ty for kind words and best wishes to you as well - though it feels awkward saying it in here, why don't I just go give you a hug on skype ♠_love:
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I haven't done one of these in a while, but I generally dislike randomly throwing in things for the sake of doing it - for example, I hate giving gifts just because it's that damn one day in my friend's life when half of his friends get to pretend they like him or her and do something nice. If I get an inspiration, I'll buy you a present.
So yes...the thing I was talking about in the first line was my Mind Thoughtulations "'book' in a blog". I've recently been thinking about one aspect of my game and I've probably even mentioned it somewhere in this blog earlier, but yeh - I'm just a typing machine, I rarely read stuff - some of the stuff I write here I actually forget about and move on to something different, only to re-read it by chance some year later and go like "w00t, I should listen to what I say more often" - not using your own knowledge properly, or to be more precise, forgetting parts of it, can be quite fun 
Mind Thoughtulations - Chapter 7: Trusting your instincts
As I said above, please excuse me if I repeat some parts of my earlier thoughts in this blog. That's kinda how things go in my head, repetitive thoughts that spin in circles until they're shaped to perfection and then stored in the back of my mind for eternity.
So yes, the topic of this chapter are instincts. I have realized this is a huge leak in my game and also one of the most common mistakes most of micro stakes winning friends I know make as well.
How many times have you thought to yourself "this pot is so mine", only to scoop it in the following seconds? I've realized pretty much 90%+ of the time my "feel" is correct.
I win a pot, my opponent had exactly what I thought he would, or close enough, and I feel great... ♠_mad: leak alert!
If I was so sure he had a certain hand, why did I just call him on the river? There were probably thousands of pots like these by now, and in all of them I lost a bit of value by not raising the river. For example, you have a top pair and you know the other guy has a weaker top pair. He bets the river and you just call - 
Another example would be - you flopping a small set, the turn comes an overcard K and you sense that your opponent has KK and has just hit his 2 outer. He checks, you bet, he shoves, you call - ♠_o: (obviously, villain shows KK and you suddenly have mixed feelings about your poker game)
This whole topic is actually pretty huge, so I'll try to cover any parts of it I can think of at the moment.
In trust we trust
During my recent stay at a friend's apartment in a nearby town, I realized he was making the same mistake I've been making, though I've awoken myself from the state of unawareness of its presence in my game.
He kept saying "this guy has hit a flush on the river", "this guy has hit two pair", "this Japanese guy is drinking tea and thinking I'm an overly aggressive mother f*cker, so he will call my bluff for sure", etc.
And what happens next? He doesn't follow his instincts and does the complete opposite. He obviously loses the pot and then comments "see, I told you what he'd have and I was right"
No...actually, you were not right and you didn't know. If you did know, you'd fold and then you'd be right.
Why do we have that lack of trust in ourselves? If we are so sure our opponent has a certain hand, just fold...We do have trust in our read being correct and we aren't all that surprised when our opponent shows us what we thought he'd have, but why don't we have trust in that trust and just follow it all the way through?
So next time you find yourself thinking "damn, he has a full house for sure here, I must fold this flush", or "this river just gave me a stronger two pair, I must raise him" - do it! ♠_cool:
If your instincts tell you to fold, call or raise, trust in yourself and do so. The more you play and the better you understand the game and your opponents, the better "feel" you'll have for the game and what to do, even if it may be against all odds, mathematical rules and what not.
Line between trust and odds
There will be many hands in which we'll be certain our opponent has a specific hand and we'll be correct. However, there will also be many marginal spots in which we'd fear a hand or suspect a hand, but not be quite sure whether we're on the right track or not.
In these spots I'd advise following the usual rules of poker, the numbers and such. I strongly believe that the higher your skill level is, the more decisions you'll be able to make based on instincts rather than numbers.
I'm that type of person, I do stuff based on a "feel", so someone with a mathematical mind will probably rather keep himself in the world of numbers. Anyway...
The bottom line is that you should recognize that line which separates a strong feel and a hopeful guess. Don't forget to never regret your choices, if you decided to follow a read and it turned out to be wrong - don't feel bad about yourself, we all make mistakes. The important thing is to keep on working on listening to your instincts and implementing them into your game.
