Langerz Grinds

Been an up and down week, but still excited to say all week was at 25NL. Started up a couple buy ins. Then a -4 BI swing. Then up 4BI, then down 6. Had a nice +8BI swing today though to finish up 4BI for the week.

I’m also excited to say that my red line has been slightly positive for the 8000+ hands I have in at 25NL. Not that I am obsessing with my redline, but I mentioned in a previous blog that it appears that my red line is a very good indicator of when I am focused and not autopiloting. I’ve been feeling pretty dialed in lately so hopefully that is the case. I can say previously when I was playing 25NL my red line was no where near positive. At this level I think the biggest key is value betting well. If you are value betting thinly people are going to fold quite often and your red line grows.

Hopefully I can straighten on my blue line and get off this roller coaster during the next week. Either way I’m over 20BI for 25NL and feeling good. If I finish the month well I think I’ll be able to officially say my Stars to FTP transition is official.

Short update this week. Had to at least make a post to celebrate being at 25NL. I didn’t really expect to burn through 5 and 10NL quite as fast as I did, but a combination of not autopiloting and running good and I’m up to 25NL. I’m pretty happy with this since I was basically a 25 or 50NL player when I left Stars. Now I just need to continue to climb to get back to 100 NL.

The week was overall very good. 25NL doesn’t seem much different than 10NL other than there are more regs obviously and I keep running into these terrible 80/20 players that don’t mind 3 barreling off their stack with absolutely nothing. They aren’t bad to have around once you recognize them, but are high variance.

In all I’m very happy with this week other than a session this afternoon where I was pretty distracted and ended up down 4BIs. It’s still a very positive week though so a little bit of that may have been variance biting me.

Before the 4 BI swing though I was not only at 25NL but there with a 20BI bankroll. Pretty amazing since on Christmas Day I had $50 in my FTP account and I haven’t transferred anything in.

One other thing to note. I just started reading the following post on 2+2. I haven’t gotten far enough into it to really judge it, but it’s at least very interesting.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/69/micro-stakes-pl-nl/moving-up-through-unl-2010-a-676130/

Also someone sent me this blog link today and I found it to be a really good read. (Everyone needs a good kick in the butt occasionally).

http://blogs.cardrunners.com/citizenwind/rant-just-fucking-do-it

I know it’s CR stuff in the links, but still good stuff.

Just by coincidence I’ve noticed that usually after making a blog post I end up running really good the session afterward. Wow was that the case yesterday. I made the post about January results knowing I was going to grind a fair amount that day, but didn’t think it would change the results that much. I ended up 10 buyins in about 1200 hands. Pretty sick run. That made the final results 8.4 bb/100 over about 22,000 hands. I can’t complain much about that at all. I’m also now knocking on the door of 15 BI for 25 NL. I may not make the jump right away. In the past I’ve found making the jump right after a huge hot streak isn’t the best idea. Some mindset and there is probably some variance waiting for me after yesterday. Still was a lot of fun yesterday.

So everyone start a blog and run hot.

My real life job has been crazy this month so it’s been a couple weeks since I wrote an entry. I’ve been doing a great job with the 2010 plan though so far. I’ve also had some good results for the month so I’m hoping the extra work is paying off. I thought I’d do a month in review post based on my 2010 weekly plan I mentioned a few weeks ago (copied below). I did a decent job on the daily goals. I didn’t reach 100% session reviews, but I’d bet I’m in the 70% range of hands I play during the week being reviewed which is a big improvement. One area that needs a better plan is reviewing my weekend sessions. I treat my weekend session as kind of “fun time” and just try to relax and grind. I end up playing a lot of hands though that rarely get reviewed.

During the commute I listed to a few DC podcasts and I just started relistening to Tommy Angelo’s 8 Fold Path. I’m 100% convinced that by far my biggest leak is rarely playing my A game. I’ve been making strides in this area. If anyone out there hasn’t listed to this series do it.

I’ve also been more active on the forums. I didn’t keep track of posts, but I know going into the month I had less than 400 posts and now I’m at 483 so I met the 50 goals. I’ll let the other people on the micro NL forum decide if they were quality posts or not. I didn’t do as well as I would have liked with posting my own hands. That was a downside of the crazy month at work. I did post at least 2 that sparked some good discussion.

On the rest of the schedule I did well. I think I only managed exercise twice a week rather than three, but that was still a step of from zero. I can only remember once that I skipped a video watching night to grind. I’ve been watching Grindcore’s series and it’s excellent. Amazingly even with playing less and studying more I managed to get in a lot of hands. I still got in over 20,000 which is about what I was doing before. Full Tilt must play much faster than Stars since I’m sure I played less hours, but about the same number of hands. (Note I did play probably 3-4 hours of Rush Poker which obviously helps.)

