Still here, just busy

It's been a bit since I've made a blog entry, and actually over the last week or so, I haven't been playing too much, either. Work has picked up a bit after the holidays, and basketball season started for my kids. Out of all the sports they play, basketball is the one I actually know something about, and I coach both their teams. At this age, that means multiple nights a week I'm in practice, and most of the day on Saturday, I'm prepping for, or coaching, games.

I like practicing with my son's team because they play on lower rims and with a ball small enough to palm, so I can dunk! The best I was ever able to do consistently when I played was to dunk a tennis ball....every once in a while a volleyball.

Between work, basketball, and family, there is less time than usual to grind. Strangely, the part that bugs me the most now is not that I'm missing hands, but that I'm falling behind on blogs, forums, and videos. I'm reconciled to a lower volume of hands, and just want to play well when I do play, but not to force it. Well, I say that now, but I didn't hold to it yesterday. I was too friggin' tired, but fired up Full Tilt anyway...boo!!

I did an impromptu session review today...thought that I was going to be a watcher, but instead I volunteered to bring up yesterday's session and go through a quick review. First of all, it highlighted some really poor play on my part, at times. Second, it reinforced how valuable a group PT review can be compared to a sweat session. I think that in a group setting, a PT review may be even more valuable than a sweat session, as you can dwell on any topic that comes up as long as you need/want. I never mind being a guinea pig for those reviews...anytime anyone sees me online and would like to do a PT review, let me know...I will review or be reviewed. The nice thing for me is that those reviews can be short or long, which is nice if I have to head to a meeting in 30 minutes or something.

This weekend, I finally finished the last part of Elements of Poker. I know that I was going to write a detailed review (a couple people have pinged me to remind me), but that is going to have to wait until I have some more time. There was a post on 2p2 last week by Focault, or something like that, in the Books and Publications forum. He pretty much took the words from me anyway...if I wasn't so lazy, I'd find it and link it. The bottom line is that I really enjoyed the book. I get a decent amount out of most of the books I've read; either I wait until the book has been reviewed, or it's by an author I trust will turn out a good book. Even with those standards, I don't read too many books that make me think, "Wow, that's really cool!" about some passage in the book or whatever. Elements of Poker did that for me numerous times. It wasn't universally like that, but there were several "aha" moments. And throughout, Angelo writes in a really pleasing manner...the book is really easy to read. In fact, as I've said before, it might be a little too easy to read! I can't believe that there isn't something in there for everyone at mid stakes and lower, and probably higher, I just couldn't say without experience.

I'm running out of time (see prior posts on time management), but I did take a snapshot of my lifetime 50NL and 100NL results which I think are pretty interesting. I'll try to make another post this week about them. In reality, I've found that I've had to limit my time spent blogging, as it's taking away from other "study" areas that need focus. I'm supremely behind on watching any videos, most of all, as in I've watched 2 this whole month. I have been trying to keep up with all the blogs, and have for the most part, although I have been a bit lax commenting. But I am reading all the blogs from the SSNL Grinders and from the workshop as well. OK, see you next time.

Back to 50NL to shore up some leaks

Had a PT review with my coach earlier in the week after playing a few thousand hands at 50NL. We agreed that I've got to work out some leaks. Some are due only to bad game play (meaning that I clearly know what I did wrong after the fact, but I'm still making mistakes at the table) and some are due to gaps in my game -- I'm playing as I believe to be OK, but I'm not approaching the situation correctly. Or, I don't have a good idea what to do.

I've got the roll, and probably the game (in spite of the leaks) to be fine at 100NL, because there is still plenty of bad play at that level to compensate for my own shortcomings. But my results will be that much more volatile -- as has been shown over the last 20,000 hands at 100NL where I go up and down fairly severely. So, I will stick to 50NL for now, and work on ironing out some of the kinks.

It looks like specifically my turn play is the most suspect. I'm turning good hands into bluffs and paying too much for my draws. To a lesser extent, I'm not getting away from 2nd best hands.

To that end, I played a session last night. Started off well enough when I stacked a guy on a cooler turned suckout...my flopped set ran into a flopped straight, but the river paired the board. That was the highlight of the night...from there it was a horror show of running like crap, although I played OK. If anything, I got away from hands too quickly. Noel (Peten2toms) sweated me for a good while, and I dropped a table to talk things through a bit. Right as I was getting Mikogo set up, the fish to my right effectively stacked me. He'd doubled up through me a little bit ago (about 60 BB's worth). He was something like 46/3/0.8, and goes to showdown a lot, and I lost with strong hands, not bad play, IMO. Some nights are just like that.

