1st Week of Feb

I'm gonna try to update on a more regular basis here since I seem be slackin' on doing so. Figured I'd get my goals thread from 2p2 posted here as well for a little more accountability.

Feb Goals
[ ] adapt to opponents quicker in my game & identify player types sooner
[ ] learn how to beat fish - threw away too many buy-ins to terrible players
[ ] +$6k
[ ] better balance - don't tilt, reoccuring theme here
[ ] more study time
[ ] gym 6x week
[ ] get caught up on school
[ ] girls girls girls

Some of these I've already failed at some haha. Gym has been OK but lately I'm slacking again since the MRI results came back and I need to get surgery again with a torn patella tendon. Gotta love the school trainers telling me it was tendinitis all year, but its whatever. At least I'm getting it sorted now so hopefully by summer I can get back into a really good groove with running and working a lot since I seem to do best when I'm balanced with my physical health.

I've gone through mini spurts of tilt as usual. A look at my ss graph shows that I'm still conquering some demons there haha. I really only tilt when I'm playing higher buy in games or playing too much so theres an easy fix to it I think: play less and play one level consistently (55s).

I've already been studying quite a bit though. Using a hand replayer I've downloaded, I'm going through some of my old hands, some of other good players, and just examining interesting spots thinking how I would play it differently. If I find a spot where I made a dumb move for the wrong reasons or examining other players tendencies etc etc. I think just reviewing this way is sooo helpful. Obviously you have to know how to interpret the information correctly, but a good first step is at least thinking about it deeply. The next part is understanding the reasons for your critique. If you aren't sure if what your thinking is right, try to verbalize or put it into writing in a word document. Doing this makes you 10x more assured of your reasons and helps clear up any loose ends in the thought process which should lead you to the ultimate goal of improving as a player.

I need to work on beating up the fish more for sure. Usually thats what sends me on those tilt cycles when I lose games I know I shouldn't or when I make moves I know I shouldn't and get pain and punishment from it. This will be a big goal for the month. So far I've cashed off around 2k but only up a little over 1k in actual profit. The online rolls a little short so this will at least force some discipline to play lower stakes for a few weeks.

GL in Feb,
brian

Jan recap

I of course doom switched myself with my last post being up around 4.5k hoping to have around a 5 or 6k month. I ended up at 3k. The last 9 days or so of the month were just so frustrating. I'd grind my opponent down only to lose several all-ins to completely reverse the dynamic of the game with being on the short stack. I also had some outside stress. I've had a nagging knee problem for the entire fall season and every school trainer and doctor told me it was tendinitis. So after about 6 months of no improvement I decided to see my surgeon who thinks I may have torn my patella tendon which from what I saw online looks like its 10-12 months of rehab. This really crushed me since I was finally into a good groove working out, even though I still can't run without pain. I'm awaiting the MRI results now, but it definitely affected my mental the last part of the month. I'll say it again, it's never a good idea to play poker with outside stress on you.

Some of you may have noticed I've been playing higher some in recent weeks, mainly 220s which probably isn't 100% smart yet. Whenever I sit tho, 9/10 I get a fishbowl or a losing 33-55 player that joins me. I think taking calculated shots and risks are beneficial to improve as a player which is my ultimate goal. And if I'm almost always getting bad fish playing out of their roll it seems to be good business right? I feel with almost 100% certainty I could beat 55's pretty easily now. At the 110s level I'm not as confident but I still feel pretty good there. I definitely haven't proven I can crush there like I have at 55's however.

I'm always caught between these two ideas where I could probably just make easy, low risk money every day or try to evolve as a player and push my limits and thresholds. As I'm writing this I'm starting to think maybe my logic is pretty dumb and that I should just crush until I know without certainty I'm a favorite. The outloud thinking continues..

Some of my friends have been talking about going up to Windsor sometime soon again. I remember when I was there last we all spent considerable amount of time in the pit just burning money more or less. I somehow came out the big winner playing an unorthodox blackjack style which left the table constantly cursing at me lol. Anyways, I found a pretty cool link which teaches some basic ideas about it. It might not be anything earth shattering to some experienced pit lurkers, but I was able to learn some from it. So I figured if anyone can benefit from it, I might as well throw up the link. Risk of Ruin

Hope everyone had a good start to 2010. I'll need to re-examine some things as I feel like I'm off my game some. I've definitely been doing some more review of sessions than normal, but I need to get back to a better balance of things. Whenever my sleep is off I just feel like a degen and don't feel I deserve to win, and probably sabotage myself in some regard.

