I am done with being a life nit.

The past 4 days I have mostly been studying from videos. I am away from Vancouver, have no access to a solver/poker until Sunday. I am excited to get home and get some real work in, but for now this is all I can do.

The course material I have been studying has been really good for understanding how to build a strategy. There are a few small things that I have learned that might come into as a big factor later. It triggered some thoughts on my end, so since I don’t have much poker to talk about I thought I would post them here.

GTO..as least on the river has an unstable equilibrium. Meaning a small change to opponents range can mean a big deviation in your strategy. For example if Villian is slightly over calling we just stop bluffing all together, and if they are slightly over folding then we fire all of our bluffs. I think this actually makes things simpler in game. Very simple set of reads, or population data can really make rivers easier. At least in a vacuum.

Since the equilibrium is unstable I think it would be very very hard to construct anything balanced at the tables. It doesn’t surprise me that some of these twitch streamers estimate a frequency and roll a rng for their action. My understanding on balance is: since they don’t know what villain is doing then they will be winning sometimes against certain villains and losing against others. I hear the argument that we don’t know what this player will do so we play GTO, but I don’t know if I agree that the line of thinking, while valid, is the best approach. I think I hear Doug Polk even making this argument. “Could be better, could be worse? Who knows”

Consider the analogy of ranges, lots of new players, myself included, try and put someone on an individual hand, when they are new. We do this because we, as humans, think deterministically rather than probabilistically, and it’s what makes poker really hard. However putting someone on a single hand is not good because we need to consider the range at a given point. If they are bluffing 30% of the time with a half pot bet, we need to call since we only need to win 25% to be better than folding. With a single hand we are going to calling or folding almost at random since we are only picking a hand that beats us or we beat, and will be biased. Every time we fold there we are losing money.

So why, if we know hand ranges are good, are we not considering a range of villains? How often does a villain with the stats we have seen so far call too much on the river? If we know 75/100 villains with these stats overfold this river we really want to start bluffing a lot, we might be wrong for this villain, but overall (which is what we care about) we are right. What percent of them will have the tendency to be on one side of the equilibrium or the other. I think this is a better way to try and make some of these decisions, rather than to assume they are balanced. Being balanced on the river is really hard, so why are we assuming unknowns are doing it?

GTO does have a nice property where, (in heads up only..this isn’t guaranteed for multiway), if we play closer to GTO than our opponent we will beat them for some win rate. But there is no guarantee there is a lot of win rate. If you play with a solver, and solve for equilibrium, note down the EV, then node lock villain to have some crazy actions. You can see against the static GTO range you get an EV increase, but it usually isn’t a lot compared to if you re-solve for the exploitative strategy against that crazy villain range you just created. Is the default assumption of balanced the best way to make long run EV?

This ended up being quite long, so there is more about mixing I noticed while playing around with solvers but I will leave that to another day.

I am not pretending to have the answers here, there may be huge gaps in what I am missing here. Everything I am saying here is really on paper, and there may be practical considerations I am missing. I expect my mind to change a lot.

Any comments on this above rant is appreciated wether you think I am asking good questions or a huge fish. I like to hear other points.

Thanks everyone.

All the best for 2021 — I didn't realize you were from Vancouver — I live up the Fraser Valley a bit.

Have you played live in any of the casinos around here?

Good Luck with your poker journey, i believe your plan is solid, If you do something similar like Nick Howard and Patrick Howard did ( nightvision and ether) you will have success.

Do you have some H2N popup for the MDA process or will you build one from scratch? I use w34z3l deathstar with some tweaks its pretty good for the price in my opinion.

How will you buy Bodog/Ignition hands for MDA, i think there arent any sites selling hands from this site at least the main ones.

Originally posted by WizardOfOddz
Good Luck with your poker journey, i believe your plan is solid, If you do something similar like Nick Howard and Patrick Howard did ( nightvision and ether) you will have success.

Do you have some H2N popup for the MDA process or will you build one from scratch? I use w34z3l deathstar with some tweaks its pretty good for the price in my opinion.

How will you buy Bodog/Ignition hands for MDA, i think there arent any sites selling hands from this site at least the main ones.

