Update, and fear again

I've had a clear moment of poker enlightenment today pertaining to my mental game. I woke up, played, and was quickly stuck my usual 4 buyins. I stopped for a break, and for the first time I became fully aware of what my thoughts had been telling me.

'You're no good, everyone knows what you're up, everybody is so solid you can't make money, you play so predictably, other regs laugh at you and how you play'.

That last one is really the big one for me personally........ I haven't ever really heard others discuss it though so maybe it's unique to me. I think it probably stems from when I first joined Leggo, hit a big downswing, and was catching lots of lols and abuse in chat at how I played.

For some reason I took it all to heart, and I guess never really shook it off. Ever since, despite some decent winning spells, I've never really recaptured the confidence that I once had- the kind of deep confidence where doing stuff other people considered 'bad' in hands is almost a badge of honour.

I think for a decent while now, without realising it, one of my main poker priorities has been to not look stupid. Especially to the better players. In doing this, I've allowed myself to get run over, not run big bluffs, play straightforwardly with the odd spaz, and ironically probably lost much more of the respect of that type of player. I've been called a huge nit more than a few times.......

Anyway, back to my old friend cognitive behaviour therapy. It's something I learned to beat anxiety in the past, and what this poker fear is, is clearly a form of anxiety. I wrote out some affirmations, twanged an elastic band on my wrist, read them out several times, and before long was filled with complete determination not to let fear, any fear, be a factor in hands ever again!

3 hours later I'm 10 buyins to the good, with almost every big hand being fucking mental. I basically went to war, went with my first instinct 100%, and tried to really think about each spot and play as creatively as possible. I remembered that there's tons of scope to be creative with sizing- people have their ranges set up to deal with normal sized bets, so small bets and river overbets really fucks with people. Noticing our opponents' sizing is huge too, whether they are repping polarised or depolarised in certain spots, etc.

But anyway, the important thing is that I felt really happy playing again. Poker has been a chore for so long that I'd forgotten why I first enjoyed it. Read my very old blog grogheadflow.blogspot.com and there's so many fun and creative hands in there......... because I was fearless. I think I can now get back to that consistently.

Some fun hands from today:

Hand 1 - just kinda lol really, tough to explain other than his flop check weakens his range a shit ton- and I'm then obviously facing a polarised range on the river.

Hand 2 - I didn't believe his flop size into two wide players, IE with a set he'd bet smaller, so flop CC is to basically improve or CR turn. On the turn size I felt more disbelief and knew I either beat QT AQ AT type hands or can make tons of stuff fold on the river. No fear! This is actually one of the guys I was talking about whereby I've always had a complex about looking silly VS him, while he rapes me day in day out ha.

Hand 2a - Same player- again noooooo fear :-) . Logic of the hand is basically that he doesn't expect me to bet small with trips on the turn, so sees a capped range and does the usual high stakes reg thing of going ballistic. I thought me might lead turn with 6x a lot though, and just sorta read the situation well.

Hand 3 - Av it.

Hand 4 - Wouldn't stab Kx on the turn because it has showdown value. Then tries to rep either it or two pair. I'm not having it.

Hand 5 - Wide fish. Again, not having it, fear is the only reason to fold given his range (weaker than Jx checks, etc).

Hand 6 - Felt there was room for creative sizing here, so much of his range is mid pairs given original raiser is a fish, so felt like betting small for a bluff would be cool, then have to call off VS the spaz factor.

Hand 7 - A sorta semi fish, and a moral victory :-). I should fold, I suppose, was sure he had QJ though!

Hand 8 - Similar line to the AQ hand earlier. I get 55% folds on the turn CREV says, which goes with my gut feeling at the time. Sets and two pair insta get in the flop, leaving AAs and AsKo, and very rare flopped flushes. Mostly AQ and JJ just folds.

Hand 9 - Just a fun hand. PF is cool too, such a battle of wills to see who is going to have the capped range. I actually 4bet KK EP-BB today very deep too VS ElusiveMark. He 5bet and I stuck in a 6bet, intending to fold to a jam. I think that way I lose the minimum VS AA and still keep in all the weaker hands. Plus I want more credible 4bet bluffs.

Finally, I've been getting abuse off this guy since forever, so because I was feeling playful decided he needed slowrolling. Devastation though, he got there the first run, leaving me sweating the 2nd one really hard, ha.

Year to date results, mental and technical update

Yo!

May as well start with a year to date graph that will show the context of the blog to come.

So yeah, overall certainly not the end of the world, but also not exactly setting the world on fire. I'm about 5 days behind SNE pace which is fine now I'm 6 tabling, hourly without VPPs is $54, and if I sustained the winrate all year I'd be on for a $165k year with SNE.

And yet! The breakeven stretch is coming close to 250k hands. I finished the back end of 2014 and started 2015 very strongly and felt, and do feel, that I'm capable of so much more.

For the most part during the break even stretch, I've played fairly consistently- I would judge both my mental and technical game during the period as being something like 6/10, with 10 being the very best that I am capable of with a little application. I guess what has happened is the affliction common to all SNE grinders; I've caught the virus of 'VPP chasing' which comes at the expense of perfection.

