My First Downswing
I’ll be honest with you. I’m a complete newbie in blogging but there is often a massive amount of thoughts running in my head so I like to write them down. 2 years of playing isn’t that long of a time but still I managed to go through several setbacks, burn outs and fckups and I’m pretty sure there are more waiting for me in the future (that’s the poker pro’s burden isn’t it?) and I think note them down (together with ways how I overcame them) will help me to get ready for moving up in stakes!

When I was going through my first downswing this is how I went about it.

“Things go wrong for some time, so what should I do?” was the question I eventually asked myself. Ok. Let’s take some time - hour, half an hour, even 15 min to sit down, relax and reflect. It may sound quite simple, but that's what really helped me. Sort of looking at everything from a higher perspective, think about my poker journey as a long term journey and then objectively evaluate my game in terms of both - mindset and strategy. It is really frustrating to face sck outs, villain's top range and making mistakes - all at the same time, because then it all gets mixed up and actually can lead to even more mistakes and incorrect deviations.
So...
1) To sum up what I’m sure that I was doing right and keep doing that.
2) To identify even only one mindset mistake, which I think is hurting my win rate and come up with a plan to fix it
3) To identify even only one strategic leak and focus on it in the game

Then things will be getting back in order and I can build up on that. Basically, organise my mind and take it step by step in an organised manner instead of being all over the place and not knowing what or who to blame. Also, the way the I looked at my downswing was as an inseparable part of every poker player and I just told myself, that it's actually good for me to go through all this, because I know it won't last forever and when I get past that, I'll be mentally stronger than ever before. And hell yeah I was right.

GL!

P.S. Next post will be more positive I promise

Upgrading my game
I am constantly seeking to get an edge at the tables as well as outside of them.
I just got a flexispot - a table which is adjustable to a standing desk.
My downer back was begging me to make this purchase for some time. Although my usual activity during the 5min break each hour while playing MTTs is yoga and stretching and my chair is pretty nuts, still at the end of a long session (after playing for 8 hours) the seating position was getting pretty uncomfortable. As that’s the part where it is likely I’d have a deeprun - therefore the most focus and concentration required - I couldn’t wait longer to make this investment.

Now I go with alternating the seating and standing position each hour and the first couple of sessions were absolutely great - at the end of the grind it felt like I played 3 hours less than I really did (you’re welcome my downer back).

As a bonus I bought a 4k 32’ monitor where I can fit 12 tables!!!

From playing 9-10 tables at peak of my sess I am moving to this plan now:
11.00am starting my session with 8-9 tables to warm up
12.00-17.00pm peak of mz sess with 12 tables
17.00-18pm cooling down back to 9 tables (17.30 stop registering)
18.00 down to 6 tables to finish my sess

When I have a deeprun I try to keep my table count a bit lower to be able to max focus on that and also wanna make the change gradual so sometimes I keep only 11 tables depending on my energy levels. Slightly increasing my ABI too which is this month 62$ (I don’t check my profit until the end of the month so not exactly sure how that is going - the long term results matter more to me anyways)

LFG!!!

Beating the variance

With the new set up I was able to increase my volume from playing cca 30 tournaments/session to around 40 tournaments/session.
Starting the session with 12 tables and decreasing to 9 at the end works great for me so far for the following reasons:
- With so many tables and don’t have time to get attached to results in individual tournaments - I simply don’t have the time to focus on bad beats, suck-outs and running in a bad set ups
- I am able to operate more from an objective perspective instead of overthinking individual spots.
- Even if I feel like I am running bad, losing big pots when being ahead etc., busting tournaments I usually end up with huge stacks in some tournaments and manage to get couple of deepruns anyways

Even it is a small sample so far, I can feel the difference with increased volume and I am starting to realize that the only way to beat variance is to put in the volume*

My poker journey

Many times poker is being a harsh fella and makes me angry, sad, irritated but also happy, motivated, grateful and passionate. An important thing is not to get trapped in those emotions and stay balanced. That’s why I like to take a step back and see the big picture.

I started playing poker when I was around 15-16 years old with my friends at very small home games. I got interested in the fact the game is actually solvable and started to read some poker books. Jonathan Little poker books were my first poker studies ever and as soon as I turned 18 I went to try it out in small casino tournaments.
As time passed I played time from tiem with friends or in casinos but only small games really. My first professional poker sight was when I met a guy who played live cash for a living and offered me a coaching/staking deal. At this point I decided to drop uni (Civil Engineering) and move from Czech Republic to Denmark to start studying Entrepreneurship there. In the gap I had to make some money so this deal was a perfect opportunity. So while my parents thought I’m working as a card dealer in a casino, I was actually sitting on the other side of the table playing.
When I moved to Denmark I had to go back to recreational poker as live action wasn’t any interesting and I ended up playing a couple of tournaments a month online. After 2 years the life changer deal came through - my very good friend who played online MTTs for some years told me there is a stable that just got running and accepted new players, so if I’m interested I could join playing part-time alongside my studies - hell yeah, let’s do it! It was nuts, something I’ve always dreamt about. Suddenly instead of spending hours of reading some poker material or watching videos that I didn’t really understand anyways, I got preflop ranges to learn, postflop lines to learn, videos with general concepts and late game and fellow peers to discuss hands - an infinitely more effective way to study the game.
That was 2 years ago in winter 2019 when I started with Poker Detox. After one year I finished my studies and in the summer 2020 moved to Playa del Carmen, Mexico as a full time poker pro - I still live here in this wonderful place, enjoying life and working hard.

In those 2 years I have learnt so much about the game and about myself - and that keeps me motivated, keeps me going and wanting to improve even more.

Me on our first PD team trip in Malaga in January 2020

GLGL

November sum up

After October when I took almost 2 weeks completely off poker to celebrate my bday and travel I went fully back on track in November.

Positives:
Over 500 tournaments played
Reached all my study goals (HH review every weak, study group sessions, solver work for PKOs)
I upgraded my working station to feel better
Planned my month day by day and sticked with my routine in every aspect

To improve:
Reflect more and write a journal (at least 2x a week)
Make a consistent workout routine and follow it
Bring more awareness to my emotions when playing and let go of the story narrative in my head

Overall decent month regarding volume, studying and the results. December will be weaker because of the Christmas holidays and also the need to go for a visa run from Mexico for a couple of days with some of my friends who are visiting me here.

GL everyone

December goals

November I managed to get plenty of work done, overall good stuff. December is expected to be a little weaker in terms of volume but I still plan to keep up on the track.

Goals for December:

• To play 250 MTTs (with regards to visa run and Christmas holidays)
• To watch missed coaching
• Once a week do a hh review and study spots in HRC
• To attend all group reviews
• To go to the gym at least 2x a week
• To reflect on presence and awareness 1x a week by writing a journal
• To turn off my poker brain during Christmas and be present in my social life

Although I'm not gonna go full speed this month, my plan is to stay consistent with my routine as much as possible to make it easier to come back to the business fully in January.

Longterm goal in this aspect is:
to keep professional and social life on balance -> don't get stuck with grind and study but find time to enjoy life and have fun as well
LFG

Mistake is an opportunity

One of my biggest obstacles to tackle on my poker journey was to form my relationship to mistakes.
At a conscious level I have always realised that making mistakes is part of life and even more part of playing poker. The crucial part is how do I see them and accept them.

At one point when my graph was aiming pretty much downwards, I reflected some months back and realised I was fooling myself. What was obvious at the conscious level was far away from truth at the subconscious, which tricked my mind. I was ashamed of my mistakes, hiding it from my poker friends, coaches and even from myself. The idea of being wrong was just too painful.

The impact this had is now obvious:
- it slowed me down in my progress
- it prevented me from finding my leaks
- it blinded me from the objective reality
- it didn’t allow me to upgrade my level of self compassion

What is the definition of mistake?

My definition is:

A mistake is an opportunity to find my weak spots and therefore improve them to become a better player!
A mistake gives me an opportunity to upgrade my performance by cultivating the balances of forgiveness and compassion (without these balances I am trapped in a reality where my only tool is pressure, which causes me to break down and make more mistakes)

Few days off the tables

In the beginning of November I almost didn’t take any days off completely just to chill. Partly because I knew I will take a short holiday to travel from Mexico to Guatemala to renew my visa.
It was a nice refreshing trip. Went with three other friends. We went out. We climbed 4000 meter above see level to the top of a volcano in one day - it was a very profound experience as we really pushed ourselves and made it up and down in one day, while normally the hike is over night. All the pain and effort was truly worth it.

Volcano of Guatenango

After that we spent a couple of days at the shore of Lake Atitlan.

I'm very happy and grateful for having the opportunity to be a poker pro and live in this amazing place with the opportunity to travel around and discover new places.
Overall, a nice restart of my mind. Fully read to go back to the tables and crush.

GLGL

Last Sunday of the year 2021
My comeback to the tables was kinda harsh. Last week I wasn’t running really well and the grind cost me a lot of mental energy. But no need to complain, really, it’s just part of the game and I’m fully aware of that. I managed to run deep twice in a smaller field of Big109 on Stars.com, made it twice to heads-up and and unfortunately both times ended up second. Second place is always a little painful for me but I am still grateful for the deepruns. Besides that, nothing really interesting

Today’s the last Sunday of this year so I want to enjoy it fully without unnecessary overthinking and pressure. Sunday is by miles my favourite day for playing. I love these long afternoons/evenings (Mexican time) with huge fields, huge guarantees and a lot of action.

I’ve done my morning rituals - yoga and meditation, prepared meals for the day and got 20min of sunshine at the pool. Those are already little victories of the day so no need for creating any expectations.

Goals for this Sunday session:
- Have fun and relax (let go of pressure/stress)
- Avoid urgent decision unless completely clear (take at least 4 seconds before acting)
- When big part of my stack was lost -> reboot and start as a new tourney with current stack
- Plan ahead
- Be happy about making a profitable play (even if lost the pot)

GL

Study day - looking for leaks

So this month went so far pretty bad for me at the tables. It feels like it’s impossible to get to a good spot and win any chips. With a cool head I can recognise the absurdity of this statement and it should not really change my strategy or mindset. The reality when playing is however different - find myself in an emotional rollercoaster throughout the grind, using negative self-talk and possibly adjusting my strategy on subjective feelings.
It’s time to tackle these issues and what I’m gonna focus on is:

Technical leaks

• reviewing my game with HM3 filtres
• specifically: biggest lost pots, bluffcatching, 3bet pots, BB defence
• Goal: to find the spots where I could have made mistakes and identify the reasons, eventually discuss the hands with my friends

Mindset

• I feel like there is a deeper issue, possibly rooted in my childhood which triggers the emotional responses
• that makes it difficult for me to accept outcomes that I have no control over (e.g. hand distribution, results of flips, coolers, etc)
• so I finally booked a sessions with a hypnotherapist, which was on my list for some time and the plan is to dig deep into this issue

Taking this day as the last day to study before a Christmas break. Will be off for the following 5 days, when me and my girlfriend will travel to central Mexico to visit her family. I want to take this time to relax, let go of poker completely and enjoy the present moment. After I want to reflect with a clear head and get ready to play again next week.

Happy holidays to everyone

Music

Music is the love of my life. As soon as I was able to do my first steps, my dad constantly listened to rock music. Couple years later I knew all the lyrics of these songs even without often knowing what they actually mean :D then in my puberty years I discovered hip hop and these two genres became my ultimate favourites. Not to say I was deaf to other genres. Time to time I listened to various genres such as jazz, blues, classical music or electronic music. This taste pretty much stuck with me until this day.
In recent times, when I gained much more awareness of many aspects of my life, I also investigated my relationship to music. In the past I didn’t really encounter moments of silence too much - when there was silence, I just filled it in with some nice music. Today silence is an important part of my personal growth and it goes beyond meditation. As an online poker pro I deal with many distractions and external noises (screen light, music, bluetooth, wifi) combined with adrenaline peaks and drops from the session, so that a peaceful moment in silence is sacred for me. As in many aspects, it is about finding the right balance. What I realised (probably in one of those peaceful moments of silence) was that there are practices that I implement in my daily or weekly routine, that music introduced me many years earlier without even consciously knowing. What music taught me?:

• Relaxation - this one is pretty obvious, certain type of music or my favourite songs could rapidly lower my stress levels
• Gratitude - songs with positive lyrics, which made me to identify myself with the singer and created a positive narrative in my head was actually my very first active practice of gratitude
• Meditation/focus on the present moment - my favourite songs could bring me to the present moment, turning off the voice in my head, making me to focus on my body, breath and surroundings - whether it was in some beautiful lookout, in the nature, in a calm night streets of the city or in a bus looking out of a window - music was my first type of practice of being in the present moment
• Releasing anger - this is a big one for me as I dealt with anger issues and was a hothead as a kid, one song could bring me back to the ground, make me feel much lighter and letting go of the unnecessary anger, I truly believe music prevented many arguments that were arising and even might saved some relationships
• Self-reflection - again listening to some lyrics just made me take a pause, look objectively on what was happening in my past from sort of a bird perspective, and significantly helped in my self-development and progress
• Energy boost/motivation - and finally, music always helped me to raise my energy levels and motivation whether it was in the gym, social situations or competitions

Many of those aspects are now active and conscious practices that I implement in my daily routine and the results those bring are identical to what I could have felt many years ago in certain situations after listening to music.

There is one difference in the genres I often listen to these days and it is much more electronic music on my playlist. It is mainly caused by the location where I live (Playa del Carmen, Mexico), where one can find many festivals and DJs playing electronic music and also by searching for music for my grind which should be preferably without or with a minimum of lyrics. Firstly I start with some type of concentration music and at the end of my session I usually switch to my favourite playlists with lyrics (when my table count is low enough it doesn’t distract me)

Playlists for my poker session (Spotify):
Afterhours (electronic)
Low Key Tech (electronic)
Night Rider (electronic)
Brain Food (hypnotic electronic music for studies and relax)
Focus Music: Work, Studying, Concentration (mix of piano and classical music)
Classical Essentials (classical music)
Chillout Lounge (relaxed beats)

What type of music do you listen to when playing poker?
Any suggestions would be highly appreciated!

