[Insert funny and witty diary title here]

[AJR14]

I’m planning on quite a big poker weekend this weekend, no plans whatsoever so I’m going to use the time to get a couple of decent size sessions going. I was thinking of returning to 30nl but i am going to start at 20nl and see how that goes. If i start to tear that up i will add some 30nl but it is more likely i will stay at 20.
 

I’ve swerved any life updates for a while purely because there has been nothing really going on worth an update. Probably the most exciting thing i have done for a while is buy a couple new fish (not some random bad poker players lol).

I don’t think i have mentioned on here before that i keep fish, I have one tropical tank and one coldwater. The new additions are for the cold water. Not sure how i got into it but started about 3 years ago. Great things to keep. They are easy to look after (unless you are me) and great visually for the house and any kids that visit love them. I’m fascinated by the fact you can keep a whole different world in a tank, in your house.

I’ve had loads of problems with the tanks recently though so the amount of fish i have got is far less than i used to have but looks like we have managed to sort the problems out and going to start refilling them.

I’ll stick some pictures on at some point.

I also recently re-acquired Cubase (a music production software) that i have been on quite a bit, creating some shocking pieces of music that because i have created sound great to me but aren’t quite ready for public appearances. Unfortunately i am self taught on that software so i know the basics (slightly) and very little else.
I’m surprised my neighbour hasn’t come to kick my head in yet as i constantly have the same part of a song on loop trying to add things, it annoys me so the missus and the neighbour must be smashing their heads on the wall.

I’m on the hunt for a good software to help create mash ups. Cubase was pretty tough for that when i tried and it’s one thing i would love to do. I love a good mash up.


Record of the Day: Ed Sheeran and Passenger – No diggity. Found this great live performance other day. Enjoyed it all except Ed’s ‘say whaaaaat’ at the beginning, No idea what he was thinking. Rest is a great listen.

[AJR14]

So, an uncomfortable situation arose yesterday while in Asda (there are other supermarket chains available). While stood looking at a shelf i said ‘i will get some of them for while I’m grinding’. This was met by a weird look from one couple and a snigger from another chap. The missus found it pretty funny as well and i started to realise how weird the poker dictionary sounds to others.

I manage to keep poker lingo away from everyday life but there is the odd time that it creeps in and it’s almost always met by the same confused looks.  The poker jargon sure is a bizarre one. Forum regs and live players must have to explain themselves all the time. The worst time to let the lingo sneak into everyday chat is in fromt of my mum, when i have to explain it's a poker term it then leads into having to spend the next hour convincing her she doesnt have to worry about a gambling problem.

That brings up another interesting question, when does gambling become a gambling problem. Is it just when we lose? I play a lot of hours, probably a lot more than most who will be seen to have a problem. Does the fact that i make money eliminate the idea of it being a problem? Or is that a poker players justification? I know the skill elemant of poker changes the issue a bit but it is still gambling. I mentioned to someone recently that i play a lot of poker and they instant took it as having a gambling problem and when i tried to convince them it was ok because i win and havent deposited in years i was met by a look of sympathy. It was clear what they thought and my Insistence in trying to convince them only seemed to make it look worse.



Anyway, i put in a decent grind last night and had a decent night results wise. It could have been more as i made more poor calls but other than that i am fairly pleased. My in game thinking and hand reading is questionable a lotof the time so i need to brush up on that and quickly.

At one point in the session i looked at all my tables and on at least ¾ of them i had the one player at 20nl i don’t want on my left on all of them. Microstakes is an easy game, it’s us ourselves that make it difficult for whatever reason but there is one or two players that make life difficult as well, and he is certainly one. It’s safe to say i was relieved to see him stand.

There was one bizarre moment of the night. My internet lagged a bit, which is pretty normal so didn’t think anything of it. 2 minutes later i look at one of my tables and see a 4424 board and i have A4. One reccy bets big so i call and a poor reg calls as well, at this point i am certain i am stacking one of them. Then the flop comes 377?!?! Still no idea what happened, the board must have stuck on screen when the internet lagged. To go from quads with players betting into you to ace high in the same hand is definitely disheartening.

I will be putting in some more hours today hopefully. Gonna try and get 3 or 4 in later this afternoon and then maybe another 5 hour session in tonight. 
GL to all that’s playing, unless you happen to make your way to my tables.

Record of the Day: New Order - Temptation

[Tal]

Best record you've chosen in a few days.

[AJR14]

Yesterdays big session didn’t last as long as i wanted. I got pretty tired by midnight and all my old problems started to resurface so i decided to stop myself from making bad calls by logging off. I finished the day with a small win, so now i have had a few winning sessions i am fully expecting losing sessions when i next log on lol.

