Variance and results oriented thinking

Variance is huge. Especially in small sample sizes. Even my mother could play poker and would have no clue whether a flush is better then two pair and still win for 30bb/100hands over 300 or even 1000 hands. Not too likely but defenetly possible.
Realising that you cant determine your exact winrate until you have a lot of hands is a major part in the evolution as a pokerplayer. I can remember when I was playing 2nl and one day I was making like 11$ in 10 minutes. And the day after was about the same. I was thinking that I could easily make 20$/hour and then calculated my winnings if I would play 5nl or even 10nl based on that.

My confidence would be skyrocketing and then drop inevitable once variance catched up on me. These big confidence swings do hurt your decisionmaking process, the accuracy you can determine your true winrate and are also projected into your reallife.
The latter is especially key to overcome in my opinion. A couple months ago, I would be extremly moody once I was on a downswing and very confident and happy when I was up a vew buy-ins at that day. The way I talked to people and approached my other areas in life were vastly different depending on my winnings at the tables.
Today, my feelings are no longer dependent on my results at the tables which is a big accomplishment in my opinion.

It is impossible to control the outcome of shortterm results in poker. We are just able to shift it a little bit in our favour.
Focussing merely on something that you cant control doesnt make too much sense. I am rather moody when I play bad now. ;)

I am very unhappy about this session as I was loosing about 50$ on very unnecessary mistakes.

Whenever someone is calling a draw against me without him having the odds, I am now always happy that I made the right play. If he now hits his draw, and let it be a two outer, I remind myself:
Fish only play against me because of variance. If there were no variance and the outcome would be exlusively determined by my skill, he wouldnt play against me. 
Or would you play chess against Garry Kasparov for 10k$? Not very likely. But if there is a 10% chance to win 10k$ against someone else, people get attracted no matter how bad the odds are. Otherwise casinos would go broke if all people would only play if the odds are in their favour.

In that sense: You are the casino, offering gamblers to try their luck in a game they cant win over the long run.

Try to find out what illusions you have in your mindset currently and fight them with logic.

Sessionreview to find leaks

I was spewing money left and right, calling hopeless turnbets where people mostly had valuehands, tried to raise one or two times in the wrong spots where I had 20% fold equity at best and so on. After my mate and I went over my last session (the last 650 hands in this graph) I calculated my losses from the most obvious mistakes I shouldnt be making and was wasting about 80bb's (20$).

good variance kept me up

Good news: There is an imense room to improve :)

Tomorrow I will try to play my best game for three to four hours and then review all of the big pots to see where I missed thin value or spewed away chips. This is mostly to motivate myself by realising how big of an impact really simple mistakes have on your winrate. Also I need to figure out, why the ranges I give certain villains are so off ingame from the range I give villains while reviewing the hand. Taking more time on each decision should defenetly be a big part of it.

Microlimits: 25nl so far

The playerpool on 25nl seems very easy to beat so far. Havent had any huge problems with regulars yet. For the most part, they are not adjusting nor do they fight back if i exploit them. Its good to see that there are still tons of fish (atleast one player per table with a VPIP:>40 / PFR:0 ).

These are my current stats for this month on 25nl. The results are obviously not accurate since it is only a very small sample. Yet it is hard to put in a lot of hands while 2-4 tabling (which i do since 2 weeks). At best i can get 400 hands/hour which is really low compared to my previous 1200 hands/hour.

I am playing loose aggressive ( LAG ) for two weeks now and am pretty happy with it. For the next week, i will keep on playing 4 tables and establish my current knowledge. After that i will focus on adding tables so that I can put in some volume again.

Introduction: From nerd to grinder

I started playing videogames when I was about 8 years old.
It all started once I was visiting a friend who had the NES in his room.
We were mostly playing outside like all other kids but about once a week, his parents allowed us to play for some time. Mario Bros was our main game and the player versus player part hooked me right away.
From then on, my parents decided to buy a console for me too. I was always looking for player versus player games since the singleplayer games werent interesting enough  to me. At the age of 12, I was playing Warcraft 3. After playing the game for half a year, I was joining a Clan and played on many tournaments: It wasnt officially allowed for me because of my age and the prices but I wasnt able to get into the price money of those tournaments anyway ;) .
This was the first game where I really got into competitive gaming. Then I played various games in between and finally Starcraft 2. I was trying to improve as fast as possible and was joining a lot of teams to increase my learning curve and play tournaments. So I was pretty much your average nerd ;)


The first time I heard of professional poker was in my Starcraft 2 study group. Two members of the group were playing poker for a living for almost 3 years. The concept of beeing your own boss and earning money by playing a competitive game sounded just perfect.
My whole focus transitioned from Starcraft 2 over to Poker.
I started playing poker and lost my first deposit after like two weeks. After my second deposit I employed strict bankroll management and started to really study the game.


Now, 11 months later I am at 25nl and am soon taking shots at 50nl 6max.