Don't rush it, do it at a pace you feel comfortable at. If that part of you isn't that active yet, just be patient and focus on learning the game. That "feel" will come in time 
Progress can be made in many ways, you just gotta find what feels the most natural for you at the moment. If you feel like learning more about your equity, go do that, if you feel like improving your hand range, go do that, if you feel like improving your reads, go do that, etc.
Instincts and levelling
Primary reason behind this last topic is a friend of mine, the moment I thought of his way of thinking, I knew what would trouble him the most.
You must be able to differentiate your instincts from your thoughts. For instance, you may think that based on this and that, your opponent must have a certain hand and is doing a certain move because he thinks you have xxx hand.
So you might think to yourself, "ok great, I've gotta follow this hunch and just call my opponent's bet". That's actually another category and instead of following your instincts, you are levelling yourself to your opponent, or however to put it.
My point being that you shouldn't fall into that trap. You can justify a loss because your instincts were wrong, but having a wrong read doesn't fall under the same category.
It is a bit tricky topic and it's hard to pick the right words, because you can say following instincts is a part of having a read on your opponent. My direction in this topic is that by "reads", I mean all the logical thinking and such stuff - aka based on preflop aggression, timing tells, etc. you can deduce various hands from your opponent's hand range and pinpoint the ones he most likely has.
Following your instincts is above mind, it's within us and comes from within in a natural flow. If you analyse yourself, you'll see that your mind is mostly occupied with the usual stuff in a hand and this instinct on what to do just comes out of nowhere - like some of the deep thoughts we enter, they don't really have a beginning, we aren't even quite sure how we got from the normal sentences in our head to this deeper inner meaning of the subject, we just got there somehow and we perfectly know where we are, though if we were to describe the topic to another person, we'd have a hard time finding a starting point at which to start the journey towards the point of the topic we're currently at.
Anyway...to summarize, you should trust your instincts and be aware of them, but also be very careful in spotting your mind playing games on you, so that you don't out-level yourself and mistake your final decision with your instincts - because in general, your instincts will be correct very often, to the insane point, whereas your reads and mind's conclusions could easily go in an overdrive and end up one level above or below the one at which our opponent actually is, thus sending us a tip to do an action that is incorrect.
This was exactly what I needed to read, it is nice to hear the same things that I think about come from another person. Amazing post, first poker thing I have read in a while as I have stepped away from poker for a little while... I'll have to take a look through the older posts as well... I'll be waiting for the rest anxiously. 
glad you liked it 
oh and you reminded me - I forgot to write about different scenarios, when to raise according to your instincts, etc.
So basically, here it goes:
I will use one example for this whole thing, so let's say we are on the river and villain bets into us. We have a marginally strong hand, but our instincts tell us that it's better than what the villain holds, what to do?
I guess this is more of a common poker logic, but anyway, if we feel that we are ahead, we should raise our hand only if we will get paid off. For example, if you have KJ+J and you know your opponent has some weak J8+J, we have to ask ourselves, will he be able to fold his top pair if we raise him on the river?
I will not go into any details regarding each possibility, so regarding this one, let's just keep it simple. So if we believe he will call us, we should raise, the amount and such is a different thing to discuss and it ain't in my thought process at the moment, so I'll maybe get an inspiration to cover that some time in the future.
If our opponent is highly likely to fold, we have little to gain with a raise, so it's better to just check behind and check out the hand our opponent had - we gain some extra information on our opponent, and since he would've probably folded to raise, this is in a way the most +EV move we could've made.
Thinking like the fish don't think
Biggest issue with this river raise for value is the reaction of our opponent. You have a mediocre hand that beats the hand you've put your opponent on, however, what if you raise and he shoves?
We risk the possibility of getting scared away by a weaker hand because our perception of a strong hand is not quite the same as the villain's. He might be a crazy fish who likes his weak middle pair so much that he'll go broke with it, and we think to ourselves - oh my god, this guy must've flopped triple quads the way he shoved that river ♠_o:
So yes, this is the biggest thing that has been troubling me - trusting myself is easy, working on my awareness of my instincts and following them is easy, but figuring out how our opponent perceives his hand...that can be tricky.
This is probably the main reason that has been holding me back from making thin value raises on the river. I am currently working on the following rule - if I think I'm ahead, I'll raise. If my opponent re-raises me, I'll conclude I was wrong and fold the hand.
I believe this will be +EV because in most cases, only hands that will reraise me will be the ones that beat me. So I'll actually get more value from many weaker hands in the long run and have an easy time folding to better hands.
