G1lius' Road to Triplenova

It's just one of those days

No, just making a post to say I'm still on a break. I played like 500 hands or something this month.
I wanted to play a session, but the tables where just too bad. Even Zzeigler was down to 10/20. So instead I'm making this blogpost.
It feels pretty good right now. Although the badrun is still somewhere in my mind, I don't think it'll get to me.
Although I don't like the fact I'm "losing" hands, my mindset is just way more important then my hands.

I'm also trying to get some things going for the upcoming regulations about poker in Belgium. Trying to contact people for it. It seems like getting in contact with a pokerclient is the hardest part. Political parties seem pretty open about it, although I haven't suggested any specific things yet. Right now I'm trying to get an idea where we should be going. I'll prolly make a specific post about all that once I actually get somewhere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_BAHdBHfJw&feature=related

I love that song for so many reasons. The text is pretty motivating, it's a nostalgic song, I grew up with this kinda music, and it's a nice beat, very good for running, I always use it on my walkman (the brand, not the old cassette thing) while running.

Anyhow, my point being, there's no point in looking behind, you can only change the future.

Yesterday I played one small session, and didn't play again because I was up, and I was happy about that. Only shows I'm not ready to play yet.
Today was just not the day to grind. It was 37°C outside in the shadow, warmest day of the year. Right now it's getting better and although I could play, and I actually want to play for a bit, I'm not going to. The longer the break the more I'll long for playing again I guess.

I will be reviewing my own sessions again this month. Something I haven't done in a while. If I really want to be better I'll have to work on it. Not just putting in the hands and thinking on the spot, but do some thinking later. Most highstakes pro's do it, so it'll be stupid to assume I don't need to do that.
If I find a microphone that actually works (the one on my laptop is so crappy you can't understand a word I'm saying) I'll try to give comments on my own game and record it. I'm more focussed and 'into' it if I'm actually doing it for "others" instead of just going over my session and view everything.
I'll likely release them on some dutchspeaking fora. Maybe not if there's too much questioning around it, but if I'm making it anyway, I might as well release it for other people to enjoy.

Once the temperature is somewhat decent I'll try and put the hours in as well. In summertime there's usually little work, so I'll be home pretty quickly from work normally.

I think I can say it's a pretty bad month

A lot of things have crossed my mind. I thought about quiting, taking a break, getting the going pro thing out of my head, etc.
I haven't made up my mind yet.

Some things I have realized:
- 400BB downswings are very likely to happen to 1BB/100 winners. And I might not even be a 1BB/100 winner.
- You need to put in a big amount of hands once you go pro. Variance can be very sick (400BB is nothing compared to wost case scenarios), so you just need a lot of hands to get into somewhat of a long run. Which basically means going pro = going for supernova elite
- I still have no clue about my real skill-level.
- I can not get 50k profit this year, unless I go for quatronova and get 20k$ in winnings. (which is from now, because I'm basically breakeven for the year atm)

I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I will continue to play, and go for triplenova. How to continue after that, I don't know.
I do remember Randy Pausch's words: The brick walls aren't there to stop us, they're there to let us show how badly we want something. They're there to stop the other people who don't want it enough.
However, I'm behind schedule for triplenova, and struggling to get things done, so it might be too impulsive to just say "hey, I'll go for quatronova".

I am not going to play unless I feel ready for it. I played some today with a very bad mindset. The mindset of "I really don't want to see another beat" and "I'm prolly getting outdrawn here again".
There's no reason for me to start playing if I have that in mind.
I don't know how long it's going to take. I might be grinding away tomorrow or be close to august before I start again. Can't tell.
The going pro in 2011 is pretty far away in my head right now. I'd say there's like a 10% chance, maybe even less.

I am currently at 135k VPP's, so 15k short for triplenova-pace.
Over the year I am up a whopping $222

I looked at my results this month. I saw my cashier by accident and noticed the number on there was fairly low.
After that I was too curious and looked in pokertracker.
The damage: 12.8k hands, 3.8k down.

