The road to my first bracelet

This is what the past two weeks looked like: lift off. I first made a deposit of $230 on full tilt on september 2008 and reached $0 13 months later. Made a second deposit of $200 on Poker Stars (not full tilt, we all know it’s rigged, lol, not) and said to myself:"This is my professional poker site, i.e. I will not play if tired, on tilt, not concentrating, etc. For every hour at the tables, there will be one hour of reading and learning. Before each session, I will have reviewed the previous one. Six weeks later, I got myself a coach. Thank God I did. Every dollar spent on him is an investment. On the first coaching session, he spotted three terrible leaks and we started working on them immediately with session reviews and videos from DC. I began feeling at home at the tables, my home. Even though I have a hard time with Math and Hand reading, I can now adapt to my opponents.

Three important things happened to me in the last two weeks. First, table and seat selection is everything. I have zero tolerance for a table I don’t like. Fishes to my right, nits to my left. A maniac to my right and I wait for the right cards and clean him. A maniac to my left, I’ll just leave. I will also start playing heads up when I spot a player sitting alone at a table with a short or medium stack, making sure he is at my immediate right. For some reason, this scenario seems to attract more fishes.

Second thing is something my coach told me talking about some golfer and that golfer said:" It’s funny, the more I practice, the luckier I get". Now, I plan my studying. Every thing I do, I do it with a pen and paper. For the eight episodes of The eightfold path to poker enlightment, I must have 12 pages of notes. This lets the theory sink in faster. And when you plan a whole week of study in advance, you can cover different aspect of your play.

Third thing is from Tommy Angelo’s serie. Last saturday, I planned to play a session in the morning, after a shower and with a good Cuban coffee. While in the shower, I thought to myself: “I had a great week, I better brace myself for the down swing”. Then Mr Angelo’s views on this came to mind: “A streak is just a thought, it’s in my head. When I am at the tables, there is no past (last week’s winning), there is no future (next week’s bad beat?). There is only the present, the current hand I am involved in”. And then, I took off.