Floppy Nuts

A couple of days late, but here are my results for February, not including bonuses.

I started out the month trying to do a bit too much. I was 16-tabling 5NL and 10NL, which mostly turned out to be 5NL since it was nearly impossible to table select and avoid shortstacks at 10NL.

I played about 30,000 hands of 5NL with a horrible win rate. At least it was a win rate though, and not a loss rate. When I moved myself back to 10 tables and stuck to 10NL, as I mentioned in an earlier post, my win rate was better.  I ended up playing about 16,000 hands of 10NL during the month. Towards the end of the month I started making my moves towards 25NL and played about 7000 hands there, with a fair win rate over the small sample.  All in all, across the 3 levels, I played 53,562 hands of poker in February.

I’m still struggling a bit with 25NL. I think I’m improving though. I seem to find myself getting a little more bored though because there seem to be a lot more regs and tables seem to get ultra-tight or just break up very quickly. I find I’m rarely at any table more than 50 hands before I have to replace it with a new one. I guess I have to either get used to it, or learn how to abuse some of the regs.

Anyway, here’s the graph for February, not spectacular, but still going up, and not bad for a short month I suppose.

May the fish be with you…

So far this month has gone pretty well. II´m still winning at a good rate, and decided to try to maximize my earnings.

I started February playing 16 tables of 10NL as much as I could. After a few days I decided I had to mix mostly 10NL tables with some 5NL because it was just too difficult to keep 16 tables going at the $10 dollar tables without them either becoming too tight to be profitable, or filling with short stacks after a few minutes. I can play 16 tables fine as long as I can keep them open and play, but having to constantly jump from one table to another on top of it was really getting on my nerves.

So after a few days of that, I decided it would be easier overall, and most likely more profitable, if I cut my tables down to 10 and played all 10NL and just concentrated more on the game. After playing 16 tables for a couple weeks and then dropping back to 10, I was amazed at how slow and easy everything felt. Although I get a litle  bored sometimes with just the 10 games going, I feel like I have forever to think about what I´m doing and I really get a lot more reads on the people I´m playing against. Not to mention, I take a lot more notes, which eventually helps even more later. I was right…my win rate improved a bit from what I was maintaining with 16 tables.  Less hands over time, but higher win rate for hands played, so everything evens out.

I´ll wait for the end of the month to get into any profit numbers, since I´m trying very hard to look at monthly income, and not daily, in order to keep myself in the right state of mind to play well. However, with the ¨Stellar Rewards¨ that Poker Stars is issuing now, plus the bonus they offered for their ¨F40¨ promo (I wasn´t lucky enough to hit any milestone hands.), plus normal bonus money from my FPP´s, I´ll end up making something like $120 in just bonuses this month.

With the extra from those bonuses I find myself rolled for 25NL. I started taking shots at the twenty-fives yesterday. First I mixed a few $25 tables into my normal session of $10´s. That lasted about an hour. I got lucky fairly quickly and stacked someone in my first 500 or so hands of 25NL. That pretty much squashed all my doubts and nervousness. When I saw that $25 jump forward, I instantly wanted more. I wasn´t going to settle for $10 at a time now. So I started closing all the $10 tables and replacing them with 25NL until I had all 10 running at the new level.

I played about 1000 hands of 25NL in that first session and shut down for the night with a respectable win rate of about 3.5 BB/100. I played another 2100 hands today and came out ahead again. My win rate was not quite as high today, but I know exactly why. I made 1 terrible mistake that I realized as soon as I hit the call button, and that cost me 1 buy-in. Then I had 2 all-in hands where I had the nuts and it turned out that my opponent had the same hand, so two split pots instead of 1 or 2 buy-ins ahead. If I´d have realized I was making a mistake 1 second sooner, and 1 of those  split pots went my way I would have finished 2 1/2 buy-ins up instead of the half buy-in that I actually ended up with.

I´m feeling 10 times more confident than I did on my previous attempt several months ago with 25NL. So hopefully the graph for the end of this month will be a happy one. I´m actually kind of anxious to get back into it tomorrow and see if I can keep it up.  I´m already thinking about 50NL. I suppose that´s good…I´m thinking that I can´t wait to get there, not thinking it´s at all scary. I´m amazed with how my outlook has changed over the last few months.

I should be back in a few days with a (hopefully) positive graph for February.

May the fish be with you…

Poker is a strange game. Every part of the game is filled with deception and misdirection. It’s not just the players trying to mess with your mind though. The game itself can get you lost behind smoke and mirrors if you don’t stop and try to see through the illusions.