Noel helped me with a couple things, although he couldn't help the cards run my way. I had a 42/35 guy on my right at another table, and Noel encouraged me to 3-bet him hard, which I don't think I do enough. He also kept me focused on my (crappy) table image, and what its implications are. Plus, having someone sweat you is a good way to avoid tilting when things don't go your way. Other than 3-betting the guy I just mentioned, I don't think I got too out of line...but I did pick up a lot of decent preflop cards, raised, and whiffed the flop. As you know, it's no fun to keep raising, then keep folding.

In fact, one thing that I am doing quite well this rather challenging month is just taking the results as they come and not losing a lot of focus about them. I wouldn't say that I enjoy it by any stretch, but part of me is kind of eager to run bad -- especially at lower stakes -- just to confirm that I can take it in stride. However, I think I've just about proven that to myself now. It's time for the doomswitch to turn off, IMO.

Finally, regarding my last post about time management. I've thrown some categories and targets into a spreadsheet, and have started tracking my time, very loosely, against those targets. I'm talking about just kind of estimating in 30 minute chunks, what I'm doing. Basically, I'm just dividing up non-play activities into 8 buckets. (To btimm's comment, there does need to be some sort of administrative time we spend with poker. If you take some time to install PT3 and learn about it, that's a decent chunk, and to me it's part of the poker equation, for example.)

Here's what I came up with, in priority.

Play -- My target here is only 48%, as I'm constrained greatly by available time...however if you have more time, I'm not really sure it should be *that* much higher...while obviously important, there are a number of things crucial to development.

Review Play -- This is one of those elements. I think if you don't devote at least a quarter as much time reviewing your own play as you do playing, you will not improve as rapidly as you can. Of course if you do this early on in your career, you can gradually taper off the amount of time you spend reviewing your play compared to the amount of time you do play. But this is a blog about and for the low limits and the relative beginnings of a poker career. And for us, I believe it's absolutely essential to spend a significant amount of time reviewing our own games.

Coaching -- Percentage wise, this is a small time investment, but I'm very excited to have gotten some coaching kicked off, and this is a top priority for me.

Forums/Books -- You need to review your play. But, you also need to read, write, and discuss poker in general. There are a number of ways to accomplish this. I've found for me, forums are the best long term route. I wax and wane in terms of forum participation, but even when I'm not participating, I lurk them. If a thread has had a lot of replies, I'm sure to open it, and think out my response before reading the other responses there. Continually reviewing forums does something besides making me think about usually marginal situations like that...it allows me to determine somewhat quickly whose opinions on the forums I can trust. There is a lot of good and bad advice given out, IMO. Figuring out who to trust is key.

Blogs -- You could link blogs into the whole forums/books category. For me, I called it out separately due to the study group...I want to make sure that I reserve time to check in on everyone's blogs. But, to me, they kind of serve the same purpose...although I would never think out something like this on a forum ;).

Videos -- I think for a lot of people, videos might be even more important than blogs and forums. For me, they're not (yet), but they're definitely important because the pros can convey a lot more information, and it's just a different media for learning. The more the better. One way that I use videos is to try and do the same thing with them that I do on forum posts...I pause the video and think out what I would do, if I think an action is upcoming...then I let it play and see if I'm right.

Poker Discussions -- If a forum/blog based discussion is good, I think that a real-time discussion can only be better. Simply due to the nature of discussing things, though, this goes down on my list...pretty difficult for me to spend a lot of time discussing things (despite what Aaron says!).

Sweats/Reviews -- Along the same lines, it's difficult for me to put together an extended period of time for sweats and reviews (whether real time or watching a video). I would love to do this, but the ideal time is in the evening, and if I'm not doing family stuff, then I want to be grinding out hands myself. However, here and there, I've been able to sweat some guys during the day.

Admin -- Like I said, some amount of administrative time is necessary to your poker career. Hopefully, not much, though :).

So, over a short sample size of several days, I'm behind in my top 2 areas....playing and reviewing my play. I can't do all that much about the playing part. Anyway, since it's a relative distribution of time spent, what it really means is that I could just be spending more time than usual on non-playing activities. That's probably true, as this week, I tried to catch up on tons of blogs, and also sweated a couple guys, plus sat in on Verneer's CR sweat session earlier in the week. I'm actually playing a decent amount for me...few thousand hands/week for the first couple weeks of the month.