Cheers!

Sump-Up 2021

Firstly, to leave things complete I will sum up my December goals:
- To play 250 MTTs (with regards to visa run and Christmas holidays) - OK
- To watch missed coaching - OK
- Once a week do a hh review and study spots in HRC - OK
- To attend all group reviews - OK
- To go to the gym at least 2x a week - FAIL one week, fulfilled all the others
- To reflect on presence and awareness 1x a week by writing a journal - FAIL, only wrote - journal once at the end of the month
- To turn off my poker brain during Christmas and be present in my social life - OK

The year sum-up

I am very happy with the improvement, performance and results I have achieved last year. Putting in the hours paid off.
To keep doing:
- Consistent routine
- Healthy diet
- Exercise
- Leisure time and traveling
- Poker study hours
- Poker playing hours

To focus more on:
- Mindset
- Game selection
- Relaxation

GL everyone in 2022 and Happy New Year

January goals and start goals reflection

For January:
- Play min 350MTTs
- Study min 40h
- Review min. 4 deepruns
- Watch min 2 mindset videos
- Create an MTT schedule for my sessions and always follow it
- Gym min. 2x every week

Goals from when starting this blog:

1) Move up in stakes and crush 200$ games in daily schedule and 500$ - 1k$ games during the series - still feel a bit uncomfortable at 200$ games but the work is in progress - both technical part and mindset part

2) Reach 200k$ profit in one year from today (12.11.) - 82k$ right now, I’m on my way

3) Upgrade my understanding of GTO concepts - work in progress as well, I devote 1 whole study day each week to a solver work

LFG

Series
The Winter Series on Stars are over. WSOPC on GG are getting to the end as well as Winamax series. So far it didn’t go so well for me on any of these sites. It almost seems like a trend for me that I do pretty well until there’s some series taking place. I was reflecting back and besides the fact that fields are bigger and I usually play tournaments outside my regular schedule (250eur on Winamax, 215usd on Stars and main for 500usd) which obviously increases the variance, I came up with other possible reasons for this:
- I might be pushing too much in terms of: playing days, playing hours, table count
- I get emotionally attached to major events of the day and get easily titled if thing don’t go my way

For the next series (probably SCOOP) I will focus on:
- Always at least 2 no-playing days (1 light study, 1 completely off poker)
- Strict time for start and finish registering, strict max table count
- No rush to the tables

Although so far I didn't have any interesting deepruns, we got something exciting for tomorrow. I made Day 3 on Winamax flight PKO tournament with 1M GTD (1.4M collected). Currently 3/100 left in 15eurThursday is usually my study day so I will have to reschedule. The plan is to start around 1h before day 3 starts and keep my table count on max 6 tables (maybe even 4) to get to the flow state and be able to fully focus on the deeprun.

LFG

Biggest cash-out so far!

A pretty sick run in the 15eur flight tournament from Winamax series. Managed to make the final table and finished 6th out of more than 100 000 entries for 20k euro with the bounties included.
So far the biggest cash-out of my career. It's funny that it was still a bit painful to make it so far and then bust 6th. 1st places for 10k or so in smaller tournaments made me feel much happier then this biggest cash-out but I am still very grateful for making it this far.

I started off the day 3 pretty well, eliminated few players and preserve the big stack. When it came down to around 40 players I lost a flip and went to average stack. Then lost some chips and with the blinds increased became a shortstack. I managed to steal some pots, double up and then ended up in decent ICM cage on last 2 tables. With last 12 players and 2k payjump to 11th and another 3k payjump to 9th with two bigger stacks with 40b and 50bb each on one table and the rest including me were shorstacks with 2-7bb. We played for around 40min in this dynamic with 12 players with some really interesting ICM close spots to shove/call. Lots of fun I enjoyed this 3-day run from my very first bullet in this milion event.

Gonna take down the next one!

Breathing
I’d like to dedicate today’s short post to breathing. The most powerful tool that we all have available 24/7 and it can be used to manage stress, maintain tissue oxygenation, increase energy levels and much more. I find those possibilities very effective for a lifestyle of a poker player, where I very often find myself stressed or lacking energy during a poker session.

So besides the active effort of breathing mainly with my nose during morning yoga sessions, in the gym, doing regular activities during the day and sleeping, these are my favourite breathing practises:

1. Box breathing - to calm my body and mind and releasing stress
   
   • I inhale slowly by nose for 4 seconds, hold my breath for 4 seconds, slowly exhale by mouth for 4 seconds, hold without breath for 4 seconds. Repeat this several times.
   • I often use this technique during breaks and when I have a deeprun to enter a relaxed state of mind. It’s also useful to stay calm when I go to an ice bath.
2. Alternate nostril breathing - to energise my brain and body
   
   • I hold my right nostril with my right thumb and inhale only with the left nostril. At the end of the inhale I release the thumb from the right nostril and use my index finger to exhale through the right nostril. Then I inhale only with the right nostril holding the left one, switch the fingers and exhale only with the left nostril. This is supposed to even out the oxygen coming to both - left and right side of the brain and boost you with energy.
   • I use this during the breaks or in the morning to energise
3. Holotropic Soma breathwork - a long sessions with a guide to reset the nervous system
   
   • I have the opportunity to attend guided breathing sessions here in Mexico, which last around 1-2 hours. It is a very powerful practice and can even evoke a psychedelic experience and ego dissolution. I managed to get a really strong, spiritual high only from my breath (that’s right get high on your own supply) and ‘leave my body’. I had some strong visualisations seeing through my ‘third eye’ as well. With more practice this becomes even more powerful.
   • I usually go to this practice at least once a month. It’s a great way to escape the daily routine, the important everyday problems and helps me to deeply reflect on my life and progress

There are plenty of others breathing techniques and practises but these three are my ultimate favourites right now.

Don’t lose any breath!

Mindset upgrades
So I’ve had my first two sessions of hypnotherapy and I can already feel the upgrades I’ve implemented. So this is going to be a great investment for sure.
The main area I wanna focus on is ‘struggle for control’ - to learn what I can control and what I can't and accept it. This needs to be approached on three different levels: conscious, mechanical and subconscious

1. Conscious - the first step is always to accept the truth, in this regard I’d say my awareness is pretty high, in other words when I face a sequence of bad beats or situation that gets me triggered I can ‘blow up’ but I can calm down very soon and as I do so I’m completely sure that all the story narrative and victimisation is unreasonable and I know that variance is just part of the game
2. Mechanical - the goal here is to remind myself daily the conscious thoughts about this struggle - e.g. to write a note on my whiteboard at my working station, put notes on wallpaper
3. Subconscious - that’s where hypnotherapy comes in, we started with a practice called ‘control room’ where I learn to control my emotions and as well deep dived to my childhood to look for where these emotions come from, for me personally really interesting stuff to investigate

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like one move with a magic wand and there’s no more tilting in game, but I feel the progress in terms of awareness in the challenging situation, much faster recovery from undesirable reactions and being able to get back to the flow state and optimal performance after facing those.

GL everyone!

Impatience and urgency

This is an area that affects me in many ways regarding poker and repeatedly challenges my conscious mind in game but also outside my poker office.
In late December / early January when things didn’t go my way at the tables and I ended up being on cca 200ABI downswing i realised that this was the main ghost that constantly occupied my mind. I suppose it is somewhat natural to try to get my losses back as soon as possible. The problem is that this attitude ends up being very counterproductive. When I sat down to evaluate what I was doing when I was on upswing and what has changed when I was swinging down I noted this:

Rushing to the tables - I would change my time schedule to start earlier to be on time at the tables for certain tournaments of the day, would skip parts of my pre-session routine and basically feel the urge to do everything fast to make it on time to the tables. This would reflect very much to ma game - I would jump straight to my high table count, make fast decisions (even if they were correct, it was much harder to accept reality - e.g. losing a flip), constantly searching to play more and more tournaments, take fast subjective decisions in tough spots and end up in this loop of starting and busting tournaments and feel horrible. So not only it likely cost me EV at the tables, it also cost me loads of mental energy.
I took action to get out of this loop - as I became aware of it I stopped listening the urgent voice in my head saying “bro, you gotta start in 5min so you can catch the latereg of BH84 on GG”, and instead just relaxed, finished all my routine and made myself feel calm and comfortable to miss whatever tournaments there are. To be honest it sounds easier than it was, because my mind was somehow convinced that this one tourney was gonna save me from my downswing. But I made it and got back to ALWAYS start my session relaxed and without urgency - then I take time before every decision, which automatically makes me accept the reality, deeply consider tough spots and play for the sake of making good decisions and learn instead of trying to recover a make-up. Now I feel back on track, in green numbers and crushing again. Just another small bounce back to strengthen my resilience.

This inner fight in my head was likely between “the self” and “the manager” - referring to the IFS (Internal Family System) model, which I've been pretty fascinated about for quite some time now. I might write another blog post just about this in the future.

GLGL

January sum-up and goals for February

Play min 350MTTs - YES -played 613MTTs, which might be a sign I’m overdoing it,the reason could be playing too high table count in the last 2-3hours of the sess and pushing the volume too much there. Need to take it more easy at the end of my sessions

Study min 40h - YES - 43h marked as used for study

Review min. 4 deepruns - YES - 4 deepruns reviewed

Watch min 2 mindset videos - NO - haven’t watched any but in terms of mindset work I had 2 hypnotherapy sessions and 3x did deep reflection

Create an MTT schedule for my sessions and always follow it - OK - made the schedule and mostly filled it, still place for improvement

Gym min. 2x every week - YES

February goals:
February is the shortest month of the year and I have a couple of social plans such as my girlfriend's bday, wedding of her friend and my friend from Europe visiting me. I should still be able to fit in solid playing and study hours and split the leisure within my days off. So keeping some of the goals the same will already be challenging enough.

• Play min 350MTTs
• Study min 40h
• Review min. 2 deepruns
• Watch 1 mindset video
• Set time for lowering table count and finishing to register and always follow it (max 2 exceptions)
• Add 300usd GG Masters Bounty on Sundays and 320usd series events on Party to my game schedule - review the level of emotional attachment and confidence in sessions with those tournaments

A sick 14-hour long session with two 1st places
Last week I managed to finally refund my PokerKing account (WPN network) and after almost 2 month without playing there I could get back to the juicy action. Really like this site because it has 2-3 pretty nice events daily and a couple more on Sundays and the field is pretty soft with many recreational players. The only downside is the insanely long late reg which is sometimes even 6-9h and this time I could feel the consequence of that. A tournament for 55usd that started at 1pm finished at 3am (Mexican time). Not that I’m complaining because I shipped it and it was a fun deeprun but hell I was tired and it affected my sleeping pattern and energy for the next day. Earlier I shipped Lucky Sevens on GG so overall lucky session heh. While I’m extremely happy about two wins in one sess I think I’m gonna leave out this 55usd on PokerKing from my schedule, it’s likely just not worth it - if I’d have finished on semi-final table and won around 10-15BIs I would still completely destroy my routine and schedule.

The less time consuming and most efficient workout

Working out is a part of my life for a long time and I really enjoy it. The former motivation which was to build muscles to make it easier to get some chicks (lol) has shifted more towards just feeling good, being healthy and the muscles themselves really being a byproduct of that.
I was struggling a bit to create a consistent workout routine that can fit into my week - 4 days of grinding and 2 days of studying - without exhausting me too much and affecting my performance. Time efficiency is also an important factor as I don’t necessarily want to spend 4-5 hours per week in the gym.

So recently I discovered a training that seems to be perfect for me in a book Boundless by Ben Greenfield. It goes like this:

The minimum is to train 2x per week and each workout takes around 10-20minutes
- First workout - high intensity bodyweight circuit
It’s constructed of 12 exercises (such as burpees, wall sits, push-ups, squats, dips, plank, …)
each of the exercises is performed for 30 seconds as explosively as possible with 10 seconds rest between each.
- Second work-out - super slow lifting protocol
It’s performed with relatively heavy weights and each rep is done for 30-60 seconds
It includes 4 types of exercise:
1. An upper-body push (e.g. bench press)
2. An upper-body pull (e.g. lat pull downs)
3. A lower-body push (e.g. squat/leg press)
4. A lower-body pull (e.g. deadlift)

I started a week ago and it’s really impressive how one can get completely smashed in 10-15 minutes of working out. My plan is to do at least 2 workouts/week, ideally 2x dynamic and 1x slow lifting and note progress and increasing number of reps/time spent. Like thisI’ll be able to train my whole body and spend only 1 hour a week in the gym with no need to train heavy on my playing days. Let’s see how it goes.

More is less
Even though I tried to deny it for some time, I already accepted that I’m at least partly a perfectionist. This causes me anxiety when things don’t go as I planned or there's an unexpected situation coming up. I’d say that I improved in this regard over time mostly thanks to meditation practice and self reflection. What it also causes is that I tend to overdo everything. In regards to poker it’s definitely the volume, playing and registering hours - I often tend to prolong the registration period even when I set time to follow for stop registering and lowering table count. I often find myself justifying it and later on accepting that the reasons were not legit.
The differences between a session when I push to the maximum the volume in the last 2-3 hours vs. when I slowly decrease the table count and am able to finish off in a relax state:
- My energy levels after the session and the next morning
- My overall mood
- Stress levels
- Appetite and a physical tension in my body

This is becoming even a bigger problem during major series such as SCOOP or WCOOP when there are more playing days and longer sessions. So as a part of preparation for SCOOP which will start off in the beginning of May, I will focus on this.
I’m definitely not aiming to become lazy but sometimes more is less and it’s always about finding the right balance.