Update

Hey guys,

I've had some exciting things happen in the past few weeks here. Pokers been going really well, I'm getting a much better balance with my daily schedule - working out daily in a routine now, playing soccer again, training in the mornings - all in all I've been really happy, I even got offered a head coaching job at my former high school as well as coaching youth soccer in the area, and I'm finishing my degree. So its been an exciting past few days.

I'm in the last 9 credits of my undergraduate degree and I cannot wait to finish. While school is a lot of fun, I'm just so over doing busy work, or researching topics I have no desire to learn about. I'm a big believer in making daily improvement a habit and learning everyday, yet writing journal entries on Business Ethics makes me feel like a scene from Billy Madison. Funny in its own right, yet not something I want to do.

I decided to finish my degree from my former school St. Francis University. I looked into it a few weeks back and I'll be able to graduate at an accelerated pace compared to finishing my degree at Cleveland State. I have 2 online courses, the aforementioned business ethics, an MIS course which is starting in a few weeks, and then I'm returning for a 7 week course at the end of the semester for my final 3 credits of Speech. The last few weeks should be fun as the end of the semester up there was always a crazy time so it'll be one last hurah (sp?) of college and to move on with my life.

Poker I've been on a pretty good run lately. I'm up about $4.5k this month and I haven't been forcing a ton of volume lately. Really not much else to say as I'll talk more about this at the end of the month. I'm trying to post more helpful information on 2p2 to give back some to up-and-coming players trying to improve.

The High School coaching opportunity is really exciting for me. Coaching is something I want to do long term so being a head coach at 22 would be a huge stepping stone to moving up the ladder into college and professional coaching. I've recently been training pretty hard again as well, and playing in various indoor leagues around the area. I've really redeveloped my passion for the game which is great because for a month or two I had lost it. I'm even considering working my health and strength back up and contemplating pursuing playing after the fall season. I've been plagued with a lot of injuries so taking a year or 6 months to just build up and move forward might be very beneficial. Especially when I'll be immersed in thinking about the game on a daily occurrence. Looking forward I'm seeing a lot of positives right now and its an exciting time.

Bahama's trip

We touched down on the morning of the 9th and stayed 4 nights in the Beach Tower. We had a solid room with a good view on the ocean side. The weather was a bit eh and the internet was shaky for a majority of the trip. And the internet’s actually out as I’m writing this, but I guess there was a volcano eruption in Haiti so the Bahamas is on Tsunami watch right now. Baller. Hopefully we get out of here OK and catch our flight in the morning. The weather was pretty cold compared to what I was expecting (60s-70s but pretty windy). It was still good to get out of the snow of course. The only disappointment was that I wasn’t able to do some cool things because of the temperature and only went to the rapids/lazy river and water slides 2 of the days because of it.

My bro played the 1k HU event and played really well with a very tough route of opponents. The structure was a best of 3 with 5,000 chips and blinds at 25/50 with 15 minute levels. I got to the first game midway through, but from all accounts it was a really aggressive game vs. craigthedeac – a leggo poker coach. He has a summary of the game on his blog. One of the more interesting spots on the leveling war was when the effectives were getting short, craig limp blind with K4o. My brother open shoved his AQ for value and hoping craig would think he was jamming any two. In his next round bcm played a fish. I came over about 10 minutes in and he was already 1-0 up looking to go for his 2nd straight sweep. The guy clearly looked irritated and wanted to get out of the game as quick as possible. After that round he had a decently long break since he finished so quickly. Round 3 was the bubble where he faced up vs. mynamizgreg – another leggo poker guy. Bcm got KK cracked by a 14 out draw on the flop in game 1 for stacks before battling back and got greg all-in drawing dead in game 2. Game 3 was a slugfest with about 6 or 7 all-ins. Greg was getting chipped down before doubling 8cTc > Qc6c then 6d9d >Ad2d. The dealer was very unprofessional in my opinion slow rolling the flop. With chip counts at about 60/40% and like 11 effectives a cooler of AJ
Met a lot of fellow hu sng’ers in the poker room when I was railing games(pomp, tppr, ekko, and a few guys from leggo poker – craighthedeac and mynameizgreg - as well as seeing the live pro donks. Sad to say I didn’t play live here once, but I’m not really. Whenever I tried to talk myself into playing I would just think about how boring it is and how I’d rather go out or do something else besides sit around and play 15 hands an hour.

