Upspiral

4-Star_General - Hey man, that's the only info I'm not allowed to say. All I can say is that is a pretty soft but tilting site.

@ dirk_diggler - Thanks for the interest sir, I'll try to keep it up.

@ Lifeguard_22 - Your graph was sexier :D

An update regarding contracts. As I mentioned in my previous post, we just completed a $200k group goal and all 5 of us accepted a 500k individual contract.

So the 200k contract was the begging. On April we met in Athens while being 10nl winners and 25nl BE players and Nick proposed us to try to achieve a group goal. 5 guys of us, under Nicks staking deal were given a shot on a pretty soft website, to jump to mid stakes right away and try to win 200k as a group and the reason it was a group goal is to reduce Nicks variance. Goal Achieved so now me and the rest of the guys accepted the new one.

500k, no group, just individual:
We're still working as a team, studying together, commenting actively each others hands, taking tests etc. After two trips and after staying together for almost 2 weeks (whereas 6 months ago we only knew how Nicks face looks like) and after having done quite a lot of truthful conversations, Nick decided to keep the stake up and go for a bigger goal. 500k, each one of us, but this time we also get salary :D And ofcourse after we're done with the goal, we're also taking our profits.

New ideas:
We're going to use the power of the group at some point, especially since almost everyone is earning solid now, to make some group investments, a conversation we had in Barcelona. But I'm going into more detail in the next post.

For the time being:
Putting in the volume, with as good quality as I possibly can.

Good luck to everyone,

Well,hello. My consistency levels were never my main strength and for those of you here that actually win at this game, you can imagine how tough it has been for me in terms of putting in the work and actually in a quality level, as an inconsistent character that I've always been. That's why the blog isn't updated for 5 months or so :)

The 2nd reason is that I play on a site that I can't track my hands, so I can't produce graphs, so I don't really know if I could really keep that blog interesting just by writting a lot of...text!
Truth to be said I'm actually winning at the game but I haven't make any big money yet. But I have a shit load of good news, I'll write them in list form to keep it short because I have a shitload of work to do.

a) Me and my team of 5 people completed our group profit goal of 200k in profits(in total). Pretty impressive if you consider the fact that all of us were BE players in nl25 less than a year ago and now each one of us is a winner on midstakes. In reality 2 of our guys are crushing mid to high stakes and we owe most of our winnings to them.

b) We have a new contract with Nick, individual this time, and not group.

c) We have a lot of upgrades in methodology, we work both in theory and exploit directions and we've structured our games based on a lot of dynamic metrics.

d) I work like hell in my mental game, even though I've been a lazy ass the last 2 months or so. Ironicaly the 2nd laziest month in my life, I've had my biggest winning month of 7k USD more or less.

e) Met with Nick lately, he reviewed a 5k sample of me that I played on PS on purpose, and he found a lot of weaknesses. Luckily I'll have a graph to post since I played there for a couple of days. It was mostly a check up, since I didn't produce as astonishing results as some people of our group. My game was mainly b game, since I played those hands in 2 days and that's not really me, as I'm the type of guy that struggles to produce 15k hands in a month, now I forced myself to produce 5k in 2 days.

f) Doing some mental game work with the legend Elliot Roe, and he made me realize that I should be more responsible when I'm getting backed from someone, and receive free coaching from him while he risks his time and money to invest on me, and instead of working enough, I was just playing video games.

I wont say anything about the next time I'll update the blog. There is def no benefit for me, if somehow believe that there are benefits for someone else, or that people are interested on my story, then I'll try to update more frequently.

Plans for the future: Grind a specific amount of hands monthly. Visit Australia on January with Nick and the crew for Aussie Millions(just the small tours), continue to New Zealand on February for 4-5 days, return back to grind.

Graph for the check up session, hopefully the last graph you'll see from me, (because when I return to pokerstars is only for spotting leaks) - 25nl zoom lost all pots with AA, KK that I got action with and they were fucking deep!!

I wish you the best people.

Hey guys,

still working like crazy. I've been given a super awesome opportunity by Nick and it goes very good and to be more specific I've produced more money than ever in my life in a period of (not even) one month. The rest of the group crushes as well. At this moment, I'm playing midstakes in a soft site, working on my mental game with a pro and we do group meetings almost every day. I'll try to update with more detailed info asap!

Hello guys,

I work like crazy, things are going very good and I have a LOT of things to write to the next update I'm going to do. Sorry that I've not been consistent, but the work load(and the importance of consistently training) are huge.

I will try my best to give an update asap, I only have good news :)

Thanks a lot man :) I'll do exactly like that.