Obviously, I will also have to work on figuring out my opponents better, for the most part so that I can recognize a donkey shove when I see one.
Live Poker
Yep, just wanted to make it bold and clear up there that I'll write a bit about live poker here. Since I won't get into it right away, figured this would be the best way to announce it, since some of you might be interested in that topic but not the following one:
*****erase that thought. It seems I will be getting into live poker topic first after all.
So yeh, before going into the latest happenings, I'll back-pedal to the time when I had that Finnish ninja as a guest at my place in Zagreb. So basically, towards the end of his stay at my place, an old friend of ours (from my hometown Osijek) came to Zagreb as well.
Him, Finnish ninja, me and one more guy sat down for a game of poker with lots of beer around us. Until then, I've only played live poker purely without much concentration on anything besides my cards and maybe pot size/my stack size.
However, this time I decided to pay a bit more attention on the people around me and how they react. What I found out is that there is one key moment of truth in a home game - the moment when players look at their cards.
They 99% can't hide their emotions when they see their cards. That split second is complete truth radiating from their body language, everything after that is 99% hollywood.
I've also managed to pick up a tell on that 4th player at the table. Basically the hometown friend had K high and that guy bet the flop. He looked really uncomfortable, picking up his knee with his hands.
That was pretty much a tell for me that he was nervous. So I told my friend to call him because he is bluffing (bad manner right? well I don't like that guy and it was a home game for fun, so f*ck manners ♠_cool: ).
Turn was the same, bet and a call. River was checked by that 4th player and I just told my friend to bet whatever and it's his pot. He bet, other guy folded and I put on a happy grin.
However, the primary reason that I went back in time to that game of poker was not because of that bluff-catching thing, but because I learned how hard it is to play focused a live game.
I managed to check all of their faces when they were checking out their cards for like only 3-4 rounds and then I simply forgot, or got caught in a conversation and didn't take a look at their faces on time, etc.
Besides looking out for tells constantly, it's also tricky not making it obvious you're doing it. For example, my hometown friend was also paying attention to other players, so in one hand, he was checking out the 4th player, then the Finnish guy and then he turned his head to check me out
and commented: "Ah what the f*ck!! I check out one guy, he's looking at his cards, I check other guy, same thing, then I check Dendra and his eyes are f*cking all over the place!"
Because he thought he was ahead of us by watching one guy after another, and then he saw me watching all three of them like a madman with eyes scanning their faces 24/7.
It was a funny moment, cuz I was watching him and he was watching me and we both knew what we were doing, so we put on some weird faces and just smiled at each other, like two sharks high fiving each other with their tails in the middle of a hunt for human surfers.
Back to the future
So yes, here I am, stuck in the middle of Osijek with lots of work to do today. But that's not the point of me travelling back to the future, if you count days from that day the game described above took place.
Two of my poker buddies live in Osijek and they've been playing in live tournaments for a while. They told me there was gonna be a live tournament these days, so I should come with them.
After some back and forth struggle, they managed to get me into the car and along with one more fishy guy from Osijek, we embarked on our journey towards that poker tournament.
Zig-zag trip on the Croatian roads between some villages and finally, we got to some weird looking building - which turned out to be something like the mini club/meeting hall/whatever of a local football club.
With no heat (at least no functional one) inside, we had to remain in our jackets to be able to stay alive in there or risk being frozen to death in the middle of a hand.
The place was a typical peasant location with some benches that would serve the role of the poker tables for the night. The guys were your typical peasant pirates as well, missing teeth, yaarrr arrr arr-ing into the night, chewing unknown substances, drinking cheap beer and so on.
The most annoying part about the whole scenery was probably the damn smoke - I joked we'll need to wave with our hand in front of the cards to clear the smoke if we wanted to see what cards we've been dealt during the tournament.
Can't say I was far from truth!
Anyhow, the tournament was let's say $6 buy-in, winner takes all. We set up two tables with 6 players and the rules were that after three players at each table were eliminated, we'd all sit down at the final table. The odd rule was that the chips would be reset at the final table, meaning you'd have to start all over with 50 chips, whether you had 400 or 10 left at your designated table.
A shitty rule to say the least, but I didn't think much of it nor cared about it, because I didn't come there with expectations to win money, I came there to gamble $6. My friend was staking me for the tournament, so yeh - pure having fun. (stake was a part of the deal, as I didn't want to play with % of my bankroll in some tournament, cuz that would be gambling with my money and I simply won't do that)
My table
Players seated at my table were all obviously unknown to me, except for one of my friends from Osijek, the guy who staked me. My first big hand happened really early in the tournament, maybe in the 2nd or 3rd round.
