Rolled On The River

I don’t know who reads this blog, and I don’t really know if I want to know who reads it, originally, the blog was a mandatory addition to the study and training. Something for me to record my thoughts on poker, and the things I’ve learned, whether it has evolved from that into something else I’m not sure. Skelm encourages the blog as often as possible, any bit of insight, any tidbit of information I think would be useful to be able to recall, or use as a milestone in my progress, I’m pressured to write about it here.

But who reads it? And should I care? Should I write to cater for an audience, does an audience even exist? I’ve pondered these questions a little but dismissed them, and refused to look at the back-end of the site or hear about how many hits I get, all I’m told is ‘I’ve gotten emails when you don’t blog for a few days, blog more, go go, blog blog blog’, so I’m either being lied to, or at least one person out there thinks I’m writing something worth reading. Which is yet another goddamn paradox, if someone is reading my blog, could it be to exploit weakness in me? I talk pretty loosely about spots I need to improve in, but I’m also careful to not to go about mentioning screen-names and the like, so I’m generally cautious. I guess my writing should primarily be for me, not in a ‘Dear diary’ type way, but just a more personal account of feelings towards the game, my struggle to get a psychological and mathematical edge over my opponents, and my ability to play poker and work a goddamn full-time job at the same time.

I was pretty scared when Skelm linked this on the Stoxpoker front page, It’s good that he’s proud enough of me to do so, and I’m flattered, but other than passing year 12 English, I didn’t really think my writing was worthy of that kind of real estate or that kind of attention. But again, I don’t know how many people clicked the link, or how many people commented on it in the forums, or what they said, I guess I feel like I’d either become self-conscious, arrogant, or paranoid depending on what others thought, so my choice was and is ignorance, blissful ignorance.

I accept that people will read, judge and critique this, so I’ll continue to make lame jokes, drop a few expletives here and there, and just generally keep it more than a boring regular observational post. Though, if you do read this blog and enjoy it (for some reason), feel free to comment on this page, keeping in mind the fragile balance mentioned above.

And I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing!

Say study and progression in skill is a constant, say you put in 1 hour of study a night on poker, keeping ahead of the average progression is a byproduct of that study. So you are a winning player at your stake, and you can talk yourself out of tilting most of the time. Now let’s say you have played 800,000 hands throughout your poker career, and you want to continue playing for as long as the games are profitable.

I look into my crystal ball and see the future, I see your death being spontaneous combustion in the year 2059, and I see the poker community staying strong until then. Now if we were to run a calculation (and I’m not the type of guy to go around running hypothetical calculations for fun), lets say you earn $5,000,000.00 between now and then, excluding rakeback and bonuses, but including all upswings and downswings. Think of a full-time winning players graph over 50 years, a steady incline where the upswings and downswings are really negligible over the millions and millions of hands played, 60k hand breakeven stretch? What is that? A drop in the ocean, thats what it is.

It seems that the only thing we have control over is the present, and at present the only thing on that graph we have control over is WHERE along the graph we are at, horizontally (hands played), nothing else. I’m sure you see the moral, and I’m sure I’m not bringing anything new to the table, but yeah.

Keep learning, play more hands.

Moving myself into a comfortable routine at the moment: Go to work, come home, head to the gym, study poker, play poker, review session, relax, sleep. It’s good to have that stability, especially since you know it will bring results in the long run. Sporadic study just doesn’t work, there needs to be a constant stream of information to process, and time in which to do it. 50nl is treating me pretty wildly, I only have a few thousand hands and I could swear the Hold’em Manager graph tab is just displaying a sine wave, Skelm is spending time working on his own game and I’ve been let off the leash a bit, though I’m still required to review hands and make videos of each session.

I got a bit of fancy play syndrome the other night, and didn’t get value out of aces, which was a shame, copped an earful about it during session review too, lesson learned.

It’s good to find a place in which you feel comfortable, where you can make 90% of your decisions knowing that you are at least on the right track with your train of thought. Toot toot. The 50nl grind has its ups and downs, obviously, but I’m making a small dent in it, keeping to 6-tabling for a while, maybe get to 8 and sit there until I get a larger screen. My decisions are more definite, and I’m questioning myself less, and I find I often have time to review player stats and do a bit of marking and commenting on others at my table in between decisions, so I think 6 tabling 50nl is my fall back, or will soon be my fall back. If I can get more hands in between my hectic schedule (read 14 hour work days, and this crazy ’sleep’ thing I tend to do from time to time), I’m sure I’ll see a steady winrate, I’m not scared of the money, and a few recent decent sessions have given me a confidence boost.

