Diary of a (disillusioned)poker addict

Disciplines:
I spent a lot of time at the tables yesterday and things didn’t start out great. I lost an early biggish pot when I ran my top pair into a set and a flush draw and I found it a bit difficult to deal with the early loss. Had some focus problems and probably played hands too hard and fast after that. My later sessions were much better but there were still some common themes and lessons coming out:
- Still too much focus on the money and where I am. This was especially the case in my last session for the night – becomes more evident when I’m more tired – STOP playing tired!
- I need to be careful about isolating my game world to only the maniac at the table – tends to result in me making very thin plays versus everyone else when I’m trying to isolate and only play against one player.

Key spots and leak flags:
I did circa 2k hands hands over 6 hours. I’ve posted most of my problem spots on the forums but there are 2 areas I really want to highlight and focus on as despite the limited samples, my leak flagging process is already developing 2 little spikes:

- Bluffing loose players: This is such a basic mistake and I don’t do it a hell of a lot but it becomes very costly to fire multiple barrels into players who WILL NOT FOLD. It’s an area I really need to work on and its really not nuclear science – poor discipline. Avoid! An interesting addition to this point – I’m finding that after missing and continuation betting the flop, the A on the turn is a really bad card to double barrel. K on the turn and we get them to fold all day. But soooo many players seem to be floating with A-rag and end up making aces-up or even floating with big A-type hands seems to be a new fad.

- Missing value bets and not charging draws: Its sort of the opposite side of the point above. Here I am letting loose-passive players in for too cheap. On draw heavy boards especially once my commitment decision is made, I need to be betting bigger against these players.

There are other learnings coming from yesterday but I think these 2 are going to be my real focus areas for the rest of the weekend.

Good luck at the tables.