I had T5o, the flop came TTA. My opponent bet, I raised, he reraised, I shoved and he called. I was feeling comfortable but then I realised he must've called me with some strong hand and what the hell could he have.
AT and any other Tx that beats me. I was like f** I might be out this early - and it always sucks getting busted early in a live game. However, the guy turned over A4 or something and I doubled up.
I busted two of them shortly after (or busted one and severly crippled the other, either way, I added lots of chips to my stack). One of those eliminations was an unfortunate one, as I took the last of chips that my friend had.
With another guy giving me all of his chips, our table was done and I had a huge stack, probably 70% or more of the chips at that table.
We then had to wait for Table 2 to finish and yep, we sure did wait for a while. Eventually, the second poker buddy from Osijek ended with the most chips at that table. The fourth guy coming from Osijek with us was 2nd in chips, and the peasantry was left with a few dimes in front of them.
So, instead of entering the final table with like 200-250 chips, friend with 100-150 and that fourth friend with 50-100, we all had our stacks reset to 50. This meant the guy who was down to just 10 was once again up to 50, as all of us ♠_cry:
The guy ended up winning the tournament in the heads-up match against me. And he also busted the friend from Osijek with AJ (my friend had TT). It was really annoying, because I couldn't hit a damn thing and I kept getting oesd+flush draw and such monsters.
The guy who staked me preached me later how I should've shoved the flop every time I got oesd+fd on the flop, but I told him I didn't want to risk it all in such marginal spots when I could've just folded and waited for a clear shot to take the guy down.
Problem was that my shove would've been +EV, I knew exactly what my winning chances were, but I also knew the other guy would call with his top pair and I'd be f** up if I missed my draws, thus losing the match.
So I don't regret anything, I think I chose the right tactic against such an opponent. I couldn't win a single pot and had a very short stack entering the heads-up match - and all I needed was just one double-up to get back into the game and slowly grind him down.
In my final hand, I had 87o and saw weakness printed all over my opponent's face. So I shoved and the other guy insta-called me, and I was like WTF ♠_confused:
He flipped over T2o. Friend who got busted with his TT and I debated on this hand and yes, the guy had the odds to call me but the thing was, I still had a relatively solid stack to make him fold and he 100% has no clue about pot odds (not that I do, but he never heard of it! so that makes him less knowledgeable than me), so he just made a bored call and his T high held up against me.
We played a second tournament afterwards, 8-handed with $4 buy-in. It was a funny ride, I forgot to mention that in that 1st tournament I busted a guy with Q9s vs his KK (flop Q, river 9).
So yeh, this tournament was no different, I busted my friend (the guy who lost with TT in the first tournament) with Q8s vs his JJ - flop came A ... and then a Q
Come to think of it, I also busted the guy who staked me as well (he staked me for both tournaments). He had AA and wanted to slowplay it, I caught top pair 7 on the flop with 75s and then trip 7 on the turn - end of story for my friend ♠_evil:
When the play was down to just three players (fish, 4th guy from Osijek and me), I missed big draws twice against the fish and had a very short stack left, so I had to start pushing light in the small blind right into the chip leader, the 4th guy from Osijek.
My first shove was Q9s, I was so happy to see those cards after being dealt crap time and time again. Naturally, the chip leader had to flip over AKo. Facepalm 
However, I spiked a nine or something and won the pot. Some rounds later I shoved Q9s again and won and then shoved Q8s to win a pot against that fish guy.
Don't mess with my Queen! Q9s is now my fav tournament hand for sure ♦
So anyway, 4th guy from Osijek and I got into the heads-up stage and made a deal, split the money and go home. I paid back the buy-ins to my friend and took $2 for myself.
The deal was to split profit 50-50, but since I failed in the first tournament, I decided to cover both buy-in expenses with my winnings in the second tournament.
It was a very fun experience and I am really starting to like playing live games (I've always liked the idea, but it's only now that I'm actually starting to feel good playing it). The reason is because I learned the player types at the table, who is afraid, who is a calling station, who is sorta good, etc.
This allowed me to make a 6 high bluff vs one guy in the first tournament and also a K high bluff in the second tournament when we were down to three players.
