So as usual I have decided to keep my blog updated much more frequently, and I hopefully I do a lot better this time. I am going to living off my roll come in about a week, and this means I am going to have to take the game a lot more serious.

The most important thing for me to do right now is to devote at least 1 hour every single to day to studying the game. I need to be posting hands, talking to members of my group, making blog entries and being very critical of my game in general. I think this is the best way for me to achieve the highest win rate, and keep my love for the game.

Basically I want to be grinding 50 and 100NL this whole summer, where I have a very good hourly wage. Over the past 115K hands I have beaten these two limits for a combined 5.42PTBB/100, mostly 10 tabling which is an hourly rate of about 37$/hr. My goal is to play about 15-20 hours a week, which would add up to about 40-50K hands a month. This would profit me about 2.5-3K a month which is very achievable.

I basically want to be playing whenever/where ever my hourly rate is the highest. Since I am going to be playing for an hourly rate I am going to quick keeping track of my results, and instead log the number of hours that I have grinded it out playing my A game.

If I feel there were spots that I wasn't playing my A game then I won't count that towards the running total, and if I was tilting I have to subtract from the total. This should get me much more focused on things that I can control, instead of letting outside factors drive me insane. My hourly rate should be about 30-60$/hr if I am playing my A game, and depending on what limit I am playing. So I can approximate how much I made in that session, just by the amount of time that I play, anything other than that is just variance and I do not need to pay any attention to this.

Now I feel that I am really on the verge of breaking through this phase in my poker career. I am ready to start playing poker for the long term results, and I am starting to realize that the short term results are insignificant, other than it can drive you crazy. So I want to quit messing around with this, and just focus on factors that are under my control.

I am starting to work out again, along with eating better and taking multi vitamins I think this should have a real positive impact on my game. I want to strive to be the best that I can possibly be in this game, and I want to do everything that is under my control to do this.

So I was just going over my graph for my recent results at 50 and 100NL and something struck me as really weird. It seems that every time my non-showdown winnings goes up, the showdown winnings goes down, and vice-versa.

Now at first this doesn't seem weird at all, and in fact completely logical, but that is only because most players are losing money in non-showdown pots, so that relationship makes complete sense. However, I have a style of play where half of my profit comes from non-showdown winnings, and I feel that I am not taking complete advantage of this.

If you think about it, the original reason that I play so aggressive, is to establish an image and get players to stack off light, or pay me off my value bets. So when I am winning my most money in non-showdown pots I should have my loosest image, and therefore I should also be able to profit big in showdown pots as well.

The reason that I don't think this has been the case for me, is because I haven't been able to realize this point and capitalize on my image. When I start winning a bunch of money I am sort of like a run away train, that just keeps going faster and faster. I haven't developed that ability yet to completely change gears, and start playing a whole new style of play. In the past my line of thinking has been, "oh he knows I am playing aggressive, so he is going to play back at me, so I need to be a level ahead and stack off light!!!" And I would just keep getting crazier and crazier, and would hopefully log off before I spewed off all of my monies.

So now I want to be able to train myself to sort of get in a rhythm, and know about when is the right time to play crazy loose, and whens the right time to change up gears and play like a nit. I think the better I can go back and forth in between the two, the more profitable I can be.

So what I want to do, basically always and as a rule of thumb for every poker game, is start out playing 100% straight forward, and not doing anything that isn't completely ABC poker. I want to do this until I can get a feel for the table, and know what types of players I am playing against.

Once I have done that effectively enough I should have a very tight image, and this is the perfect time to loosen up and start making the moves that I want to. Still passing up on opportunities if they are less than perfect, but I have to be exploiting my opponents mistakes in the best way that I know how.

After I do this for a while I will probably get the LAGy image that I am used too, and this is when opponents are going to start stacking off light. This is when it is most profitable for me to be at the table, if I can change gears, and stay ahead of them. The way to take advatage of this is not to start stacking off light myself. but to go into nit mode and start pushing the nuts.

I think this is a wonderful cycle, and would be about the ideal rhythm to get into for basically every session that I play. This would really lower the variance on my side, and could make the upswings a lot bigger. If I can utilize my image properly, my non-showdown winnings will go in an upward trend at the same time as my showdown winnings, and this would be a huge WR, so hopefully I can live rather stress free, while maintaining poker as my main source of income.