Originally posted by pleno1
Great blog. Keep up the good work, did you finish my video btw? Probably should turn off before the last hand
Thanks a lot, I will do my very best

Few seconds ago I finished watching your video and as I already said above I like your approaches and the logic reasoning. You always sound certain and formulate plans that intuitively make sense. This is one of the main reasons why I participate. The last hand is really funny, true entertainment. Hopefully you produce more videos like this in the future.
Originally posted by ErikStenqvist
Hey JustMillion!
I'll be one of the coaches focusing on Tilt, A-game, and Mindset issues. And i have a ton of experience both personally and helping clients dig into and work on issues like these. Let's see if we can start make some sense out of it logically first. smile
So let me just ask some questions and well see where we end up.
If you think about the issue a bit more deeply. What do you think is the cause of this? I just want to see what you think about it.
Take 10 minutes and just really think it through and see if you can give any more details or have any new insights.
Cheers!
Hi Erik,
thanks for reading my blog!
here is what usually goes through my mind when thinking about poker or starting a new session. At the first moment I am either really motivated to play or simply feel like I need to play in order to seize time effectively. Whatever my motivation comes from, the root is making money - but that´s just superficial. My therapist and I revealed, that money used to be kind of an exchange currency for feelings and emotions between my parents and me when I was a child. When getting an A in maths it either was standard (they never expected anything less than that) or it was worth a short smile and a gratulation. No one never told me about being proud of me or stuff like that. When report cards came I got money for my achievements. As you can see I´ve always been used to work for money and nothing else because money ever has meant acceptance. Therefore money in a way correlates with self-esteem. The moment I win money I feel confident - the moment I lose money I feel like a (complete) failure. I´d like to dig even deeper: Subconciously my ultimate goal is to achieve a state of unlimited freedom that grants me to not have to worry about anything anymore whatsoever. The only way to at least achieve a part of this somewhat unlimited freedom is to possess almost endless ressources = being rich as hell. Therefore anything that includes earning money is like the wild jungle for me - failures might be deadly.
Sure I fell in love with poker, I remember dreaming of it every night back in the day. I watched it every day on television or pokertube and I was thinking about the game constantly in every second. I learned really fast and had decent results until the first downswing hit me. My motivation was blown away immediately and I basically quitted after not getting back on track after a few days. To be honest it took me almost half a year of concentrated thinking to accept that online poker wasn´t rigged

After that I decided to give it another shot and decided to just play a really solid and rather defensive TAG style. Back then I was able to get away with playing 15/13 and still won on a decent clip at 50nl. This was in early 2009. But just a few months after I established myself at 50nl, the games got tougher. (This was when Stars introduced 40-100bb tables. Shortly after that Italy and France were banned from .com) As I already mentioned above, I grow extremely confident when winning / being successful. Back then I thought "this is just what I deserve, nothing more nothing less" (which obviously is huge bullsh*** and I am ashamed in a way) As you might expect my arrogant attitude in a way prevented me from learning and developing my game. This was when the LAG-style got more and more popular. My closest poker buddies adored this style of play - for me it simply appeared to be way too difficult, likely resulting in too much uncertainties (tough spots) and therefore it did not comply with what my philosophy ever has been: Keeping things just as simple as possible and therefore easy to control and analyze. To make things short, playing LAG and super aggro was just "cool" and not profitable in my eyes. But somehow everyone was opening up their ranges and everyone started 3betting and did not give any credit to cbets. What used to be 5 players to play cards with (and win money) turned into 5 aggressive, dangerours enemies that simply sucked at poker (because they were playing too loose in my opinion). Poker became war in a way. Now guess what happens when some aggressive opponent acts aggro vs me and finally even manages to win a big pot...1 door, 1 monitor, 1 phone, couples of mice (luckily no living mice but computer mice

), countless glasses and much more got broken in the past. I´ve ever been a tilt monkey. In a way I really can´t accept to get beaten by another reg or aggressive opponent - not as long as I don´t have enough evidence to prove that he is a sustainable winner. What this comes down to is the illusion that those guys are extremely lucky which means that I am extremely unlucky. Thus my "efforts", skill and so on does not get rewarded. Their (in my opinion) stupid and uncontrolled aggressive style of play though gets rewaded. If things would go "normal" they lost every single hand right?
I know this is probably going to be way too tl;dr but there is one more important thing I urgently want to mention: Poker ever has meant some sort of backup plan for my life. Actually some kind of a cool dream job. And for almost 1,5 years I managed to earn enough money to get me through university. Compared to other students I did not have to work in a grocery store or something like that and for me this in a way meant freedom. Guess what: I did not concentrate on my studies anymore, got bad grades and finally nearly busted out. This was when I met my girlfriend 5 years ago. From the first day on she had been live on stage when the monkey started to go on tilt and sometimes it really scared her. Bad poker days made me sick and depressive. When my university-carreer nearly went down in 2010 I solely blamed poker. I changed from energetical engineering to aeronautical engineering and decided to start a "new" life. I got a job at a grocery store and poker became a still somewhat fascinating and addictive hobby I fear. Deep inside I believe that poker in any given moment has the ability to turn my life from success to failure within a heartbeat. It has enough power to destroy me and the only reason ar (yes, you´re right) those blind aggressive idiots that simply got lucky the majority of the time.
Ok I simply wrote down what came to my mind. This is what I think my problems stem from. Since I handed in my bachelor thesis I am way more confident about playing because poker now does not have the power to destroy my life entirely. I finally realized, that most regs are somewhat solid and much more they are human beings like me. I learned to respect them. Further two friends of mine made it past the 100k mark and I am neither less talented nor less intelligent. They simply sticked to a plan they had, they worked hard and finally they do succeed on any given day. That is why I finally accepted that success in poker first and foremost comes from hard work, and I am no prodigy kid or whatever that deserves to win without investing one single second.
But nonetheless there is some kind of fear left.
Now 1,5 hours went by, I hope you guys are still awake

Thanks for reading and much more thanks in advance for commenting. Hopefully this was not too tl;dr and maybe even a little interesting.
I am really tired today but I definetly feel like putting in an hour of grinding now, I mean it is friday and friday is high-day right
Stay tuned