|
The main advice I give to myself though these days, which could be helpful to other people is this.
'TRUST YOURSELF'
I spent so much of the last couple of years trying to figure out the perfect way to play in a bunch of situations using math & filters, but the reality of it is they can't make a bot that can beat NL playing this way yet, so what hope do I have.
I was always trying to figure out what I was doing technically different when I was winning alot. It was so annoying, how could I forget what I was doing right! But I think it's something like this, when you start winning you start feeling confident (trusting yourself) in this state you just flow better and make better decisions. Then you hit a bad run, either variance/tilt/a couple of poor decisions/forcing the action to try and maintain your momentum, whatever it is, that creates that down-swing, but now you're less confident, you start to doubt yourself and you start being a loser...
Before you know it you're looking at your last 50k hands and wondering how did I become this loser? You decide you should go back to basics, you do some filters and see you should be CB more, not getting involved in big pots with marginal hands/OOP so often/etc./etc...
It all looks good in theory, yeah I was making a ton of basic mistakes, yeah that was the problem. Fast Forward another 50k hands & surprise, surprise - I'm a *ucking robot! 'I must CB this low PP OOP, I can't call another bet with second pair etc.' But at least you're not bleeding money you're somewhere around a marginal winner at a level below where you used to play. Whoopee!
Ironically it's only playing SS recently (where mistakes have less of an impact on your overall win-rate ergo I'm less afraid to make them.) that I realised this.
Before if I made a few big, slightly non-standard 100bb stack plays and got them wrong I would berate myself. - Idiot! you would have had a winning session if you just stuck to the basics! This cycle of getting angry at myself either made me freeze up (make 0 moves) or worse tilt and be even more likely to just stick to the (robotic) basics the next time.
So don't over anal-yze the filters too much and don't start being a break-even/marginal winning robot. I mean you've been playing poker for a couple of years, thinking about it everyday, reading the forums, watching the videos, analysing your game, at some point you have to say - I know most of this and I trust myself to make good, intelligent, creative decsions at the poker table.
Confidence is key in poker, it's why you seem to get momentum when you start winning even though it doesn't make mathematical sense & why your green line can look like someone climbing mount everest one month and someone jumping off it the next. So when you're trolling through stats trying to find what made you, the same person, with less knowledge, a winner a year ago but a loser today, & it's almost impossible to find the answer, it was probably just confidence, bought on by some positive variance.
So be confident, trust yourself and your ability, esp. in a downswing.
(Kind of rah rah lame, esp. from a SS, was meant to be one paragraph but whatever.)
|