Don't know how your depression has been diagnosed, or by whom, but have you considered chemical assistance?
I eventually did, and the benefits were almost instantaneous. Apparently my brain chemistry just doesn't cut it. With assistance I was able to establish myself in different behaviours and outcomes, even (occasional) effortless happiness.
After five years, I left them behind. The benefits remain.
Life does too, the same kaleidoscope of births, deaths, marriages and breakups, with all the side effects that are implied. Just nice to be better placed to deal with it.
Hey AcidDrop, It sounds like you actually overcame something like depression. That's really awesome to hear.
Yeah, its not easy to talk about but I've been diagnosed by multiple psychs as having depression.
We've tried several types of medications, and I'm totally open (but cautious) about their use. My perspective is if you have a problem, every solution will have some "side effects" and in general they've been very limited.
SSRI's only worked for social anxiety. SNRI's have had the same effect, only helping with social anxiety. Benzodiazepines are really a cognitive inhibitor, perhaps even over the long term after consistent use and they are addictive so I'm not crazy about those, and trycyclics generally are much less specific in targeting serotonin and have more side effects so we haven't yet gone to that point.
Not that drugs should ever be a cure all, but from my perspective, the pharma industry still has a lot of money to be made by creating some better medications.
Best of luck to you with all your issues and to be honest it's good that you've recognised there is a problem and are actively pursuing trying to do something about it.
I have had my own problems over the past 10 years which I have seriously struggled to come to terms with and allowed it to seriously affect my life, I was just too stupid/stubborn at the time all it began to believe there may have been something wrong and the specter haunted me for years because of it. Might be something I do a blog about in the future.
It's always good to have an outlet though and we're here to listen and read.
http://www.pokerstrategy.com/images/ranks/mini/gold.pngLogic Knot Series
http://www.pokerstrategy.com/images/ranks/mini/gold.pngUser Reviews
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Hey, I didnt read the entire blog but I've read a few pages and it took my attention.. do you have a skype or a messenger ID ? I'd talk with you some time, mostly about the depression part..if u got skype add me, ozsa87
Originally posted by Boomer2k10
Best of luck to you with all your issues and to be honest it's good that you've recognised there is a problem and are actively pursuing trying to do something about it.
Thanks Boomer, I have known for several years now, and if we'll permit a metaphor - I've gotten a little better at preparing for the severe storms and its almost always raining. There's a lot more room for progress.
I have had my own problems over the past 10 years which I have seriously struggled to come to terms with and allowed it to seriously affect my life, I was just too stupid/stubborn at the time all it began to believe there may have been something wrong and the specter haunted me for years because of it. Might be something I do a blog about in the future.
I think that a blog by anyone who's struggled in life and also managed to find a good deal of success in poker has much to contribute to the way people think about this game.
It's always good to have an outlet though and we're here to listen and read.
Thanks again, and I hope you're right. It can turn out to be some kind of critical mistake to write publicly and as honestly as possible. It can also be very easy to end up in heated debates about things. Many feel quite strongly about certain perspectives, and I respect their opinion but on such complicated topics its difficult for me to entertain much discussion.
Spoiler
For instance, If one suggests: "I'm to blame for the way things are in my life" I simply couldn't fully disagree with that statement, but its difficult to reconcile and blame has few practical applications. I also don't feel people should be forced to defend the way things are when there's little dignity in this status quo. Why fight to explain what you'd rather fight to change?
I remember once this guy, a single father came to the door. He needed the phone to find a way to collect his two young children. It was quite late at the time, maybe 9PM. There were other details, and it was a somewhat desperate situation, and I just couldn't help but think why should we be forced or even feel compelled to plea our case in order to have our basic needs met. I sort of think that you should never have to submit your self to dehumanizing scrutiny as a means of meeting your basic needs as a person.
Originally posted by OZSA
Hey, I didnt read the entire blog but I've read a few pages and it took my attention.. do you have a skype or a messenger ID ? I'd talk with you some time, mostly about the depression part..if u got skype add me, ozsa87
I've developed some simple training "programs" that I thought you guys might be interested in checking out. Basically, through mass repetition (like multi-tabling) I focus on learning my range equity against different hand ranges either preflop or on the flop.
