Fun Player's Guide to the Galaxy

Yeah kind of a shame ACR doesn't offer anything for these.

Been paying back that Royal debt today.

You don't really see this everyday.

Yatahay Network - $1 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

Hero (BB): 124.9 BB
UTG: 144.57 BB (VPIP: 21.23, PFR: 17.81, 3Bet Preflop: 4.46, Hands: 300)
MP: 122.88 BB (VPIP: 19.70, PFR: 16.10, 3Bet Preflop: 9.09, Hands: 2,296)
CO: 238.54 BB (VPIP: 42.57, PFR: 19.80, 3Bet Preflop: 8.33, Hands: 108)
BTN: 137.18 BB (VPIP: 28.36, PFR: 22.49, 3Bet Preflop: 11.31, Hands: 4,126)
SB: 103.8 BB (VPIP: 21.96, PFR: 16.59, 3Bet Preflop: 8.90, Hands: 2,330)

SB posts SB 0.5 BB, Hero posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) Hero has Q♣ T♥

fold, MP raises to 3 BB, fold, fold, SB raises to 11.5 BB, fold, MP calls 8.5 BB

Flop: (24 BB, 2 players) 9♠ 8♣ 8♦
SB bets 17.1 BB, MP calls 17.1 BB

Turn: (58.2 BB, 2 players) J♠
SB checks, MP bets 18.05 BB, SB raises to 75.2 BB and is all-in, MP calls 57.15 BB

River: (208.6 BB, 2 players) J♦

Players agreed to run it twice.

River #2: (208.6 BB, 2 players) T♣

MP shows 8♠ 8♥ (Four of a Kind, Eights)
Board #1 (Pre 20%, Flop 99.9%, Turn 98%)
(Four of a Kind, Eights)
Board #2 (Pre 22%, Flop 100%, Turn 100%)

SB shows J♣ J♥ (Four of a Kind, Jacks)
Board #1 (Pre 80%, Flop 0.1%, Turn 2%)
(Full House, Jacks full of Eights)
Board #2 (Pre 78%, Flop 0%, Turn 0%)

SB wins 102.8 BB
MP wins 102.8 BB

Except on ACR. On ACR you do see this every day.

GL!

i believe those expire - unsure of which site though so use em up

Conspiracy theories and "poker is rigged" discussions aside, are you able to articulate a decent explanation of why you were 100 BI under EV over this sample? How likely is this in statistical terms, i.e., taking into account your win-rate and standard deviation? At what point do you say the likelihood is close enough to 0% and then start seeking explanations other than variance, such as manipulation of RNG? I've lurked this thread for a while and respect your application of strategy and was left a little stunned by the 80 BI downswing. I also understand that you're probably over the whole thing, seeking closure and tired of thinking about it.

Anyway, irrespective of the above, GL and I hope you find a decent site to play.

It's pretty simple. Most of it was just losing 80/20s aipf more than I should.
The other part was losing a ton of 90/10, 95/5 spots post flop where you get all the money in w/ one card to come and they have 2 outs.
These were way more out of wack than the aipf stuff. There were a few days where I lost 4 or 5 of those spots consecutively.

If you tally my AA/KK vs underpairs aipf I ran 65% which maybe isn't that bad? idk but it felt pretty bad going through it.

For some reason QQ/TT/99 ran super hot vs these hands.

AA vs TT aipf 4 win 6 loss
KK vs TT aipf 3 win 3 loss

AA vs QQ aipf 21 win 18 loss
AA vs 99 aipf 3 win 7 loss

And don't get me started on the AA vs AK that didn't seem possible.

idk I guess I just ran in the bottom of the prime dope sample. I see other people seem to be running a lot more normally.

I guess the only thing I will credit ACR is a fast withdrawal process. I got the money within 4hrs of my initial request.

Hey, any updates for the past couple months? How was the switch to Global, and are you still playing there exclusively? Hope you're doing well!

hey

Appreciate that Rick

After a long hiatus starting again from the bottom with 3 stacks of low society

Wooo welcome back!

Thanks! Are you playing $2knl yet?

A lot has happened in the past couple years. Yesterday was the first hand of poker I've played since my last hand on ACR.

Got busy with usual life stuff and tried out some other things.
Started grappling again and then tried a little online side business for a bit and that kept me pretty busy.

It was an interesting experience starting something from scratch and watching it grow.
Learned a lot, but decided it wasn't for me.
Did ok, but nothing earth shattering.

I recently relocated and have had a little more free time of late and the poker bug reared its ugly head. No real aspirations to grind I'll likely play once a week for a few hours for fun.