Since we're almost at the half year point, this would mean a very negative conclusion.
It would mean 7k hands short this month, 10k in profit short this year, and 23k VPP short for triplenova.
this is just not acceptable. I will try to get to 20k hands by the end of the month, and we'll see how the results are.
Yesterday I played two tourneys. The pokerrailradio (dutch online pokerradio every sunday) freeroll and the million dollar turbo takedown, both on pokerstars.
I cashed in both. The freeroll good for a step 2 ticket, the turbo takedown good for 180$.
Those Turbo takedowns are sick value. 3000 fpp, which is 48$ at supernova rate, and a million dollar guaranteed prizepool. I think there was like 14k people in there this sunday, so that's a sick 328k overlay.
The prizepool is also less top heavier , 5k people get payed.
There's also a bounty on every pokerstars pro's head, and an extra bonus for everybody who cashes two weeks (or more) in a row.
It kinda sucks it's so late for me, but I prolly play it every week now. I didn't know it was that good value.

Anyway, while I'm typing this I'm playing two tables, and that's how I'm gonna roll this three days. Playing as much as I can.
I am going to take small breaks, but just very short, like fifteen minutes up to half an hour.
Those 20k hands are a MUST have. It would be nice too if I had a winning month, but I need some goodrun for that.

So after my tilting about the whole regulation in France, I went to see a movie. The A-team.
Pretty good movie. It's not the best movie of the year, but it's good enough. They really honor the series in my opinion.
Anyway, after that we had a couple of drinks. Too many drinks.
Which basically ended up with me not feeling well during the whole day yesterday. That combined with the hot weather here, making it VERY hot inside, means that I didn't play yesterday either.
It sucks, but I never could've gotten in a lot of time anyway. I lost about an hour of play I guess, because I felt better during the evening. But I've looked at a couple of videos on youtube, and I don't really regret it, giving the nature of the videos.

That's where the science comes in.
I've always been interested in the human psyche, and saw a lot of videos about it. It's strange you can quote whole lines from somebody's speech, but fail to realize it also applies to yourself.
I've been struggling with motivation since forever, and although I've seen the video before, it took me another look before I realized it could also apply to me.
http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg#p/u/0/u6XAPnuFjJc

For the people that don't view the video, the think it boils down to is that you have 3 things that increase performance and give more personal satisfaction.
- Autonomy
- Mastery
- Purpose

And I've thought about them all.
I don't have to report my pokerresults to anybody (except for you guys ;)), so that's a lot of autonomy.
Without a doubt, I got where I am because I got better at it. I learned more and more, mastering the game.
And like I've said in one of my previous blogposts, I like to view the bigger picture. Even beyond going pro.

So I got all incentives, yet I'm not all that motivated.
And I realize now that I should focus on all three things at the same time. If I'm thinking about moving up, I'm thinking about shortterm, I must do this in X time. I lose sense of bigger purpose and autonomy.
Same goes for all the other things.
While it does give me some boost, it's not for long. And it's obvious why. I forget about the other things.

The goal of mastery is also a bit faded. I would've signed for this to be playing the 10/20 games 1.5 year ago. It doesn't have to stop here however.
I never really wanted to be the best, and it's still a long way to go, but why wouldn't I try to reach it? After all, it's not the goal that's important, it's the route you take to get there that is.

I'm taking my "restday", although I didn't plan on doing one, because I wasn't happy with the amount of time I played, but I'm just too tilted to play right now.
Not because of some hand or something, but because of the news about the French poker regulation.
Again, they isolate the country, only allow to play against each other. Plus, they ask a big amount of taxes on every pot, which basically means, no one is capable of playing winning poker. Even if someone manages to do it,  it'll be by no means something worth playing for.
Belgium has his own regulation planned for the start of 2011, and it's easy to just do the same things the other countries did. I looks bad.
I have the option to move out, to another country, but if everybody closes off their country, there's a lot less people to play with.

