mental game accountability blog
Hello.
This will be focused solely on the mental/psychological aspect of grinding poker.
The plan for this blog is simple but radical: After every session I play, I post here about how the session was mentally/emotionally, including details of mental blunders or successes.
Why? I'm a poker pro fallen on tough times. I never thought I'd start a blog here, but had the idea that it might help for my mental game. Doing this would constitute accountability, supporting the building of stronger mental game.
Also, sharing it publicly will let it be something I'm consciously proud of and thus won't come to take for granted and then let slide. (That's how it goes in my experience: Once having made sufficient mental game improvements, one becomes less pro-active and it deteriorates, resulting in unexpected tilt and mental regression somewhere down the line.)
I will also share some specific mental aspects I'm grappling with. For example letting go of the need to play hands perfectly, avoiding even the slightest mistake. A need based in paranoia around other regs pouncing on my every weakness. Or: having the courage to play hands the way I want to play them, as opposed to how I think they should be played.
Some more detail:
Recently I've already been focused primarily on the mental side of grinding instead of focusing on exactly how I should play hands - and I think that this is the way forward. I think mental game is really the foundation required to confidently and freely improve ones technical game. And I don't want to be doing something many hours a week that is unpleasant, boring, painful. I want to be able to grind for hours pleasantly, relaxed, without mental and emotional exhaustion afterwards.
My relationship with poker has been patchy. I've gone through phases of very resilient mental game, but also very rough, painful phases and low-points, exploring the meaning of 'rock-bottom'. I've made promises to myself - for example that I will never again let myself feel so bad playing poker - so bad that, rationally, It really makes no sense for me to continue living off poker instead of getting a job. I've broken those promises, which that feels shameful and unsettling. I've gone through a period of a kind of burnout that wrecked my mental game thoroughly, after which I took a break from serious poker for a couple of years. Reluctantly returning to poker after not finding a good alternative income, I've been faced with painful experiences of really not being the player I remember being - missing the sharpness and the intuition that used to be part of what let me be a confident regular at mid-stakes.
So why am I even doing this - why stick with poker? Three months ago I seriously considered entering the job market after a stint of half-heartedly grinding in my local casino hit rock-bottom. Re-evaluatung my life the next day, I found new motivation to once again truly try to be good at online poker. Realising it would mean that I could stay in the very nice but slighty expensive appartment where I live and could have the time for the things I love in my life, especially rock-climbing -going out for a whole day whenever the weather conditions are good. Plus I realised that I'm curious poker would go if I actually did try again. I realised that the fear that I'm washed up, that I should admit that I just don't have what it takes anymore, really isn't based on anything, as I hadn't really tried yet, and of course if I don't really try I can't expect anything more than ****. So why not at least try and see what happens.
So since then it's been a combination of: on the one hand fresh motivation and indeed quite fast progress in how my game feels, and at the same time the impediments of the years emotional baggage and of the stresses of my really quite dire financial situation. I'm living as a poker pro in a western country with a net-worth hovering around €2-3k. That really would have sounded absurd to me in the past - but then again it may be freeing to find that it's possible to do this.
Saturday and sunday I tilted in a way I hadn't tilted in a long time. I feel guilty about how self-destructive I was.
To give you some idea of what I can do and how insecure I feel about poker and my bankroll afterwards, one of the worst hands involved me open-raising to 125bb with A5o, then when called I shoved the remaining 80bb on a random flop. (and got it in with 10% EQ)
As to the mental game, what do you think of the idea that some players and writers who seem to have little appreciation of the significance of the mental game, lack insight on this because of their extremely rigid, mathematical, and unemotional approach to the game. So when they sit, most all of the emotional factors that tilt many millions of players are already ironed out of their game via this approach, thus making them blind to the subject.
This is good stuff keruli, this can definitely help you bring more awareness to your mind patterns.
I won't bother you with my past but from reading your first post I kind of resonate with you. But long story short, I too had a rough relationship with poker. There were only short bursts of time where I found myself enjoying the game and 80% of my career felt like a grind. I too am still working on it but the momentum has shifted for me and I'm starting to be much more indifferent about mistakes and results.
The mind is an amazing tool and if used properly will help you reach your goals, if used improperly will be dragging you down.
Good luck and will be following your progress
As to the mental game, what do you think of the idea that some players and writers who seem to have little appreciation of the significance of the mental game, lack insight on this because of their extremely rigid, mathematical, and unemotional approach to the game. So when they sit, most all of the emotional factors that tilt many millions of players are already ironed out of their game via this approach, thus making them blind to the subject.
That's a complex topic and I'm not sure I understand what you're saying or asking.
Some players who lack that insight also just don't really need it, right? (due to their strategy and personality being sufficiently machine-like)
And they don't need to iron those emotional factors out of their game, as those factors simply don't arise to a sufficient extent.
But regardless of why: If they do lack that domain of insight, then they must be flawed as coaches, mentors etc., I suppose.
yesterday first session since rock-trip and getting a cold.
