Day 31.
I played 1:10 at the morning. PokerStars showed me that to win anything at all I should put 130% of effort. The difficulty of situations is always appealing to me, with only condition - me being in the zone. That's because I still trying to avoid difficulties when tilty or tired and frankly it won't do any good putting yourself in difficult spots with zero chances of gaining something.
I played very well today, though I made 1 mistake which caught my attention, so I'll write about it later.
But due to very high concentration I got a headache at the end of the session. And instead of relaxing, preparing to the next session, I suddenly decided to "do something useful" while recovering. My hm2 database got much slower in the past month and I attempted to fix this. Unfortunately I ad no idea that purging hands in hm2 could take enormous amounts of time. Like 8-9 hours of so, with out any possibility to stop the process. In comparison in hm1 it took around 1 hour even on large samples, if your base is on the ssd drive, like mine.
Again my sub par organizing techniques cost me precious playing time. I did some off table work, but I'm not even close to being satisfied with how thing went today.
Since 30 days passed, I guess it's time to give some conclusions to what happened during past month.
The results after day 30 were:
Playing 70:45, off-tables 110, with overall result of 180:45.
This is the most time I put in for poker in one month in past year, which is good. it's still not even close to what I want to achieve, but I'm thinking about as a stepping stone to my goal. I never tried to really train for playing poker ever, so my mediocre result was expected. Nevertheless I discovered quite a lot of useful ideas to use.
How I see my poker practice of near future.
First. Everything should be build around the practice - playing poker. The best time of the day, which is always the first half of it, even if I like evenings more than mornings, should be dedicated to practice. In the first 8-9 hours of the day 4-5 hours of practice is mandatory. Everything else should be devoted to make yourself practice with 100% of your abilities.
Second. In the evening you need to allocate enough time for the off-table work. I want to say the more the better, but some critical minimum of 1/2 of the practice time is required. I still working on adapting some ideas from different fields of expertise for the poker off-table practice, so I will include my findings into the next report.
Third. Even you allocate you time perfectly through the day, the most important is to stick to your schedule. Not allowing to anything to distract you in any major way.
I you read my earlier posts, you could find that there are 2 general types of distractions which I encounter on the regular basis.
One is regular procrastination attempts. They usually manifest in the desires to do something unrelated to poker. Like find something "very important" in the internet. Last time I had and urge to check the new 27" monitor review, the one before that was some information digging about headphone amplifiers, what was the last performance test of different linux distributions, etc etc. I can fill the whole page with different ideas about what useful info I should look for right now. It's not like I need a new monitor, or headphone amplifier, I'm pretty happy with what I have now. And as a poker player I can't use linux. But still I experience desires to fill my head with some technical information which really is of no use to me.
This is not the only way to procrastinate I found. The other one can be called false relaxation. Basically that's the same procrastination, but it comes from a different desire, desire to rest. But sometimes this leads to activities which can only kill time, not really helping us to regain the optimal playing conditions, or helping too little, so the time demands are way to big. Our brains have simply tendency of how future thought patterns are influenced by previous ones. If you thinking about poker, the chances are in favor of you thinking about poker more. But if you start watching TV, youtube, playing games. And after some period of time you still didn't feel rested, the odds are in great favor for you to continue the useless activities, which can easily lead of the rest of the day being lost.
Third way to do things wrong is the result of very bad days or sessions, which leads to negative emotions overload. A natural response to it in most people is avoidance. Here is the place where desire to postpone things could kick in, resulting in days or even days lost. It's very easy to justify skipping a day. I once said to myself: "Screw this, I can't even think straight right now, I'll do it tomorrow". This doesn't work, because tomorrow opening the session in hm2 or video player makes all these negative emotions, all that ego damaging experiences to reappear. The odds are that you can never make a decent analysis of that session.
If you are counting these were the subcategories of the one general type of distractions.
The second type refers to desire to do some poker related activities, just not very important for the moment.
I, for example, spent too much time reading material about practice. The amount of scientific researches on this topic is limited, so most of the material repeats the same information over and over. At the end I understood that, but kept looking through with desire not to miss anything, sometimes sacrificing precious time for other really important activities.
The subset of this problem is, what I call, substitution. In the middle of the month, when I messed my schedule, my sleeping times, I was in a bad general condition, which led to my inability to put in any reasonable amount of practice. And instead of of fixing the roots of my problem, I started to spend more time off-tables, because I was sure I could push myself through off-table work even when I'm tired or sleepy.
These are the potential problems which I encountered during the first month. Being fully aware about them, usually lowers the chances to step in the same traps again. The only thing which is left is to keep doing what was planned in more efficient and fail-safe ways, which were discovered in the first month.