The recreational Reg

why is my signature not showing as hyperlink?

Good Luck Man at which time you are planning to reach your Goal?

end of the year

Very nice goal but do not forget we are humans and as human beings we do mistakes so to play a A-Game during every session , at every hand , every street ...
Not sure it can really be done but you can improve your C and D game to get closer to your A-Game and that's already a great way to start i think.
I'm not a pro so it's just an opinion like any other. There's some nice books about it. "The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler" the 1 & 2.

Best of Skills & Luck @ Tables,
J-C.

Thumbs up. Following 😊

Originally posted by OldSchoolPapa
Very nice goal but do not forget we are humans and as human beings we do mistakes so to play a A-Game during every session , at every hand , every street ...
Not sure it can really be done but you can improve your C and D game to get closer to your A-Game and that's already a great way to start i think.
I'm not a pro so it's just an opinion like any other. There's some nice books about it. "The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler" the 1 & 2.

Best of Skills & Luck @ Tables,
J-C.

Totally agreed. But there are some things which we can control: Mainly the circumstances we play under. This includes the state of mind, motivation and focus at that particular moment. Like now: After about 2h I got bored and more interested about surfing the forums. Normally I would continue playing. I noticed that and I stopped.
"The Mental Game" is great. I willl have to revisit it anyhow

I am starting my update a little early b/c I have some time on my hands and do not feel like grinding.

Actually this is the first good news.
I have started to document every single session in a table containing everything from start time, # tables, mood or state of mind, distractions.

Also after the session I document the bb/100, but most importantly bb/100 for won w/o SD. Whenever that runs -5bb/100 or less this is a sign something might have been wrong either with my play, or concentration.

I have stuck to this for almost (lol) every session so far. When I really not feel like grinding, but have time (like last night), I just start some MTTs. When time is short (like weekdays) I play some MTT SnG or draw poker. When I do that I can also watch some TV or listen to news, or like now writing some stuff and listening to Lex grind the Sunday tourneys.

The figure below shows how it looks like when I am just clicking buttons (left) and when I am super concentrated (right). These are just artificial data sets I created from appropriate sessions.

For example the week has been so far ~ -10bb/100 for won w/o SD, so it was not good, but not terrible either, by my own metric.

Cash games I am up about 5 buy-ins. But week is not over yet.

I worked a little on my twitch channel, but apparently I need to tweak it much more for a stable stream.

My Sunday afternoon session turned out really productive. I lost my concentration somewhere in-between, but was able to pull myself together in crunch time. This allowed me to finish 2nd in a 1.1 $ Splash tournament for 274$.

Brag below:

Cash game grinding ended on a downswing, but overall still 5 buy-ins ahead.
I have to be really disciplined in controlling the conditions I play under.
The habit of starting to play out of boredom need to be stopped!

BR challenge:
Week 1:

Hands (NL10): 8086
Tourneys: 21
ITM: 4
Bankroll: 408€ (+263.23€)

Starting bankroll: 144.77 € (at PS)
Goal: 1447.70 €

Overall I played slightly less this week than usual. Only about 6.5 k hands.
I moved up to NL16, and other than the pool being smaller it was not so much of a difference.
At zoom actually games felt softer.

I did not do much work on my game. As a matter of fact I am currently not quite sure where to put my main focus.
From the stats point of view, I should be
- defending my blinds better
- Betting less turns, especially OOP
- …???

I still have to go back and look at key hands from last week. But overall the trend of my redline through the session strongly correlates with the quality of my play.
Anything steeper than -10BB/100, especially running continuously monotone, without any significant steps upwards, are a sign of lack of focus, or too many table, or other grave issues.
Sometimes, during longer sessions I can correct the trend somewhat, after looking at the graph, and becoming more focused and agro.

I joined Lemon's group on GTO Sims. I may be over my head there. The guys/girls are so much savier and experienced than I am. Also they appear to be dreaming poker. Me as a fun player feel alittle out of place.
Still I feel like I am learning a little.

BR challenge:
Week 2:

Hands (NL16): 6619
Tourneys (cash-buyin): 11 ( -15.8$)
ITM: 1
Bankroll: 348€ (-60.00€)

Starting bankroll: 144.77 € (at PS)
Goal: 1447.70 €

Hello mate ♠_drink:

Originally posted by bigdog63
I joined Lemon's group on GTO Sims. I may be over my head there. The guys/girls are so much savier and experienced than I am. Also they appear to be dreaming poker. Me as a fun player feel alittle out of place.
Still I feel like I am learning a little.

Well, don't be too hard on yourself, you've crushed everybody at equity trainer !
And your contributions are helpful.
You know beside Lemon we're all playing more or less the same stake.
What do you mean by "dreaming poker" ? When I sleep I got weird dreams but they are not about poker, I don't seem to have reached that stage yet

To work on your game I'd suggest to prioritize your blind defense as it's a frequent spot where there is a lot of EV to be gained. SRP and 3bet pots BB vs BU are the bread and butter of this game so it makes sense to try to master these first.

Thanks for the kind words myfloxybaby.

Had a very busy week outside of poker.
Cash game volume did actually go up, because I had several sessions going later into the night than usual.

