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Play your A game every day at every stake you play in.
When it's your turn to tilt, take a pass.
When you're not playing your A game, leave.
When the table conditions suck, leave.

Master that and you'll have an edge on the competition up into the middle limits.

I want to run so fast the forest catches fire and i can see my goal ahead of me, just got to finish my degree...it's a big tree right now.

Great post as usual aokrongly

great avatar as usual TM

great comment LeFou.

Great post

Amazingly inspirational post.

Just Amazing.

Thanks Aok

I came across this while looking for something else. I thought it worth a bump.

Quite.

any aokrongly post is worth a bump

There is a lot of good points in this post, but also a few that I believe are incorrect. I added my thoughts.

Originally Posted by aokrongly

How do you like that title?

The beginners circle is such a great forum for quick questions, asking advice, finding out what's what with a hand or situation. But I want to take one post and give some over-riding advice for any who may find it helpful.

(My 10 second bio is years of break even poker leading to a commitment in Dec of 2004 to get a "professional" level game together, followed by intense work in Jan that lead to greater success than I imagined and the ability to quit my job in Feb and complete freedom ever since with income quickly racheting up every month. At this point I'm re-entering the work force for non-monetary reasons. And my success continues to increase beyond my highest expectations last December. To which I have realigned my thinking toward 6 figure poker winnings which I have no doubt in accomplishing. The issue this post attempts to address is how that sort of this is possible and how it occurs.)

First, why do you love poker? Yea, you can make money. But it's when you break the money-thinking barrier that you will be free to pursue your poker to ever stratispheric success. Here's why. Winning money is good. But we all have mental blocks on how much money we can win (or should win). It's true. Sure we Dream of winning $5 mil at the WSOP. But it's a dream, which is different than what we Really think is POSSIBLE. And believe it or not, as you progress in skill, the only limitation you have is what you Truly believe is possible and is deserved by you. So, what happens? Your focus on money regarding poker causes you to literally freak out when dollar amount become larger than your expectations - for either buy-ins or wins. The reason the same people show up at the final table in MTT's online and offline is because others literally get light-headed, overwhelmed and disoriented by the amount of money on the table, the size of the bets and stacks, and the "life changing" effect actually winning can have. It's the arrogant bastards who absolutely know they deserve to win every penny of that #1 finish amount, whether it's $1000 or $3 million, who win it.

To get beyond this limitation as your game improves then you need to be able to see beyond the money and know why you play poker Other than money. This will keep you from letting money limit your game, or from becoming a "one hit wonder" who wins a big payday and then goes on Perma-tilt chasing the next big win without the grounding or mentality needed to achieve repeated large $ wins.

Second, there are no shortcuts. You need to know this and accept it. Everyone is looking for the magic bullet or secret trick to winning. There isn't one. There are alot of techniques that you add to your play, there's experience and there's training that we get through reading, asking questions, etc. That doesn't mean that it necessarily takes years to go from OK to Great poker. You can do it quicker. But if there's a path from point A to Point B in the woods and you can't take a shortcut, then the only way to get to point B faster is to RUN. You can amble along and get there eventually, and some do. You can walk slowly looking at the trees and get sidetracked by a pretty lake and stay there forever, and some do. You can piddle and diddle on the path until you foget where you were going in the first place so you turn around and go home, which is what most do. Or you can RUN. You have no idea what the path will bring and you don't care. It gets dark and you can't see 2 feet in front of you and you don't care. You get scared that maybe the path leads nowhere, and you don't care. You keep running.

So how do you run? First, FTR is a runner's club, not a walker's club. Use it! Use it by asking your questions, posting your hand histories (but please dear God keep em short), bouncing your ideas, and sticking your neck out to help others. Use it post your goals publicly, post your progress publicly, get feedback, find allies!!! Because the 2nd way you run is to surround yourself with a pack of runners. The #1 asset you can have in any endeavor is mentors who will help you run faster. There are people here, and elsewhere, who have run the path before. They've touched the finish line and have the care to come back and help others find their way to the finish too! Find those people and surround yourself with them.

How do you know who they are? First they talk about success, not failure. They talk about good lessons, not bad beats. They're consistently there for you and they want you to succeed. They challenge you and say you're screwing up when appropriate. They communicate in a way you understand. They know HOW they got to the finish line and understand how to help you get there as well. Alot of those people are here. And it's your role to be the same for people farther behind you on the path as well. One reason why my posts are generally long is because I want to help people understand not just "what to do" but "why to do it", etc. FTR isn't the only place, you can find other runners where you live.

