Short And Sweet

I've never hated poker as much as I have the last 3 days. Fuck this game.

WTF?!?

A reg called one of my 4bets OOP with A8s today.

WTF?!?

Another reg called one of my 4bets IP with AJo today.

WTF?!?

I got 1 outed in a 400bb pot.

WTF?!?

I lost 7 buyins today, and was down 12 at one point. At 100NL of all places.

WTF?!?

Recap Of This Week

The good:

• Made it to the gym four times this week, twice to lift and twice to play basketball
• Played every game of basketball on Friday without getting too winded
  
• Read another chapter in Superfreakonomics
• Read msnbc one day and watched the news another day
• Played 17k hands, which was a little less than what I wanted but still more than usual
• Played 1/2 today and the session went well, so I'll def. be mixing in those deep tables when they aren't reg infested
• Finally hooked my xbox up since I haven't really been home much. Still pwning at COD
  

The bad:

• I weighed 165 lbs. In May, I weighed 182 and was the strongest and heaviest I've been My goal was to weigh 185 and maintain it. Basically, I have to start all over again
• I could only do 5x5 of 155 lbs on bench press. I was doing 215 lbs in May
• I could only do 5x5 of 165 lbs on squat. I was doing 280 in May
• I played 3 games of full court basketball on Wednesday and had to sit out the 4th due to being too winded. I ended up puking a few minutes later. Turns out, cinnamon toast crunch, gatorade, and being way out of shape don't mix
• I could hardly walk after Monday's work out

Maybe I'm Just An Egotistical Pussy

Sometimes I wonder if my ego is going to be my downfall in poker. I hate sitting at a table if I don't feel like I'm the best player. Sometimes when I'm on tilt I spew in retarded spots because I want to win every pot. I talk shit to any reg who I think sucks but wins a few medium sized pots off me in a session. I even talk shit if I value bet the shit out of them and they make ridiculous bad calls. Hell I even called out one reg on the forums because in the heat of the moment because I was so tilted after he shoved over my bet on the turn in a 3-bet pot when I was bluffing; and that combined with the fact that he's up a shit ton on me but doesn't crush the games set me off. I used to play entirely too loose for full ring just because I could get away with it and because it's the cool thing to do, even though it may not have been the most optimal way to play.

Having a little bit of an ego is a good thing, but I think maybe I take it a little too far. When I first started playing on Full Tilt again a few months ago, I would spew a little too much because I wanted to prove myself. The regs didn't know who vizer02 was and I wanted them to respect me. When I was on Cake I felt like I was the best player on the table almost every session that I was playing my A game. On Full Tilt, regs are constantly waving their e-peen and attacking you constantly trying to get under your skin by 3betting your ass off and playing every pot with you. I remember one session last month where a reg was 3betting almost every open that I made, but yet I was outplaying him constantly, and he never adjusted. Stuff like that shouldn't affect my game but it does. I just say fuck this guy, and then suddenly instead of focusing on making money off the fish my ego kicks in and all I want to do is pwn the regfish over and over. That's all good and everything, but sometimes I over-adjust and overestimate my edge on the player, which is a leak. Other times I'm that guy, just like the annoying reg, going out of my way to constantly pick on a reg even though I know I'm taking it just a little too far. Instead I should just focus on picking my spots against the regs and picking on the fish.

Going along with the topic of ego, I am afraid to move up to 2/4 because I know that I'm no longer going to be the best player at the table, and maybe not even ONE OF the best players at the table. That scares the shit out of me. I am confident that over time I will become one of the best, but the adjustment period is always the worst because I know what kind of spew I'm capable of while over-adjusting and how depressing several failed shots at a limit can be. I have considered getting coaching to help get me through the transition to 2/4 and 5/10 but I'm not sure my ego will allow it. I would much rather learn and conquer on my own because that is way more satisfying.

Also, I'm beating .50/1 and 1/ 2 for 8BB/100 this year, and I'm afraid that I'm not going to be happy with a 3-5BB/100 winrate at 2/4 even though the money is going to be great. One of the perks of a winrate like mine from this year is I hardly have any losing sessions, and my swings aren't very big. If all of the sudden I start winning at 3-6BB/100 then I'm going to have start dealing with bigger swings, more losing sessions, and what makes that even worse is the swings will be for 4 figures quite often, which is hard for me to deal with. Before my Europe trip I lost 2k and I was mentally scarred for a few days because that was my biggest loss in a session before and thinking about having to deal with that a couple times a week kind of freaks me out.

