I need a plan

I need a plan. This month has totally sucked pokerwise (and work-wise for that matter). First off, all of the goals and thoughts I had in the last post are utter fucking blown. Forget about it. I need a fucking new plan.

I am so bad at poker its not even funny. Thing is, I honestly don't know why. I've watched video's, I've read books, I've posted hands on forums -- nothing helps. Probably because I am misunderstanding/misapplying everything I see/learn.

I need to have a plan and I need to be disciplined about it. I believe I spoke about playing less tables as one of the things I was going to do. I must stick with that. Four may be too many tables. Which, is a problem because I get bored with it easily and it will take forever to get in the hands I want to get in for my plan. Oh well. I must remain disciplined and stick to a MAX of 4 tables. Why just 4 tables? Its simple. I need to think long and hard about every single hand I play. I need to think out why I am taking the action I am taking; I need to think about my opponents ranges and how my hand fairs against that range. I need to have a plan for beyond the current betting round - I need to know if I bet the flop, what is my plan on the turn/river based on my opponents actions/cards that come out. Basically, I need to THINK. Just fucking THINK. I'm a fairly smart person so if I just fucking THINK I should be able to reach the goals I want to reach.

The plan: move down to lowly fucking 25NL 6M and play 10,000 hands until after such 10,000 hands, I have a winrate of over 3.0 ptBB/100. For a 1/2 way decent player, that should be easy as fucking pie. Not for me - cuz I suck. If I do not reach the wintrate, I will play another 10,000 hands. If I am still not there, I will play another 10,000 hands. Until I make the winrate as 25NL then I just don't fucking deserve to move up.

When (if) I finally accomplish that goal, then I will move up to 50NL, where I will start the process all over. So many beginners do this and rise on up. Me - I'm an experienced player with over 400K hands and I STILL SUCK.

Also part of the plan is to take at least 30 minutes after EVERY day or session to review my hands. I will devote another 30 minutes to posting a hand on the forums for review/comment.

I will show my 10,000 hand results here to embarrass myself.

June 08 Goals; Leaks; Stoxpoker

First, we'll start off with my poker goals for June:

1. Play over 60,000 hands between the 50NL/PL FR and 100NL/PL FR, primarily at 100NL/PL FR.
   
2. Stick with FR. I know that you think 6M is fun (and it is), I need to settle-in at FR instead of playing both, I need to focus on FR for awhile - besides, it better fits my nitty style.
   
3. Have a pt/BB greater than 3 over those 60,000 hands. Don't think I've ever made that goal yet. It will happen for the first time this month.
   

Leaks, and why I will be successful this month:

1. Small Pots for Small Hands, Big Pots for Big hands. I've recently become a member of Stoxpoker, which is another video/coaching site (more on that later). Anyway, one of the first videos I watched was "small hands for small pots" taught by Ed Miller. Kind of obvious, and logical right? Well, not for me, apparently. I look back at how I've been playing and I've been building big pots out of small-to-mediocre hands such as TPTK, and overpairs. I need to find a place to check when in position and stop building huge pots. There is nothing wrong with taking down a modest-sized pot with TPTK, or TPGK. Its ok to sometimes check the flop with TPTK, its ok not to cbet EVERY-SINGLE FLOP WHERE YOU WERE THE PRE-FLOP RAISER WHEN YOU ONLY HAVE 1 CALLER. I'm going to keep the number of tables down to six and really focus on building a pot the size commensurate with my hand and my opponents range, which leads to....
2. THINK ABOUT YOUR OPPONENTS RANGES. From that, I can see how it fairs against my range to determine what size of pot I want to build. In thinking about my opponents range, I also need to think about how he would play those ranges based on his stats and the plays I've observed him make. In other words, instead of blindly cbetting or blindly checking behind when I miss, I need to put my opponent(s) on ranges and then decide best how to exploit that. I need to remember against certain opponents in certain situations its ok to take a passive line; its ok to fold a good, but not great hand.
   