Lately I've seen good or decent players make a play that I can't really figure out all that good.
I see some extra value in it, but it's so marginal, and so exploitable on first sight that I really wonder what's the deal about it.

The play goes as following:
they're in position, I'm not (I bet you didn't saw that one coming). I check, Villain bets, I raise, villain 3bets, I call, turn goes check/bet/call, river goes check/check. Villain shows Ax high.
Pretty often it's on lowcard flops, so I guess there's little really strong hands in my range that can really punish him if I have a made hand.
If he folds if I check/raise the turn I can play my draws really aggressive, but if he doesn't I can't really do alot about it. Being more aggressive with my weaker hands is not quite the solution I think. After all, he could have tptk hands and overpairs and sets.
Then again, it's only 0.5BB, and you can get in really though spots if you get raised on the turn, or capped on the flop.
You also might miss the value from missed draws, but often people don't fire the 3rd barrel because it's obv. villain is calling down.
It is a well balanced play. Instead of calling the flop and turn, which makes your hand pretty face up, you disguise your hand a bit more.
It seems like it is in fact a decent play, but it just doesn't feel good to me. It is very exploitable, but only if you know his hand (and everything is exploitable if you know villains hand obv).
I'll give it some thought, might implement it to my game.
I can't really remember the last time I learned a completely new line in pretty standard spots. Maybe this is one of those times. :)

So it's the first weekday in the two weeks I don't have to work.
I skipped the morning session, because the tables where just insanely bad. Went for a run, played a session just after noon. I was planning on doing one or two sessions before dinner, but my mother came home and said it's time to cut the hedge.
Just to give a good idea of how way too long our hedge is I made a video :)



Long story short, only 2 hours of poker.

I hope to get in 4 hours from now on. The other hedge is not that long, so it should be quicker.
For the people just buying a house: don't plant a hedge, it's a fuckload of work, and a pain in the ass to get rid of.

I like to give song and movie quotes as a title :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyUPFMHCA_Q

Anyway, last workday this month. Looking forward to my well deserved rest.
I hope I can play a lot, and enjoy some other things as well.

Was very close to buying a house last week. After long thinking I decided I'd wait a bit for that.
One thing that played a small roll in that was the gamblinglaws in Belgium. It's very unsure what will happen, and as a limit player I'm kinda bound to pokerstars.

I still haven't looked at my results this month, although I have looked at my yearly result, because I needed some information about that. So I know I'm not massively up or down.
It does make me realize I'm way behind schedule on my winnings. It seems like I'm not beating the games as well as I thought I would, and therefor I'm not even close to the +/- 13k I should behaving right now.
July 1st is the official halfway mark of the year, and I will be making some conclusions.
Maybe take coaching, maybe just accept 1BB/100 is too though (not a lot of people have that kinda winrate over a decent sample). We'll see. I don't like to think about it all too much, I'll do that at the end of this month.

FAILED!

Also my schedule kinda failed. If I'm home a bit earlier from work, I usually get everything done, but if I'm just on time, or later, it's usually a fail.
In 2 weeks my vacation begins. I'm not going anywhere, so according to my schedule I should be playing like at least 20 hours a week. Let's see how that's gonna work out.
I do succeed in not looking at my results. At this moment I don't know if I'm up or down, or how many hands I have. I'm thinking about doing a videobloggy thing at the end of the month so you can see live how I look when I see my results :D
Also played a bit HU today. felt ok, I did run good so I ended up with about 200$ profit. I think it was quite equal in terms of skill. He limped a lot, and did some limp/raises. It looked like a fairly balanced range. It was definitely a regular (he was sitting along with 10 others), so I wonder what the idea is behind that, and most important: how do you play against it.

First mental change is starting I think, I see playing poker a bit more as just putting in the hours, instead of winning some money, or playing X amount of hands. It's not a big thing though, but I do feel it.