I will probably use a custom one, or build my own. I am not sure on the bodog. I have some friends that have a lot of hands, but I joined a group that might have done some of that work for me. I was mainly going to use it for fish in the beginning where they are all kind of the same, but I am not quite there yet. Since it is going to be mass profiled I might just have to look at datapoints where I have a lot of confidence and move out. Or find friends lol.

New blog post

I decided to just post one blog a week now, otherwise it’s going to be me rambling about results. This week I had to re-calibrate my study. I joined the EQ-Poker Patreon. I almost don’t want to mention it because the value for $40 CAD a month is insane, but he is a really nice guy so I thought I would give the few, but amazing, people that read this blog a shout out.
His first few videos explained a lot about GTO, why we simplify and how the structure of poker it self makes it very hard for humans to be balanced. I really didn’t think about it like this. I am a really big fan of this approach and it makes the path to improving much clearer.

The basic outline for how to improve is like what I was doing, but slightly different. Simple flops and then focus on learning turns and rivers. This is well known for now. A lot of the MDA is done for me and I can study for effectively with working full time. He made some very insightful points about river ranges that I never would have figured out on my own.
I switched to his pre-flop ranges to study for now, and I have some fish protocol lines that I am making sure I understand. There is 3+ fish at my table all the time, and I am in a pot with them so often that I thought it would be most beneficial to start there. Most of my money is going to come from them so I am studying these for now. I will do deeper work in cycles. There are just so many bad players that I almost can’t work out a reg strategy at the tables yet.

I am also running a bunch of sims in the background for study later. For now I think I have a good enough idea for simplified flops that studying weirder spots won’t give me that much EV. I feel really good about knowing how to improve and then just putting the work in.

I am still going to priorities study over play. I have been studying 1hour every day, but play 30-60 minutes. This will change, but for now I more so want to make it a habit.

My mindset has been ok / poor. Vancouver is in lockdown and everyone is out with covid or not coming out. I have been feeling anxious again lately. I was going to go snowboarding this AM, and I just didn’t. I am forcing myself to go tomorrow and will post about it here for accountability. Right now it’s the only form of exercise I can get. Gyms and BJJ is locked down.
I found myself worrying about work a lot. It’s not a bad place to work, and I was told I am doing really well. I don’t know if this will ever go away, but when it’s bad I want to lay on the couch and be alone a lot and it isn’t healthy. I tend to want to eat a lot of junk food. I did not do good on eating healthy this week either.

Dating has been pretty meh. Lots of matches on the apps, but it’s hard to find someone you connect with. Just patience there.

The poker part has been fun / easy. I am running well, but still not super happy with my play. I will stick to NL10 for a few months and see what happens. Not being able to work out feels like it’s feeding my other bad habits.
Next week I will cook at home the whole day. I will just worry about it one meal at a time. No junk food until Saturday.
That’s it for me.

Hi, awesome blog so far.:f_thumbsup:
Although, I don't like to read long blog posts, I'm hungry for yours.

I subbed and looking forward to your documenting.

I wish you the best of luck!

I'm wondering if you know Gary Vaynerchuck?

Originally posted by VorpalF2F
All the best for 2021 — I didn't realize you were from Vancouver — I live up the Fraser Valley a bit.

Have you played live in any of the casinos around here?

Sorry I missed this message! I haven't played any at all. Have you played any? Know any good spots?

Originally posted by mjez1
Hi, awesome blog so far.:f_thumbsup:
Although, I don't like to read long blog posts, I'm hungry for yours.

I subbed and looking forward to your documenting.

I wish you the best of luck!

I'm wondering if you know Gary Vaynerchuck?

Thanks!

I do know of him. He really has a get out there and grind attituded that I respect.

Originally posted by Chowchow12
I do know of him. He really has a get out there and grind attituded that I respect.

I felt his influence in your post

Start of Blog post.
This week was a lot more consistent with poker. Darius’s group, and his approach to improving is great. There is a lot of gold in his group, and it’s conceptual, meaning you can use them to build your own strategy, which is what I want. As a tangent here, my goal is to just get good at poker, and the money will come. I think working on things, doing them yourself, realizing it wrong, fixing it and repeating is slower to get results in the short term, but your roof will be higher in the long run because you understand it more.

The general approach for getting better in a spot is: data (solves, MDA, whatever) -> simplify -> adjust -> practice.

