bedofour 2017: NL200-NL600

After a long time i've written sth meaningful into my diary, so i'll share it here as well:

i dont enjoy playing that much recently, bc i dont have anything to think about. basically all the questions that i had are answered. and i know there is a ton of unanswered questions but right now i dont know what they are and it will take a bit of time and money to find out. im thinking whether poker is rly the thing that i wanna do, but it definitely is. last month was probably the best since i got injured for me (not taking exceptions like trips etc into account). obv there will be many times like these. and nothing bad is going on, no depression, it's the other way around. it's awesome how many options i have. if i wanted to, i could pack my bah and travel for a year, i could drink every day. i could sit down and write a try to write a book, i could go to uni, sit at home and stare at the wall, go somewhere far on my bicycle or i could coach football. i could visit all my friends and family, work for a charity, fck everything and try to pick up girls, i could try to teach english somewhere in bangladesh. but when im thinking about it, i know that nothing is as great as i imagine it and that a lot of things are fun only for a while and i cant do them longterm. probably not. e.g. travelling. and even though i am a bit lost right now the freedom i have is just amazing and i can decide as i want. and thats not completely by chance even though there is a lot of luck involved.

march 2016

satisfied obv. i have to sleep now, i prolonged my session at 888, since i was the only regular reg in a snap pool of 30 entries. who knows, maybe the vip changes will be even positive. the difference between 15% and 2-5% rb is not big, it's just 1-1,5bb/100 and if it scares away many regs, it doesn't have to be that bad. anyway, i started playing on party too

time for a short update: grinding on party atm, rb is not bad, pool is not as soft as on 888, but it's fine and i've finally overcome my inner feeling of disgust, when i see shortstackers. i've got some problems with 888 soft, after upgrading to windows10 it lags much more than before and i had to stop playing there after first involuntarily folded 100usd pot. i'll have to reinstall whole pc from scratch. but i don't feel like i'm missing out on sth, snap100 sometimes doesn't run at all and when it runs, there aren't that many fish anyway. so i'm content with party and i'd like to add some ipoker too.

after a bit of a dull period, i've found many topics for studying again, which is super important. during a good run it's soo easy to fall for the illusion that you know everything. when every borderline bluff gets through and you don't get into a tough spot on later street etc. right now i have miliion things to work on again and i love this uncertainty in my game. i actually think that certainty in my game is quite bad and boring - it becomes just day to day grind.

i'm not used to party yet and accidentally saw my cashier again; i run very well. i could try to play some nl200 again soon; right now i don't play it at all.

Wish u I know that feeling about studying. I mean like I think it's never ending process. At that time when you think you know something, things change and you have to adjust again.... never ending story.

recently my run is a bit worse, but at least i can see the positive effects of ignoring cashier. i have no idea whether i lost 1 or 15BI and i'm fine. i still have million things for studying; the board where i write down poker stuff is always full of thoughts about different spots.

i keep on giving more and more importance to sizings; i feel like i've understood many spots in terms of sizing and i've got some edge vs most of the regs. not even mentioning the regs who don't have a common sizing for the whole range and therefore they give out a lot of sizing tells (even though i should learn to exploit this more). however there are a lot of spots where i just don't have a clue how the ranges look like and how i should construct my ranges; i just have to work hard. next week i will travel a lot since i go to austria to see my doctor and later my sister, so it will be important to stay productive on trains/buses.

another thing, which i improved recently (but i still suck at it a lot) is OOP play. it's insane how far from the theory is currently the play of avg nl100 reg. gradually i try to overcome old habits and realise that slowplay is often not tricky, but mandatory play. really often.

just two hands for today:

i don't rep that much here, but i've got okish blockers and i think they both cap themselves quite a bit. maybe i could use a bit higher sizing
partypoker - $1 NL FAST (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

BTN: $192.04 (VPIP: 42.11, PFR: 15.79, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 21)
SB: $148.24 (VPIP: 34.43, PFR: 20.00, 3Bet Preflop: 10.53, Hands: 62)
BB: $212.30 (VPIP: 19.15, PFR: 12.70, 3Bet Preflop: 7.14, Hands: 1,074)
UTG: $29.00 (VPIP: 0.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 4)
MP: $259.03 (VPIP: 18.82, PFR: 15.54, 3Bet Preflop: 8.89, Hands: 466)
Hero (CO): $158.66

SB posts SB $0.50, BB posts BB $1.00

Pre Flop: (pot: $1.50) Hero has 8♥ 8♣

fold, MP raises to $3.00, Hero calls $3.00, fold, SB calls $2.50, fold

Flop: ($10.00, 3 players) 5♦ 2♦ 9♥
SB checks, MP bets $6.50, Hero calls $6.50, SB calls $6.50

