god people that hit and run in heads up are the biggest lowlifes in this world. I guess when you are on the internet people just have no shame or personal pride of any kind.

yeah haven't really been in the blogging mood for a while since that massive downswing. Maybe i'll recap things when I am running well again.

edit: I have been thinking about my mental game alot regarding tilting and etc. It seems like I have really gotten a very good grip of my mental game the last few days and I definitely tilt a lot less now. Now i just gotta continue working on that along with calling people down less and giving them more credit. Also I really should spend time to think through decisions in middle of hands instead of just being lazy and spazzy.

had a pretty sick day playing HU 50NL today. I dont even want to talk about it to be honest. I kinda expected it to happen though as i have been running so well in HU. I guess when u run at 15 PT BB/100 for like 9k hands, shits bound to go down. Just got shat by the cards all day today. i.e. getting it in with TT on a Q63r board against a super aggro player with 67 for a 500BB pot and getting 5 outed. Don't even ask how we got it in with neither one of us beating top pair for 500BBs. Also just kept on getting 5 outed on the river like flopping top pair and having them spike their 2 pair on the river. So much sickness went down it wasn't even real. Lost a whopping 10 Buy-ins today which is pretty sick. Definitely tilted away like 3 of the 10 buy ins though. I think I should have stopped playing when i started becoming unsure of my reads. My reads in heads up have always been sick good which was how i was able to play soo aggressively. ugh im gonna go vomit or something now.

edit: played a guy heads up after the blog and won a quick buy in. He valued owned himself with Q7 against my A7 both of us hitting top pair. Definitely gained a load of confidence back knowing i can still win at these limits. Will makes me sleep a lot easier tonight.

played some random hands of heads up and was able to stack this guy at 50NL twice. Actually got pretty lucky both times getting 22 on 27T board against QQ and QQ against his JJ. Then decided to test the waters at 100NL heads up with my Br at about 21 buy ins. The player that i ended up playing against was actually pretty awful. He was kind of a station and would make small bluffs here and there. He also played a wider range out of position compare to most 50NL HU regulars. Since he wasn't all that aggressive, I was able to put a lot of pressure on him and get him off of his game. This player also only folded to 3bets once the entire match. Eventually he started giving me very little credit and i was able to get it in with QQ against AdQx on a 3 diamonds board on the turn in a 4 bet pot.

I am starting to realize that I have a huge edge over most low stake players in HU cash. Over about 9k hands im running at about 15 PT BB/100 now. Of course I can also just be on a gigantic heater and just not realize it. Even if i was to go on a good size downswing in the next 11k hands, I am pretty sure my PT BB/100 should still be around 8 or something, which means i have a pretty sizeable edge over the competition. It seems like my main problem playing donkaments and cash games is that I get bored too easily and lose focus. I should instead be thinking about what the other players are thinking just like in HU during the downtime. Really concentrate and pick up on reads instead. I find that I pay a lot more attention when i am playing without PAHUD. I really should just quit playing donkaments altogether for a while and just focus on improving my 6 max game and crushing HU.

I am about to get an apartment soon with one of my buddies and look for a job. I have always wanted to play poker professionally and I think if I can win a few more buy ins and move up to 100NL, and keep up a decent winrate at HU; that I can possibly just start living off of poker. If i really concentrate solely at HU i only need to pull in 15 buy ins a month to make an ok living. I am probably getting a bit ahead of myself here but I've always been telling everyone that I just want to be a professional poker player. I've been playing cards all my life before i started playing poker a year ago ( magic: the gathering at a high level). I dunno, im probably just crazy but we'll see where all this takes me.

I'm about to go insane here in Norfolk as everyone is home for the summer and I have nothing to do. So being the maniac that I am i'm gonna drive back to Northern Virginia at 5 AM lol (three and half hour drive). Yeah, im impulsive and probably ADD'd or something. I just cant stand being bored and cooped up in this house any longer : /

so took yesterday off from playing poker. Hung around the house and smoked hookah with my neighbors. Then went went to see ironman with them. Ironman was definitely a lot better than I expected, one of the better movies I've seen in a while; so if you still haven't seen it yet, go see it! Afterwards i went over to the fraternity house that I used to pledge for. Got to see some of the guys again which was pretty nice. Chilled and shot the shits about life with one of the founding fathers til like 4 in the morning over some coors lights and hookah.

