Tuesday, May 08, 2007

My poker mindset

Matthew Hilger and Ian Taylor (Piemaster) have a great book on the poker mindset. I know most of the material they write pretty well, but I admire their cold and calculated look at how a poker player should approach the game. Sometimes I wonder about my own mindset.

If I am being honest, I think my biggest skills are:

Ability to adapt to many different situations in MTTs, especially post-bubble
Analytical ability in NL holdem and willingness to adjust
Ability to never take a massive loss and walk away from games if I had a bad run
Ability(?) to never play games that are outside my bankroll.

My biggest weaknesses
Inability to be satisfied with mastery of one game (I jump from PLO to NL holdem, to tourneys, to SNGs, etc.)
Frustration level when I get a couple bad or unlucky beats
Unwillingness to move up levels quickly

Most of my biggest weaknesses have to do with mindset. Sure, I can become better at every game I play, but in NL holdem and NL holdem tourneys, I am not "weak". I am not sure my emotional state with poker is optimal, however. For example, I had a great run over the past few days, clearing about 1000 in a few days. But one session where I have AA losing to QQ on a flopped set, KK losing to QT all in on a Q94 flop, and 22 losing to 99 on a 982 flop, got me very frustrated. I need to do a better job realizing this is variance and focus on the longer run.

I know completely that a focus on the short term is unhealthy, yet my mind and emotions don’t always run side-by-side.

Summer is here – expect more updates

The school year is over, and grades are in. I expect to update my blog much more often!

Got a new computer with dual monitors

I am just getting it hooked up, but I expect to be able to 8-table some now with this setup. Woo-hoo!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home