As far as results out of 21271 hands 20413 were at 10NL which was nice. I played at 4.55 bb/100 at 10NL. That’s obviously nothing to complain about, but I’m sure I can improve on that. I started the month playing a lot of autopilot and was basically flat. Something clicked the last half though and my concentration was greatly improved at the tables. I’ve fall back into autopilot mode a few times over the last few days, but at the same time ran really good. Over my last 10,000 hands I’m running 15.39 bb/100. That probably isn’t sustainable, but if I can stayed focused I believe I can do better than 4.55 at this level.

A couple days ago I about had a huge hand that could have really swung those results. I got it in 4 ways with a couple 75bb stacks and another player I was deep with. The two shorter stacks had A7 and AT. I had KK and the other deep player had QQ. It was a 5 buy in pot and was mine until the river brought a Q.

I also cleared $80 in bonuses for the month which is nice.

At this point I am now at my normal 20 buy in bankroll mark for 10NL. I was using 10 buy ins since I moved to FTP to either quickly build my roll or just bust and go back to Stars. I’m nearing the 10 BI mark for 25 NL and I’m thinking about making a change at this point. 25NL is getting closer to my normal limits and I’m not sure I want to play as short there. At the same time I really want to get back to at least 50NL. The jump between 10NL and 25NL also kind of stinks since it’s 2.5x not 2×. I think I’m going to split the difference and use 15 buy-ins for 25NL and then the full 20 BIs for 50NL. If things keep going well I may at some point transfer some money from my Stars account as well.

Anyway that was January hopefully during the Feb update I’ll be talking about 25NL.

Daily – At breakfast do a session review of night before.
– On commute back and forth from work listen to 2-3 podcasts or theory videos
– Lunch/after work spend time on forums – make at least 50 quality posts per month and posts at least 5 of my own hands
Evenings:
Sunday – 1) Exercise 2) Blog 3) grind
Monday – Grind
Tuesday – 1) Excercise 2) Watch video (mostly sweat videos) 3)finish Sunday/Monday session review
Wednesday – Grind
Thursday – 1) Excercise 2) Watch video (mostly sweat videos) 3)finish Wednesday session review
Friday – Grind
Saturday – Fun day grind as I have time

Not a big update this week. I did make it up to 10 NL on Full Tilt. I’m pretty happy to say that. I actually don’t think I’ve ever played 5 NL before. When I originally moved from limit to no limit I was rolled for 25NL and started at 10 NL to get my feet wet. I remember running really hot when I made the switch and never looked back.\

That said I think playing 5NL was actually really good for me. I’ve seen a few posts about people running bad and what they should do. After playing a few thousand hands of 5 NL I’m a firm believer in moving down to get some confidence back. The players down here are really bad and there is nothing like a few thousand hands against horrible players to make you realize “hey I am actually better than some people at this game”. I might actually mix in a thousand hands every once in a while just to keep my head in a good place.

That said having played higher it’s nice to move on. Not to mention the bonus I got clears crazy slow at 5NL. Now that the bonus is clearing faster I’m actually well on my way to 10 BIs for 25NL. I need to think a little about what I do there. Like I mentioned before I’m using 10BIs until I build up my roll on FTP. Somewhere in the 25-50 NL range I’ll go back to 20 BIs. Maybe I’ll use 15 to move to 25 NL.

Overall I did a good job sticking to the plan. Watched several videos, reviewed lots of hands, excercised, and other than one session stayed pretty focused.

Happy New Year All.

Not much of an update this week. I spent four days in the land of dial up internet. You can play over dial up, but it takes about 5 hours to download Full Tilt over dial up and the connection failed half way through several times and I just gave up. I got to spend lot of times on the forums though and thinking about 2010. I also ran pretty good for the first 3 days of the week and end the week up about 2 BIs and again close to 10 NL. I’m hoping to stick this time. The novelty of owning the 5 NL games is starting to wear off a little bit so I’m looking forward to continuing to climb back up the ranks.

