An Update

Where is the edge? This is not a rhetorical question, I know that my edge exists, but I'm at a strange period in my poker mindset and I want to write some stuff to straighten it out.

First of all, just an update on my 2016 results to date:

So going off recent evidence at least, I make money at poker. I just feel so......... empty at the moment. It's been a stressful 6 months or so, ever since going on a stag to Germany, overdosing on Red Bull, getting home, nearly getting sectioned and subsequently melting down poker-wise.

It meant that for living expenses, I had to borrow from my GF's business. This came at a bad time for the business, what with Christmas coming up and stock orders to pay for. The knock on effect was that the store was badly understocked going into Christmas, which meant much less sales than is usual, which meant less money, and so on and so on. All the while I'm playing poker trying to make up the shortfall, and also eat, and also move up stakes, all of which is a bad recipe for mental stability.

So yeah, we're here again, with tons of orders to pay for depending on my ability to conjure up at a heater worth $3-$4k at 100nl, an ability severely hampered by a weird combination of stress, low BR, and coming to fucking hate the game. To be honest, given these factors, I'm amazed I've done as well as I have.

I owe a mate (cheers Chris, pay you back soon bro!) $500 too, plus various court driving offences and various other shit dating from years ago. Shop orders for stock were looking at ~ £3.5k. Then mortgage, food, and actually breaking out of 100nl while stressed and undermotivated. FML.

Solution yesterday- borrowed £3.5k off my Mum n Dad, used to pay for all the shop orders. Woot, it's meant complete separation finally of my day to day pokering from the business, and finally a respite from all the stress. I mean, I still have to make money to live, but that's fine I've always done that, and I can live frugally if need be!

Strangely, and this has happened before, the disappearance of all the stress has left a feeling of emptiness and depression. Almost like my body is just like beat up, and just has to lay there a bit to recover. It's also made me realise that I have indeed 'paired' poker with stress, and so minus the stress I can actually see myself enjoying it again now.

I had a weird rebound yesterday though where I swear to god I just lost money on purpose, almost as if to say yersssss it's not the end of the world to spew off a buy-in sometimes. This act then made me quit and had me worried, but I think to be honest it just came from a combination of relief and being under-motivated.

Motivation is hard for me at 100nl, sorry if that comes across annoying or whatever. The game is just so mind numbingly dull. Actually, scrap that last sentence, it came from the very place of low motivation that I'm trying to cure. It certainly has APPEARED dull given the low quality of play, but I guess it was probably the life sentence of 100nl that was mainly doing my nut in. Now that the tantalising possibility of escaping it is floating in front of me, I can see myself getting interested again.

The main thing to remember at 100nl is that when something seems completely and utterly obvious, so fucking totally obvious that you can't believe that your opponent isn't aware of how galactically super obvious it is, then it is the truth. There is never any need to go an extra level and avoid making the big fold when someone turn check jams a rainbow board in a 3bet pot when his range is like, sets, for example.

Man that was another depressive style paragraph wasn't it? The whole point of this blog is to move away from that stuff, and so with that in mind I'm gonna talk about things I think are important in poker that people don't really talk about much, or ever.

So back to the point of the blog, where is the edge? Well, I have a dozen or so concepts that I think I understand better than other people, simply by virtue of me basing all my decisions around them.

*writes several paragraphs about technical things, gets paranoid about opponents reading it and raping me, deletes and writes this instead*.  But fuck it, it had the desired effect on me.

Cliffs: bring yourself back to now, again and again and again. Do it now, and now, and now. And now. Not the idea of now that exists as a thought bubble, but the literal undefinable now. And just when you think you understand now, and can get on with playing, IT'S A TRICK, so do it again. If any question truly needs asking, it is 'who is the one asking?'. From this place, technical concepts and ideas naturally flow, understanding appears, and before you know it we've right back into another hand, another moment. And now.

Tilt Profiles

This is just a short entry, I wanted to write about TILT.