Poker is not a card game, and one does not win at poker by playing the best sets of cards. Poker is a game of mental challenges and strategies that just happens to use cards as the vehicle for setting up the situations that a player must navigate. We do not play poker against the cards, we play against the other players. We do not always win when we have the best hand, and we do not always lose when we have the worst hand. A good player must learn both how the cards work, and how his opponents work.  Someone who only understands one or the other is severely handicapped when playing against someone who understands both.

“Winning” at the game of poker is not about having the best hand when all the cards are on the table. Someone can win several hands of poker by showing down the best cards in a short period of time, but still be an overall loser because they continue to lose money over longer periods of play.

Making money in poker is not necessarily based on winning hands.  I, for example, average a fairly good win rate in terms of money made for hands played, but when I examine my stats I see that I normally only win in about 5% to 6% of the hands that are dealt to me.  I “lose” roughly 95% of the time that I play, but I make money.

A poker player does not earn money by winning large amounts when he wins.  Everyone at the table is going to get the same number of top hands eventually if they play long enough.  Everyone eventually will win a big all-in hand and maybe even get stacks from 2 or 3 players all at once. The difference between making money and losing money though, is that a losing player will continue to play and eventually lose it all back to another player or players. A winning player, while still losing plenty of hands, will lose less money as he continues to play, then when he wins again he will show a net profit after his series of losses.  A good player does not make money by winning more, he makes money by losing less.

These are just some of the things that go through my mind as I sit with my fist under my chin, humming along to songs I’ve heard 1000 times, waiting for the next 2 cards to fly across my screen and add a few more cents to my bankroll.

May the fish be with you…

As usual, it´s been too long since I wrote any kind of update here. Over the last month I´ve told myself I was going to write up an entry at least 4 or 5 times, but I never got to it. I didn´t get to it because I was playing a lot of poker, so I guess that´s a good enough excuse.

My last entry was at the end of November, and as I´m sure anyone could tell from that post, I wasn´t exactly super excited or super confident about playing too much. During December I played a fair amount, but nothing on any type of schedule. I was trying more to get some enjoyment out of the game rather than trying to push things and go crazy again. It was some quiet time with myself to try to relax, not try to become a poker champion.

I discovered something pretty enlightening during my off and on play throughout December. I discovered that when I didn´t care so much, and when I stopped trying so hard, I actually played some pretty good poker. As soon as I decided that I just wanted to have some fun, and let all the chatter from the ¨pros¨ at twoplustwo slip out of my head, my win rate began to rise. It is absolutely amazing what can happen when you just sit back and relax a little.  I don´t mean to imply that there is anything wrong with the twoplustwo forums…but there is certainly a very wrong way to go about using all the information you find there. When you get advice from someone else, you need to look at things very carefully, and then be even more careful when you try to use it in a real money game. It´s VERY easy to think you totally understand, when, in fact, you´ve completely missed the point.

Towards the end of December my win rate started to hit levels I had never achieved before. I was quite happy to say the least. But, more importantly, I had finally figured out why I was winning, and what allowed me to play a winning game. I didn´t learn any new tricks, or solve any crazy math. All I did was finally sit back, relax, and listen to myself. That was it. The hardest part of the game was simply following my own advice time after time. The ¨time after time¨is the key part of that sentence. I realized that every time I ended a session 1 or 2 buy-ins down, I could remember losing 1 or 2 all-in hands where I went against my own judgement and made a call I knew I should not have made. I didn´t bleed off blinds or big bets in slow trickling leaks, I lopped off big portions of my bank roll all at one time with the speed and precision of an axe murderer. I realized I was allowing myself to tilt, and if I could just stop doing that 1 or 2 times during a session, I´d have a lot more sessions that were 1 buy-in winners instead of 2 buy-in losers. Simple enough, right? It´s harder to do than it sounds.

Proving my point above, about understanding advice, I finally understood a concept that I thought I had understood all along. Tommy Angelo speaks of ¨tiltlessness¨ in his book Elements Of Poker. We try to tilt less in an effort to become tiltless. I don´t know exactly how I got myself to this point, but I am here, and it feels very good. I don´t think I´ve achieved full tiltlessness, but I am certain I tilt less, and I´m probably somewhere around 90-95% tiltless overall. Thank you again Tommy!

So anyway, I decided to get back into things full swing with my new attitude for the new year. I started playing a bit more on a schedule with daily goals, and tracking my play in January. I did just slightly less than double my bank roll on Poker Stars during the month.

