How to learn, Session themes and drawback!

Hey again :)
Whenever someone says "Get better, just learn" it sounds very easy but it is hard to imagine, how you actually are going to do it.
Here I want to point out my view on learning and how I try to improve.
I will use the term the "Adult learning Model" (ALM) that can be found in the book "Mental Game of Poker" by Jared Tendler.

ALM:
Level 1 — Unconscious Incompetence.
You have no idea that something like openingranges exist and therefor are not aware of the fact that something is wrong. (This is the part where most people get stuck in my opinion, as they dont see what could be wrong and therefor assume there is nothing to learn.)
Level 2 — Conscious Incompetence.
You realise that opening all cards from all positions is not right. You still have no clue what to do but you atleast know, that something is wrong.
Level 3 — Conscious Competence.
This is the knowledge you aquired by reading/talking/watching something about it. You now know what Cards are profitable to open and which ones you are better of folding. This is the stage were your skill is still beeing learned. If you are not thinking about your knowledge, you may turn incompetent again.
Level 4 — Unconscious Competence.
At this stage, you got your skill worked out. You have used it over and over again so that you are using your knowledge automatic. Writing on the keyboard might be an example. At first it was hard, searching every letter with one finger. Now you dont even have to think about, where the different letters are.

Now knowing this, how are we going to get some knowledge into our Unconscious Competence(UC)?
I try to select themes for the sessions I am strictly abusing to learn. Lets say I want to be focussing on isolating fish. I focus strictly on using every oportunity to isolate a weak player profitably and really think about those spots and make experiences what works, and what doesnt. Dedicating 2-3 sessions just to one topic really strengthens your skill so that you need less "brain power" for that task and have more, to focus on different things. This can be done with basically any skill in poker. Notetaking, Cbetting, 3betting, Re-Isolating, 4betting etc. etc.
I hope this helps to improve your game if you are clueless on how to actually do it.

My current progress has a little drawback but nothing that concerns me too much.
I am playing 50%-25nl/50%-50nl for the time beeing as I had a small downswing of 10BI but expect to recover pretty soon.
After the christmasdays, I will get volume challenges running with my mate to get me back in pace.

Happy Xmas-days :)

My new goal, A-game and coaching!

I am so happy that I managed to get my goal in the requested time and I even have one month left in my timeframe. Since I had no ongoing goal until the end of this year, I made a new one which is expressed kind of vague.

New goal:
Be able to play my A-game on 4 tables over 2 hours until the end of the year.

I thought a little about the definition of "A-game" but couldnt come up with a better phrase. My main focus will be on notetaking as this is the bread-and-butter skill that I need to master because without it, I just spew money with a weak range all over the place. Yesterday I played 30 minutes after I went home from a friend of mine and only slept 6 hours that night.
I could feel my dizzyness while playing and after 15 minutes, I had not written a single note. Upon realising this, I instantly quit my session. This will be my main information point that I can analyse while playing, if I am on my A-B or C-game, as I can check how many notes I took and how usefull those are in correlation to the time spent on the tables.


I made my volume challenge about 4 days ago so I can also cross that goal of 100 hours in November.
My mate and I will make volume challenges in smaller timeframes from now on, as the motivation boost from it drops vastly when the deadline is 30 days away. He didnt quiet made it so that means some extra cash for me ;)

I now have two students that I coach starting from nl10 and nl25 and it is a lot of fun. There are so many concepts I can talk over with them so it never gets boring and we always find something to improve their game. Talking about a lot of concepts also refreshes them in my mind and makes me more concious while playing afterwards.

Good luck on the tables and stay focussed! :)

50nl, big pot and villains!

At first I was scared. I expected the average 50nl regular to be very smart. I thought there would also be a lot of 100nl regulars that had to drop a limit to rebuild their bankroll. Well I cant know if there were any but it didnt feel like it. The limit has just been as weak as 25nl from the very limited experience I have of the playerpool yet. But from what I have seen, it is not so much about sample, but more about how they adjust. Which was not noticeable. For example there was a deepstacked (260bb) fish to my right and I was just isolating him with about 60% of hands. Was there anyone adjusting? For sure not.


Anyway I am doing great at 50nl at the moment , which also comes from running good obviously. But still I havent seen any regulars that were getting out of line to exploit somebody like I do it.


Here is my biggest pot so far from 50nl ;) He was a pretty big fish but I had betsizeing tells on him. Against a regular passive fish I might find a fold but not against this villain because of my notes.