So I reread some of my blogs from the past few days and they all seemed pretty negative and down on myself. I have been brutally honest with myself, maybe a little too brutally honest. I think those blogs have definitely killed my confidence and have caused me to play even worse. From now on i'm gonna refrain from only looking at the bad plays I make and pat myself in the back here and there. I think it's very important for my game and mental health to stay positive. Depending on how confident i feel today i may log a few hands or run some donkaments. Peace out.

Don

note to self:

dont play poker when not in the mood to play.

Played a heads up shoot out tournament and the midnight madness. Simply didnt have the heart to play either tournaments and didnt play that well. Maybe i should take a break from poker for a bit.

Played very few hands yesterday but managed to play strong ABC poker and ran decent and won about 1.5 buy ins. I tried to hang out with some people yesterday to take a mini break from poker in order to rejuvenate my motivation. Apparently it didnt really work as i didn't have much of a motivation to play today either. I just didnt feel sharp today and thought i probably wouldn't play that great. But since i was bored and am a degen, I decided to 3 table some 50nl 6max. Played like a total donky calling station and quickly dropped like 3 buy ins in 100 or so hands. I immediately put an end to playing and lounged around to help clear my head a little.

after a bit i decided to fire up a heads up table and came across this super aggro guy. I've been watching a lot of heads up videos and was really confident in my heads up game for a while as i was simply crushing everyone i played at 50NL. It seems to me that switching to 6 max made my heads up game worse; I guess my brain simply hasn't been adjusting to the difference of the games as i play a lot more by feel. This was probably the main reason i played so badly in the few hands of 6 max today as I played some heads up last night also. My heads up game is generally very aggro, read dependent, and heavily dependent on gameflow. I felt like I was playing my B+ game while playing this overaggro guy today; this guy, however, played even worse. He kept on calling with garbage out of position, donked out on all sorts of flops with middle pair kind of hands, never folded to 3 bets, and would donk out every river whenever he had a really strong hand, even if i had the lead in the hand. Eventually I pretty much knew what all his bets meant and really tilted this guy pretty hard for a while. I ended up winning SEVEN BUY INS off of this guy in 300 or so hands by coolering him one hand to set him off. Here were some of the big hands:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2583268: we've been three-betting each other quiet a bit and im simply never folding QQ for a buy in here. Standard cooler.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2583279: so we go back and forth for a few more hands and this comes up. My call might have been a bad call but i thought AQ was the tweener hand in this spot. Considering how aggro we've been playing I thought its possible for him to shove AJ here. So I get there again cos im a giant luckbag. This was the hand that really set him off to the deep end.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2583291: After the last hand I was able to really take control of the match and just run him over a bit. His bluffs were pretty transparent so i've been raising them alot. I've also been double barreling a lot. So when i hit i obviously just kept on pushing.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2583299: 3 hands later this comes up. Obviously on the turn when he raised i knew i had no fold equity, But considering that against a top pair hand i had about 41% equity on the turn so i was definitely not folding. Also if i sucked out on him, he would tilt even harder. Was pretty surprised to see him turn over a worse hand but yeah.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2583313: So i continue to pound on him after the last hand for a while. He hasn't folded to a single 3 bet the entire match even though this was the first time i've 3 bet him for a while. Thought this was a really drawy board and i knew he was going to bet any pair, straight draw, or a combo draw. I also thought he gave me no credit and would be happy to get it in here with any pair with a straight draw.

After the KK hand he managed to turn the momentum of the match by making some hands and caught me bluffing a few times cos i started spewing a bit. I kept on trying to bluff him when he had the mortal nuts and i started losing some of it back. I kept my cool though knowing that i had such a huge edge on him postflop and that i can certainly turn the momentum around. Then this hand came up.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2583329: The stacks got really deep and I've started to 3 bet a lot more since he kept on folding to my double barrels in 3 bet pots(considering he never folded to any 3 bets). He eventually caught on and knew i was double barreling him light in 3 bet pots and have seen him raise my turn bet on semi-dry king high boards like this. When he raised me on the turn i decided to go with this hand and just let him bluff off his stack to me. I also thought he'd more inclined to call the turn with a monster instead of raising.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2583350: about 6 hands later, I pickup aces. Since he hasnt folded to my 3 bets, and obviously want to gamble it up, i thought he probably wasnt gonna fold to a 4 bet either. I checked back the flop to induce bluffs and thought that if he had KQ, then i'll go broke anyway.

so after the last entry i played about 500 or so hands 4 tabling 6max 50NL. I ended up running like god and winning like 160$. Then i decided to run a few donkaments including the daily doubles. Lost in daily double B getting 2 outed on the river after getting all the money in on the turn with KK vs 44 on random middle cards board.

