"The only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart..."  Ted Hughes

Shortly before my 45th birthday I made a decision which, it is fair to say, many would question. I had been a lawyer for over 20 years and my heart was no longer in it. So I sold my share in my law firm and decided that I was going to do what I really wanted  and play poker professionally. To some I guess my decision is a manifestation of a mid life crisis and I should just go and buy a sports car instead. For me it is about feeling alive again and not wishing away the days until retirement, comforting myself with the material trappings of 'success' in a career which was making me unhappy.

So in October 2013 I left the office for the last time and started playing poker professionally. I started playing in 2007 and ran up my bankroll and was playing $200NL at the time of Black Friday. Being based in Europe, Black Friday did not have same impact as in the U.S. but it did still significantly impact on the availability of games and the toughness of the games that were still available. At around the same time work issues meant I played a lot less poker until 2013 by which time the games were a lot tougher.

In the 9 months since playing professionally I have learned a lot about the game and myself. The mental aspect of the game has been more taxing than I thought imaginable. Things started well. My focus from the outset has been on learning so I started again at $50NL and moved back up to $100NL rather than just leaping back  in higher. Things were going well until I decided that I wanted to play 'fast' poker (Speed/Zoom/Rush) to bolster my earnings with better rakeback. The quality of my decisions went down as the volume went up and I all but wiped out my earnings for the year to that point. My confidence has been affected and resulted in a vicious circle as my play became worse-not with crazy lose your head type tilt but more a timidity which resulted in  me failing to pull the trigger and follow through on my reads.

The positive is that I think the downswing has shone a light on the inadequacies of my technical and mental game that were always there but were hidden by never having experienced a downswing before. I have an excellent coach who I respect as a player and as a person who has started to address the issues in my game. If there is one overarching lesson I have learned from him it is this: you can read all the books, watch all the videos, use all the training tools but there is no substitute for applying your mind to each and every hand you play on it's own merits and in it's own context. This may sound obvious but how many people are confronted with situations and say 'do X here-it's standard' ? This type of thinking is so often prevalent in forums and in poker players' approaches that it must stifle proper thinking and development. I know that I had studied an enormous amount but there has been a tendency on my part to almost shoe horn my learning into situations in game and make decisions based on what I had read, seen on videos etc. rather than truly apply my own analysis to situations.

So that brings me to why I am starting this journal. I was already keeping a daily journal and my coach encouraged me to approach this in a different way, focussing more on the mental side rather than a series of technical thoughts in advance of playing. Post session I would record my analysis of sessions by looking at the main pots and also by using Poker Snowie to analyse errors. I still do this but every day I will now analyse at least one hand and usually more, using Flopzilla to analyse my own range and that of the villain(s) in the hand street by street to examine how I would play my entire range on every street, whether my estimation of villain's range is reasonable ,how my hand and my range plays against villain's range and so on. What I  plan to do in this journal is post these hand analyses for discussion. Also I am looking for comments on how to play my entire range at various stages rather than something like 'just fold' etc. Rather than post them in the normal hand history section of the forum I plan to post them here (unless the mods tell me otherwise) because I think it will be good to have people posting who have followed my thought processes (and leaks) in this thread.

I also intend to post about mental game issues and other things on my mind as I go. Anyway here goes...