It's the review play that I must get off to now, as it's lagging. Next up on the study rotation..watching another video. I'm actually over my target by quite a bit on sweats and blogging (no wonder with posts like this one!). Thanks for slogging your way through!

Time Management

Posted this one on the NL Theory forum, but thought I would cross-post it here, as I'm trying to come up with a reasonable plan....

Borrowing a bit from "real life," I'm thinking about putting together a high level plan about how to allocate my poker time. I'm trying to come up with a percentage of time spent on different aspects of poker, rather than a set amount of time, so that whether I have 5 or 25 hours per week, I can distribute roughly the same over time.

Anyone serious about the game who does not play full time probably has more they wish they could do with poker (study as well as play) than they actually have or make time for. And even for full-time pros, there are still some better ways to spend time than others, as far as development.

I'll lay out 3 main areas that have smaller components. I don't know how important it is to break them down, but perhaps some of you have thought about this more deeply for yourselves already and feel that they would require their own buckets of time (like for me study is one big category, but there are various types of study, and maybe they should each have their own dedicated percentage).

Study -- 30%

• Review your own play (PT, replayers, etc.)
• Strategy/theory forums and books
• Watch videos
• Blogs (writing and reading, but again, strat and theory)
• Coaching

Play -- 55%

Other -- 15%

• Administrative (for lack of a better term -- organizing your records and roll, setting up software, anything really that doesn't fit into a nice category
• Talking/chatting with your buddies, study group, etc. (could be part of study I guess)
• Sweat sessions, where you rail them

I feel like for this to be helpful or interesting, the time breakdown should probably get somewhat into the components of each area, so like for studying, try to spend x% reviewing your own play, y% on videos, and z% on coaching. So, I'll probably try to work that out for myself, maybe try to just track high level how much time I spend.

Anyway, I'm using up too much of my "Administrative" time ;).

Quick update

Got less than half an hour, so this will be quick (rare for me). First, in regards to Willie's comment from last entry, villain flopped the nut straight. I'm still frustrated by my play in that hand. Grrr.

I am almost done with Elements of Poker. Not sure whether I can write a full review because I'm not sure I could easily describe the book. Here's my quick recommendation. Go to Tommy Angelo's website. Read some excerpts from the Universal Elements section. This was by far my favorite section of the book. Go to the Articles section, and poke around. The reciprocality article is actually interspersed throughout the book. If you like what you see, buy the book....it is more of the same. I will be happy to try writing a more detailed review rather than referring you to his site, but I don't have the time right now. I am certainly glad I read the book, and will go through it again as well. If you are looking for a review, and don't see one in the next week or so, leave me a comment.

Poker went well over the weekend. I actually continued to run below expectations (the gap widened, according to PokerEV), but I was hit so hard by the deck that I was still able to have decent results. It feels like I'm getting a crapload of big pocket pairs and AK. I'm 3-betting a ton and getting action because of it. They aren't holding up as often as they "should" but I'm getting them so many times I'm still turning a profit. Flopping the nut flush and stacking a guy who flopped a lower flush helped last night, too :).

My play also feels solid to me, but to be honest I've run out of time to actually go through all the hands and review them. I should be doing that rather than writing this, probably :P. But this, I can wrap up in a few minutes, and I like to dedicate a continuous chunk of time to review, as like playing, I feel better when I get into the flow of it.

Before I review my play, though, I've got a number of blogs to hit, as the study group has grown quite a bit. Then perhaps review some forum posts, then review my own play. Ack, that's why I never get to my play.

Non-poker, the other coach for my son's basketball team basically admitted she didn't know a thing about basketball and since I did, could she just kind of sit on the bench and do nothing, maybe shadow me so she could learn for next year. That was kind of a relief because now I can just do what I want for practice, setting the lineups, and giving the kids instructions during the game. I didn't want to step on her toes, and I'm glad she initiated the conversation.

Both kids' games went really well, and a few of the things I tried to coach actually came out during the game...those moments are just awesome.

OK, got to head off to that meeting.

Glimmer

If you want to see a humorous link, just go straight to the end.

