I am done with being a life nit.

My goal for next month is to put it more volume and less worrying about trying to understand every single spot and stuff. I think I just like studying more than playing or something. I find I am making a lot of adjustments to my game and it's making me a little inconsistent. My goal for NL25 was to get the pattern matching down better and I think I have done that.

I am getting into these wormholes with trying to understand when we want to overbet some rivers vs GTO to try and understand what is happening with the pool vs betting medium size, but I don't think there is a lot of EV in doing this, but it just helps me brain have some kind of mental model.

This was my graph (HERE) as of Friday or something and I think it's fine to just focus more on volume for a while, so for March I am going to make a volume goal, and try focus on this. I am like one heater from shooting NL50.

Work was very busy and I think it was hard to do this and poker at the same time. This has changed now, and moving onto a project that has variables that more inside my control, so I think it will be less stressful.

I think my results are pretty good, the volume is still low, but the total results ate 22bb/100, and then just the NL25 part is 13bb/100.

My main fear is "cheating" my way to some limit with some fundamentals missing and having to go backwards, so I have been taking it slow. Even in a soft fishpool like bodog poker is fucking hard. The nice thing about it is there is enough punters where having a winrate > 0 is not that hard so you have 1 less thing to worry about.

Pushing myself to do lines that are uncomfortable is still hard.

Overbetting a scare card on the river IP cause both players are super capped is scary, but that's how you make more money I think.

Risk reward is a big thing in finance as well, and I think it's true here too. People are scared of losing.
Higher risk plays in finance usually involve taking out a loan to leverage your investment. No one likes doing this, despite mathematical models showing it's optimality for return per unit of risk paid, everyone just un-diverisfies their portfolio when they want more risk (ex ALL IN ON TESLA), but the idea of losing seems to rattle them. I see the same analogy in poker. OVERBETTING IS SCARY.

Overbetting is scary when you have a good hand cause they fold a lot. It's scary when you're bluffing cause you can lose a lot.

The emotional journey..especally when I have been feeling really anxious in general has been very interesting.

The next challenge to break through here is to play more.

Your results are awesome! And that is most likely an outcome of your good approach.
What you describe as your own mental state, I think applies to the majority of people/players, the vast majority of them are risk averse.
So it's good that you push yourself to making tough but correct decisions.
For me, this is inspiring. Keep crushing!

Originally posted by monteCarlol
Your results are awesome! And that is most likely an outcome of your good approach.
What you describe as your own mental state, I think applies to the majority of people/players, the vast majority of them are risk averse.
So it's good that you push yourself to making tough but correct decisions.
For me, this is inspiring. Keep crushing!

Thanks, I am trying to be very open about how I am feeling. I think I am going to play less during the week and more on weekends for now, so I can bring in more time for other hobbies. Then study more during the week.

I have a year and a half to climb to NL200, so lots of time.

Originally posted by Chowchow12

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!

Let me know what you think!

I listened to both of them and they are really good. I think Nick really paid attention to the pains he experienced while coming up in the game, and really has been a lot of time into verbalizing it for other people. He has some really good points.

Blog Post

This week was good. I am back to exercising regularly and I made some really break throughs with my anxiety. Therapy has been helpful, and I recommend it if you’re dealing with these issues.

I started a more structured routine for poker and that has been very helpful. During the week I study Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, and play Tuesday Thursday. Then Friday Saturday Sunday I try and play a lot. The structure has been much easier. When I study, I spend 30-60 minutes on pre-flop, and then 60-90 minutes on post flop.

This week I really focused on playing from the BB vs SB and BTN and developed some basic heuristics for check raising. I do find this very difficult to distill the bluff / merged raises because the mixing makes it tough to simplify. I would browse solutions write notes, and then distill those notes into heuristics, and dedicating a full week to do this is boring, but it is effective for improvement.
Once I distilled the heuristics I would use the trainer in GTO wizard, but I used it ask the question if a raise here is mixed in GTO, so I at least know what the candidates are.

Turn play get’s more complicated especially raising depolarized, and I am still uncertain in a lot of these spots. It takes a while to really understand, but we can use the same trainer to figure these things out.
Next week I will continue with BB but look and turn probes vs BTN.

When it comes to hand reviews, I am finding I look more at villains’ range in GTO Wizard to help understand a spot better, rather than just look at my range. I find it easier to understand what the rest of my range wants to do, and really help answer the question why. When you combine that with data, to know if pop gets to that spot with a wider or thinner range you can adjust. And learning how to adjust is what I find interesting about poker.

The game feels very different now. Not harder or easier, but just different. Asking the right questions is hard, but I think that is what I am improving at.

I still think (GTO / Data / Exploitative) maximalists avoiding the wonderful tools on the other side of things. Nash equilibrium gives you a structural framework for the game, and data work gives you directions to adjust. It’s beautiful.
Poker is really cool.