Here is my PokerTracker graph for the month. I think I´m going to try to post one every month to help motivate myself. Click it for full size.

I started the month playing 6 tables of 5nl and finished the month playing 14 tables of 5nl and 10nl mixed. I´d say I switched up to 10 tables around the middle of the month and played the last 4 or 5 days at 14 tables. Time varied from about 2 or 3 hours in the beginning of the month, to a more solid 4 hours every day towards the end. I played just about every day. I don´t think I could have missed more than 1 or 2 days.

I´m hoping that by playing 14 tables from the beginning of February, and moving to all 10nl tables, I´ll be able to bump that income up to somewhere around $500 for February. We´ll see how that goes.

May the fish be with you…

There is something to be said for setting goals for yourself. There is also something to be said for accepting a failure to reach those goals.

It’s been quite a while since I wrote anything here. I have thought a lot about giving up poker. I also thought about just letting this blog become one of the thousands of poker blogs out there that suddenly stop short one day when the author apparently  gave up, walked away, and vanished into cyberspace.

I decided I don’t want to be one of those guys that starts off all excited, writes about all the good things, leaves out all the bad things, and then just disappears one day when the unmentioned bad things get too bad. I started this thing with the intention to tell a story, a whole story. I would have liked for it to be a glorious story of triumph, happiness and riches…but it hasn’t worked out that way.

Somewhere along the way I broke myself. What had once been a clear plan and a disciplined style of play, learning and review became a convoluted stream of mistakes, confusion and disappointment. I lost my ability to focus, my trust in my own judgement, and my faith in my strategies. I was convinced that I was smarter than everyone I played against, and that I deserved to win, no matter how many bad moves I made or how many stacks I handed over to my opponents.

Shortly after my last post regarding Full Tilt, things went bad in a very straight down to hell sort of way. I was able to clear a lot of bonus money on Full Tilt and rack up Iron Man Points like a madman. Unfortunately, all that happened was that I ended up giving my bonuses away to other players. I was able to keep myself pretty much even, but I didn’t make a dime. If I take out the bonuses I was awarded, I lost a ton of money. I started changing everything I was doing, every time I sat down for another session. I tried regular tables, deepstack tables, loose strategies, tight strategies, shortstack strategies, and maybe even an Indian rain dance mixed with some Voodoo ritual.

To make a long story short, I crashed and I crashed hard. Shortly after that last post I gave up on Full Tilt, and shortly after that I pretty much gave up on poker alltogether. I spent several weeks basicly scared to play any poker at all, because I just couldn’t control my state of mind anymore, and I was afraid of losing everything I was able to make so far. For several months after that I would only allow myself to play occasionally for a few hours on weekend evenings. They were usually very short sessions, leaving when I hit either my first big win or big loss for the session.

I decided recently that I don’t want to give up. I realize I still have a lot of work to do, and that my goals from the beginning were probably a little bit unrealistic. Perhaps the goals weren’t unrealistic as much as the time frame in which I tried to achieve them. I still have the same dreams, even if maybe a little less drive.

I need to find the fun in everything again. That’s true for much of my life at this point, not just the poker part. I haven’t read any blogs or participated on any forums for at least 6 months.

I’m planning to try to get myself back into twoplustwo and hopefully play a bit more on a regular schedule, something like 1-3 hours a day, 3 or 4 days a week and see how that goes. I’ll be sticking to Pokerstars since I’ve always been most comfortable with their software, and in my absence they seem to have kept on growing. There are always a ton of players on and plenty of good tables running.

Luckily, even through all the trouble, I still haven’t had to redeposit. My current bankroll on Pokerstars leaves me a bit over-rolled for the $10 tables, so that’s where I’ll be.  Hopefully I’ll also be able to make more regular updates here and pull this thing back from the dead.

May the fish be with you…

When I decided to move up to 25NL, I also decided to try to move over to Full Tilt Poker to take advantage of rakeback and their $600 first-time deposit bonus. I did not like what I found at all.

My first experience with Full Tilt was absolutely horrible. I was incredibly used to the PokerStars software, and found Full Tilt’s client program to be slow and lacking in many features. Aside from the basic software itself, I was not used to the look and layout of Full Tilt. I found myself confused and making stupid mistakes, like not spotting players in the hand because I didn’t realize their 2 little cards were still active. PokerStars shows live cards on the table, Full Tilt shows the cards above the player’s name. I kept looking around the empty table and thinking I was heads-up with someone when there was really a 3rd or 4th player still in the hand. I also kept confusing who was on the button because the two sites place the button slightly differently in relation to the player avatars. In the end, I ended up losing slightly over $100 in slightly over an hour. I was not a happy camper.