Busy week so far...everyone is back from vacation at work, and we're cranking things back up again. That's good and bad, I guess. I'm managing several smallish and one big project right now, all in different stages of development (software development). The big one is near the beginning, which is my favorite part...we are fleshing out high level functional requirements and getting into some detailed functional design.

For those of you not familiar with software design, you usually start from what you want the software to do, then figure out how it's going to do it, then build and test it. I used to absolutely love the "how" part, technical design. Now I'm more interested in the "what" part, functional design. I think that this is the most creative phase of development.

I've played a couple sessions since last post, with better results, playing pretty well, still not running all that good. I think long term, I probably run worse than just about everyone, and the fact that I can overcome that and still win is pretty amazing.

I kid.

Last night, things were going pretty well, but I didn't quit well, and it cost me the better part of a stack. I was kind of thinking about calling it a night or at least taking a break, having played for a couple hours. It was late, but I thought my focus was still OK, and I was just starting to get a little tired. Then, I found myself in the SB with 75 and a limpfest already. So, I did my part and completed. TAG in the BB checks. Flop is 765 rainbow. I led out for just a bit over pot, the BB raises smallish, and everyone else gets out of the way. At this point, the warning bells were firing, but since he could raise pretty wide, I put in a 3-bet, to $16 (this was at 50NL, BB had a full stack and I covered). He min-raises me.

Villain is a textbook TAG from all the numbers on my HUD, albeit on the nitty side of TAG. By that, I mean he does not appear to ever get out of line, and he is also a monstrous winner over the hands I have on him (36 ptbb/100 over 1.5k hands). Not the guy to get involved in a big pot with. What do I do? Jam it in there. I'm vaguely thinking he's at worst got top pair and an OESD, but more likely he would shove with that...the min-raise is most likely at worst top two but more likely a set or straight. I mean, I'm thinking that, and yet I still jam it. There's the other part of me going, well he could be FOS this time, and I've still got some outs against a straight. Yuck.

It wasn't frustration...I was playing well and up at the table, and was pretty sure I was up for the session (don't check until the end). It was kind of bad discipline, but more than that, it was just being tired. Due to time constraints, I want to eke out as many hands as I can so this will be a balancing act for me, but it will do no good if I overstay my effectiveness at the tables. I'm thinking about making myself sit out for a couple orbits per hour(ish) even if I don't think I need to do it. Just to make some mini-quits, and so that I can ask myself before starting up again if I'm still on my A game and if the table is still right to play. Actually, that's usually not an issue because my sessions are not much more than hour long chunks whether or not I want it. So, maybe there are better things on which I should focus.

Hmm, I spent a lot of time talking about that one hand, and the end, showing the importance of quitting well, I guess. But throughout the session, I thought I played pretty decent. The only other 100BB+ hand I lost was against a massive maniac when I flopped top two and he turned a gutshot. Don't feel bad about how I played that one. Maniacs get paid when they hit. He was running amazing, though. That was the only big hand I lost to him, but it wasn't the worst he did to the rest of the table...he also won with runner-runner flush and a two-outer on the river against some other guys. Sick.

I'm way behind on my session reviews, though, so I'm stopping here, and will comb through my last several days to look for some hands I can post. I also need to email some hands to my coach with my thoughts in them.

OK, for the humor I promised. I've been following Jman's well on 2p2....an amazing thread, if you haven't read it yet. Someone kindly linked this Jman post from the archives. On a sad note, I realize after reading stuff like this that I am not nearly as funny as I would like to believe.

Carnage

Hoping to get the converse of the old "don't post your good results, or you will be hit with the doomswitch"......





Obviously, things have not started off too well in 2008 :P. I know that this is not a lot of hands, but still, it's been 2 weeks since my last winning session, and 2 weeks is 2 weeks.

In a way, this is going to be a little bit of a brag post, strange as it seems. The brag is in the way that I have been handling this at the tables. I'm usually good about not carrying around any negative emotions for too long after a session. But I do have a decent amount of work to do in limiting the effects of a bad run while sitting in the game. I've been on the wrong end of draws getting there and long shots beating me a fair amount this week, but I am shrugging it off better than usual for me. I haven't been ideal, but I've let go of frustration a number of times before the guy who just got there's stack has incremented. It's a significant step in the right direction, at least for me, in a continuing quest for simple acceptance of a bad result.