Turn: ($29.50, 3 players) J♠
SB checks, MP checks, Hero checks

River: ($29.50, 3 players) 6♠
SB bets $14.01, MP calls $14.01, Hero raises to $45.00, fold, MP calls $30.99

Hero shows 8♥ 8♣ (One Pair, Eights)
(Pre 54%, Flop 10%, Turn 5%)
MP shows A♣ 9♣ (One Pair, Nines)
(Pre 46%, Flop 90%, Turn 95%)
MP wins $130.51

i see these x/calls in mway pots quite often from regs with very capped ranges; even though i don't have an awesome hand it's a clear shove on T imo
partypoker - $1 NL FAST (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

BTN: $154.40 (VPIP: 25.00, PFR: 25.00, 3Bet Preflop: 33.33, Hands: 16)
SB: $115.78 (VPIP: 24.34, PFR: 17.70, 3Bet Preflop: 9.09, Hands: 228)
Hero (BB): $100.00
UTG: $116.69 (VPIP: 24.69, PFR: 19.81, 3Bet Preflop: 8.77, Hands: 755)
MP: $103.18 (VPIP: 19.72, PFR: 14.08, 3Bet Preflop: 3.45, Hands: 71)
CO: $100.50 (VPIP: 50.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 2)

SB posts SB $0.50, Hero posts BB $1.00

Pre Flop: (pot: $1.50) Hero has K♥ A♣

fold, fold, CO raises to $4.00, fold, SB raises to $13.00, Hero calls $12.00, CO calls $9.00

Flop: ($39.00, 3 players) 8♥ 5♥ 9♠
SB checks, Hero bets $15.00, fold, SB calls $15.00

Turn: ($69.00, 2 players) J♣
SB checks, Hero bets $72.00 and is all-in, fold

Hero wins $138.00

I'm laughing at myself how much i care about what others think about me. I got a few replies about 1st hand from yesterday in cz/sk community stating it's rly rly spewy (which very well might be true) and i felt a bit bad. I just want everybody to think i'm a good player etc and i feel ashamed when i post something wrong. But nobody cares anyway; everybody thinks he is the middle of the universe while in fact, everyone just lives his own life. It's such a dumb irrational felling and i can probably get over it only by posting borderline decisions; there will be lots of stupid stuff but no problem, i do stupid things all the time and whoever can know that.

Right now i'm leaving the appointment with doctor... Since the injury hadn't improved, i'd expected he would be talking about surgery, but to my surprise he told me the muscles around the hip joint are now stronger and that i should increase training load. At first i thought it's awesome and that i could play within 2-3 months again. But on the other hand it means it's likely the joint will never really be fine and i'll never be pain-free. The question is now whether i'm able to play longterm like this. And i'm not sure of that at all.

I'd rather wait for another surgery if i knew it would likely improve my situation and i'd play poker till then. Now i don't really know what's gonna happen and it's also very hard to keep focus on more things at once, but i will make it somehow for the following weeks and will see what happens.

junky song, got addicted thanks to my gf:

I didn't play much while travelling, but at least i've put in a couple of hours of studying, i've sorted out many things and i was delighted to find out that many spots should be played as i had expected. i also realised many new things and now i have to implement it all. After 2 days off i'm slowly getting back into grind mode; so far i play quite bad and it's probably related also to some RL stuff which i hope will be sorted out soon.

I'm looking forward to the following days/weeks of working in poker and football. A few days off were also good for getting rid of the silly bad feeling that i get when i don't play. Every time i try to relax i've got it somewhere in the back of my head - that i could play, how much did i play that day/the day before, how much did i play that month etc. It's so hard to balance it - to put in a good volume and be able not to think about it while doing other stuff.

Originally i had wanted to post the graph of 1st half of the month, but it wouldn't be +ev for me. It would probably be fine for the blog, but i am afraid of falling into the resul-oriented trap again.

btw i'd also like to write about sth interesting that i'm currently reading but i am not putting much time into books atm... From time to time i just open a popular philosophy book Waking up and i slowly work my way through The mathematics of poker.

grind continues; i'm probably down this month so far; other than that, the only thing i know is that it's def not worse than 40BI. some days are fine, some days i wanna jump out of the window again, but that's poker. grind pace is set for ~150h/month again, hopefully i can make it. i had to lower the pace a bit now, since i've been sick a bit, maybe i'm a bit exhausted. i've been trying to study+play a lot and gradually i'm also training more and more. it's tough to get it all done in 24h, especially since i try to remove caffeine from my diet due to stomach problems.

