NL100, Nutrition and Self-Improvement: Road to MSNL!

Originally posted by adelaar
Do you play on 888 poker?
I had the same experience there: way too often the rivercard gave my opponent his hand. When he had for example only 2 or 4 outs on the turn.
That's why I stopped playing there.
And I recognize your feelings: you get so angry when this happens when people are calling on the turn with the wrong odds.

You can always loose on the river even if you have 80 or 90% on the turn.
But In other rooms this happens much less.

I don't play on 888. But I ended up thinking about something: we consciously use 10-12% of our brains, the rest is subconscious. Basically, if we believe something, our subconscious mind will work on achieving those beliefs, and then I thought about something: what if we believe we are running bad, and then when facing a river bet when we believe we have been sucked out, we subconsciously want to call, so that we can have our confirmation? Then we call and whine "see, I run horrible", and it's consistent with our beliefs.

Then we obviously forget when we have been the one floating the GS and hitting river, or all the other times when we have not been sucked out.

Your must have tried several rooms, and it's very likely someone will run bad on one room, for you it's 888, for others it can be PS, iPoker, the french rooms etc. you certainly had a rough start and it's possible that you ended up having false beliefs after that. What do you think?

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Confirmation bias, also called myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, or recall information in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses.

Originally posted by Swish29

Edit: I already feel that I lost some weight, or at least my jelly-belly has suffered from last week, that's good motivation to continue. I felt really tired and woke up with a headache this morning, I don't know why. It could be because I slept 4 hours between Sat and Sun and had a long day, because of the fasting, or something else. I was incredibly thirsty as well. Writing this here so that I can try to guess better where it comes from next time it happens.

I fasted for 5 days at the end of last year.
The first 2 days I was freezing and tired all the time and had also a headache.
The books I ve read about fasting said this would be normal.
Did you make sure you drink enough water?
Also coffee isnt good for you while you are fasting espically if you add sugar etc to it.

Yeah I got told by a friend that coffee while fasting is not super smart... I saw on your blog that you were fasting while juicing, not exactly fasting then I did it for 13 days back in 2013, lost 8.5kg in that time, juice-fasting is quite amazing, it gives you a bomb of nutrients and the hunger isn't so bad. I could probably have had more water yeah.

So about the last week's goals:

[/] Track the money spent. How? By writing on my phone after each purchase: Well I could have done it better. Though I spent too much money on crap foods and organic stuff. Organic is good but not with the bankroll I have. I will go organic only when it's sensitive stuff (like bell peppers, the things from which you eat the skin, but no more organic bananas, nuts, avocado etc. organic eggs though)
[ ] Cook 3 new things (they don't have to be full meals, just 3 random things that I have never done before) and post the pics here. I can go check online for LCHF/Paleo recepies if needed): Massive fail there. I don't have my own kitchen, using my neighbor's (also a friend) kitchen, and it's not convenient at all. I'll be stricter on the food when I have a kitchen I can use, it should happen this month.
[ ] Play 30 hours. I played a lot of small sessions last week. Part of the reason was that some days I wanted to book a win and keep on feeling happy. But that's not sustainable long term, playing less on good days and more on bad days doesn't make a lot of sense. I need to push myself and do 100 mins sessions when I play. 3*100 is 300, thus 5 hours, if I do this 6 times in a week I have my 30 hours :): I haven't reached my goal but overall I made long sessions, only one session was <100 minutes so that's good but I have troubles with HM2 at the moment, I spent many hours trying to figure out what was wrong with the help of the support, sent log files 4 times, the last time they told me that the issue is something the developers are working on now that they have enough information. This is one reason why I played only 18.5 hours, the other one is that quite some unforeseen things happened at the beginning of the week as well. I probably could have played more anyway. Even 30 hours isn't much given that we have 168 hours in a week.
[ ] Exercise every second day from Tuesday: Did it only once I have no excuses. I was tired (maybe because of the crap I ate) and lazy. Congrats...
[ ] Low-carbs diet
[ ] Avoid processed food (Unless it's organic. But no more BS that has conservatives and weird stuff in it): Massive fail there. Ate some processed BS, some sweet peanuts etc. I just fucked up. Not having a kitchen is quite annoying, I'll work on fixing that this week.
[ ] Fast for one day, I won't be able to do that on Sunday because I want to play the 9M SM. On Saturday I should be running, so I'll do that on Friday.:
Well, I just didn't do it~~
[/] No distractions while playing. Put AP mode on the phone as well: Getting better there, still not perfect.
[ ] Start a self-improvement diary: Nope.
[ ] Pay the rent and internet bill (it's something I have to do online and I don't want to skip it): I actually haven't gotten the bill for the rent and when I went to pay the internet bill I saw that I didn't have enough money on my bank account, wp!
[x] Write an email to M.: Done! (finally some green)
[ ] Arrange the country change on Skrill: No.
[x] Not eat out unless it's part of a social activity: I should stop bleeding money on going for food alone: Yay I managed.