It's become clear to me that it's become difficult for me to recognise, or maybe just accept that I'm on tilt and should therefore stop playing. I guess it's just too easy to kid myself that I'm not on tilt, or that I am but if I just CONCENTRATE or DON'T DO ANYTHING STUPID then I'll still be able to make money.

Tilt for me these days manifests fairly subtly. Long gone are the days when I, or anyone else, just starts open shoving hands or 3betting like a maniac. I mean sometimes I will snap 3bet 63s or something VS EP, but it's a clear signal to me to stop and I insta do.

That tells me that I don't actually have a problem with stopping, instead my problem is maybe just recognising when I am on tilt, and accepting the extent of the damage that subtle tilt can cause.

I think there's some sort of belief that I'm SO GOOD that I can be on subtle tilt and still win. I'm excited to put that belief to bed. It can be put to bed by virtue of overwhelming anecdotal evidence.

I. NEVER. WIN. WHEN. ON. SUBTLE. TILT.

EVER.

So, this is exciting, maybe it's just all about recognition! How do I recognise it? Well, simply by identifying all the symptoms and characteristics of subtle tilt.

Here are the symptoms of each of my 'playing mindsets'. Please forgive me for calling my non-tilt mindset 'the magic'. When I'm 'on it', that's what it feels like.

'THE MAGIC':

* it appears always in the current moment, so by definition no 'rushing'
* I easily and constantly bring myself back to what is happening right now
* constant evaluation of the EV of what we're doing
* often leads to a creative play, a big fold bet or call
* easy and simple thinking ahead, stopping us leaking money
* non judgement of situations, or even positive judgement of them
* mind is not on money
* in each decision I wait for the 'magic' answer


'THE SUBTLE TILT':

* a subtle 'desperation' to play and win is present
* 'rushing' through hands trying to get money
* plays are largely standard. never 'terrible', just 2p2 standard which doesn't win at 200nl+
* a false belief that 2p2 standard will be good enough to do well
* technical leaks such as leaking money with poor early calls and un-thought-through bets
* judgement of situations 'stupid turn', I'm so unlucky, poker hates me, his big bet is stupid
* mind is largely on money, current bankroll, annoyed
* buttons are pressed quickly and irrationally, we don't wait for the 'magic' answer

I really believe that if I go through 2016 playing (maybe less) poker without ever being on 'the subtle tilt' that I could print infinite amounts of money. There's more work to do on this probably, but I think recognition and quitting is the most important thing right now. I currently in my low BR state have a lot of 'triggers' of subtle tilt, and they can be identified and addressed some other time.

Probably the easiest of 'the subtle tilt' characteristics to recognise is the desperation that I feel. Quitting doesn't feel like a good option, I NEED to win and I'm good enough to, right? Wrong!

There's probably another profile or two in there somewhere. I should probably write out the 'hasn't drank water, maybe had gluten, is tired' profile, but I simply plan to negate that one occurring by drinking water, avoiding gluten, and sleeping!

2015 Results

+ about $34k rakeback. Actually my worst year as a professional, but still not 'lol bad, terrible' of course. It's all relative, I've had periods of complete meltdown at times this year.

I could talk about several areas of potential improvement going forward, but honestly I think the main improvement is just one of lifestyle. Eat regularly, drink a lot of water, don't play when I'm not feeling it, quit when I'm not feeling it, and always always bring myself back to the hand currently in progress when any other kind of ideas take hold.

I start the year extremely low BR'd, the above graph is deceptive- I basically won infinite at 100 and lost it at 200 and 500 in the latter quarter of the year. I sorta don't wanna stay at 100, a) because of my pride, and b) because I worry that I'll become indoctrinated to that level. There's a good chance though that it's so ridiculously lol-soft that it's better value than 200 atm. 200 is rapeable too though, I just have to grow my BR to the point that I'm not looking over my shoulder when playing it, while also removing the 'need' to play which causes me to play during sub optimal times (aka, my head's done in with something).