I mentioned above I’m spent some time thinking about 2010. I still haven’t given my poker history, but the cliff notes are 2008 was a good year. I was playing very well at 50 NL and 100 NL and taking some shots at 200 NL. 2009 was rougher. Looking back one of the big reasons was I got into chasing FPPs on Stars and kept shooting for Platinum. That meant grinding most of the time and not studying the game as much. That’s part of the advantage of moving back to Full Tilt. I don’t have to maintain a monthly status to keep the rakeback % so I feel less pressure to grind out hands. So given that here is my plan for 2010. (Note there are also a few personal health goals included as well since that tends to happen during the same time as my poker time).

Daily – At breakfast do a session review of night before.
– On commute back and forth from work listen to 2-3 podcasts or theory videos
– Lunch/after work spend time on forums – make at least 50 quality posts per month and posts at least 5 of my own hands
Evenings:
Sunday – 1) Exercise 2) Blog 3) grind
Monday – Grind
Tuesday – 1) Excercise 2) Watch video (mostly sweat videos) 3)finish Sunday/Monday session review
Wednesday – Grind
Thursday – 1) Excercise 2) Watch video (mostly sweat videos) 3)finish Wednesday session review
Friday – Grind
Saturday – Fun day grind as I have time

I also want to try to get more involved with a group at some point, but would like to get used to the schedule above and hopefully back to at least 25NL before joining one. Also when I get back to around 50NL I’m going to look into some coaching as well.

Hopefully this keeps my game sharper and I’ll be able to run my full tilt roll up to around 50NL in a short period of time.

See you on the forums and at the tables.

Before I get into the update for the week I wanted to clarify from the last post. The 10 buy in bankroll management deal on full tilt is just temporary. The basic thought is I don’t really want to transfer money into my FTP poker account. At the same time I don’t want to spend a ton of time playing 2NL and 5NL when I have enough on Stars to play higher. So I’m going to be aggressive with the money I have on FTP until I get it up to at least where my Stars roll is (between 25 and 50 NL at the moment). After that I’ll be a little more conservative and if I bust no biggie I just go back to Stars.

Now for the update. Over the last week I’ve been rocking the 5NL tables at a rate of 22 bb/100 over ~5000 hands. Probably not sustainable, but the players at these levels are really weak. It’s been kind of fun playing here and very good for confidence. At my last entry I was just barely at my 5NL BRM requirement and I pretty quickly ran that up to 10 buy ins at 10NL.

Then I played a really crappy session at 10NL. I was back to my old auto pilot ways and not really paying attention and dropped about 5 buyins and was back to where I started. In the past that probably would have led to some tilt, but I handled it well and am already more than half the way back to 10NL. So I learned another solid lesson about making sure I’m always playing my A game (I’ve probably learned that lesson about 1000 times in my poker career, but another good example).

I also made an interesting observation about A game and my red line. I’m not one to obsess about my red line, but I thought this was interesting. Lately now that I’ve been concentrating more and playing my A game more often I have a good feel at the end of the session whether or not I was focused and playing my A game or distracted and playing my C/D game. This is independent of results and more based on the number of hands I remember when reviewing the session and the number of notes etc I have. I’ve also been looking at my graph and it is pretty clear from my red line when I’m on my A game and when I’m not. If I finish a session that I feel I was focused on my red line is flat to slightly negative (I think that is likely optimal at 5 and 10 NL), during the few distracted C games sessions I have had over the last week you see a sharp downturn in the red line. It’s a small sample, but I think this makes a lot of sense since things like thin value bets and spots to pick up pots are the first things we start to miss when we go into auto-pilot mode.

Anyway hopefully by the next update I’ll be solidly into the 10 NL games and more focused then I am now.

All right I’m starting a new plan in my poker journey and thought it would be nice to start a blog along with it. Who knows if anyone will read it, in which case I’ll call it my journal.

I’ll save my poker background for a later post, but for now the cliff notes. Been playing about 4 years as a hobby. Been playing NL 6 max since about the time of the UIEGA. I had a good year in 2008 and though I was on my way to the mid stakes. The last year has been rough due in my opinion lose focus on the game both at and away from the table.

So recently I started a new plan. I was offered the Full Tilt rakeback bonus (been playing at Stars and don’t have rb at FTP). I had a little bit of money on FTP so decided to give it a try without transferring anything into the account.

My plan is to be pretty aggressive with my roll on FTP and play as long as I have 10 BIs. I still have my money on Stars so if I go broke no biggy. I started with a little over $100 there and playing 10NL and ran like crap the first few sessions. I’m something like 8 buyins below EV over 4000 hands and now down at 5NL.

I’m enjoying it though and really trying to make a point to focus on the tables, study hand histories etc and get back into learning the game not just playing it.

So if you are interested stay tuned and hopefully see you at the FT midstakes before long.