Massive fail week, could be explained by the troubles I got irl but I really could have done better.

Poker went great though, +25BI lost 215$ in the SM9M, I have no regrets in terms of how I played so I'm fine with that. So still a +2.5k$ week with the rb really happy about the redline as well, I've been definitely playing better on average.

Monday Meeting:

[ ] Play 30 hours
[ ] Avoid cow-milk products, gluten and processed food
[ ] Only buy organic stuff that is the most sensitive to the pesticides and the way the food industry works (vegetables from which you eat the skin, eggs, etc.)
[ ] Eat out only with other people.
[ ] Arrange Skrill address
[ ] Exercise 3 times
[ ] Fast one day
[ ] Start a self-improvement dairy
[ ] Track the money spent
[ ] Work in my flat and begin to arrange my kitchen

__

I need to play my first session earlier in the day. Last week the earliest I have started a session was at 11.45, it's though to play 5 hours if you start late (like today... ahem). There are people working outside, renovating the roof of my building, I can't sleep in mornings now anyway.

Massive fail week, could be explained by the troubles I got irl but I really could have done better.

Yeah lol what a fish you are, who would play 18 hours for only $2500

were is the monday meeting?

following! GL!

Originally posted by aikira
were is the monday meeting?

I still had issues with HM2, so I used PT4, it took me forever (well, a week) to recreate a HUD similar to what I had. I got the adapter of my 30" on Monday, it stopped working on Tuesday, when I finally got my HUD ready I had problems with the PT4 HUD as well! I sent one email to the PT4 support with log files (I did this a few times more with the HM2 support), I got a reply telling me to upgrade PostgreSQL, which I did and now it works great. So I basically bought PT4 to get better customer service, as it was a PostgreSQL issue and not a HM2 issue.

At the moment I live in Tallinn, I'm 99% likely going to live in Prague from May with a friend that lives in The Netherlands at the moment. It's a dude who has a far healthier and more mature approach of poker, he puts in more volume and is a lot more detached from variance. So basically he can inspire me to destroy my two biggest leaks.

The hardware (the 30") and the software (HM2/PT4) issues that I had lately were quite heavy on me, as this was on top of other issues I have at the moment (among others the place I live in is quite depressing, and an ex that is emotionally draining at the moment). Basically I had failed quite hard my weekly goals and didn't feel like doing the Monday Meeting and be like "oh hey, well, I failed at everything because shiat keeps on happening to me". Now I have a working software though, Monday Meeting will be back next week and I'm confident I will crush again.

One thing I managed to do this month is to be gluten-free, I guess the last time I did something like this was when I was still pooping in diapers. I don't have pain in my belly like I used to have and I believe I feel better overall. That being said I still had sugary food, milk and processed foods, I will work on that in April. I'm still happy I did a no-gluten March, maybe I wanted to break too many habits at once, it's better to do small steps but doing long run than wanting to do too much, fail, go back to square one.

https://forums.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=210881

Just went through the last few months of this blog. His dedication to the game is so impressive

Here are the last 2 weeks of play. Quite unhappy with the volume obviously. Tracker issues and not having the 30" is very annoying. That being said I spent many hours having a HUD that fits the smaller screen, now I have PT4 which seems to perform better than HM2 as well, so I should be able to grind somewhat normally.

I will grind with a pen and paper to write down what I think is missing in my HUD (today I noticed that I need to add squeezes stats for example), and I should put the keyboard away as well. I have a wireless numeric pad so I don't need the keyboard. It will prevent me from chatting, which is quite bad. Trash-talking only makes me steam more, if I don't trash-talk I can move on quicker.

I want to finish to read Psycho-Cybernetics as well this week, it's taking me forever to read it whereas I believe it's a fantastic book. It basically talks about the self-image and how we, humans, can't act against our self-image, or what we believe to be true. Very simple example: if I picture myself as a dude that's tilting, can't put in volume and has lower tilt resistance as the years go by it will be close to impossible to start to relentlessly put in volume while being a zen master. It works with every topic obviously, this book has nothing to do with poker and is even older than the WSOP :).

