lucky_scrote's (b)log/diary

[lucky_scrote]

Last Saturday I was very lucky to go to Prague with my girlfriend. Incredibly no poker was involved, it coincided with her birthday so we decided to have a 4 day city trip.

The timing of the trip was pretty good, I had what might be a record losing streak for me since joining the stable with pads in June- I think 5 or 6 losing sessions in a row, this is certainly not abnormal by any means, but it goes to show how well I have run this year. I felt like I was playing a B game throughout which is acceptable I guess but I was losing a bit of hunger for it. I think the strongest part of my game is being hungry and determined with 2-3 tables out and through to closing the tournament. When I was really busto and feeling down I used to get nervous in these stages and definitely make mistakes. These days I find sticking my chips in the middle lots of fun and putting people under pressure, it comes naturally. Since being backed by Pads' stable (June onwards), in the final 3 I have managed seven 3rd's, three 2nd's and sixteen 1sts. I think when I lose a bit of hunger for the game I can downswing pretty hard since I am making more mistakes than normal.

Prague is an awesome awesome place. I have been many times before but always for poker so I had only spent a few hours each trip doing touristy stuff. This time I had 4 days of being a tourist! I did the typical tourist stuff of visiting the busiest areas first that everyone knows about- Wenceles square, old town square, Charles bridge and so forth. This doesn't massively excite me. Well, it's nice, but when I travel I like to be places that most people don't go. I know that you never get the real feel of somewhere in these crowded places where everyone is speaking English and around 35 photos are taken every second. It's also the reason why I can't imagine enjoying somewhere like New York.

On the second day in Prague (Sunday) I booked a segway tour for me and my girlfriend. It was a private tour for the two of us and we spent 3 hours going around the outskirts mostly. It was hands down one of the most fun things I have ever done. I'd never been on a segway before and they are bloody awesome and very easy to use. After just 30 minutes of being on one you can just step back on and move without thinking, it's easier than riding a bike! After spending 3 hours speaking with our tour guide (A czech student, mid twenties) we took every opportunity to ask questions about Prague and to get recommendations on where to eat and drink. I ate out with two other friends Benedetto (DaMatrix), his and my girlfriend where we ended up in a Czech restaurant titled "LOKAL" in which they only served Czech food and some staff didn't speak English. PERFECT. The grub was quite good there, czech cuisine isn't exactly going places though. We ate out as a four the previous night in the Corinthia where it came to 4400 Czech Krona (£200), this night it came to 1100 Czech Krona (£50) and we had more courses and drink!

We did plenty more sightseeing throughout the trip, I find myself constantly fascinated staring at all the buildings in Prague, the way they use two different types of stone to give the buildings beautiful patterns and design is breathtaking. There was certainly an era when Prague was very wealthy.

Back on the grind yesterday and I made it a short one. Whenever I take a week off I find it incredibly difficult to focus for any decent length of time. I luckboxed a 1st in the lightening 6max on 888 for 2.5k or so to book a little profit.

I'm going to set myself some targets for the upcoming week of poker: I need to work on my early game. I notice my win rate on HM2 is greatly affected depending on how I play early game as it calculates how many big blinds you are making. I think I can be lazy sometimes. Currently my investors of the stable mainly look at profit, work ethic and win rates when deciding on stakes. It's a pretty fair course of action. To continue climbing the stakes and bettering myself I believe that early game is where I need to put more focus at the moment.

A solid EV adjusted win rate at the stakes you are playing is 5.00-5.99 bb/100 and 6.-6.99 is crushing. Mine is currently at 6.83 since October. Crownupguy also noticed a few weaknesses in my game that he believes can improve my win rate (notably from the blinds, it's probably from laziness). If I can get this over 7 then I know myself I am ready to begin including some of the biggest regular stuff online.

-Dan "lucky_scrote" Carter

[tikay]

Love the positivity, Dan,

This was awesome, too....

in the final 3 I have managed seven 3rd's, three 2nd's and sixteen 1sts

[redsimon]

What did you feel about the graffiti tags which seemed to be everywhere in Prague, found them a bit dispiriting tbh.

[lucky_scrote]

Poker is a very tough game to be good at

I've not really been winning since my last post, but hardly been knocking it in. On Thursday I had a lesson with Tomi (elmerixx) and it was great. We focused on my stats and went over a few of my leaks that I'm really working on. They should in theory be easy to adjust but I've found that quite often in poker, it's never easy. My biggest weakness is probably folding a little too often from the big blind (one of the easier fixes) and not constructing a better flop cbet or what to do after skipping a cbet. In the last 2 sessions I've played I've been trying to put in 110% by working on these leaks and I can't seem to get things going. The problem is, it's far too easy to be results orientated in poker. In most things in life, if you do something with a certain method and it doesn't work, you need to try something different. Einstein's quote doesn't apply to poker so much: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.". So my hard work the past few days has had no positive feed back. During my session yesterday I was almost thinking about trying to forget anything I had learned in the past week.