Hello everyone,

I apologize that I've not updated for so long but I have the best reason ever :)

First things first, lets close the challenge, which in numbers I've failed:

Here you can see the total volume (in hours/times) I should put, and the volume I actually put. Did go too well, but the last part of the challenge I was completely away, organizing some stuff for the near poker future and also because Nick, Logan, Simon and Yves visited Greece for 5 days and it would be retarded from my part to do anything else except hanging out with those awesome guys, for as long as I have energy during the day. The amount of value I gained cannot be described, at least not with my current knowledge of English. Not even with my current knowledge in Greek. It sounds like I'm exaggerating but trust me I'm not.

It was one of the most beautiful and beneficial experiences of my entire life. It was the first time I had the opportunity to hang around with people that I " don't know ", but we share the same struggle, one way or another, so In my eyes, I know them. Or at least a big part of themselves. The amounts of honesty and energy were massive. We planned super awesome stuff for the near future and it was the base of what I perceive as an honest friendship.

We developed a new study plan as that's one of the most relevant actions we have to take for that period of time and we decided to work together 1 hour / day for 6 days/week.

Graph for the challenge

I don't really care as I know that I've improved as fuck and the most important part is that I'm aware of a couple of mental leaks that are holding me back and I'm about to solve them.

PS. Nick is a major troll :D

Good luck at the tables, I'll be back soon!

Dddog & troublesome thanks a lot!

Hey guys, 3rd quarter of the challenge is over so here is the update:

I didn't realize it until I saw the numbers that this quarter wasn't productive as it should. The bad news is that I've started to show some inconsistencies the last 3-4k hands during some bad sessions. A couple of bad calls, and a couple of bad folds as well. So it was the first time that I showed signs of regression and it felt as shit as I imagined is going to feel. I also think that I run a little bit bad and that makes it harder since I don't yet have balls as a player neither I do have a lot of "pro" qualities. Not at least at the extend that I should.

I think it's a mental leak, and I'll have to do a lot of work to solve it. In the mean time I'll focus 100% on drills. I'll use repetition to burn the concepts to my subconscious.

The good news is that I started working out, and I have 4 months to become a beast or else I'll loose a big bet to Nick. It's a way to train myself to responsibility, consistency(macro) and insistence.

Volume for the 3rd quarter

Challenge so far:

Graph since last update

Adversity is useful. It's the driving force for us to grow.

Hello, it's the end of the 2nd quarter of the challenge, so I'm back with some updates.

Really mixed feeling because Nick is happy with my game, but I'm not happy with my overall performance in both studying and playing. I find if very hard to be as consistent as I want to be and I don't feel confident in my game. It's a form of arrogance actually, since Nick tells me that he isn't concerned at all, but I choose not to feel safe, like I know something better! Fucking ego, tough opponent.

We're almost half way through the challenge and I've only completed 33% of my goals, which is really bad as I wanted to be a little bit ahead by now. For some reason I feel tired all day long for the last 10 days or so.

I am happy with the overall progress, and try to keep my mind away from looking short term. That's easier said than done.

Last coaching with Nick was one of the best, he believes that the base of my game is solid, and we need to work on smaller leaks now. I keep drilling every day, and the results are coming. They don't show in my graph but I'm sure that it's just a matter of time.

I've noticed that I'm forcing myself to play even if I don't feel well, or I'm hungry, tired etc. I'll try not to do that, and in case I just want to keep working I'll stop playing and I'll switch to study.

Last 10 days volume(total work load)

Overall progress of the challenge

Graph since my last update

Thanks a lot for your comments, good luck at the tables!

Thanks a lot, I'll try my best to update as frequently as I have something to write!

Thanks man, you're right. I definitely need to change my approach on that.

Disharmonist Copernicus

Guys, how often have you seen a loosing player becoming a winning one (over a decent sample obv)? I would assume that the percentage is less than 5%. I think that a looser that becomes a winner in poker, is the exception to the rule. Maybe you're both crushers and you don't feel how big of an achievement this is for someone, but for the rest of us(at least me) it's a damn big thing.

As one of his students, I want to say that with those 20k, which seem expensive to you, you don't get technical coaching only(because you mentioned the videos of this site). You have a guy - that knows his job, delivers high quality and supports his students like fuck - to serve for both as coach and mentor with an approach that crushes the mental and technical aspect of coaching.

Unfortunately I've had coaching from a lot of different people, and all of them combined, can't deliver what Nick does.

1st post of this thread Nick mentions: "We are all students and teachers, simultaneously. Neither role is in greater service to the other."