Just scanned through my HH's inbetween writing this and it is actually pretty joke bad. Ending the day with a profit seems a fantastic result after these hands. I am glad i decided to have a quick look as these are very very poor from me. I am actually quite shocked at how bad i played last night. I blame tiredness! I didnt think it was that bad. I knew i was making mistakes and thats why i logged off but was completely ignorant to how many, and how bad. I will certainly be using these to learn from in the week

Well, this has turned into i tilting writing session lol.

Poker free day today for me i think, until later when i inevitably decide to donate and then tilt cursing myself for deciding to play when i didn’t want to .




Record of the Day: The Hippy Mafia – King of the Sky. On a more cheerful note i heard this for the first time this morning on Sunday Brunch. Love finding new tracks. Great record. Ths will be getting a lot of plays from me for the next week

[Katais]

Just scanned through my HH's inbetween writing this and it is actually pretty joke bad. Ending the day with a profit seems a fantastic result after these hands. I am glad i decided to have a quick look as these are very very poor from me. I am actually quite shocked at how bad i played last night. I blame tiredness! I didnt think it was that bad. I knew i was making mistakes and thats why i logged off but was completely ignorant to how many, and how bad. I will certainly be using these to learn from in the week

Had this same feeling yesterday when I did that quick hour looking through hands.

It was pretty humiliating seeing just how bad I played, just giving money away to bad regs and clueless fish. No real excuses at the mo for not at least playing well with the tables how they are.

I was just sat there for 3 hours in last nights session focussing on "not making mistakes"

That was enough for 1 of my best sessions ever! Admittedly I ran shit hot for the majority.

Can't help but spew a few buyins when I see your name at the table for some reason! Mental game of poker might have the answers?

Took the gloss of an otherwise unreal session, pretty sure if I hadn't done that hand review in the afternoon I wouldn't have done so well, so cheers for taking the time out! Happy to do an hour or so tomorrow if you reckon it'll help. Think 'quick hours' r the way forward with those kinda things.

Good luck if you play later today, cash in as much as you can while the tables r like that!


edit*

There's probably a lot of people read this for the music content and 'record of the day' as much as the poker, so worth a try.......

Does anyone know who's singing the Michael Jackson 'thriller' cover on the sky sports Ashes 2013 'ad' ?

[AJR14]

Just scanned through my HH's inbetween writing this and it is actually pretty joke bad. Ending the day with a profit seems a fantastic result after these hands. I am glad i decided to have a quick look as these are very very poor from me. I am actually quite shocked at how bad i played last night. I blame tiredness! I didnt think it was that bad. I knew i was making mistakes and thats why i logged off but was completely ignorant to how many, and how bad. I will certainly be using these to learn from in the week

Had this same feeling yesterday when I did that quick hour looking through hands.

It was pretty humiliating seeing just how bad I played, just giving money away to bad regs and clueless fish. No real excuses at the mo for not at least playing well with the tables how they are.

I was just sat there for 3 hours in last nights session focussing on "not making mistakes"

That was enough for 1 of my best sessions ever! Admittedly I ran shit hot for the majority.

Can't help but spew a few buyins when I see your name at the table for some reason! Mental game of poker might have the answers?

Took the gloss of an otherwise unreal session, pretty sure if I hadn't done that hand review in the afternoon I wouldn't have done so well, so cheers for taking the time out! Happy to do an hour or so tomorrow if you reckon it'll help. Think 'quick hours' r the way forward with those kinda things.

Good luck if you play later today, cash in as much as you can while the tables r like that!


edit*

There's probably a lot of people read this for the music content and 'record of the day' as much as the poker, so worth a try.......

Does anyone know who's singing the Michael Jackson 'thriller' cover on the sky sports Ashes 2013 'ad' ?

Yeah, i saw you had some pretty big stacks. I had to move from one table where we were both 500bb's deep because i was convinced i would do something stupid and hand you the lot. The AK v 99 hand made it clear i had to move, i was genuinely shitting myself about you raising river lol, i wouldnt know what to have done even though i had the house. Having to fold a house to you would have hurt. I was sat repeating ' please dont raise' lol.

I will do an hour tomorrow. I dont mind showing the hands even though they are poor. I would never have dreamt of making some of these calls when i was grinding 4nl so no idea why it has started to creep into my game now. I'm doing them a lot so showing them to others may help get it into my head to stop doing it lol.

Tables were great for while. they got pretty tough for a spell but like you say there is no excuse for making mistakes and not playing well on those tables.


Regarding the Thriller track, i have kept my ear out but nothing. Shazam will help with that. I know you dont like technology but its v easy to use once you have downloaded it to your phone if you have a phone that will allow the app. Think you get 5 free a month on the app, or at least you do on my blackberry (the worst phones in the world btw. if anyone is tempted by one DO NOT, i have had nothing but troublewith mine). If you have a phone that wont support it i know there used to be a Shazam number you could ring, play the song down the phone then they would text you the name of song. Obv expensive but worked the onece or twice i used it years ago. A lot of fkin about but if you really want th track tis worth it.