study-wise, i've subbed to the best training video site. i could have done it earlier, i knew it's clearly +ev, but i always had some stuff on my study to-do list, so it wasn't that hot. i am looking forward to it, there's infinite amount of valuable stuff; i don't know what to watch first and i guess this won't help to solve my problem of not being able to relax away from poker btw originally i'd wanted to take another strategy pack from GTORB, but i got angry about one thing from previous pack. i think there's an obvious mistake which i wouldn't have expected. from what i've seen at higher stakes, nobody plays one spot the way GTORB suggests, so...

it's a shame i'm diamond for the first time now, when it's worthless (except a few % of RB)

i told myself i shouldnt be such a nit and i should try nl200 at least sometimes - i have ~60 BI there atm. i'll probably play there mostly on weekends, because of softer field obv. it's quite motivational, i feel that excitement of playing higher everytime... it's the same as a few years ago, when i played nl10 1st time and had 2-digit sums at the table. if the shots don't go well, it's not a problem to move down and play just 100.

the downside of 200 is def traffic, fastforward and speed dont run so i play snap and some reg tables on ipoker/party. i rly hate tableselection, i'd like to just sit and play; that's the reason i considered moving back to stars, but i realized i'd actually pay a bit more rake there than at ipoker/party and that sucks. i'll just try to do the tableselection then and play snap when there are enough fish and we'll see. if it is too bad, i'd probably play some zoom.

i can't help myself, but i'm a bit dissapointed with RiO - it seems like the coaches try to comment on the hands in a way that kind of makes sense but reveals as little info as possible. for example they often talk only about their current hand and not their whole range at all. sometimes i also feel like they don't really understand it that much, or they use wrong tools for analysis, ignore results from solvers etc. but i have kinda small sample so far and there is still a lot of useful stuff, so... and maybe i'm a bit wrong at this too, don't know...

atm my motivation is down a bit, i don't rly feel like playing. I don't run too great, esp on 200; this month i'm probably a couple of hunderds down pre-rb (originally i thought it's even worse). It's tough to work 100% when i'd be happiest if i could quit in a month and play football. But i don't know if it works out - when i train, my hip hurts quite a bit and i don't know what's gonna happen. Uncertainty everywhere, i just have to stay focused on the work and i'll be fine; i'll probably finally buy pio.

Maybe bad weather is affecting me negatively as well. I used to really like cold+rain/snow - ideal for melancholic reflections. But over time i changed somehow and now i love it when i can go for a sunny walk between sessions. But whatever, my happiness shouldn't depend on these conditions out of my control. And maybe it doesn't, i am just looking for causes of my burnout...

Hey,

Do you watch essential or elite from rio? I think the elite is worth it but I agree a lot of essential videos are like watching someone autopilot fastfold which isn't very beneficial. I recommend Sulskys and Tyler Forresters videos are definitely the best imo. Gl!

Originally posted by tukioppilas62
Hey,

Do you watch essential or elite from rio? I think the elite is worth it but I agree a lot of essential videos are like watching someone autopilot fastfold which isn't very beneficial. I recommend Sulskys and Tyler Forresters videos are definitely the best imo. Gl!

Hi!
i have seen some essential stuff in the past, but now i was talking about elite videos. so far i've actually seen videos of sulsky and forrester only and those were the videos i was a bit dissapointed with. like i understand they obv cannot give away all the strategy for so little money, but some things are just weird - e. g. deciding whether a river valeushove IP is good or not based on a crEV sim instead of just finding out whether we have >50% vs calling range (maybe i didn't get something there, but i doubt a bit)

i should just watch some more, maybe i have video runbad

April was result-wise very dissapointing. At least there's no big swing, just a BE stretch - i have to look for the bright spots. I'm really angry about the redline, i was finally expecting some improvement there; i changed my game in a lot of spots and improved certain stats, where i could have been losing a ton nonSD, but didn't help. I also improved sizings in some spots; I don't really know what could be the causes then; guess i'll just try to improve generally and won't bother with the redline much.

I try to work a lot on 3b pots in simple postflop now; i played them pretty badly until now and it'll take a lot more work to get a sense of what's going on there. Then i'd like to look at some single raised pots, where i thought i've understood them a bit thanks to GTORB, but they're often played completely differently on higher stakes, so dunno... I'll work on that, but there's also so so much work to do.

I'm obviously a bit demotivated by the results, but it's not that bad. The volume will be probably a bit lower in May though; after two 150h months the bar is set really high. I will train a bit more and i also have appointments with a few doctors, so i probably won't get too far past the 100h mark.

btw on friday we defended Slovak football cup; it's really tough to watch it on TV only, but i haven't really played for almost 3 years already and i can handle it much better than before. Until i can play again, the best thing to do is to concentrate on poker as much as possible and that's what i'm gonna do. There's a ton of things to find out and a ton of goals to achieve...