Notes:
- donk/calls halfpot with draws/3rdpairs
- Bet close to pot with TPGK, overpots a little with better kicker and underpot with weak kicker
- snap shoves with 2pair/sets+

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em $0.25/$0.50 ante $0.10 - 5 players

CO: $177.28
Button: $139.31 (Hero)
SB: $125.89
BB: $50.00
UTG: $100.12

Preflop: ($1.25) Hero is Button with (5 players)
2 folds, Hero raises to $1.75, SB raises to $3.50, BB folds, Hero raises to $12, SB calls $8.50

Flop: ($25.00) (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $17.50, SB calls $17.50

Turn: ($60.00) (2 players)
SB bets $59, Hero raises to $109.71 and is all-in, SB calls $37.29 and is all-in

River: ($252.58) (2 players)

Hero showed , and won ($250.08) with a pair of Aces
SB showed , and lost with a pair of Queens
Hero won $250.08
(Rake: $2.50)
Pretty happy to get it in OTT as he can only have KQ/AQ there, based on my reads.

Full Tilt, new goals, and meeting Pokerstars

Hey there again
I have been playing quiet a bit on FTP and accumulated to the, in my opinion, very different playerpool. People on FTP seem to be way more aggressive on the normal tables then on pokerstars. Nearly every table has his two or three guys 3betting 15% and up. But they are messing with the wrong LAGtard. ;)


Last 6 days: 180$ from winnings and another 65$ from rakeback

At first I was playing the Rushpoker tables which turned out to be a pure rakehell. I havent seen anything like this before. NITs all over the place. Not playing a single hand and if they do, they slowplay it hard for the most part. Have seen some guys calling AA preflop and then c/c 3 streets not even thinking about a raise.
Anyway once I went over to the normal tables, I started crushing as no one seems to be handreading of them and you have a lot of fish and regfishes too which is always nice.
With the first deposit bonus, it feels like I have way more rakeback on FTP as on Pokerstars but I am not sure, as the rake on FTP is also higher.
So far I plan to stick with FTP until atleast monday next week as I will have to grind some hands on Pokerstars to not loose my VIP-level there.


New Goals:

I think my 50nl goal is defenetly achievable by the end of the year. Hey I could even start to play there now ;). But will wait until my bankroll is more handy and I will have a better overview of the playerpool on FTP. All my shots at 50nl have been succesfull so far tho.

My other goal, to reach 2000$/month by the end of the year, isnt realistic and I had to drop it. This goal will be achievable, once I reach 50nl tho as my Volume is staying very solid. (also pushed by my 1st deposit bonus on FTP)

Meeting Pokerstars:

I was invited by Pokerstars for a feedback meeting and it was fun. I got  to meet grinders who also were living in Hamburg. I felt like a fish as everybody else was playing 100nl and higher ;).
But I dont feel my game beeing that far away from beating 100nl (watch out selfconfidence oO)currently. I added them all to skype and then hosted a group to keep us all in touch. It was defenetly a very good experience to meet other grinders and I didnt expect to be that many of us just in hamburg.



Have been skipping my updates on this blog lately which sucks as I had the time to do it and I apologize for that. I will keep em coming more frequently now. No slacking allowed!



GTO, exploitation and frustration!

Game Theory Optimal:

I am sure most of you heard of this concept atleast vaguely. Many know that it exists but nearly no one really tries to use it to their benefits as the rumors say that you cant play this way anyway as it would be too complex.
Game Theory Optimal means that you play a strategy that cant be exploited by anybody. If two players play a GTO style against each other, neither player can improve their expected value by changing their strategy.
A very good article about GTO on 3bets/4bets and 5bets is here .
It basicly illustrates how each player defends with a range that makes him unexploitable against the other players deviations.

So how does that benefit us now?

Most of the time it is not smart to play GTO unless the other player is better then we are because we can play exploitative. But if we know how our opponent should respond if he would be playing GTO, we know how we can exploit him if he doesnt!


Here is an example of Game Theoretical Optimum play and how we exploit any deviation:

Player A opens for 3bb. The pot is now 4.5bb including the blinds.
Player B 3bet to 9bb and its folded to Player A.
How does he know what is GTO now? Well he has to know, when Player B starts to exploit him.
Player B risks 9bb to win 4.5bb. So once Player A folds more then 66% of the time, Player B is autoprofiting (assuming Player B always looses once called).
So that in mind, Player A has to defend 33% of his initial opening range to not get exploited.
Since Player A is out of position to Player B, he chooses to only defend by 4betting or folding.
If Player A 4bets to 27bb, he needs to win 1 out of 3 times again to be breakeven. So if Player B folds more then 66% to 4bets, Player A is autoprofiting again :)
This is completly without any equity calculations since those can be found in a lot of other articles and take a lot of pages to write. 
But my example gives us enough information on how to use GTO knowledge to exploit someone.