I set small goals for
# of qns answered in X amount of time with an accuracy constraint
Streak goals for # of repititions of the above sort...
and turn to video games I've played, like "Perfect Dark" to develop new goals as things get boring.
I suspect that practicing in this way will really improve my equity estimations, and that improving this ability will make me more money!
So I talked with Taavi after my Pattern Recognition training post went up. He was like "yeah, lots of numbers... wtf was it about?" and I realized that the post was mostly incomprehensible garbage.... SO I made a video of me training preflop. Maybe this will clear things up.
Originally posted by VincentNew
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
Hey Vincent, thanks for visiting.
You're probably right, and as with all good metaphors its hard to disagree, but we can certainly question the validity and usefulness of a metaphor. As for myself, I don't like to harbor a lot of anger and I suspect my struggle is with something else. Recognizing that we should deal with an issue when its appropriate is just part of the process. To me, figuring out and then making the right changes and sustaining them seems more difficult...
With just a few days left in the month, I'm only about 3 sessions away from demolishing all my monthly goals.
November Goals
[18k]18K Hands (~40% more than last month)
[15k]15K at 1/2 or Higher (35K/50k for 2011 Milestone)
[11] 2+ Gold Articles / Chapters
[15] 4+ Session Reviews
[7] 2+ Coaching Sessions
[x] Work on HU theory (Read an article, examine ranges)
[9] 9 HU SNGs
[x] Get Hands for 2/4. [x] Find Suitable Rewards for Completing my tasks.
[10] 5+ preflop equity training sessions.
AND, pending variance, I'm a solid favorite to turn a profit, currently up about 120 including rake back... Which is a long way from earlier this month:
Spoiler
Today is a "day off" grinding. I'm planning to review some marked hands, equity train for some HU spots, and possibly play out those last few HU SNGs. Tomorrow I will complete all of my November goals.
Session review complete! Time for a short break, then some HUSNG equity training, then my SNGs!
Also, I'm going to watch Cowboys and Aliens later today... wtf some kind of Clint Eastwood theme today?
Here's a hand post that came from the review. If you have a comment about the hand, here's the thread link
Originally posted by datsmahname
Villain is a LAGfish. 45/27 15% 3-bet with 55% agg postflop by street.
I suspect that I have his coldcalling range mostly crushed. with K-high given that he 3-bets so often. I'm assuming he rarely calls with weak Ax unless its suited, sometimes has weak PPs but often calls with middling connectors and lots of suited high cards.
His won $ SD when raised flop is about 40%. Pretty low. Most solid regs this is 60ish or higher.
WTSD is 42%
$1/$2 Fixed-Limit Hold'em (6 handed)
Preflop: Hero is MP3 with Q:d, K:s. MP2 folds, Hero raises, CO calls, 3 folds, 2 folds, BB folds.
Turn: (4.75 BB) 5:s (2 players) Hero checks, CO checks.
River: (4.75 BB) A:d (2 players) Hero bets
I have options on the river. My bluff opens me up to being bluff raised. I can rep the ace quite well, but he may rep the 3. I do have some SD value and expect he'll check back weak made hands that might fold to a bet but will bluff the river with random trash that I expect he will have occasionally raised the flop with.
Better to turn KQ into a bluff or play check/call?
I suspected when reviewing this hand that check/call is much better and that I'd be better off bluffing with J-high or T-high, or even 97s with BDFD where more of his spazy flop raises are actually ahead of me and I have much less SD value.
With J/T/9-high I'm also finding the fold button much easier when he raises me. There are some more considerations but I don't want this to be TL;DR.
When it comes to poker, I can't tell you how exciting the last week has been for me.
As a hard working poker student, I worry sometimes that my return on investment is diminishing. If only I could find a better way to work hard, or find another low hanging fruit to pick... then my game would take another solid leap forward.
That's exactly what's happening now.
Last Monday, The Mental Game of Poker arrived at my door step and I immediately devoured over 4 chapters. Boom, 100 pages down - if the book had caught fire I would never have noticed. I've already finished and I'm two chapters deep on my second reading. My thoughts?
This book is the low hanging fruit of the poker world.
Incidentally it's teaching me to work better too. Reading his approach has helped me realize where I'm struggling with the game, why these struggles are important, and how to correct them through hard work - just like the work I put into developing my poker game.
