Operation: Learning to Think - Eliminate The TAG-FISH in Me

*Last edited by Micro2Macro on Sat, 31 Oct 2009, 3:30pm; edited 1 time in total*

Had a brutal final session to end the month the other day which was half running bad and half spew. Just got back from Toronto now and won't be playing anything but the freeroll as far as poker goes because I'm too tired/hungover/tilted etc so I'll save it for Sunday.

Alright here's the monthly: (72% of the hands are 50nl, the rest 100nl and a few from when I took a shot at 200nl)

cash game $: 3,738.21
Rake Back $: 680.60
month closes @ + $4,418.81

Goals for November:
[ ] >100k hands
[ ] spew less/quit those sessions where I'm not feeling it
[ ] play more when I am feeling it
[ ] try getting some sort of study done..going to be difficult when going for nova at this pace though, fml
[ ] ...?

Yeah you are correct, I was at 2nl earlier this year.

Okay I'm in serious need of VPPs or else I screw myself out of getting Supernova for next year. I also want to have time to spend with family around Christmas without having to grind so much over the holidays, and I also would like to take this girl out for dinner - in other words I need to find a way to get these VPPs faster so I can have a life!

I will attempt to play 100,000 hands over the next 20 days.

*50,343 VPPs till Supernova*

edit: as of disclosing this I'm at 8,062 hands already, so this should be easy.

Yea that's not really difficult, so you'll be just fine imo. Rather than saying gl I'll say "Canada suxorz!"

Thats a pretty badass month man! Looks like the questions about pro status are starting to get answered Smile

bleh..been swongy, im 4ptbb over my first 13k but have spewed about 4 stacks :/

I need to follow this new rule: When a session isn't going that great, DO NOT stick it out for more than 2 hours - they always end in disaster this way.

I find it okay to grind longer than 2 hours if I'm in the right mindset/zone or whatever you want to call it, but if I'm a bit edgy from the way I've been running/playing/feeling etc, I need to learn to keep it short.

Hopefully the 3 buyins I lit on fire this session will be enough to force me to focus on getting this right for once.

Nice new sig Smile

New sig is courtesy of spoonitnow Very Happy

In the first 3 days of the month I've played 16k hands. Been Absolute hell. Running way below EV, spewed off like 4 buyins on top of that, which has created some epic swongs.

Let's hope I can get my head on straight and start focusing!

*Last edited by daven on Wed, 04 Nov 2009, 6:34pm; edited 1 time in total*

Thanks daven. I plan on altering sessions today from 6-8 tables to 10-12. Hopefully this alternating method will provide more balance between thoroughly thinking and auto-piloting to to get veeps, and in turn increase focus and minimize spew Very Happy

congrats on the month, i thought you were a really low stakes grinder haha. well done

Wow cant believe he CR river and did not lead. I had a hard time putting him on a range.

I don't understand why but I keep making too many bad bluffs and to top it off I'm running bad. Run bad + play bad = loss of money.

Perhaps you've always been making them and they aren't actually all that bad, but the running shit = constantly running into the top of people's ranges etc. Why not post a few and have 'em looked over.

If a downswing is startingn to affect your game and cause extra spew, this prolly goes without saying, but consciously try to take the lower variacne option if there's aclose spot. i.e elcting to not bluff if you think it's really close to being neutral EV. Might help to straighten your head out and avoid uneccessary extra spewage.

GL man.

Thanks man. Yeah, I'm going to perhaps avoid these really thin 'long ball spots' until I start showing signs of profit. Especially since spots like this end up being very costly if played incorrectly (i.e. 3 barreling etc)

I think I just fixed a ton of leaks that sort of creeped into my game over the past week. I'm now much more aware of alot of things I'm doing incorrectly and am taking action to eliminate these mistakes.

B/E for 40k+ hands

[x] not anticipating further action like I used to
[x] in the process of fixing this
[x] recently cashed out money
[x] ppl irl stress me out

oh it's okay, I'm raping people again at the tables Very Happy

sweet I just c/f'd in a 3bet pot..looks like a new beginning for me.