[AJR14]

Only a quick update. Played 2 small sessions yesterday even though i said i probably wouldn’t. Predictably lost a couple of buy ins with the 2 main hands me handing over stacks trying to bluff an over pair on a 4578Jccc board vs a player that will never fold. In the other hand i convinced myself the opponent was messing me about with the line they took and i embarrassingly handed him a 175bb stack with top pair in a 3bet pot. Looking at it now, it was a clear fold.

That was later in the sessions though after i had been coolered a lot so tilt had set in.

I think i am trying to win every pot i play at the moment which obviously is a bad strategy. At these tables all you have to do is wait for a hand and take their chips but i seem to be unable to do it. 


Record of the Day: Black Sabbath – Paranoid. I read they hit the top of the album charts yesterday and i haven’t heard this in ages.

[AJR14]

This will be a larger update than normal, I haven’t updated for a few days and those few days happen to have been quite eventful in terms of poker.

These posts seem to always have a downbeat theme. That’s normally not what I am like, I am usually always positive about my poker and the games I play but the truth is since I started writing about my poker in this thread , results haven’t been great and it’s tough to not have the downbeat theme in your posts when results are like that. I’m not a fan of writing moaning type posts so I’m almost certain people won’t like reading it so I am hoping this post will be the last one for a while.


So, where to start? In the last updates I had had a losing session the day after a good winning session which seems to be a trend for me. I then had to make a withdrawal. That’s when the problems started.

I had a real bad night a couple of days ago where my play and the cards were all going wrong. What made that day worse was I had decided before the session I needed to win because I could really do with making another withdrawal. Wanting to win too much makes my game go west, making mistakes puts me on tilt more than anything else and wanting to win but then losing increases that tilt dramatically.

It was one of those sessions that are the most frustrating when you want to win. I was losing every pot. No matter what happened I just couldn’t gather any chips. The weirdest part of that night was I was running really hot cards wise for large parts. I was picking up premiums all the time but everyone would fold, I was flopping sets galore but the opponents would always fold and most would check fold even though they almost always cbet and the same was happening when I hit straights or flushes. This became more frustrating than my complete inability to win pots. When you want to win, you get the cards to win but don’t get the customers it can add a weird element of tilt whilst already tilting because you can’t win other pots. This happened all night and I was down a lot of money.

By this point I was tilting pretty bad and decided to have an hour break.

I logged back on half hour later, still tilting and loaded up more tables. Thankfully I decided to put in a stop loss on which I had reached in 20 minutes so snap logged off again. I am so glad I have the discipline to do this, it’s crucial to be able to get that discipline to walk away. You always hear people who go busto saying they should have stopped earlier. I have no doubts that if I didn’t turn off I would have been busto by the end of that night or at least very close to busto.

It was a tough night, my writing ability is poor so my interpretation here won’t portray how close to busto I was. I was convinced I would be and when going sleep that night I predicted being busto by the weekend. I had probably over exaggerated the true predicament to myself (as tilt can have a tendency to make you do) but the sessions I had where brutal, mix in needing to win and other stuff and it becomes even worse.

I felt pretty awful when sat reflecting on the night later on. I use poker money to help with living expenses while I am still unemployed and losing that would be tough. I have never felt that bad after a session before and I was seriously considering stopping playing for a while, but as I said, the income generated from these games help a lot which makes it very difficult to stop playing.

I woke up in the morning with a strong determination to repair the damage so decided to grind all day. The night before had shown me that the problems for the last few months have been me and my tendency to lose all sort of concentration and discipline. Basically I would make plays, calls or folds without thinking about them. That is why my results have been so erratic, that is why I haven’t been able to gain any momentum and that it why I had such a bad night the other night. Losing any sort of thought processes is a problem I have had since I started, I start to just play the cards and play them badly and the problem for me is I can’t spot it until a real bad night at the tables. I have had 3 other occasions like this in the past but not for about a year.

This has been my own fault, yes I have run bad at times but spew and lack of intelligent thinking has put me where I am at the moment. It’s that fact that has made me more determined to turn it around. It’s weird, when looking at forum posts, looking at HH’s or watching videos I am reading situations right but in my own games it’s like I am the 4nl player I was a year and a half ago.

So I decided to grind all day yesterday to dig myself out of the hole I had created and when I saw that I was tenth in the current sky promo I have took the unusual step of using that to help me gain some roll back. I know they say you shouldn’t chase volume when not playing well but I feel the other night was a turning point and the extra money from the points and promo will come in handy. I am never one to chase rake back as anyone who has read this thread will know I have never mentioned points or rake back earned but I will be doing until Sunday now due to the promo.