Reflecting back something that always bothered me was how bad I was with the mental side of the game and I never really made any significant improvements in that area.

No matter what books I read or what advice I got, ultimately none of that worked. No meditation, breathing exercises or "think of the long run" mind tricks ever worked for me. All these things seemed to work for everyone I saw around me, and I just chalked it up to I was just a weakling. Maybe I was.

Then I don't really know what it was but as I was talking about it with a friend something clicked. I was always thinking about the game wrong.
I don't really know why it never occurred to me before. But just something about the way he put it made sense to me in a way I never saw before.

So yesterday it was kind of cool I got to put it to the test.
The session was overall unremarkable. Typical loose passive game ez monies.
I was mostly card dead for the first couple hours then I get in a multi way pot
holding 44.

Flop K 8 4r.
I bet flop and jammed turn over a donk. Long story short I lose to A4.

And I don't think I've ever had less of a reaction to losing a hand much less in that manner.

Old me would've been steaming pretty badly and likely donked off a couple of buy ins just because.

I continued to play on another fairly uneventful hour, racked up and left down $250.

Better late than never I guess, I'll take it.

What did he say? 😀

Thats an impressive side business starting from scratch. No I haven'tpalyed $2k yet, the swings are just too much for me to handle mentally as a part time player. I did open up a study group mostly comprised of midstakes players earlier this year and my winrate has skyrocketed since then, but its always just more comfortable grinding 200 and take the easy money.

Any plans to return to online streets? Club WPT Gold launched while you were gone, apparently its really soft and US only

This was actually through a lot of conversations over a period of time, but basically what he helped me figure out was below:

He said most of the tilt advice I was trying to use was aimed at the symptom (me being angry and frustrated at a result). And mostly they were just different distraction techniques to try and get me to calm down.

But it never addressed the actual cause. That's why I could still be steaming about some hand or session a day later.

The cause had more to do with my confusion and that when certain things occurred I didn't know what was going on. The model I thought I had of poker was broken and my reaction was tilt, when it should've been curiosity.
And it had a lot to do with how I viewed the game.
I didn't really look at the game holistically enough.

That plus having a lot of ego really added gas to the fire.

In short to say I think I was looking at the game too granularly when it really needs more of a systems view and when things shift like that any particular hand is quite meaningless.
And I know this concept isn't new and was presented to me plenty of times in different forms of getting more volume, etc. But for whatever reason it didn't really click or resonate with me before.

All that to say I think the fix for me was mainly losing ego and becoming more curious at the table. Sounds dumb that something so simple plagued me for so long. But hey I've never been the smartest guy.

Yeah who needs that pressure when you can take the ez $ 😀

That's cool about the study group. Being able to talk to different people regularly really accelerates the learning curve. I think that's one area I could've been a lot better in historically as I've tended to be a loner.

I'll probably try and check out the online scene again. Not sure what sites are still up and running I haven't kept up with anything poker related at all.

Thanks for the tip! I'll check out WPT Gold

In a nutshell, would you say that being committed to viewing results over a "long" sample or "zooming-out" is what was absent? I'm guessing this is what you mean by looking at the "game holistically"? Guessing also that reacting to results with "curiosity" rather than anger/frustration is much the same as "learning" from experience? Or is that an over-simplification?

Anyway, I like what you say about not being reactive or thinking in terms of tilt symptoms. I also gained a lot from your thread and was quite affected by the major downswing. It left me confused and in fear of experiencing the bottom 2% of a "prime-dope" stretch (e.g 100 buy-ins).

Pleased to hear you've landed on your feet.

Hey there I appreciate that and glad you got something out of it.

When I say I wasn't viewing the game in a holistic way I think it's more about how I thought about it in general. Not like zooming out and looking at a graph.

For whatever reason I never really thought about things in the right way.

For an example if I had a hand let's say some guy 3bet me and called a 4bet w/ 93o and won some big pot off of me.
My natural tendency would be to just think how he's an idiot, how could he play that hand and how did the board allow him to win, etc.

Just kind of very reactive and focused in on the wrong things.
Instead if I had curiosity, I could think that's interesting I wonder why he played that, what does that mean about the rest of his game? What do I do to exploit that?

So it was just a lot of wasted mental energy going towards the wrong things that didn't help me at all.

In the same way if I had someone who's very aggressive 3betting me constantly, my natural reaction would be man this guy's annoying who does he think he is? And how might I react? 4betting more, maybe opening tighter, clicking wars.

Again a lot of it is also ego driven. Instead if I replace ego and reactiveness with curiosity it kind of reframes everything and directs my energy to something actually useful.

And I think this also made my actual study of the game less effective as well because as much as I was studying different concepts and doing solver work my framing of the game was just off.