GL

Keeping up with study routine
This month I had to adjust my usual schedule of playing from Friday to Monday and studying Tuesdays and Thursdays with Wednesday being a day off due to a couple of social events that I have planned for this month. For this reason it was a bit challenging to keep up with my study routine. The key aspect for me is to use my poker study time as effectively as possible.
I separate my study into 3 parts:

• Review (Hand history, hand discussion and deeprun review) - this requires at least 3-4h a week in continuous study with deep focus/flow
• Foundational study (ranges, lines, population tendencies) - this can be done in several shooter sessions 30-60min and I spend no more than 2 hours a week
• Creative study (research projects in the team, solver work) - this part requires the deepest focus/flow state and creative and critical thinking in continuous study session 4-5h long + chunks of time in relaxed state devoted to thinking

I follow couple of rules in order to be efficient:
- For longer study sessions always take short break every hour for at least 5min
- Plan the topics of study for each weak to avoid unnecessary decision making and subject picking and also to keep track of what was studied and what is missing

Here’s an example of my study plan sheet, which was extremely helpful this month where there were many adjustments in my overall scheduling and plans

Ship it!
After last weekend off the tables due to attending a wedding of my friend I got back to the action. It’s not easy to make me skip a Sunday grind, which is definitely my favourite day to play, so after one Sunday without poker I already missed the action and came back in a big style.
Played 36 tournaments with ABI 80usd, ITM 27.5% and managed to make couple of deepruns and finally take down the 200usd Battle Royal on Winamax

Pretty solid upswing so far in 2022 and besides the big chunk of luck and hard work I owe many thanks to the whole team Poker Detox. Without them I wouldn’t be where I am now. The coaches and executives taught me how to be a true professional, tons of technical poker knowledge and offered me mental support during tough times. The progress wouldn’t happen so fast without my teammates either - they’re inspiring and motivating and the studies and reviews we do together is one of the most effective ways to improve in poker.

Let’s keep working hard. GLGL

Not sure how I missed this great thread but I am very inspired by your work ethic and attitude and very happy for your success. Keep up the good work.

What does ‘being rich’ mean to me?
I was recently recommended to start reading a book - The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime! by MJ DeMarco and I came around a concept he mentioned in the beginning of the book which I hundred percent identify with, therefore I would like to share it here.

What is real wealth and when is a person actually rich?
The wealth is composed by 3 pillars:
- Family - the social relationships with closest friends and family
- Fitness - the health of an individual
- Freedom - being able to spend time on what one likes to do and not being obligated to something in order to make a living

I can see a deep relation with success in poker. If this is the ultimate guide to wealth and happiness then the money part is really only a one third of the equation and the underlying motivation for crushing at the tables should be actually to live a fulfilled and happy life. If it was only to make a shitload of money then it will sooner or later lead to a burn out.
That’s how I see it and I couldn’t agree more with MJ DeMarco about the fact that there are plenty of people with expensive cars, huge houses or prospering companies that are actually not rich, they just have money but they are not happy and satisfied.
I am at around one third through the book and so far it is quite interesting.

February sum-up and March goals

Play min 350MTTs - YES - total 544 tourneys played incl re-buys

Study min 40h - YES - 41h on my study sheet, so so

Review min. 2 deepruns - YES - one with peers, one on my own

Watch 1 mindset video - NO - only managed to attend one hypnotherapy this month, place to improve

Set time for lowering table count and finishing to register and always follow it (max 2 exceptions) - GOOD - here I made big improvement, definitely still need to focus on this but I think I’m on a good way

Add 300usd GG Masters Bounty on Sundays and 320usd series events on Party to my game schedule - review the level of emotional attachment and confidence in sessions with those tournaments - YES - added some higher BIs to my schedule and the more of them I play the less pressure I feel, in the end it is just another tournament, have to confess that it is much easier to play higher when you’re on a sick upswing, so I will keep focusing on that

March goals:
- Play min 450MTTs
- Study min 50h
- Review min. 3 deepruns
- Post min 4 hands on HH server of Poker Detox
- Spend min 3h on mindset work/reflection
- Record time for lowering table count and finish registering after every session
- Record any signs of emotional attachment or pressure caused by higher BI games

Edge of the tables: 1. Sleep

Besides studying ranges, strategies and all the technical stuff there’s plenty of edge to be gained indirectly connected to poker itself.
For me, sleep is a number one indicator for my performance, it's literally connected to everything. For example, even if one is on a very healthy diet and yet sleep poorly, his body won't be able to absorb all the nutrients.
The low hanging fruit for a good sleep:
- Good mattress and pillow - It’s definitely worth to invest in something we use ⅓ of each day
- Temperature, noise and darkness - Cold dark place with no distraction is a must. If there are any external factor which we can’t control using simple tools such as ear plugs or eye blinder is a cheap and effective way to go
- The melatonin levels - light has a great impact on our brain and melatonin levels, I stick with two simple rules

1. Light exposure right after waking up (ideally from a sunlight) and short recharge in the afternoon

2. Avoiding any light at least 1h before bed time, especially any screen light and using blue light blocking glasses around 3 hours prior to sleep
   Consistency - waking up and going to sleep more or less at the same time every day. This sets my body clock and improve my sleep as well as energy during the day

Free tool to track sleep (basic, low-accurate, effective) - I personally use free version of Sleep Cycle app, which uses mic to record sounds to recognize in which phase of a sleep you are, after few trials makes a base line a evaluate your sleep, also you can set alarm in 30mim range and it wakes you up when you're not in a deep sleep. For me it’s a good way to investigate the factors that affect my sleep and I often find the results of sleep quality from the app corresponding to my actual energy levels during the day.

For high-performance sleep has a great impact. For playing MTTs, when one must stay concentrated for several hours and the highest $ decisions often come at the end of the sessions, sleep can indirectly make a difference of hundreds of dollars for me.

GLGL

I liked your entry about sleep! Well-done. You got me thinking about the impact of light and I will look into that more. Thanks.

Here are some tips that seem to help me sleep better.
Go to sleep a little hungry. Dont eat 2 or 3 hours before bed, except maybe some herbal tea. For sure, avoid alcohol, which causes me to wake up in the very early morning.
If possible see a sleep doctor because they may detect a medical issue that is preventing good sleep. For example sleep apnea is very common and by improving your breathing you can improve sleep quality.

Good luck!

Mindset upgrades and goals for Poker sessions.

Monitoring the increasing of my ABI I can feel improvement in terms of emotional attachment to the highest tournaments of the day, which just more and more feel to me as any other tournaments, although I can still notice a bit of pressure going on, especially if running deeper or playing for big bounties.
In terms of mindset during the session I noted that there always comes a critical hour - which is around 4-5 hours in the grind, when my brain gets more tired and it becomes harder to accept bad outcomes and stay calm and balanced.

So to ensure a consistent development and attacking the higher stakes in full power, rather than go hard to burn out later, I will focus on following aspects and practices for the upcoming sessions:
- Play only the best 200usd+ tournaments and prioritise better value lower BIs
- Calm breathing during the breaks towards the end of the session (using the app Breathwrk)
- Body scan during the breaks towards the end of the session (audio from my hypnotherapist)
- Practising and using a ‘calm anchor’ to handle difficult situations
- Set time to ‘cool down’ each session - decrease tabel count, stop registering, get a meal, switch to my favourite music

I will finish this post with an idea of visualising the thoughts which were mentioned in my hypnotherapy session today and literally reminded me of myself and the processes in my head during a poker session.
The constant flow of thoughts is like a river and each thought is like a leaf which has fallen from a tree above. Some are small and not interesting, some are big and take my attention. But I always have just two options - to jump to the river and get dragged by the current with a single leaf or to stay at the shore and just watch them pass.

Habits: 1. Morning routine
As a professional poker player with full control over my time I find it crucial to focus on creating good habits to help me improve consistently. For me personally, my morning routine is the most important part of the day and it sets a solid foundation for how my day is going to be.

After waking up, brushing my teeth, taking a leek and cleaning my face I grab my yoga mat and go to the pool area or the terrace. The first hour of my day I spend in a peaceful state of mind, partly because waking up at 7am in Mexico ensures it’s only me and the chirping birds. I keep my phone in flight mode overnight and I keep it that way the first hour after waking up. Getting some fresh air and bright light while doing 30min yoga, followed by 10min meditation is the foundation of my day. It boosts me with energy and good mood and after that I usually head to make myself breakfast and again connect with the online world.

One of the benefits of my morning routine is its impact on my mindset during playing days - to get it done is already a small victory, it is something I have control over. Therefore it helps me stay more relaxed in tough emotional moments during the poker sess and accept more things I have no control over.

I might get ‘bored’ over time if my routine is exactly the same so in that case I do some changes and keep the basic foundation and idea the same - time only for me with peace and tranquillity.

Morning routine done, ready and boosted for the Sunday session, finishing off the Bounty Builder series on Stars with a lot of juice action including the 500usd BI Main event with 2m GTD!
LFG

Tracking of Goals when starting this blog

To keep monitoring the progress I will check every now and then on the goals I set in my first post:

My goals:
1. Move up in stakes and crush 200$ games in daily schedule and 500$ - 1k$ games during the series
2. Reach 200k$ profit in one year from today (November 12, 2021)
3. Upgrade my understanding of GTO concepts (yep, it’s true until now I was going on with pretty much basic theory concepts and exploitative strategies only)

1. On my way, I recently added 200$ BI games to my daily playing schedule and am feeling more and more confident in those. Played 500$ main on Stars as well without any luck, busted second bullet, felt a bit of pressure and bad beats hurt more then other tourneys but I’d say my game in those games stay the same, which is good, because I noticed that in the beginning I tended to be risk averse caused by fear of busting the high buy-in.
2. To today’s date: $115,049 profit (starting blog profit $89,634) LFG
3. I’m building on my GTO knowledge every week as I currently spend around 5-10hours/week on studying GTO. I feel it becomes necessary to have this understanding in the higher games, especially in deepruns where the field is left usually with solid players.

Habits: 2. Pre-sess routine

Having a warm-up before each session is an absolute must for me and I can't imagine just sitting down and registering tournaments without any preparation. To reach maximum focus for several hours, no doubt it's worth it to spend even a couple of minutes getting ready to go.

I have changed and adjusted my pre-session routine several times based on circumstances of living and playing hours. The basics to follow would be:
1. The physical and social needs - this is simply to get done everything I can (physical - toilet, food, etc., social - respond to messages to avoid distractions later)
2. Goals for the session - set goals to focus on mindset wise and technical wise
3. Meditation/primer - 10-15min meditation, mostly I prefer guided either from my hypnotherapist or from PrimeMind app where there is also poker related content

Warming up before each session became far more important than the cool down. Every time I have for some reason rushed to the tables and skipped one or more steps it always proves to cost me a lot of EV and I would find it very difficult to handle challenging situations.

One week off the online tables straight to the live tables.
As I’m in the process of getting my Mexican residency so I don’t have to go out of the country every six months and risking troubles with the immigration centre, I finally got my appointment in the Mexican embassy in Miami, which means a one week bureaucratic holiday without online playing.
I have planned some trips in Miami, wanna see the beach, get some tests for DNA and gut, buy electronics and of course hit the live poker tables in Seminole HardRock casino. I’m planning to jump on a cash game 2/5usd. It’s been quite some time since I played live so I’m really looking forward to it.

This will probably affect my monthly goals a bit since it’s an unexpected week off but I’ll try to keep up with some study for at least a couple of hours but no pressure. I think I was putting on a very solid volume the last couple of months in terms of both studying and playing online so I’ll take it easy and enjoy my time there.

Cheers!

Have fun at Miami, a wonderful place. Maybe you can add a bit of Salsa to your musical soul, if Mexico aint did it yet.

March sum-up and April goals
I’m back from Miami. Even though everything didn’t exactly go as planned it was a fun trip and I’m ready to get back to the online grind. I’m gonna evaluate my last month goals with a reduction of 25% of the goals set due the unexpected week off.

March goals:

Play min 450MTTs (resp. 338) - OK - played 484
Study min 50h (resp 37,5h) - OKish - 37h studied
Review min. 3 deepruns (resp. 2) - OK - 2x deepruns reviewed
Post min 4 hands on HH server of Poker Detox (resp. 3) - OK - posted 3 hands
Spend min 3h on mindset work/reflection - NO - only spent 1h on reflection and 1x hypnotherapy session
Record time for lowering table count and finish registering after every session - GOOD - good improvement in noting down times, I can finish my session in much relaxed state
Record any signs of emotional attachment or pressure caused by higher BI games - GOOD - I paid attention to higher BIs and my reactions in tough moments such as coolers and sckouts - to work further on this I will incorporate meditation/visualisation of my best self to handling these spots

April goals:

Play min 450MTTs
Study min 60h
Review min. 3 deepruns
Post min 4 hands on HH server of Poker Detox
Spend min 3h on mindset work/reflection
Min 2x a week visualisation of my best self handling difficult spots
Create a time slot for a weekly reflection and follow it

Overall average/goodish month - in terms of results I played 80ABI and was down 67BIs, in terms of goals, it feels like I uncovered some spots for improvement and in April I will try to easy out on playing volume and increase the study hours to get fully ready for SCOOP which kicks off in the beginning of may

LFG

Edge of the tables: 2. Sun
Recently I came to the conclusion that sun exposure is number 2 on my list of things not directly connected to poker that can increase my poker edge.
The sun is the main source of vitamin D and has many other benefits such as improving mood and charging with energy.
At least 20min daily sun exposure is usually part of my routine, usually in the form of reading at the pool, doing yoga or walking in the sunshine. After reflecting and looking back I have realised that my most problematic poker sessions in terms of mindset and tilt occurred when I skipped the 20min sun exposure due to time pressure. In the past I wouldn’t put importance to this at all and as it naturally became part of my routine (I’m grateful to live in place when there is sun pretty much all year around) I realised how big of an impact it had on my performance. So now those at least 20min is a non-negotiable on days when I play and to avoid time pressure in the morning I try to do my food prep for the day the night before.

Today I already got my 20min of sun at the pool after my morning workout and now I feel fresh and ready for the Sunday session. Received some 500usd and 300usd free tickets on PartyPoker for my point in Legends of the Week leaderboard 2 weeks ago so I might play one of those today plus the Winamax series is starting so as always tons of juicy action on Sunday. Let’s get back to business.

