Hey Rio! Another month is coming and I decided to commit myself to a new vision: achieving legendary performance.

In my first poker journal here, I was mostly trying to improve my tactical game, my understanding of poker in terms of strategy. I think I have improved significantly in that area, as the graph below suggests. I'm still not a crusher, but I can say confidently I turned myself into a winning player. I started 2016 playing nl5 zoom and I was basically clueless at that point. Auto piloted from january to april with little improvement, and then in april I decided to stop what I was doing and focus my time in studying, which was when I started the journal. It was the best decision I ever made and I wish I started the year with that mindset.

Life to date graph

But anyways, 6 months later I discovered that being a poker player is much more than understanding range vs range interactions in board textures. Poker strategy is only a tiny part of what is actually being a professional. And I realized that during the whole year I had been only focusing on that tiny part, and neglecting all the other areas, which are equally, if not more important to my $EV and life EV. Things such as sleep, nutrition, exercise, study process, level of focus and concentration during the grind, and so on.

I was going to make this thread about motivating myself to reach my volume goals, since I've been failing miserably in that area for the last 3 months. Averaging 50k hands/month which is an absurd considering that I have all day to grind. But I figured that my lack of volume had a deeper cause, and I'm going for the cause in this thread. The cause is that I'm not performing in my highest level when I sit down to play. Constantly lazy, unmotivated, feeling sleepy or tired, getting distracted with TV series, music and facebok. I will no longer accept this.

If I want to be a professional poker player I need to take all areas seriously, not only the strategy part. I think my strategy skills are good at the moment. But everything else just sucks to be honest. So my goal with this thread is to motivate myself to get better on those other parts. I will be measuring my success by: 1) my monthly volume and 2) overall happiness/motivation/life EV. If I can increase my volume while feeling better and happier, I will consider that as a sign of improving significantly in the other areas of my life.

I want to publicly say thanks to Samu Patronen for a conversation I had with him on Skype, where two words he typed got deep into my head and I will carry them with me for now on. He might think it was not a big deal, but I think everyone that wants to become a poker player needs to learn to respect and seek these two words: patience and consistency. Damn, this is strong! Consistency has everything to do with the purpose of this thread. Legendary performance and consistency work together, and the first can't be achieved without the second.

So, to sumarize...the purpose of this thread is:

1) Motivate myself to work hard on all the areas of a poker player's life apart from poker strategy

2) Share ideas/resources of what to do in order to improve in those areas
I have already some interesting articles/resources to start:
Nutrition/Exercise/Sleep: Thank you Kalupso! - Just googled it, seems good.
Motivation/Goals/Self-discipline: Revisit TMGP2 - "No Excuses! The Power of Self-discipline"
I also own a copy of "Nutrition made clear", an audio book, but never really got into it.
Please, share any valuable resources on this!

3) By doing 1 and 2, consistently play a high volume every month.

4) By doing 1, 2 and 3, achieve Legendary Performance. This statement is super strong, and I read it from former high stakes PLO pro Gabriel Goffi. I just can't accept the average. I'm going all in and I will do the best I can. No more excuses, no more procrastination. I want to be the best. So I need to act like one.

I will also be posting some HH since I love talking poker strategy. Please, engage with the analysis! Not superficial analysis tho, bring your A-game. I will bring mine for sure.

Let's do this.