As I attempt to take NLHE more seriously and actually read up on strategy, post in the 2+2 forums, and basically start all over again at the lowest online levels, I find that I am forced to take a long look at myself not only as a poker player, but as a person. I have described in past blogs, that I tiled very easily when playing poker. That has improved over the years, but not as much as I would like due to the fact that I approached losing sessions as an indictment of my overall ability which is a ridiculous thing to do. I would go from bubble to bubble of tilt, so to speak rather than really making a concerted effort to change my way of thinking so that I wouldn't allow this to happen. It was obviously challenging to do so when running bad, playing bad, losing money, or all of the above.
I believe that I mentioned a few posts back that I have been "gambooling" a bit more when I go to a nearby casino that doesn't have a poker room. I've been playing the $10 slots and winning, luckily. This was my attempt at an exercise in learning not to care about losing money. I would limit myself to the amount I could play or lose and although I wanted to win, the point was to let go of being afraid to lose money. Now this was just one small step in trying to change my outlook on poker and there isn't much strategy in playing a slot machine. It was a very basic step in disassociating myself from playing scared. There were times when I lost $400, to $500 in a matter of 10 minutes. Luckily I won a bunch of money which allowed me to continue playing slots as well as take that money and play poker at my local casino.
The one problem with not caring about the amount of money is the slippery slope of playing well. In poker, the basic bottom line is to win money. I don't want to go to the opposite extreme and just play wild because I have no value for money (which has not happened). I began focusing on NL4 online, which is basically playing the smallest stakes on CAKE poker. $4 is the maximum buy in to start with, and the big blind is .04 cents. As I have stated in past posts, I have played NLHE before and even won some money in a tournament soon after Black Friday, but I have quite a bit of work to do, not only to get the fundamentals of the game in to my brain, but to then catch up to where the above average player is. The last part is going to be the big challenge. given the fact the I don't have as much free time to spend studying and playing poker. So far I winner at NL4 since I made an effort to play better and learn, but recently have had some tough hands that cost me 4 buy ins. Combined with a 2 buy in loss at the live tables last week, my focus of not valuing money at the poker table has been faced with some resistance. 2-3 years ago, I would have had some major blowups and tilting behavior, but this time around, I had less of a blow up or tilting behavior. I still tilted a little, but nothing like before. I consciously told myself that I needed to focus on making good decisions and not looking at the win or loss. It worked for a while, but I still allowed my emotions to get the best of me at times.
One thing I am doing this week is to take more time to post in the poker forums so that I can keep my mind on making good decisions and learning about common situations that will arise. If I just try plugging on and playing poker, I may not learn the fundamentals as well as I would like. The other thing that is more of a long term challenge for me is to not look at my results when playing online. I have the auto rebuy set and keep the HUD display over my stack. There are times, that I have to check how much I have in a hand, but that won't give me a clear idea of where I am at win/loss wise. Beginning in September I am going to make an effort not to look where my bankroll is at so that I can just focus on making good decisions in each hand. I don''t expect to be completely successful, but you have to start somewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment