mental game accountability blog
Hello.
This will be focused solely on the mental/psychological aspect of grinding poker.
The plan for this blog is simple but radical: After every session I play, I post here about how the session was mentally/emotionally, including details of mental blunders or successes.
Why? I'm a poker pro fallen on tough times. I never thought I'd start a blog here, but had the idea that it might help for my mental game. Doing this would constitute accountability, supporting the building of stronger mental game.
Also, sharing it publicly will let it be something I'm consciously proud of and thus won't come to take for granted and then let slide. (That's how it goes in my experience: Once having made sufficient mental game improvements, one becomes less pro-active and it deteriorates, resulting in unexpected tilt and mental regression somewhere down the line.)
I will also share some specific mental aspects I'm grappling with. For example letting go of the need to play hands perfectly, avoiding even the slightest mistake. A need based in paranoia around other regs pouncing on my every weakness. Or: having the courage to play hands the way I want to play them, as opposed to how I think they should be played.
Some more detail:
Recently I've already been focused primarily on the mental side of grinding instead of focusing on exactly how I should play hands - and I think that this is the way forward. I think mental game is really the foundation required to confidently and freely improve ones technical game. And I don't want to be doing something many hours a week that is unpleasant, boring, painful. I want to be able to grind for hours pleasantly, relaxed, without mental and emotional exhaustion afterwards.
My relationship with poker has been patchy. I've gone through phases of very resilient mental game, but also very rough, painful phases and low-points, exploring the meaning of 'rock-bottom'. I've made promises to myself - for example that I will never again let myself feel so bad playing poker - so bad that, rationally, It really makes no sense for me to continue living off poker instead of getting a job. I've broken those promises, which that feels shameful and unsettling. I've gone through a period of a kind of burnout that wrecked my mental game thoroughly, after which I took a break from serious poker for a couple of years. Reluctantly returning to poker after not finding a good alternative income, I've been faced with painful experiences of really not being the player I remember being - missing the sharpness and the intuition that used to be part of what let me be a confident regular at mid-stakes.
So why am I even doing this - why stick with poker? Three months ago I seriously considered entering the job market after a stint of half-heartedly grinding in my local casino hit rock-bottom. Re-evaluatung my life the next day, I found new motivation to once again truly try to be good at online poker. Realising it would mean that I could stay in the very nice but slighty expensive appartment where I live and could have the time for the things I love in my life, especially rock-climbing -going out for a whole day whenever the weather conditions are good. Plus I realised that I'm curious poker would go if I actually did try again. I realised that the fear that I'm washed up, that I should admit that I just don't have what it takes anymore, really isn't based on anything, as I hadn't really tried yet, and of course if I don't really try I can't expect anything more than ****. So why not at least try and see what happens.
So since then it's been a combination of: on the one hand fresh motivation and indeed quite fast progress in how my game feels, and at the same time the impediments of the years emotional baggage and of the stresses of my really quite dire financial situation. I'm living as a poker pro in a western country with a net-worth hovering around €2-3k. That really would have sounded absurd to me in the past - but then again it may be freeing to find that it's possible to do this.
Saturday and sunday I tilted in a way I hadn't tilted in a long time. I feel guilty about how self-destructive I was.
To give you some idea of what I can do and how insecure I feel about poker and my bankroll afterwards, one of the worst hands involved me open-raising to 125bb with A5o, then when called I shoved the remaining 80bb on a random flop. (and got it in with 10% EQ)
couple of thoughts about what happened:
- I thought my mental game was at an ok level because of how I was feeling and how well I was focusing and intuiting during sessions.
However, this didn't mean that my mental game was OK. I had neglected/forgotten the basis of my mental game, which is the constant focus on and prioritisation of avoiding tilt. As in: every session I play, every hand I play, only ONE thing is important for the long term, and that's not tilting.
Enough time had gone by without tilt that I had dropped my focus on that and shifted focus to higher levels of mental game. This must never happen. The basis must always remain - as a constantly present integrated level.
- basic error of feeling good during rungood sessions and letting my guard down. In hindsight, it makes sense that with generally lower mood and with lack of practise a bad run session would hit me harder.
- lots of patterns and red flags that I ignored.
