Fantastic! Thank you for clearing that up for me.

Nice post @thetallpaul

Placed a sports bet from my Unibet account and lost. This apparently turned the run bad back on. Some of it is getting a bit silly but enough stack donation going to keep me trucking. Still laughing though so thats something. Playing through the March Challenges, then off back to Stars.

I know i am not allowed to post on this thread however i want to inquire are the games really that soft on Unibet? What stakes do the games run up to and do they run regularly? What are cashouts like are they quick? I might be interested in signing which will be good for PokerVIp so this is why i think my post should not be deleted.

Brag: Hit a nice $8k bonus at work so took a week off. Berlin with my best mate for some solid drinking, food and culture then Centre Parcs with the family. Class times all round.

Beat: Went trail running with my wife and broke my foot. Stress fracture, so nothing major but means few weeks off running and makes 1000km year unlikely.

Played no poker either. Motivation is low right now. Chats with @CrazyCookie put my lack of learning in perspective. It's like when I see people taking it seriously I just think there is no way could care enough about it to do that. If that's what you need to do to beat the micros then maybe I'll learn something else that losing is free. Chess maybe? Play this game as a pure rec and just enjoy it. Don't know, I think I like it too much.

I'll still be playing the same $400 BR in 2020. I should just be thankful for that and enjoy the game!

Sick bonus! Sick about your foot (in the other meaning of hte word!)

In terms of study- I would put it like this:

If you put 20 minutes into poker study every evening where you look at a flop texture and your range in two spots and spend 10 minutes on both working out which parts of your range you want to bet and check and make sure you can't be exploited much (which at micros doesn't happen much anyway!) Then you will be putting in about 20 minutes per evening more than your opponents. After a month that would be nearly 7 HOURS if you just did week days! Stretch that to 30minutes 7 days a week and you're up 15 hours/month on the field! Also those 15 hours will be so much mroe advanced than everyone else and your mind will begin to make spots in game natrually easier. Honestly it isn't as hard as you are thinking and it wouldn't take you much time at all to move up if you wanted to

Hit me up in skype when you're around and I'll try and get a Snowie session in a skype call so you can see the kind of things I'm doing. Might not be exactly suited to you or might be who knows! But it will show you that literally 20 minutes/day can improve you so much!

How did you bink the bonus?

Just being awesome! Its on yearly financial results which we hit every one and smashed a couple of them. Nice little bonus when it comes. Its not the bankers style bonuses and most of my pay is still salaried but when I land it I smash it into fun stuff. Its not in the budget for the year.

Back playing and running decent. I'm flopping strong and getting decent value from it. Thinish value betting well as well which is nice. The only thing I can't do is win any races. AK vs QQ is the standard, and I'm losing all of them!

Can't complain though. The solid flopping is making up for it and people spazzing into me.

Only slight flinch of tilt was short stacker guy limp called KK on the button, I flop top top OOP (Q65 two tone) and bet and he snap jams for 40bb. I call and thats a bit annoying. Next hand he opens the SB for 10bb's. I have QQ and think, well if KK is a limp call, a huge open is possibly not just nutted hands, but will have some Ax in there, maybe KQ, some PP's. I decide to rep tilt (at least thats what I told myself, maybe it was actual tilt) and jam. He snaps me off with AA and makes quads just to be annoying.

Other than that I've been doing well. Definately on the right side of variance as I say in terms of cards but I'm most happy with how I'm dealing with losing all the flips and my judgement on small value bets I'm squeezing out of guys with A high or 3rd pair or whatever.

I swear I replied to this yesterday!?! Must have no hit submit or something stupid!

Glad to hear you are running good and feeling good! Onwards and upwards.

Always buddy. I actually got my home office a bit better sorted this week as well so now have a decent grind area. I'm going to stop playing in the lounge in the evening sitting next to my wife watching Downton and instead go to the office and see if I can treat it a bit more seriously. Two screens, good chair etc.

The downside to that is lower volume possibly as I still want to hang out with my wife. The other volume impact will be that I got an Xbox One off my wife for my birthday so...... I'll be playing that for at least some of the time. FIFA 16 is rock hard on first viewing. I'm sort of looking forward to getting a new Call of Duty game as well. I used to be a league standard player once upon a time. Not a good one like the pro e-sports sickos you see now but I was OK. It will probably be hugely depressing to get smashed by the new generation of kids now.

