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!