I think it's a good time for a session review. Also you should play more and put your new mental skills into practice ♠_evil:
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hey dude, sounds great. I'll be on skype later today and can probably do one later this week.
yeah, still rly slacking on play recently.
August 6th, 2005.
At times forgetting the past is easy; all it takes is several dozen drinks and a solid blow to the face--you won't even know what hit ya. I stumbled while regaining consciousness and found myself leaning on a concrete partition in downtown Ottawa.
A buddy and I had been exploring the hidden risks of combining ambition with arbitrary goals. We'd decided to have one drink in every bar along Bank Street from the Highway to Parliament before heading into the Ottawa Market.
Foresight wasn't a large part of the plan. On arrival we naturally decided to smoke cigars and eat foot long pita's before meeting friends. We never found them.
Walking past an open patio bar I saw a cute girl. My Impulse control at an all time low, the words "you're gorgeous" slipped out effortlessly. She heard but not clearly. Too shy to repeat it, I just smiled and strolled off.
What happened next is hard to explain but easy to describe. Another half block up the street we realized a small mob had fallen into step along with the 'cute girl'. Turns out she really wanted to know what I'd said - even if her boyfriend had to beat it out of me.
But here's the catch: I was so drunk that I'd already forgotten the whole event. The argument that followed was... confusing. Claims like "I've never seen her before in my life" didn't hold much water.
There was no way out. I was committed and way behind but despite the headache I quickly divided my opponents with one fundamental and embarrassing question: "Do you love her?" He paused and she glared at him. His friends laughed in surprise. I asked again. "Its Saturday night, you've ruined my evening and I want to know why." Translation? "Do you want to look like a pussy or sleep on the couch for the next week?" He timed out when a street cop broke up the scene.
Ship it?
I've posted a free Coaching Session offering on 2+2 but I also wanted to share this small opportunity with PokerStrategy members.
Feel free to reply here OR on 2+2 if you are interested.
Hi there,
I'd like to offer three sessions of basic to intermediate level FLHE coaching to three 2+2 members.
If you play at microstakes, or struggle in low stakes games then you will benefit most. This includes players who are completely new to online poker or players who would like to develop stronger fundamentals. Among this group, players who work hard and have the strongest desire to improve will improve the most.
How to apply: If you are interested then please tell me a bit about yourself, what games and stakes you play, your experience level, why you enjoy the game, and what your goals are in poker. The first three players that write a 120-300 word response will earn all three sessions (up to 1 hour per session).
I am happy to offer coaching in formats that are best suited to the player but players who have access to Skype and a microphone will be able to make the most out of their coaching sessions. I would like to have these sessions take place between now and the end of March.
About me: I've been playing for around three years. I currently play 1/2 LHE and my lifetime winrate at those stakes is 2.4BB/100.
I study very often, have my own dedicated mid/highstakes coach, and am gradually working my way up through the stakes. First and foremost, I am a poker student. There are many parts of my game that are still developing. It would be a very big mistake on my part to rest on my laurels (so to speak).
I am offering this chance because I'd like to explore the idea of becoming a coach and I think coaching will give me a tremendous opportunity to work on and improve the strongest elements of my game.
This is my lifetime graph in BB:
EDIT:
Good morning, Im a micro stakes player. I have had some fairly average success at those limits, nothing super epic! I've been playing online poker for roughly four years now. Only towards end late year I started grinding stars and trying to play optimal poker. The three years before I mainly played on a small local poker room.
Im currently a loosing CG player, I won at NL5 for about 40k hands, but lost playing NL25 HU PLO and NL 10 SH.
Im more of a MTT/SNG player, last three months went quite well playing mix of 45s 180s and some mtts. Got my best score last December on stars in a $2.20 mtt, 2nd of 2137 runners for $588.
This month has been BE so far. In the last two days I have been trying CG out. I want to improve everyday and never stop learning! I want to be able to earn a living from poker. I have put alot of time into it and am willing to whatever I must do to become a pro!
Still open, but I should mention again that this is for Fixed Limit Holdem cash games.
Check out the post for more details.
Even if you don't play FL, I'd be more than happy to introduce players from other formats.
my apologiesNo problem. I should have made it really clear.
Its common for people to think NLHE when they see micro Limit Holdem.
