Hi Guys
First;y apologies for the rather boring title. A little bit about me, I've been playing poker for nearly 2 years now and I think I have had a go a the majority of different games and formats SNG, MTTs, cash, a little PLO, a little Stud etc. and much like one of the other posters on the forum I could never really commit to learning any of properly. I would play one format for a few weeks but then I would want to try something else so I ended up being a jack of all trades but master of none.
I started playing some HUSNG at the turn of the year, hypers mainly and only really to improve my end game in SNGs. I found that I liked them and decided that I would put some effort in learning them. Hypers did me in so I switched to regular speed and eventually turbos which I am glad to say I have stuck with for around the last four months.
I can split my results into two distinct periods, it is a game of two halves as they say in football, pre-Greenbast and post-Greenbast (referring to the video pack). Pre-G I was a losing player prone to tilt and regularly donking off BI after BI. However post-G I feel like a different player everything seems to make more sense now. I did have a couple of coaching and leakfinder sessions with pbogz (who is a top man btw) but I believe that I had so many fundamental leaks that needed plugging at that time (plus other non-poker shit going on) that I didn't really get full benefit out of them.
To be fair a couple of things have changed in my personal life and basically I now have a lot fewer worries outside of poker than I did previously.
Anyway on with the goals. I currently play at the $7 turbos on Stars and have set myself the goal of reaching the $30 level in 6 months time. If I can manage this sooner then great but I need to allow some slack for work commitments etc. I currently in the Middle East 3 months at a time so I do have some free time to get games in and also to study. I would be interested in any advice as to how the $15 and $30 levels play as in my opinion the $7s play pretty much as the $3.50s and even the $1.50s.
My current BR is circa 50 BIs and I would be interested in opinions on when to take a shot. I am a little bit of a BR nit however.
I do have some poker friends that I chat with quite regularly on Skype but I would interested to hear from any other turbo or reg speed players.
My results so far post-G are:
If you are interested in what they were like the period before then just hold a mirror to the screen.
I will try and update regularly on my progress and also post any interesting hands that I'm not happy / not sure about.
What are you doing in the middle east/where at?
Good luck on the challenge, I'll be following.
I'm working as a Financial Consultant in Iraq for an Iraqi Group with fingers in all sorts of pies, so to speak. I'm currently working on a project setting up a Fuel Farm at one of the airports but to be honest I'm not sure what I'll be doing in a couple of months beacuse they seem to be expanding into everything over here. I travel to China next month for something to do with another company so it is quite varied.
It's not that great being away from home as I do have a family but if you take a long term view then it's a pretty good opportunity.
You have to be prepared to do without the three Bs, that's Booze, Bacon and Birds (women) but all in all it's not acutally that bad. At least I can indulge myself in the 3 Ps though that's Poker, Poker, Poker.
Ah interesting stuff. My buddy was out there for over a year as an engineer and he talked about black market bacon lol.
Haha I've never heard of that. You can get booze in other cities to where I am but to be honest I'm happy to stay off it for a while. Plus it would really look piss poor if I did roll in one day with stinking hangover when 99.9% of everyone else doesn't touch the stuff.
There's always the shisha pipe though as consolation.
What would you say were the main changes you made to your game (post g) that turned you into a winner?
Some of the changes that I've made are as follows:
- A lot of my mistakes could be put down to not adjusting to different villains. I now try to idenitfy what kind of player villain is and adjust accordingly. This is now the first thing I do when i play someone. I was quite bad at adjusting previously and would CBet and barrel calling stations, the more they called the more I got frustrated and the more I barrelled.
- Not making fuck you shoves / call offs with marginal holdings v super aggro (predominantly Russian) villains. I've become a lot more patient against these villains and I'm now happy to sit and wait for the right spot whereas I used to be desperate to get it in. This follows on a little from the first point.
- Passing up on small edges pre flop particularly when still quite deep. I used to be guilty of this a lot but now I think why should I take a small edge pre-flop when I'm going have a much larger edge post-flop.