For pre-flop that is taking some pre-flop solutions, building a strategy that is pure, or simple mixing, then adjusting it for population tendencies. In microstakes people don’t 4bet as a bluff for example, so we can add more three bets. Solvers three bet kind of polarized, so aside from the bb we use linear, but we can use a % of our range similar to solver. Then we learn them and use them at the tables.

Flop, turn and river strategy can follow a similar pattern. You get a bunch of solves, and simplify it by reducing the number of bet sizings etc. I don’t want to give away the actual strategy that Darius recommends we start with, but I think if someone wants to experiment with finding simple strategies with GTO+ they can get quite close. Post flop for example if we used 3 bet sizing on 3 streets IP we would have 3^3 decision points = 27, OOP we add in a check so that’s 4^3 = 64, so if you simplify the flop then you really simplify the turn and river.

Once you have a simple strategy down you can go through your complex strategies / solves and add in a small piece each time where you’re simple strategy is costing you a lot of EV. If you start low enough your simple strategy is probably enough to beat those stakes.
I think a lot of people want the “just tell me the lines so I can go crush”, but I think this is really flawed thinking. Eventually the game will change and you will rely on others again, and for some people that’s ok. Personally, I want to be able to make my own strategies and get better at the game myself. Limitless doesn’t get the lines from someone. Sure he gets ideas and stuff from his friends, but the absolute sickos figure it out. I want to be a sicko.

I have been really motivated for poker. Study has been easy and play has been easier. I have been “wanting to book a win” a lot, and I have been forcing myself to decide on the time I am done playing and then just staying at the computer for that time. Practicing my Reg strategy at the tables has been tougher because there are like 3-5 fish at any given time, but that is minor. I have been running insanely good. Volume is really hard with regular 4 tabling, I am use to being able to get 2k hands pretty quick with zoom, but now it’s hard to get 500. I have been ramping up and playing more now, so volume will work itself out.

I have been getting some hands reviewed in Darius’s group, and then reading and trying to work out what I would do in all the posted hands. There are a lot of people who play a lot higher than me in there, so I am learning a whole lot from them.

I have been running so good that I need to start shooting NL25, with the deposit bonuses getting unlocked as well I am at $900 bankroll. (I started pretty high I think I up like $100 or $120 with the bonus). I played a little bit on NL25 last night, and there is a lot of fish at the tables still, so we will see how this goes. Shot taking hasn’t really been good for me in the past, but I think getting use to it now is really important.

I decided to post my graph as well. This is no sample, but I want to be open with results. Hands just take longer.

My results are here

Obviously a very sustainable winrate 😊.
I still see a lot of people talk about GTO vs Exploitative, and I think it’s very clear now that they are two sides of the same coin, but I think there could be an interesting discussion. I think you have a continuum of pure GTO vs Max Exploit, and there are dangers to both. If try and play GTO against all players all the time you’re protecting against things that aren’t really going to happen. You’re going to be worrying about picking the correct bluffing hand with blockers when it might not matter. Pure max exploit and you risk opponents adjusting very quickly, and the data you have to exploit might just be coincidence and not a real leak. Where on the line should you sit? There is also min exploit where you exploit at one decision node, then play equilibrium post that node.

I think you need to consider the factors: will they notice, if they notice can/will they adjust correctly, and if they adjust how hard is it for you to re-adjust. If they can’t or won’t adjust correctly then it’s all good. Fish for example, just aren’t going to counter you properly because they aren’t fish. If regs see you getting out of line with fish there isn’t much they can do about it, since they aren’t in the hand with you.
In the case where you have some secret against regs, what do you do? Can you slightly exploit them to where they don’t notice? Can you exploit them with some strategy then move back when they adjust? How do you know they have adjusted? I don’t want to be in a situation where if I get found out I need to leave the table. Especially if it is on a named site then I am done for good. It is an interesting problem and I have some ideas, but I am not sure I have the complete answer. What do you think?

That is it for me today. Next blog I will post more life stuff and less poker stuff, but for now I am motivated to keep improving. There are going to be dark times as they are in every blog I have read it’s the nature of poker. I am hoping to get through it.

This week was interesting for poker. I studied my face off but played very little.

Two reasons:

1. Bodog ran into issues with reg tables.
2. I am having mindset issues with wanting to book a win, and it's tough than I expected.