I guess everyone needs something to centre themselves with, a home base, a place where they can reach out and grab what they want without exposing themselves to ruin.

4:30am start tomorrow. Probably won’t be back home until 7pm, I hardly see my house in the daytime, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel, this blog being my outlet, these words being my testimony to salvation from monotony, with procrastination and apathy being my biggest hurdles. Work is getting harder and harder, and I’m thinking about poker more and more, I’ve convinced myself I’ll be delivered through it, so I’ll battle on until I can battle no more.

Then I’ll probably take a shower.

The latest thing that is being beaten into me is the amount that I’m betting for, since life is one big session, there are a lot of hands ahead of me, I may as well not put more money into the pot that I have to, as long as it portrays the same message as the larger bet. Stealing sizes, continuation bets, 3-bets, check-raises, all the sizes need to be calculated for the situation. What are you trying to do? For example, if your aim is to cause the villain to fold on a flop with heaps of draws in his range, you should go in hard, while your hand is best, not giving him value to draw. If you are playing against tight short-stackers in the blinds, why bet your normal stealing amount? These guys aren’t playing too fancy, fold or shove is generally the game, so bet small, giving the same odds you would give a full stack to play, minimising the cost to you.

The videos in which Ed Miller reviews selected hands played by ActionStan really highlight these points, he speaks more about bet sizing than he does about ranging, so you gotta know it’s the focal point. I recommend them, purely because they give an idea of the different situations where revisiting the betting sizes could have saved/made money. I watched a review of Skelm’s game by another player, discussing hands and such, it was good to see Skelm making mistakes that are so obvious in hindsight, and saying ‘whoops, why did I do that?’.

Just nice to know I’m not the only one prone to brain farts, and also good to know that he will immediately admit when he’s wrong, since pride has no place in the ever-improving poker game.

I got a new PC this week, and have been spending some time installing programs and tinkering around getting everything set up, Skelm helped me out with everything, and now I’m back to where I was a week ago, but with a beastly rig. It has the power to run Crysis at around 25fps on max settings which is extremely, uh… useful for importing poker hands and completely necessary. I swear to god.

Other than that, I’m getting used to 50nl, and getting used to being bitch-slapped for making mistakes, rather than careful guidance, but I guess it’s a part of the process which couldn’t be avoided. Rebuilding my game for the higher end of the low stakes/lower end of the mid stakes and it’s pretty hectic, still trying to get preflop play perfected. Right now, I’m getting a lecture about marking players drilled into my head.. ‘whenever you enter a new table, check the stats, and mark the players’, basically noting the regs, short-stackers, and the fish for easy identification in the future.

It’s all a bit overwhelming, since Skelm wants to take a slightly different, lower variance approach to playing, I’m revisiting a lot of avenues I used to take, opening ranges have changed, 3-betting strategies have changed dramatically, as well as post-flop play being geared more towards pot control and ranging rather than statistically-based aggression. I’m still quite a bit lower on the hands-played scale than I would like to be, but whenever I do play, its basically a sweat, or semi-sweat session so I’m progressing through repetition, rather than trial and error.

I was discussing pros and cons of training with Skelm, and what percentage of training to play should be incorporated into a players game. I find, if for whatever reason, I can’t play, there’s only so much I can study before I start forgetting what I’ve recently learned. When I learn something new, I try to push it to the front of my mind, so I can find where to use it in my game, then it will slowly sift itself to the back recesses, making a lovely little home, where it can be accessed when needed.

But the amount of playing to training is really relative to where you are, if you are moving up a stake, you should be looking for spots that are played differently in your new stake, and focusing your time and money fixing your leaks in those and other areas before you make the jump. If you’re paying for staking or coaching, you should use the time with your coach wisely, and reflect on their teachings, because, if they are winning, and you can play like them, then you are winning. But can we really put a ratio of training to playing? I guess not, but Skelm decided to bestow upon me a little insightful quote he thought up on the spot:

The money and time you paid to learn about a subject should justify itself through eventually adding more than that amount in value to your bankroll.

He was quoted saying this with a mouth half-filled with KFC Sweet Chilli chicken, we both fell silent and meditated over it for a small amount of time, until I piped up and said ‘I’ll blog on that tonight’. It really encompasses everything that poker coaching represents.