- Weird spot too near the start of the session, so before I'm in the rhythm of things, that puts me off balance, takes me out of my comfort zone. Especially a hand where I find myself investing more than expected in some very speculative, unnecessary line. The line itself might rationally look fine, but it's putting myself at risk too soon in the session that hits me and maybe makes my body tense up and dictates a negative mental trajectory for the rest of the session.
- shouting "**** you" or similar. quite embarrassing, and to an outsider it may seem obvious that it's a clear sign that the mental game has dropped below the required level to play... And I've told myself before that it's too often been followed by a horrible session. But in the moment I still try to just re-group and push on. Maybe thinking it was just a brief lapse of control, a normal outburst of energy that occurred because I was so focused on the actual play that I wasn't focused on my emotions. But actually this only happens if some important internal level of meta-cognition/self-observation/feeling is shut-off or in pain.
- seeing a pattern of: losing some large hands with marginal holdings or bluffs, and then hitting lots of good hands and getting absolute minimum value every time. usually in that order. and feeling disbelief at this
- intrusive thought/ self-harm thoughts.
I need to learn to: WHEN these red flags occur, have the discipline to simply accept temporary defeat and end the session on the spot. If I end it early enough, I might be able to play again as soon as half an hour or so later after going for a walk or whatever.
short-medium session, went well, quite focused and stable.
feel quite down now though, guess I just need to patiently wait until I feel more energy.
medium-long session yesterday evening, 950 hands in 2h40.
fairly solid, managed OK with what little energy I had.
Wasn't tilted or even very surprised by an extreme slowroll: I shove full stack on the river with a flush and opponent, from my country, tanks their whole timebank to chat, emoji and call with rivered quads... I've come to expect this kind of thing from austrians tbh.
If you take out a boat, and your main focus is always not to tip over.. you are not going to enjoy your time very much.
If you put up a sail and have a good rudder, you wont have to worry about tipping over all the time, and can enjoy your trip, and get exponentially further.
What is your sail and or rudder?
fairly long session, 950 hands,
decided to quit due to how I was feeling.
Objectively I seemed to be playing ok, and the tables are extremely good,
but I decided to quit and in fact maybe should have quite much earlier.
It's extremely hard not to be superstitious and suspicious in sessions like this, where there's just an endless stream of things going EXACTLY wrong, and in more and more unlikely/weird ways. Regardless of what line I take with what hand-type, it turns out to be EXACTLY THE WORST LINE given my opponents cards/play.
And even if I manage to keep reminding myself that it's fine, it's just the illusion of a pattern, there's a problem:
If I start out actually playing well, and things just happen to go like this, which is very unlikely but possible, then I inevitably start second-guessing myself and start trying to force myself to play more solidly or more carefully/precisely...
so there are 2 possible cases:
case 1: I'm not playing very precisely/solidly (and this is a big factor in the session going like this)
case 2: I am playing very precisely BUT I force myself to play differently, and therefore guarantee that I no longer play precisely...
It's honestly a tortuous experience for me, especially combined with my body increasingly tensing up to the point of a kind general feeling of vibration.
It's just so hard to quit early when the tables look SO GOOD
All my mental game issues are back and it's incredibly unpleasant.
If you take out a boat, and your main focus is always not to tip over.. you are not going to enjoy your time very much.
If you put up a sail and have a good rudder, you wont have to worry about tipping over all the time, and can enjoy your trip, and get exponentially further.
What is your sail and or rudder?
Thanks for another metaphor.
Firstly, I don't completely agree. If I'm sailing or captaining a boat, I should never forget to make sure the boat isn't capsizing... But I wouldn't necessarily say main focus, but rather a constant pre-requisite - a level of management that's constantly active, at least subconsciously.
"If you put up a sail and have a good rudder, you wont have to worry about tipping over all the time" - I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here. A good sail and rudder are effective tools to steer the boat but have to be actively used to prevent cap-sizing, agree?
But how do the sail and rudder parts of the metaphor translate to poker here? What sail and rudder do you think one should have?
Anyway, in my way of thinking: When I feel OK and play, I automatically improve over time even without pushing myself - continuously building and expanding my skillset. So if I can just ensure that I feel OK - that I don't feel bad, then the rest will follow. And opposed to this, what hinders me is getting too focused on how my game is right now - i.e. on the short-term of the learning curve, and get more and more critical and judgemental here. This then leads to feeling bad, which shuts down the whole process.
long session, very tough, lots of nasty spots. would be demotivating if I didn't need to make money now... No option but to grind.