My NL25 shot went really well, and I felt like I was waiting for the moment where it all came crashing down. I would win 1-2 BIs then want to stop the session. Initially I thought I could just blast through it, but it a very powerful sensation. My strategy to deal with this was to play for 60 minutes, and it was about 90% of what I could take. Then take an hour off and come back for another 30 minute session. Coming back for this session helped a lot. After doing this for a few days it was easier. I have a lot more cushion at NL25 now, so I think this is helping as well, but there is something telling about my mindset here: I have a emotional connection to short term results. There will be a battle with this all the way up. I don't want to play more than 90 minutes on weekdays for now, so this strategy will be ok for now.

I feel confident in my play in these pools they are just so soft, so I am not sure why I want to book a win so bad. Darius gave some advice about not trying to numb yourself to the sensation, and be aware of it, and I think it's really good advice. I am just not certain how to implement this. I hear good things about meditation. I will need to look more into this.

I came through some theoretical break throughs as well. I posted this in my Darius's discord, and I don't want to give away too much but consider this example:

Lets say, for the sake of example, a player is at a river node and they have 10 value combos and 100 trash combos. The play decides to bluff trash at 10%. What is their bluffing percentage? Most people think 10, and that could be correct if their choice is value betting, bluffing or checking. But after deciding to bet they have 10 value combos, and 100*0.1 (100 trash combos bluffed 10% of the time) = 10 bluffing combos, so the rate they are bluffing given they have bet is actually (10/20)100=50%. We are printing here.

This example demonstrates balance is really dependent on not just your frequency, but your actual combos you hold. If we don't get to the river with a different range than a solver and the solver says bluff 25%, the RNG won't protect us. We could be over or under bluffing here. Something to keep in mind. In practice probably only 1-2% I would think. But I Believe this gives a lot of power to min exploit strategies. I need to play around with some solves, to see how extreme this can get, but I think you could put yourself in a position where you can be exploited on the river and there is nothing you can do about it with your river strategy.

I am learning a lot about how to get better. I actually had a lot of issues with adjusting before starting up poker again. I think it was an artifact of Zoom, where you just had to do it so infrequently, but now I play very differently against "regs" than "fish".

I had some really great advice for bluff catching as well, and seeing other people better than me execute these, and post the hands have been really helpful to calibrate my own thresholds.

I have been using the trainer in GTO+ for some of the simple strategies too to help calibrate how a solver plays here. It really helps with lines that are less familiar. I mostly drilled BTN vs BB in SRPs, and it actually helps a lot with very little hands. It's actually interesting to see how the solver tries to exploit you. When you realize pop will never do this, you can almost see where the EV is coming from.

Continuted results

I don't think I have ever been on a heater like this before. I wanted to share this sample since it's so pretty haha. Again no sample and not sustainable, but sure looks nice.

The next week I want to be more focused in my learning. I have been all over the place. I am going to spend the next 3-4 days on OOP SRP strategies (BB vs SB and CO vs BTN), and then after that I will go to bluff catching or three bet pots.

I would like to get more volume in next week as well, but we will see. It's still early days, so one day at a time.

That's it for me today.

Hey! Congrats on your progress. I enjoyed reading your post very much.

Keep that good stuff flow

Hey,
really enjoy reading your blog. I am in a similar situation as you are, as I am also working full time in tech, and additionally I have a family which leaves very little time for poker, maybe like 2-3 hours a week. I usually play 2-4k hands a month.
I am very interested in MDA based approaches, but I do not really have access to any good resources. Do you have any recommendations?
You mentioned that you sometimes struggle with your mindset. I can highly recommend meditation, there are a few good apps out there, personally I use Calm. Also, cold showers are great, scary, but effective IMO. You learn to control your nervous system, your body reaction to shock, and that helps also for stressful mental situations. Checkout Wim Hof method, if you like.
I wish you good luck with your journey!

Originally posted by monteCarlol
Hey,
really enjoy reading your blog. I am in a similar situation as you are, as I am also working full time in tech, and additionally I have a family which leaves very little time for poker, maybe like 2-3 hours a week. I usually play 2-4k hands a month.
I am very interested in MDA based approaches, but I do not really have access to any good resources. Do you have any recommendations?
You mentioned that you sometimes struggle with your mindset. I can highly recommend meditation, there are a few good apps out there, personally I use Calm. Also, cold showers are great, scary, but effective IMO. You learn to control your nervous system, your body reaction to shock, and that helps also for stressful mental situations. Checkout Wim Hof method, if you like.
I wish you good luck with your journey!

