I don't know what's worse as a fail-stamp so I'm not going to try and visualize how my week went.
After the first day while working I didn't get the hands in, which made me look at the numbers. Last week I played 4 hours a day on average and still didn't make my goal.which means I have to play more than 4 hours a day.
Given that working takes away, say 9 hours, that includes the whole waking up routine and lunch, sleeping takes away 8 hours, which means I have 7 hours left to do everything else. Which includes making dinner, eating, dishes, washing, shopping, etc. plus 4+ hours of poker.
Which is not impossible, but hard to manage. That left me kinda down, and led me to just stop trying to get the vpp's in.
One obstacle I really felt is my tiredness. I thought it would go over when I didn't eat a lot of (red) meat in a while, but when I go back to my standard eating patterns it just gets bad again. Right now I'm emptying out my freezer and when that's done I'm going week-day vegetarian for a month. I love eating meat, but if I feel significantly more energetic and fit after this month I'm just going to stay with it (but include chicken/turkey and fish). The week-day part is just so I don't have to be an ass when my friends want to grab a kebab, although I will take one with chicken. The key to eating and drinking healthy is just not to buy unhealthy stuff.
I'm likely going for some meat-like products that aren't meat, because since I don't like to eat, what I call 'rabbit-food', it's hard to not eat pasta all the time. There's been a lot of improvements in that department though. There's actually some stuff that tastes great, and I've just tried a couple of things while there's a lot more stuff available. There's this cheeseburger they have at colruyt which tastes better then any meat-burger if cooked right (I think I over baked it a couple of times whereafter it doesn't taste nearly as good).
You have to stay positive and make positive changes. Lately I feel a bit stuck, things don't move forward it seems. Maybe I'm just getting older, maybe I just feel the urge to get a girlfriend and start a family, although I'm still not a big fan of kids. If I compare myself with a year ago, I'm basically the same person, I have the same problems, mentally and physically. It's not yet a year since I moved on my own, I lived with my parents before that, however I feel like it didn't change me one bit. Maybe that's one of the things about being an introverted person, you spend a lot of time on your own anyway, something other people might be forced into when they go and live on their own.
Last time I challenged myself for something I hung up a piece of paper against my door saying "How badly do you want to succeed?" which did help. In risk of overdoing stuff I'll be hanging some stuff against my wall this evening. One of it is a "to done-list" as recommended by Hannah Hart (from My Drunk Kitchen), it's basically a to-do list, but with things you've already done that day. For one, it's more positive compared to a to-do list, because you can't fail it and you feel good about doing stuff you'd otherwise don't care about. For two, you kinda force yourself to do positive things, because you'd want to write some stuff down so you don't have an empty paper at the end of the day. Well, that's the theory. "How badly do you want to succeed" will make his comeback, because I still have to grind a bit this month. When my freezer is out of meat something along the lines of "Be awesome, eat healthy" will be there too. If somebody has a good idea of a one-liner to hang on my door, put it in the comments.
It's just too bad a paper with "forget about her" has to opposite effect.
As for my grinding plans, I'm "just" going to play towards 75k vpp's yearly this month, which is still 10k to go, but it'll bring me back on schedule for SN this year.
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Right now I have 7166 VPP's this month, which means I shouldn't be posting this according to my rules. Speaking of which, I have sinned in that department too. I've seen some youtube videos :(
Since I had the week off I kinda thought I'd be on schedule or a bit ahead, but alas. Which means I have a pretty shitty time ahead.
12k hands I have at the moment, which I think is the most I've played in a month this year. 5k hands however are from 2/4 which doesn't give that much vpp's. There is something very convenient about 2/4. You can always join a good table pretty quickly. 2/4 is mindblowingly easy, so I might play those games by default after I get supernova. I'll have to do some calculation, but given that I can play a bit more tables on 2/4 it's likely the best thing to do moneywise.
Although I'm not on schedule now, I definitely played more and longer. While also shortening my other internet activities, which is a good thing since that was eating up way too much of my time.
Most of my time I've spend this week is with friends and family, so if that's what took me off my schedule, I'm fine with that.
Although I do get a bit in the grinding spirit, I'm not going to say I look forward to this week. However, I'd like to surf around and youtube a bit without feeling guilty so I have to get back on schedule asap.
Still down a whopping 140$ this month, 355 if you count the LHE WCOOP. Why do I keep playing tourneys, I don't get it. 5h+ of play to bust out of the money against some idiot who 3bet K2s and backdoored into a flush. I must be addicted or something, because everytime I play I end up regretting it, yet I don't seem to learn.
So,
in order to get myself grinding I made a rule for myself.
No internet stuff unless I'm on a 1000 VPP/day schedule for the month. Which means I should have 3000 vpp's by the end of today (since it's the third of september... that day I'll always remember... Yes I will) and a whopping 30k vpp's by the end of this month. That'll be a personal record I think.
I've got this week off at work, with only 2 days with some scheduled stuff going on, so that makes it a bit more doable.
I've played a small bit of 10/20 this morning, and it felt even higher as usual. Which likely has something to do with adding 2/4 to my play.
It's pretty weird too. If you compare that to NL stakes it's playing 500NL while also playing 100NL.
Must say the difference between 2/4 and 3/6 and up is huge. Depends on what time of the day it is, but there are some extremely soft tables on there. Which needs some adjustments too, I'm not used to playing big multiway pots anymore, I'm likely c-betting a bit too often and overvaluing my hands a bit.
Since that's about all I can say about that, I'll add a small anecdote to lengthen the blog :p
So a couple of weeks ago I broke the screen of my new phone. It's a €550 phone so that kinda sucked. With a bit of research online I found out you can replace the top touchscreen. So I ordered one, trying to repair it at my friends house since I didn't have a heat gun. Anyway, I broke the LCD while trying to get the touch part off which, I found out later, was actually impossible for this specific phone.
Following simplified conversation took place: Well, I guess you'll just have to buy a new phone. No, I can buy the lcd-screen too and replace the whole thing. Well, what if that doesn't work either? THEN I'll buy a new phone. After that he gave me this weird look.
I realized this is the pokermindset that comes into daily life. To me it seems very obvious trying to replace the screen is the most +EV thing to do. Other people however are pretty risk averse, they don't want to take a gamble while they should.
He's a smart guy, so after I fixed my phone and told him it only needed to work like half the time (it was like 40% or something) he got my reasoning. However, when trying to get some idea he asked me about the cost of the LCD screen and the new phone. He also asked me about the prize of the touch-part. I said there was a touch-part attached to the LCD I bought. He insisted on knowing the prize of the touch-part, because in his mind the total prize paid is how you look at the profitability, while for a pokerplayer it's obvious the earlier purchased part has nothing to do with it.
Anyway, that's likely a boring anecdote, but at least it got my blog a bit longer...
Cya