Welcome to my blog

Hey there, I am 20 years old and I currently play the micro limits on Pokerstars.
I give myself the chance on becoming a professional pokerplayer until September 2013 and will put most of my time into studying and playing the game to achieve this goal.
I am going to update this blog regulary to keep track of my progress and write about concepts I found important for my development as a player and as a person.

Follow me on my pursuit to become independent as a Poker Pro!

12/11/2012

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 :)

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