Third, you have to really want it and be willing to keep pushing yourself. You hear this with any undertaking, "stick at it". But I'm saying stick at it with a twist. Pure repetition won't improve your game if you're repeating the same mistakes over and over. You have to constantly examine your game and others, watch winning players, read books, discuss, demand more of yourself, explore Yourself and your lost hand. EVERY TIME YOU LOSE A HAND you damn well better know why you lost. Your goal should be to win every hand your involved in. Of coarse you Don't win every hand. But when you lose you need to examine every aspect of the hand and figure out why you lost, how you could have played it differently and either won or known you were hopeless (by hopeless I mean you couldn't win on the value of your cards and you couldn't buy the pot). I'm not exagerating when I say this. If you want to be a runner, then this is how you run. How did I go from break even to thousands of dollars per month in less than 90 days? I made a written record of EVERY hand I played for a month and analyzed it 6 ways to Sunday. Then I took action and changed my game to change the results. Now I don't record every hand, but I can quickly analyze any hand and know what went "wrong", if anything.

While Aok didn't say this himself, I want to make sure some people reading this understand. Making the correctly play doesn't always involve winning the hand. There are plenty of times you will review the hand and conclude that you infact played it correctly. Don't be so concerned with how the hand but understand how well you played it, and how you could have played it better.

You can, and should, have others look at hands if you want. You see alot of that here. But, don't post looking for people to say "You did good". And if they say that, then you need to look at it again and again and make damn sure there's no way to improve. You see alot of "I pushed with QQ from the button in this position and was called by ... blah blah" The responses are often "you did good", "I would have done the same", etc. Now that MIGHT be right and that might be wrong. And I would always read the posts that say how someone thinks you screwed up 10x for every post that says, "whatcha gonna do, you got beat".

Always, Always question why.

I'll give you an example that I'm making up:

"I pushed from the button with QQ and got called by the BB who had TT. Of course he caught his T on the river and I lost. I hate suckouts"

- "Yea, I know what you mean, same thing happened to me with .... But you've gotta push QQ from the button with the blinds what they were.... blah blah"

MAYBE.... MAYBE NOT. Imagine if you had just raised 3x BB and got called. Flop is J4A. He bets 1/3 pot, Hmmm you think I really don't think he has an A and you raise. He calls. The turn is a 7. He checks and you push. What's he going to do? There are 2 over cards and he's surely beat, will he call off the rest of his stack NOW? No way! AI with TT against the button preflop is a fairly easy call. AI with TT against 2 overcards and increasing betting is totally different. Now I'm not saying you should or shouldn't push preflop, or anything else. I'm saying that there are MANY ways to ANY hand in A Thousand situations. Last night I took 5th in a 1000 player MTT. One critical hand before the final table the button raised to 120K from the button. I pushed in for another 350k chips, and he folds. I had 83. It's the only true bluff I made all night. No one would say push in that situation unless they had watched all the action up to that point and had reads, etc.

Another critical hand. On the final table I had Kdx on SB so I raised it up big and the BB calls. Flop is rags with a couple diamonds, I make a big bet and get called. River is another diamond, I check, The BB makes a smallish bet. I call figuring another diamond and I have a K high diamond flush. The diamond hit, I bet, he pushed. I had him covered and called. He had A7 of Diamonds and I went from about a million chips to about 300k. What did I do wrong there? Alot of people would say alot of things. The simple answer is I should have pushed for folded preflop. Either would have saved my stack or taken the BB preflop. After that I made a standard continuation bet - nothing wrong there. I called really weak bet with a strong draw- nothing wrong there. And when he went AI the pots odds were such AND I had him covered so folding would have been insanely poor play with a K high flush. There was only 1 card that could beat me. So there's almost always another way to play a hand, is what I'm saying.

I really don't agree with this. Not really knowing anything more, it is hard to really go into the hand detail. But, I know Aok can't predict hands. The person who develops the skill to always know what everyone has will be the person who destroys poker. The beauty is that unless we are actually shown we can't know exactly what people have. It is easy to come back and say, oh yea if I would have done this, I would have won instead of loss. I'm not saying don't come back to look at the hand, but don't be blinded by the results. Know that there are times that you did make the best plays and lost. I can go back and look through my hand histories and find many hand where I should have called with 72o because I would have flopped a full house, but that doesn't make it the correct decision.

Next, get a philisophical view of YOUR LONG TERM POKER GAME. Poker is a martial art, it's a philosophy, it's a religion. All those "things" have differing "houses" or "clans", different ways of approaching the same thing. Each way has it's strengths and weaknesses, but if you mix them you get a very muddled and disjointed approach. Make sure you develop your philosophy and work everything into a whole. That doesn't mean play tight or play loose or play any particular way. Any "whole" includes different ways to approach situations. But, you have to know your game FIRST before you can execute it, ANALYZE IT and Improve it. Bouncing around will get you nowhere.

FINALLY. Commit to the quest, the long-term. If you intensely focus on something consistently then results will come, new resources and assets will materialize that you never expected. Great things will happen that you never saw coming. You don't have to be able to see the finish line to run toward it. You just have to KNOW it's there somewhere. And "KNOWING" means absolutely believing that you can reach that Zen state of poker that you desire and deserve.

Good luck.

aokrongly,

That is a great post, we may want to copy some or all of it to the html section of the site.

yea i just reread to to make sure i don't want to change anything. it's fine. feel free.