In summary, I know that I have some 'leaks' to work out before I move up to 2/4 and beyond. I have to get rid of the part of my ego that leads to me spewing while over-adjusting. I have to learn how to deal with big swings. I have to accept the fact that I won't be the best player at the table. I have to be happy with a smaller winrate. I need to talk a little less shit and just focus on constantly playing my A game. I need to figure out how to deal with all of these 'leaks' pretty soon, because I sure as hell don't want to be the guy who is stuck at small stakes his whole life.

October Results

+$1k in rakeback, so I'm pretty happy with my results since I was in Europe for half of the month. Pretty much all of my play was at .50/1 deep tables except for a few hands of 3/6 HU against a fish and a couple sessions where there weren't enough deep tables running at .50/1 so I had to play regular tables. Every time I would have to play on the regular tables I would get so tilted because I'd have to search through the lobby for playable tables, sit down, and the proceed to run my KK into some shortstack's AA, or QQ into their AK and they flop a boat...you know, stupid shit like that. Playing with shortstacks just tilts me to no end now.

My goal for November is to grind out about 120k hands, although I'll be happy with 100k. I've started 16 tabling now so I'm getting around 1k hands/hour, so that goal shouldn't be too unrealistic. I want to make $25k over the next two months and then hire a coach to get me through the transition phase of moving up to 2/4-5/10 which I would like to start playing in January. In the meantime, I think I'll just be sticking mainly to the deep .50/1 tables, since my hourly 16 tabling those games is very very close to my hourly at 1/2 while 12 tabling at 4pt. I'll probably just start mixing in whatever deep tables are running at 1/2, which seems like usually only around 4-5 tables.

Pokers Done Made Me A Ritard

I read New, Views, and Gossip on 2+2 as if it were the USA Today. However, I don't read the USA Today and I don't even bother following the current events that are going on in the world. That is, unless they are related to poker. Where can I find Cyril? I could tell you. Who's winning a lot in the high stakes games this month? I could tell you. Who's rumored to replace A.J. Benza on High Stakes Poker this year? I could tell you that too. What has Obama done as President so far this year? Hmm, I have no idea.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my life is completely engulfed by poker. I'm caught in this vortex where I don't really care about what else is going on in the world. It's not that I don't care about the other stuff that's happening in the world, I do, but it's just not as interesting to me. I'm beginning to think it's actually a problem, to the point where I kind of feel like a ritard when someone starts talking about current events or politics. My vocabulary has gone to shit because all I read is posts in the forums containing all kinds of acronyms like gtfo, ldo, fyp, and siihp.

Being completely engulfed in poker isn't such a bad thing, but at some point I think it can be. I still have a social life so it's not like I grind 24/7 and never get out of the house. But that's not enough. I wonder if some of the poker players out there that grind 150k hands or more a month even have a life. It has to be hard for them to have any kind of social life. I don't grind hardcore like that, but when I'm not grinding I am actively doing other stuff related to poker, like reading NVG, watching poker videos, chatting on aim to my poker friends, and trolling a bunch of other forums on 2+2. If I were to tally up the hours that I spend doing poker related stuff that isn't actually playing poker, I'm sure it would be a lot of hours per week. Yes, poker is my job so I should be pretty interested in it, and it's probably good that I am, but I think it's kind of bad that I have to make a conscience effort to do other things. I haven't gotten to the gym yet this week because I've been grinding so much and when I'm not doing that I'm either sleeping because my eyes are so tired from grinding or I'm doing all of the aforementioned poker-related stuff. I haven't opened up the book that I started reading on the road trip to Virginia since I've been back either. What I have to learn how to do better is balance my urge to do poker-related things with other non-poker related activities.

When I was traveling poker didn't take over my life. There were so many other things to do and poker was the last thing that I wanted to do for the most part. If it wasn't for the fact that I had to make money while I was over there then I probably wouldn't even have brought my laptop. Back here in Indiana though, I'm going to have to make effort to clear my head of poker more often than I have been. My plan is to start reading books a lot more, watching a lot of TV shows, and either read the newspaper or MSNBC.com once a week. Hopefully I'll get back in the gym soon, start writing songs on my guitar again, and then start exploring a few of the new hobbies I've picked up lately and want to get into; ie. photography and video production.

Also, I've been thinking a lot about my feeling of self worth again. I touched on this about a year ago on this blog, but as a professional poker player I'm not really contributing to society. All I do is take, take, and take. I feel like I should be contributing to the well-being of our society in some way. Also, as a poker player it's hard to have much interaction with people besides your friends. For that reason, I think I'm going to volunteer somewhere. I'm not sure where yet, but I think I'll probably become a big brother and then do some other volunteer work where I get to work with other people and actively help mass amounts of people. Hopefully this will help fill the void of my feeling of self worth. It's weird, because it's not like I'm unhappy with my life or anything. I am actually loving my life right now. But I think I need some kind of change that will keep me grounded and in touch with society.