Deffo going to aim for lots of hands though, but if I have a single resolution for this year, it's to remember that 'not playing' in certain situations is infinitely preferable to playing. And over the year, I'm going to get decently rewarded for just watching Netflix instead.

Hope you're all well.

Dan

Update

I really feel like things are coming together at the moment. My friend Stefan gave me a massively important and helpful talk about his mental approach to poker which has really resonated with me. As always, it's about being in the moment in each and every decision and trusting your heart.

So flowing from that has come some important technical considerations that have been getting neglected. There's been so much poker thought coming out that I'm struggling to keep pace with it all. I'm just writing down quick notes and then planning to write it out more in-depth in this place and others.

I've been looking for an 'approach' for a while. And what that means is an overall approach to poker- something to fall back on when making a decision. Some people have the pure exploitative approach, they'll 3bet 95o if they think their opponent folds enough to 3bets. Others have an approach of implementing 'pseudo game theory', ie they religiously don't want to defend too little and always find a bluff even if their opponent never has a hand that will fold.

I keep playing around with GTORB, but still have more videos about it watch. This has re-energised what was once my main goal when playing poker, and that is simply to make less mistakes than our opponents. Mistakes can take many forms, but it's essentially anything that doesn't fair well VS the solid GTO (strategies that I'm attempting to implement). Obviously not actual GTO in virtually any hand- it's just too mad and complex- but what each GTO strategy has in common is that every hand is well supported by plenty of other hands that stop our opponent from doing anything to make a lot of money from us. Key to this is board coverage and range coverage, ie we should never get to the river with 'no bluffs' or have a river comes that completely destroys our range.

This approach does wonders for our mental game too, as well as giving a solid technical foundation which doesn't disappear the moment we go out of the zone.

Fear has been a big problem for me, but this approach takes that away. If we're playing Sauce, just make sure we're not doing anything terribly exploitable and what's he going to do? A lot of this does require a fair bit of ingame thought, but that's ok. For example, we get to the river with 45% bluffs and 55% value. We need to think to ourselves whether we're going to bet a normal size and lose some of our bluffs, or maybe bluff all our bluffs but go 5x pot. Which works best, and why is this? Typically in the above example if comes down to the capedness or otherwise of our opponent's range, and so VS a capped range we take the big betsize and VS the uncapped we go a more standard size.

4betting deep IP ranges, I was thinking about this today when I had AA in this spot. Basically we end up flatting a lot in a vacuum, but this hurts our range because it loses value with AA. I decided something like Q9s, J8s, and a smattering (red suits) of the 64s, 75s of the world, + AKo and occasionally something like 22-33. All giving us really good board coverage and virtually making sure we're making no mistakes postflop.

Anyway this is a ramble now, off to play and review.

LET'S DO THISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Man I've been coasting for fucking ages now. Coasting without coasting, if you know what I mean. I keep playing, and sorta thinking, and playing, and playing infinitely more. And heatering, then cooling down again, and thinking about other shit while I'm playing, and making the odd concession to 'stuff to think about' to give myself the illusion that I'm actually fully present in all this shit, and then getting mad, then playing some more, etc etc etc.

I'm fully mad now, but I think for the first time I can see it getting directed in the right way. I'm fucking raging to have spent the last 300k hands losing $16k or something, at the fact that I've showed not enough pride while playing, and at the fact that I'm fucking life broke. This shit is stopping, right now. (Well actually, 30 mins ago prior to my last session).

Intensity is the name of the game. Intensity not just in my concentration, but in the fact that 'poker' as a whole is a cycle of playing, analysing, improving, correcting. I am going to destroy every session that I play from now on, or else what is the fucking point?

I think what is basically happening within my pyshce atm is that I've come off these anti depressents, Cytalopram. They have weird side effects, but their main effect is dulling ur brain to feeling any pain whatsoever. When I first went on them, poker sorta improved, cos I was previously too highly strung and it really helped my tilt problems. Over time though, the inertia of the drug kicked its way into my play. Like, why bother trying to win or play well if you feel good anyway, right? Because of this, I sleep walked my way into Bustoville, which I'd never allowed to happen in 7 years as a professional. I usually have such a strong radar as to when I'm 'in trouble', usually when my BR hovers around the $10k mark.