For instance, a few months ago I struggled with variance and my response was to study more and more, just learn everything I could and added new facets to my game.
I was becoming uncertain, losing confidence, and progressively I was starting to make fundamental mistakes in common situations. These problems were accumulating over time, and I hardly noticed. I was playing less, studying more, and becoming less and less confident about my play.
My coach, AdamantHQ helped point out these fundamental mistakes and we chalked some up to negative variance. I turned things around soon after, but I never realized how much I could actually learn from my response.
In Tendler's book (Chapter 3), he talks about the spectrum of emotion and how it can accumulate over time. The section seemed useful at first and then I turned to page 46.
The Mental Game of Poker, pg 46 (by authors permission)
Here's an example of how emotion builds along a spectrum: A player might have some uncertainty after a rough, losing day, unsure if he played badly or if it was just variance. Then, after a few more days of constantly running into the top end of a players' ranges, he begins to doubt if he's making the right plays. He starts to hesitate, second-guess decisions, go against his gut, and make mistakes. Then, anxiety starts showing up in bigger pots because he's afraid of making a mistake. Eventually these mistakes do happen because his mind is malfunctioning. Now, with bad play mixed into the bad run, anxiety starts to build before even sitting down to play. Simply thinking about playing is enough to spark anxiety. Over time, what started as uncertainty has turned into a strong fear of losing. So, he doesn't play as much and instead spends hours working on his game to figure out how to play perfectly and avoid losing.
Reading this passage I must have said "no f-ing way" about five times. It was me, right there on the page.
Now I have new tools to work with. Like the Adult Learning Model: when the times got tough, I played worse because I had not ingrained the skills I was learning to the level of Unconscious Competence. Also, the concept of the inchworm: now I understand that learning new material just created much more variance in my performance. My best got better, but my worst lagged far behind and showed up repeatedly when negative variance struck. The Process Model: my focus was declining because I had to think so hard about each decision. I had maxed out my ability to concentrate and subtle but important information was being ignored. I was trying to juggle to many new concepts. This left me vulnerable to being easily overwhelmed by negative variance (AND positive variance, which would falsely reward my study habits as being correct).
This is all about to change.
Now, I'm stepping forward from the back by grinding these developing skills to the level of unconscious competence. When I can prove that these skills remain even while a downswing hits, then I'll know they've been trained at the unconscious level. Eventually I'll begin the process of stepping forward from the front once again. My game is taking a monumental step for the better and this is helping me to free up some extra mental space in order to think more clearly, more quickly.
Now I'm also developing a mental game to understand why my approach is incorrect: I can never avoid losing in the short term because I don't control the cards. I control my decisions. Now I can work to safe guard myself against the negative re-enforcement that suggests my study habits are the correct ones (an upswing after studying new material), because I know that my end game logic: avoid losing is fundamentally flawed. Of course, I never expected to win every pot, every session, or even every month. However, by looking deeply at the reasons for my behavior I realized that I believe on some level that if I studied hard enough that I actually could, but this is not true.
As a contribution to the poker world, I really think we'll look back on this book in 50 years and say this is where the Mental Game in poker really got started. In hindsight, the void will seem so obvious that we'll wonder why the book hadn't been written earlier.
The real kicker is the way that it happened. It took a semi-Pro Golfer who ventured into Sports Psychology, became a golf Mental Coach and happened to meet Dusty 'Leatherass' Schmidt on the course - all of this just to get us in the game. You'd have to defer to Jared for the full story, but it seemed destined to occur by the least likely of events.
Now, Jared is the only professional poker Mental Coach in the world that I know of. I suspect that too will soon change.
Special thanks to Jared Tendler for letting me quote and use material from the book.
Super solid post - EXACTLY the same leaks/problems I face(d)/have.
Also read Tendler's book and arrived at similar conclusions/started making solid progress, but ran into a brick wall once again by overloading myself with so much new information by reading it cover to cover all at once and feeling like I don't know where to continue/what exactly to do now coz I have soo many mental game leaks/basically all of them that he talks about in the book
Will have to go for round 2 as well and start taking it slow, step-by-step picking apart.
Thanks Static, tbh I think the material sunk in a little easier because I studied Psychology for 4 years. The general approach to understanding his concepts was already in place.