Also with the PS bank it works just like real money. Amazing how differently each game felt. It would be very interesting to see how well I would do on stars if I could instantly cash out and have it there in front of me; such a mind trick, but a huge one. I would usually go to the lobby and play in the morning just trying to win a buy in or 2. Regardless, it really devalued playing any $1/2 or $2/5 since I could snap up fishies online just as quickly and cash out the money on the spot. The cool thing was I nearly able to pay for my trip here just from my online play over the course of the week. I’m without question going home with more money than I first came with which again, I guess is another mind trick.

Funny quip of the trip was when I was out one night around 3:30am I wandered over to a roulette table after the bars and started talking to the group there before learning it was a guy I’ve played a number of times at the $57.50 hu’s: Milf Island. Lol such a random funny occurrence, but overall from the little I talked to him he seemed like a cool guy. And then while walking back to the room from the cashier window I bumped into former Man Utd player/legend Teddy Sheringham. I’ve always been of the opinion that I don’t want to bother famous people so I just said hello and left it at that.

All in all, it was a fun time. I went there with the mindset that I didn’t want to grind poker on this trip but to treat it like a vacation. I would have liked to done some more touristy things like the dolphin swim or the booze cruise, scuba, etc, but the weather just wasn’t there and the group was more of my two brothers friends. We did go to a comedy club one of the nights, which was alright, nothing spectacular. I was gonna upload some photos, but I lost my camera the last night there which was of course awesome. Overall, its a fun place though, I’m already planning on playing one of the HU events next year when I’m hopefully ballin’ a little more than where I was in ‘09.

Coaching informtion up and Bahama's tomorrow

Hey guys,

You can find my coaching page on the right. I've had a few inquiries already so don't hesitate to contact me if you are looking to improve your game. There are a number of options available that should work for any number of players from micros to medium stake players.

I'll be escaping the snow and cold of Ohio, heading down to the Bahama's for about 5 days in the sun. I've heard the weather hasn't been that great, which is disappointing since last year I heard it was 80-90s. Hopefully it'll change though crossing my fingers there. I'm lookin forward to going down though and meeting up with some good hu players I've talked strategy with a decent amount online and attaching faces to the names. I'm hoping that I learn as much while I'm there and pick up ideas and improve as much as I have a good time and enjoy my vacation.

I've regained some confidence in my poker ability as well. Had a very good session late last night when I wasn't even planning on playing, but got drawn in. I'm about +1k on the month now. I was teaming 110 with BigPapaLind earlier in the night where we went 4-0, then we went out for a bit. Came back and continued finishing 6-1.

I'll try to give an update while I'm in Atlantis and if anyone that reads this is goin' to be down there and wants to meet up for a drink or whatever, leave me a comment and we'll try to arrange it.

Brian

Few days into 2010

Few days into the new year and I've got a few updates, a goal addition, and information on my coaching page.

I'm not really that happy with how I've played at times this week. The good thing is I've spent a few hours the past few days reviewing some things. I've posted some hands on 2p2, talked with some good regs, discussed hands, read some strategy advice, and done a leak finder with a top hu snger. At the very least I'm starting to regain some confidence again in my play.

I started to watch some hands in the replayer from my sessions and examined spots where I went broke and examined spots where I didn't need to go broke. Most of the time it was due to me looking to play a big pot and be aggressive on the turn. Some of this is just me running into the top of their range (i.e. 2 pair or trips vs. turned flush, boat), but its also spots where its high risk/little reward I think. I started to analyze this further and I remember how controlled and slow I played in November and how fast I tried to play in December. I'm starting to connect the dots. I'm going to try to advocate more pot control on the turn.

I've played a lot of hu sng's so far this month. My stats are way off as in reality I'm down like 3 or 4 buy in's total. That's the nature of 4 man's. The new VIP bonus system is a good addition though. I've already cleared several of the $10 VIP stellar reward bonuses as well as the reload bonus for $150. Me and phmerc bet the cowboys game based off his research (rookie center ftw!!). Haha so far I'm 4-0 or 5-0 on sports bets lifetime. So between the bonuses and sports bets I'm just about even on the month, down 1 buy in. SO between the run bad, play avg, I'm just above even and I'm also acquiring a decent amount of fpps which I'm saving up. I guess I'll take it.

I want to add to my 2010 goals:
1.$60,000 before rakeback
2.Improve as a player/Increase my study time tenfold/discussion with other regs
3.Be legit
4.SS Leader board (if I hit my 1st goal, this should happen)

I also wanted to announce in the coming days I will have my coaching page (linked at the right) setup. I'm in the process of putting together the coaching options since the coaching forum on 2+2 was closed. Interested parties are encourage to get in touch with me through this blog, IM, skype, or email.

thanks,
bpmst2