GLGL

Work-out challenge
Couple of weeks ago I started to follow the ‘minimum dosage’ workout - 2x per week, 1x fast intense full body workout with short resting periods and 1x heavyweight slow-lifting sets. I really like the first fast intense workout which I was doing before only with different exercises such as pull ups, dips and so on, so it’s good to have more options to mix it up. To be completely honest, the second heavyweight slow lifting I don’t enjoy at all. The best part about it is the time saving, otherwise it's pure suffering. I much prefer to do the heavyweight training at normal pace including squat, deadlift and bench-press, usually 6x sets each exercise with 6-10 repetitions. I feel I can do a much harder workout this way without that much suffering during. It just takes a bit more time, but I usually rest only around 1min between the sets so I am able to be done in 30-40min with that.
Now with the trip to Miami I missed a whole week of workout so it’s time to get back to track. Ideally the plan would be 1-2x/week fast intense body weight and 1x heavyweight at my own pace, only with a lot of time pressure I would use the super-slow training.

One of my teammates from Poker Detox just started a fitness challenge for the guys of the team - as it’s gonna be one month before SCOOP starts. The idea is to sign up to this challenge with a ‘donation fee’ of 10-100usd and do any kind of exercise every day prior to SCOOP. If the participants reach at least 75% of the days - my teammate with one more high stakes crusher will double the money in the pool, which will then be sent to some charity institution. I think it’s a great initiative that will help both - all the participants to improve their health and exercise consistency and make the world around us a better place.
So I will donate 100usd and my exercises will include the workouts mentioned, swimming, playing tennis and yoga.

Grey zone
I first came across the concept of grey zone when I joined Poker Detox and understanding and applying this concept in game served me as a very useful upgrade during the whole time of my poker pro career.
What is a grey zone? A part of the game tree where I have no or very little technical knowledge (in terms of both GTO and exploitative strategy). I believe grey zones are inevitable and even the best poker player in the world could now and then find himself in a grey zone. The poker game tree is just so comprehensive that it seems impossible to gain knowledge over every single spot.
How to approach a grey zone mindset-wise? First it’s crucial to mention that the idea is obviously to avoid grey zones as much as possible by funnelling into lines where I have some vision and avoiding those where I don’t. F.ex. I have very little vision in 5bet pots, therefore I probably just stick with calling 4bets where I have more vision. Anyways when finding myself in a grey zone, it is important to accept it as a situation I will not be able to solve during the game - therefore not getting stressed and OCD about it and simply just put away all thoughts, sometimes even accept I might get exploited or outplayed and move on. Possibly mark the spot and if it's a high frequency occurring spot it will be worth to study and improve in this part of a game tree.
How to approach a grey zone technical-wise? Next question is what to actually do in such a spot. My approach is either pot control or fold. The idea is not to invest any money in spots that are at best marginal and as my general tendency is to be over aggressive and spewy, taking the safe road when unsure is the way to go for me.

Last few weeks I feel like poker is being tough and the deck is treating me badly. Many times I find myself in spots where I have no clue where I’m at. It has to do with card distribution and likely that on higher BIs people are simply able to put me in tough spots. I have the tendency to want to solve every spot and my perfectionist nature often makes my mind distorted if there are many grey zones in one session. So I post this as a reminder of this concept for myself to be able to battle this little downswing with a calm and balanced mind.

GL everyone.

How to approach a grey zone technical-wise? Next question is what to actually do in such a spot. My approach is either pot control or fold. The idea is not to invest any money in spots that are at best marginal and as my general tendency is to be over aggressive and spewy, taking the safe road when unsure is the way to go for me.

How you manage to do that? Sounds like fighting nature (I feel the same but still struggle to step on the brakes)

Back in the saddle again - 2x second places in one session
Last several weeks I was on a slight downswing although in terms of BIs it wasn’t anything too crazy, in terms of $ it created a bit of pressure and challenged my mindset during the game. I was getting in a lot of difficult spots, admittedly did some blunders now and then, building a large stack didn’t last too long and deepruns finished too early but there were always plenty of chances just not that much luck in final stages.
One big improvement in my routine that undoubtedly helped was finally creating a habit of regular reflection and journaling. Putting my thoughts on paper just put me in a different perspective with a lot more objectivity. At the end of the day for MTT players it really doesn’t matter what are the results of one session, one week, one month or even several months. But the human mind really likes to take everything personally and put way too much importance on short term results.

During the last couple of sessions I caught myself thinking: ‘Why do I always get to those cooler? Why does this happen to me every day? Why can’t I have at least some luck in a deeprun?’ - recognizing this pattern of victimisation and negative self-talk I tried to reframe it and come up with some self-supportive reframe: ‘It’s okay. The key is to get myself in as many opportunities as possible and sooner or later the luck will show up. I just need to stay focused and play to the best of my ability.’
And hell yeah it was true, yesterday I made a bunch of deepruns and made nice scores of two second places Bounty Hunters Big Game 210$ on GG and Gladiator 55$ on PartyPoker. Really happy to score those, especially the 210$ BH as it is the highest buy-in I play in a week day and the field is getting tougher in the late game.

GLGL

Deja vu - another 2x second places in the very next session
Turning on the heat and managed to finish second twice in one session again - Daily 88 on GG and 109usd on WPN. Both were fun runs with many interesting ICM spots, so the time spent with solvers and reviewing deepruns definitely paid off. Heads-up unfortunately lost again which is always a bit painful but with all humbleness I think I played solid in all of them just without any big mistakes. I’m super happy with the results.
Now I have Saturday and Sunday grind ahead and then on Monday going to Costa Rica for 5 days with my fellow teammates from Poker Detox who live in Playa del Carmen as well as a small retreat before the SCOOP series to unwind and travel around. Then I’ll have one week to finish off all the planning and prep for SCOOP and when it’s finished I’m just going to take one or two days off and continue with my regular schedule. Great to have these scores before the series because my ABI will go up the next month so this will help with mindset in the bigger games for sure.

GLGL

Back from a short vacay
First to complete my collection of second places from this month, here's another nice score from last Sunday on Winamax in Highroller 250eur. In the end I was on a pretty sick heater the second half of this month.

The trip to Costa Rica was great, we spent one day surfing in Santa Teresa (I’m the second left in the picture below), one day visiting a waterfall and beach near there and one day in a rainforest in Monteverde. Overall we had lots of fun with my teammates from Poker Detox and I feel very refreshed and relaxed. Costa Rica is an amazing place and definitely deserves more than 5 days, so I’ll definitely come back one day to explore more - especially the nature which is really beautiful there.

Now the plan is to get ready for Sunday and Monday poker grind and during the next week I’ll do April sum-up and prep for May when there is gonna be the SCOOP series.

April sump-up

April goals:

• Play min 450MTTs - YES - played 577 based on SC

• Study min 60h - NO - my study sheet counted 40h of study, which is still acceptable due to 1 ‘study week’ missed due to my trip to Costa Rica. I wanted to push studying pre-series and this week before series I am to study more or less 10-15h extra which can be counted in. In general I want to stick with 10h/week as an absolute must for study and challenge myself to add some extra hours if possible.

• Review min. 3 deepruns - YES - 2x alone and 1x with my peers from Detox

• Post min 4 hands on HH server of Poker Detox - NO - managed only to post 3 hands, no excuse here

• Spend min 3h on mindset work/reflection - YES - hypnotherapy and revisiting my mindset notes

• Min 2x a week visualisation of my best self handling difficult spots - NO - to be completely honest with myself I did it the first week but then for lack of organisation I might have done it couple more times, but for sure didn’t reach the goal

• Create a time slot for a weekly reflection and follow it - YES - probably the biggest accomplishment of this month! I set a date and time to do my reflection and after that I found myself reflecting and journaling even more often than I had planned. I can feel so much benefit out of that simple habit I believe I just created.

Goals for May - the main focus is the series so I will focus mainly on mindset, planning and performance optimization. I will set the goals that I failed last month. And will post a bit more detailed plan for the series in the next few days.

• Study 1x per week doing HH review of the previous week.
• Post min 4 hands on HH server of Poker Detox - as hand review will be the only study I plan to do I should manage to post a hand every week to get some feedback from my teammates
• Min 1x a week visualisation of my best self handling difficult spots - going down from 2x to 1x/week in order to build a habit. The idea is to set exact day and time for that

SCOOP 2022
So here comes the spring series on Stars. GG announced the series too as expected and even Party will bring some special events so there will be plenty of action for the MTT players for the rest of the month. I am very excited to get playing but this turned out to be a somewhat dangerous approach in the past so I spent a bit more time preparing in terms of scheduling, mindset and routine.

Here’s the plan:

• Playing days: 5x/week (Fridays and Wednsedays off)
• Playing hours: Normally starting around 11.30am local time and finishing registering around 5.00pm with Sundays starting 1-2 hours earlier

• Table count: my max table count is 12 tables, the plan is to start with around 10 tables to avoid missing slots for series events that start later. For every session I set time to go down to 9 tables and then to 6 tables

• Daily routines - I’m gonna stick to my standard morning, pre-sess and cooldown routines as they are pretty optimised already

• Work-out - my gym routine is going to suffer, which is okay. I’ll stick with light exercise on playing days and optional heavy workout on non-playing days
• Study - only HH review for previous week with my HM3 filters for punts, bluffcatach and 3bet pots

The motto is: THE MORE IS LESS
When there’s lot of action at the tables I always tend to overdo the volume so this time it is non-negotiable to stick to the table count rules and ot my tournaments schedule - after consulting with my hypnotherapist/life coach he made me create a schedule for tournaments that I am going to play incl. series and non-series events for every single day. First I was a bit annoyed as it seemed like a waste of time but actually already after finishing it I could feel determined to stick to the rules and imagine it will be much easier to let go of the voice in my head that says I can still play some more or that I have energy to keep higher table count. On a conscious level I realize this will increase my EV in the course of the whole series and one day or couple of tournaments won’t make much difference. This will also help to relax and maintain energy for the upcoming days.

So I made a very detailed plan, took some days off to relax before, recapped strategies and other technical stuff. Last month was great money results-wise which will help to keep the expectations down and I feel ready to sit down and have some fun at the tables.

I’m gonna start on Saturday with a lighter session to warm up and then go full speed on Sunday. I’m gonna tackle pretty much all the 215usd SCOOP events, some 500usd and the 1k main last Sunday.

LG and GL to everyone who’s gonna play too

Good luck. Im sure you will stick to the plan

First days of the series
After 4 days of grind since the series started I feel pretty good and I’m still very excited to play. I made day 2 in the Sunday Million with an average stack but unfortunately it lasted only 7 minutes until I lost a big flip AKo vs QQ. Next one, please.
Yesterday I managed to finish 2nd in Fifty Stack on GG for around 6k usd which will probably just bounce me back over the zero line on the dollar graph for this month - gotta admit that I was a bit tempted to check the profit so far for this month when I’m playing higher but I resisted in the end and stick to my rules of not checking daily or weekly results.

One nice upgrade I discovered from a podcast is to listen to binaural beats to boost concentration and brain performance and after a 3 day trial I think I’m gonna pay for the subscription. It really feels like I’m able to focus and think more clearly with this music in my headphones and there are other useful types of music that I can use for relaxation, creative work or sleeping - it’s called brain.fm if anyone wants to check it out (no affiliation).

Today I took a first day off to attend short coaching, hit the gym, do hand history review and watch some of my teammates streams. Later I’ll go to the sauna and tomorrow I’ll get back to the tables.

GL

Mindset reflections and FOMO
Every day when I play a session it always reminds me in one way or another how mindset is an absolutely crucial thing for success in poker. Even a player with very good GTO knowledge and exploitative understanding can end up being a losing player over the long term just because of mindset issues and nothing else. Since I implemented a reflection and journaling I end up investigating more and more my mind and behaviour and here are two observations I made after last few sessions:

1.Self compassion and self support -
- I used to be a big time hot head and was terrible at losing as a child. I also grew up in an environment where getting angry, screaming and learning things the harsh way was considered pretty normal (although I had a very nice childhood) and all this obviously reflected in my behaviour today especially in the poker world
- Here’s what I discovered: when I get tilted for whatever reason I tend to see red - this is not a new thing and it’s a work in progress for some time. The improvement there I already made is that I am able to gain awareness over my feeling in that situation BUT I am being very urgent for it to go away and fighting with myself - this is very counterproductive and to overcome those tough emotional moments and not let them affect the session as a whole it is important to build a up a legit honest self compassion and be able to accept and support the inner child in those moments. Only this way I believe I can get back to my A-game.
2.FOMO - Fear of missing out
- This is something I have struggled with for almost two years. I have the tendency to play every single tournament in the schedule and whenever I have a full table count I find myself thinking how many tournaments there are yet to catch up on and how much time for late reg is left. When I'm downsizing this feeling intensifies and I may spend too much of my focus on the lobbies instead of the tournaments I am actually playing.
- Two ways to go about it: First is a technical one which is simply scheduling and creating rules for table count and registering times and being strict with that. Second is a mental one which is to reframe the EV and ROI of playing a specific table count and focusing more on games I have vs on starting to play new tournaments. As an example for the current series: yesterday after quite an expensive session I registered 3 tournaments outside my planned schedule at the end which caused me to lower my table count 1 hour later than I intended too. This arguably hurt my EV in that session as I would focus less on each tournament in progress and in the whole month as it wouldn’t let me finish earlier and recharge

Small details can sometimes make a big difference. Going ahead the aim is to be more supportive in difficult emotional moments and just accept it is understandable I sometimes react ‘inappropriately’ giving my childhood and personality and to realise on the consciousness level that to miss a tournament is totally fine and will not make literally any difference whatsoever.

Gl everyone.

Ready for the weekend
Feeling fresh and ready for another juicy weekend after Friday completely off poker, which became a rarity over the last few months.
Just finished a short deeprun of my final table of Battle Royal 200eur from Thursday where I encountered many tricky spots because bounties were often bigger than the payjumps. Studying ICM PKO spots with HRC is probably my favourite way of studying. I found out I made some mistakes and shoving too wide in some spots (A2o as a shortstack from BTN with 8bb but very little fold equity due to huge bounty) and folding too tight in other spots (76o vs 6bb shove from BB vs SB with 20bb stack). And a couple more interesting spots. Finished 4th in this one and excited for next deepruns.