If we know, that our opponent is 3betting more then GTO but folds a bigger part of his range to 4bets and only continues with [QQ+, AK] (which is not enough to reach those 33% that he needs to defend), we can increase our 4b-bluffingrange by a lot and only call a 5bet with [AA,KK].
If our opponent is 3betting less then GTO, we can probably remove our 4bet bluffingrange and just be jamming with [AA,KK] as he will not fold after 3betting with such a strong range anyway.

This is applicable to a lot more situations like the Cbet. When are you autoprofiting with your Cbet? Does he defend less then he needs to, to not let you autoprofit? If yes, bet ATC. If no, work out a range that does good against his range.

This is only a very broad overview about GTO and I advocate you guys to research a little more to get more insight into it.

Frustration:

Four more days until I can see my Cashier again.
It really itches me to not know how bad I am running currently but I can also feel a better emotional state of mine as I have no clue if I am down or up overall, which shifts my focus more towards how good my gameplay is. I think 50nl might have to wait another week or two as I am not running too well currently. I have a broad overview of my bankroll in mind, eventho I cant look at it but I will see how much reality deviates from my assumption :)

Progress, Results and Job!

This Update wont contain too much valuable content in terms of development and strategy as I didnt had the time to come up with something worth writing about. I promise tho I will come up with some good stuff in my next update so stay tuned :)

Volumewise I am doing great. I have been able to put in more hours then I wanted per day so that goes into the right direction.
Results are a little bumpy as I am running 17 Buy-Ins under EV, yet I am still in the green numbers for this month and we are not even halfway through.

I disabled all statistics that keep track of my Net-$-Won and bb/100 and plan on to hide them from myself until next Sunday to see if it changes my mindset.
Results dont really matter that much in the timeframe of a few days. So bothering about them is probably -EV and preventing myself from getting attached to results will improve my overall mindset I suppose.

Challenge: 
until november 15th:
Hours: 36 / 42
Days:  12 / 15

november total:
Hours: 36 / 100
Days:  12 / 30

you might notice that it is 42 hours now until 15th because I messed up writing it down correctly earlier. I will change that tomorrow on all posts.

________________

Today I got my letter from the government and they give me the opportunity to work for them, starting in september next year! I will try my best to get very good at poker and try to make it a more profitable profession then working for the government in that timeframe.
The deadline is set! Lets go!   

Goal setting, achieving goals and update!

Short update:

November doesnt like me anymore ;) I am still up about +120$ but I am at +450$ of expected value (EV) which makes a difference of 330$. 
 But it could be worse. I am very happy tho about my poker development and how things are progressing overall! Such a good EV line indicates that I am doing things right and am on the right track.

Challenge: 
until november 15th:
Hours: 27 / 40
Days:  9 / 15

november total:
Hours: 27 / 100
Days:  9 / 30

I will keep on grinding and studying with my shedule as it fits me very good. I managed to grind more then 3 hours for the last two days and it wasnt as hard after I set my goals which leads me to the following.

 
Goal setting:
Without a defined goal, there is no destination. Without a destination there is no path that heads towards what you want.
If you know what you want, you eventually will pick the right path that heads directly to your goal instead of waddling around on a path that takes way longer or even leads you somewhere else.

So at first, set your goal. Make it as specific as possible.
An example:
I want to earn 2000$ a month by the end of the year with poker.

Write all your goals down!
You will build up your short-term goals to achieve your long-term goals.

What am I willing to do to achieve that goal?
- Play atleast 3 hours a day. Study 1 hour a day.
- Review my sessions in detail every tuesday, friday and sunday.
- Every Sunday I will review my overall performance of my work-ethic.

These short-term goals should increase my chance by a ton to achieve my previous stated goal instead of having this way too unspecific statement: "I want to be good at poker".
Whenever I got one more day done and achieved all my short-term goals for that day, I cross it off in my calender. It motivates me even more and just makes me happy that I achieved something.

I also set goals for other things besides poker. Getting better at the piano, improving my sleep patterns and improving my work-ethic overall. For all those goals I have short-term goals to head me to the right direction every day.

That way every day is a productive day for me.


Until two days guys and good luck on your own goals :)

Short update and my challenge

Hello to all new visitors coming over from reddit or two plus two ;)

7 days into november and I am still doing good.
I am up for about 250$ (with rakeback) but behind in my volume-challenge with my mate.
To make up for it, I will have to put in 4 hours per day for the next 6 days which should be no problem.