I played three different 3 hour sessions yesterday and made a small profit in each. I am nowhere near the level of roll I would like but hopefully the recovery has started. Nights like the one I mentioned earlier can have the side effects of actually helping your game. I am also 6th in the promo at the moment, I probably won’t be that high by the end of it. I would be a happy with a tenth place finish.


As I side note, this is the 3rdcash promo Sky have run in about a month and although I can see why they do it, it really ruins any sort of fun in the games. Any player wanting to play for fun will soon log off. I find these games utterly tedious when the promos are on, and that’s from someone who can win in these tedious games. Any player wanting to spend money playing will soon stop spending money when they lose it and come away thinking ‘well that was a waste of my time’. I have been using the test software for Sky over the last few weeks and with the chat box on screen you get to see how many people complain about ‘hardly any hands being played’, ‘this is boring’ and many more comments from recreational players who then log off. The promo is great short term for Sky but it will be bad for them in the long term. 

I am going to be grinding pretty hard until Sunday unless I start to think it is hindering my game or causing too much hassle and i might not update until Sunday.

[AJR14]

Record of the Day: Cage The Elephant - Aberdeen. Another new discovery for me, Ive never heard of them before until this. Will have to have a listen to their other stuff.

[AJR14]

I have managed to string together 5 winning sessions out of 5 which has actually got me out of the mess i had created the other day.

I was far closer to being rolled for 4nl than i was 20nl but I’m now comfortably rolled for 20 again. I’m usually really strict with my BRM, i’m quite aggressive with it but will move up or down as soon as i need to. This time however i decided to gamble when i wasn’t rolled as i was pissed off with myself and felt that i had worked out what i needed to do. Thankfully it worked, as like i said before losing the roll would not be good away from the tables so there was a lot of pressure on these last 2 days.

Im really happy with my game since the blow up, i have made quite a few big adjustments which seem to be working right in time for a big weekend grind. Obviously there are still mistakes here and there but im playing 20nl, i have to expect to make a lot of mistakes.

Gl to everyone at the tables over the weekend.      

Record of the day: The Smiths - There is a light that never goes out

[BigHawk89]

Hey up mate.

Still following the diary, its been a good read. Glad things are starting to go right for you, didn't realize how serious you were been other day when you said you were unrolled till i read this. You know your well capable of beating nl20 don't think its much of a gamble playing underolled. The games are just a lil bit tougher cause of these promos sky are running atm, the players aren't that special but they know their stuff so its much tougher to play against, specially when your playing 6+ tables. I do agree that these rake races are just ruining the action for recs, i wouldn't want to play vs 3-5 regs on each table if i was just playing for fun. The money isn't really that great tbh cause everyone's really playing for 2nd place cause DTM just cleans up both the lower and medium tiers, the money you can potentially win when the tables arent reg infested is much greater than the 300£ up top.

Good luck anyway matey probably see you at the tables.

p.s stop making me make hero folds i cant be folding trips every hand vs you haha.

[BigHawk89]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpOSxM0rNPM

Thought id add a "track of the day".

[AJR14]

So i managed to get 4th in the cash promo sky was running which was good, as at first i only wanted somewhere around 10th. The bonus and extra rake back will come in handy away from the table and i managed to get the roll back to a comfortable level so all in all a successful weekend, unless you start to analyse my play.

Im nowhere near the level i was or want to be at the moment. I’m just clicking buttons. I should have stopped going for the promo on Saturday with the way i was playing and with how low the roll got again, but hey, why start making sensible decisions? It’s over rated... I carried on. To be honest im glad i did. I won quite a bit Saturday night but not sure how i did.

I have no idea how people grind that many hours a day. I’m totally goosed after the weekend. I used to be able to grind a lot but nowhere near the level of some people on Sky at the moment. There is one chap who must play 16/20 hours in the day, maybe more. I would be a mess after them sort of hours.


I’m having a break from playing for a while. No idea how long yet, could be a few days or could be a few weeks but feels more like a few weeks at the moment. Will just play whenever i feel i like it and when i feel i have flushed away the poor play.


Record of the Day: Groove Armada - Fogma. I thought i was called Fagma until now. Great record

[AJR14]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpOSxM0rNPM

Thought id add a "track of the day".

Great choice for track of the day, have to say im looking forward to this album more than the last few. Sounds good. They are one band i haven’t seen live yet that i really want to see as well.

How you doing at cash at the moment? Im glad the promos (or shgould i say DTM's wages) are finished now. May get better tables.

Also if you been trying to talk and i havent replied at tables i aint being ignorant, its just i havent got the test software now so harder to talk again.

[titaniumbean]

you do realise they play 16-20 hours and yet don't play a single hand well or tough?!?