A quote for this weekend:

“Nothing is as important as you think it is, the moment when you’re thinking about it.”

Bad beats or mistakes in big tournaments may feel like the end of the world but hey, after another 100k hands played that one bad beat or mistake will be most likely forgotten anyways. Staying relaxed and balanced throughout the whole sessions is still one of the biggest challenges for me although I realise how important it is in order to access my A game in the deepruns and preserve energy for upcoming sessions.
GL

Removing decision fatigue by scheduling
Decision fatigue is in my opinion something worth paying attention to as a MTT poker pro. I am able to play 20-30 tournaments during one session which could be approximately 2000 hands therefore I must make more than 2000 decisions over 8 hours (some of them will be trivial but often one hand will require more than one decision). It is a hell of a lot of decisions to make and the tricky part comes at the end of the session where each decision becomes worth much more in $ terms and obviously the brain would be more tired.
How many decisions I make during a session is out of my control, however there are many more decisions to be made outside the poker tables which I can control - this brings me to scheduling. I have a friend who is an absolut hater of scheduling and planning - he’s also a MTT pro and he loves his freedom and refuses to schedule and plan. I see it the other way - when I schedule and plan everything I gain more freedom, because it removes all the decisions I would have to make which takes time, therefore makes me more efficient and obviously when I plan something it doesn’t mean I cannot change the plan so I feel more free and I strongly believe it creates more time in my day as it minimises the time between tasks and keeps me more relaxed by removing the decision fatigue. The caveat here is not to become slave of my own schedule and still be able to be flexible and rational about the planning and later changes in that.
Few examples that I focused on during this SCOOP to remove as much decision fatigue as possible:
-Hour by hour plan for each day (e.g. when to start playing, when to shop, cook,…)
-Meal plan - prepare meals for playing weekend, have some back up meals in the freezer, knowing exactly what I’ll eat before I start playing
-Tournament schedule - knowing beforehand which tournaments I’ll play so I don’t have to scan the lobbies all the time

Remove all decisions from the 5min break I have each hour of my grind is absolutely crucial. Running in the kitchen and preparing something to eat real fast in the only 5min I have to let my mind relax is the last thing I want to do (and I was guilty of doing exactly this many many times).

Good luck for the last weekend of SCOOP!
LFG

SCOOP 2022 sum-up
Very challenging four weeks of poker are now over and it’s time to get back to the regular schedule of playing and studying. Overall I had lots of fun playing higher ABI with huge fields and guarantees, encountering some crazy lines and plays by recreational and battling some world class players as well. Besides the 20k score I made a few final tables, a couple juicy deepruns, but unfortunately busted those with 3-4 tables left. To be honest I am happy it’s over now as at the end of the series I felt more and more frustration, likely caused by huge expectations which did not come true. Let’s sum it up from few different perspectives:

-Playing schedule
- one of the most problematic areas over time for me as I mentioned a few time here I tend to overdo the volume and get close to burn out as a result of that
- proper preparation and scheduling all the tournaments was very helpful in this regard and I am satisfied how I managed this issue
- I felt sufficient energy each session and even though it wasn’t perfect I finally sticked with the rule more is less (maybe that’s one of the reasons why I finally had a profitable series)

-Social life and studying
- I feel I preserved great balance between playing, studying and socializing, I did a hand review 1x a week, rested well on my days of and still had a social life with my girlfriend and friends

-Mindset
- the beauty of playing poker for living is you are constantly challenged and you learn a whole lot of new things about yourself and I’m truly fascinated of the psychology and mental part.
- by reflecting back on this series I observed and noted couple of areas of the mental game I want to focus on going on:
- expectations and disappointment - this was a big one the last month, obviously all the major events created a big expectations for me and anything that went wrong there was pretty painful and triggering to me, besides that I noted that this happens with single hands as well - i.e. when I flop the nuts with lto of chips in the middle my mind is filled with joy and I expect to win lot of chips just to face some awful run outs which cause me to either loose or not extract value - those situations triggered me a lot and my EV in all tournaments likely suffered as it led to mind distortion, loss of concentration and therefore mistakes
- the story narrative - this is something very fascinating because I am consciously aware of that and realise that it hurts my game in both short and long term but still there were parts or even whole sessions when I got trapped in my mind playing the victim with negative self talk going on, besides the EV loss it took lot of my energy and overall optimism and good mood. In those moments it seems impossible to take a step back and see the bigger picture. On the other hand I had sessions where I would comment to myself on a bad beat in a supportive way, acknowledge and accept my mistakes as an opportunity to learn and calmly continue to solve every spot

I believe the difference between those two types of self talk are the key to my success. With the negative self talk I end up making fast, subjective, usually over aggressive decisions and blaming everything outside my control leading to hatred and negativity while with self supportive positive self talk I am able to make objective, profitable decisions and learn and grow as a player at the same time.

June goals
- Play min 400MTTs
- Study min 30h
- Review min. 2 deepruns
- Post min 2 hands on HH server of Poker Detox
- Catch up on posted hands in HH server of Poker Detox
- Mindset work min 1h
-Investigate and work on self talk during the game by using visualisation, meditation and proper preparation for the grind

This month my goals are on the lower spectrum, that’s because first 4 days of the month were used to revamp after the series and the last week I will be leaving Mexico and travelling back home to Czech republic for a month, then going to Poker Detox team trip in Barcelona combined with playing the EPT Barcelona in August.

Antidote to Ego
Ego is the number one enemy of personal growth. I think every poker player - live or online - has seen someone making plays driven by ego and most likely has made them himself. One might argue that it is a part of poker and maybe the beauty of the game to bluff someone in an insane spot for tons of chips and be ‘the table captain’. I am no exception to this and many times found myself in such spots. Honestly in my puberty and some years after I was a very egoistic person in general. In the poker example it can feel very good with all the endorphin releases but I’m sure it’s not profitable in the longterm. That’s not to say that coming up with big bluffs is a bad strategy, just the motivation for doing that should be based on objective data points rather than trying to prove something. These are some examples when my ego takes over and what it causes to my game:
- Makes me to win all the lost chips back and play suboptimally, usually becoming overaggressive with preflop ranges (RFI, 3B, 4B) and postflop lines
- Makes me to act fast without allowing me to think carefully about important spots
- Makes me to justify bad plays, blame others and refuse to admit that I made a mistake, which stops me from further development

In practical terms one advice from a high stakes crusher from PD was to actually tighten up from baseline ranges and in postflop play when I become aware of this behaviour.

It’d take more than one blog post to break down ego, it’s tendencies and impacts on my life but I’d like to share an idea which is simply practise something that is the biggest enemy of the ego - that is gratitude. If you think about it then being grateful for simple things that we have just don’t let the ego take over. When you’re honestly grateful for something, you can’t act from your ego. Daily gratitude practice - either in the morning or evening or both for that matter helped me not to let the ego enter my game that often. Sometimes the reality can be harsh in our eyes (at poker tables but also in everyday life) yet still there are many things that we have and should be grateful for - friends, family, hot shower, food to eat, and so on - that we often take for granted.
Let’s be grateful. Peace

Working on the negative self-talk
So the investigation is on. The plan regarding mindset work for the next several weeks or months is the negative self-talk and victimisation.

CONSCIOUS
Challenge yourself whenever you use harsh language to yourself.
What would you say as a coach?

SUBCONSCIOUS
By reflecting back I realised the talk I tend to use is very often repetitive, illogical to my conscious self and interestingly I would use wording and even the same voice as my father did in the past when he was angry (often about things he had no control over).
So i wrote down three sentences I use the most during the game with the goal to reframe them into mature and positive sentences:

1. ‘It’s impossible to win.’
   -after series of bad beats, coolers and lost spots I start saying this., that’s the point where I often start seeing a bit red and tend to act fast and overaggressive
   Reframe: ‘Short-term and current results are not important, because I know that in the long-term I’m a winning player.’

2. ‘It always scrws me.’*
   -this comes up often during deepruns when I suffer a bad beat and lose a big stack.
   Reframe: ‘Sometimes I lose when I’m ahead, sometimes the opposite. The way I will handle these situations can give me extraedge.’

3. ‘I hate it.’
   -strong words which alarms that I’m possibly in very bad mindset state and comes up after series of bad outcomes and bizarre spots and/or big mistakes
   Reframe: ‘I love poker for its unpredictability and the challenge it gives me.’

To build this into my subconscious I practice this every day during my morning meditation, when I visualise challenging situations in poker where I’d use the undesired language and see myself actually saying the reframes of the negative talk. Then whenever I catch myself going that way during the grind and focus on actually saying the reframes. It is very interesting practice, what I found out the first couple of days is that as easy as it might seem it is actually damn hard. I often literally feel resistance to say those things and it’s almost like part of my just wanna scream ‘Shut up, what a bullsh*t!’ but with more and more practice this will happen more naturally and become more legit.
The skill of mastering one’s own mind is not something that can be just learnt and solved once and forever. It is hours and hours of continuous practice and self awareness and that’s why I believe it can become a huge edge for crushing online poker.

Edge of the tables: 3. Nutrition
How we fuel our body and brain will affect performance and cognitive function. First I’d like to mention that there are many studies that research the connection between the gut and the brain and the science suggests that gut health and proper function impact the cognitive function and neurotransmitters in the brain. Second, there are studies regarding specific food that improve concentration and cognitive function as well as food with the opposite effect causing tiredness and slowing down the brain. Although I’m very far away from being a nutrition specialist I’d say that nutrition is one of my hobbies and I spend a decent amount of time every week investigating this topic through different podcasts, articles and books and then in a way experimenting on myself.
It is necessary to mention that every single person has different deficiencies and tolerances to different types of food therefore it is very unlikely someone can bring up ‘a perfect diet’. That being said I’d like to point out a couple of basic directions regarding nutrition in order to maximise performance and brain function.
1. Fats - eliminate unhealthy fats mainly from vegetable oils that are proven to cause long term damage to the brain and replace them with quality olive oil, avocado oil or coconut oil and use them with proper heat temperature to avoid releasing some undesirable substances.
2. Sugar - avoiding foods that contain lot of processed and added sugar can improve concentration and energy levels, these can be replaced by fructose, stevia or other natural sweeteners
3. Processed foods - which usually contain at least one of the undesirable from above and are packed with excess of sodium
4. Diversify the diet - as I said there’s no perfect diet, for me personally making sure to have different types of foods including veggies, fruits, nuts, seeds, meet and so on is important to get big scale of vitamins and minerals for proper function of my body and brain and potentially adding a supplement of something that is hard to get (with backed up science or medical advice)

Generally my diet is pretty healthy and at the same time I don’t feel I limit myself in any way. I created a habit of craving healthy foods in order to feel good rather than craving unhealthy food for the instant pleasure and undesirable feelings later. So without any inner fights I’m seeking healthy nutritious foods especially on my most productive days and I as well enjoy a slice of a nice cheesecake or a juicy burger with bacon now and then when I don’t intend to perform my best.
Any other basic diet rules someone has to share?
Cheers

Progress of goals when starting the blog
My goals:
1.Move up in stakes and crush 200$ games in daily schedule and 500$ - 1k$ games during the series
-I gained solid confidence in 200$ in my daily schedule, also got some nice scores there and the last series played several 500$ and two 1k$ tournaments, gotta admit tho that in those I still felt significant pressure

2.Reach 200k$ profit in one year from today (12.11.2021)
141k right now. Getting closer and closer, time getting shorter. LFG

3.Upgrade my understanding of GTO concepts (yep, it’s true until now I was going on with pretty much basic theory concepts and exploitative strategies only)
Feel solid progress here as well and with my fellow players from Poker Detox we’re currently working on a huge GTO project beside other parts of the tree in 3bet pots, so only the hours I will put in will improve my GTO understanding.

Long distance travel
Long way to go from Mexico to Czech Republic. When I was booking the flight I decided not to make the same mistake like many times before and book the cheapest flight, which is usually very long with long layovers as well. If I’d travel for 5-6 hours more I might even spend the difference of the price of the ticket for the expensive meals at the airport, not to mention the impact on my body and mind, recovery time and even my hourly rate.
Anyways I booked some kind of middle option but in the end turned out I was running pretty bad on this journey. First they changed the route and added one stop on Havana which added another 3-4 hours on the plane, then I had to pay extra 100usd for tax which apperantelly was’t included. I flew overnight and managed to sleep more than half of the flight, which was great. What wasn’t great was that on my transfer in Milan to Prague I spent a couple of hours at a totally overcrowded airport watching the delay of my time rising to the point when they just cancelled the flight completely. So that meant one more night in Milan before arriving home. Money lost, time lost but that’s the reality and nothing I could do about that. I surprised myself that I didn’t tilt at all although I was very tired after around 16h of travelling already and looking forward to getting home.
I just booked my trip to Brazil where I plan to spend one month after EPT Barcelona and play the WCOOP from there. So more long travels are upcoming. Here’s couple of things to keep the travels as smooth as possible:
-If possible, choose the longest flight overnight to sleep as much as possible and avoid the shitty airplane food
-Sleeping mask - bought a sleeping mask for couple of bucks which leaves total darkness and it was great
-Noise cancelling headphones - I downloaded 6h deep sleep music/wave from brain.fm and let the crying baby two rows behind to bother everyone else but me
-Good seat selection - I made a mistake and booked a window seat, which is definitely better than a middle seat but next time for a long distance flight I will exchange a nice view for comfort to get up and stretch anytime I want by choosing the aisle seat.