After being his student for about 5 months now, I have to say that he is one of the few persons I've met in my life, that his words become actions. Some days ago, he went into an integration period(and he told us) because he realized that he found a better way to teach us a specific topic. He took 100% responsibility to find the way to teach us more effectively, instead of just stop giving a fuck and just jump to another topic. In my opinion this requires "balls". It requires honesty and humility and this is something that is not really common especially in poker "industry". - BTW, my opinion is like that, because so far all I've seen from other coaches is a hate towards responsibility, and it's not only my personal experience.

So in other words, besides a poker coach, we've found a mentor here. If I go back in November where I first send an e-mail to Nick, and at some point I asked him:

"Could you please give me some advice, or an action plan of what should I do in order for you to be my mentor at some point?"

I wouldn't imagine that awesome of a journey! And maybe what I say sounds like an overkill. I'm not playing high stakes in 5 months or anything, but for first time I'm a winner over a solid sample and I can sleep at night. I can have fun with out feeling guilty.

Nick, thanks man, you're a rare type of person and I really hope that we'll work together for a long time. Much love.

PS. I want a graph like Semu!

Thanks a lot Quido, checkmyBIP thanks a lot man, I'll deff try those sources.

So, hello to everyone, and the first 10days have passed since the beginning of the challenge. The good thing is that I've improved even though I still have to make some changes to my schedule, which again, is a good thing. The bad thing is that I'm in a break even stretch, and by bad I mean that I would prefair to be on an upswing :)

In CFP group we decided to make a challenge, based in both volume and winrate. The result doesn't really matter, the journey is more important since we keep training ourselves to become better. It's very difficult to become a pro, even though it's "simple". Because learning strategy is relatively easy when you have someone like Nick to guide you. Your attitude though, you're approach, your perspective (which IMO are 90% of success) are tough to master, even with Nick to guide you.

So we switch from 1:1 study to play to 1:2 study to play. For every hour I'm studying, I'll play 2. Nick told me that I'm playing pretty good, and that I can deff put more weight towards playing now, which is awesome. That means that the challenge requirements change.

Here you can see the new requirements:

Here you can see my progress so far:

That makes us about 16% of the goal achieved, while time is at 25% which means we're behind. I'll not get mad at myself though, since the leak we have to solve are a little bit badass and also I'll add the fact that my sister visited us after 3 months(she lives in London) and also 1 strange thing that has happened in my everyday life and kind of made me sad. But fuck this, I can reach the goal for sure and I'll be ahead of my schedule soon.

Last but not least, a graph since my last update

Good luck at the tables everyone. I'll be back soon

Hey everyone,

I'm back so it's time for a new challenge since the first one is completed with quite decent results. The main project remains the same: "Play each session at the height of my capability" and we're just going to aim a bit higher in our 2nd part, especially since we're moving up in stakes!

Before that here is one pic of my short trip

Play each session at the height of my capability - Part 2

The Goal:

Beat 25nl with a minimum winrate of 6bb/100h until the 5th of April 2017 over a sample of 50k hands.

42 days in total.

For the simple reason that It's one step closer for me to be financially independent and improve in every aspect since poker kind of requires that, for us, not talented humble human beings.

General Approach
My main focus will be training. In order for my context to expand, I'll use repetition and targeted training. This will bring as a result, my decision making process to be based on my intuition. But in order to improve my intuition I have to penetrate knowledge into my subconsciousness, and this happens with repetition. Knowledge that consists of empirical data, that are results of mass database analysis. This is were I thank Nick. So practically I'll train my mind to automate a lot of decision making, based on black and white data that show the most +EV situations. So I'll not care about the result. This approach, besides the fact that improves the overall quality of my game, it also protects my mental state, which also improves the overall quality of my game. Simple, and difficult :) Difficult because it's easy to say, but hard to be as consistent as my training(or poker in general) demands.

Training - 132 hours in Total

1) Data point recognition drills +/ Drills on Leaks. - 85/132 hours
- Data point recognition: Everyday review of hand histories, even if they're old, focusing only on recognizing data points, on any street and completely disregarding my play, because the point is to train my brain to recognize.

• Drills on Leaks: If Nick spots any leak, I'll switch my "drilling focus" to marked hands, watch our coaching vids and also do tests as an integration process until I get rid of that leak. Until that happens, I'll not put any hours in any other form of training.

  As mentioned, I'll put a total amount of 85 hours in both of those drills, depending on what It's more relevant at the time.

2) Notes - Simplify and study - 23.5 hours
I've already a solid amount of notes that contain thought process about a lot of spots, either very specific either generalized ones. Those are also a part of repetition progress as I'll study them almost every day until the concepts are burned into my mind. After that I'll review them once or twice per week.