Man i like this blog, such a nice reading! Keep it up dude

Originally posted by MDMAzz
Man i like this blog, such a nice reading! Keep it up dude
hey, thanks, appreciate that!

update:
all i can say my run is just scandalous. the only thing that keeps me alive is studying, otherwise my game would completely fall apart.

goosebumps all day long

Run is probably still quite bad, but i'm coming to terms with the fact that the move from 100 to 200 is one of the hardest (plus beating 7.5bb/100 rake at 888 is not easy unless the pool is ubersoft - maybe i just shouldn't play there) and that i cannot expect by default to be 5bb/100 crusher at zoom variants of nl100. imo 100% of players overestimate their true wr, so i just try to minimize that and keep on working.

i'm happy that stuff regarding single raise pots and 1/3 cbetting in them starts to make a bit of sense to me. I also did some more work in 3b pots. Overall i'm currently changing my strategy in many spots, so it'll take a while till everything clicks together and i'll have also solid checking ranges etc. But it's necessary and i'm looking forward to it; these spots are so frequent that i guess it could have a solid positive impact on my overall game.

interesting video from gtorb about btn vs bb play (hope it's allowed to post)

Sometimes it's ok, sometimes i feel rly frustrated; i think i play quite well, but results are simply not coming. I study a decent amount of time, i play decent volume under these circumstances, but it isn't turning around. Yesterday i was thinking whether there is a job more frustrating than poker and i couldn't rly come up with many. But whatever, i know what to do; i should probably try not to cry all the time, right?

It's quite tough to do all the things i wanna do - i have training sessions, poker, doctor visits and now also a couple of (after)parties (boys from my team defended also the league title). Random activities like fifa/TV are minimized and i don't rly enjoy them so much; so if i just wanna chill, i don't rly have anything good to do - i'm not sure whether it's a good thing. But i'm able to do a lot of great stuff and i think i'm happier this way. This week i also managed to put in a 9-hour day 1st time in my life.

great article about will, goals and habits - it goes a bit against conventional thinking known from random motivational literature and i completely agree with it.

I'm on a mindset downswing atm; tbh i don't get it how somebody can be a poker pro and have an active party life at the same time. I've got a tougher weekend behind me with two parties and even though physically i'm feeling good, mentally it's quite poor. This is the exact reason why i didn't do much clubbing this year (not that i was too active before, but this year it was really almost zero parties). I simply trade 1 or 2 (great) nights, which i cannot even remember (i usually cannot remember much even when i'm not wasted) for a day of doing abs nothing + 2 days in depression + 5 days of loss of enthusiasm to work. I haven't understood myself completely yet, but i simply spend my days waiting for another party. This is exactly what i tried to avoid, but right now nobody could explain that to me, because i'm right inside of it - not much interest in anything that would go a bit deeper - the only fun is a night out.

I wrote that last week - since then things have improved a bit; i didn't figure out my ideal attitude towards partying, but i feel much better now. I have no idea how i've managed to do that, because a week ago one good doctor told me that i should def stop playing football forever. Ofc i was rly sad, but since that was in Vienna, i knew there was a chance that there might be a mistake in the translation from slovak language etc. And it seems there really was a mistake and there is still a slight chance that i could play football someday. Even though it's not big and it would probably mean undergoing another surgery, it's really important for my inner peace to have hope - i got in terms with not being able to play atm; but knowing that i will NEVER be able to come back is the worst feeling ever. As if 15 years of my life have been one big lie.

So now i'm waiting how it all turns out; in between i play poker, i've already got cca 100h in May, which is rly solid. When i am able to put my calendar together based on doctor appointments, i will go for a week-long bicycle trip around Slovakia. I've been already for 3 days in winter, but it will surely be more enjoyable in summer; i'm rly looking forward to it, i love slovak rural areas and it will be great experience.

550 km. originally i'd wanted to go for a whole week, but i was faster than expected and i didn't really feel like going further, even though physically i was fine. in winter i reached Kosice (2nd biggest city in Slovakia) by southern route, so now i have it all covered quite nicely even though there is still a couple of regions that i'd like to visit.

i made a rule to never go by bike to an area that i've been to before. it's so boring; i was going mostly through such areas on day 1 and i almost quit. from day 2 on it got much more interesting and i especially liked north-east of our country; the atmosphere of villages lost in mountains is fascinating.

on saturday i am going to Athens for 4 days (not by bike this time); till then i'd like to put in some reasonable volume.

just lol. yesterday i played over 6 hours; i knew it wasn't my best day ever, but i didn't rly expect this. -1,7k, nice end of the month. ofc i doubt myself; on the other hand i feel like i'm improving quite fast, dunno... there's no other way but to keep on working; i don't rly know what else to say, it's still the same...