Shuttle's blog

3-high turn soul read. sick.

must have put me on deuces

Hey not huge sample but huge wr difference between 10nl and 25 nl. Do you remember why? Did you find the games that much different in that 25 plays for like what you are used to but weaker so you were able to crush? Wasn't case with 10nl?

Kerwinty, most likely was a sample size issue.

Good work sir.

This is an AMAZING feat IMO. Putting in that kind of volume away from the table is truly phenomenal. How are you keeping yourself motivated and focused? Are you studying for say an hour at a time?

And a 10 hour coaching session?! Would love to hear about the breakdown of that.

I really really struggle putting in the hours away from the table, so I will definitely be following the blog and would love to hear more updates.

I tend to study when I get some inspiration to do so, in those cases it tends to be for a few hours at a time. The motivation is coming from the fact that I'm very competitive and I want to be the best player I can be. I don't like just grinding, if I was just grinding out the hands I'd already have quit long ago and started a business.

The 10 hour session was the longest of the sessions I did with the guy I stake. We actually did like 2 8 hour sessions the days after that too. It was pretty intense. There were some deepstack spots we uncomfortable with so we just decided to grind through the analysis. It was incredibly enlightening and I learned a bunch of interesting things from it.

I have heard you say that a lot of the poker players say they study hard, while they don't. Or they study the wrong way. Can you explain that?

Many people watch just passively watch 1-2 vids a week and casually discuss hands with friends and think that this is studying hard. The simple fact of the matter is that there's a lot of stuff to learn if you want to get to an elite level. Most of the really important stuff involves *actively* learning. Time needs to be spent reviewing marked hands, posting hands, watching videos, recording your own play then watching that later, doing EV calcs, doing sweat sessions, etc. All of these things should be done with goals in mind for areas of your game that you want to work on. There's simply a lot to do and I think that people would do much better if they spent like an hour or two a day on this stuff but in reality hardly anyone does.

All this might just be a cultural difference thing though. I just remember back to the time I was doing my masters in mathematics, studying hard in that context was solid back to back 5+ hours days 5 days a week of really intensely hard material. Not doing the work pretty much meant instant failure. The thing about poker is that not doing the work doesn't result in instant failure because games are still easy if you game select hard and it takes a while (or sometimes never) to realize that you could be doing better if you are already winning.

As to the question of motivation above: I had a bit of a change of heart about all this last December, I used to be unmotivated and barely played and barely studied, for the most part I was just working on other projects. I made a conscious decision that if I was to return to playing poker professionally I'd treat it like a profession, working really hard to play the best game I can and have the highest winrate I could. An "aha" moment was when realized the money side of things doesn't motivate me enough, the thing that provided the drive and motivation to put in the hard hours was wanting to be the best player I could be. I had a score to settle with 25/50 and instead of just dreaming about playing those stakes again I decided I'm make a concerted effort to work my ass of and grind back up to those stakes.