BR today: $461- and debts to pay. Sure I have £60k equity in a house, but selling it is not a realistic option.

So yeah, I'm off Cytalopram, and because I'm no longer 'depressed' I've had shit tons of energy flowing thru me. I've been unleashing this at football, reverting to the super aggressive style of my youth that I thought had left me forever. Now, smashing people and winning games is nice, but I've struggled to take that energy and do anything with it at poker. I've just felt too 'mad', getting tilted at stupid things like mistakes and bad river cards.

http://grogheadflow.blogspot.co.uk/ was my orignal analysis blog, and re-reading it is fun. The hands are mostly lol by today's standards of play, but you can see the intensity is there and the will to win and improve.

My eye has left the ball, without me realising it. I honestly think that in my mind the past 6 months I've felt more like a pro footballer. Just, at the equivalent level of 2nl. Well fuck that, poker won't be around forever and I still have an amazing opportunity to rape this game for the next few years. Football, drinking, seeing my parents, worrying about life, can all take a backseat now while I direct all this energy into the cycle of eat sleep rape repeat. (Rape has the sub-sections I listed above).

I just played a 30 minutes 100nl session, and had two notepad files open, one for 'strategy thoughts' and one that functions as a 'thought and logic dump', allowing me to lose those rando thoughts that come in and disrupt my ability to implement effectively.

Here's the raw dump of the latter:

Put urself in their shoes, they actually fear us! We can fuck them up once inside their heads

Losing a hand, mistake? there are no mistakes, only points of interest, review the hand later

Instinct- don't worry about remembering to trust it lol, just relaxing and doing it is enough

Thinking ahead
Money won or lost is an illusion, physical symptoms can arise tho like adrenalin. That's all they are.

CR river fail, went against instinct.

Mistake tilt? Or just physical feelings. Again, there are no mistakes. We can learn from trusting our instinct more

mistakes from our opponents, noticing them?

confidence at some decisions, like river calls

checking money, what does it mean?

video a day?
making moves without thinking of range, overly concerned with proteciton when it might lead to me getting raped

money

can I get over the past? seems i focus on it a lot

complacency?


And here's the strat thoughts:

30 mins session then review

Pot river in obv bluffcatch spot
Remember our range at all times
Small bets with range advantage
Sizing, using our own sizing on dynamic turns to communicate what we want
PSR, reading ahead
what if the board isn't getting barreled that often?
when cbetting ip, plan ahead the cards to barrel
bluffs on 3flush runouts
deep pots, overbetting becomes a really massive weapon no?
maybe we should just look to be solid, then crush when deep
'what he would do'
OOP as pfr, we just not arsed about giving up a lot right? especially cos we minraise
inflection points
unplayable hands, a9s etc? just shit, right? yeh cos they lose a lot of straight potential
checking a lot OOP

So there's so much to think and talk about. Where to start?

Well first of all, I've been sub consciously having 'fear' without me realising it. The fear has been one of an inferiority complex, even at 100nl, and then rather than addressing that I've tried to 'prove' I'm not afraid by doing stupid things, lol.

I wrote this blog on fear at the start of the year http://grogheadflowanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/stuff-and-stuff.html.

It's got lots of really good stuff in it actually, and making me realise just how little shit I've been applying of late.

So yeah, how to fix fear? Well, you just inject logic, they're actually more likely to be afraid of us. We're the 500nl regular, we know poker better than they do, we know our own ranges and their ranges better than they do, they have every reason to be afraid! Just reminding ourselves of that is very powerful.