Outside of actually playing poker I have worked really hard on a new hud. I shamelessly modeled it on my coaches HUD but I had to make it from scratch at least. I remember CambridgeAlex making a funny video a while back where he was commentating whilst playing and correctly guessing his opponents hole cards just because his HUD said so. It's bloody difficult to use a HUD correctly. Just because I own a book on Quantum physics doesn't mean I know anything about it.

Here is what my current HUD looks like:



Hopefully I can close down a little of my makeup before I am done for the year, I'm not in much ($6.4k) but I'm probably only going to squeeze in two more sessions before I'm done for the year.

[youthnkzR]

Hopefully I can close down a little of my makeup before I am done for the year, I'm not in much ($6.4k) but I'm probably only going to squeeze in two more sessions before I'm done for the year.

I should hope one of those sessions is going to be the $5milly milly!

Nice read Dan. Best of luck for the new year!

[tikay]

Good read Dan.

$6.4k in make up?

I absolutely get why MTT-ers are staked, & why they are, by definition, always in make up (I don't necessarily agree with all of it it, but that's a different story), but even though, in relative terms $6.4k is not much......in real life relative terms, that's a great deal of money.

It would scare me to bits.

Have enjoyed the revival of this Diary, hope you keep it up.

Season's greetings (ugh at that corny phrase) to you & yours. 

[lucky_scrote]

$6.4k in make up?

I absolutely get why MTT-ers are staked, & why they are, by definition, always in make up (I don't necessarily agree with all of it it, but that's a different story), but even though, in relative terms $6.4k is not much......in real life relative terms, that's a great deal of money.

It would scare me to bits.

I've been playing much higher these past few months and I would say $6.4k is nothing. I have been EXTREMELY fortunate that I've not been in 5 figure make-up for around 5 months now. Of course the bigger edge you have the harder it is to accumulate make-up but poker can mess with your head when things aren't going well and make you play awful.

@gaggle I'm not sure if I'm playing yet. My sister is coming over to Holland for 4 days so it seems a bit rude to play. We will see.

[lucky_scrote]

I hope everyone had a fantastic christmas and new year! Mine was full of friends and family and very little poker. I managed to sneak one session in just after Christmas since some guests had to delay a visit by a day giving me time to do something on my own.

I have played 4 sessions since my last update and managed to win in every single session, quite a feat when playing online mtt's! I've been studying pretty damn hard on my own game using what resources I've got. Since my last two lessons with CrownUpGuy and Elmerixx a lot of things have clicked into place. I've been working really hard on my style of play and exploiting the field. It is beginning to feel that I am getting further ahead of the curve and that I am starting to notice a lot more of my opponents mistakes and ways I can exploit them. A year ago I used to look at certain fields and think "what's the point" or "That comp is a dick swinging contest" but that couldn't be further from the truth. There are some great MTT players out there, but the biggest games online still consist of regs that think they are just as good as the rest if not better. I think it's easy to fall into this trap though, you get complacent and confident of your own abilities so you stop studying as hard. I imagine I will go through a phase of this if I decide to cut down on my studying.

My session yesterday was fun. Sundays are obviously the biggest day of the week and I feel really good about them these days, winning what felt over 50% of the time last year. The session started so badly, I was busting early stages in most of my comps and making a few mistakes, I was also pushing my table count and doing so I found myself not playing my best (and playing slightly tighter). Eventually I managed to get on a roll and had huge stacks in the Sunday Milly, Big 162, Big 11, a $55 freeze and the ipoker major. I didn't do well in any of the biggies, but the cashes managed to just about make me have a winning session and given how the session started I was really pleased.



I also managed to make day 2 of the ipoker major. I'm 20/29 with €14k or so up top so it's a nice way to start my grind today.

Outside of poker I'm looking to improve my health and fitness this month. Definitely not a new years resolution but after copious amounts of food and alcohol over December I'm repping a mini gut that I'd like rid of. I also decided to completely stop my anti-depressants that I've been weening off for some months now. Two reasons for weening off them are to see if you still need the extra serotonin (I don't) and also because the side effects can be pretty bad. For me they really suck. Previously, every second day of not taking my pill I would feel dizzy for a couple of hours in the evening and sometimes have stomach cramps. I've already accepted that I am probably going to feel ill in the forthcoming days, but it has to be done.

[lucky_scrote]

The past week I've been busy at the tables. Since my last post I was enjoying crush mode just without any of the closing. Without being results orientated I was running well and making lots of good decisions. I've been trying to bump my table count a little but I've been finding it difficult, every time my table count is above 9 I start making auto-bot mistakes and old habits keep creeping in that I've been working on. I will keep toying with this, since if I can play optimal with 12 tables then I should be doing that as I can make a lot more money that way.