Basically I had KJs and raised, the fish called. Flop came A and I bluffed him off of his 66. Relatively hard since he was a semi-calling station. I showed him a Jack after he folded and said he can use his imagination for the other card.
He was pretty much bummed about that hand for the remainder of his tournament life - why did I fold 66, why did I fold, etc ♠_biggrin:
Speaking of him, it was fun getting reads on him - I recognized in one hand he had a flush draw when there were three same suited cards on the flop. It's funny because my staker lost a pot earlier in that game vs a flopped flush and when his uncle (he got us into that game in the first place) criticised him for not seeing that flush, my friend said - well how am I supposed to know he flopped a flush!
So yeh, it is very doable to figure out what ppl have in live games, especially in these low skilled ones.
All in all, it was awesome and I think we'll do it again. Will be cool if three of us from Osijek sit in a car and just go around the country owning local peasants and what not. Something like brunson, amarillo slim and those guys did in the old wild wild west days.
I don't have a separate roll for live games yet, but I have that in my plans for the future and I'll definitely improve on hundreds of things in my live game. It makes me drool just thinking how good you can actually become as a live player.
For now, I gotta focus on grinding cash for rent, new PC, a gift for my friend and so on 
P.S. I could go into details regarding the live games and some tells, differences between players and so on but I've got some work to do now and it would require a lot of focus to remember all of the stuff and write it down in a way I'd be pleased with, so yeh - sorry, no can do.
Poker update
Just a brief update of my poker situation - I'm grinding NL2 FR primarily. I've been weirdly tired lately and played some awful sessions these days, losing in FR and SH NL2. Only place I won some money was NL5.
NL5 is horrible for the most part of the day, so I play it only if I see it's got some nice action going. I seem to be back on winning track as of yesterday, so all is cool, I'm not worried much - I need to earn like $200 by the middle of this month to cover my rent.
I'll save up cash as soon as possible to take a shot at higher stakes on another site, or maybe even stars NL25, because I sincerely hate the action on NL5-10 stars. (NL2 action is 10x better than FTP or anywhere else in the world, but the rest of the micro stakes are a complete disaster)
Huge Bump,
Whatever happened to you man?
I miss seeing your news were so interesting! I hope everything is well, you had some major writing skills and it seems like nobody is taking care of the 1 year 1 million challenge now!
take care
The ghost is back - guess I could possibly rename myself to Black Pearl instead of Dendra, given all the foggy disappearances I've done in the past year or so.
Anyway, let's see what we got on the menu for today's update - I guess it's about time since I didn't refresh my blog for ages.
@steve Yes it would be great if we got the 1 million challenge back, I'm not sure why community round-up was cut in the first place, but hey, it's a new day and if all planets align we just might see a resurrection of the 1 million challenge report.
Before dipping into the poker updates, I'll just briefly write about what I've been up to all this time - if you're more interested in poker adventures rather than random stories, feel free to scroll down all the way to the red "Poker" sign and read from there.
Rollercoaster life
To make a long story short, I'm back to my hometown after life showed me just how fast things can go downhill in almost every possible way. The starting point of my trip downhill is related to having your mind at the right place and I'll probably cover parts of that topic in some purely non-poker related post, but not today (and whatever you'd think the topic is about, I'm willing to bet you'd guess wrong ♦)
So with missing a few screws in my head, my work on PS.com pretty much reached a nicely shaped zero. I still had some reserves from my NL2 grinding, so I figured taking a month or two of relaxing and putting the pieces of the puzzle in my head together.
However...my reserves ran dry pretty much one day after I came up with the above mentioned brilliant plan. How?
I was moving from my old apartment to a new, nicer+bigger+cheaper apartment I'd be sharing with a friend and due to a series of events, I found myself in a situation where I had to pay two rents for my old apartment and the rent for my first month in the new apartment.
In total I needed to come up with $1,000-$1,200. And ok, I must apologize, if you are new to my blog you're probably wondering what the happened to the "To make a long story short" - well yes, you see...I am not programmed to write things short, so even though I'd sometimes like to save you some time, I can't help but write n write n write into the night ♠_ugly:
Anyway, back to the story - so naturally I took out $800-ish or whatever I had in my poker reserves and remembered I had (and still have!) friends who owe me money.
