My Thoughts on Poker (long but good)

[TruFloridaGator]

Just beautiful, I feel enlightened. I know it's nothing new, but it's very refreshing. Awesome!

[Eagles]

TFG,
That sums up my post pretty well, I didn't really say anything that new but sometimes it's important to go back to basics. One thing I forgot to talk about is hand reading and Bigt and pudge both made long posts about it but to oversimplify I'd say two really important things about hand reading.

1. It takes practice but the more you do it the better you get.
2. Use common sense if villain c/c a two tone board and then leads a flush card on the turn it would make sense for him to have a flush.

[suzzer99]

Very nice post. In the middle of reading it, your post inspired me to make my post about subtle mistakes I was thinking about.

[snakekilla88]

[ QUOTE ]
I know personally I cannot play cash for much longer than an hour before my mind starts to wander or I check my account to see how much I’m up or down and at this point I almost always quit all my tables.

[/ QUOTE ]

Interesting, this means you dont play very much... unless you are constantly playing small one hour sessions every day. Maybe its a good thing if you find yourself tilting, getting bored and playing bad. For me, it sometimes takes an hour of cash before I even get into the zone, and start focusing and playing better. After an hour I usually have a good feel for how the table is playing, so quitting when I finally get the table dynamics down seems bad if my ultimate goal is to make money. I dont know just an observation.

[Mike MacIntosh]

[ QUOTE ]
when I’m playing SnGs my mind is something like this. Push, fold, call, fold, fold, fold, raise, check, push, push, fold and so on. In reality my mind should be going at a much slower rate while there are tons of slam dunk pushes and calls and folds there are tons of hands in between and when faced with any borderline decision if you just stopped for five seconds looked at the hand and focused your game would improve a lot. When playing a million tables people are under the impression they need to act as quickly as possible, however if you are incapable to stop and think in tough spots I seriously suggest you reduce the amount of tables you are playing.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is me as well. I am currently five tabling the 60's, and never have time to take more than 15 seconds in between decisions. I find myself making the same default decisions over and over when there is defiantly a more profitable option available.

I am going to take your advice and drop a couple of tables for a week and only add another table when I feel 100% comfortable doing so.

[adrockuk]

I normally just lurk here, but I thought I'd show my face to say thank you for the post.

If nothing else it helps to see that people playing higher stakes face the same type of problems so it's going to be very worthwhile to get a healthy grip on these kind of things before moving up.

[Eagles]

I'm going to bump this because I have something to add.

I was looking at my stats and realized since I won the second chance I basically have broke even for the last 5 months or so. Now I consider myself to be a very good player so why am I breaking even over such a long period of time?

Well this is how I have played a lot of cash games, 2/4 and 3/6 and I am up a lot of money in them and this is where most of my profits are coming from. However most of these profits have been lost in the following three things. HU sngs, MTTS, and PLO. Now I do not consider myself to be a bad player at any of these. MTTS I have proven over a fairly large sample I am a good player and HU sngs I have not played that many of but I have a made a lot of money in HU cash and am probably +ev in them. PLO I am just learning but I still feel like I am probably decent at the game and am a marginal winner/ break even.

Now how could I lose so much in money these games when I am probably +ev or neutral ev in all of them. The answer has nothing to do with variance but it has a lot to do with my mindset when playing them. Frequently I'll be bored and I don't feel like starting up a session so I'll just open up some of these and donk around without really much care and end up losing. Basically I'm just gambling, like a gambler who goes to the casion with hopes of beating roulette but more often than not he comes home down money.

I explained this to AMT on AIM and I think it's a pretty good analogy so I'll use it again here.

In the video game GTA when you play you'll either do missions and try and beat the game or you'll donk around and start going around killing everyone. Now both of them are fun but going around killing everyone is often more fun. However the problem with doing this in poker is you are playing with real money and can end up losing a lot of money . While doing it in a video game has no negative result.

Now ultimately this comes down to me playing when I'm bored so I'll give everyone a last piece of advice.

Never ever play when you don't feel like playing

[snakekilla88]

[ QUOTE ]
When I hit the refresh at the end I figured I was probably up 1 or 2 BI's but before I hit it I decided that I was going to be happy with my session no matter what. I ended up being down a bit

[/ QUOTE ]
Sounds like me, hmm....I think I am only down one or two thousand from this horrible session lets check the cashier......o okay nevermind five thousand. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]. [censored]!.

[The Yugoslavian]

Eagles,

Awesome! This is exactly how I've played for much of my poker career, lol. No wonder I never made enough to loose 100k in a couple days at 200/400.

Yugoslav

[lacky]

[ QUOTE ]
I was looking at my stats and realized since I won the second chance I basically have broke even for the last 5 months or so. Now I consider myself to be a very good player so why am I breaking even over such a long period of time?


[/ QUOTE ]

thats actually kinda funny. reread what I wrote in that post you linked. Last time it happened to me I had a 5 month nearly break even period after a couple good mtt wins.

basic recipe is I suddenly didn't really need the money and had a larger bankroll than I was used too. So, I naturally played higher stakes than I normally would, and was less serois/focused than I normally would be. I knew at least in the short term it didnt really matter.

All that pretty much set me up to fail, sounds like the same has happened to you. My advice is take one game, your best game, and just do that one thing for a month at a level you know you can beat. Focus, review, and get back into the habit of winning. Thats how my last intense sng period came about (over a year ago now). I went back to something I knew if I lost at it I may as well hang it up. For me that was $55 and $33 party regulars. I focused, I grinded, and I made about the same return I always had. Then I moved on to other things, but with a winning mindset.

gl, Steve