Sooo, March is coming towards an end after the bank holiday. Where am I at. Running wise sucks as I think I broke my foot and can't really walk very well. Should go to get it x-rayed now but just keep thinking it will get better if I leave it.

Mental game is on point which is great.

Poker wise I won a bit on Unibet but done there until April now. No point carrying on as got all the bonuses I will actually clear and none of the rake is showing up on here so not in the Top 500 which is rubbish. Says I did $3 of rake in March. Clearly that is bullshit but with no idea if I'm actually close or not I'm not wasting my time. I think I'll nip back to Stars for a few hands of Zoom maybe just for fun. I say fun. Zoom is easily the best and worst of the game. If my mental game is still strong later this weekend I'll test it with a bit of Zoom and report back.

So BR on Unibet is up to £250 (300 Euro) and on Stars its $230. I'm playing NL10 on both at the minute.

Playing Zoom.

Isn't Poker fun when you are smashing flops and cbet success rates read 29% flop, 10% turn and 21% river. My bluffs are not working but hey I'm a nit so value heavy and getting paid.

Run good is good. No useful insight to my mental game though when its going easy.

How are you tracking this?

Snip...





At least I'm not the only one that does this. This should be on a mug or t-shirt.

Hows the foot?

Yeah, thats a good question Cookie. I'm talking about larger than poker. Especially vs my key mental game goal of not attacking myself all the time and trying to be thankful or enjoying my life.

As it comes to poker the short answer is using the rating system from Mental Game of Poker at the end of a session. The long answer is watching for some of the tilt issues I have when my mental game is not doing well.

Examples of this include but are not limited too...

Redline trending up for a few hands after a bad loss as I try to avoid getting sucked out on and miss value.
Checking back clear river value bets after I have ran into the nuts the previous orbit.
Opening too loose when I'm winning.
Opening too tight when I'm losing (basically deviating from my ranges for any reason other than exploit).
Calling river triple barrels with AQ on A high brick run outs.

I wanted a gif for broken. This was the first that came up. I don't know why but the idea of me answering that simple question with this much attitiude really made me laugh.

This is good

Have you read MGOP2? IMO that is FAR mroe valuable for mental game. It's is focused on getting in the zone and getting back there when you have fallen out. My game atm is at it's highest level ever given my study BUT my C game was still soooo poor because I've never worked extensively on my mental game. I just wanted to see what you did to track your mental game as it's what I'm doing atm.

What is working for me so far:

Having and tracking my warm up (noting down in a journal so that if I reach the zone or play bad I can see what I did before the session and either repeat for zone or stop for C game)
Taking notes during my session focussed 100% on my mental game. So these are "Feeling a bit angry after bad bluff- injecting logic and back to normal quick" or "in the zone and feeling: relaxed, mental capacity at optimum, mood & energy at 7/10, very focussed, very clear idea of my mental game & skill level"
Then after having a cool down where I review my game, my mental game and my sessions goals.

Sounds LOADS but now I don't see how anyone plays without this setup :') Like I go into each session at a higher level, rarely tilt, always work on playing my best and reaching the zone which is where our most EV is. I think it will prove to be biggest thing I have ever done to get an edge in the games

No, I think when I play my best its with a good mental warm up routine. One simple thing is telling myself what weakness I'm not going to display and what skill I'm going to work on developing. I don't always avoid all the tough spots or improve what I was looking at but the very idea being in my mind seems to help.

Played a fair bit of Zoom the last few days. I love that game and how the momentum seems to swing. I had a good spell where I was killing the game and everything I touched turned to gold as I mentioned earlier. Today the exact opposite. I have only tilted a little though. I made one call in the SB straight after a river suck out with QTo vs UTG and MP cold call. I also opened 72o on the BTN. Misclick not that much tilt but it happened as I was clicking to quickly (another sign of tilt). I have made a couple of questionable calls on the river but I think (though I'll reflect tomorrow when I review) that they were OK. Sort of ones where I do their range and think he can have some bluffs or PDDS and I can't see what value hands can beat me except a rivered ... oh. Or if he flat QQ+ in the BB vs a min open...oh. Just a grin and move on. Had a couple of AK vs QQ BTN vs BB go against me as well. That one doesn't seem to register anymore. Wierdly when I run AK into KK or AA that still pisses me off. I cannot understand why though?

I feel pretty good about my response to a sustained few hundred hands of sustained runbad (plus I'm sure a load of errors). Prep seems to help. I'm going to have a drink and have one more session I think. Depends how I feel sitting back down after a break. Happy times though mentally speaking.