poker discipline, and studying

hello!

so recently ive been trying to focus more of my poker time (~25%) on studying the game, eg, lurking forums, reading articles, watching videos, and occasionally posting hands, but ive been finding that my actual performance when I play is not doing so hot.

this brings me to a few questions for anyone more experienced than I to weigh in on. for starters -

1) when you study poker, how do you let it affect your gameplay? obviously for experienced pros, youre already doing a lot right, but for a kinda fishy amateur reg like myself, how much should i focus on trying new things, for example?

2)how do you deal with tilt? and i dont mean just the 'oh my aa got cracked by kk after preflop shove', but like...continuing along the lines of studying, I find that I start second guessing myself while I play, because im trying to put new concepts to work. as a result, I end up losing both confidence in my actions, and my monies. got tips?

3)how often do you do session reviews, and do you have any sort of systematic way you go about doing them?

4)do you have any tips for improving ones personal discipline? for example, studying more intently, rather than just reading, or realizing when youre playing your B game, and pushing it up to your A game.


and i guess just for fun...

5)anyone want to coach/mentor me despite the fact that im a broke bloke? :d

tilt comes when my w$sd is like 35% and under for any extended duration, i quit playing, usually eat because it's probably been many hours since ive done that, play a video game for an hour or so and then go back to internet poker

Originally Posted by Zorkion

3)how often do you do session reviews, and do you have any sort of systematic way you go about doing them?

Hi Zorkion,

check out this thread:
http://www.flopturnriver.com/pokerfo...ds-186705.html

it's got links a-plenty; there's stuff in there about session reviews

PS - Mods: why isn't rpm's thread a sticky, please

1: I only try to implement new things or concepts one at a time and I don't add anything new to my game until I feel I have a good handle on when and why I should be doing the one thing I'm already working on. This way I feel my game incrementally improves and I'm not just frantically doing things because some book said I should be.

2: Like bikes, I take a break, maybe have something to eat, read a book, take the dogs for a walk or whatever then come back.

3: I review all the big hands of a session pretty much straight after the session. I do HH reviews every few thousand hands.

4: Can't help you here. Discipline is a big part of my life away from poker yet funnily enough I still find myself having problems bringing it to the poker table. It's something I'm getting better at though and really only comes with practice.

When it comes to study of poker though, like with pretty much anything in life, there is the theory and there is the practice. All the theory is great to have but you will still lose money at poker until you figure how to apply that theory. That figuring out can only really come from practice time at the table.

ETA: I would also advise reducing the number of tables you play at once if you haven't already. I was playing 4, which really isn't many and I thought I could do easily and yet my win rate over 15k hands was only 2bb/100 hands. I reduced my tables to 2 and over the next 10k hands I have brought my win rate for the whole 25k hands up to 6.8bb/100 hands simply because I have been able to really concentrate on the players rather than focusing too much on the cards.

I think that the best thing to do is not find how to deal w/tilt but to find how to avoid tilt .

I bought 2 books about the mental side of poker :

The Poker Mindset

The Mental Game of Poker

I find this books very helpful .

Good Luck

2) Become TILT

My session reviews always consist of reviewing hands that I have marked during my session because I was unsure. Then I would run them through stoxEV and post some on irc or the forum. If someone is giving me trouble I might look into adjusting against a specific villain - looking up the hands I have with him, see what he has shown down, construct a range, etc. All that might not be necessary. If you have tilt issues then you need to get those sorted out asap. The most important skill to learn to combat tilt is quitting. Since when you tilt you are at your weakest and when you're at your weakest, it's harder to quit, you can practice quitting by quitting when it's easy. Set an alarm - I prefer a stopwatch cos it's less invasive and just quit at a set time.
I never really had a problem with quitting. I had a problem with starting. So I practiced starting sessions. I might only play a couple of orbits, quit and start again a little later. This migh sound strange but it worked for me.

The biggest thing I'm working on right now is willpower. This relates to poker as well as anything else. I'm huge on procrastinating, but jumping into big projects right away won't work, so I'm focusing on the little things.
Not having any dirty dishes in the sink when I leave the house is one of the focal points.
This might not sound very poker related, but it is.