I had several sessions which started off with an early big loss, due to lack of concentration, overplaying mediocre hands etc.
This is something I have to keep in mind in the coming weeks.
Also I might have played more tables than usual, not much, but still. It was often 5-6 tables instead of 3-4. and this surely made a difference.

Also, ran below EV again. 7 buy-ins below EV hurts. The week before it were 3 BB.
Stat wise, it look like I have been defending my blinds better than average. My cbet IP appears to be low, but could be due to the run bad. My Turn cbet stat is still way too high, so keep watching that

On the study part, I spend some time looking at the GTO solution for BTN vs. MP. I still have to find a suitable system to evaluate and channel conclusions from that.
Most solutions have mixed strategies which are hardly applicable for a rec like myself.

Plan for coming week:
- Play only when focused. If not possible to play focused analyze some hands or a GTO spot
- watch Turn cbet, do not just barrel because you can
-

BR challenge:
Week 3:

Hands (NL16): 7675
Tourneys (cash-buyin): 8 ( -0.75$)
ITM: 2
Bankroll: 330€ (-16.00€)

Starting bankroll: 144.77 € (at PS)
Goal: 1447.70 €

Originally posted by bigdog63
Also, ran below EV again. 7 buy-ins below EV hurts. The week before it were 3 BB.

AIEV doesn't do justice to whole "luck" involved, like, at all. You could very well have been rather "lucky" overall and still it wouldn't show in the AIEV. All in all it's better to not focus on this because it can only affect your mental for nothing.

Originally posted by bigdog63
Stat wise, it look like I have been defending my blinds better than average. My cbet IP appears to be low, but could be due to the run bad. My Turn cbet stat is still way too high, so keep watching that

One week's worth of volume isn't enough to make conclusions about a turn stat.
Moreover having a turn cbet very high could totally work as an exploitative strategy at NL16 so I wouldn't worry about the stat in itself (you could maybe begin by trying to correlate it with the cbet success stat) and would rather look at spots to see if my 2barrels seem wise or not.

Originally posted by bigdog63
On the study part, I spend some time looking at the GTO solution for BTN vs. MP. I still have to find a suitable system to evaluate and channel conclusions from that.
Most solutions have mixed strategies which are hardly applicable for a rec like myself.

I wouldn't call it "the GTO solution" because like Janda said, even with solvers and whatnot, it's still a toy game compared to the realy GTO solution.

Mixed strategies are not meant to be applicable, at least not at NL16. Blindly copying a sim in real game is the wrong way to use a solver.
When there is a mixed strategy in a sim, it only means that for the precise parameters of the sim, the 2 mixed lines have roughly the same EV (so already you could suspect one of the lines to be better at NL16 and just take it every time) .
Because in the sim they have the same EV in a vacuum, you could opt for either one and do fine unless you're playing thousands of hands against the same incredibly savvy opponent, which I don't recommend
Now because a solver have to take that scenario into account, it ends up mixing both lines in a certain frequency to assure that every range is perfectly balanced on every possible runout. If else there would be some potential runouts on which we would end up with a little more or a little less good hands (and no average human player could tell). That's all. Those frequencies doesn't mean more than that. Their purpose is so subtle and out of concrete application for small players like us that there is no point fussing over those.

Hoping to be clear, gl hf

Floxybaby, you tend to take stuff I write too literally. When I write GTO solution, I do not mean GTO solution, I have no way of determining that one, and I do not want to

Wow, I am totally tilting right now. My results are running 15 buy-ins below AIEV and this is pulling everthing else down.
I have the feeling that every AA is going to be cracked by some other PP, villain hits every draw OTR. It is so bad, that I become afraid to get to SD, because I might see another suckout.
On top of that I have some non-poker issues on my mind which make me quite angry and are surely affecting my play as well.

Last session was really bad:

however Snowie does not think so;

I think I'll drop a level or two in stakes, keep my mind of the bankroll and get back into a healthy playing mode.

This is just fucking ridiculous.
It feels like every hand I am playing I am laying it wide open for all to see. Or, I get sucked out. Calling out losing run-outs is really the pinnacle of run-bad.
And of course, what is the consequence?
Bad plays, overfolding, overplaying, overbarreling, overcalling. All for the wrong reasons

Originally posted by bigdog63
I think I'll drop a level or two in stakes, keep my mind of the bankroll and get back into a healthy playing mode.

that is a good idea.

Just work on your mindset

And your orange line is minus 300 bb as well
So what about Stopp loss limit

Make a Review of the Losing hands and post them

GL at the Tables
Talisker

This has been for sure one of the worst poker weeks ever.
The downswing continued and I played really bad poker for most of the week.

I totally lost it mentally. I ended up dropping to from NL16 to NL5 just to slow down the bleeding and to win some hands.
The good news is that my bankroll is still > than at the beginning of the BR challenge.
I ended the week with a couple of reasonable sessions at NL10, playing only 2 tables at a time.

Overall it does not feel good right now. No confidence in my game at all.

BR challenge:
Week 4:

Hands (NL16): 6474
Tourneys (cash-buyin): 0 ( -0$)
ITM: 0
Bankroll: 175€ (-155.00€)

Starting bankroll: 144.77 € (at PS)
Goal: 1447.70 €