"If you put up a sail and have a good rudder, you wont have to worry about tipping over all the time" - I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here. A good sail and rudder are effective tools to steer the boat but have to be actively used to prevent cap-sizing, agree?
But how do the sail and rudder parts of the metaphor translate to poker here? What sail and rudder do you think one should have?
The sail and rudder would be habits and practices that help you stay balanced, healthy, and in the right direction.
Exercise, meditation, martial arts, regular sleep schedule, generally most disciplines. (meditation on attachment is my recommendation)
It could be a hobby, or even nurturing a relationship.
Whatever it is that you find keeps your spirits in the right place.
Poker is a grinder for the body and mind.
You must be in even better shape than you think to come out the other side in one piece!
Beating poker is so crazy difficult, that if you don't change who you are for the better, poker will eventually win.
Never take your mind off the balance of the boat.
But prepare your boat as well as possible so you can enjoy the ocean more (the fish :P)
The sail and rudder would be habits and practices that help you stay balanced, healthy, and in the right direction.
Exercise, meditation, martial arts, regular sleep schedule, generally most disciplines. (meditation on attachment is my recommendation)
It could be a hobby, or even nurturing a relationship.
Whatever it is that you find keeps your spirits in the right place.
Poker is a grinder for the body and mind.
You must be in even better shap
Bro you never miss 👏
long session - 3.5 hours 1.4k hands.
went extremely well with surprisingly good and constant focus until the last half hour or so when I started to feel tense/stiff and motivation to continue playing was waning. Then suddenly 2 tilting hands occurred and I snap-quit the session, feeling disappointed that it had taken a sour turn.
studying before a session is also a good rudder.
anything you can do off the table to provide an easier time on the table will save you energy during your sessions.
you only have so much energy..
and you need it all to focus and play your best at the table.
if you spend too much energy trying not to tilt, you will burn out and tilt.
the better your rudder and sail, the less energy you need to stay upright and get where you need to go.
if you are constantly underperforming your expectations, it could be to underlying mental/emotional fatigue.
mental and emotional fatigue is underestimated and underdiagnosed.
ok, I'm beginning to like the metaphor more.
and agree about fatigue etc.
Don't quite agree on this "if you spend too much energy trying not to tilt, you will burn out and tilt.".
- I mean technically that's true. But I've found that the best way to build a solid mental game is a kind of very simple, brute-force constant reminding onseself that the only thing that matters right now is not tilting, and thus feeling OK - all the rest will follow in the medium and long term. Maybe a key difference is that, due to the aforementioned logical consequence of not tilting, it's not primarily "Do not tilt!", but rather a constant reminder to not let negative feelings get a hold - that everything is ok as long as I can stay feeling OK, so as long as I don't let tilt lure me into feeling worse than I should...that as long as I avoid that, I will recover very quickly from whatever brief unpleasant moments may occur...
So really it is meditative anyway.
A key lesson I learnt just occurred to me, good to remind myself of it: I remember my biggest winning month, where I played a lot and won a huge amount of buyins, actually included horrendous negative variance that have, without anything but very solid mental game, let to tilt that would have prevented it from being a huge winning month. In fact I think very few of the other regs could have handled it. However, my mental game has only been that good for relatively brief stretches.
fairly long session last night, nice and steady.
long session - 4.5 hours, 1.6k hands
maybe very noteworthy: Playing with constant and more aggressive focus, I actually felt not only that time was going by faster, but also that I was spending/losing less energy ...
extreme tilt. Fortunately I was able to close all tables a few hands after it started instead of waiting for the orbit to finish.
I just couldn't handle a stretch of SO many major decisions I made vs all player types having the exact wrong result -
plus I couldn't handle the obviously shitty decision-making. Brought on in part by my upper body tensing up horribly, which stops me from being able to relax and think properly. It's a chronic physical issue that on some days, like today, re-occurs even though I was motivated, in OK shape and had just gone for a long walk. ****ing awful.
Maybe I should have snap-quit half an hour or so earlier when I had an inkling of a re-occuring phenomenon whereby I continuously ALMOST make the right decision, knowing just AFTER I click what it would have been - with a feeling of my mind somehow having a slight delay behind the action. Maybe it's never worth continuing a session when I feel that. Maybe especially at microstakes and with position on big fish, as it then just feels even worse when things go south...
