jjd323's blog

Today I played 350 hands of NL100 NLHE and 66 hands of 3/6 stud hi. I was breakeven for the day at NLHE, and identified one very large mistake where I didn’t stick to my plan for the hand and just clicked buttons – even after thinking about the spot for a while.; I lost a few bets at stud after losing the one big pot I played with trip QQQ – however, I do feel that I misplayed the hand and definitely lost more than I should have.

Whilst playing I noticed that I can become easily distracted. There is one thing in particular I need to avoid:

I table select heavily for NLHE, and play across several sites in order to do this. One of the tools that I use is the Table Finder at pokertableratings.com When I’m checking out the tables I might play at, and the opponents I could be playing, I often find myself clicking through their junk-links, such as “player of the year” or “latest highs-takes action”. These distractions are detrimental to my goal of making the best decisions possible because they take away my focus. However, I feel that the site itself is very useful, and I just need to be aware of the possible pitfalls and learn to avoid them.

Today I also failed to prepare appropriately for either session. I had to run to the kitchen to get a glass of water during each session, and in the future I am going to add that to a check-list of things-to-do before starting. I just sat down and played stud without any real table selection or rationale for choosing that game to play; I was also on the wait list for a really juicy triple-draw game but passed on the seat when it became available. This is just a minor thing, but I was definitely not “prepared” for this session.

Finally, I noticed that during the stud session I would turn to propokertools and crack out some equity calculations, check my equity street-by-street etc. This caused me to lose focus on the game itself, and it could definitely be left until after the session is completed. Delaying analysis such as this until after the session will prevent me from missing reads on my opponents as well as help me practice putting past hands behind me.

j