I think you can get H2N with the DeathStar hud and then "find" some hands from stars or something online. I can't really share what I have unfortunately. That is what I would do.

This week was busy. I was on a Machine Learning Engineer panel aimed at helping new grads with their career. It was an interesting experience, normally I am on the other side of the fence trying to gain a lot of knowledge about how to get my job. It was a cool experience, and my LinkedIn blew up. I also had a new project at work, and it’s been a few long days so I can figure this out.

I think poker is getting harder to be honest. I am heading down the dunning kruger effect. The past few sessions I just felt completely lost and started making weird plays. I think it’s a form of tilt to be honest. I also had my booster the day before, so I really don’t think my brain was working at full speed. Adapting to a more aggressive, and looser strategy, is going to have some growing pains, and I just everything felt like a mess suddenly. I didn’t really know what to do in a lot of spots. I think I was treating bluff catching in 3bet pots like bluff catching in SRPs and it’s tighter, so I fixed that up a but yesterday and tried to re-calibrate my thresholds vs regs. Wasn’t sure if it was run bad or if I am just getting smashed there, but the data I have suggests they are a lot tighter than I thought.
All in all the results aren’t bad, for feeling like my level of play I have just been breaking even, which is funny to me.

I decided to just invest in coaching. My time is limited and the $$ I would spend on it would give be a better ROI than what would happen if I invested it in the market, so I am going to pull a little from my monthly savings. I think it’s the correct play. If I can get to NL100/NL200 quicker with this then it will pay for itself + Expected market returns quicker. Pretty sure this will pay off well. I don’t have enough time for a CFP, but I think hourly will work out great.
Poker mindset has gotten a lot better. Playing for longer periods is not nearly as hard for me anymore. Life mind set has been rough to be honest. In generally I have been noticing my patience is lower and I have been getting pent up in general. I am just starting to get back to the gym now that they are open again, but I can feel myself being tense all the time. This pandemic has really messed with my mindset the past few years. Amazon stressed me out so much, even now that I am out, I think I am still feeling residual effects. Small things really give a big emotional response from me.

This is it for me, there isn’t too much exciting aside from keeping on trucking a lot and starting coaching with Darius on Monday. Hoping to keep the improvement on the up and up.

Originally posted by monteCarlol
Hey,
really enjoy reading your blog. I am in a similar situation as you are, as I am also working full time in tech, and additionally I have a family which leaves very little time for poker, maybe like 2-3 hours a week. I usually play 2-4k hands a month.
I am very interested in MDA based approaches, but I do not really have access to any good resources. Do you have any recommendations?
You mentioned that you sometimes struggle with your mindset. I can highly recommend meditation, there are a few good apps out there, personally I use Calm. Also, cold showers are great, scary, but effective IMO. You learn to control your nervous system, your body reaction to shock, and that helps also for stressful mental situations. Checkout Wim Hof method, if you like.
I wish you good luck with your journey!

If you don't have any idea how to start doing MDA you can sign W34z3l training site jedipoker, it's the cheapest training site with such content.

After you have some idea you'll have 2 paths to follow:

1. The harder one
-Step 1 Buy a solver and run a small subset of flops. Try to understand why the equilibrium use a small or bigger sizing, frequencies etc.., you can read Modern Poker Theory that will give you a good framework to work with solvers and understand equilibrium strategies.

-Step 2 is do MDA using Hand2note for an specific line, position, sizing, villain type (for example: Facing Flop Cbet BB vs BU 33%psb cbet), you will nodelock a solver tree and see the best response against this real strategy. Your goal is simplify your strategy in some way that will make easier to execute when playing even if you lose some amout of EV.

-Step 3 Create some conclusion and summarise them, try to use something like microsoft onenote, evernote and keep them organized.

2.The easier one
-Enter some poker team that you trust and they will give you the tools, blueprint strategies. The downside is that you will need to give them 50% of your profits.
-The best poker teams on the market are BRPC (Brazilian Poker Crew) and Pokerdetox, the other of poker teams are crappy and only want your money.

