jjd323's blog

I want to define some goals for February. I try and make most of my posts interesting for others to read; this post is just to keep me accountable to myself. I’m sorry if it’s a bit dry. Feel free to skip it.

At the start of January I made a blog post that outlined a general process for efficient improvement of my poker game. I have definitely incorporated some aspects of this into my (fragmented) routine, and still believe that it can help to increase my long-term performance. Here is the process again, in outline:

Prepare —> Perform (results) —> Evaluate —> Analysis —> (loops back to Prepare)

I started the month trying to be hyper-concious of this cycle. I actively tried to separate all aspects of the process. I wanted to perform without being distracted by hands I wanted to analyse. I found that towards the end of the month that my old habits were kicking in again, and I believe that my performance suffered as a result. I even started chatting on Skype again whilst playing. BAD. It is important to perform some short term evaluation of your opponents whilst at the table, and the odd pokerstove equity calc here and there can’t hurt. However, I do think that a full-blown pokerazor analysis, a group Skype discussion and playing an A+ game at 4 tables of deep stack NLHE is more the stuff of dreams than reality.

My goal #1 for the month is to remove distractions whilst playing.

It is difficult to know how to measure my level of distractedness, and therefore to evaluate my goal. I do have an idea, though. I have been recording some videos, and posting the results on my blog. I am usually 110% focused on the games when I am recording these with live chat, and because of that there is no room for distractions. In order to help me measure my goal this month I intend to record a lot of my sessions. All of them. My aim is simply to record every minute of play for the month. That might sound a bit insane, but if it makes me slow down and cuts out the distractions I don’t think it can be a bad thing. We’ll see how it goes. At the end of each week I’ll make myself sit and watch at least 1 hour of recorded footage and I’ll make a comment on it.

As part of my preparation routine I will be selecting an aspect of gameplay to talk about during dead air moments. With the poker and the talking, I won’t have a chance to do anything else. If you got this far, perhaps you would like to suggest a topic to add to my list so I don’t get bored talking about the same things over and over (I’ve put a list at the bottom of the post and I will update this throughout the month as I record sessions – I won’t necessarily be posting any of the videos on the blog).

I have also started to play semi-HUDless. I hope to make a video explaining this concept soon.

[ ] combinatorics on the river/value betting
[ ] dead money
[ ] perceived range of PFR on the flop
[ ] likely preflop strategies/hand selection based on observed showdown and playstyles
[ ] (your topic here – write me a comment)