From Puppy to Full Grown Red Dog

Well… Following all the rules kinda sucks sometimes. But, I guess it is what I need to do. So, I went back to the basics. I tightened up my preflop range again, folded a lot more, and kept my session to 1 hour (63.7 minutes to be exact). Unfortunately, with the two table rule (and a really slow table) that only resulted in 179 hands. Not to mention that my studying has been lacking and I could only play for 1 hour because of my 4:1 study to play ratio.

Here are the results…

25NL
64 minutes
179 hands
VPIP% – 20.9
PFR% – 18.6
3bet% – 5.9
AggFct – 2.63
WTSD% – 7.4
W$SD% – 50

Result – +$4.31

Not much to say about this session other than nothing really happened. I rarely made it to showdown and a lot of the stats are meaningless. I will keep YTD stats so I can see how they wash out over time. However, you can see I don’t put in a lot of hands, so it will be a while.

Hopefully, things will get more exciting (in a good way).

If you look at my “joined” date, you will see that I am not all that new to DC (1/09). Unfortunately, due to real life getting involved, I had to take a hiatis from poker during a large chunk of that time, so I will still consider myself a DC newbie.

A quick profile is that I live in Northern California. I played my first hand of holdem about 6 years ago, but never played seriously until about 2 years ago. For the first year, I proceeded to piss away several deposits. I then decided to join DC and even get a few coaching sessions where I learned a ton. However, (much to the chagrin of my coaches) I lacked any real discipline to use what I learned. So, I played tired, tilted, drunk, etc. and basically refused to impliment any of the wealth of knowledge I had gained. So, even when I managed to build up a small bankroll, it was not long until one of the “bad” sessions would begin. That resulted in my pissing away a few more deposits.

Luckily, I had to take a break and this is my starting over point. So, my new poker career begins on May 5th and I have new rules for myself to follow.

• Start at 25NL with 40 BI ($1000)
• Move up to 50NL once I have 30 BI at 50 NL ($1500)
• Move down to 10 NL if I lose 15 BI at 25NL ($375)
• Study to Play ratio of 4:1 for first month
• Maintain Study to Play ratio of at least 2:1 the remainder of the year
• (study can be videos (with note taking), reading, HH reviews, forum contributions)
• Play only 2 tables for first month
• Play no more than 4 tables the remainder of the year
• Sessions are to be approximately 1 hour (give or take 15 minutes)
• Each session’s hands must be reviewed with difficult hands posted to the forum
• Breaks must be at least 30 minutes
• Enforce a 3 BI stop loss per session

I know some of these rules sound strict and will make it impossible to get in huge numbers of hands, but unfortunately tilting and playing marathon sessions is a weakness of mine and this is how I am going to deal with it.

The videos I will be watching are a lot of the best microstakes videos. Some of them I have seen and they are review. I also have some videos from coaching sessions that I will review. A few that I plan on watching are below.

• +Evolution of a Poker Player
• Baby Steps
• From the Ground Up
• Mathmatics of NL Holdem
• Coaching Kristy
• Road to Robusto
• Real Life NL Micro Grinder (both)
• The Coaching Tree
• Professor Plotkin
• Hand Readers
• Haj School
• Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment

I will gladly do sweats with other DCers, but unless we are doing HH reviews, it will not count toward study time for me.

So, hello to the blogging community and feel free to message me.

Travis