Ok, that’s enough travel blogging. Now I’m gonna take a few days off to spend with my family and then get back to a somewhat adjusted playing schedule next week - going back to playing European time zone so it will be late night grinds again.
GL

June sum-up: The highest ABI so far and great swinging comeback
So this month I started to leave out 25-33$ BI big field tournaments and rather played smaller field 109-215$ BIs which made me climb to 100ABI this month which is the highest I played in my career.
When I checked sharkscope to post the graph I realised I was down over 8k in the second half of June. Ending up 8k plus is besides the luck and variance thanks to two factors.
First, not checking daily/weekly results which spared me a lot of anxiety, stress and pressure. Of course, I knew I wasn’t running particularly well at the start of the month but just trying to stick to my game and keep playing was the way to go.
Second, 13th of May I received a quarterly review from Poker Detox - detailed analysis of my game, leaks and place of improvement and how to fix them. This might be due to after SCOOP tiredness or mindset shift after running bad, I’m not sure but there were several leaks where I was bleeding EV that started to show up, when I realised it’s mostly caused by projection in game and subjective thinking rather than some technical misconceptions.

June goals
- Play min 400MTTs - YES 423 MTTs played

• Study min 30h - NO - 25h only

• Review min. 2 deepruns - YES

• Post min 2 hands on HH server of Poker Detox - NO only

• Catch up on posted hands in HH server of Poker Detox - YES

• Mindset work min 1h - YES

-Investigate and work on self talk during the game by using visualisation, meditation and proper preparation for the grind - YES

Edge of the tables: 4. Dopamine
I’ve mentioned my top three ways of gaining an edge of the tables - sleep, nutrition, sun. The next one is managing dopamine levels - the main driver of our motivation. This is something I wasn’t paying enough or maybe even no attention earlier in my life until very recently. I was always that type of guy seeking immediate pleasure and dopamine boosts in any way possible. At the poker tables we are all exposed to dopamine highs and lows all the time which can cause some very serious issues in the long term but if managed correctly it can bring balance, calmness and objectivity to the tables.
I’ve witnessed other poker players, and even experienced this myself to some extent, getting their dopamine levels completely out of line. As a reference I’d use a cocaine addict as extreme as it might seem. A person addicted to cocaine gets a dopamine boost every time he accesses the drug (actually already with a single thought about the drug), which makes him feel on the top of the world. He will start to build tolerance and seek higher doses to reach that same level of satisfaction and when he doesn’t have the drug he will feel completely bored and even depressed. His dopamine levels will be disrupted to the point when he won’t be able to enjoy anything else. And this is the state of being which I witnessed caused by playing poker. So the dopamine highs from watching big flips, running big bluffs and playing final tables for big money caused that then in regular life the poker player will find it very hard to enjoy anything. It just won’t be pleasurable because the dopamine tolerance is now very high, which leads to anxiety and depression. Honestly, I can experience this every Monday after playing huge fields and big tourneys on Sunday, the low guarantees are just not thrilling to me. But now I became more informed and aware of this and learnt ways how to maintain dopamine levels balanced and controlling the peaks and baselines, here’s some tips:

-Cold exposure - ice bath is my ultimate favourite, it will immediately increase the level of dopamine but after that it will cause long-lasting increases in dopamine baseline (I started doing 8-12min ice bath every Monday before my poker session to balance out the dopamine highs from Sunday)
-Intermittent fasting - eating cause dopamine release, fasting 12-16 hours a day can balance the dopamine levels
-Avoid doing activities which spike the dopamine simultaneously - such as not playing poker and watching a favourite movie, not working out and listening favourite music, and so on
-Source of caffeine used - e.g. yerba mate which can preserve the survival of dopamine neurons

So the edge it gives me is that I experience much less of moments when my dopamine levels are very low, therefore I lack motivation and feel like I don’t care about anything which makes me play spewy. On the other hand the moments when I’m over motivated (high dopamine levels) I use a lot of energy and become more emotionally attached, which can very easily lead to tilt, are also happening way less when I pay attention to the dopamine regulation.

In my opinion dopamine is a crucial thing to understand, especially for a poker player. I recommend checking out a very detailed podcast about this topic from Dr. Andrew Huberman:
Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction | Huberman Lab Podcast #39

Mindset reflections: Expectations and Objectivity
Currently I’m enjoying a working holiday in my home country Czech Republic, which will soon transfer into full holiday for a few weeks. Besides playing a couple of sessions back in the long night sessions I used the time to reflect and investigate some of my recent mindset struggles.

Expectation - every time there’s a good opportunity I tend to create big expectations e.g. when running deep in some big guarantee or even in a single hand when I play a huge pot and flop good. Of course I am not always going to ship the tourney or win the big pot and in that case the expectations cause tilt, loss of focus and mental distortion. The way to approach this is to focus on staying present - not thinking ahead of how it’ll feel when I win the pot or ship the tourney, which creates emotional attachment. A mantra that I often use in my meditation and also put on a note at my desktop is: “I will play to the best of my ability with no expectations of immediate results.”

Objectivity - often what unfulfilled expectations or other mindset issues lead to is losing objectivity and starting to base my decisions on subjective feelings, which is no doubt -EV in the long run. I realised this when reflecting back on my game and found some illogical deviations from my standard strategy. To tackle this the work outside the tables must be done I believe. Reviewing hands with other poker friends and studying together is a great way to build objectivity in my game, because studying/reviewing alone can still be done in a very subjective manner. This is one of the reasons I progressed quite fast in Poker Detox - it’s thanks to the community of other players and the coaches that provide regular feedback on my game and always put me back on the right track.

GL everyone

Good reads: 1. Michael Singer
In today’s post I’m gonna share one of my favourite author’s books that helped me in my poker journey in terms of mindset (not directly poker related books) and contributed a lot for my spiritual growth as well. I project and interpret many thoughts form this book in the poker environment - especially the mindset. In the past I read many self development books, some good, some worse, and now I look for quality reads that are written by people with great life stories and experiences and are not repeating the same concept over again.

Michael Singer is an entrepreneur that started to pursue an inner peace and became a yogi and spiritual author. His first book is: The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself. This book based on yogic philosophy talks about inner peace, the self and the nature of mind.

His next book: The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life's Perfection is one of my all time favourite books that has had an incredible impact on my life and helped me in my life and poker development. He’s touching on the subject of life flow, surrendering of whatever happens and accepting the uncontrollable. It is a story that is worth reading again every few years and that’s what I’m going to do for sure.

Right now I am finishing his latest piece: Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament and he’s some quotes that stuck with me:
“One of the most amazing things you will ever realize is that the moment in front of you is not bothering you - you are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you.”
“Once you stop suppressing uncomfortable experiences, one thing you’re going to realize is that there really is no subconscious mind, per se. The conscious mind and the subconscious mind are actually the same one mind, and the only reason we see a difference is because we artificially created a division.”
“The technique - positive thinking - is a very basic and useful one for bringing about change. (...) You are simply replacing the automatically generated thoughts with willfully created ones. Don’t fight, just replace. It doesn’t matter if the negative thoughts continue in the background; just focus on the positive thoughts you are willfully creating. Over time, your willfully created thoughts will replace the automatically generated ones. This is a very healthy thing to do.”

The last quote felt like direct advice to my current mindset development. I experience an inner fight going on in my head in challenging situations at the poker tables and when I try to use positive self-talk or mantras to calm myself down I still hear the negative talk going on, which is a very discouraging and somewhat painful experience. Reading this helped to stay determined to the mindset work and embrace positivity until it becomes automatic.

I am open to interesting books and stories of any kind, if anyone had a recommendation, please share it with me here.
Cheers

Back to work & MTT poker as art
In July I took it quite easy as my girlfriend from Mexico came to visit to Czech Republic. I played a few sessions at the beginning of the month and put some hours to work on a GTO project for 3B pots that is going on in Poker Detox and for the last 10 days I was completely off my computer. For that reason I didn’t set any goals for this month, therefore a very short sum-up is: played 185 MTTs, ABI 100$, profit -1300$. It was nice to turn off my poke brain for a while but honestly the holiday has reached its limit and I’m excited to go back to the lab. The plan is to jump in to my study+grind schedule in an easy way, probably starting with 10 tables and shorter sessions and next week I’ll be heading to Barcelona for PD team trip and playing the EPT - I’m insanely excited to play live poker again and fulfilling one of my dreams by playing the main event.

The days off made me realise how much I love my job and enjoy the MTT format of poker. The main drive and motivation for me is the final tables and ICM situations, where the game changes completely and the best strategy is dependent on the specific dynamic. Even with all the technology and solvers it’s very far from being solved, as many people argue that the ICM model is flawed (f.ex. Doug Polk has mentioned this often). So in my opinion this is the part where poker becomes a real art - having some theory baseline, adjusting to my opponent’s strategies and picking up the best spots, while playing for the win.
One thought the came to my mind is that the online MTT offers lot of big field (1000+ players) tournaments and when I look back to the beginning of my MTT career, I would play mostly those with a solid chip EV poker and then wouldn’t adjust for ICM in late game, where the money is actually on the line. A good way to master these spots is to play smaller (100-200 players) fields, which will bring more ICM spots and allow you to study them, practice them and also very importantly to get used to the pressure of the final table and payjumps. This seems like an efficient and fast way to progress.

GL all!

EPST Barcelona is on + hand breakdown
Here we go back to the live action. I was looking forward to shuffling chips and looking for tells of my opponents. Now the game’s on and leash’s off. First few days in Barca and it’s rapidly climbing on the list of my favourite cities in the world and on top of that the poker tour looks like it could be breaking records in number of players.

First event I jumped in was the ESPT Main Event 1100Eur.
I started on Day 1C (missed the first two as it was the first day after arriving and I didn’t feel fresh enough to jump in) and it didn't go my way at all. Late regged with around 60 big blinds, failed with bluffing two spots, didn’t improve my equity in multi way pot and then went all in with JJ vs KK. Second in Day 1D I think I played solid, didn’t get too many good spots and the table wasn’t the easiest one, lost some chips and after some levels I busted and went to the rebuy cage. The second bullet was much more fun - I drew a much easier table (finally people that open limp) got some value hands, caught some bluffs and bluffed successfully myself. When we were around 300 people left (108 ITM) they broke down my table and send me to a new one where finally enough was sitting main coach of Poker Detox MTT, who actually eliminated me when he re-jammed A6o BBvsBTN for 12.5bbs and won against my AQs - well, thanks a lot boss!

Here’s an interesting hand shortly after joining the last table (so not much info on anyone):
250 people left, effective stack 60bbs

Hero opens UTG 2.3bbs with QsQh
UTG+1 (older Italian gentleman) calls
MP calls
BB calls
Flop 4-way: 8c6s3c (10.5bbs pot)
Hero checks, UTG+1 checks, MP bet 3.5bbs - BB folds, Hero calls, UTG+1 raises 10.5bbs - MP folds, hero calls
Turn heads-up: 8c6s3c9d (35bbs pot)
Hero checks, UTG+1 checks
River heads-up: 8c6s3c9d 6c (35bbs pot)
Hero bets 8bbs, UTG+1 raises 25bbs, Hero folds
The Italian gentleman starts swearing in Italian and shows 3d3h.

Here I lost a big part of my stack and then battled shortstack for some time until I busted. Thoughts on this? Playing passively overpair or getting away at some point? I think I like the way I played, maybe on a flush closing river it would be better to just give up, not really sure.

Today I’m gonna jump in the last flight. The price pool is already 3.5 million euro and still 2 flights left to play. LFG!

Min cash in EPT Barcelona 5k Main
In the ESPT 1k Main I haven’t fired the fourth bullet in the end and rather prepared myself for the EPT 5k Main, which is the biggest EPT main event in history.
At the beginning I had a pretty good table, which turned out to be a pretty tough one at the end of day 1. In the second last hand I bluffed half of my stack against a Spanish pro G. Baumann in 3bp when I flat called flop and turn with a draw and bluffed on the river. She made a great call with A-high for two thirds of her stack and I packed around 50bbs (2x starting stack) for day 2.
The day 2 started with the luck on my side and managed to build up my stack, then got all in for 50bbs with AA against AK, the very next hand I defended TT against a 3b from BB to face overbet jam on QT2 of the same suit and unfortunately lost against AK with flush draw, that hit on the river - probably a pot for the chip lead at that point. And then I didn’t get any good spots as the bubble was approaching. I had to tighten up as a middle stack and just waited for the money. After it burst I got all in with TT against KQs and AA and that was it. I finished 295/2300 for min cash 8.8k eur but more importantly it was a great experience for me, a lot of fun and an amazing atmosphere at the tables. I’m happy with my mindset and attitude and actually, I felt more nervous playing the 1k the week before. It felt great being able to play live again in this big event and I can see myself going for the WSOP 10k main next year

Back to the online MTT business
Two weeks of working holiday is over and as much fun as it was I’m happy going back to the usual online grind. The main reason is the control of the environment one has when playing online. No shitty casino chairs and food, no artificial light till the late night, no overcrowded rooms and one-tabling for hours but rather a healthy food prep, a comfortable gaming chair and a consistent schedule for sleep and work-outs. These are the areas where one can gain an extra edge, of course it’s possible to deal with this in live poker too but it is just more challenging and time consuming.

So right now I have a 6 weeks working holiday from Florianopolis, Brazil ahead. The plan is to acclimate the first 10 days for which I booked an apartment close to the beach, get back to yoga and meditation daily, some workouts and also to refresh my mind with some poker studies again and reflect and prepare for WCOOP which starts on 4th of September. Before that I’ll be moving in a house with 4 other players from Poker Detox and staying there until 6th of October. Hopefully I will also find the time and courage to take surfing classes.
Vamooo!

‘Different personalities’ in different languages and its mindset implications
After arriving in Brazil I met a former Detox player, who was one of the firsts when the MTT site was created. We had a very interesting discussion about mindset - specifically about different languages and how they can shape a character of a person.

It all started by discussing the language switch and how confusing it is to switch from one language to another. Then he pointed out the distinction of him talking to himself in Portuguese compared to talking in English during his grind and how it feels more grounded and objective when the self talk is in English. This made me think and realise an important factor affecting my negative self-talk. First, I remembered reading an article a long time ago about how thinking and speaking different languages shapes the personality of a person to the degree, where we can argue that the person has a different character in every language they speak. It was written by a man that speaks 7 languages and he was explaining the different traits of his personality in all the languages he speaks. From my personal experience I found it to be true. My mother tongue is Czech, I have been speaking English for many years, my Danish is at beginner level and for more than a year I speak fluent Spanish too. In every language my personality shapes a different way and I could speak about those differences but that’s not really the point of this post.