3. With the above two things in mind, I think I can open up my PFR % from button down to the hijack position as I will be doing a better job of evaluating the situation and exploiting my opponents tendencies. Meaning that I'll be playing better post-flop and so I can open up my PF ranges when in position.
4. Work on getting my $won w/out showdown up. PT3 has this cool graph that shows the dollars you've won when you did not go to showdown. Last month, mine went pretty much at a right angle. I don't think it needs to be positive, but it needs to be much closer to even so it isn't such a drag on my dollars when saw showdown. From my graphs from May, I noticed that I was winning a ton when I saw a showdown (my big hands and ok hands were holding up), so the fact that I was consistently losing money w/out a showdown didn't feel like it had a big impact. But, when some of the bad beats starting coming, and I built big pots with ok hands that lost on showdown, my dollars won at showdown flattened out and my won dollars w/out showdown continued heading down. You can guess what the results were. So, how am I going to get that up? A lot of that has to do with the first 3 points - I have to stop building a big pot on the flop/turn with marginal hands to keep from being pushed off of them on later streets. Its ok if I lose a small-to-medium pot with at showdown with small-to-medium hands once in awhile if I don't lose as much when I build a big pot only to wimp out and let it go. And, if I am paying more attention to my post flop play in thinking more about what my opponent's range is, I will be better at letting hands go w/out getting too much in and I will be better at finding spots to push my opponents off of their hands and actually winning w/out a showdown.
   

Stoxpoker vs. Cardrunners:
I may have mentioned this before, but shortly after I paid the rather large sign-up fee at Cardrunners, I learned that if I have a rake back of more than $500 in a month, rakbreak.com will pay for 1 month of Stoxpoker membership. So, this month I did just that (but had to pay a $75 sign-up fee). Well worth it, IMO. Of the two, I find Stoxpoker much better because of a cool classroom videos they have in which they go over strategies and then apply them using a replayer vs. featuring almost only videos where you watch someone play tables. I personally get a lot more use out of the classroom feature where you get the background and then very in-depth explanations using examples. Stoxpoker also has classroom videos regarding psychology and math. I will keep Cardrunners for a little while longer to get some value out of my sign-up fee, but I think I will stick with Stoxpoker in the long run.

May 08 Results; Worst. Downswing. Evah.

June, ah. June. What can I say about June? I can say it was one helluva rollercoaster ride. I started out on absolute fire -- in the first 2 weeks I was up over $900 playing both 6M and FR at the 50NL/PL and 100NL/PL levels. I was rocking. Then I made the big mistake of opening my mouth and bragging. I told my wife how well I was doing; I told my buddy Denny how good I was doing. That very day, I started a 10 day downswing in which I did not have a single friggin' day where I was ahead. It was amazing. The last week of May, I turned it around a bit and was up about $400, having 5 out of 6 days in the plus column. A lot of that was taking bad beats (JJJJ loses to K10s when guy hits his 1 outer for the royal flush - lost over $200 on that hand), but admittedly a lot of the downswing was spewy play with me. I did figure it out though and I believe that was the reason for my turn-around during the last 6 days. Anyway, check out these results by time period:

May 1 - 16:
Hands: 17,151
P&L (w/out rakeback & bonus'): +$979.60
ptBB/100: +4.79

May 17-25:
Hands: 25,642
P&L (w/out rakeback & bonus'): -$2,238.50
ptBB/100: -5.41

*PL100 6M: -$725.40
*NL50 FR: -$659.70
*Nl100 FR: -625.50

May 26-31:
Hands: 7,254
P&L (w/out rakeback & bonus'): +374.25
ptBB/100: +6.05


Total for May:
Hands: 48,657
P&L (w/out rakeback & bonus'): -$949.95
P&L with rakeback & bonus': +$68.57
ptBB/100: -0.52

2008 Total: +$2,369
2008 Goal Thru May: +$5,000
Pace: -$1,631

For my next post, I will list my June goals, and explain what leak I think I've found and what I plan to do about it, as well as Stoxpoker and how it compares to Cardrunners.