Grinding myself to NL100 - or busto

Hello everybody! I’ve been running like total crap lately. My all-in EV -8BIs in the last few days. Enough said. I still play my A game, leave immediately when the mighty tilt is coming. Blah-blah-blah… It is important to realise, that as a regular, variance is one of your best friends. Seriously! This is what makes fishes come back to the tables time after time. In soccer, basketball, football, the better team wins. In poker, the better player wins also. But in the long run. You might not see the results after ninety minutes. It might even take weeks, months for your profit to be realised as a part of your bankroll. That’s poker! The above phrase is used a lot, but only a few people can truly understand it. And in my experience, the key to successful tilt management is in that tiny little sentence. Write that on a sticky, and post it on your monitor. Or make it your desktop wallpaper. Or tattoo it on your forehead, and put a mirror on your PC. Alright, the last one is a little bit out of line. But you get the idea!

Hi everyone! Another day has gone by, and I’ve just finished my session. If I want to continue with my daily routine, I should do my session review, post some stuff on the forums, and watch a video before going to bed. But I feel like my mind is getting overloaded. Did you ever get the feeling of being lost in a pot, just because there are so many different lines you can take. God, it’s frustrating. I think this is an effect of absorbing so many different point of views about certain situations, that your own is starting to fade away.

I should raise, because…
Just call, because…
Fold, you’re beat.
OMG, I’m confused.
All of this ends up in abandoning the plan that has been working very well for you. Instead, you start following plans suggested by others. And these are very good plans as well. Just that you are not familiar with them on a working level.
Maybe a day off will do good for me, just let my brain rest a bit. On the other hand, I should grind like crazy.
Although as I look back at my most disastrous sessions, they all occured when I was not in the ‘zone’.
Results: I’m screwed for tomorrow. Maybe I’ll go fishing. Or should I hit the cinema? Iron Man 2 is out… Well, system overload doesn’t seem so disastrous overall:)

Thanks for reading this, Good luck at the tables!

Hi everybody!

It has been two weeks since I last posted. Sorry, I was busy grinding as always:)
The song remains the same. I have to play more. I can watch videos for hours, but when it comes to playing, I lack commitment.
When I started playing poker in October, I deposited 50 bucks, and started grinding NL2. My goal was to reach NL50 till September 2010. I really have to give my best to accomplish that. Now it’s May, and I’m ‘sailing the seas’ of NL25. In October, it seemed like one year is a lot of time, but now it is getting closer and closer, and you start to panic a bit. I mean a lot!
I will also have to deposit some next week, so I might drop down to NL10 again. I insist on being well rolled for the limits I play. I simply can’t make optimal decisions when I am threatend by going busto.
The PS updates were discussed a lot in the forums. I actually like playing the 40-100bb tables. First of all, my favourite tables are the ones where I have a loose-passive guy to my right, with straightforward TAGs on the rest of the seats. I can isolate the fish all day long, and make the regs feel very uncomfortable the same time. And when the regulars start to adjust, they usually do it in a horrible way. They usually start getting more and more agressive because of sheer frustration. This creates situations in which they are lost, but you are very comfortable. DIABOLIC LAUGHTER
I actually tried the 20-50bb tables. I have found the games very juicy, lot of fishes everywhere. Still, I have to admit that I hate playing in those games. First, shallower stacks diminish your skill advantage. A lot(at least a lot more than I first expected). Just imagine the following very common scenario. You raise, two guys call, the pot is around 10 bbs. You flop top pair good kicker(ubernuts) on a two-tone flop. You pot it, one guy calls, the other folds. There are 30 bbs in the pot. The turn brings a suited card, the flushdraw completes. See what I mean? There is no room to c/f, c/c is the recipe to ruin, check and give him a free card? 50 bbs allow only two streets of postflop play. And that sucks bigtime.
Or what happens if you go for thin value preflop? There are so many fishes on all the tables that you will be surrounded by 80/15 guys all the time. If you isolate a limper, but will get called by three more random guys, that slight card advantage doesn’t exist anymore, and your fold equity is not even worth mentioning.
Whatever. I still have the 40-100bb tables for grinding. Poker is still wonderful.

I will definately post more in my blog, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading this one. You all deserve some nice music!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otY1sfvELXQ

Hello everybody! It’s been a week since I posted, so the time has come for me to look into the mirror and see how I did in the last seven days. I as you may know, my goal was to grind out around five thousand hands in 75 minute sessions, but stricktly by playing my A game. I am very dissapointed, but I have to admit that I didn’t reach that, as far as the number of hands go. I played approximately three thousand hands. Still, I think I did really well last week. Simply because my internet connection went broke for almost two days. And when I had it fixed, Pokerstars updated their software. And HM HUD also had to be updated to work properly with the new version of PS. And I am really glad this happened, as it reminded me of the times I was playing HUDless, and had to make my decisions based on my reads. I am very thankful that I used to play that way, as that experience has proven to be really helpful. I think it made me focus on second level thinking early on, which is definately a great thing.