I've actually been thinking about what it takes to get to true and total acceptance of your bad results at the table. The kind of acceptance where they affect you as little as humanly possible, whatever that may be. I'm starting to think that I'm not sure I want to get to that total acceptance, even if I could. The reason: I think it would take some fun out of the times that I do well. I just don't see being totally dispassionate about your losses yet still relishing your victories. If I were a pro and/or played at much higher stakes, it might be more important. But if so, it would change the significance of my motivating factors. Namely, the element of fun would be reduced. I'm not saying that pros and high stakes players don't have fun, but the emphasis changes.

There are a number of different poker aspects that can be fun, by the way. It's fun for me to work my way through a problem away from the tables, whether or not I was in a hand, whether or not I won the hand. It's fun chatting with other guys about their poker successes. But I'm talking about the fun of playing a hand and profiting. Not Sklansky bucks or G-bucks, but real profit. I'm not playing for life-changing money. But it's still more fun to win than to lose for me. And that's not only OK, it's good (to maybe paraphrase Tommy Angelo, it's good because I choose it).

So, if I enjoy the winning of a pot and don't enjoy the losing of a pot, and want to continue attaching some emotional meaning to it because I like that meaning, I really need to make sure that it minimizes any impact on my future hands...and elation can be as harmful as despair. The trick for me is to compartmentalize those feelings...to on one level enjoy/hate the outcome of the hand, and on another level...the get-ready-for-the-next-hand level....to ignore the outcome. And that's what I've been doing for the most part over this brief little slide.

My play, for the most part, has been decent, IMO. Last night, in an absolutely card-brutal session, I only made one significant mistake. To be fair, it was a pretty big one, and I also made a number of smaller mistakes. And to be more fair, I'm sure there were other mistakes I made that I didn't detect upon review. But those are always there. I uttered a couple one-word profanities, but was ready to go the next hand both times, and one of them the next hand was kind of tricky and I got max value. The only time I really cost myself something on the next hand was when I was on a steal, hit top two, and the BB predictably called and led into me on the flop and turn with bottom pair, then called my turn raise to put him in. He spiked one of his two outs on the river. I shook my head and typed "lol" in the chat box, while I had a playable hand on another table. I don't normally get into chats.

The graph looks a bit tilty, but other than that one mistake I referred to, my big hands have been either coolers, beats, or reasoning mistakes on my part (i.e., bad play technically, not emotionally).

Bottom line, I think that one really good indicator for me is that although I've had a rough few sessions, I'm looking forward to the next one in a positive way...same way I do when I'm winning.

Still on the schneid

Yet to book a winning session for 2008 :(. I had a couple that I should have won, but ran like crap, but I still feel I'm not playing my A game, either...although that was mainly the first two sessions...since then I think I have been playing pretty well. My hands are holding up well against the little stacks, not so hot against the full ones...and my draws are just not getting there.

I'm doing a better job of not getting into really big pots with my one-pair hands...as long as I'm not taking it too far and losing value, it's all good. Even if I am losing some value, learning how to find the fold button with an overpair is a good lesson. I can always begin to fold less as conditions warrant, but I want to convince myself first that I can regularly lay those hands down.

I did have a slightly abbreviated coaching session last Friday. There were a couple interesting spots with medium pots. The good news for me is that we were in agreement how to play what I thought were those trickiest spots with the big hands. There were a couple other times, in smaller pots, where I would have approached hands a little differently. Those are kind of the gold hands as things come up.

Our plan for the next couple weeks is for me to drop back to 50NL and play a few thousand hands...then kind of do a mini-checkup and review. Along the way, I'll document a couple interesting hands per session (day) and detail my thought processes. This will do a couple things:

• Help my coach learn my game a bit more quickly...specifically where I need to develop my understanding better.
• (Hopefully) reinforce some confidence, as I've been on a slide this month so far. My confidence is actually OK, I think, but it sure would be a nice psychological boost to have a session or two end in the green.

I think the next sweat session -- coaching or otherwise -- I'm going to drop a table or two so that I can really focus on articulating my thought processes...it may mean there is a little more dead time, but on the other hand when an interesting situation comes up, it will help whomever is watching provide better insight into my thoughts. I'm pretty comfortable 4-tabling normally now, even on my small monitor (1024 x 768....total ghetto!). I'm getting a fair number of notes and decent reads beyond just stats. But, I can think faster than I can talk, and more importantly converse/listen...so I'll see how it goes dropping to 3 tables.