Thanks @WizardOfOddz, do not really want to hijack this thread, so quickly, CFP is not an option for me, because I lack the time resources. Doing the data analysis ourselves has some benefits as @Chowchow12 mentioned above, we do not have to rely on others, get a deeper understanding, and are able to transfer the approach to other games, limits, etc. On the downside, it is not easy without guidance (at least for me) and it is time-consuming. Also, IMO, not feasible if we do not at least by a couple of millions of hands from somewhere. Ideally we would do both, learn proven MDA based exploitative strategies, and verify by running our own analysis etc. I'll keep on searching...

Originally posted by WizardOfOddz

Originally posted by monteCarlol
Hey,
really enjoy reading your blog. I am in a similar situation as you are, as I am also working full time in tech, and additionally I have a family which leaves very little time for poker, maybe like 2-3 hours a week. I usually play 2-4k hands a month.
I am very interested in MDA based approaches, but I do not really have access to any good resources. Do you have any recommendations?
You mentioned that you sometimes struggle with your mindset. I can highly recommend meditation, there are a few good apps out there, personally I use Calm. Also, cold showers are great, scary, but effective IMO. You learn to control your nervous system, your body reaction to shock, and that helps also for stressful mental situations. Checkout Wim Hof method, if you like.
I wish you good luck with your journey!

If you don't have any idea how to start doing MDA you can sign W34z3l training site jedipoker, it's the cheapest training site with such content.

After you have some idea you'll have 2 paths to follow:

1. The harder one
-Step 1 Buy a solver and run a small subset of flops. Try to understand why the equilibrium use a small or bigger sizing, frequencies etc.., you can read Modern Poker Theory that will give you a good framework to work with solvers and understand equilibrium strategies.

-Step 2 is do MDA using Hand2note for an specific line, position, sizing, villain type (for example: Facing Flop Cbet BB vs BU 33%psb cbet), you will nodelock a solver tree and see the best response against this real strategy. Your goal is simplify your strategy in some way that will make easier to execute when playing even if you lose some amout of EV.

-Step 3 Create some conclusion and summarise them, try to use something like microsoft onenote, evernote and keep them organized.

2.The easier one
-Enter some poker team that you trust and they will give you the tools, blueprint strategies. The downside is that you will need to give them 50% of your profits.
-The best poker teams on the market are BRPC (Brazilian Poker Crew) and Pokerdetox, the other of poker teams are crappy and only want your money.

I use to get coaching from Weasel, I think maybe 5 or so sessions. Actually I was in one of his hand storm videos.

Regarding your explanation for "path 2". This won't work since you don't have enough data points for a given flop. There is a lot more "hand waving" involved than the plug and play method you described. You can figure out where population is making mistakes, example: folding too much, then move certain parts of your range into that node, and experiment with node locks for different strategies, that might be close to what you expect to be happening. to verify the solver does something close. This is where rubber meets the road for understanding poker and how to adjust.

The past week I finally started to downswing. I am not surprised about this, but the mental toll it took on me caught me off guard. The strategy I play is pretty high variance, and it felt like there was just something wrong. Since I am still new to this again I was actually convinced there was something wrong. It helped me study more, but it actually made me play worse. I lost confidence in every thing I was doing, and started to change the strategy.

It was wild. In my past playing this I remember the downswings feeling like they are playing tricks on you, but not like this. I mentioned this in our discord before, but running bad is kind of like being on acid. You know you’re running bad, just like you know you’re on acid, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

I tried to be very conscious about how I was feeling. It just felt like I was doing something wrong. My mind would wander looking for something to show that I “made a mistake” and sometimes they were found. I def punted more easily through this, and it might not be over yet, who knows.

My inner conscious stream would feel like losing chips is a loss of progress, and obviously this isn’t true. Especially since I am in 0 rush to get to NL50 now. It’s interesting to try and openly analyze my own thoughts. Getting sucked out on really doesn’t bother me, but when I lack confidence + a bad result then I get this mix of thoughts: “something is wrong”, “you’re doing it all wrong” and “you’re losing progress”. You’re getting worse, and going down the the Dunning Kruger effect.

Obviously this is silly, I am improving, studying every day and getting better, that is the progress, not the stochastic nature of my bankroll, but here I am writing about it.