After playing for a few hours i really started to lose focus playing and started playing badly in a lot of marginal situations. i.e. shoving AQo from SB against utg minraise with 27BB stacks when i know in those donkaments im not getting called by worse and the players are just awful and would minraise AK in spots like these(obviously probably should've just flatted). So obviously he had AK and i busted myself from A of daily double. I then proceeded to bust some other donkaments that i was playing in by playing making a lot of questionable marginal plays.

This morning when i woke up i simply didnt feel like playing poker. I should have simply taken the day off as i definitely did not play my A game most of the day. I guess i know from now on that if I am not motivated to play, that I really shouldn't bother. I am really starting to miss home as i basically have no friends here in Norfolk. I went to college here for the last year and have decided that school simply wasn't for me. I made a lot of friends here at school in the last year but most of them were pot heads. I smoked a lot of weed for the majority of the first semester and parts of the second semester. I decided to quit smoking about a little less than a month ago because I simply can't play my A game while smoking regularly. I also realized that weed definitely changed my personality for the worse and dramatically lowered my confidence along with making my short term memory terrible. I simply have nothing to do here aside from poker because in order for me to stay away from weed, i need to completely disassociate myself from my stoner friends since all they do all day is smoke weed. I guess its time to figure out how to make some new friends around here.

I started playing poker around the same time i started smoking weed. I know that by quitting weed, my game will improve faster than ever as weed really made me play terribly. Also unlike other players, i dont really tilt when people suck out on me. I tilt the hardest when i misplay because I have really high expectations for myself. Although i am getting a lot better at forgiving myself after fucking up knowing that if i don't, then i simply can't continue playing. I know this blog so far sounds really disoriented, but at this point im simply too lazy to try to try to express my thoughts in a more organized manner. I feel I just need to put my thoughts down somewhere.

so today i realized how big of a spewtard i've been. I've been destroying 50NL heads up for 13.5 PT BB/100 over 8k hands but have been consistently losing at 50NL 6 max. For a while I just thought that everyone were making moves on me and so I kept rebluffing people back, but the matter of the fact is that even though there are some crazy spewtards at the limit; most players are simply playing a solid ABC game. I decided to run some 50NL deep 6 today since the players in those deep games play pretty loose. I was doing really well playing an ABC tight aggressive style for a while. Picking my spots here and there to bluff etc. Then i was able to pick up this gem:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2572575: Originally opened the hand for deception and to mix it up. I called PF simply for the implied odds as we were 200BBs deep and my hand was very well disguised. On the flop I thought that if i raised he probably would just flat and definitely be folding to any turn or river clubs as he simply beats nothing. Not 100% sure about my play here though. Then the turn and river were pretty standard.

Then after playing well for a while I guess i started to lose my patience and thought my image was pretty good when this hand came up:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2572527: At this point i haven't 3bet for a few orbits and thought i had a pretty good image to squeeze. When he flatted my 3 bet I was putting him on a hand like JJ or some AQ/AK type hand as this player seemed to be playing pretty cautiously. I checked the flop for pot control and wanted to try to get to show down as i am now beating any Ax hand. I think turn call might have been bad but my thinking was that he was just taking a stab at the pot. Then the river was where i turned into a total spew idiot and thought he was making that as a blocking bet with JJ. In retrospect my shove was obviously terrible cos what i was representing simply made no sense. At the time i thought he would definitely fold a hand like JJ cos this player was a pretty weak and cautious player even though my bet made no sense.

So yeah, I definitely need to stop trying to bluff people so much and at the same time simply believe what others are representing. I should log like 10-20k hands of 6max just playing straightforward ABC poker. I think i get bored too easily and try to force the action so much when in reality i have a huge edge playing postflop. I think i am a lot better at getting a feel for what the other player is thinking and that is why i have such a huge edge in heads up at these limits. Hopefully putting things into words will help me stop being such a total spew donk.