Challenge:
until november 15th:
Hours: 18 / 40
Days:  7 / 15

november total:
Hours: 18 / 100
Days:  7 / 30

_____________

I have been analysing some regulars I play against on a regular basis. The leaks I found in their games are so tremendous, that the time I put into analysing them should pay off quickly.
I will make a new update in two days and add some usefull content. I have not decided whether it will be about goal-setting or a little reminder about becoming self-employed.

Playing your best game, warmup and update!

For me this was the single most important thing to learn. Playing your A-game, your so called best-game, as often as possible.
The first half of my playtime was basically a pure waste of time as I just thought, putting in the hours and grinding 6-8 hours a day would make me go up in stakes. But that was pretty far from the truth. What happened was that I kept playing on autopilot for the most part. I made decision after decision and skipped all the marginal ones as it was told in most of the coaching videos/books that are out there.

In my opinion this is the worst thing you can do. You dont improve your game, you train yourself habits that you will have to untrain later on and you dont play with your full attention.

Only since October I went back to fully concentrate on my gameplay and the results have been tremendous. Moneywise aswell as my game strenght.
You get more conscious about what you are doing and what you are doing wrong. Where you can improve and what gives you troubles. While playing 12 tables or more, a lot of those aspects get lost in the amount of decisions you have to make per timeframe. Atleast that was what happened to me.

Now why is it important to get into our A-Game?

Lets take this common but simple example:
You open with AJ and get called by a big loose passive station. He plays about 70% of hands and has never raised anything so far. Thats why you open for 4bb's this time.

The flop comes As Ts 5d. You can feel yourself drooling for all his chips.
You make a potsized bet for 9,5bb, he calls. The turncard comes a Kc. (Pot = 28,5bb)
You make your potsized bet but this time, he min raises to 57bb. Ohh man you know what is coming. You learned this a long time ago, you know whats the right decision but you hesitate to fold because you just see the money that you could win. Maybe he has a flushdraw? Maybe he just has a worse ace? You call the other 28,5bb. River card doesnt change the board and now he goes All-in.
Lets assume you do now recognize that you should fold and do so. Atleast you prevented yourself from this last mistake. But the turn call did cost you 28,5bb already. Calculated that over to your winrate (in my situation it is ~7bb/100) and you see how big of an impact it has.
I will have to grind about 400 hands now to make up for that single mistake if I play my best game (which is questionable, because I wasnt playing it 400 hands ago. Why should that have changed?).
That single mistake (which would have been easy to prevent) cost me 14% of my winrate for the next 2850 hands just because I made a mistake I normally would not do because I was tired, distracted or anything that put me off my game.

So how do we increase the odds to play our A-Game? Well at first we have to minimize the chance of playing our C-Game (our worst game). Get enough sleep! Calm down if you are stressed. Dont eat big meals before you play. Get hydrated! Warm-up!!!

Warm-up:
The goal of the warm-up is to set up your brain ready to work efficiently right from the start of your session. If you have no warm-up routine, the first couple of hands in your session are your warm-up.
The brain needs a little bit of time to accustom to the task it has to do. So if you prepare it prior to that, you will have a higher chance to play at your best.

My personal Pregame Warm-up:

1. Preparation: Remove distractions, get water + snack, toilet

Close skype, close all unnecessary programms

2. Calm down: Play the piano/guitar, meditate

3. Review your Longterm Goal: I wrote my longterm goals down and like to remind myself, why I am doing this and what I am trying to accomplish.
4. Review new knowledge: What are you currently working on? What have you learned in videos/books in the last couple of days?
5. Review leaks to focus on: Find them while reviewing a session and then focus on them the next time you play. Give them no chance to occur again!
6. Make some range analysis: This is to get you ready to think about ranges. Open your last session and just look over one or two hands and try to think about the range villain could have, how you could adjust to that. Dont extend this too much as you dont want your warm-up to be too long.

The routine should be tailored for you and since you are the only person that knows what calms you down, you are the one that has to design one.

 

Improving my volume, music and update ;)

Improving my volume:
 I have been lacking the motivation to grind for longer periods or general put in the time to play per day, even though I definitely could.
So I made a challenge with a pokermate of mine.
But to make that challenge a little more vital to my unconsciousness, there has to be a penalty if I dont make it. Not facing a penalty should be enough of a reward to keep me motivated during those times where I just surf the internet or play games that dont contribute to... basically anything.  

