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…