Incredibly angry over the loss and disappointment with their software, I immediately went back to PokerStars (and kept right on losing). The amount of money I’d lost, and how quickly I lost it, really set me off. As I mentioned in my last post here, that’s where I started changing things in my game. I lost somewhere around another $100 in the $25 games on PokerStars.

After a couple weeks of convincing myself that I do indeed know how to play poker, I’m giving 25NL at Full Tilt another shot. The first few sessions have been promising. I can’t yet handle the 8 tables I normally play on PokerStars, but I seem to be doing well with 5 tables running. I’ve come out a winner the first few sessions, and got the first $20 of my $600 bonus. I’m also earning rakeback which should end up padding my earnings by something like $400 per month.

I’m getting more and more accustomed to the Full Tilt software now and not having nearly as much trouble figuring out what’s going on at multiple tables. It’s taken a couple days, but I’ve figured out how to use their software a bit better and get myself up and running quicker in the games I want to be in.

I do still, however, feel that their software is terrible. With multiple tables open, it starts to slow down my computer much more than the PokerStars client. (I have a dual core Pentium D system with graphics card and a ton of RAM, I’m not trying to run it on some outdated junker.) The sorting options in the lobby (at least for cash games) are just a hair above useless. PokerStars allows you to use multiple criteria for sorting table lists. I can get into the games I want without thinking about it. Full Tilt doesn’t even let me filter out stakes I don’t want to play. So I have to find my stakes, watch out for pot-limit or no-limit, then I can only sort by 1 of the listed criteria, and everything else I have to manually scroll up and down and find the tables I want. I’m getting better at doing it, but it drives me nuts. It’s such an incredible waste of time and effort when all I want to do is play cards.

As far as poker itself, I’m still sticking to my little hand chart, and so far it’s working great. I’m also concentrating very hard on keeping myself in the right state of mind, and avoiding emotional play. My wife even said that she finds it a little disturbing that I’m showing so little emotion as I play now. She says she doesn’t like it that she can’t tell if I’m winning or losing because I’ve always got the same calm look on my face. She says I’ve become “Poker Buddha”.  I think that’s a pretty good thing. I’m not feeling nervous, or scared, or outnumbered, or outsmarted, or any of the other things I was feeling when I took my first shot at the $25 games. Things are going well so far, and I’m feeling pretty confident. I think I’m going to stick with both Full Tilt, and the $25 cash games.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do once I’ve cleared the full $600 bonus. I may just go back to PokerStars and try to get higher VIP and bonus levels with them. I suppose it all depends on how accustomed I get to the rakeback…

May the fish be with you…

Wow…It’s been entirely too long since I made an update here.

For a little over a month now I’ve been fighting with 25NL. So far, it’s kicked my ass twice. I started out winning for a few sessions, then hit a bad streak, started questioning myself, and things went bad. I moved back to 10NL for a while to recover my bankroll and get my head on straight again. Took another shot at the 25’s and had almost identical results the second time. I’m now recovering a few buy -ins at 10NL again, and planning my next (and hopefully last) shot at 25NL.

Moving up to $25 games had a much bigger impact on my mental state (and consequently on my game) than I thought it would. The amount of money you’re betting turns into dollars instead of cents. Losing just 1 buy-in drops you down 2 and a half of your usual $10 buy-ins. $25 doesn’t sound like so much compared to $10.  But $50 seems like a lot compared to $20.  Losing $75 in 10 minutes hurts a lot more than losing $30. I won nearly $80 in a single hand one night. I couldn’t even come close to that number in 10NL.  The realization of how much real money I was actually playing with hit me like a ton of bricks.

I started questioning what I was doing, looking for ways to change my game and be more prepared. I started changing things…that was the fundamental mistake. Even when I went back to 10NL, I started off losing. It took me a day or two of playing 10NL to get all the ghosts and goblins out of my head and convince myself to just go back to doing exactly what was working before.

I finally sat down with a paper and pen and wrote down the positions around the table, and exactly what hands I want to be playing from what position. I marked down which are open-raising hands, which are calling hands, and which to fold if there’s already a raise out there. I told myself that I’m not going to deviate from this chart unless I sit and think, and make a change that seems like a good idea when I’m NOT playing. Making changes to the chart while I’m playing is not allowed. That keeps any kind of tilt out of the process. Once I started following my own advice,  the numbers immediately started going up all over the place.

