Back to the grind bitches

So i’ve been gone for a while and for that i apologise, i know this might have caused an adverse effect on some readers lives and i feel kinda selfish you know, everyone just must’ve been breaking down into tears when they checked my blog and found that i’d let them down again by not updating, so i’m sorry, it won’t happen again i promise.

The past month or 2 of poker for me has been a downward spiral really, i took out a chunk of my roll to pay for some wedding stuff, which i was happy doing as it was all profit from poker which made me feel good, i left enough to be still rolled for 10nl but then of course the downswong came and i ended up back at 5nl and getting my ass handed to me by the deck on a regular basis, i ended up in a really negative state of mind and my play definitely suffered as a result, a load of spewy, tilty, generally horrible play later (losing $80 at 5nl is rather horrible) and i found myself right back down at $50 in the roll, $50 down from my original deposit after 40k hands and 3 months of grinding!

I think a graph would be more effective in showing just how bad a time it was for me, notice that the huge drop starts at about 6.5k hands and $90 later finishes at 7.8k, that 1k hands was like a kick in the balls for my confidence and it took me nearly 2 weeks to pick myself up from that, inbetween i was kinda just flitting about playing any old game really, even gave SnG grinding a shot once and stacked 10 $1.25 Sng’s lol

But anyways, enough of the whinging, i’m back now, i' realised that not all of those loses were due to bad luck and suckouts, i stopped feeling sorry for myself and instead looked at my game and realised that the majority of them were from getting into bad spots with hands that never warranted being in those spots, i was breaking the “big hand big pot,small hand small pot rule” over and over and it showed in my results, i was playing too loose and too aggressive for the micro’s, not paying enough attention to position and most of all stacking off far too lightly.

I think i needed this fall back to earth, i’d grinded up $300 and felt like i had this game cracked, which is stupid b/c i was only playing 10nl, and not very successfully at that lol I think i have a character flaw of sometimes getting too confident in my own ability, which can have its good points but it can also lead to me being cocky and slacking off when there's still improvement to be done. This has reminded me that your always learning in poker and if you take your foot off the gas for one second when it comes to self-study and improvement… then your not going anywhere, and for someone who dreams of retiring early one day to do this for a living its just not good enough.

So i’ve flung myself right back into this grind, starting from 2nl and $50 i’m going to play 6max exclusively and grind back up the limits, i thought i’d have trouble playing the penny games again but one good thing thats came out of this so far is that its made me completely detached from the monetary side of poker, all i think about now is buyins, and whether that buyin is worth $2 or $25 all i’m going to be thinking now is how many buyins i need to make to get to the next limit. I heard an interview with haseeb, or internetpokers, on mediocrepoker’s podcast where he said he used a BR system of moving up when he had 23BI’s for the next limit and taking a 3BI shot, so i’m going to do the same, a 20/23 system and see how it goes, I’ve made 13BI’s at 2nl this week so far, and thats not running hot, its just me crushing it, 15 more BI’s and i’ll be back up to 5nl, from there who knows :D

Sorry again for not updating in a long time but i was in a rough spot for me, but i’m back now and more focused than i’ve ever been so keep checking back here and see how i’m doing, any advice or comments on anything i discuss are greatly appreciated as they always were.

Next update approx monday me thinks, laters.