Iscre4m's blog. (6max, 10NL)

Hello! Nice to see you, TakingAShot. Thanks for coming by!

It does feel good to have an opportunity to play a higher stake and experience what
awaits me further, like more aggressive preflop game. 3bet/4bet/5bet.
I had a dream to chase those deals, but it ended up tilting me. Now I'll just try to
get better and be comfortable at my site.

I'm withdrawing from bankroll challenge as I see no upside for me. I'm thankful for the opportunity, but as I expected it is a great tilt inducer for me and not participating will actually grow my bankroll faster (as I don't aim for weakly monetary targets). It is actually weird that PS does a challenge like this as it is completely against normal mindset concepts. Example, read books like: The Poker Mindset or The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler.

I also don't promise to be updating this blob more that once a week.

It took me over 150k hands to get a Royal Flush and I got full value out of it.

PokerStars Zoom No-Limit Hold'em, $0.10 BB (6 handed) - PokerStars Converter Tool from http://flopturnriver.com/

Button ($5.77)
SB ($10)
Hero (BB) ($10)
UTG ($5.87)
MP ($10)
CO ($17.37)

Preflop: Hero is BB with A, J
2 folds, CO raises to $0.30, 2 folds, Hero raises to $1, CO calls $0.70

Flop: ($2.05) K, 3, Q (2 players)
Hero bets $0.98, CO calls $0.98

Turn: ($4.01) 10 (2 players)
Hero bets $2.20, CO calls $2.20

River: ($8.41) A (2 players)
Hero bets $5.82 (All-In), CO calls $5.82

Total pot: $20.05 | Rake: $0.90

Results below:

Hey yo!

I feel a lot better after I quit a silly (for my mindset) poker bankroll challenge. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
However, I think PS are doing a good work to keep players interested and I'm cool with it.

Learning tool of the day: Doug Polk youtube channel is a must watch. Athough he talks a lot about balancing River bluff range (which is not too important at micros, or rather to remove most bluffs, I guess) I think that it's a great learning value and it's also free. For example, way ahead - way behind spots are explained very well.

I have a new target. I'll not climb up in stakes just because my BR allows it. Instead I'll play about 100-200k hands at 10NL and then improve some ranges 'n' stuff.
At the moment I have played 67k hands, where I was break-even for 50k hand stretch. I'll see how it goes. It's not too bad, because I made very big mistakes and now I seem to have improved some spots (still many to go). I look at this stake (10NL) as my learning stake.

The best way to learn poker is to play more and learn less, IMO. With that I mean, that I'd rather think on a concept and then play like 20-30k hands to just improve that spot and understand basics. The worst thing is to learn many concepts at the same time and not having a playing experience and with that I mean 5k hands, 10k hands. It's nothing, very few spots.

At the moment I'm learning how to defend my BB and I have to say that it will take like 10k (BB hands) hands to get to the place where I defend enough hands. The problem for me is that I forget to defend lower part of my range (like 264 combos, 10%), because I used to be too tight and need to relearn. If I'd chose to work on another poker concept at the same time, then this would suffer.

Following! GL

Hey, what's up, gigaPT! Thank you for coming by!

Poker's good, life's even better

Feeling good poker wise and real life is getting even better. It is so much more enjoyable to play the game, when it's all fine with all the other needs and values in life. Automatically, I think, it might get easier for people to desensitize away from money if they just put all the REAL values in the first place. Then poker is just a game.
This is exactly how I want to look at this game and even try to get away from it more often.
Family, girlfriend, kids, pets, sport, a walk in a park - all are more important and it's free and everyone deserves it without being in top 10 % of player pool (at their stake). Just live first and play second.

EV of a ticket

I had an interesting situation a long time ago, when I was still a student. Me and my buddy we were driving in a car. He was a driver and at about 25% through the distance from point A to point B we had a problem situation. Now, the thing was that he realized he forgot his driving license at home. Problem here (in my country) is that, if you get stopped by the police and don't have a license to show, then you will pay a fine of about (let's say) $20.

The question is following, what is the best play here? What get's us the best EV? To go back home or just keep on moving forward?