Over the last months I have been investigating the negative self-talk, unfairness and victimisation revealed by playing online poker and moving up in stakes. In practice it goes like this:
After some time in my session, usually the final few hours, and after a compound of triggering situations (bad beats, coolers, etc.) there is a voice that start saying statements in Czech such as:
‘Of course, when there’s more than 60 big blinds in the pot, it’s impossible for me to win the all-in, no matter if I’m ahead.’ or ‘I just can't get a good spot in a late game, I always get a cooler, it’s just impossible to win.’
At that moment I am aware of what is going on - that’s a really good starting point. The next step is to find a calm and peace in my mind and support the inner voice that is most likely coming from childhood. Now this is where I struggle. I created mantras of positive, self supportive statements to tackle this negativity but when I am about to say them (in Czech) it seems extremely difficult and not legit, the inner child/victimised self is pushing the rational me away and keeps going. The main issue seems to be that it simply doesn’t trust the positive statements. I came to the realisation that if I spoke in English it would be much more legit and trustworthy. When I discuss this issue with my hypnotherapist, it is in English as he’s from the UK and the hypnotherapies, where we go back to my childhood, also take place in English. My Brazilian friend argues that the Czech personality carries all the childhood traumas, while the English personality developed when I was more mature, therefore it’s perceived this way.
I found this very fascinating and will experiment with answering to the negative self-talk in English (perhaps in Spanish too, no Danish please - that sounds too rough).

August sum-up
After taking pretty much the whole July off I got back to the grind in August and combined the two weeks of live poker with some online grind as well. I haven’t set any goals for August because of the inconsistent schedule and travelling. Of the 232 MTTs I played, I had a couple interesting deep runs and final tables and ended up being up almost 10k excluding around 2k cash–out from live poker. Admittedly I did pretty much zero studying this month, except last week when I set up my office here in Brazil, caught up on what I missed from PD coachings and refreshed my memory a bit. To be fair I have the sense that I am losing some EV in different spots due to lack of studying and have more mental distortion caused by not having vision or enough technical knowledge in some spots.

• The plan for the next few days before WCOOP kick off:
  Studying - refreshing concepts I know already rather than try to learn something new last minute:
• ICMizer study of late game - this is one of the areas, where I feel I need a refreshment - semi-final and final table spots
• Refreshing the most important MDA spots in early game
• WCOOP schedule - prepare a daily schedule and MTT schedule for each day to avoid FOMO and burn out
• Set up in a new grindhouse - move and prepare everything in the new grindhouse that I am gonna share with other 4 crushers from Detox
• Relax and recharge - take one day to explore the beautiful surroundings of Florianopolis, probably will go for a couple hours hike in the nature

WCOOP plan and schedule
So all the plans before the series from last post are done - did some hours of studying ICM, deepruns and refreshing chip ev spots, set up a station in the new grind house, created tournament and daily schedule and went for a 3h hike in a beautiful place Lagoa do Peri, Florianopolis.
Here’s couple of key points to follow through out the series:
- Daily schedule: waking time 7.30am - start playing 12pm (10.30am on Sundays) - finish registering around 6-7pm - go to sleep around 10.30pm
- Weekly schedule - First week playing everyday except Friday, second and third week every day except Wednesdays and Fridays
- Study - only short warmp-ups with ICMizer or PreflopAcademy and a short hand reviews once a week
- Table count - 10 tables at the beginning - 12 tables only when feeling absolutely fresh and alert and not playing 500$+ tournaments
- Buy-in range - everything up to 215$, most 530$ and 1k$ only on Sundays

This is going to be probably the most professional series as I share a very nice villa with some of the best players from the team, have planned everything and hired a personal chef for grocery shopping and meal prep, therefore I can use my time to get centred, balanced and fully prepared without unnecessary pressure. I have scheduled a hypnotherapy session after the first week in the series and plan on doing a lot of meditation and self reflection on a daily basis.
Even though I am very excited to jump into the series I feel my expectations are lower than usual before major series. When I discussed this topic in my last hypnotherapy session I was asked to give a realistic estimate of how it will go and my answer was: 1-2 Day 2s in series events a week, 2-3 FTs a week and 5-10k$ profit for a month. This seems realistic but doesn’t mean it will be the case. So no matter the results, the key is to give my best, investigate my mindset and most importantly have fun!
GL everyone at the tables!

Solid kick-off of the series
All set and ready and the first Sunday of the series and hype at the grind house! Great vibe and atmosphere together with proper preparation led to I had one of my best sessions ever. Not really results wise even though I had a juicy score on Winamax, but more in terms of performance and mindset - I managed to fulfil and follow all the goals for my session and handled difficult situations and tough mental and emotional moments very well. I had a few other deepruns but also busted some expensive tournaments like the WCOOP 1k and 530$ or the BH HR 530 on GG. Besides that the other guys from the grind house had some solid deepruns as well and one of them final tabled 2 WSOP events on GG, shipped one and cashed around 45k$! So the hype is real
LFG

Winamax Series 250eur Marathon

First week into WCOOP 2022
Today is my first day off after 5 days of playing and so far I feel very well. I intend to do a ‘what went well and what I could improve’ every week to reflect on my energy levels and be more accountable to my plans.

I really enjoy the atmosphere in the grind house and I feel like it’s a great experience for me development and growth. The challenge comes when it is required to turn off the poker brain and rest and relax, which is the case for me especially during major series. As you can imagine the most common topic is poker and you can hear strategy conversations all day long. After 8 hours of grinding there’s a hand review going on late at night and obviously after finishing the session it is common to rail the other guys if they have a deeprun, which sure is lots of fun but it keeps the brain stimulated and is not really the best activity in terms of sleep hygiene.

What went well?
- I stick to my tournament schedule and table count strictly
- I did couple of hand reviews and ICMizer spots

What could I improve?
- Implement some type of short, light exercise routine for everyday
- Fix the sleeping schedule, despite the different times of finishing of the grind each day
- Investigate and become aware of the emotional attachment to specific tournaments (mainly all the WCOOP events on stars)

Good luck all, have fun at the tables!

Second week into WCOOP 2022
Second week in the series and I’m still feeling well. I wasn’t running as hot as the first week but my energy and sleep is on solid levels. Having said that it starts to feel like my poker brain needs a break - the first thought that pops up in my mind after waking up is usually some spot from the day before and with playing many days in a row the frustrution and irritaition of anoying spots and bad runs is increasing. For that reason I’m gonna take two days off - Friday and Saturday and just chill, get a massage and sauna and going to a reaggae music festival in Florianopolis on Saturday to get ready and fresh for Sudnay grind and Monday’s day 2 in Colossus 400$ on GG Poker.
The vibe in the grind house is still amazing and two guys got a 20k score each on the last Tuesday.

What went well?
- Improved my activity levels and managed to hit very high readiness and sleeping scores every single day
- Improved in feeling unfair and as a victim by using breath exercises and self support

What could I improve?
- Take it easy at the end of the session and drop the table count rather than keep registering everything and re-entering a lot
- Let go of emotional attachments to the highest buy-ins and expectations in deep runs
- Be more present in difficult spots to access my best decisions rather than getting irritated I ended up in an impossible spot

GL all

Last weekend of the series
The series are slowly coming to an end. So far it was quite a rollercoaster for me with a pretty good start, then swinging a bit down and then facing a very stressful challenge last Wednesday when I experienced pretty rare technical issues - all of a sudden the connection of pokerstars started dropping and all the tables were lagging. Other sites were working just fine and other guys from the grind house had no problem with stars either. When I tried to and log in I couldn’t. I would connect after some time but I couldn’t play - I saw my cards but under my nickname was written ‘sitting out’ so every hand was automatically folded and I was slowly blinding out at all three tables from pokerstars while playing other 6-7 tables on other sites. I blinded out early game of 109 4-max WCOOP, Big 55 and deeprun with last 140 players in Mini BB HR 55 - the immediate $ lost of this isn’t so horrible but it was very challenging for my mindset as I kept trying to fix it and use most of my concentration for that and became very tilted by the unresolveable situation. Such a situation is not so different from having a bad beat as it is outside my control and I should keep the focus on tournaments and spots I actually have control to make a decision. So even though it wasn't a long session I felt drained after and I brought some of that negativity to the next grind on Thursday, when I ran bad, made many mistakes and overall played one of my worst sessions ever.

The past is over, reflections were made, lessons were learnt and now is time to put max focus on last weekend of huge fields and guarantees.
No expectations for result, the goal is to give my best in every aspect possible and treat every situation as a professional:
- The spots against top players
- The deep runs
- The final tables
- The losses of my biggest buy ins

GLGL

WCOOP 2022 reflections
The winter series are over and it’s been quite a rollercoaster for me. With the skyrocket starting to swing down for almost the rest of the series with a couple of big chances that were close to reach but missed in the end.
Huge field tournaments (1500 entrants avg) and I reached my highest ABI of my career, mainly due to playing as high as $1k and 400-500$ flights. Objectively I didn’t run that well in the highest range of my buy-ins but with all honesty there is as well a ton of work to be done to improve in those tuffer fields. Both technical wise and mindset wise - I felt a pressure and emotional attachment in the highest tournaments and it’s something I need to reflect on more (I will write a post about climbing up in stakes).

What went well:
- Balancing of grind, study and rest
- Reflecting on table count, volume and playing hours and adjusting accordingly

What could I improve?
- Staying present in difficult spots and put the effort to solve them to the best of my ability
- Self support and letting go in deep runs
- Handling expectations

Overall it was a great experience to share a grind house with my teammates. I learnt a lot in terms of technical poker as well as mindset and lifestyle choices. Even though I ended up down, these four weeks of intense grind opened my mind and uncovered a lot of areas for improvement and at the end of the day that’s my ultimate goal for every day - looking to improve.

Moving up in stakes - Pressure
‘Ignore the $ value and only focus on making profitable decisions’ is easier said than done. Everyone who’s aiming to move up in stakes in poker will face challenges on the way in one shape or another.

For me personally, this is a constant challenge as I have started on micro stakes almost years ago and aim to keep increasing my ABI. Here’s a funny observation:
‘Alright, now focus, don’t fck it up, this is the most important tournament of the session with quite a lot of money on the line, so better avoid making punts and mistakes.’*
Something along these lines would be going on in my head every time I play higher than before. During the last series I noticed similar self talk when playing 500/1k$ buy-ins and I realised that I was in the very same spot a couple years back when I played Big 22$ and Bounty Builder 33$ for the first time and felt exactly the same stress and pressure.

Pressure
- It is the natural response of the human mind when being put in a challenging situation. It is a very counterproductive tool. (The challenging situation being playing the tournament itself, therefore it is a constant state of mind as long as the tabel is on the screen)
- Being in pressured, stressful situation usually triggers the fight or flight mode and will lead to response depending on one’s archetype - risk averse person will end up playing way to tight and giving away EV by not bluffing and bluffcatching enough and the risk taker might end up spewing his stack in completely unreasonable spot.

How to go about it?
- Be aware of your archetype and in unclear spots go the opposite way - in my case it’s the risk averse archetype for the most part - therefore, whenever I am in a spot when it feels very close to bluff or bluffcatch I should take the riskier decision.
- The main goal is to make profitable decisions which will make money over time, the immediate result doesn’t matter - remind this to yourself and keep it in mind
- Feel and live the challenge - 90% of the spots in the higher games will be exactly the same as in the lower games, great! I can be confident it is the right game for me to play; 10% of the spots might be very difficult ones, facing tough players and feeling like being exploited, great! Now I can change the gear of my poke brain and try to solve it to the best of my ability and if I’m lost or make a negative EV decision, I can mark the hand and improve my game in a certain area that I never could’ve done unless playing this high.

So when I look at my poker journey until now as a whole I can differentiate between two states of mind whenever I play higher than I used to
1. Pressured, risk averse, emotionally attached, looking for uncontrollable outcomes that I can blame and feel like a victim - which causes playing my B or C game, missing many data points and idiciations, creating story narrative and justifying my plays on subjective feelings rather than well grounded knowledge
2. Being ‘in the zone’, being excited about the challenge, sticking to my standard play most of the time, using my intuition in some spots where I don’t have vision and being happy about whatever outcome it brings, being grateful and see it as an opportunity to battle very good opponents to learn from them

Hola señorita! Can't believe I'm only now finding your blog, great read.

‘Alright, now focus, don’t fck it up, this is the most important tournament of the session with quite a lot of money on the line, so better avoid making punts and mistakes.’

I think everyone has this happen. I've personally found that whenever I try too hard to stay in control in these situations I tend to self-destruct.

I've found that by allowing myself to be present and just accept that I'm nervous in this spot without judging myself, I can more easily clear my mind and just focus on executing my strategy in the same way I always do. Like you said, most of the time our strategy doesn't even change when we move up stakes.

Graph update It's almost been a year and I want to see how close to $200k you are

Making peace with variance
For poker players and especially for MTT poker players variance is an inevitable part of the process. Having only profitable months and a graph aiming only upwards sounds like a dream but is rather a utopian idea. The truth is that variance is actually necessary and is what makes the game profitable for professionals. All this is very easy to forget in the storm of thousands of hands every week.

Let me get back to the graph with a line going up. I’m sure there are many crushers whose graph looks exactly like this, so that is not to say it is impossible. It is, however, under one condition - enough sample. On a low sample a graph like that is pure luck. Here is a way to seeing the bigger picture and visualise variance:

Zoomed out:
Focusing on the process rather than the short term results
Being consistent with lifestyle (sleep, nutrition, exercise), studying and playing volume
Evaluate every session/week/month based on those parameters above rather than $ results
For that reason ideally not checking any short term $ results
-> this is the recipe for skyrocketing graph over long term

Zoomed in:
If you take big enough sample of this type of graph and zoom in - on any part of the graph, you will see the variance - I call it the ‘graph’s teeth’
Let’s say you have all the aspects for a long term success on point. With all the rational points kept in mind, there’s two ways to go about it during the process:
1. Getting angry about the graph’s teeth and wasting energy everytime a big flip on semi-final table is lost, getting 3-outted in a spot for a chip lead, getting a cooler on major final table or bubbling 5 tournaments during one session, whatever it may be.
2. Making peace with variance and accepting everything that is happening at any moment with the intention of playing to the best of the current ability, learning and improving.