Re-phrased, I think I've thought that 6/10 is going to be 'ok'. And by ok, I mean better results than in that sample. I've been waiting and waiting for the uptick to return me to the mean of at least my long term 2bb/100 winrate, but at this point I don't think it's ever going to come, not playing this way.

So yeah, neither my mental nor technical game have been very bad, nor very good. Technically, I'm typically not making a ton of obvious mistakes, but not doing anything wonderful either. When I'm playing well then somewhat unorthodox calls, bluffs and folds happen fairly regularly. At the moment, I'm just sorta like 'flat 3bet, flop J85ss, call flop, turn Ks, fold turn with TT, next hand' which is obviously all fine, but there's no X factor there, no tricks or decent handreading or fucking with people, or feeling in any particular spot that 'yes, THIS is where my edge lies'.

There's loads of details in poker that get missed. Almost an infinite number, but I'm talking about all the low hanging fruit type ones that rarely get mentioned in videos and take a bit of effort to process ingame, thinks like betsizing VS PSR. Maybe high volume just means I can't go super duper spidey sensey in every hand, but I'm not buying that just yet. It's certainly the case that if I 1-tabled I'd expect to win at a very high winrate, so doing the same at 4 or 6 tables is just a case of finding a way of repeating that ability at high frequency.

I've always talked about brain 'bandwidth', which is basically the processing power of the mind. One tabling, tilt free, we'd have the most bandwidth ever, and our decisions would be the best we are capable of.

Six tabling, the bandwidth is spread much thinner, so it's much more important to be tilt free so your mind is not occupied with unrelated, non strategy related stuff. To that end, I can improve my tilt control- I simply need to be more aware of the types of tilt and get back into the habit of constantly injecting solid logic in order to nullify them. For example, playing a bad river call over and over in our head is our mind basically wasting energy trying to solve a problem that simply doesn't need solving right now, because the hand is over. Saying to yourself though 'some mistakes are fine, we'll review after the session' puts an end to the problem, and frees up that vital brain bandwidth re-focus on solving whatever poker hand is happening at the time.

There's another huge way for me to free up brain bandwidth though, and that is to have a lot more defaults on earlier streets, when the pot is small. What is happening at the moment is that I'm doing too much thinking in game, on all tables, across lots of different types of flops and turns. So many of these spots are very repetitive, and can definitely be simplified such that no brain power is really needed.

When brain power is truly needed is in those medium and big pots where it's likely we're going to be swapping 100bbs one way or another. Those spots are huge for our winrate, and doing consistently well in them is difficult when I'm in 3 other single raised pots deciding whether to cbet in a very common, BTN-BB spot.

Things like what to cbet BTN-BB, what size to take, whether to check or bet, are very very very common and I'm wasting a lot of brain power on them.

I'll run through some common spots now and get some defaults down.

BTN-BB - definitely pretty crazy that I spend so much time thinking about this spot in-game. The jist of the spot is that I minraise, so BB's range is extremely wide and weak. I waste thinking time on whether or not to cbet, whether to barrel, and what size to take. This stuff is all fairly easy to get down: I'll cbet depolarised, so all pairs, and mostly be betting the turn too. I'll chose one of 3 sizings, 50%, 66% and 75%, depending on the wetness of the board. t44r is 50%, t82ss is 66%, QJTss is 75%. In terms of bluffs, I'll cbet anything that can bet the turn most of the time. On dryer boards, this might mean QJ on t44r. The other boards, just kinda common sense stuff. If we check and it checks through, we take our weak equity hands and delay bet, and leave pure bottom of range for post oak rivers. Anthing else on the flop, check!

Flop OOP spots as the caller. We flat and face a cbet. We're OOP, do we cc or check raise? Well, as a default I'm just going to solve this by never check raising flops, and going for turn check raises instead. The spots to do so should be fairly obvious- we have equity and can't check call. If flop checks through, we'll be bombing turn with all equity stuff, bombing med- strong value too (bomb = 75%), and leading 2nd pairs to med value at a 66% size for protection. Protection bets are only made when there are some worse hands that can call, thus shoring up the value element of the bet enough to make it profitable.

Flop OOP spots as the cbettor. If we have equity to continue, then I think I'm just going to have definitive plays depending on board texture. Type 1 and type 2 boards (very dry, and medium dry) are getting cbet, while type 3+ boards are getting checked with everything. It sorta follows that if we're cbetting type 1 and type 2, that our range when we check is going to be very weak and therefore not delay stabbing very much at all. I expect our cbet % HU for the type 1 and type 2 boards though to be pretty high, so this is not a big factor. Again, cbetting range is top pairs+, and hands that can barrel often. On the type 3 boards when we check, we can go to town with CRs and delay bomb bombs given the uncapped nature of our range.


So the above accounts for the most common spots I'm talking about that currently eat up brain power. What this should do is free up creativity in other spots allowing me to think more in the medium and bigger sized pots, this should lead to running more bluffs, more decent call downs, that kind of thing.

I'm tired from writing this, but I think I'm going to have to start blogging some hands to keep up my technical sharpness. So, I'll have a rest then put up another blog with hands, or maybe just update this one.