Here is how I came up with the best play:
X = I asked my friend "How often have you noticed police on this road? Like once a weak, once a month?" Answer was like = once every 50 days, so our expected day to be caught was 2% (we can manipulate the data a bit) ;
Y1 = We calculated how much fuel we will consume if we just keep going to point B (and then back to A, because we planed on returning home);
Y2 = We also calculated much fuel we will consume if we go back to point A and then to point B(and then back to A, because we planed on returning home);
(We took the average fuel consumption on given amount of distance and multiplied it by fuel price)

Y1-Y2 = F (fuel economy in $ if not returning for a drivers license);
X*$20 = 0.02 * 20 = $ 0,40 (which is what we pay to police in a long term)

So, basically, fuck it, just keep on rolling!

i've realized that after i played enough poker i was thinking about many life decisions in terms of EV. i think that's a plus

Hey Tomaloc, thank's for coming by!

Probability in life

Yeah it's fun to recognize situations where we can use some statistics and probability to our use.
Also, another interesting point is that there is so much variance in real life and it's crazy how lucky or unlucky we get from many x, y and z. It's like, for example, if I wouldn't get lucky/unlucky the other day and by these consequences do or didn't do the thing X, I might never find "this" (but other) special person in my life.

See, I feel very luck that I won a lottery of getting born at a good family and in decent material conditions, while there are so many people, who lost the same lottery so badly. Also, there might have been few close situations where I might have died, but got lucky (probability) that certain circumstances went my way. Say, there was this lucky car accident, which went well for me. Once in a winter time we did an accidental 360 degrees spin on a highway (=X), where there was a big slope at the sides of the road (=Y) and snow stopped our car (=Z) and no one came from the opposite way towards us (=A). I might certainly be running above EV in Life.

I heard there is some kind of a book, which reveals many interesting points about probability in life and how lucky we might or might not get. I'm looking forward to find (and read) it some day.

New challenge - No session graphs or money checking

Whenever I play poker there are moments when I look into my current session's graph.
I reread J.Tendler's book "The Mental Game of Poker" and suddenly realized that I'm playing
so much worse while doing it. My challenge from this point on is not to look in a sessions graph,
but I have to start with little steps, so ...

Challenge: Not to look into a sessions graph for next 5000 hands.
Current hand amount at 10NL = 60 600h. Target deadline = 65 600.
Reward: If I manage to do this, then I'll keep going for another X amount of hands and will see how far can I go.
If failed: I'll post a feedback of my mindset - explaining why I looked there and what is the logic behind this.

Challenge update #1 (No session graphs or money checking)

I did it! Not looking into a graph was easier than I expected to. I also feel that I'm in a more control
over myself and can concentrate on strategy a tiny bit more.

Challenge: Not to look into a sessions graph for next 5000 hands.
Current hand amount at 10NL = 65 600h. Target deadline = 70 600.
Reward: If I manage to do this, then I'll keep going for another X amount of hands and will see how far can I go.
If failed: I'll post a feedback of my mindset - explaining why I looked there and what is the logic behind this.

Total amount of progress: 5k hands.

Challenge update #2

Challenge: Not to look into a sessions graph for next 27 860 hands.
Current hand amount at 10NL = 72 140 hands. Target deadline = 100 000 hands.

Total progress: 11 540 hands.

I highly advise this type of challenge for everyone, who wants to battle his/her own short term thinking leaks.
Some bonuses that come with this are:
- Since you are not gonna look, you will never know by how much you are up or down, therefore you will rather start to think if those decisions made you a money in long term run;
- I think it will also help you to deal with the variance better, because winning doesn't mean you play well and loosing doesn't mean you play bad. And since you don't know where you're at (this day, last day, last week, etc.), your only weapon is to check if your general stats in HEM are OK;
- You wont start to play more or less aggressive because you are losing and also you wont start to play more or less aggressive because you are wining, but instead you'll keep thinking: "OK. What's my game-plan in this position against this particular table/player?".

I think I made my point.

Strategy for BB update

Looks like I have better results than before, but I still want to put in some volume to be sure and be able to analyze my ranges and lines properly.

EDIT: I widened my BB vs BU ranges by a lot (often I play about ~50% of hands).

Challenge: I failed a couple of times and looked into a graph while playing. I can learn from this that I should make easier 5k hand goals and look into it after each 5k. Just because I want to and I shouldn't build up an additional pressure. I'll trick my brain a bit.
More on this later.

Poker: I haven't played for a week since my job doesn't allow it. It goes like this: Weak1 - work, weak2 - poker, and so on …

Strategy: Thank you world! There is so much free stuff on internet. I just need to put in volume … to prove the strategy in practice.

Life: Life is love. Love is life. It's all good. Have a good one!

Hi Iscre4m,
Enjoyed reading your blog and success
Hopefully see another blog about your NL25 adventures soon

Regards

Matt