Technically, there's so much stuff I'm not applying. I haven't been handreading well, transitioning ranges from street to street. Simialrly, I haven't considered my own range enough...... and I should do so not as a defensive tactic but rather to ensure I'm putting maximum pressure on at all times. Betting 1/2 on the river for value is properly stupid when, had I considered our range, we end up with infinite bluffs and one or two combos of value. Similarly, I'm going to be missing bluff spots where our range can be handread as infinitely strong. Also on this subject, it means I'm probably giving sizing and PSR tells away by not thinking about my whole range on earlier streets.

One thing I'm very clear about in poker is that taking on too much is a recipe for disaster. Although I have lots of stuff to think about, I have to concentrate on one or two things, and I think handreading, being aware of our range, and planning ahead are going to be those things for now. Mentally, trust instinct kidda!

Goals for next session:

Handread opponents
Handread ourselves
Plan ahead
Trust instinct

I'll grade myself at these, even if it is a bit sad ha.

Session Warm-Up, and Session Analysis

I think that, despite my best efforts, I've been going through the motions a lot lately. I'm busto despite being decently up on the year (fuck life), and have suffered frustration playing 200nl and then 100nl.

Entitlement was an issue, which I felt I put right, and now I feel it's crept back in 'I've fixed my entitlement issue, why am I not winning now???' lol.

So I definitely need to get back into writing and analysing in order to improve. I've waited a fairly long time now for it just to 'turn around', and it's quite possible that this is just the 1 in 6 year series of hands where I've ran the worst, but I don't like the feeling of putting anything down to variance and it's quite likely that a fair number of leaks have crept in.

In no particular order, I'll list some random thoughts as to what I'm doing wrong:

Mental:

1. A bit of impatience when playing lower stakes.
2. Not having confidence in myself, and therefore not trusting instinct 100%.
3. Not ensuring that the 'narrative' is working, and forgetting how to re-ignite it.
4. Not having enough awareness of the 'tilt cycle' and therefore being unable to exit it.

Technical:

1. Not taking my time and planning ahead enough.
2. Related to the above, I feel I'm a little bit too 'splashy' atm.
3. Also related, I've been a little too passive and looking to show down hands too much. Winning with a made hand should basically always be a last resort, and so for example doing the standard button flat with KQo to a 3x is a bad idea.
4. Lack of 'dopeness' (lol). Dopeness is basically that point in a hand where I go the extra level or have that extra bit of creativity needed to crush the hand. In my last 200k hands of breaking even you won't find many 'horrible' hands in there, nothing 2p2 could laugh at or anything, but there's nothing where I've really had a flash of inspiration. When I'm playing well, these flashes are extremely common.
5. Related to the above, really core variables like PSR and bet sizing have been absent from my analysis of late.
6. Not adjusting enough to the players I'm up against. I'm ending up on the river with really weak ranges and convoluted bluffs VS 100nl players who are simply always calling top x% of their absolute hand strength.
7. Lack of care given to my own betsizing when bluffing and value betting.

So yeah, quite a lot on there, and I'm only stopping because I don't want to over crowd things. My plan is to play a 30 minute session, analyse some of the hands here, and also grade myself on each of the things listed above. Be right back.....

Session Cool-down

Ok, fairly happy with that. Played just 2 tables of 100nl and found I had tons to think about and really enjoyed it. Probably the enjoyment came from seeing the infinite possibilities for getting edges. There were a couple of really unorthodox plays in there too, which don't mean in of themselves that I was playing better, but are certainly a sign that I shook off the inertia and 'fine, standard' mentality that took hold.

Hand 1: This it the hand I was least happy with. It's 'standard' of course, but just extremely meh. I quite like the smal cbet size on this board texture, but I think turn and river are just going to be way too weak. Instinctively both streets need much bigger bets. I'm going to check that out on CREV now....

Yeah, like betting bigger on the turn folds out more of his 7x, and betting bigger on the river folds out more the Tx that remain. Our blocker's pretty decent, and optimal on the river seems to be about 1.5x pot.