- I think about and plan the hand more. If I CBet and I get called am I done with it or am I going to barrel and if so on what cards. I'll sometimes even say it out loud "I'll fire one barrel if he doesn't fold I'm done". I've also got better at defining ranges and basic hand reading than I was before whereas previously I was prone to not being able to give up in a hand even if I knew I was probably crushed.
- I used to give up too easily when I had good equity in the hand, sometimes folding bottom pair on the flop even on dry boards. This leak alone cost me tons of value.
- I used to be prone to spazzing v donk bets (and I do mean spazzing out) even readless. I would stacked off with fuck all in the past because someone dared to donk into me. Now I'll fold if I have nothing and call down if I have something and try and work out what his donks mean.
- I've worked on and improved my <25bb game a lot.
- I am tilting a lot less. Granted some of this is due to things outside poker but when I feel more in control I defo tilt less. I used to play when I wasn't in the right frame of mind or when in a bad mood and so my tilt threshold was very low and even losing a flip would cause me to go bananas.
- I've got better at 2 tabling so I'm not making rushed plays any more. I'm guilty of trying to run before I can walk and it cost me a good few BIs.
Don't get me wrong, I did used to have shorts spells of good play but unfortunately I had much longer spells of bad play.
It's been a while I know but as is usually the case once I go on record with a goal the arse fell out of my (poker) world. Basically I didn't dare show my face until I'd pulled it back around which involved me droppong right down and grinding it all back.
It seems that I am still prone to piss poor play mainly due to pretty bad tilt. The downswing on the graph below was made much worse that it needed to be because I play like a massive arse. It is almost as if I am watching myself just spunking buyin after buyin and making the worst plays against what I know to be the wrong players.
I still have a problem with walking away when I am losing, which let's face it is when I should be walking away. Anyway this is an ongoing problem that I will have to deal with.
Anyway quick catchup on other stuff, work - good, family - great. Back in the UK now for 2 weeks so will try to get some reasonable volume in. I have started to mix in a few $15s so all in all things are slowly moving in the right direction.
GL to everyone.
Hey, judging by your post (only posting again once you regrinded back) you're being way too results oriented in your macro-poker thinking.
"I still have a problem with walking away when I am losing, which let's face it is when I should be walking away."
This is definitely a mental leak.
You should NOT be walking away when you're up or down X buyins.
You should be aiming to be making the best decisions possible, completely independent of how you're running.
Any single session you play will be subject to a lot of variance and in the long term you will win more by playing emotionally indifferent to whether you're up or down.
Obviously if you're prone to tilting when you're down, then walking away will be +EV.
BUT this is just treating the symptom, not the fundamental problem.
The problem is that you haven't accepted the realities of poker.
I think you would benefit from reading the poker mindset => it provides a rational framework for thinking about the non-strategy randomness of the game. Personally I found it also illuminated a lot of mental leaks I had as a poker player resulting from my personality.
If you want a quick fix, rather than setting yourself monetary targets, set yourself volume targets for a session.
Consider (a somewhat contrived) example:
Irrational macro-poker thinking: I am an excellent player and entitled to win money at this game. I will play each session until I am up or down X buyins. I will be happy if I win and sad if I lose. If I lose I will post on the forums asking if the losses on my graph are due to variance.
Rational poker-thinking: I am a student of the game and committed to constantly improving my game. I am not entitled to win money at this game; in order to win, I must outplay my opponents. The randomness of poker is a good thing because that is where I find my technical edge vs my opponents. I will play X games focusing on the making decisions which yield the best expectation and then take a break, review my play and see if I could have played better in any spots. I know that the results of these X games do not matter materially to my long term earnings so the results will not affect my mood after my session. Additionally, these games will provide data for me to review my play and develop as a player which will materially affect my long term earnings. There will be times that I get outplayed and lose: I welcome these times because I have been presented with an excellent opportunity to improve my own game.