SCENARIO:
Hero's been playing for 3 hours. Thinking about wrapping up my session for a decent break, BUT I've been getting in the habbit of pushing myself to grind 10 more minutes so thats what I did.
Just as soon as I decided to stay, a good table popped up and I sat for a few orbits. I start running really well.
The mark went on tilt on a few tables, and a spewy TAG seemed really tilty. Table conditions went from good to very good.
THEN, my timer went off.
So here I am, tired... already forced myself to play 10 more minutes. I know I'm pushing my limits here. I planned to quit after 10 minutes, but the situation changed. Maybe I was just running well?
All the sudden I seriously thought about playing another 10-20 minutes.
Is this kinda results oriented / irrational?
It's only results oriented if the result influences the way you feel.
You decide to stay and play because the circumstances are favourable, i.e. a tilty fish and a reg going on tilt make it profitable.
You win some money, and decide your decision was a good one, results orientation.
You lose some money and decide you decision was a bad one, results orientation.
EDIT:
If your state of mind/health compromises your ability to properly take advantage of the otherwise favourable situation, then the original decision becomes marginal.
I was watching a SNG coaching between Chenny and Akrammon last night, and they talked about a situation in SNGs where you can be faced with marginal decisions. That is, there will be many very close situations where you will be faced with calling a push, or the opportunity to make a first in push.
They advise this:
Where you are faced with a closed decision about whether or not to call a push, and you really aren't sure, you should fold.
When faced with a similar very close decision whether or not to push first in, and you really aren't sure, you should push.
In principle, it seems to me, your decision to play on or not as you described would be more like making the call.
Yeah I think you're right aciddrop.
Lets say I ask the question "would I feel comfortable staying for 10-20 minutes longer had I lost during my extra 10 minutes of play?"
If the answer to the first one and the second one are different, then my decisions are results oriented (BOTH of them).
At the very least, this suggests to me that some of the variance in my session length can be attributed to a flaw in the way I evaluate Stay/Quit decisions.
What this really means is that my Stay/Quit decisions have been systematically sub-optimal and cost me money. This should be a challenge to work on particularly because I've never heard people talk about this before.
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Your edit: I agree with you but only if we can take on board one change.
Pushing but not calling in equally uncertain situations implies that the decision type influences our decision in cases when we do not know what is correct.
I'd argue that when presented with an uncertain situation, taking a lower variance route and immediately working on that spot is the best option. Its not the decision type that matters, its the amount of variance that each decision produces.
I think that if you had a call decision and a push decision with equal uncertainty AND variance, then deciding not to call in one case and push in another is completely illogical.
In general its probably true that one is usually higher variance than the other with respect to the frequency that a player is likely to cash in a SNG. So we can say that the heuristic is flawed but certainly more efficient. In this spot that might be a good thing, but I'm sure you can see how this is a scary combination.
When deciding to Stay/Quit I may have tricked myself into thinking that one proposition is a risk and the other is not, but since it seems like quitting is low variance then I can agree that given my uncertainty it seems I made the right choice.
Regarding the answer to the push/fold situation, i'd say in these very marginal situations the reason the decision type matters is because a push gives us fold equity, whilst a call has no fold equity. Therefore the extra pot equity the fold equity from the shove makes the decision marginally +EV, whereas with a call it's still too marginal to make a definite, correct decision, so we choose to last longer instead.
Hence why your decision to stay longer could be considered more of a "call" than a "push", unless you think you're capable of sucking it up and playing your A-Game for an extra 20 minutes, in which case this would provide us with the extra "fold equity" to make the decision to stay a "push" decision and therefore +EV.
Sorry for the rambling ♦
Yeah, i think you're saying the exact same thing I am in more of a "bash on the head till u get it" kind of way. Cant be too sure 
Calling off your chips lightly is a higher risk to your tournament life than shipping light so it tends to be higher variance in terms of how likely you are to cash, but the key element here isn't the decision type - its the variance.
Innovation: The cure for Complacency
Writing this entry has been an eerie process. I'd write, put it down, and not a day would go by where I was reminded - at times in sobering clarity - just how important it was for me to get this subject out in my own words.