I played a bunch of MM events, (the SH events mostly and the ME), ran very bad when ITM overall. I believe I shouldn't play tourneys that are this cheap even if I'm pretty sure my ROI is very very high, it's probably not high enough to play them as a NL100 grinder. In April I will try to play 2 tournaments only: the Sunday Storm 1M GTD and some 500€ live SH here in Tallinn. Maybe decent loyalty freerolls on top of that. Didn't feel like grinding my regular CGs with the setup I had so I often monotabling some MM while working on PT4, so it's okay, it's not like it has influenced my CG play because I would not have played a lot anyway. For the next MM I guess I should do only the ME

See you tomorrow for the Monday meeting

Monday Meeting:

[ ] 35 hours of poker (1)
[ ] No milk or high carbs processed foods nor gluten (2)
[ ] Put the keyboard away when I grind and keep pen and paper for things I want to write (3)
[ ] Airplane mode while grinding (4)
[ ] Finish to read Psycho-Cybernetics and write a summary for me and another one here (5)
[ ] Fast one day (6)
[ ] Arrange Skrill address (7)
[ ] Start a self-improvement dairy (8)

(1) It's in the very high range for me. Best month was 150h of poker in 30 days, barely had any months over 100 hours. The key here for me is to start my first sessions early I believe. I also need to waste less time on the internet or playing games on the phone. I should stop opening Skype automatically when I'm on the computer as well.

(2) I had no high carbs goals throughout the month. It didn't work well, I ended up eating BS like M&M's among others. The thing is that I have more and more problems eating meat. I was vegan for 7 months for health reasons (I believed it was better). I got tired of being vegan and I just quit. The annoying thing when I was vegan is that I noticed that literally everyone turns out to be a nutritionist! Every dude will tell you what s/he believes to be true, without science backing it up. The same dudes who give you lessons about what foods we're supposed to eat will go to the MacDonald's. One of my ex was like "well I'm a human after all", while she was eating a cheeseburger, she meant that she had weaknesses like all of us. I told her that she was in fact human so that cheeseburgers should not be part of her diet, and she went like: "oh come on".

But lately I have problems when I eat meat, I don't think it tastes as good anymore and I can't stop thinking about the animal I'm eating and the life it had. Moreover, people are dying out of hunger and other because they're too fat. It's quite sad in general, but given that these two groups of people live on the same planet it's pathetic. No one can argue that being a meat-eater is better for the environment, and I'm quite sensitive to that cause. Having a way of eating that (a) is sustainable for the planet and (b) makes it possible for every human on this planet to eat like me is somewhat important to me. And I just don't get how being smarter gives us the right to do what we do to other animals.

Now I'm not so convinced about the health benefits. I'm sure that Big Mac meat is terrible for one health and that grass fed cows/paleo style are a lot better. That being said quality meat is super expensive and we can't feed the whole planet with grass fed cows. And it's a environmental disaster. Next time a dude from Greenpeace bothers you, ask her/him if s/he is vegan, because one can't claim environment is important while eating meat, it makes no sense, given that the meat industry is the leading cause of pollution. There are other funny things as well: I get it that people eat meat because they believe it's healthy, but it's 2015. Do we need to do stuff like wear animal skin? Have animal skin bracelets or wallets? We're sending people to Mars next decade, I believe we have the technology to get rid of animal products use in everything we don't eat.

Back to me now: well, if I quit meat and high-carbs products I will end up eating only vegetables. Not really funny. I believe that for my health it's a priority to not eat gluten, I feel better this month (especially my digestive system), then there is processed food and milk (M&M's are horrible of course). And since I feel less and less happy eating meat there are too many things I can't eat in my opinion. So I will allow myself to eat fruits and legumes and see how it goes in April. I will still eat organic eggs though. I will make a transition to a better diet in order to create sustainable habits, instead of going cold turkey and run the risk of doing what I did in March.

(3) Easy fix and direct rewards! Pen and paper so that I can get rid of my thoughts while playing and continue to be in the flow of my session.

(4) Same as (3). Easy to do and the Facebook bell won't distract me anymore: more profit!

(5) Reading it on my Kindle, highlighting what I think is important, and I will go over the highlighted parts when I review the book.

(6) This time I shall not drink coffee the day I do it.

(7) Easy to do, I've been too lazy.

(8) Same as (7) basically. It's like having a small "Monday meeting" every day with one-self, very useful for someone seeking to improve his daily routines.

Wish me luck and GL at the tables!

Ok I'm calling it a day and month.

Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

Hero (BTN): $115.50
SB: $117.53 (VPIP: 25.10, PFR: 19.55, 3Bet Preflop: 7.82, Hands: 13,027)
BB: $241.36 (VPIP: 32.61, PFR: 25.23, 3Bet Preflop: 11.57, Hands: 570)
UTG: $192.31 (VPIP: 64.71, PFR: 38.24, 3Bet Preflop: 21.43, Hands: 34)
CO: $100.00 (VPIP: 26.64, PFR: 20.30, 3Bet Preflop: 9.87, Hands: 969)

SB posts SB $0.50, BB posts BB $1.00

Pre Flop: (pot: $1.50) Hero has 4♣ A♦

fold, fold, Hero raises to $2.50, SB raises to $6.50, BB calls $5.50, Hero calls $4.00

Flop: ($19.50, 3 players) K♦ 3♦ Q♣
SB checks, BB checks, Hero checks

Turn: ($19.50, 3 players) 6♦
SB bets $12.00, BB calls $12.00, Hero calls $12.00

River: ($55.50, 3 players) 9♥
SB checks, BB bets $19.00, Hero raises to $97.00, fold, BB calls $78.00

Hero shows 4♣ A♦ (High Card, Ace)
(Pre 53%, Flop 44%, Turn 16%)
BB shows 9♦ T♦ (Flush, King High)
(Pre 47%, Flop 56%, Turn 84%)
BB wins $245.50

So after this one I stood up to get my keyboard and insult that other reg as much as I could.

The great thing about this hand is that there is the Kd on the board and I have the Ad in my hand, so there is no way on earth that villain could ever have a flush, because calling QdJd or worse preflop would be terrible. Not only he has worse than QdJd but he manages to bet/call the river. No NL100 reg would bluff the river spot in my shoes, nor value bet worse. Maybe some would but probably not enough of them. One could argue that I'd bet a NFD flop or raise turn. But this still doesn't mean his b/c is good at these stakes, and why would a villain bluff shove this river spot and x/b flop the NFD?

Please let me know if my logic is flawed here. Or if you're the kind of guy that would take the same line he did.

Lost 860$ the last 2 days. I'm also super tired at the moment, and I don't know why. You have no idea how it's depressing to have foggy brain 24/7. I slept over 7 hours, from 11:30pm until 6:30am, ate healthy food, so why?

Heater is over.

69h30mins of poker this month, quite bad obviously.

Will do 150 hours next month. It's 5 hours a day and I have nothing else to do in my life at the moment anyway. Going to Prague will be fine, one of my friends just bought a car and is OK to let me borrow it to move to Prague, so I don't have to worry about this anymore.

I believe that part of the problem of this hand is that I'm trying to bluff a dude off two pairs or a set, maybe I should keep my life simple and give up? I'm raging a lot and I'm thinking that this spot would never happen at 5/10 because no one bad enough to 3bet to 6.5bb OOP vs a 2.5x open can climb up the stakes, nor a dude who plays T9s like this. But I'm blaming others before I blame myself. I'm often raging when I estimate that villain played terribly some hand, whereas I should just use that info to play better. It's like I don't take responsibility for being stuck at NL100: "it's not my fault, it's because I run bad or horrible regs make things they should not which causes me to lose money".

The key to climb up the stakes may be to get rid of that mindset, I don't really know how though.

I could see myself calling QJs if I was in the BB's shoes. The 3bet is really small and BU has a very wide range and will often fold so I can be HU ip vs the SB pretty often or play a 3way pot with a hand that plays quite well.

Do you ever call the turn with the nut flush when SB leads and BB calls? You could get outdrawn or lose value and the line you take looks bluffy imo.

Not saying that I think the bluff is bad, it's just not unbelievable that you got called by a medium flush on the river imo.

I will not post updates for now. Poker is just killing me, it makes no sense for me to blog about it for the time being. Just busted from some 500€ donkament, was 2/20/50 in chips entering day 2. I was at the table of a dude that had 750k in live cashes, he made 3 terrible decisions in one hand. He limped 85o BT, SB that was away folded, I did 2k on 300/600/50 (5 handed) from the BB, and he called. I checked to him and he bet flop and turn on 853TT and decided to check behind river. As you can imagine I was beat. When I left, this player was still in the tournament obviously.

Justice and fairness is quite high in my values, and seeing that this kind of dude has 750k on the mob drives me crazy ( http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=151971). I believe I should quit live tournaments for the rest of my life or find a way to accept these kind of situations. He seems like a "reg" and thinking player. But what happened in his mind so that he thought limp/calling 85o vs a 3.33x raise was good? It's a hand of the bottom 25% for fuck's sake! It's not like borderline bad, it's outrageously disgusting. The icing on the cake was when he checked river. Was he afraid of AT or something? 89? Doesn't he realize that if he has 85o in his range here he probably has 65, 97, 64, 96? 85o is the top of his range and he manages to check it back I told him that I would have been happier if he had bet river (oh yeah, because I'd rather lose to people that play well than vs regs that suck).