900 hands in 2 hours at the lower stake.
uneventful, relaxed - good considering slight anxiety prior to session due to low volume + break.
yesterday night, very tired from cold+coming back from visiting a friend, played about 800 hands in 2 hours.
- Had some challenging hands where I went with an only-weak feeling that my line would work/made sense - both times (maybe too lightly) making a big bluff that my opponent called easily
- When I'm very tired it's important that I play careful/nitty/basic lines to avoid what otherwise happens, namely what one could call half-conscious auto-spews: Big spewy lines that my more alert brain would ring alarm bells to stop me from doing and/or would more carefully check that the line makes sense.
...slightly worrying that I didn't completely avoid that.
- I did stay calm though and wasn't tilted by this. Overall feeling stayed fine despite being slightly too tired to feel good.
short 500 hand session, felt fairly good.
- I was playing just the lower limit to see how I feel today, but somehow I'm not getting round to playing any more than that. Too much time spent on cooking and other stuff, and I need to get up early tomorrow, so probably should only play very briefly now if at all...
I mention this because one of my biggest pitfalls has always been starting sessions when I'm not sure whether I should be playing, with any tilt during that session then being amplified by regret over even having played that session.
Did end up playing a session later yesterday.
Just 500 hands, and maybe I struggled to adjust to things going badly. There were a couple of big, unfortunate hands where It seemed that I could have thought more clearly about the situation and either just found a fold or at least folded a higher %. In one of the hands, in addition to failing to find a possible fold when my hand's equity tanked on a board-change, my opponent turned out to be using a seemingly brainless 'level 1' line and I caught myself angrily typing a derogatory note...
1k hands session last night at higher limit.
- after a meh hand with a foggy mind that resulted in getting 'owned' I berated my opponent in chat re. whether they could even read the board. embarrassing.
- starting to get slightly worried. Maybe my approach is too simplistic or abstract and I need to be putting in more effort to engage mentally during play.
- where is the boundary between mental game, focus and playing hands well?
Maybe one distinction is between a) quality of focus/thought during a decision and b) emotional response
1k hands session last night at higher limit.
- after a meh hand with a foggy mind that resulted in getting 'owned' I berated my opponent in chat re. whether they could even read the board. embarrassing.
I have a bullet list of some bad habits and one is "internal and external grumbling over variance". I find that when the internal grumbling becomes external I've clearly reached a point where my emotions are starting to have a negative impact on my decisions. Berating an opponent in chat definitely falls into that category, of course. Question is what do you do about it mid-session? Do you quit? Do you reset? Do you just accept that emotion is part of poker, etc., own it and soldier on?
900 hands at lower stake, easy and uneventful
Last night played another session, 2 hours at the lower limit and low number of tables.
Somehow became a relatively bad session though.
the two main factors I recall:
- general theme of noticing some doubts about my overall game
- being unsettled by a specific reg who I was clashing against during that session: Firstly I was uncertain whether they were a bad/passive nit-reg or actually a more thinking, flexible type. Several tricky hands vs them.
This culminated in a hand vs that player where I certainly could have found a fold, where their play again didn't quite fit my mental picture of them, and where at the crucial point in the hand my thought process kind of broke down, with me having a vague feeling that I was beat, not clearly picturing hands that would take the line, whilst also being unsure what my own hand's qualities were in that river spot and how I should react...
After calling I briefly felt tilt physically, that kind of slight heat rising into the head. Fortunately I was already considering ending the session, so it felt fine to just blind out there - and the tilt didn't build.
short session, uneventful
failed to post about quite a big session on friday - real life stuff in the evening and all day yesterday.
1.5k hands in three and a half hours. Several hands where, in hind-sight, I was a bit disappointed that I lost the maximum - Maybe I could have tried harder to play the hand more carefully. Maybe I should have managed the final decision slightly better.
negatively to variance and could have
At least I didn't feel any tilt accumulating. I did feel that I had responded badly to variance - could have saved money and energy simply by weathering the variance a bit better.
long session last night: 2.7k hands in 5 hours.
In a context of a building feeling of dissatisfaction with my game - how imprecise, neutral and lacking in clear general tactics it has recently been, this session I felt slightly drawn in to a more aggressive approach. Getting more into the thick of things, a longer battle, collecting a lot of impressions, more actively looking for spaces for key strategies that I could more purposely build my game around.
A couple of hands briefly irritated me, maybe because my opponent's strategy was blindingly simple, but i quickly recovered each time and was able to maintain ok focus until the end of the session when I blinded out for a break and suddenly felt that I didn't want to play on.
One hand at the same time irritated me due to not having been able to read it correctly and my opponent clearly playing it quite well, which is always worrying when playing at a level where I need all my opponents to be bad, whilst also encouraging me when I realised that my opponent had used a tactic that I had often used in the past - a strong tactic that I could definitely add to my game if I wanted.
1.7k hands in three and a half hours.
Fairly positive overall: fairly comfortable and motivated to grind.