Chris stole my post

I think I am seriously overplaying one-pair hands. I keep getting in large pots calling bets and raises with TPTK and overpairs. Sometimes this is fine, but the norm at 100NL should be that you need a good reason to get it in, especially if someone is calling your preflop raise, calling the flop, and shoving the turn. I have been the donk in the stack-a-donk game. I see it a lot when I review my play, and for some reason I am talking myself into big calls during the game.

Some of this is read-related, and I actually believe my calls have thin value...but the point is that when there is value, it's pretty thin. And realistically, I'm probably not doing as good a job as needed in making correct reads. So, what I think to be thin value is based on bad inputs, and it's not value at all. If the best I can hope for is to get thin value and the downside is that I'm crushed, I won't be making a big mistake in pitching more hands. Eventually, I'll need to be able to make those thin calls, but I'm not playing against the right players for it. I see that now. Will I see it when I play?

I've tried dropping a table or two, and it doesn't make any difference. Must be a psychological problem, a blind spot when playing. Or just stubbornness. Perhaps it is that I don't want to think that I'm getting run over in a game. Well, in all my posts, and all the posts I've read, no one has complained that they are just getting run over too much. It's all like me...spewing away too much or turning into a payoff monkey. OK, end of pep talk. Time to get out there and fold some more :).

Goals

Here's how I did on my December goals:

10,000 hands. Played just a little more than that.

Community participation. I did pretty good here, I guess there is always room for improvement. Strengths were pretty good blog updates and blog reviews. Did a couple of sweat/group sessions (would like to do more of those in Jan.). Forum participation was kind of spotty, but I did try to single out posts from my two main groups, and I think I responded to most of those, if they were in the Low Stakes forum. Biggest weak area was video reviews.

Review hands. I did a good job getting through the hands that I played, over 3/4 of them, going by day played. I am catching some things, but I am beginning to question how effective my self reviews are. I have a sense that there are a number of things I'm missing...perhaps that is what poor results will do to you.

Review showdown hands. I failed at this one. It's been several months in a row that I have wanted to do this and have not had the time. I think that I am just too busy with other stuff, and this one goes. I'll continue to think about it, but this may just be too ambitious right now. Barry suggested that I just pay attention when I review my own hands to get practice at this. I do, and I think it's a pretty important part of the review, so I will be satisfied with that for now.

Review 5 coaching videos. I did this one, and I mean seriously reviewed them with notes and pausing before they take a likely controversial action to work it out myself. That really helps get something out of them, but it makes it take a while. While there's a bunch of moaning on the CR forums about a lack of content, I can't keep up with it all if I really study. Between pauses, rewinds, and note taking, I would guess that it takes me over two hours to review a video typically. I'm now making enough in MGR to get free access to Stoxpoker (leave a comment if you want a referral for the same deal). They are utilizing a different format for some of their videos, basically giving lectures and made-up hands to illustrate concepts. I have to say that I really like that. I hope that Cardrunners takes that approach with some of their instructors as well.

Overall thoughts. From development standpoint, December was a good month. I didn't get to watch as many videos or participate in the forums as much as I would have liked. But I started reading a lot more blogs from all stakes, and there has been a lot of good food for thought. I also ordered a couple books I'm excited about. In general, I think that I am almost done laying a pretty darn solid foundation from which to expand. My 100NL results have not shown it, but I think I should be able to beat the low stakes pretty soon. My challenge has been, and will continue to be, balancing poker with all the other good things I've got going.

January Goals

• 10,000 hands. Seems I can reasonably hit this, although I would like to devote some time that I would normally play to some other activities. So, we'll see.
• Review hands. Same as before, I think the challenge is going to be to draw some actionable conclusions from the review, not just go through them. But in order to draw some sort of conclusion, you do have to get through them.
• Active study of 5 videos.
  
• Raise Won $ at Showdown. This one I'm less sure about, because it's a little out of my control, but I'd like to get this higher than it is now. I think what I can do to this end is not call down so thin. Hopefully general good play takes care of it...but it's one stat that has bothered me for a bit. I would accept a lower Won $ at Showdown number if I were being more LAG, but I'm trying to play pretty much ABC after the flop, for the most part, so I think that this should be higher.
• Finish one poker book. This is kind of a cheap one, because I'm already 2/3 done with Elements of Poker. But, it's still a good goal.
• Regular sweat sessions. Noel and I have been chatting about setting up some sweat sessions on alternate weeks, and hopefully that will take off. Noel is farther along with poker development and plays higher stakes than I, and I'm sure that I'll get a good amount of insight from his play and his advice, but I think I'll be able to hold my own as well, as someone to sweat him. It's a bit difficult for me to participate in sweat sessions, since I'm usually playing when the rest of the family has gone to sleep, and I'm trying to keep things quiet. But I feel it's a key part of improving.
  

