Tuesday, December 04, 2007

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.

6 comments:

grinder said...

Hi Marc

Your analysis here is excellent ,
I know what its like to be juggling time . One of my goals this month will be to post more comments on members blogs

I always pick up usefull information from your post

Thanks
Graham

RakebackFAQ said...

They seem like solid goals. I wouldnt worry to much about the cr vids last months ones were pretty crap they had a full week of heads up play! Wish they only had 1 multi one and 5 nl cash a week.

I dunno if you will get time to but i would like to see a short vid on how you review your hands i want to start putting more work in , in the new year and that seems like a great thing to be doing.

I was reading 'the poker mindset' book and it mentions that if you dont keep putting the work in you lose what you learned, they used

'its like a car going up a steap hill if you keep your foot on the gas it will get there if you take your foot off you will stall and probably move backwords'

Which i though made sence. I think with the work your putting in you can only improve.

Good luck

Velislav Babatchev said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Solid goals Marc! I agree with Willie, would love to see you do a video of your reviewing. I will check out BT's second video though, thank you for that tidbit. I too am reading the poker mindset currently Willie, and find that to be an awesome analogy. Good luck with the December goals Marc!!!

Bazclef said...

Hey Marc,

Don't worry about not being able to catch up with videos or anything at the moment. Reviewing videos fully actually takes a lot of time. It'snot surprising most people don't manage to get round to it. I probably spend around 2x the length of each video as I pause it a lot to run numbers, think about hands, write comments, etc. I rarely get the chance to sit down and watch them from start to finish either though, usual watch 15-20 mins at a time while eating lunch/dinner. A couple of hours per video is a lot of time/work!

It's great you've still got the time to post and review some hands. Even that alone takes up a good bit of time! If that's what works best for you at the moment then it's great just to focus on that. It's still working on your game.

Holy shit, you played 13k hands?! That's pretty sick! Nice! Well played for finding the time to get that many in!

Why are you reviewing 75% of your hands? I don't get it. Are you actually going into PT and looking through 75% of hands? Seems a bit of a waste of time. I'd focus the review more. Just look at the hands with net win/losses over 10BB. Anything outside that just write down the number of the hand as you play to review later.

Holy shit you're reviewing other peoples hands too, that's insania. :) I don't think this is really that neccesary until you play in a game with a lot of regulars where you need to analyse their game. You'll gain the experience on opponent ranges from just paying attention while you're playing, and analysing your own hands.

I think if some of your goals failed this month it was because they were unrealistic or because you prioritised getting hands in rather than watching videos, which is fine. Overall this was a great month, you're working really hard at your game and using the time you have effectively.

I agree on watching Sbrugby's PT/Pokerstove hand analysis, it's awesome, works really well. I'd take review showdown hands off of the list of todos, as I think the time would be better spent getting hands in and plugging your own leaks.

Damn, this post is long, I hope u get the time to read it all. ;D

seymour:cards said...

hey marc,

great blog, love the analysis and thought you are putting in. has really made me think about my game.

would love you to check out my blog and link me up

http://seymourcards.blogspot.com

have linked you up as well.

will defo be back to check out your analysis and share my thoughts

seymour