It's wild that I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on coaching and courses but I never really understood anything until recently.

It seems like a very simple adjustment and maybe a lot of others just always did this naturally. But for whatever reason until I really talked it out with someone who understood me pretty well and also the game it eluded me for pretty much my entire life.

And during downswings it's very tough because it is easy to get confused and you feel like maybe what you thought you knew could be wrong. And that's where a lot of frustration can happen.

^ Thanks for elaborating. Makes more sense now. Substituting "curiosity" for "ego" is easier said than done, though. I was an early Tommy Angelo adoptee and still do meditation (and occasionally breathing at the table), but understand how such practices don't work for all personality types. In the end, I don't believe it's realistic to assume we can remove emotion from poker but we can reconfigure it, perhaps, so that anger or frustration, can be transposed into, say, determination to understand opponents better and apply the appropriate strategy (with it still remaining a psychological "battle").

I believe the 93 4bet pot example is also about a lingering sense of injustice and lost opportunity. I actually folded 99 from utg1 v utg PFR yesterday after he c-bet Q73 multiway with that exact hand (93) and then watched on the sidelines as he turned the case 9 to stack another player's Qx!

The strategic adjustment is obvious in this case (i.e. 3bet the 99 from utg1) but the reality is that such a set-up is unlikely to reappear and internally I'm saying to UTG: "what the ****, why are you Rfing 93 UTG in a full-ring game, for, if you just snap-folded preflop, I would have Rfied and turned a set, and, furthermore, why after Rfing 93 did you c-bet bottom pair into four players, for, if you just checked then I would've probably seen the turn etc." The point is this internal monologue of mine, which poker players experience all the time, with its repetitive and conditional logic etc, is unwanted noise that fuels the emotions and heightens the sense of injustice/run-bad narrative/absurdity and so on.

But while we know the signal should be "ok, this guy who I assumed was playing standard ranges is tilted/impatient/in a mood to gamble/isn't fazed by the stakes and therefore we can adjust and 3bet wider etc", the noise still lingers and keeps the unwanted emotion alive, lessens our cognitive abilities and threatens to seep back into the decision-making process, even though we know we shouldn't let it do so.

Anyway, this is my take on your perspective, which I was pleased to hear after such a long break. Good riddance 93 and may your echo diminish into nothingness (or at least become a reason to be more curious).

Appreciate your perspective and I think you pretty much got it spot on.

I think mostly it's how I let my brain allocate my energy and attention.

If you're mostly asking the right questions like "ok this guy did X or showed up w/ Y in this spot, what might that mean? how can I exploit that?"

I think you'll mostly be too preoccupied focusing on the important things so there's just no room for "man I just got runner runner'd again".

At least that's how it ended up working out for me.

I'm sure a lot of better players just did this naturally without a second thought but I don't think I had any natural talent in that area and really had to learn by the numbers.

But I do understand this is likely easier to apply to a cash grind where the money doesn't matter.

Tournaments I think are psychologically very different.

Interesting. I'm the other way around. In cash games, that's actual money that I could have used for something, and its loss hurts. In tournaments, they're just chips, and it's easier to maintain a psychological distance.

I've taken a ridiculous beat HU at the end of a tournament that led to a $14K difference between first and second and just laughed it off, but I've been crushed by less ridic beats in a $1/1 home game.

+1
I used to feel the same way in a cash game pot thinking "omg that was a weekend vacation somewhere."

but now playing within my BR much more conservatively. its all just BBs and SPR and BRM

Yeah I guess it really depends on the stakes at hand.

For me the thing with tournaments is if you make it far enough you kind of look at the what if of the top prizes and even though you technically didn't lose that money psychologically it could kind of feel that way.

Also the fact of the time commitment. But yeah everyone likely does have different perspectives in how they view each format.

But for me I think it wasn't even really monetarily connected because I would get about the same amount of tilt busting out of a $1 tournament or playing $10nl.

You can only control your own actions. Try to accept everything as calmly and dispassionately as possible.

Imagine taking away from yourself one of the greatest feelings in poker, the comeback. Enjoy the ride, the ups and the downs. The other day I lost a stack to a bad beat to a lady who complained after putting a bad beat on me that that particular dealer never let her win, yadda yadda yadda. I took it like a champ, even joked why did the dealer have to start letting her win now! Then during that same dealer's down I win all my money back and when the dealer leaves she and I both exchange a knowing look and a smile. If the bad beat bothered me how am I going to enjoy getting my money back? It's not going to be possible. The less the bad beat affects me the more the comeback feels good; there's a correlation there.

I'm glad you're playing again and good luck!