__________

Volume-challenge:

Playtime on the tables for november = 100 hours
First 40 hours have to be played before the 15th day of this month.

For every not completed hour under the above presets, I have to send 2$ to my mate and vice versa.

__________
The next challenge after this one will probably increase in hours played and penalty payed but only between December 1st to the 20th to keep room for Christmas.


Short Update:
I finished my 3 hours for today and was pretty happy how motivated I got to keep playing. Also results kept beeing good ;)

4,2 hours played

I played some Zoom tables on 10nl to get in some rakeback points which eventually was a bad idea, since I have a completly different playstyle on zoom that doesnt contribute to my development.
But well, was a little greedy there to get that stellar reward completed (still 60 vpps to go -.-).
Pokerstars mailed me for a feedback-meeting that I will be joining in the next week which gets rewarded with 50$ too. So within the next 2 weeks, I will get 175$ in bonuses which is a nice boost to my bankroll ;)

Music:

Playing an instrument is very beneficial in my opinion in terms of happyness. I do play the piano for ~11 years and the guitar for maybe 1-2 years now which I am very grateful for.
It helps me cool down, clear my mind, have fun alone or with others and most important making music just gives me the feeling that I do something that is worth doing it.
Only a few months ago I read some articles about "music and intelligence" so I might be more stupid now if I had not played music ;)

I've been skipping a lot of playing for the last 2 years and just recently got back into it as I implemented it into my pregame warm-up (I might do a post about that).

How? Why? WHAT?: Loose Aggressive Playstyle

In my opinion there are no real "playstyles" in poker. Just evolutionary stages of your own playstyle compared to the majority of players you are playing against. I will explain this in the following.
There are three factors that determine your edge in a hand:

Cards                                         Position                                         Skill

Lets take this extreme example:
We are playing on a table where everyone has more skill than us. Most players will agree that it is the most +EV decision to leave the table but lets just assume we are chained to the table and have no other options than to play. ;)
The correct adjustment to play on this table would be to exclusively maximise the other factors to gain an edge over our opponents. We play very tight and preferably only in position to the villain.
Conversely if we play against opponents we have a significant skill edge, we can sacrifice a little of the other two factors to play more hands profitable. Still we cant make up for playing 100% of hands by our skill except for very rare cases but you get the deal.

So to be able to play more hands, we need to have a skill advantage over our opponents. This could be in the form of specific reads, for example our villain always bets the flop and then check/folds the turn if he missed the board.
Our adjustment against this villain: We can open up extremely wide preflop, float his cbet on the flop and then take the pot down on later streets when he checks to us, even with air.
Or general flaws in their game like folding too much to 3bets, paying us off too light or betting too often with a very weak range.

If we are able to play 30% of hands profitably now, we make more money than if we only would play 20% of hands. If you didnt open J/9s before and folded it for 0bb/100hands, but now are playing it for a profit, you increased your overall winrate by a little.

 Knowing where your villains range is weak is way more valuable than knowing the line how your opponent plays his nuts just because the latter doesnt happen that often.
So whenever your villain plays a certain line and you took your notes, you can narrow his range down very accurately and make the most +EV decision against him. Lets be honest. No one in the micro stakes and even only a few in small stakes try to play balanced or near GTO. They isolate big parts of their range with the lines they take. So we can take very unbalanced lines against their unbalanced ranges.

This is basically the reason why its flawed to say that no playstyle is better or worse imo. If we are able to play more hands for a profit than if we were playing less hands, the first playstyle is obviously better. Hence if we play too many hands and loose marginal with a big part of them, the tighter playstyle is better for us for the time being until we manage to get good enough to play more hands profitably.

The only downside to it is, you really have to pay attention and cant autopilot because if you just play with a VPIP of 30 without making moves on ppls tendencies that you gather from your notes, the whole concept falls apart and you are just lighting money on fire.

I only manage to play 4 tables yet while beeing very loose. After this sunday, I will try out how it affects me when I play 5 to 6 tables.

Also looking forward to this tuesday as it will be my very first live session ;).

October recap

October was going well for me. Did hit some good variance as well as very juicy tables to play on.
Next week I will have my very first live session. Lets see how often I get outplayed because as you can imagine, I am probably just a big tellbox that cant hide his body language/facial expressions xD.

7,25bb/100hands - 513$ profit after rakeback

I found a lot of "easy to correct mistakes" which cost me over 200$ this month. So its good to see that there are a lot of simple adjustments I can apply on my game to improve my winrate.

I hope that I will play better in November and move up to 50nl in the process. I dont mind if variance would stay this way ;)