I one tabled 10nl earlier lol. +1 BI in 97 hands. EZ game. I got stacked within 3 hands of starting cuz I was all antsy, came back and didnt flop any big hands and still raped. One tabling is so eyeopening. Im def going to do some sessions of it in the future. Its awesome to just sit there and call out super narrow hand ranges and have their hand pegged 9 times out of 10. Now if only I can do that while 6-8 tabling. Wink

I find I can't play less than 6 tables without going on mega spew tilt.

Yea agree, I was running 27/21/4.5 which isnt insane I guess, but its probably a lot more laggy than I would be running normally lol. I found that I was able to exploit the retards so much more. It was pretty much awesome lolz.

Its good to see you're working on getting back on the right track. Smile

There will come a time where you will be down so many buyins you will feel as if it is impossible to grind it back. My advice to you:

Do not check your results while playing.
Be active in the forums/post some hands.
Keep thinking and putting people on ranges, eventually you'll grind it out and in the end, you'll become a stronger player after learning from your mistakes.

Amen brother. I've gotten really results oriented over the last couple of weeks, due to that prop bet I had going. If you just focus on playing well and making the right calls/folds/raises and don't worry about your results or BR, you're going to be so much better off. I've lost sight of that a bit and its good to see you hammering it home here. I'm going to go look up some articles in the BC Digest on tilt and not worrying about results. I need to get back on my game ASAP.

hows the 100k hands going bro?

Yea same dude. I was trying make lolbank this month (you know why obv) and like you said, its just the totally wrong approach to take. Just need to focus on the right plays and not worry about the money. I seem to recall "running like god" when I finally learned this before boot camp, and I certainly could have been on a heater, although I also feel that I was playing REALLY well, and my winrate/BR showed it. I need to get back to that ASAP!

asdfghjklasdfghjkl

Another 7k hand day.

Be nice if I could do like 8-10k tomorrow..

Holy shit M2M, 4.4k month? Grats man, your operation is just crazy impressive and inspiring.

Thanks man.

So today I'm going to shoot for 8k+ hands.

Kaboom!

8000 hands today, BOOM Ship it!

I decided to come up with a color scheme for my notes on Stars. What do you guys think? Would love some feedback+suggestions for improvement.

Yellow: Uknown/default
Green: Fish/donk (25-30+ vpip)
Light Blue: Soft reg (too wide of a gap from vpip/pfr, doesn't 3bet enough, passive postflop etc)
Medium Blue: TAGs I own in wars
Dark Blue: TAGs that own me in wars (or just ran hot Rolling Eyes

)
Purple: Standard TAGs without history (10%+ pfr, 12-17% vpip)
Red: Aggro/SLAG/LAGG/TAG who plays aggro postflop/3bets alot
Orange: Mass tabling nit (vpip below 11, pfr below 9)

Can't see how this Your can be anything but +EV. Your colour scheme is all messe up to me since I take green to be nit and orange to be SLAG, but do what works for you, the categories seem good.

Had just woke up lol, I wont edit it since the incoherence makes me lolz.

If that color scheme helps you, I say go for it. I do mine a little more straight forward. For any player I want to sit down with whether they are a fish, calling station, maniac, or whatever, I mark them as green because green means "go". If a player is a nit, tight regular, aggressive shark, or whatever and I would rather play against easier opponents, I mark them with red because red means "stop". Lastly, for true shortstacks who typically play push/fold pre-flop and/or leave tables when the double up, I mark them as "pink" because it's girly and feminine. Smile

I don't use the other colors. I just want a snapshot of whether or not I'd like to play @ that table.