I Partied With William And Mary

Damn, I wrote a couple of poker-related blog posts while in Virginia that I am eager to post, but I guess I might as well finish my Virginia stories first. We woke up around noon on Sunday and went to get some food to eat. We ended up at some pizzeria that had a lunch buffet which was freaking disgusting. I could dump the grease off the top of the pizza. After filling up on Coke we went to colonial Williamsburg and and spent some time there before Alicia and Randi left to get their facial and massages. I was pretty frustrated because I wanted a massage too but they only had 2 openings at the spa that day and I figured I should be nice and let the girls go. So instead I stayed behind and strolled around colonial Williamsburg which is a blast, let me tell you. I ended up leaving there pretty soon and walked to the town square which at least had some modern shops and restaurants and didn't have a bunch of people dressed up in pilgrim outfits.

I went to a cafe and had a turkey sandwich that was almost inedible due to the brick that was supposed to be bread, then went to the coffee shop to get a latte and literally as I was placing my order the fire alarm starts going off. They made everyone leave and somebody said that we couldn't go back in until the fire department got there, so I said fuck that and walked to Baskin Robbins to get some ice cream instead. Keep in mind that I was tilted by this point. Bad food, no massage, and no coffee = a tilted Vizer. So I'm standing at the counter at Baskin Robbins for 5-10 minutes while there were 3 girls working and they kept going to all the people around me but not me to ask for my order. I'm not usually vocal about these types of things, and since I wasn't in a hurry I just stood there. Finally, another girl that was waiting to order was asked what she wanted, and she told them to get mine first. I told her thanks, although I probably should've kept talking to her because I had my in, but instead I just got my order and got the hell out of the story because I was so frustrated.

I went back to the timeshare and took a nap before we went out later that night. We decided to go on another ghost tour, but this time we just snuck into one instead of paying the $12. It was dark and there's several of these groups walking through the main part of colonial Williamsburg, so it was easy enough to walk down the street and then sneak into the back of a group and tag along. We heard some more ghost stories and then afterward headed to the bars. When we passed the bars we saw that the lines were ridiculously long, so after parking we went to the WaWa, which is their convenience store, and got some 24 oz cans of beer. Randi and I chugged ours on the way to the bar while Alicia slowly sipped on hers (she a lightweight), and the whole time Alicia was worried about getting arrested or something. I mean it was homecoming at Willaim and Mary, the college in Williamsburg, but still, there's probably 3 cops total in the town. We went to one of the bars and after a long wait we finally got our 3 pitchers of beer. Randi's and mine didn't last long as she kept challenging me to chugging contests, of which half of them I won thank you very much! Yes she's a girl, but trust me, she can probably drink most of you under the table. I got pretty wasted, to the point of having to go puke in the bathroom (shocker, I know) and then we ended up going to the Greene Leaf, another bar across the street. I don't remember much of the time there, nor much of the rest of the night. Luckily for us, Alicia took a bunch of pictures and she stayed relatively sober so the next morning we looked through her camera and tried to piece everything together, kind of like the credits from The Hangover. Alicia was drinking from a drink that had like 10 lemons in it, I look like I'm about to pass out in several pictures, they were drinking out of a traffic cone (wtf? we have no idea), Randi was sitting on a bed at some house (apparently we walked into a frat house and drank there even though we didn't know anybody), then we have pictures of eating bananas in the WaWa which I'm pretty sure we didn't pay for.

Apparently I was too drunk to remember to chug a bunch of water before passing out because I woke up the next morning with the worst hangover ever. We were supposed to checkout at 11 so at 10:30 Alicia woke us up and I hopped in the shower. Randi came and told me that we had until 1 to check out, so I just went back to sleep after showering. We got up at 1 and left and didn't make it too far before we had to pull over along the Interstate so Randi could puke. Luckily, since I drove most of the way to Virginia I didn't have to drive on the way home, so I just laid down in the back and slept for a while. When I woke up I started reading Superfreakenomics, which is shaping up to be a very interesting book. I'm pretty sure when I'm done with it that I'm going to be recommending it to a lot of people.

Anyway, it was a miserable drive home but we finally made it back around 1AM. All I've done today is play poker, which so far I've played 3500 hands for $160 profit. Not the results I wanted, but I had a $200 bluff picked off at the end of the session which led to me having to quit prematurely. Then I saw that I got a rakeback payment on Cake of about $4, so I put that to good use and entered a $2 SNG and a $1 Kamikazee tournament, which is where you're forced to go allin every hand. Here's how I did...

Ship my 1st tournament win ever!!!