Bad Run/Good Life

So, it's proving to be much harder to blog from Malta then I was expecting.. Weather is getting very nice, tourists and English students are coming in greater numbers each week and well every time I start a new post, by the time I find time to finish it too much has changed. Anyways, I will do my best to do a better job in the future possibly with smaller posts and will just give you guys a quick update on my poker/life over the past few weeks for now.

Basically it's like the title says, I am running bad in poker. My downswing hasn't ended although I have had a few winning days finally. Most of the bad run is due to bad luck at the higher stakes I've been taking shots at (1ks/2ks) and well my horrible run at ftp super turbos which I have decided to not play as I am attempting to remain a somewhat sane person. Of course i would love to say my bad run is all bad luck but there has been a decent amount of tilt since my last post. Mostly in the form of openshoving 570s and 520s. I am happy that it is not as bad as it used to be but still somewhat disappointed.

I've made a few changes to my approach to poker over the past few weeks that definitively have helped me play better although variance does not want me to see $$ results just yet. My friend Pistons convinced me to stop crying over my allin ev graph and uninstall Holdem manager. I thought this was a great idea since EV graphs only make you feel like you have an excuse to lose and you shouldn't. If you're losing you should work harder and EV graphs just make you think you're fine as you are. Of course, I am not saying that is never true, in fact it is likely that I was to some extent fine the way I was. But without that excuse(the ev graph) I have much more motivation to work harder on my game which is something I have definitively not done enough since I arrived in Malta.

The other good thing is I no longer use a HUD. I have been using a HUD heads up for most of my poker career and I believe it was NOT beneficial. I think HUDs hurt your growth and awareness as a poker player. In HUsngs at higher levels, players' strategies change way too much at different stack sizes and if you can't stay focused and are solely dependent on your HUD it will hurt you and make you very lazy. I do believe though, that a person that has played most of their career without a hud will benefit from using one. Also, in my experience huds are much more useful in superturbos, deepstacks and pokerstars regspeeds then in turbos which are now my main game.

Anyways, because I no longer use HEM I can't give any updated EV graphs which I know you guys love but I hope you will just be happy with one of the graphs I saved before I stopped using it.

















Unfortunately I have no clue which of my graphs this is. If I had to guess it is my lifetime turbo graph or 200 to 500 graph or something but it's the one I have saved on my PC that has the most games in it so probably the best one to post. I should start naming these things when I save them ^^.


Some people asked for more pics of my flat so here's an ok one. My camera is out of battery atm and I'm too lazy to charge it to take more pics of other rooms just now but I can do that in another post if people are interested:

Living room/dining room/kitchen area:








I am enjoying life in Malta more and more. It is very different to wake up after a downswing to go to class then to wake up to an ocean view, good weather and a sick flat. One thing that happened in the last weeks that definitively affected me pretty badly psychologically and confidence-wise though was that my poker results affected my life plans. Poker is an extremely stressful job, and for me, one of the few things that makes up for it is the freedom it gives you. You can work anywhere at any time and that just made all the variance in the world worth it. Recently though, my downswing got so bad that I decided to cancel a planned trip to Berlin during the EPT to focus on playing. This really hurt me because it feels like I lost the one thing I love most about poker as a job. I plan to focus as much as I can now on playing well and making constant money so that hopefully this does not happen again.

Good luck at the Tables!

TYF