Going to do some more jiu jitsu next week. I think I am going to go to the BJJ gym once or twice instead of just trading with my partner, and on the weekend I am going to go to Whistler to go snowboarding. Tomorrow I am actually going to the hill in Vancouver to go snowboarding as well.

Work has been okay. I effectively decided to try and move into research and without a PhD this might be very hard, but we will see. I am still new to Microsoft, and I still feel I need to prove myself before I start making any asks.

The main goals for poker are to keep playing, and keep trying to make sure I am keeping up with executing the basic strategy. I am reviewing hands constantly, and making a good effort to mark any hand I am unsure of for review later. I am studying spots as the defender since that is where I feel way less confident.

I had a session with Darius and it was really helpful. I just need to keep staying the course for now.

That’s it for me.

I don't really want to write a full blog entry today. Maybe tomorrow but in general I am experiencing really bad anxiety, and it's getting to the point where I want to do all these things, but doing them scares me.

Poker wise my biggest leak is not playing enough. Otherwise it's fine. I am actively marking hands and spots that show a constant pattern I work for a week, so it is a little like wack a mole, but confidence while playing is up.

Life wise I am a bit of a mess. I want to do all these things, but then find some reason to talk myself out of it, then get mad at myself for not doing it, and I am wearing myself down. The main point of the blog was to shed this, but it's really a struggle right now.

My BJJ Partner has covid so that is on hold for a while.

overall I think I could be doing better with things, so going to just try and build better habits back in slowly.

I am waisting a lot of my life being anxious.

Originally posted by Chowchow12
I don't really want to write a full blog entry today. Maybe tomorrow but in general I am experiencing really bad anxiety, and it's getting to the point where I want to do all these things, but doing them scares me.

Poker wise my biggest leak is not playing enough. Otherwise it's fine. I am actively marking hands and spots that show a constant pattern I work for a week, so it is a little like wack a mole, but confidence while playing is up.

Life wise I am a bit of a mess. I want to do all these things, but then find some reason to talk myself out of it, then get mad at myself for not doing it, and I am wearing myself down. The main point of the blog was to shed this, but it's really a struggle right now.

My BJJ Partner has covid so that is on hold for a while.

overall I think I could be doing better with things, so going to just try and build better habits back in slowly.

I am waisting a lot of my life being anxious.

Hey, this comes to mind:

In one of either this or the 2 subsequent episodes with Nick Howard, Nick says something nice along these lines:

It puts perspective on tough decisions, when you ask yourself, is the upfront pain bigger than the pain of regret for not doing it?

In any case, those podcasts are really amazing, they touch on so many interesting things, technically and psychologically. I highly recommend the listen.

Since you mentioned that you do not do it, I still very much recommend meditation. Jon Kabat-Zinn has some good books on it, or check out Waking Up by Sam Harris.

So, here you go, some advice that you didn't ask for. I hope that's ok? All the best!

Originally posted by monteCarlol

Originally posted by Chowchow12
I don't really want to write a full blog entry today. Maybe tomorrow but in general I am experiencing really bad anxiety, and it's getting to the point where I want to do all these things, but doing them scares me.

Poker wise my biggest leak is not playing enough. Otherwise it's fine. I am actively marking hands and spots that show a constant pattern I work for a week, so it is a little like wack a mole, but confidence while playing is up.

Life wise I am a bit of a mess. I want to do all these things, but then find some reason to talk myself out of it, then get mad at myself for not doing it, and I am wearing myself down. The main point of the blog was to shed this, but it's really a struggle right now.

My BJJ Partner has covid so that is on hold for a while.

overall I think I could be doing better with things, so going to just try and build better habits back in slowly.

I am waisting a lot of my life being anxious.

Hey, this comes to mind:

In one of either this or the 2 subsequent episodes with Nick Howard, Nick says something nice along these lines:

It puts perspective on tough decisions, when you ask yourself, is the upfront pain bigger than the pain of regret for not doing it?

In any case, those podcasts are really amazing, they touch on so many interesting things, technically and psychologically. I highly recommend the listen.

Since you mentioned that you do not do it, I still very much recommend meditation. Jon Kabat-Zinn has some good books on it, or check out Waking Up by Sam Harris.

So, here you go, some advice that you didn't ask for. I hope that's ok? All the best!

I will check them out, thanks!