Besides roof over my head and food on my plate, I really don't need money and if it sits in the bank it sure won't help me, but if a friend needs help - why not? Following that logic I ended up missing a few coins here and there and obviously, when I told those friends I've got fire beneath my feet and I really could use every penny - they turned on the dumb mode, no habla Croatian (I'm Croatian and so are they, in case somebody was wondering why I wrote that).
After asking everyone I knew, friends and half-enemies alike, my last resort was to find some shady way to more money orrrr catch an old friend from StarCraft gaming days who happens to play NL50 and is a PS.com member - the latter ended up working just fine.
Pretty eyes and gaming reputation were enough to grant me $250 from my Bulgarian friend - something I won't ever forget. The final few bits and pieces of the money needed I created from thin air and yes, life finally seemed to have eased its pressure on me.
However...and that's the second however in this story, probably even bigger one than the first...
How to turn two apartments into zero - the vanishing act
Yes, some people can pull a rabbit out of a hat, some can make your wallets disappear and I...managed to end up "apartmentless".
One day I was technically living in two apartments (since my contract tied me to paying two more months for my old apartment at the same time I was already moving to the new apartment) and the next day my roommate told me something unexpected: "Daughter of our apartment's owner is getting married and she wants to move in that apartment with her husband."
Apparently we had 2 to 3 months left to leave the apartment and I was about to move in there! Oh and yes, he told me this on the exact same day I gave him the money for my 1st month rent. Don't get me wrong, I hold no grudge against him or anything, he even offered to give me my money and I could walk away.
There were two problems with that idea - I didn't want to stay in my old apartment because it was getting too expensive and I also didn't want to leave my friend alone in that big apartment for the following three months - he had big exams at college and enough financial stress already, while I was a free bird, my only worry in life being getting the money to pay the rent(s).
Just to make things more interesting, life decided to really turn the heat on me and convince random thieves to steal my bike! I loved that bike, worth around $300 and fast as lightning as they'd say. Stolen right outside my old apartment, even though it was chained - oh well...
It was funny, owner of my old apartment stood in disbelief outside (my apartment was like a separate section of a big house), shaking head and feeling bad - and what about me? I was smiling, it just made perfect sense more things had to go wrong and I just didn't care any more if a piano landed on my head the next moment.
So with all the crap behind us, my roommate and I sat down to figure out how we'd pull off the following three months (he had a series of bad events himself). To jump over that part of the story - the following three months I changed his opinion on poker because he watched me play a few sessions and realized that my penny by penny "gambling" is actually making the money for rent.
Even though that was never my intention, I also ended up taking some money from his college friends - we had a homegame and even though I wanted to play just for fun, the drunk girls were determined to put in some money or else it's not poker - and fine, who am I to argue with a lady who is right.
We played a tournament and the final two players were me and my roommate - what followed then was a 5-hour marathon until like way past the dawn.
Ironically, I was supposed to take a train to hometown that morning and my roommate was expecting to win by me being forced to forfeit the match. Obviously, I missed the first three morning trains just to beat him - both of us half-dead cursing at each other "you're so stupid", "you are such an idiot, I can't believe this".
Well yes - winning is not just an option, it's everything! It did almost cost me a scheduled test in hospital, but I managed to do the hospital stuff and save my pride all in one day 
(the way I figured, I always come to hospital at 7-8am when I'm "ordered" to come and obviously, every f*ckin' time I wait until 2-3pm to actually get the stuff done - so why not simply come when they're ready to do their job???)
So yes, it's been fun, was on my own Robinson Crusoe style for a year and a half, didn't get everything I wanned to get by moving out alone but it's okay - you can't win 'em all and life sure wanted to send me back to my place, though me probably not playing all my cards right had something to do with it as well.
Even though I'm back in my hometown and the comfort of my house, I'll still need to cough up money each month - partially due to my plans to start playing live cash games and partially due to my parents needing help with paying credits (the recent currency strength changes are making most people in Croatia pay much higher rates than usual).
Poker neon sign - (yes it's safe to enter now if poker rant was your primary interest)
There is nothing new in regards to my online adventures - I'm still grinding on 24xNL2 tables@PokerStars and I'm content with doing so for the next month or so until I sort out financial stuff and get around $300-400 to invest in live cash games (I'll write about that in a bit).
After that I'll try to focus on switching from robocop grinding mode to getting my game in shape and improving because I'm really hungry to improve, I just see so many things that will be better in time and so many directions I can go that I'm having a hard time making my mind what to do first, where to start learning more.
