November and December Goals

First, the November goal analysis:

8,000 hands. I played over 13k hands...I had a few more opportunities to get some hands in than I thought.

Community participation. This was a mixed bag. My CR and 2p2 posting was really low. On the other hand, I'm now keeping up with two different study groups and posted a fair amount on the workshop forum (yay, more posts than Verneer somewhere!). I did decent updating this blog...certainly not daily, but several times a week, and I did follow other blogs. All in all, I did a lot of reading and writing, just different formats. Plus, there were a number of group sessions I attended. The biggest gap was that there were some group members who put up videos, and I couldn't view all of them. I wish I could, but it's just difficult to find the time for everything, and at least for the study part, I need kind of 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there a lot of the time, and videos don't lend themselves that well to that format for me...I like to get in the flow of the video a bit.

Review hands. I had targeted 75%, but reviewed 64%. I wish there were some way to quantify the effectiveness of my own reviews, though, because I don't think that I'm taking enough away from them.

CR videos. I targeted 8 videos for active review (detailed notes/thoughts, not just watching the video). I only did 2, and they weren't even from a pro at the time...they were Verneer's. However, we'll call that good, since CR did the right thing and invited him to be a pro. Actually, between those videos and several sessions Pawel led, I felt like I got some great CR-type activity in there, so maybe this one isn't as bad as it seems. But the whole month went by without any TC, BT, or CTS video, and those guys have such great perspective that I need to get back to them as well next month.

Review showdown hands. Different than my own hands, this is going back in PT and reviewing showdown hands no matter if I was involved in the hand or not, and try to put people on ranges...since there is a showdown, I can see how good I am at it. Well, I did zero of this...just too many other things.

Overall thoughts for November. I failed more of my goals than I succeeded, but still feel it was a successful month. Room for improvement, but still productive overall. I certainly put a lot of effort into study, and got to log a good number of hands, for me -- I just do not have the time to grind out the serious hands. One area I'd like to improve is identifying leaks in my own game better...I feel sometimes that I lose the forest for the trees. By that I mean that I can go through my hands and analyze my mistakes, but I'm not sure it translates well enough into not making the same sorts of mistakes again, or that I'm properly generalizing from my mistakes into a pattern that I can correct as needed. I do think that the more you can play, discuss, and think about poker, the better some things will just sort of seep into your game. But what I'd like is for a more active guidance of those things, rather than just waiting for them to naturally happen by hard work. I think that's a lot of what I'll get out of coaching, or at least I hope so.

December goals. I don't think my goals should stray too far, mostly it's about getting better at executing on each one of them.

• 10,000 hands. Even though I played 13k, anything more than 2,000 per week is a stretch for me, but I will have a couple times that I can dedicate more time than usual to getting in hands this month, I think.
• Community participation. Same idea as the previous month.
• Review hands. In addition to just reviewing, find a better way to get value out of reviewing. Dice gave me a bit of advice to follow here....first take a look at Brian Townsend's second video for a PT review approach; second make sure to extend the mistakes you see in your own review to flaws in your thinking; third (a tactical suggestion), keep a file open as you play and jot down problem hands.
• Review showdown hands. Going to keep this on the list until I actually do it :). I need to start ingraining a process of getting people on ranges, and this seems like it's got to be a good way to go about it, since you can check your thoughts at the end.
• Active study of 5 CR videos. There's a lot of other stuff I'd like to do, but I've got this great video resource from some top-notch players...no reason to not use it. However, now that Pawel's a pro, I get to count any of his sessions in there!

Alright, that's going to keep me decently busy. There's a lot of process items here. I hope that for the new year, I can incorporate some strategy-related goals, too.