It's just so sad to be SO CLOSE to making a really GOOD decision, but instead not making it and imediately seeing that it would have been the right one.
Tbh it's just tough to consider that maybe I've become one of those washed up pros that I saw over the years.
looking through the hands, of the 5 hands where I lost over 100bb, I could have avoided literally ALL FIVE of those losses with solid play.
What stakes do you play?
$20 on each table recently
Nice. Is that enough to keep you going as a poker pro in a western country? Ofc no need to give specifics, but I live in a very expensive western country and I’m seeking insight into how pros do it.
Also, do you study, and if so, how?
Thanks in advance ����
Nice. Is that enough to keep you going as a poker pro in a western country? Ofc no need to give specifics, but I live in a very expensive western country and I’m seeking insight into how pros do it.
Also, do you study, and if so, how?
Thanks in advance ����
As for study, where do I begin?
I'm not directly studying much atm, but that's not exactly a useful answer. In general my approach, including when I was good, has been to get a sufficient handle on the currently relevant strategy and meta-game in my player pool, esp. among the best regs, to have a foundation that enables me to continuously self-learn by playing consciously and analyzing hands - in order to continuously develop and update heuristics(and strategy) and intuition.
I know this can be a very good method for some people, but probably has some significant pre-requisites to be better than more school/training-like methods. My problem was rather lack of grind-ethos, insecurities and later some kind of burn-out.
And from my perspective as a professional, how and what you study should always depend on what maximizes your edge. Especially at micros, spending ones study energy on training a GTO/standard strategy is very unlikely to be the way to a huge winrate.
Sounds like you are still trying to row your boat with oars.
spend time building a proper sail.
deep relaxation, therapy sessions, breathing, yoga, meditation.
loosen your grip on yourself and your outcomes, and let your upper body relax.
take some time off and get the deepest sleep possible.
Poker is a guru, and it is showing you your weaknesses.
Your ego wants to push through with sheer force.
Let it go and allow some grace back in.
Take a trust fall into your self, and give yourself permission to love yourself more.
Everything gets better, poker is just a catalyst.
Poker is trying to get you into shape so you can move on to bigger and better things.
Poker loves you, but you are not listening, because you too damn smart.
Stop, breath, and listen.
love you
Sounds like you are still trying to row your boat with oars.
spend time building a proper sail.
deep relaxation, therapy sessions, breathing, yoga, meditation.
loosen your grip on yourself and your outcomes, and let your upper body relax.
take some time off and get the deepest sleep possible.
Poker is a guru, and it is showing you your weaknesses.
Your ego wants to push through with sheer force.
Let it go and allow some grace back in.
Take a trus
What a great delivery, espessially this one: "Your ego wants to push through with sheer force."
GL to OP . and keep this thread alive we all win from this one.
ty
medium-long session, testing out a new strategy.
was getting slightly frustrated that it wasn't working as well as expected, at least yet. But did manage to keep reminding myself of the purpose and focus of the session, namely testing and practicing the new strategy. And I think in general having a specific strategic game-plan that one is motivated to focus on is helpful for getting through frustrating sessions.
2nd fairly long session, 1.3k hands in 3 hours
again testing the new strategy, seems good but still inconclusive.
Was getting somewhat wired and panicky during the 2nd half, funnily enough due to what I thought was a small dose of snuff tobacco hitting me way harder than expected to the point where I took a break and lay down for a minute. And it didn't exactly make me play terribly, but I wasn't feeling the way I want to during a poker session... I guess that stuff isn't for me afterall. (I'm not a smoker)
3rd long session last night.
The final hour was too much for me to handle, I guess. Slight tilt, or rather mini/tilts from a combination of causes - fatigue, winning-tilt, focus sliding from the strategy to the opponents/metagame and winning/crushing, etc. etc..
This time the mini-tilts coincided with a fairly serious doomswitch, with each one resulting in a very sudden maximal loss and combining to conjure up paranoia.
Really quite unsettling how my mental game priorities and heuristics just evaporated once again. Not going to beat myself up about it though, I'm locked in now and I'm going to make it work. I know I can get the mental game aspect on track, and this time it's the final piece of the puzzle - the technical game and grind routine seem to be in place.