All this is much easier said than done. But it is absolutely crucial for success in poker, because the feedback loop is very long and therefore hard for the human mind to accept and understand.
The big danger of not understanding this is that:
- A poker player with an optimal lifestyle, study routine and volume playing a profitable winning strategy may feel like he needs to drastically change his attitude or even a technical aspects, when on a downswing, while the reality is he just needs to get through the graph’s teeth.
- A poker player with a suboptimal lifestyle, study routine and volume playing losing strategy, may feel like he’s in a perfect place and doesn't need to change a thing, while on a heater.
Both will end up losing in the long term.

Lately, I found myself taking many bad spots very personally, blaming the poker gods and feeling like a victim of variance. That’s why I put my thoughts on this page.
Let’s make peace with the variance again and the results will naturally come.

My goals:
1.Move up in stakes and crush 200$ games in daily schedule and 500$ - 1k$ games during the series
- Getting more and more comfortable playing 200$ buy-ins and adding some 250$ and 300$ to my daily schedule. During the series playing the best 500$ and 1k$ - it is an area where I put the most focus mindset wise right now and planning to keep doing that.

2.Reach 200k$ profit in one year from today (12.11.2021)
- Still missing quite a big chunk to make this real. With higher ABI the swings at higher and low volume during summer months didn’t help either. No stress though, MTT poker has ups and downs and big scores can come any time.

3.Upgrade my understanding of GTO concepts (yep, it’s true until now I was going on with pretty much basic theory concepts and exploitative strategies only)
- This is an area where I am starting to put more and more focus as it becomes necessary in many parts of the game tree against very good opponents. I’d say I improved a lot since last year but definitely still have tons of work to do.

Not stopping, on my way up. LFG

Small stakes, high BI Sunday bink & stoic wisdom
It’s been a while since I shipped a tournament and even though I am grateful for every deeprun and final table score, there’s always the lack of satisfaction even if I finish 2nd place in a huge field. ‘In it to win it’ is the motto. This was a fun one. Sunday's PKO run, where I was very lucky throughout the whole tourney but also it was one of my best sessions in terms of mindset. I managed to stay calm and patient, manage my table count to the deepruns and be patient and relaxed with my decisions and the outcomes I faced.

Most day of the week I listen to short passage of stoic wisdom (Daily Stoic podcast by Ryan Holiday) and the last I listened to really resonated with me - it’s titled ‘You Make Your Own Good Fortune’
The idea is that in everyone’s life there’s time where everything goes their way, they are lucky and fortunate, kinda the exact opposite of Murphy’s law. Which of course does not last forever. But instead of looking at it as: ‘I was once a fortunate man, but at some point fortune abandoned me,’ we should see the fortune in our good character, good actions and good intentions, in how we see the world and what we do for ourselves and for others. So instead of being fortunate meaning being lucky it’s more of gratitude and acceptance.

GL

October sum-up and November goals
Pretty tough month in general. Didn’t manage to make that many deepruns as usual and neither did I run that good in those I made. That caused quite a big swings, therefore a big mindset challenge. I also discovered some obvious leaks, therefore it’s time to start working on my game even more. But besides the results here’s a a sum up of how it went the last month:

What I did well:
Got back to my top performing lifestyle (sleep and readiness scores on my oura ring were through the roof)
Go back to my study routine (47 study hours, even with first week off due to travelling)

What could I improve:
The main adjustment for next month is to lower my table count from 12 to 10 as standard
The reason for this is adding some higher buy-ins in my daily schedule (Bounty King 315 and BB HR 530 on GG) and as well to put more focus on quality rather than quantity in order to battle the downswing
Stick with registration hours and table count rules
Study at least 60h
Play at least 500 MTTs
Devote at least 1h/week for mindset

Edge of the tables: 4. Exercise
Pretty simple and straightforward one, but yet very effective.
As I learned there is a lot of scientific evidence that proves the benefits of regular exercising. Besides the longevity, improvement of metabolic functions and many other long term benefits, there are short term and immediate effects of exercising that can undoubtedly bring edge to the poker table:

• Endorphin release - these chemical improves mood a trigger positive feeling, which is a great way for overall mental health and good mindset for a poker session
• Dopamine release - releasing the chemical of motivation with a way such as exercise can help to stabilise the dopamine levels during the highs and lows which a poker rollercoaster can bring (a bit more detail about dopamin above in my Edge of the tables: 3. post)
• Improvement of concentration and energy - paradoxically by exercising we burn calories, which makes us more tired in the moment of performing but at the same time increases the energy and concentration levels later during day (there will be a sweet spot, different for every individual)
• Improvement of cognitive function - some types of exercise will better cognitive warm up than others, what I learnt the best are tennis, swimming and running as it requires the brain to keep coordinating the movements of right side and left side of the body

I think it’s important to mention that the time and intensity of exercise is something to consider and will depend on one’s shape and readiness on the exact day. I have a friend who would do an hour long, very intense heavy weight crossfit session and feel great to play poker after that, while for me what works best is 15-20min intense exercise, mostly I stick with swimming or bodyweight HIIT but sometimes even a 10min walk in the sun is a good way to go. Obviously I wouldn’t recommend anyone to run a marathon and then expect to perform the best at the tables. There are limits to everything (except the pot size in NLHE).
Personally I found this a very effective way to boost my energy and performance for a session! GL!

Weekend playing marathon continues
My usual playing schedule is from Friday to Monday but this week I had to extend it. All the fun started on Sunday when I made a final table in GG Masters 150$ and finished 6th for almost 14k$ and also qualified for day 2 in Winamax 250e PKO HR. On Monday it was a juicy session again as I made it to day 3 on Winamax with 30 players left and shipped BB 109 on stars for 9k. Tuesday I played only the deeprun and busted 18th after 2 hours of playing and took the rest of the day to relax and recharge to get ready for Wednesday grind - normally I’m off or studying but I qualified in Mystery bounty 20eur 600k GTD on Winamax. Fun fact - I have never won a single mystery bounty yet in my life and I played some tournaments of this type. Who knows maybe I won’t be a mystery bounty virgin anymore tomorrow. The field is still huge so I decided to play a full session today.
Let’s have some fun. GLGL

Evaluation of the goals from starting the blog a year ago
Before going to the goals, just a quick update on my mystery bounty virginity - I did it guys! It was rather fast and clumsy but it made me feel great! No big expectations for the first timer and humble acceptance of 40eur bounty. Remarkably it was the only one I won and I managed to play for hours and get from 1k runners left to around 150 left. Anyways I heard the second time and forward it’s just getting better and better so…

Here are the goals:
1.Move up in stakes and crush 200$ games in daily schedule and 500$ - 1k$ games during the series
-Feeling great about that, I got a couple of titles in 215, 250 and 320 and I’m not stopping here.

2.Reach 200k$ profit in one year from today (12.11.2021)
I’m a bit late for this and missing quite a big chunk still. I decided to give myself more chances to reach this (with all honesty this is the less important goal for me, but do it for fun) and extend it to the end of the year. The idea is to set new goals for the new year and have a more memorable deadline not to miss it again.

3.Upgrade my understanding of GTO concepts (yep, it’s true until now I was going on with pretty much basic theory concepts and exploitative strategies only)
-I work with a couple of GTO tools for learning now and I feel I’m expanding my knowledge little by little. Again, not stopping here.

GL all

Good reads: 2. E. Tolle - The New Earth
This is another book that is and most likely always going to be one of my all time favourites. It is simply filled with the presence, peace and wisdom of life.
It gave me a new way to see the world and myself. I once listened to an audiobook and once read the kindle version. Time to time I listen to E. Tolle’s teaching on Spotify where he goes deeper to some of the concepts from the book.
I think soon it’ll be time to re-read this piece again and that’s really my intention to do every year or two because it’s helped develop myself in my personal and professional life and most importantly caused at least a partial ego dissolution. Powerful stuff. Simply a must read.

“The ego isn’t wrong, it is just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don’t take the ego too seriously...Above all, know that the ego isn’t personal. It isn’t who you are. ”

“There is the dream, and there is the dreamer of the dream. The dream is a short-lived play of forms. It is the world – relatively real but not absolutely real. Then there is the dreamer, the absolute reality in which the forms come and go. The dreamer is not the person. The person is part of the dream. The dreamer is the substratum in which the dream appears, that which makes the dream possible. It is the absolute behind the relative, the timeless behind time, the consciousness in and behind form. The dreamer is consciousness itself – who you are.”

November sum-up and December goals
November was a very productive month. I feel very great progress in terms of fixing my leaks and discovering new areas. Results-wise it was great, also I had a bunch of big deepruns and got close to some huge scores. Performance-wise it was a bit of a rollercoaster. Mostly coming from mindset issues and pushing myself to my limits when not necessary. This reflects in my goals evaluation and will in my December goals as well.

What did I do well?
Study and fixing technical leaks
Lowered my table count to 10 as standard

November goals:
Stick with registration hours and table count rules
-This seems to be the main driver and/or the result of bad performance. When I don’t have some deepruns I feel like I need to maximise my registering hours and table count. On the days when I performed very well I managed my registration and table count very well and the opposite when I performed poor.

Study at least 60h
-In my study sheet I ended up on 62h and feel like I covered everything that I have planned. Started doing short study sessions 1-2h on playing days in the morning after my morning routine either alone or with my peers reviewing hands

Play at least 500 MTTs
-ended up on 600 which is 20% above my goal therefore indicates an alert for me that I might be pushing too much - not in terms of playing days but more with registration hours

Devote at least 1h/week for mindset
-Total spent 2.5h for mindset work which is a progress but not enough to fulfil the goal. I need to reframe the time spent on this because I often feel like I would rather do some technical studying instead, but this is something that will undoubtedly increase my EV, especially in the long run. I have plenty of materials and areas to investigate for now.

December goals:
It will be a week or two off the tables during Christmas as my family is going to visit me in Mexico, therefore lower requirements for grind and study and more days off.

Registration and table count
-week days:
Start playing 11-11.30am 8 tables as warm up
Peak 12.30-4.30pm 10 tables
Ease off 5pm 8 tables - register only table filers
Cooldown 6pm 6 tables - no more registering

-Sunday
Start playing 10-11am 8 tables as warm up
Peak 11.30-4.30pm 12 tables
Ease off 5pm 8-10 tables - register only table filers
Cooldown 6pm 6 tables - no more registering

Play at least 300MTTs - focus on quality rather than quantity

Study at least 30 hours

Time spent on mindset at least 2h

Happy new year everyone!

Last couple of weeks I wasn't too active due to Christmas holidays, family meetings and getting back to my routine and to the tables. In general, I will be less active here in the upcoming months as I have got some work on the research side of things and still be busy playing and studying. However I will still post from time to time and the aim is to map my mindset journey and obstacles that I'm facing on my way to the high stakes.

I kicked off the year in a style and hit my record score so far. Funnily enough it was the exact same tournament that I hit my biggest career score a year ago - 20eur multi-day PKO tourney on winamax with 1m GTD. Last year I finished 6th for a bit over 20k eur and this year improved by 3 places and a 30k euro. Next year I’ll do my best to finally ship it.

Operating on 2 levels during a poker session
Playing a MTT poker session requires hours and hours of concentration and logical thinking. Analysing different spots and putting effort into making profitable decisions is obvious to be the key driver for a profitable strategy. That is operating on the logical level. But that’s not the whole part of the equation. We are not robots or zen masters and we face annoying spots, triggering situations and unlucky outcomes, which brings us on the emotional level. The conscious and subconscious, objective and subjective, at least to some extent. There is no separating line between those levels and often they are blended together and affected one by another.

So when a triggering situation takes place, an emotion arises and we are threatened to get trapped at the emotional level, risking making suboptimal and costly plays. It's a good idea to have a plan on how to go about it.

Firstly, it is necessary not to identify with the emotion. This of itself is not an easy thing to do at all and it can be practised not only while playing poker but in everyday life. Perhaps it is appropriate to feel angry, but for how long is it actually appropriate and what purpose does it serve? Be aware of the emotion. Feel it both - physically and mentally, and give it respect.
There is an underlying reason deep in our subconscious mind for feeling that emotion. Rationally, losing is just an event. But on the emotional level it doesn’t seem like that.

After recognizing the emotion and the mental state it brings us to, we realise that this is not a desirable state to be in. We want it to go away. This is the key part, because it is very counter-intuitive and completely against logical thinking.
To make it go away we must not try to make it go away. We must respect it, sit patiently with it, and make it feel safe. The emotion is a living thing. It has a need that is not being met. It represents a part of ourselves that was wounded in the past and hasn’t yet been integrated.

This is extremely challenging because while the emotion arises and gives us the opportunity to do the inner work and embrace the self-compassion, at the same time there are many decisions to be made that require operating on the logical level.
Very often our protective system and logical mind are happy to suppress the unwanted emotion and jump back on the logical level. For that matter there is often a tendency not to stay in that uncomfortable emotional level and look for any excuse to escape instead of risking facing the scary emotions and problems from our past. It may be the highest EV thing to do in vacuum as it will allow us to solve the spot, but can leave the risk of completely burning out in a few months.

Should we sacrifice a little bit of EV in the short term by autopiloting and making decisions just by our standard default knowledge or gut (instead of trying to solve a spot to our best ability), for long term healing process, relaxation and integration of our wounded inner parts?

For me the answer is yes and the plan is to make it my challenge, get the reps in and embrace the self-compassion.

astonishing!
I'm really curious to know your nicknames on the PS and WPN platform... :-(

This is the most amazing and inspiring thread about becoming a good poker player that I have ever read. Thank you for the charge of unreal motivation for grind and studying. I hope you still doing great!