After the negativity of writing the last one, I'm looking forward to this. I'm going to adjust the format of this, mostly just to make it a bit easier on myself, but also to add an element of focus. Last month I wanted to do quite a lot in every branch of my game, which I think was a big factor in me failing at every branch. I think from now on I'll focus in on one large broad goal, and have some other less important side goals. Before I discuss my goals for April, it's important to mention that I have a month off to study for my exams in May, so that'll be what takes up most of my time for the next 2 months. My goals this month will reflect that.
1) Studying - As this is going to be a mostly studying month, I'll treat poker the same way. I will massively skew my time this month towards post session review and off-table studying to compensate for last month. This will involve two things primarily, I will finish reading PLOQuickPro, and make myself a set of notes on the important concepts. I will also go through and review every single VPP hand from last month, of which there are about 3000. This is about 100 hands a day (maths degree finally paying off), and I imagine the majority are steal and cbet or defend and miss OOP, so most will be fairly quick to review so this won't take me long. I want to use this to identify patterns in my own game to pinpoint the issues I faced. If I manage to finish both of these, I'll start using my studying time by watching PLO videos, or by reading another book.
2) Mental Game - I have a suspicion a lot of the reason I went on such a bad downswing was because of tilt. I began to read TMGOP, and I reached the point where all of the tilt concepts were explained, but I hadn't read anything about how to deal with them. I will read both of his books this month. I am quite a fast reader, and in total this is about 400 pages left, so I think it is very doable. This seems to important to ignore as a couple of times this month (including my final session a couple of hours ago) I felt tilted, actively identified that I was on tilt, debated making a hero call with two pair on a wet board, realised that I was never good here and I was only considering calling because I was on tilt. And then I called. This is just ridiculous and evidently I need to stop.
3) Actual Poker - I'm not setting a goal for profits or EV this month. However I am considering making one big change - switching to normal PLO tables from ZOOM. This is made a bit more difficult with the shitty laptop, but I am going to invest in a monitor to connect to the laptop and be able to play more tables comfortably that way. I also want to decide how I want to multitable through experimenting between tiling, stacking and cascading. I am determined to prioritise the other goals this month and not just spend my small amounts of free time grinding without any review or improvement. The actual goal here is to become more comfortable playing standard tables and then make a more informed decision about which to play.
4) Timetable - I will have to strictly timetable my revision next month, and each day I plan on devoting 90-120 minutes to poker, depending on how long it takes me to get my work done. How the time will be divided exactly I don't know yet, but poker will be a part of it, and the elements of poker I want to work on will be timetabled too.
5) More regular blog posting - With me going back through hand histories, I will select the most interesting hands and write about them more regularly. Depending on timetabling, I will either aim to post a hand history with review either every day or every other day. The main reason I do this is because it forces me to be correct - I really don't like the idea of publicly stating an incorrect opinion (although I'm sure I do it constantly!) so I go into a lot of detail with the hand and make sure I've looked at it from every angle and used PJ to its full potential with it. I'll save the most difficult and interesting spots for this.
6) PokerJuice - there are two main PJ goals I have. The first one being to completely understand everything it does, as right now I'd say I am fluent at using 70% of the features. PJ is just so amazingly invaluable to the modern day PLO player I'd be putting myself at a disadvantage to not use everything it offers. The other goal is to use their forums more - never in my life have I spoken to such a helpful, friendly and patient group as the people who comment on hand histories in the PJ Club on pokerjuice.com. Most importantly, most of them seem to be (in my experience) coaches so they articulate their points very well, and don't just tell you an answer, they explain why and allow you to take the information on board into your own game. There is absolutely no reason as to why I wouldn't go here as my first port of call if I can't solve a problem myself. I will be writing a more extensive review at the end of the month of PJ once I am 100% unconsciously competent using all of the features.
7) Don't go broke.
So, to summarise, the large broad goal this month is to spend more time learning the game whilst not gambling. There is so much information and software at my disposal it feels a bit stupid to play another hand without processing all of it.
That's it from me today. I'm going away again in a few days so I may not reappear for a while. Once I do I'll be posting regular hand history reviews.
Hopefully see you next time! Seacombe
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