However, I think he's come up with some really elegant solutions in spots where people often figured the answers were necessarily complex and beyond comprehension.
Honestly, I can't wait for the next phase since I sort of expect a "poker boom" to occur in this industry.
Lost 100 bucks, but awesome month. I was inches from getting platinum star so despite being a little tired I grinded out the extra 2.5k hands today. I kinda treated it like a fun session and had a couple drinks while catching episode 200 of the pokercast.
It turns out "not taking poker seriously" is expensive. While in the long run I might have been around -1BB, over the short term its a solid reminder to keep myself focused.
This is my first losing month ever.
November Goals
[20k]18K Hands (~40% more than last month)
[17k]15K at 1/2 or Higher (35K/50k for 2011 Milestone)
[12] 2+ Gold Articles / Chapters
[15] 4+ Session Reviews
[7] 2+ Coaching Sessions
[x] Work on HU theory (Read an article, examine ranges)
[9] 9 HU SNGs
[x] Get Hands for 2/4.
[x] Find Suitable Rewards for Completing my tasks.
[12] 5+ preflop equity training sessions.
yep I'm actually really happy with the month. If I really looked at it, I probably ground out enough VPPs to turn a solid profit. Platinum is valued at +300 a month, mind you I have no idea what contributes to this figure.
My new(est) setup for practicing preflop equities is awesome. I'm down to 100 questions in ~ 14 minutes with ~2% average deviation and I think I'll get it under 10 minutes before the new year.
After every session I've developed a decent habit of estimating the quality of my play, my opponents ability, and variance... all this before looking at results. It only takes a couple minutes.
I need to work a lot on control. I tend to take lines that I can't easily justify. A situation will come up and conventional lines don't seem correct, but I actually don't have the theory or read or whatever to back up my decision. As a result, correct or not I'm just spewing bets without a clearly defined plan.
Next month should be great though. I'm going to work out my month goals tomorrow morning after my coaching session with AdamantHQ. I think I'll do something similar to this month, but may include some goals for session quality.
Recently I've been evaluating my play/control/focus each session from 1-10, but i want to develop a baseline before attaching any goals to it so I'm less likely to bias my evaluation. I'll think about that tomorrow.
Another Month means another crazy list of poker related goals.
December 2011 Goals
[4.5k] 18k Hands (sustain last months hand volume)
[4.5k] 15k @ 1/2 or Higher (Complete Low Stakes 50K Milestone for 2011)
[ ] 10 HU SNGs
[4] 3+ Articles / Chapters
[x] Work On HU theory / Range Train for HU
[9] 5+ Session Reviews
[2] 2+ Coaching Sessions
[1] 5+ Postflop Equity Training Sessions
[2] 5+ Preflop Equity Training Sessions
Session Evaluations:
[ ] 80+ Average Score: Focus (baseline = 78)
[ ] 80+ Average Score: Quality (baseline = 75)
[ ] 80+ Average Score: Control (baseline = 84)
Session Evaluations are new... I'm grading each from 1-10 where:
10 = a huge fish on monkey tilt mashing buttons randomly
100 = essentially the most skilled player @ my current stakes.
This means its really subjective but also relative to the player pool. Making it relative may help in the long run since it will serve as an easy reminder that my opponents are improving too.
I'm also standardizing these scores so I can look at some correlations between them and try to understand how the distribution of scores changes over time. My prediction is that each distribution will gradually become more narrow over the next month(my inchworm stepping forward from the back). This means my worst got much better. It also means that I can start developing new skills. The ones I have learned are approaching the level of unconscious competence.
At that time I'll also check my variance estimation to see if I'm over estimating negative or positive variance. This is basically a bullshit detector. Session variance should balance out over time. When I'm off the mark, realizing this can help me notice when variance played a big roll in a certain hand, session, or day.
All of this crazy stuff is to help me develop a skill for identifying good play, good opponents, and also correctly identifying variance each session. Now that I have the foundation laid out, post session evaluations should only take about 5-10 minutes.
Rewards For Completing my Goals: I've been learning about tablets... but they're all skewed with some having features/limitations that I think are lame. I'll have to do more research. Right now I'm thinking
45/27 15% 3-bet with 55% agg postflop by street.