Back to last week’s grinding! Without further ado, here’s my graph:

So as you see, I had a pretty big swing in my showdown winnings at ~1700 hands. This was due to a few suckouts on me, but then I completely misplayed a hand, lost a buy-in, and this was because of tilting. I don’t tilt much at all. Honestly, I haven’t done it since January, I think. I read an article about how people say the phrase ’That’s poker!’ all the time, but very few understand it. So back to my tilting session, as you see on the graph, my red line was pretty static till pretty much that point. I play an agro style, so cbetting, and second barelling is vital for me. But if the wast majority of turns are terrible spots to second barrell, than there is not much to do. So running bad, realising that I won’t reach my goal ended up putting me on tilt. Thankfully, I stopped my session immediately, and went out to play soccer with one of my buddies. Soccer! I’m a huge Manchester United fan since ’98. This year, they have a chance to win the league for the fourth time in a row, which would be sensational. This weekend was superb for the team as we won against our big rivals Manchester City (Scholes scored in the ninety-third minute), and both Chealsea and Arsenal lost their matches, so with only three games left, we are one point behind Chealsea.

And Dimitar Berbatov is starting to play great, so I’m very pleased with him as well:)

I was thinking about what to write my first article about, and it will propably be around isolation, how to create passive dead money in single raised pots, and take it down. I’ll propably post the whole thing in the following one or two weeks, depending on how much time I’ll have. Thanks for reading this long-long post, good luck at the tables!

Today, I’ve been thinking about how I should increase the number of hands I play.

I mean should I jump into boiling water? Should I grind until I fall asleep in front of the screen? There is a big downside to this. It will be inevitable to start playing my B game after a while, and this could lead to bad habits in the future.
So I decided to build from where I stand now. Gradually. Nowadays I tend to play one hour long sessions. My goal will be to force myself to play 75 minute sessions instead of 60. And also concentrate on playing the best I can in the last second of the session as well as in the first second.
I will also try to squeeze in multiple sessions into my daily routine.
I ran a little calculation in my head, and if I can keep up with the pace described above, I am going to play a little above 5000 hands next week. Still not much, but I am really looking forward to this challenge.
I am currently playing 10 NL. So far, I’ve been running quite bad, but this is only over a few thousand hand sample, and I’ve been still able to make some money. I played a bunch of really interesting hands today. I’ll surely post them on the forums later, but it’s almost midnight here in Hungary, I should get some sleep.

Good luck at the tables everybody, and thanks for reading!

I make a ton of mistakes. I am not talking about making weaktight folds, bluffing stations, and such poor plays, but mistakes that ruin careers. I mean what do you say to yourself when a guy sits down at the table with the following name: ThePlaybook. Yep, that’s my name on Stars. I didn’t want to sound like a guy with an ego so big that the Stars server doesn’t even have enough space to save his account. So where does the name come from? You have propably heard of How I Met Your Mother… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ZVEvxSR7g

Legendary.
The minute I started playing with this account I was like omg, I am soooo stupid. Whatever, at least it grabs people’s attention.

I started playing poker in November. I deposited 50 bucks to FullTilt, and I tried a little bit of everything. Sit and gos, tourneys, cash games. Obviously, I didn’t have a clue of what is going on. But I really liked the games, and I decided to get more serious about it. Thankfully, I’ve found the magnificent, brilliant DC (free subscription plz for the ad), and cash games started to grab my attention. I don’t play anything else than NLHE 6max cash games nowadays.

I have a ton of leaks. This blog will sure help me plug one of them…
I simply don’t play enough hands. I only play 4-500 a day. This is partly due to grinding only two tables at a time. But it is also due to being lazy about playing. So from now on, I’m going to post my goal(how many hands do I want to play till the end of next week) every Sunday. And at the beginning of every blog post, I will write down the amount of hands I played since my last blogging.

This propably wouldn’t be enough to write a blog about, but I also intend to post strategy-related articles here, hands, and basically everything that is on my mind about poker. And food. And comedy. And girls. And some more poker.

Hopefully, this will start some great conversation helpful for most of us, micro stakes grinders.

P.S.: For some extra motivation, I should do something really unorthodox every time I don’t reach my goal. What should it be? Should I go to the gym dressed as Sarah Jessica Parker? Should I wrestle a bear? Anyway, whatever creeps me out every time I think of it should do the job:D

Thanks for reading!