The way I see it for now - I'll force myself to read a PS.com article or watch some video, anything that catches my attention enough to dedicate some time to it. The time I plan to invest in doing it is after the sessions when I'm tired - why?
Because during that time I often feel lost and bored, wanting to play more and knowing I wouldn't be focused enough to play "properly" - so instead of playing a marginally +EV session or most likely a -EV one, it seems logical to invest that time in doing something else.
Now it seems (actually is) like I need to learn thousands of things and perfect myself in million ways, but staring at things that should be done won't bring changes - so if I even read one paragraph of an article every day, it is better than reading nothing at all. In a month I'll know more than I did before.
Live cash games fish - I love you! ♠_love:
A new casino was opened in my hometown merely months ago - it is AWESOME! Hope you don't mind the caps lock, I rarely use it, so I guess that says more than enough about my first impression of that casino.
It's a part of a large shopping centre which also has bowling alley and what not. I felt like I was in Vegas for a moment in that casino (never was in Vegas but the way they decorated the place it sure looked like some old school casino you'd see in movies). The music is pretty much perfect - they're playing rock from 80's and 90's.
The best part are of course the players - they are horrible, as in "are you kidding me horrible". Gamblers, wannabes, you name it, it's a paradise. After my 1st visit there I told my parents I'll go there virtually every day once I get a bankroll to take a shot at live games there (roughly NL100, skill-wise NL0.5) - my mom "feinted" when she heard that, started freaking out and seeing god knows what black images in her mind of my gambling addicted future.
Honesty is my policy and I don't give a crap I never really cared much if people could handle the truth, oh well - guess my mom is thrilled with that concept I follow in life.
Anyway, about the live games - it felt great, it was very easy to identify the players, as in who slowplays, who is a gambling "call any two" player, etc. Overall everything was great, except for two minor details - I played as a short stack which is not something I like and I also need a lot and a lot of practice with reading/not giving tells.
I.e. my first three hands of the night were KK-QQ-JJ in that order. My hands were relatively shaking, partially because it was my 1st trip there and I was half-nervous and partially because that's apparently a tell of a strong hand - thank you Negreanu for that information.
So yes, now I'm re-watching HSP seasons 4 through 6 and learning everything I can pick up from the pros. I don't expect to be "in the zone" in live games until I play a lot of games, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.
I.e. I have 10000x easier time pinpointing someone's hand online than in a live game. Even when playing 24 tables, over time your mind simply passively learns various patterns and you start sensing things that are out of order, fishy, etc. Why did this player suddenly take half a second longer to act, why did that guy call in such a weird spot and so on - in live games I don't notice these things.
It'll take time to start noticing delays in reactions of players in live games and all the little details - but from what I've seen so far, reading the live players in my hometown will be a piece of cake - they're literally printing on their forehead what they have ♦ You just gotta know what to look for.
Anyway, I'll end this post now, sleep is calling me. To wrap things up, I'll tell you two things that happened to me in my recent online sessions:
First thing is kinda usual, I was chasing a fish around the tables and I didn't notice the wise guy was playing 3 NLHE tables and 1 PLO. I ended up playing a round of PLO, which was fun considering the fact the guy to my right decided to steal my blinds twice - first time I hit the nut flush, easy hand. Second time I flopped set of kings but things got ugly by the river - KT953 the last three cards were all hearts.
The guy made some large bet and I was like oh sh* oh sh* what do I do, what do I do, I got a set but he might have a straight or any flush to beat me - so I decided to cross my fingers and make the call, worked out well
(mistakenly taking a seat at the PLO table isn't the first mistake of that kind I've made, since I also ended up on a stud table once - weirdest poker experience of my life, I think I played like 2-3 hands and ran for my life!)
Now the second thing that happened to me was kinda funny - I was in a hand with KJ, the board was A-x-x-J. Due to villain's aggression I folded and shifted my focus to other tables. After a few seconds I saw a message in chat saying "you had KJ?"
I was like wtf! How the hell did he know? What gave me away? There was no way to put me on KJ, wtf???
So there I was, pondering about this issue as I regarded it, unable to figure it out. After a minute or so I realized that message was sent on the table below the one I had KJ on - meaning it was some other guy commenting some other hand. Huh, a huge relief to say the least
I leave you now to your daily adventures, have fun and may the poker gods watch over you in your poker sessions.