There were some lapses in attention though, and it was one of those sessions where those lapses are instantly punished to the max.
This is one of those points where mental game and technical game meet: I think I need better heuristics for how to manage hands where I know my attention or intensity up until that point in the hand has been significantly interrupted or just not enough to run a full stack bluffraise. In one hand I wasn't sure who the preflop squeezer had been, knowing which would have made my decision easy. I remember that I NEVER used to make this kind of mistake - one of my strengths that I used to notice in comparison to friends who played lower stakes was that I wouldn't just miss basic info about a hand. But then again maybe it's precisely because I'm playing micro/low stakes now... If the 3bet had been to €50, maybe I would still have no trouble keeping track of things...
1.1k hands at lower limit (tired after training)
felt the feeling of tilt and close to actually tilting in game. One of those sessions where there's a seemingly endless stream of hands where my opponent shows up with some strangely played strong hand, to the point where a paranoia starts to form that says that none of the spots actually work as I thought they did, that whatever I try will backfire - and especially some hands played by my opponent in a way that seems really silly and strategically bad but that I can't quite avoid putting in money against ...and then ask myself why I didn't just lay it down and then feel impatient for a next situation where I can redeem myself by folding... very hard to maintain balance.
No hurries!
Sounds like for every session lately, tilt is at least creeping around.
This is like having a a tire loose on your car in a race. You will never win the race worrying about when your tire is gonna fly off.
Take a pit stop, completely change the tire, fuel up, and then get back to it.
The more time you take off to delve into yourself and rewire how you approach your challenge, the better you will be.
The beauty of cash games is that they are always around!
No shame in taking a few moments to recuperate and self-care!
For some, it can be the hardest part of the game.
GL!
Changing the tire (its also gas, oil, maint. check,) would be changing your old worn out mindset and getting as healthy as possible
Its highly personal, and different for everyone, each time.
Usually a complete disconnect from poker for a few days, to immerse yourself in something else, healthily.
Camping trip, volunteer work, family time, run a marathon lol, meditation or healing work(shops), fishing trip, skydiving, vacation, etc etc.
Or a concerted effort to delve deep into your own mind, uncovering the roots of mental game issues.
The point is sometimes the best thing to so is to just completely stop and let people lap you while you DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO..
..so when you do get back out there you are in peak condition for as long as possible.
If you make changing for the better (as a person) part of your poker program, you will give yourself the best chance for success on and off the tables.
very small session last night, uneventful/pleasant.
900 hands in 2h20 all at the lower limit.
Played with slightly higher intensity, which felt good overall but did result in a build up of hands where maybe I spewed and lost more than necessary.
Then a single hand annoyed me momentarily so that I loudly said 'come on!' in exasperation. Fortunately I didn't go so far as to really shout, and recovered immediately. It was one of those hands where the tilting thing is the drastic change in ones all-in EV line dependent on whether one goes all-in on the turn way ahead or waits and puts the rest in on a river that has changed it to an only slightly worthwhile call-off - and one indeed puts the rest in against one of the hands that improved on the river.
So it's a specific type of results-orientedness: instead of caring about the winnings relative to the all-in EV line, caring too much about the all-in EV line itself. (where are my G-Bucks?!)
LONG session, 1.6k hands in 4 hours.
Felt like my game was relatively good, maybe things are coming together. Finding a lot of spots where either a) I could see/sense a weakness and know how to put on pressure or b) just generally had a good sense of the right thing to do.
Interestingly, this is despite my thought processes still being very basic/abstract - partly because more complex thought processes are rarely appropriate on these tables and partly because I still felt brain-fog/freeze in some higher-pressure spots.
And maybe due to things feeling good I pushed the session to a point where now I feel significantly fatigued and am worried about whether I can play a good second session.
Did play another session last night, 1.3k hands in 2h45.
This time mainly at the higher limit, and noticed that I feel slightly scared-money at the moment. Need to navigate that carefully - mainly I think by table selecting very heavily so that I'm OK with playing nitty/weak.
The second session seemed to have been worthwhile, but afterwards it was very late and my sleep was patchy - didn't get more than 5-6 hours and the today ended up going to sleep again after morning/brunch routine...
700 hands in 2 hours at higher limit
Had to end the session because of doom-switch, reaching limit of tolerance.
The session had been going quite well - again felt like I was playing relatively well, many major hands with an improved sense for a gameplan.
2nd session after eating: 800 hands in 1h40.
Was hesitant about playing the higher limit again, but opened some tables and quickly felt fine.
Again, and this time more clearly, felt that my overall game is finally starting to come together. I remember this process from many years ago, and in recent years had been worried that it just isn't happening anymore. It's a kind of slow, unconscious crystallization process, with the competing side/aspects of decision processes eventually finding a balance so that in real time they fall into place in a way that functions well.
Not sure why this would be happening now. Maybe no particular reason, maybe because I've done a lot of stretching in the last few days and weeks to relax.
Anyway, if this is happening, then I can look forward to enjoying significant improvement.
