Requesting Advice for reaching your level
Posted by RagingPillow
Posted by
RagingPillow
posted in
Mid Stakes
Requesting Advice for reaching your level
What advice would you give someone aspiring to reach your level?
I have been moving up limits quite quickly and I am about to begin playing 50nl. I have read Peter Clarke’s grinder’s manual and watched the From The Ground Up Series on this site. I continue to reread and rewatch to try to ingrain the content. However, i am sure there is more I can be doing. I thought it would be best to ask those of you who have made it this far.
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There are 2 pieces of advice that have served me very well for climbing up in stakes. One is a piece of life advice from my dad, which is that "the money will follow the value". Essentially this is supposed to mean that if you create something valuable then the money will take care of itself afterwards. In this case the valuable thing you're creating is your skill as a poker player so the idea is to just get as good as you can first and then you'll make money rather than sitting there trying to grind as many hours as possible at your current stakes. I find a lot of people take this view of "x hours until I get to move up" where they're just thinking if they can grind their roll a bit more they can move up in stakes. The truth is though that if you get significantly better than your current stake you'll move up in no time at all and also if you think of it in the long term if you manage to get good enough to beat a higher stake sooner that's worth more money to you than just grinding out hours at your current stake now. Play to improve, don't play to make money and you'll accidentally do both.
The other piece of advice I'd give is more poker specific; every time you reach a spot where you don't feel like you're getting paid enough either over the table or looking at it in a solver, go deeper into the solver and work out ways to draw as many bluffs as you possibly can. This will help on 2 levels, first and foremost you are now every nitty regulars worst nightmare and can achieve consistent win rates against a lot of multi tabling regs that just don't fancy the headache of calling down vs you and secondly you will gain a fuller appreciation for how hard it is to actually find a load of bluffs in certain spots which will allow you to fold comfortably when facing aggression in those spots.
Awesome advice DNegs98 not the OP but trying to learn from you midstakes guys all the same! p.s. your Dad sounds like a smart man!
Being a nitty regs worst night mare made me laugh lol
This may become a poster in my poker room. I greatly appreciate the feedback. Thanks for taking the time.
Glad to hear that it was appreciated by you guys :)
DNegs98 Really great advice! Recommend to follow this guy:P giving away many free golden nuggets..
Well yeah, however, I feel like I got it at a conscious level you know, but I am struggling with the practice part. Sometimes it goes well, but there are times where my subconscious wants to have an immediate proof that I can be a winner. It doesnt care about long-term whatever, it just wants to win now to satisfy needs of my ego. Obviously, this is not a conscious thinking process.
As I said, sometimes it goes well = I am able to be strongly aware of whats going on in my head, therefore every single irrational thoughts go away, because I am conscious enough to be able to recognize that. This results in playing in a way you described - play to improve.
However, there is also the mentioned other side of coin. The times where my conscious levels are not high enough to be able to recognize what my subconscious is creating and therefore I just fall into that trap where I blindly believe I have some control over myself/ my thoughts. But in reality, its far from the truth, cause my main focus is just to win a hand or ssn and yeah its funky how unaware I can be in that state haha. So my question on you would be, how to train to boost your conscious levels (while playing a ssn)?
I think many players myself included will always struggle with mindset issues from time to time. I just took a big shot at 100nl on stars and got absolutely slapped. At 50nl I feel super comfortable and often people are so clearly making bad plays that even if I have a bad session I leave feeling fine. At 100, I was seeing less mistakes, was in tougher spots, AND I ran absolutely awful. Two of my boats got cracked, as did the nut straight twice. I definitely was not playing at my best after the beats, because the money mattered more to me. Yadayada. We've all been there.
I think ideally, we go into a session without expectations, but because our subconscious often wants very badly to win (particularly for me just now taking a 100nl shot that went too deep), "no expectations," subtly gets warped into "okay, but I'm a small favorite to win though, so that's kind of like a big favorite, so I'm basically guaranteed to win..." Honestly, what works for me is visualizing before a session the scenario where I lose 5 buyins in two hours, where I could have avoided one of those buyin losses, where things go wrong. I prepare for how I'll react to that outcome. I prepare for how I'll play when things are going wrong, because playing well when things are neutral or good is fairly easy for me.
Now, thinking about the worst-case-scenarios might psych some players out, so your mileage may vary, but consciously visualizing how I'll react to the bottom 10% of runs before a session is what helps me prepare for them.
That's my long two-cents for you.
