Getting back on track...

I had a great talk today on AIM with Noel. Noel is in my poker group Destined2pwn and a really great poker friend, always willing to discuss hands and other stuff too. I think having great poker minds you can talk to about hands, concepts, etc. is very important to being a solid winning player. Also, it undoubtedly speeds a poker player's skill progression.

Anyways, I mentioned to Noel that I got crushed yesterday and he asked me a few questions that really made me "wake up and smell the coffee." He asked me if I had been checking my results during my sessions... well the answer to that was "yes". Every time I lost a big pot yesterday I was frantically refreshing Holdem Manager to see where I was at for the session and checking my all in EV. Noel commented that checking results during a session is the worst thing to do as a professional player, because we use bankroll management so we don't have to worry about how much we are up or down. What he said next is a perfect way to approch poker and is the ideal mindset for playing the game... he said, "(having bankroll management) allows us to focus on decision making and let results take care of themselves."

This is exactly what the book I've read, "The Poker Mindset," preaches. It's a great book, and I'm going to re-read it as soon as I can. Noel also pointed out that all in EV is pointless to worry about, because so many things are not accounted for (like set over sets). There is nothing we can do about how our all in EV is turning out anyways so it isn't worth wasting mental energy on. And he made another excellent statement, saying "but the simple fact is, all me and you can do is make the correct choices when we have to make them... with the info we have, and what happens after that is out of our hands." This statement is so true, and I think in order to be the best player I can be I must follow this "decisions are the only thing that matter" mindset.

We also briefly talked about amount of tables to play at once, and Noel mentioned that anything more than 6 tables is going to be spewy, at $2/4 NL or higher. I definitely agree with him, except I think that his statement is probably true for all levels. It's just simply not possible to achieve the highest winrate you possibly can, if you are playing more than 4 tables. That is why I have decided to only play 4 tables this month.

We also looked over a few of my big losing hands from yesterday, and I figured out a few spots where I had made mistakes.

I'm going to grind like crazy over the next few days, but I think I'm going to just play in like 2 or 3 hour blocks, then log off and take a 30 minute break. When I play, I end up putting in marathon sessions of like 5-10 hours straight just sitting at the computer and just getting up to go to the bathroom. This is very bad for my winrate, because after playing for that long in a row, I am sure that I enevitably start playing on auto-pilot and probably am not playing my "A" game. There is plenty of month left, and I'm starting at even right now since I lost everything I had won the first few days of the month, during yesterday's session.