Yeah, my color scheme is a bit detailed and may be a bit too much for most of you guys that are putting in lower volume. For example Jason, your setup is great because its really simple and easy to follow without having to remember 8 catergories lol. I think my set up is ideal for high volume players - I put in a lot of volume so it's pretty customized to what I will be dealing with. Like I have many players in my database with 5000+ hands on them and extensive history so I can get a bit deeper into labeling my opponents. Whereas having say 500 hands max on any regular won't be much to figure out their true style, so a more general approach to categorizing villains is preferred.

I don't play tables that aren't 50bb min so I don't have to deal with short stackers, so this scheme is ideal for someone who is also playing these tables as I don't have a color code for them.

When it came to deciding the colors, I used green for fish because money is green (well in the USA it is lol) and I'd be happy to sit with them. I used red for someone who position rapes others because it will remind me not to sit to their right. I don't avoid these guys though, they're great to have position on because you can tilt the f--- out of them if you do all the things they do to people. Bullies don't like to be bullied. If I see a few red tagged players at a table, I'm not passing if I get a good seat.

As for dark blue, I like to pretend no one ever owns me, so I'm going to change it to 'Tricky TAG'. This would be defined as someone who's raising lots of flops light, is capable of making big bluffs on later streets, flats premiums preflop, all that kind of stuff. This is also someone I'd probably prefer position on and then just mess with them and put them in all the tough spots that they like to put others in.

As for nits being orange, I look at orange as sort of saying 'caution', like a constrcution sign haha. These guys are just so tight that I'd love to have them on my left, however if they end up putting money in the pot well we need to proceed with caution and slow down/re-eval a bit. If I see a table full of orange I'm joining because running 24/20 at full ring is fun.

In general though there's just passive players and aggressive players. Passive players are always bad, and aggressive players can be good or bad. So perhpaps the ideal color scheme would be green for pasive, red for good aggressive, and blue for bad aggressive.

You should hit up Muzzard, hes knows how to make the whole circle around the person's avatar the color of the tag you have on him, instead of just that gay lil notes box.

yeah I go way into detail over everything lol

and this is why you've actually succeeded where most ppl puss out and give up after half assing it for 5 or 6 weeks.

Thanks man.

So the doctor at the gym took me through some workouts/evaluated me and came to the conlclusion I'm lacking core strength, my lower back is weak, and my legs are garbage. My foundation can't support my upper body apparently (I started going to the gym a couple months ago and my upper body got ripped but my lower body trailed behind). This is pretty much all my fault from 1) half assing my core routine 2) ignoring dead lifts 3) being a pussy when doing squats/leg press.

So he tried to sell me a private trainer, which is like $55 an hour...yeah right like I'm dumping that kind of money for someone to babysit me when I workout. I'm lucky I have my brother who is going to be there to keep me motivated and get me doing the right exercises, otherwise I may have been forced to go with a trainer. I know what I need to do to start seeing gains again, I need to focus my routine around my weaknesses while just doing enough to maintain my strengths. The process is pretty simliar to learning poker, and I think I can figure it out without dumping more money into the gym services.

As for poker I took a cruise through my database yesterday and realized that one of my weaknesses is paying off bad players on the river by calling their river raises too often. Perhaps a good aggressive regular will bluff raise or make a thinner value bet, but against really passive bad players, you often just need to bet/fold.

Your operation is motivating me in my operation ^-^

I just started grinding 25 NL yesterday and I won 5 buy ins right away then lost 7 buy ins.

Usually, this would be the end of my operation but I am maybe finally passing the point where I am able to acknowledge if I make a mistake instead of blaming all on variance....

Looking at your graph and ur positive attitude has convinced me to keep grinding and working on how i play! woot!

Glad to see my operation helps as sort of a blueprint or inspiration or whatever you see it as haha.

you don't wanna see this months graph though Sad

but 1 month is meaningless, the long run isn't for well..a long time!

Don't sweat losing a few buyins, just do your best to get better and make more good decisions. Money will flow in later, gl man, and keep up the grind.

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Operation: Learning to Think - Eliminate The TAG-FISH in Me

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Operation: Learning to Think - Eliminate The TAG-FISH in Me