Thanks for the warm welcome Laz.
I’ve always had a problem with assessing my performance and analysing my game. Everyone needs some sort of metric to measure their performance and they work around that metric or sets of metric.
When starting poker I think everyone rushes to profit/loss as that metric and so did I. Then there are others like EV, hands played, time played etc. None of these really worked for me.
Profit/Loss for obvious reasons and that brought about a big hate losing tilt problem. I’d book my wins sooner, I’m talking play 10 mins, up 3 BIs I’d call it a day cause it would suck to end the day at less than 3 BIs profit then.
Hands/Time Played was slightly better but I’d increase my volume and no. of tables and the quality of my decisions would fall drastically. I would just bloody overdo it thinking I need to grind it out, especially if I’m down or running breakeven, gotta grind out the period to sweet profit land.
Here are some of the highest volume days I’ve put in.
Spoiler
Overall in these high volume days shown, I was down almost 7 BIs in over 100k hands, pure bad mindless play only focussing on volume.
So I’ve decided a new metric for myself to measure the quality of my play and measure my performance, I call it error rate. I don’t like too long posts so I’ll explain the metric in this spoiler.
Spoiler
I play the day and avoid checking results, the next day before starting my playing day i open a filter i created that filters hands where i won or lost > 8.5bb.
I have created new tags in HM2 to mark hands namely, played correctly, played incorrectly and optimal play unknown.
I review all these hands and mark them based on how I think they were played, correct, incorrect or I don’t know.
Then I calculate the % of incorrectly played hands to the total reviewed ( which is like ~50 per 1500 hands played). I call this figure my error rate.
Whenever this figure goes up i'll know i'm playing bad regardless of my results or the variance involved.
So the implications are:-
1. I am still result oriented my result now is not variance dependent it is the quality of my play dependent, however there is variance in my quality of play too and a proper work ethic can reduce that variance.
2. I am analysing hands a lot more now than I used to cause I need to know my performance and this measure is the closest I have been able to come to measuring quality of my play rather than just won/lost results. Also this helps me find spots where I don’t know what to do when I’m playing in auto pilot mode also the mistakes I commonly make, the leaks I have and can fix them more effectively.
3. In due process I hope to become less money result oriented and more quality of play result oriented. This should fix my hate losing tilt and other money related tilt which are rooted cause of the problem that we measure performance on money and not play.
4. I make better quality decisions on the table, 1 hand incorrectly played from 30 hands is 3.33% which means 2-3 such hands can make my desired 10% acceptable error rate to 20%. so now all of a sudden I'm not worried about how much I might lose if I'm wrong, it’s about the quality of decision only regardless of the outcome.
There is enough room for improvement in this type of metric too which think I’ll improve on as time goes by, maybe stuff like have ratings for various kinds of incorrectly played hands so that I know which are the bigger problems I need to work on more seriously.
The aim is to keep this error rate as low as possible, lower than 10% for now and then go lower, and at the same time increase my volume but slowly and gradually so that the error rate doesn’t suffer cause that’s the most important metric and volume of hands follows.
I also plan on increasing the number of tables right away which I already have, moved from 6 to 9. Did so cause 6 tabling makes me get bored sooner, I need music to keep me grinding and I try funky stuff in between plays that leaks money from my win rate. 9 tabling keeps me going properly, I play my standard game which is auto pilot mode most of the time. From here I'll slowly increase my session lengths and eventually add more tables and go up to 12 tables or even more if I can handle it.
I am convinced that its way better to play more tables and hands in auto pilot mode than play 6 tables and think about your game while playing. The thinking about your game should be done away from the table when you’re analysing your play and fixing leaks in your auto pilot mode.
Auto pilot mode after all is the unconscious competence where we need to train skills and fix leaks so that we can achieve high levels of performance.
Also interestingly, I noticed that my error rate in sessions where I 6 table is usually higher than when I 9 table cause 9 tabling doesn’t give me room to do any tomfoolery.
So this blog is about helping me fix leaks in my auto pilot mode and where I do my away from the table work that should help me higher levels of prolonged performance at high efficiency. I plan to be able to be playing 150k hands a month soon but not too soon that I compromise on error rate.
I hope I can get some good advice here along the way to help me fix my leaks :).
A
5
lesser club combos that he can bluff with otr. Versus fishes I am bet folding river (idk about 1/3rd?). Thin value against weaker Aces. Vs regs without reads I'm X folding.
instead of A :club:. 