. As Flippety said, it's all about improving the maths/ combos/ game theory side to the level of unconscious competency. Just constantly doing the sims is what eventually feeds in your gametime brain and allows you to play better.

Step 3 of my plan is to delete Twitter (done), unsubscribe from the online Spectator magazine (not yet done) and save myself about 4 'leisure' reading hours in the day that I can spend instead reading mental game of poker, maths of poker, D2s books, Matt Janda's new book, or whatever.

Step 4 is to have some mental consistency. I often have these little relaunch episodes, and I crush for a while, but complacency is the worrrrrrrrrst thing for me. I'll analyse, crush, analyse, crush, then just play play play breakeven, lose 30BIs, come back here crying about it. I need to be massive on guarding against complacency and keeping the workrate up.

Step 5, already mentioned, but reading mental game of poker over and over and over. Just getting much better at it........ more and more top players I'm hearing from read it constantly..... even CTS who you would think is just like super level headed anyway has read it twice recently. I think my mindset in a ton of spots recently has been atrocious and it simply needs to improve.

The end.