Hand 2: Obviously looks standard, but I was happy because I didn't treat it as such. Firstly, villain took a while to 3bet pre, so this weakens his range considerably and I was happy getting in 99+ there. Secondly, I gave a lot of though to my sizing....... I've gone back to splitting my sizes here, so I choose the bigger size with pure bluffs (AJo etc), AK, JJ and some QQ. Basically hands that want to encourage a jam or fold. Then I have a smaller size to around 8bbs with AA, KK, some QQ and hands like QJs, JTs, T9s. This range is kinda exploitative, because it gets fucked over by light jams (though not by that much actually.

In terms of grades, my mental side was really good. A few times I 'forgot' what I was doing, but a quick strategy injection of 'look at all the details, plan ahead' brough back the narrative. other stuff was all good too actually, though in a short session there weren't too many opportunities. I did play one sick hand that I'm not going to post because it just looks really bad lol, but I was super confident in my read and happy I went with my instinct.

Coming up, more 100nl weee.

Update, strategy thoughts

Hello! I've been going great guns the past month or so, basically traceable to the day I got rid of my old chair and spent 3 hours moving a giant reclining and massively comfortable armchair into my office. This has made a huge difference to my mindset. Previously, I think tilt was starting off by manifesting as pain and general discomfort. The chair was just really badly made, it tilted forwards and had a really small seating area and I swear I had to struggle to stay on it!

So yeah since then I've had 90k hands winning at 7bb. Other mental stuff has helped, I resolved to lose all my fear again by basically facing it- this means accepting that things are going to go wrong a lot and that this is fine. Freed from the shackles of fear, all sorts of creative lines present themselves.

I've also been *thinking* about poker a lot, and this is the big difference between a 'grinder' mindset and the mindset of a crusher. A grinding mindset is a predictable one; there are very few surprises when I'm up against any high volume player. AA is always 3bet and 4bet. Draws are always barreled. Bluffs are never made into strong ranges. Exceptions to this are few and far between- I'd probably list Flippety, OTB, Amarn and Wizard as the few capable of mixing it a little it. They all do pretty well.

I've had a slight wobble the past couple of days and that's what this blog is about addressing. I have a notepad file with a list of technical concepts to think about and this has gotten really really long. This means I have loads of random concepts floating around my head that need committing to paper. These shouldn't be too much of a problem though, and they probably fall outside the scope of this blog given the number of them. The main issue the past few days has just been one of mindset. A certain sense of 'micro rushing' that I can't quite explain any other way.

Basically what it means is that, say you're in a hurry to play lots of good hands and get rich like I am, then this can result in unhelpful behaviours such as rushing in the short term. It's like a fractal, if your overall aim is to quickly get rich, then you can zoom and zoom down into that mindset and find that decisions are rushed, variance is deliberately but subconsciously increased, even the mouse is clicked much faster. This causes the opposite of what it is intended to do- and I've found in life that this is a constant 'law of the universe'- 'grasping' at your goal means it is never attained.

A couple of technical reminders before I finish- basically the goal of crushing cash poker is to constantly be thinking in terms of making sure our range is protected. Whenever an idea seems good 'in a vacuum', the fact that we haven't considered our entire range probably means that our intentions are pretty obvious.

To take an example, say on the river we have a range of air and obvious bluffcatchers that are always calling. To fold out the air we only need to bet 1/3 pot. To get max value we need to bet much bigger. Because people don't think about the entirety of their own and our range, they end up just betting the 1/3 with their bluffs and going 3/4 with their value. Good players notice this and you get annihilated in that spot, perhaps without ever even realising that you are- which is actually probably the true killer!

So in that spot, we need a consistent size. Splitting the difference and going 2/3ish is probably enough disguise, though it obviously depends on the ratio of value to bluffs too.

Ok that's enough for now, I'm going to play and take my time and have fun and see what happens. By the way I'm going to cull a lot of people from the readership so I know who's reading, so if you want to stay reading please let me know either in the comments or on Skype. Off the top of my head I'll probably keep Chris, Dodgy, Pawel without them needing to ask as I don't ever play VS them. Anyone else, please lemme know. Bye.