Inspiration comes from strange places. I found myself watching a lecture given to Pilots - highly trained to respond in a fraction of a second. In the air force mistakes are systematically intolerable; if you make a mistake it might just be your last. The closing remark: rituals are death traps. Put another way, in unfamiliar situations complacent people are the MOST likely to fail and respond incorrectly. At over 700 miles an hour its easy to see why 'doing it wrong' can get you killed, but how does this compare to poker? We're highly trained to respond quickly BUT our failures are much harder to recognize--so difficult in fact, that we make mistakes and believe we've done it right.
Complacency in poker? Death by a thousand cuts. It's creeping mediocrity.
At the end of the 20th century grinding the poker table was an industry for trailblazers. I'm not a historian (or an anything else) but it hardly seemed to matter if you were particularly good. You just needed to be better than the blokes at your table. In this regard nothing has changed of course... but a lot of other things have changed.
Like any product or industry, Poker is beginning to mature. Finding ways to remain profitable or increase profit demands a much more conscious approach. It reminds me of the Red Queen's dilemma "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
In 1992, Robert M. White, the now President Emeritus of the US National Academy of Engineering wrote: "Success is only the opportunity to compete in the next round." In the spirit of Western Capitalism he meant this to apply for just about everything; though, he never mentioned poker. Lets not hold it against him. Rather, we should be fiercely interested in the topic of innovation. After a three year study on the topic his office concluded that in order to remain competitive you MUST routinely and efficiently turn good ideas into profitable strategies.
On January 5th, 2012 ONEOuter.com released an excellent Podcast interview with Sheets, Eric Haber. Sheets & Bax are famous for turning staking into a very successful business strategy. Consequently they have a strong outside perspective on the lifespan of a player (or product) within the poker world.
At about 34 minutes in, Sheets discusses the player cycle in poker in no uncertain terms. The "unfortunate reality" is you have a guy who's good enough to win and slowly but surely he stops learning, either by choice or by ability. "Meanwhile, the rest of the world is catching up, the rest of the world is getting better." Our stagnant player goes on a downswing, but they've had downswings before. When it gets worse, they believe they've become very unlucky. After a while they're forced to move down.
In reality, smart players allow themselves to become irrelevant every day. After years of crushing they fail to adapt their game, they fail to move down in stakes, and gradually they blast through their bankroll. They cut and chop away until they're looking at the last tree on Easter Island - whether they knew it or not, this is complacency.
The way to fight complacency is by creating an environment where innovation is rewarded. Learn to discover new ideas. Learn and create efficient strategies for developing new ideas into practical tools. Proficient innovation means mastery of a dynamic process.
Here too, I've got a long way to go.
February went well. Lots of study, and I was very lucky.
On Jared's advice I played many sessions when I would usually have just crawled into a dark little hole. The results were very promising. I've spotted some serious leaks in my game because of those sessions, and some of these leaks are going to be pretty straight forward to correct.
I've also been given a really unique opportunity to invest more of my time in some creative poker stuff. Its something that came together rather quickly at the end of this month, and I can't wait to get started. I've always wanted to develop a better framework for thinking about core ideas and fundamentals, and I'm looking forward to the challenge. I'll save this for next week 
Volume Goals:
[9.5k] 10k hands
[2] 3 HU SNGsStrategy Training:
[7] 4 Session Reviews
[4] Coaching Session
[3] Postflop Equity Training Session
[9] Preflop Equity Training SessionMental Strategy:
[x] 20/100 Signs. Identifying my C-game. (Study)
[10] Play sessions when I feel like crap.
[70%] Evaluate & Prepare for Sessions.
March Goals:
This month should be interesting. I have a lot of plans right now and some of them are very new. Its hard to predict how much time I'll invest to get things done properly so I'm sticking to a low hand volume, but I have a rough idea of how its going to play out. I just need to make sure I'm not wasting time on things that don't matter. Plan is: work hard and then get myself some new toys as a reward.
Volume Targets:
[5k] 10k hands
[3] 3 HU SNGsStrategy Training:
[6] 4 Session Reviews
[9] Coaching Sessions
[8] 4 Postflop Equity Training Sessions
[8] 4 Preflop Equity Training Session
[4] 2+ ArticlesMental Strategy:
[ ] 40/100 Signs. Identifying my C-game. (Study)
[11] Play sessions when I feel like crap.
[x] Develop a new Prep / Evaluation method.