I've managed to follow up my 4 day winning streak with a 4 day losing streak. I mentioned in my last post that I was also coming off my anti-depressants for good and that I might feel slightly sick; I really underestimated this. I thought I would get just flu like symptoms as I had something similar before but it was completely different. The most prominent side effect I have to mention is the dizziness. Not normal dizziness but it feels as if there is a drunk gyroscope in my head, every time I move my eyes it makes me feel a bit nauseous. Secondly it feels like my brain is plugged in to a power socket. Constant head zapping. I thought that the side effects would stop with just being physical ones but two days ago during a grind the pokerstars servers were lagging and it was really making me feel on edge. I've not experienced much irritability since being on the wonders of anti-depressants but I was really feeling it. Then this happened:

Click to see full-size image.

11 left in the Big82 and I was timing down here. I couldn't do anything but watch my aces get folded because of the shitty stars servers. I was 10/11 at this point so was obviously a very pivotal point. To make it worse the blinds ended up in a big 3b pot that didn't go to showdown. I kinda flipped at this point, I could feel my heart pounding much harder and I felt very tense in my chest. I think my girlfriend walked in shortly after and I snapped at something she said that wasn't remotely annoying. After this happened I tried to compose myself, but for the remainder of the session I struggled to play my best.

The following day I booted up another session. Weirdly, I still felt down about the previous day. I haven't felt like this for a while. I normally have a good nights sleep and wake up feeling like this:



The grind went south pretty quick, my focus was poor and approaching the end of the short lived session I was feeling pretty terrible. I would say at 11pm yesterday I was feeling the worst I have felt in over a year. I had to do some research on what was going on. A slight fear was in my mind that I shouldn't have stopped the medication even though the doctor gave me the go ahead. I had even weened off as best I could, down to 1/4 of the originally prescribed dosage. I remembered that many months ago I found a very good website about anti-depressants, there is a lot of nonsense on the internet, if you google a lot of symptoms it often gives you the worst case scenario. The website was from the royal college of psychiatrists and this page was most useful: http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/healthadvice/treatmentswellbeing/antidepressants/comingoffantidepressants.aspx

After reading all the information and watching the video I then realised that I felt depressed, I had just been suppressing these feelings (as depressed people often do) to protect myself. I think there was possibly some denial too since I really really don't want to be depressed again. Once I was done with the site it was soon time to go to bed, but I was just staring at my computer screen not wanting to go to bed. I had felt like I had lost the will. I thought "what is the point in anything". Don't read this as suicidal thoughts, it's just a complete lack of self worth (Another common effect of depression). I ended up opening 2 beers which is a complete no-no since I shouldn't be relying on alcohol to make me feel good- even just a small amount can make you feel a lot worse the next day. I ended up falling asleep on the sofa downstairs and the missus woke me up at 5am asking what was going on (I always go to bed).

I'm not seeking for any sort of attention or help with this in my blog, I have just learned two ways that this is beneficial. One is that writing these things down makes you feel better, not to mention it's always good to look back on. Secondly is that it's this sort of openness that helps lift the stigma of mental health as well as anyone who is struggling with any sort of mental illness who is reading this. I've felt pretty indestructible on the tables the past 6 months and this has been the first real hurdle for me in a long time.

In some slightly more uplifting news, I played golf today for the first time since October. My friend was aware I wasn't feeling well so I might have to cut the round short, but we played 9 holes and I felt great, it really helped my mood! I was pretty confident that I wouldn't be playing poker today, but here I am currently 1 tabling the big 162 in 9th with 27 left and still feeling in a good mood.

[david3103]

Thank you for sharing the link, and even more thanks for sharing the experience.
It's a process that I will have to go through at some stage and, well, just, thanks.

Hope the Big162 ended well for you.

[tikay]

That's a tremendously insightful & interesting Post, Dan.

How did you get on in the Big 162?

[lucky_scrote]

Thank you for sharing the link, and even more thanks for sharing the experience.
It's a process that I will have to go through at some stage and, well, just, thanks.

Hope the Big162 ended well for you.

If you want to know anything then drop me a PM. The doctors in this country don't prepare you whatsoever with coming off anti-depressants. I have had to learn a lot myself as well as from my GF (Psychologist).

That's a tremendously insightful & interesting Post, Dan.

How did you get on in the Big 162?

It went well

Click to see full-size image.

5 handed I had half the chips and lost a flip to have 75% of the chips in play. Regardless, I'm happy with the results.

[tikay]

Very nice. If that does not make you feel better, nothing will.

[lucky_scrote]

I followed up my decent score yesterday with an impeccable day today. Playing great and running great once again.

Click to see full-size image.

Click to see full-size image.

As well as a 4th in a $33 turbo for 1.3k.

Sunday can't come sooner, would love to have another day of crushing .

[pleno1]

Great days mate, make it a hat trick