I’ve taken a few days off playing this week. I think I’d started to feel the grind a little, the constant up down swing and not feeling like I’m making any progress. Having looked at pokergrapher, this year has just been one big rollercoaster so far without making great progress. Here’s my graph for the year to date:
As you can see its been a tough time, terrible downswing in the middle, battle back to profit, hit the skids again, and now back to break even. Adding on the last 15k hands of 2007 leaves about the same position. All in all it just goes to show how tough poker can be mentally, you can go through long periods of not seeming to achieve much at all. Career wise I’m still running at about 3bb/100, so I’m confident that this is just one of those inevitable swings. But it really can be longer than you think.
So by the end of last week I was feeling jaded with the whole thing. Battling back only to run into some more coolers and slump again. I think the toughest part is when you feel you put people on a decent range, decide you are ahead of that range, and play strongly – only to find that their hand was at the top of that range 
Of course this is going to happen, the mental challenge is not altering your game when you go through a run of sessions where the villians always seem to be at the top of the range. This is certainly what occurred in that most recent slump – running hands like QQ into AA when the villian’s stats are like 30/20/5.
In other news I have decided to make a purchase from Amazon – a title called “How to Read a Book”. One of the things I have been groping for is a really good METHOD to learning from books. It’s all to easy to read a good poker book, like the concepts, but how much really sinks in? This new book is supposed to teach a method for efficiently absorbing the contents of an instructional book, and actually understanding the information that is written. It’s currently in transit, I have high hopes for this title. I will post an update and review once its arrived and I’ve had a chance to have a decent read.
March 28, 2008 at 8:04 pm |
Keen t o hear how you find that book, may need to had it to my own book list.