Great friends

I'm fortunate to have such a great group of friends from poker. Most of the people I talk poker strategy with I do not consider just "poker friends." I consider them all great friends and today I was reminded of how great they are. I've been in a bit of a slump over the past two weeks, as I started the month off up around $13k over the first six days but am now down around $3k for the month.

I ended up chatting with two of my friends on Monday and three of my friends on Tuesday. On Monday, I spoke with Tim and Adam. Tim was helpful in making me realize that my mindset towards the overall game of poker is somewhat flawed and definitely somewhat of a 'defeatist' attitude during rough times at the tables. My mental game is far from perfect and I plan on working on it in the near future.

In my discussion with Adam over the phone, we spoke a lot about keeping emotions in the past and not worrying about where you were at before, or how much you were up and how much you're down now, etc. He had a really good quote, "Keep your knowledge from the past, but leave your emotions behind." I haven't really done that over the past two weeks as I've been getting extremely frustrated over the fact that I'm losing playing against inferior players. That, along with my glass-half-empty view on the game lately has contributed to me actually playing some pretty shitty poker. Of course I've been running like a midget with a broken leg, but that really has only been the source of about half of this downswing.

Tuesday, I spoke with Jason, Derrick, and Noel. Jason was really helpful with helping my mindset towards the game and pointing out that there's no point in getting worked up about variance. The discussion with him was really refreshing and it made me feel a whole lot better. To quote Jason, he said... "variance is like getting tackled in football, it's just part of the game. When you get tackled you don't quit playing, you get up, re-set, and keep playing your best." Also, we spoke how everyone makes mistakes, not only in poker, but nearly every activity humans partake in. What sets apart the average players from the great players is someone's ability to recover from their mistakes and quickly go back to putting in their best work.

After telling Derrick what has happened so far this month, he suggested a hand history review. I took him up on his offer and we spent at least a few hours reviewing every single large pot I had lost over the last 11k hands or so. Wow. I learned a ton from him. We spoke a lot about bet sizing and there were many spots in these big hands where I should have found a fold. I seemed to be basically ultra-focused on my absolute hand strength and didn't take into account relative hand strength enough and people's ranges, which is retarded because all that really matters is relative hand strength and the strength of someone's range compared to your hand.

There was one hand in particular, where a super nit had flatted the initial pre-flop raiser's flop re-raise of my donk lead on a soooted flop where I had a flush. At the time of the hand, I remember saying to myself, wow, if this nit flats that re-raise he will almost always have a flush... I had a 7 high flush, the lowest possible flush, but I shipped it in anyways. I've shown that particular hand to three largely winning players and each one of them said it was a fold on the flop.

Derrick also pointed out a number of spots where I would make a flop raise with a top-pair type strength of hand that basically over-repped my hand when I didn't have an aggressive dynamic with the player in the pot. I was fast-playing my hand in hopes of getting them to spew but often it just seemed to polarize my range and make it so they would only continue with a range that had my hand beat. I also didn't tend to bluff-raise on those types of boards either so it didn't even balance my ranges at all... plus I'm still going to get value from the top pair type hands I was ahead of if I hadn't have raised the flop.

Also, I realized that reviewing HH's directly after a session is a pretty horrible way to review your play. Basically, I had reviewed nearly all of the hands we went over in this session... but I did so under the clouded judgement and burned-out thinking power right after a playing session so I was unable to objectively analyze my play. I will no longer do session reviews directly after playing, as it is actually counter-productive. I think it's best to wait a day or at least take a few hour break before going back to see if you made any mistakes in your session. It was very clear to me while going through the hands that I was definitely on some type of subtle form of tilt and wasn't thinking clearly at all during many of my losing hands. Of course some were coolers and suck outs, but in many of the hands, my bet sizing was not ideal. Also, it was obvious I totally disregarded or forgot about hand ranges entirely during a few of the worst-played hands.

It was fun to catch up with Noel and I ended up sweating him for a bit while he was playing some 100NL. Looked like he was playing solid and I'm sure he'll be up at 200NL soon.

I think I'm definitely on the right track to getting back to my winning ways, but I'm going to take one more day off today to read through the entire book, The Poker Mindset, as well as run a few errands. If everything goes well, and I get through the book, I might watch a few poker vids and then hopefully go back to the office on Thursday.

I need to buy some headphones to avoid getting distracted since I really need to keep my focus on my tables while playing and will only review HH's or recorded sessions from now on with Nute, because getting coached live in-real-time is very detrimental to my performance. Add that to the fact I don't actually retain any of the coaching while getting a live sweat and always second guessing myself and not thinking as much as I should = disaster.