I was just saying the other day to a friend of mine who has just got into poker that I find the sessions where I play the best are the ones where I'm going out there looking for spots to study. I think it's a mix of becoming incredibly detached from the results when I'm in that mindset and also that when I'm trying to get an idea of exactly how I'm thinking about a spot so that I can correct any errors the actual process becomes a lot more involved.
Some mindset "tricks" that I use are usually based around becoming unsatisfied with imperfect play and they very much relates to the idea that I play my best poker when I'm looking to improve. In a similar vein to the idea of "dress for the job you want, not the one you've got" I always try to think and play in such a way that would be good enough to beat the next stake or one much higher. The idea is that I'm trying to imitate the thought process of a stronger player than myself and in my efforts to do that I start to notice the areas where my game is lacking. In practise what this leads to is me sitting there trying to get as precise an answer as I can muster for the relative frequencies I want to take any given action rather than just hitting my rng and hoping it gives me a number that's fairly obvious. This doesn't mean I'm trying to get things down to the exact % but rather that I'm trying to in my head establish whether something is pure/high/med/low/never. This helps my play over the table because it gets me thinking about the specific reasons for taking a given action, it helps me mentally because I start seeing even fairly innocuous looking hands as an interesting puzzle to be solved and it helps me to improve because when you are trying to come up with really precise answers you start to become very aware of the spots where you can't come up with one at which point you can go into a solver and address that.
This is kind of a tangent but I think it's somewhat relevant as I think it's the biggest thing which stops people improving at poker. Lots of people think they like poker for the strategy but they really just like the feeling of winning. It's not wrong to enjoy the feeling of winning but if you really want to improve you have to become invested in the strategy side of the game. More specifically I think a lot of the time people just don't care about the actual things that go into building a win rate because these things don't jump out at you when you look at your graph. Essentially what I'm getting at here is that lots of people only care about stacking people and getting stacked, they look at their database and they find 20 hands that if they hero folded them they'd be winning at 10bb/100 or something. But that's just not how you improve, the spots you improve are way more subtle than that and they take more effort - nowhere on your graph is there a big section labelled "lost ev from not finding block bets on river with marginal value hands" or something similar and because of that people just never study these spots where you actually can establish a consistent edge. Rant over I guess lol but just wanted to put that out there as it drives me nuts seeing all the river hero fold posts on here that realistically don't matter in the long run. I've come to accept it but if a few people decide to start posting some actual questions about theory or confusing solver outputs then I'll take that as a win.
While playing today I constantly noticed a lot of small mistakes by mid-stakes guys. Well it is hard nowadays to see big blunders but many small ones is easy to spot.
What I was thinking about it? I've run over my head and said to myself ''these guys do mistakes you can profit here, just do your best and be consistent'' I think consistensy one of the biggest things in poker - consistensy with game plan, with study plan, with long term poker vision. Another time we talked with friend and we were disscussing that likely player who is most solid is winning among the most (200z/500z), who makes good laydowns, doesn't go after opponents and try to punish regs by making creative lines. That player just playing simlified strategy, nitty preflop and .... crushes. Of course he is not the biggest winner/redline warrior/most scary player at the table but he is winner and consistent one. Having him at the table is pretty annoying as well, cause damn he rarely make mistakes and execute his simple strategy well enough.
Set measurable goals that are centered on progress and not results. For example, a volume goal of playing X hours per week. This works well for me and helps the “mud settle in my mind”. I focus better with a clock on and not being so caught up with all the details of the changing environments that exist in a room. I’m more focused on executing my system then always trying to push my sessions/edges. I will extend on special occasions like if a player is voluntarily dumping it really hard, but that’s about it, because I find I am more at peace and confident when my focus is centered around completing the task I set for myself, rather than trying to win something. The completion of the task is a win in itself, and something I can control every day.
Get a friend who is dedicated to learning the game or who is better than you(even better), and be able to discuss/talk hands with them.
Every time a situation, no matter how “small” seeming, take meticulous notes on and get feedback from your friend/poker community, as well as do some analysis with an equity calculator like flopzilla to build an understanding of the game and what equity looks like in different situations. This is where real improvement begins imo
Create a routine/schedule.
Make time for fun/hobbies/friends/service work. It somehow makes it all worth it and shifts perspective.
Learn what works for you and be okay if it doesn’t look like the next guy.
live poker. I’ve played online for most my career and switched to live over the last 2 years. The main thing I’m grateful for in playing online so much is it has developed a greater appreciation of equity i believe, but live games are so much better than online imo, and there are people routinely dumping thousands all over the place. For example. The 2-5 games where people buy in for 1k are softer than a 25nl game online. Probably softer than 10nl
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