Fun at 50NL

My 50NL coaching has started well and I have been playing some 50NL for 'research'.

I have been 12 tabling without breaking stride and it just hits home to me how important it is to be comfortable at the level you are playing. Tannenj said in his latest video how you need a bit of a swagger at your level and that is how I feel playing 50NL, as opposed to feeling out of my depth sometimes at 200NL.

The game is much less stressful when you have nothing to prove!

On a different subject, my 25NL course has not been the roaring success I first thought. Maybe I have not marketed it well enough but there was a pretty shitty post from a regular CR member, who I don't know from adam, which I think has put doubt in peoples minds.

I do not understand why this guy would post such a thing. I sent a PM asking him to explain to me privately but as expected he isn't big enough to give me a reply.

Not much I can do about it now although I must thank Pawel for putting in a good word for me on my thread and I will run the course starting this sunday even if the few that have paid so far are the only takers. It will be a good experience whatever and I have already learned some valuable lessons.

Students galore!

My ideas for coaching 25NL and 50NL have been very well received by the cardrunners community and it looks like coaching will be take up most of my poker time to the end of April at least.

In view of this I am going to play these levels for a while and use the opportunity to test PT3 some more.

The fact that I suck at 200NL has nothing at all to do with this - honest!

Saturday Night is Donkament Night

Have binned Holdem Manager idea as support sucks, could well be a blessing in disguise though as I am now running PT3 beta 6 with realtime HUD and this is looking awesome. PT3 is starting to excite me.

Haven't played much this weekend as I am going through a study and review phase but did manage to final table saturdays $18k guaranteed on party. Crashed out in 7th but still a nice $600 profit whilst watching the cricket!

Trackers

Been busy with work last few days and haven't played much but lost a few buy ins since breaking the 1k day barrier.

Have managed to get most of my stats into PT3 beta and have to say that it looks very good. Am getting a bit impatient though as they keep putting the release date back. I did a sweat with a student on sunday who uses Holdem Manager and this appears to do all the new PT stuff, HUD looks good and it is ready to go.

For the sake of $80 I am tempted to just go with Holdem Manager for now as this does have a big edge over PT2.

Grab a grand

First $1,000 profit in a day playing 6max. Hopefully the first of many ;-)

I got lucky

Last night was weird.

First up I did a video review for one of my students and then played a couple of 200NL sessions.

First session I felt completely at ease with my game, more than ever before. I was playing well, making tough but correct folds, and making some well timed moves against decent lags. I was planning hands, sticking to my plans but adjusting where necessary, I was well and truly in the zone. I only won a buy in or so but when I finished the session I was very pleased with my play.

I then had a break and some food and later sat down to play again. I'm not sure what happened to me during the break but I came back to play some of the worst poker I have ever played!

I am not kidding, I was truly awful and I thank the poker gods for smiling on me just this once. Overall I booked a decent win for the day, yet I am really pissed off with myself for playing so bad.

I have never felt bad about winning before. I like winning.

The worst thing is that that I cannot work out why I played so bad and therefore can't think of an adjustment to make. Normally I can identify some contributory factor (eg. i was tired, i will stop playing tired) but the only thing I can think of in this case is that I started to think poker is easy and I was invincible.

Or maybe I just cannot handle sucking out in a big pot and just have to do everything I can to get the money back to the intended recipient as soon as possible. If that is true I have developed a major new leak!

Coaching Update

I now have 4 students and we are working our way through my newly designed Introduction Programme. Is taking up a huge amount of my time but is going well and very much worth it to see how well these guys are doing already.

It seems that a lot of low stakes players, especially cardrunners members, have just a few small leaks which are stopping them beat their current level. It is just amazing what a slight change in style can do for your game and so far the adjustments I have suggested have been well received.

Yesterday I spent over 3 hours producing a session review video. I started off by importing the hand histories into poker tracker and looking for any obvious leaks. I then went through hands using the PT replayer and made notes on any hands I wanted to use in the video. Finally I recorded my thoughts on the hands in question and tried to explain my thought process.

Haven't watched it back but I know I say 'erm' a lot......hopefully that won't be too off putting for my student and he will be more intertested in what I am saying around the erms!

Calling Stations and Moving Up

Have moved up to 200NL on pokerstars. Doesn't seem to be a huge difference in these games and in fact they are very similar to the 100NL games at full tilt. Table and seat selection is going to be the key.

I have noticed when moving up a level I always seem to play a little too aggressive for the first few sessions. I think this is because I am trying to prove to my opponents that I belong at this level and am not 'playing scared'.

This is not too much of a problem (better than playing too passive) but the fact is my opponents will mostly be unaware that I am new to the level. I will just be another unknown, my play will be taken at face value, and when I make a spewy 3 barrell bluff into a calling station, they will label me as an over aggressive donk!

Note to self:

A calling station don't fold QQ at whatever level, whatever the board and repping a monster with effectively air is therefore -EV!

The crucial thing here is to learn is to make adjustments and use this image to my advantage. My opponents are now much more likely to be paying attention.