Started Over

I've been spending alot of time with Crossfire and trying to integrate some of the thinking into my PLO game, particularly in my blinds play. I'm not strong enough postflop to integrate all of it, but am finding it very useful. I altered my HUD to reflect some of MagicNinja's ideas, so it now includes explicitly steal from CO, steal from BTN, SB VPIP, and BB VPIP, and I pulled out a bunch of stats that I think aren't very useful. Also spending alot of time cleaning up my old notes on players that don't tell me anything and on making meaningful notes. Overall, I feel more confident in my game now than I had - just need to run a bit better and develop some better "habits" (i.e., I think I'm getting it in a bit light a bit too frequently).

Been playing mostly PLO this month, 11K hands or so compared to 3K hands of NLHE. I'm playing microstakes, where I'm well aware of the rake being 20bb/100 - over all 14K hands I'm winning at around 18bb/100. My upswing at the end of last month was mostly PLO fwiw. My plummet last month was mostly NLHE FR - while I feel pretty good about my 6max game, I'm seriously in a funk regarding my FR game. I started watching slowlane's current series and plan on getting back to it later in the month.

Hard to develop confidence in my PLO game, though, given the swings. I'm running an absurd +82bb/100 at 5PLO (3k hands, 25bi's). At 10PLO, I'm only running +4bb/100 - but that's after two 10+bi upswings and a massive downswing over 6.5K hands. My allin EV line for all PLO hands slopes up at a very small angle pretty consistently (presumably meaning that when I stack off, I'm stacking off good) - whether or not my winrate line goes up or down seems to be independent of that line (and my winrate line does go up and down quite a bit), though, so presumably my winning and losing is heavily, heavily, heavily based on whether I'm running good or not. Makes me question whether I'm playing villain types/poker effectively as opposed to playing my cards - I've noticed that my redline is essentially flat when I'm winning and slopes when I'm not, not sure if that means I'm handreading well when I'm winning and badly when I'm losing or not (i.e., cbetting the wrong board textures/villain types, betsizing problems, drawing passively too much, etc.).

I recorded a 4tabling 10PLO vid, but am having problems uploading it to the site. Once I get that figured out, I'll be asking $tudlani's group (and anyone else nice enough to take the time) to review it.

Sorry to beat a dead horse from the earlier post, but...

Brag - up 23bi's over last 8.5K hands.

Beat - still down 2bi's for the month (33.7K hands total).

Beat - upswing is over lower limits than those in the downswing that got me to -25bi's for the month.

Well, June sucked for me from a results perspective. While I started the month at 50nl and took a shot at 100nl, I ended the month down at 25nl. Such is poker life.

So I've been reviewing the month as a whole and analyzing my weaknesses. Came up with a few that were the direct result of trying to change some things in my game - I don't regret trying them, and think the general ideas are correct but the execution was poor, so it's more a matter of figuring out where I'm executing poorly. There's an additional substantial leak that's been in my game forever and that's just going to take more work.

I just started watching Real Life Micro NL Grinder for the first time and ran across some f*&king basic ideas that I knew but haven't been executing correctly, and I think they go a long way to explaining why my showdown stats all look awesome but my results don't. From Search and Destroy ep 1, my WTSD, W$SD, W$WSF, W$non-SD are all high (i.e., I go to showdown a lot, I win at showdown alot, I win when I see a flop alot, and I win non-showdown pots a lot) but my results don't reflect that. It sounds lol impossible until you realize that while I win frequently, I'm losing pots so big in other spots that they outweigh the pots I'm winning and/or I'm failing to get enough value from the pots that I win that they don't offset the pots I lose. So the good news is I've got some ideas that will make July a better month than June I hope.

Oh, and of course I ran below allinEv, but whatever.

For whatever reason, my June FR results really suck and my June 6max results sucked alot less, so for the purposes of fixing leaks I'll be playing 6max pretty exclusively for a while.

I occasionally get into this mindset. Not having a great month, such is life, but that's neither here nor there. What I'm experiencing is some short term run good, but feeling at the same time that it's in spite of my play, not because of it.

I'm not doing anything particularly idiotic that I can see. However, I see the hands I'm winning with and they're total no brainers - a monkey could win with these hands against these villains. I don't see hands I'm winning with where I think "damn, I really outplayed that guy - floating there/bluffing there/that betsize/whatever was absolutely the right play and I won money I wouldn't have if I weren't smarter than hell". So while I'm not seeing anything obviously stupid in my session reviews, neither do I see anything that makes me want to brag post.

On the up side of things - I absolutely love 2fouroffsuit's new Duel video (#2). I know he was thinking that alot of newer HU players recognize spots where they could/should be making an adjustment, but don't really know what adjustment to make - I'm one of those - and this vid is a great way to start getting better at it. I'm not, however, currently playing any HU (my foray a month ago was a little disastrous, I'll get back to it in a couple of months I hope), what I truly love about this video is his checklist and his notes/analysis/plan of attack, and it doesn't have to be about HU. That checklist made clear to me how much info/analysis/note taking I'm missing/not doing, and I thought I was doing pretty well at that stuff. 

I'm running several sessions now just 2 tabling 6max, and have a template for notes I'm using that's a simplified model of what 24o has in that vid. At the end of the month I'm intending to spend a day or two reviewing 6max regs and consolidating/simplifying the notes into a "plan of attack" for each.