*Caveat: I did not take the time to write this out to be mean to you. From what I can see you are making a lot of the same macro-poker mistakes that I have struggled with personally. If I was in your position, I would want someone to illuminate these mental leaks for me. If you disagree with me, please let me know. I'd love to be wrong and have the opportunity to further develop my poker schema further :)
Cdon, you should produce content for this site.
Great post as always.
Hi Cdon
Firstly thank you for taking the time to reply especially in the fashion in which you did. You are 110% correct in your analysis of how I view poker at times. In my defence I don't posess this attitude all of the time but I do enough of the time for me to class it as a serious leak in my game.
The advice is very much appreciated especially from someone who has made similar mistakes in their thinking and managed to overcome them. BTW I've made a start on the book.
Update: I had been avoiding playing a lot recently, certainly not at the stake / level at which I should. Partly because I'm home and want to spend time with family etc, but also because I couldn't get myself motivated.
It was whilst re-reading and replying to Cdon's post that I decided to give my head a shake and just play some games at the level at which I am rolled for and to just take whatever the game throws at me.
No sexy graph but hopefully a much better mindset going forward.
Hi Jonathan,
I've read you posts here and I find it very amusing, especially when you talked about barrelling calling stations, getting frustrated of their calls and barelling some more , I literally started laughing in my chair lol. Reminds me of myself in my bad moments :)
I've been playing poker for a few years with decent results, I've won some money (good money for a poor student) first at NLH SNGs then at MTTs and then also at PLO MTTs. I've played mostly at micro/low stakes.
Now I'm heading over to HU SNGs I've played a few hundred tourneys and I seem to have a positive expectation against the average field. Only after a few thousand games will I be able to tell more precisely just how good a winner I can be. Currently I'm hungrily looking forward to learn from this site, from the forums, from the better players, I'm reading articles and books and doing my best to improve my game at HU SNGs.
Unfortunately, I have a job now and don't have the time I would like to. I would dedicate 40+ hours per week to poker, but due to other commitments (job, personal life) I can only put like 20+ at the moment.
What I wanted to talk about is the mental part of playing poker. I've read many articles in this years and also I have literally spent a lot of hours simply meditating about this aspect of poker and focusing about understanding how the variance works for/against you. Although I haven't had the time to study the technical aspects of the game as I'd like to (but as I said that's work in progress), I'm proud of having obtained a very clear picture of how you should deal with tilt management/variance. What helped me alot in this was my passion for statistics (it's some sort of a weird hobby for me).
In order to fully accept the fact that sometimes you just loose more than you should, it's worth studying some statistical theory (requires only basic math knowledge, nothing fancy).
I'm thinking of writing some articles about this subject but for now I'd like to underline a few basic ideas you should follow, mostly building on top of Cdon's advice.
I hope these will help you deal with, accept and eventually embrace the statistic swings you will get in HU SNGs. Some of my advice assumes you have played at least a few hundred games and noticed you ROI seems to be positive (you're not a fish).
Here it goes:
I could add some other things but I'll wait to see if you think my advice has any good value. I'm not a poker pro, just a guy who understands statistics and has also trained his ego in variance theory :)
Bogdan
Thanks for the post, believe it or not I read most days now before I play a session. Following on from Cdon's post I'm also targetting a minimum of 10 matched per session with the focus on the decisions rather than the results.
Early days with the new regime but I'll keep you guys updated......
Hey, glad to hear you appreciated the advice.
Best of luck with your goals :)
Cheers cdon
GL to you too.
Hi Jonathan you made a very nice post here and hopefully your still doing well at the moment and play now at 15s (since im doing the same think but at 7s level hehe) Love cdon and bogdan comments wow guys really happy to post out my things and push myself to read a lot of article day after day here to get a better view of everything for my game and love the message you deliver to jonathan since its also a quick reminder for myself. Keep on the great jobs and Jonathan keep us updated i will follow your evolution
Dont Let Variance Affect You!