Life and Poker

Hey

Big dissappointment to find myself hardly making a dime in the month of february. It started so well with a few good tourney wins, but it was tilted away while i wasn't in the mood to be playing or playing limits just too high for my roll. Trying to get £50000 for the year now looks like it won't happen at this rate and the main cause for this is that tournaments tilt me. If i grind tournaments for a living i will be a losing player because the swings get to me and affect my skill towards them. How i am going to solve this is by only playing a maximum of three a night, if that, of the tournies i feel i have an edge over and of good enough relevance for me to want to play properly in them. I will trial this for the next two weeks but this too has a glaring problem.

I could spend 9 hours in total playing cash and make a profit of say £120 for the day which is good, and then in the 3 tournaments i am looking to play nightly, im digging into 3/4 of those profits towards a high risk investment. On the back of say 5 days of no tourney results my bankroll might be stationary and further frustrate me. But i am going to trial this to see what happens, maybe the combination will help settle me and i will play a better cash game as a result and increase profitablility like never before.

I was on for £1K a week just grinding 12 tables of the 0.5/1$ limits and its the tourney virus that has prevented me from sticking to that lovely track, as without tournies i feel lost and in comparison, cash can seem so generic. So the combination of the two artforms will hopefully come with great success.

Also another important thing to add is that over the past two weeks i haven't lived much of a life. I have gone out at least 3 nights a week which sounds about normal but it just seems all i do is stay in my room and play poker. Im 19 and life could pass by without me knowing it so i will be taking strides towards getting some sort of balance. It sounds like i am depressed but believe me i'm not i am worried im too relaxed in the environment i have set for myself.

Exercise is so desperately needed as well as i have maintained a comfortable state of chubbiness for quite some while now and see myself ordering a lot of takeawys and annoyingly find that i am ordering more each time which can't be good lol. Exercise will also get the endorphines (your body's natural happiness drug) running around the body and that will settle me in times of bad beats so that i can brush them off and play as if i was a robot.

Speaking of robots, I was thinking earlier i had picked up the best description in the world on the game and that is that being human in pro poker is a liability apart from one's natural intuition (or gut feeling) aside from that a freakishly robotic approach helps one succeed, away from emotions that can only tarnish your game. Even happiness, as this only heightens the sense of misery when you experience a bad beat, as you knew what is was like to be joyful and in contrast it feels much worse to be sad/angry. It's 5.40am and i haven't slept yet so apologies for the philosophy i feel i can all of a sudden embark on you, i hope it doesn't leave too much of a lasting impression and hope i can still garner respect as a player lol.

Back to the reformation anyway. Discipline is now my number one priority. I am going to set a loose daily plan each morning for how many hours i want to play in that day and how many tables i will play and i need to stick to it. Need to treat poker as if it really is a job that i can't afford to fuck up. Possibly act as if i have starving children to feed, struggling for money to pay the bills which will in turn get my killer instinct going and stop me from wandering away from playing properly, because you know what, there are no excuses. There is variance but this is so blatantly made worse by our reactions to it and a lot of people don't seem to notice it. Get get a bad beat and it can take a certain amount of hours/days to get back to playing a profitable game, as you were still mentally reeling over the bad beats, and chasing wins, when really you should have patience to let it come to you.

I seem to know all the ins and outs of what is going wrong with my game but seem to just carry on in my ways regardless. Not anymore. As of today i have to change. I am going to play poker responsibly with a level head, with no drink or any mental instability and i am going to make sure i give out as much pain to the losing player as possible. Sadism in this sense is a good thing, and in being a rampant sadist i may well have some fun in milking a clueless flush draw chaser, or value bet bluffing a tight grinder on the river who thinks I must have made my draw because I'm betting so little.

I am looking forward to changing everything, from the amount of exercise i get, to how much of a social life i have to how many hours i put in and so on. With this transformation should come results. If the wonga in my account is always rising then i don't give a shit how it got in there i just need to continue doing the do. Tournaments will try to fuck me over but i feel if i keep them on a tight leash i can use them to my advantage and couple them nicely with a solid cash game.

Big question is then, is it onwards and upwards from here? Or is it a rapid descent into having to get a real job for minimum wage? I guess you can place your bets in the comment section.

peace.