I still need to recover a few dollars at 10NL before I can “safely” take another shot at 25NL, but I’ll have a lot more confidence this time around. Having to drop down a level and build up again sucks, but I know I can do it. I think this time I’m finally going to get up there and stay.

May the fish be with you…

I finally took my first shots at 25NL ($25 buy-in/No Limit) last night.

I had a few bad days over the last week that slowed me down, but I managed to hit a few milestones anyway. I went well over 10 times my starting deposit, without ever needing to re-deposit. I hit Silver Star VIP status on Poker Stars for the first time, giving me access to bonuses and special events.  And while I technically haven’t hit this one yet, I’m about 250 hands short of playing my 100,000th cash game poker hand. I’ll hit that in my next session.  If I’d realized how close I was to the 100k I would have played another 15 or 20 minutes to make it last night.

I started the $25 games playing 4 tables so I’d have a good amount of time to think about everything and really observe my opponents. I played a few hundred hands and won a few dollars.  To my surprise, I quickly realized that many of the $25 tables are even looser than the $10 tables. It wasn’t  long before I brought up a few more tables and was back to playing 10 at a time. I played for about an hour and came out a half buy-in ahead for the session. I decided to stop there and book a winner for the day, as I’d already played 4 or 5 hours for the day and I was getting burned out.

Since my normal raise is 4 times the big blind, and I tend to raise almost every hand I play, this was the first time I’ve played where all my initial bets were in whole dollars. That was both a little scary, and a little exhilerating. It was a really good feeling to think that now I’m playing for dollars, not cents. Now I’m getting into real money on the table. I’ve been waiting to hit that goal for a long time. With 10 tables going, I’ve got $250 in play at all times. That too was both scary and exhilerating.

My next step is to get myself set up on Full Tilt Poker and take advantage of their bonuses and rakeback. They give a 100% bonus up to $600 on your first deposit, plus it’s possible to get up to 27% rakeback through affiliates. So that’s my next target. Once I’ve got a few more sessions at 25NL under my belt and I’m feeling comfortable, I’m going to sign up and make the deposit there.  That should provide me with a very nice record month, and I’ll be able to make my first cash out and actually get my first “paycheck” from all of this. That is going to be a huge confidence builder. I’m also looking forward to playing on a new site where the regulars don’t know me and I should be able to get away with a few more tricky plays until they figure me out.

It really is a good feeling to see this starting to pay off. It can be incredibly hard to stay patient and allow things to happen in their own time. That’s the way poker is though, you can’t force anything. The cards are gonna do what they’re gonna do. All a player can do is make the best choices possible and wait for the rest to work itself out.

All in all, I’m amazed by how far I’ve come, and by how much I am still learning. If I can manage to move up 2 or 3 levels in the next 100k hands, I’ll be in the $100 games, with $1000 in play at a time. That looks scary as hell right now…But then 60 or 70 thousand hands ago, the $25 games looked scary too.

A special thank you to everyone at the TwoPlusTwo forums. I couldn’t have done any of this without the knowledge and skill I’ve gained from all of you.

May the fish be with you…

At every poker table (if you are good at selecting where you sit down) there is someone who isn’t so good at the game of poker. There is at least one person playing “just for fun”. There is at least one guy who’s just looking for something to do, who doesn’t really care that he’s providing the entire table with a few free meals this week. He looks at a poker table the same way he looks at a slot machine. To him, it’s all just a big gamble. This player is what we affectionately call a donkey.

If you happen to sit down at a table with a donkey (or more than one) who also happens to be a lucky donkey, you also have a high probability of running into a jackass as well. In the end, the jackass can be even more profitable for you than the donkey. A crazy monkey tilting jackass can throw out an amazing amount of chips in a very short period of time.

Tonight, about 2 hours ago actually, as I was picking out some tables I’d like to play, I had a few minutes of dead time while I was waiting in lines at a few tables. I’m now playing 10 tables at a time, so I don’t usually see too much of the chat that goes on at the tables while I play. While I was waiting to get seated, the chat at one of the tables where I was waiting heated up.

The first words I saw were “sand nigger”.  I thought to myself, “This is gonna be interesting.” I almost immediately thought of calling a moderator. (I don’t have a problem with general trash talk. It’s to be expected anywhere men gather to compete, and even more so online. I think resorting to racist degradation though, is over the line. ) Within a few seconds though, the donkey replied, “Say what you want, I’ve got your chips.” He didn’t seem to be offended, so I decided to just sit and watch and see what happened.