It was at the Estonian Poker Championship. And well, if you're Estonian and reading this, GG because I will never play this again. Obv speaking was in Estonian and Russian, I barely understand any of them, but sure, why not, I can live with that. What really annoyed me today was that I was on the TV table. It's my first TV table ever, I don't do live MTTs usually. I was on the phone, asked the dealer if I could use it, he says he doesn't know. NONE of the other players said anything, so I kept using it. After I had been on it for maybe 2 hands, floor manager comes to me and tells me to put the phone down. Rules are the rules so I do it. I played 2 big pots vs a dude on my left, his phone rang a while after (there was an online streaming with a 15-20 mins delay), he checked it, dealer said nothing.

The 85o artist was nonchalantly checking his phone under the table. Like, he had his left hand on the table, and his right hand under the table. It looked like he was staring at his hand. I look under the table and he's checking his phone! So for example he can know what I had on the 853TT board, and what I had on other big pots we had been playing, but I can't know anything because I didn't plan that TV-Table thing (it's a 50 players 500€ tourney...) and because I do as the floor manager told me to do: put the phone down. Then I mention he's using his phone, some pathetic fan boy takes his defense and goes like "oooh you're that kind of guy, reporting people blabla", so I explain to him that he can know my hands whereas I can't etc. He basically told me that it could happen on EPTs but not here, I go like "how do you know?". Of course he didn't know, he just wanted to kiss the ass of Lord Madis Muur, 1st player of the Estonian All-Time money list. "I don't care", he said. "You're talking a lot about it for someone that doesn't care". Of course he didn't want to admit that so he continued to talk BS, I asked him: "I thought you didn't care?" and it was kind of over. Madis didn't say anything, the dealer didn't say anything and phones were still being used. I talked to some people watching the stream and they told me more were using phones~~

Then I lost almost 99% of my stack QQ vs AK vs AA aipf. CO opens (he has AA and a bit over 50bb, his opening range is definitely over 70% of hands), I 3bet QQ, SB folds, BB 4bets AI 20bb, and CO calls. I'm not exaggerating when I said 70% of hands, he was endlessly raising and 3betting. I cold 4bet him light a bit earlier, I could be perceived to be steaming because of a hand right before BvB, I had 3bet him light before as well. I was dealt hands of the bottom 50% way more than 50% of the time so it was tough to playback. But anyway, CO calls the BB shove and I reshove, he snaps and I lose. The dude was raising and 3betting so much, it's ridiculous. I decided to get it in with ATs earlier SB vs him BT. Had 24bb, he minraised, (he opens 100% here) I decided to 3bet and snap the 4bet shove. 3bet shoving was massively +EV as well, but I prefered to 3bet to 6-ish BB and call a shove, this way I get more Ax type of hands. I ran vs AQs obv! I managed to suckout this one but then he got me with his aces.

Started the day losing KK vs QQ aipf 1st hand, then quickly after there was the 85o hand, and the phone situation. I was steaming most of the time, not too happy about how I played. Though I made a sexy bluff on KQsshJ5h, I called SB a raise and BB called, it was a 4-way that was checked through the turn. Turn I check, BB bets, PFR folds, BT calls, and I x/r my 97ss, both folded. So many annoying hands overall, like, I raised AQ less than 30bb deep, BT called with 97s and raised my cbet on KJ5 with the bdfd, I folded. Somehow I expected people to not do this kind of calls pf. Earlier (and deeper) he had called 97hh BT vs me CO again, the 85o genius called BB, it came J75hhcAc6h, I 2 barreled (I expect Mr. 85o to peel light given the huge amount of draws and that it's a scared card etc.), got 2 callers, checked river obv. 97hh bets and Mr. 85o tank calls, maybe he had 43hh or some 98. Overall I got the feeling that people were really annoyed that some non-Estonian/Russian was playing their dear "Estonian Poker Championship", including the dealers. I forgot to mention that I showed down quads on day one, villain mucks and dealer ships the pot to villain. I was so tired I didn't notice directly, while the dealer was shuffling the next hand I started to be like "what?" and the villain gave me back the pot with a smile.

There was another table with regs on the younger side, had played with some of them yesterday and a few seemed really good (one of them made 3 final tables in small tourneys in 2015 and won one of them), I'm sad I didn't get to play this table. I play much better when I play people that I respect, but yeah, I need to change that mindset.

So yeah, basically this blog is on pause until I have a better mindset.

Take care

This is sad Really enjoy reading your blog!!!

Take care!!