I spent the last several days HUDless and without my player notes (I was on a different computer). In practical terms, I ended up cutting tables (four full ring tables instead of six, or two 6max tables instead of four) and had to recreate reads on most of the players I played against for those few days. Turned out to be pretty stressful for me, but also pretty interesting. I ended up experimenting quite a bit, where I'd take a line I probably wouldn't have otherwise in order to test the other guy so I could get the reads I was looking for.

That little experiment lead me to re-watch the first two episodes of The Thin Red Line, going to watch the entire series again. I realized that there are a ton of good ideas I hadn't taken notes on the first time through the series.

Very happy now that I'm back to my HUD and player notes! I did recognize, though, after my little experiments, that my note taking skills need some work, I learned more about how some of these players think while I didn't have my HUD/notes than I had with my HUD/notes.

I rely heavily on color coding. Unfortunately, my color coding pretty exclusively only reflects VPIP/PFR/3bet stats rather than any postflop reads. Thinking about updating my color coding, but kind of dreading it - I already have a fairly complex scheme, I'm not sure increasing that complexity is a good idea yet.

Haven't posted in a few days - things are going well on the poker front. I got some great feedback on a vid I posted in the members vid forum from Poker_Road. One of the things that's always been a problem for me is thinking that the laggier regs are "better" than I am - so I get run over when they start making plays at me. Poker_road picked up on some of that and prompted me to refocus on that dynamic, I'm getting much more comfortable playing in those spots than I had been.

Oh, when I say "things are going well", that means I think I'm playing well - important to not be results oriented. If I were, I'd be unhappy, but I'm not, so life is peaches and cream on the poker front in spite of being down several bi's over my last 10k hands.

I and my family recently entered a pretty hard situation. I won't describe the situation, it's immaterial to my point here, other than to say it's emotionally stressful and caused us to withdraw quite a bit from the outer world. You know the sayings regarding how you find out who your real friends are when things aren't going well - those sayings pretty much sum up my feelings atm. Not in the sense that any of our friends have abandoned us per se, in the sense that some truly special people have really stepped in. Most of those are the usual suspects, very close friends and family - we don't expect necessarily as much as they give, but when they give more than that it's special. But a few of these special people are casual acquaintances of whom you wouldn't have any expectations - and when they perform special acts of kindness, even very simple ones, it's so wonderfully unexpected that it restores your faith in human potential and inspires you to want to be a better person. 

I finally got around to watching most of Eightfold Path - omg, do I feel dense for taking so long to get around to watching it. If you haven't watched it because you're trying to improve your game, and think this is "nice to have" info, don't make the mistake I did (I've been a DC member for over a year and a half and never watched it) - watch it this weekend. Seriously. If you start off feeling like you don't like the presentation for whatever reason, and I mean WHATEVER reason, force yourself to watch a couple of episodes anyhow. After two ep's, I guarantee you will have found something worthwhile (please, please, please make it through ep 4, if you do, you'll watch the whole series).

Enough advertising for Tommy, he doesn't need it, everyone loves the series.

It did prompt me to do something I hadn't done before, and that was to look at my winrate by time of day for the year (prompted by the reciprocality discussion in Eightfold Path). Lo and behold, I discovered a pattern that I wasn't aware of - my winrate is consistently highest for the year, and consistently month on month, between my hours of 5AM and 10AM, and then from 9PM through 2AM. My winrate is worst from 1pm to 5pm my time. You might think I would've noticed this before, but honest to god, I never realized it.

Before watching Eightfold Path, I would have attributed this to the player pool or something like that. Now I realize that these are the times when I'm in my best physical and mental condition (I have an odd sleeping schedule ldo), and when I have the fewest distractions (I have 3 kids ldo). Cutting out some of my C game may be as simple as studying in the afternoon rather than playing.

Tommy and Wayne, thanks so much!!!

I'm going to pat myself on the back a little, and then chew myself out a little.

I'm tilting today. After running pretty hot for a nice long stretch, I got hit with a couple of coolers and missed several draws that I'd chosen to play aggressively, so I'm down 4bi's today. The 4bi loss, though, wasn't produced by tilt - I reviewed the sessions, and other than a couple of "normal" mistakes, I can see that I played my A (well, at least B+) game through that point - the tilt started after that and lasted for a single session (around 450 hands).

The most common way in which I tilt (and the way I tilted in that session) is to start second guessing myself left and right, leading to a weirdly tight passive game in alot of spots, including too many light showdowns. It's a strange form of impatience - I'm not one of those guys who goes aggrotard when I tilt, I just find myself thinking that Villain COULD have such and such busted draw/medium strength hand, and it's been a while since I've been involved in a 20bb pot, so...

OK, so great, I recognized my tilt and stopped playing. Yay! I'll take a break for a while and do something else after I post this. That's the pat on the back.

So here's the part that's not so great - I still haven't watched Tommy Angelo or any of the other "poker mindset" vids (Tolerance, Pokersense, etc.). I've read The Poker Mindset by Taylor and Hilger about 10 times and really liked it, it had a big impact on my thinking, but I can't compare it to Eightfold Path simply because I've never watched it, and I haven't worked on my mindset beyond that book in a very long time. 

Keep meaning to get to it, time to kick myself in the ass and get it done.