Over the next 5 minutes or so, I witnessed one of the most stupid arguements I’ve ever seen in my life, and I watched the 8 lucky players at this 9 man table collect their hourly wage as this jackass handed out two buy-ins worth of chips…all the while, spewing a mix of racist redneck trash talk and declarations of what a great poker player he is into the chat box. I was amazed by both his wide range of racist slurs, and the speed with which he handed out his money.

The 7 uninvolved players (and any other observers) stayed silent, while the donkey continued to poke and prod at an obviously open wound. The jackass was now sitting at the table with $0. “Where’s your money? Why don’t you reload? Can’t afford another $10?”, says the donkey. A few moments later, the jackass shows $10 in his stack. Still spewing garbage into the chatbox, the jackass spent the next few minutes dividing up about $20 and handing it out to the rest of the table. All the while, the donkey just continued to say the same basic thing over and over, “Where’s you’re money? Who’s got your chips?”

I’m a regular player. I’m there every day, grinding out what’s going to be a really good living. Several other people at the table I recognized as regular players as well. In the end, I forgot the name of the donkey player. But the jackass? I have notes on him. Notes that read “Super monkey tilter”. Every time I run across him at the tables, I know exactly who he is and how to get him to just hand me money.

While I sat and watched this pathetic display on the screen in front of me, I felt a bit unlucky that I was watching as an observer and couldn’t get in there to take some of the free cash this idiot was handing out. I also thought to myself that in a way, it was very lucky that this particular donkey didn’t get offended, and didn’t leave the table (or worse, the site).

While a jackass can be sometimes amusing, and sometimes profitable, he is, overall, very damaging. The jackass not only points out bad plays to bad players, the jackass both encourages the donkey to leave, and encourages the donkey to learn. Neither is good for anyone. If the donkey leaves, he takes his money with him. We can’t make money from someone who isn’t at the table anymore. If the donkey learns, it gets even worse. Not only can we not take his money so easily, but we have to worry that he might come back some day and take our money from us.

We call them donkies, we call them fish, we call them suckers, we call them all kinds of things. In the end though, they are where the money in the pockets of a winning poker player comes from. No matter what we call them, we call them affectionately.  They provide us with our winnings…our earnings.

The jackass not only doesn’t understand the very game he claims to be a “pro” at, the jackass doesn’t even understand the most basic concept of economics, give and take. While I will not actively hunt a donkey to try to exploit them personally…It’s open season on jackasses. I will gladly take stack after stack from any jackass that I run across. I will do my best to bust them, to humiliate them, and to get them out of the games I play.

May the fish be with you…

I’ve been a little slow on my posts lately, but at least it’s because I’ve been playing a lot, and not just being lazy.

In the last couple weeks things have been going great. I finally figured out a few strategy points that I was missing and it’s made a tremendous difference in my game, and in my win rate. I’ve moved up to 10NL ($.10 big blind/$10 buy-in) and my win rate is currently at 8BB/100 hands over my first 10500 hands. Last night I set a new record high for myself in money earned in one day. I have more than doubled my bankroll since I started the cash games. So far, I have only logged a single losing session at 10NL since I moved up. That loss was for one single dollar. Not too bad if I do say so myself.

I really think most of the success I’m having so far with the cash games has to do with the lack of stress. Without the added pressure of tournament play, I seem to be able to get through 95% of my sessions with almost no emotional charge (except for feeling good when I end the day ahead). With less stress from the start, I’m able to play more hands, and see things go up and down a lot more. That leads to even less stress.

With every session I play, I get more and more confidence that I can ride out whatever negatives come along. The first time your pocket Aces get beat, it drives you mad, you can’t believe it. The 10th time, it still gets at you, but not so bad. After 100 times, you don’t even think about it anymore. The more times you go through the bad and see the good again, the more confident you become that there is always something good waiting there on the other side if you just get through this little bad spot.

When someone beats my made hand with some whacko 1 in 1000 suckout, I try to look at it as a positive. Yes, this particular hand sucked, I lost money, and I don’t like that. But still, I know I was making the right play, and now that we got that 1 in 1000 shot out of the way, I’ve got 999 more times where I can do the exact same thing and I’ll win. That’s not so bad, is it? I’ll gladly give you what’s in my pocket now, this one time, if I can come back and take stuff out of your pockets 999 more times.

I guess that’s all I got for today. May the fish be with you.