I would have included coaching in this list, but I'm already finalizing a time with Verneer for our first 1 on 1 session, and he's busy enough right now, that monthly may be all he has time to do. That's probably not terrible for me anyway, as that would mean getting some coaching every 10k hands or so, which is not a huge gap between coaching sessions, compared to a lot of full-time players. If he has time for more frequent sessions, great. If not, this will still be a valuable start for me, I'm sure.

2008 goals

So, I've been chatting with a couple people about overall 2008 goals. I'm not sure what to think about as a reasonable goal besides continuing the general goals that I've set out. Get the hands in, keep actively trying to improve (as opposed to going through the motions), and keep poker appropriately balanced with the other stuff in my life. But those are pretty high level.

I've still got the desire, determination, and potential to improve, and I guess that's what it boils down to for a year-long goal. The methods to improve will probably not change much from a lot of my January goals. Where would I like to see that culminate? I guess at the least, I would like to be a solid mid-stakes player by the end of the year, including being able to withdraw a significant chunk regularly once I hit 200NL or 400NL, just for some fun money for the family. I don't like making $$ or win rate related goals, because I don't play enough volume to leave that goal unaffected by variance. Let's just say my goal is to play as well as a solid 3/6 regular and leave it at that. If that means I'm at 3/6 or beyond, fantastic. If not, hopefully I'll still have the enthusiasm for the game that I have right now.

December results

The pictures:


I did the graph in terms of big bets, since I split my play between 50NL and 100NL. The graph by amount won is worse, since my score at 100NL was much lower than my score at 50NL. Hit a rough patch in the beginning of the month...combination of bad cards and bad play.


In addition to these hands, I had a little over $400 profit in live play, and whatever my rakeback will be (not much, since less than half of these hands are on a rakeback account). Results wise, I'm not too thrilled, but I think overall my play was OK, especially later on in the month. No higher than B overall I think, though, so plenty of room for improvement.

My preflop raise is too low for my VPIP, but some of that was intentional -- experimenting with some cold calls in position -- and some of it was due to good game selection. By that I mean, I found myself on the button or in the BB with a multiway raised pot already, and I had the odds to call. This didn't happen a ton, but it doesn't have to over such a small sample for it to influence the stats.

My Won at Showdown is really low, and it has been low for quite a number of months. A while ago, I asked Verneer about how to raise it in general. He had some ideas, and also posted the question to the NL Theory forum. I've been thinking about this stat for a while, since mine is much lower than the norm a lot of the time. I've come to the conclusion that it could be telling me the following...and I'm not sure in what order this is:

1. I am calling too light on the river. I need to watch out how many hero calls I make, even after inducing bets by checking behind the turn. Of everything, this is probably the most actionable point, and it reinforces my opinion that I probably let myself be value bet too often, and give too good implied odds to good players.
2. I c-bet too much when I miss. They call, I give up, and their marginal hand beats me. I may need to look into seeing whether I can push more people off hands, but my won when saw flop is already decently high, so I think that way lies spew. The other adjustment is to not relentlessly c-bet, but I tend to rely on the fold to c-bet stat a lot, and will pretty much always c-bet someone folding more than 50% of the time, as that should show a profit if the stats are right.
3. I may be running cold. I would give a lot more credence to this if it were a blip. But in only one month since June has my Won at Showdown been over 50%. Even though my Went to Showdown is pretty low (this month's is the highest by far..it's consistently been around 21%), I consistently lose frequently at showdown.

Related to the low Won at Showdown, I think that my river aggression is a tad on the low side. Aba suggested in one of his vids that aggression by street should be like 5+, 4+, and 3+, and to shoot for a 2.5 river aggression. Of course, he's in different games, but whatever. The point is that I should likely be over 2, and the fact that I'm not supports the premise I'm calling down too light.


I am doing a good job staying disciplined (tight) in early position. I am playing too weak in late position. I don't think there's too much more to say about this. Somehow, I've got to start getting a bit more out of line in late position. But my button VPIP is about 2.5 times as high as my UTG VPIP, so it's not terrible.