3) Videos - 23,5 hours With priority to my coaching videos, and focusing on improving my leaks. Other than that I'll watch my fellow students videos, and also some videos from Twich that Nick has uploaded in youtube.

Grinding - 132 hours
Play each session at the height of my capability. 100% focused, without skyping or anything. Before each session I'll focus 1min to my breath. Meditation 101. I'll be playing in PS for the time being, and I'll be focusing in datapoint recognition/observation.

Boxing - at least 10 trainings of 90mins each
Meditation - at least 40 times of 10mins each
ShadowBoxing - Only for the days of the week that I'll not go for boxing training. At least 12 times for 30mins

Every day, before I do anything, I'll design my schedule according to my goals

Every 10 days I'll post a review, and If I've achieved more than 25% of the total challenge requirements I'll reward myself somehow.

Yeah man, that was one of the parts that I failed. I wasn't really committed to it. But since it's been a period that I've tried it consistently for about 20-30 days in a row, I have to say that it's a good habit for sure. I don't want to say more because it is different for everyone but it's deff a good start for your day, until you find one that fits best for you.

@Quido, Miami002 thanks so much guys, I appreciate that.

@Miami002 Yes sir, I like martial arts, I'm practicing boxing and I used to practice BJJ aswell(i'll be back) and I also like UFC a lot.

@Michaelvb thanks for your good words bro, I just try to remain consistent and it's exactly as difficult as I was imagine it to be!

@Faceoffland thanks a lot for your good words. The drills are repetitive exercises. Like in martial arts, when you learn for example to throw a jab or a hook, you have to practice the same things a bunch of times until you make it right, and then 1000 times more until you can say you know it :) So like that, I practice datapoint recognition, hotspots exploitation etc

Hello everyone,

I'm back for an update before I take 4 days off. We did another "5k Storm" as Nick calls it, which is a detailed review that Nick does to our most recent 5k hands. Super good results, Nick was happy with the improvement and I felt awesome by the fact that I eliminated the vast majority of my leaks because 1st and foremost I win money and 2nd but equally important I seem to take the chance that has been given to me, seriously.

Leaks so far - Since I started with Nick

1) Not good understanding on relative strength of my hand (missing value or doing bad calls). - Almost eliminated.

2) Loosing focus. - Huge improvement

3) Not good understanding of range vs range interaction. - Super connected with the first one, I've improved much but deffinately not enough. There is a huge amount of work to be done here.

4) Projecting my own assumptions on my opponents. - Improved, but not enough.

5) Polarization with Medium strength hands - That was due to my transition from HU to 6max, eliminated.

6) Fold confusion with hands high up in my range - Eliminated vs Regs, now I need to eliminate it vs fish.

7) Ambitious stabbing/bluffing on the river - Eliminated, almost too much, I need to balance it.

8) Valuebet too thinly - It connects with polarization at some point but it's not entirely the same leak. Almost eliminated.

9) Forcing aggression - 80% eliminated.

10) Folding high up in my range vs volatile player profiles - That's the one I'll work from now on.

No matter in which leak I'm working on, or what kind of training I do, the base of my training is:

• Training in range vs range interaction
• Data point recognition drills

Last but not least, Nick told me that I can move to 25nl. My BR is very healthy for that limit so we're moving up in stakes!

I'll be back on Tuesday 21st of February, until then, good luck at the tables(I only wish what you cannot control...strange realization)

Hello,

This is the last update for the part 1 of "Play each session at the height of my capability " project. So we're going to do a review.

Last 8 days of the challenge - Productivity:

Last 8 days of the challenge - Graph:

Total Review

Productivity
a) Boredom: Could get better. A lot of times I didn't use my time wisely because I felt bored to do what I had to do. And I was spending time in useless things like database review. Which isn't useless in general but it was at the time.
b) Procrastination: A lot of times I skipped some parts of my schedule to do them later, because I prefered to do something else at that time. For example I had to stop playing and start doing drills. But i wanted so much to play that I skipped the drills for later. Guess what, a lot of the time those drills didn't happen.
c) Lack of capability when it comes to put a lot of hours consistently:
Blurred "vision", numb brain etc. Breaks didn't help, my mentality was very fragile and even though I didn't feel tired I had the rest of the symptoms.

What's good in all those: Everything that I mentioned above, used to be about 200% worse, 2 months ago. So yeah I started the post mentioning the negatives, but the reality is that each aspect of those has rapidly improved if I compare it with recent past. Which means that I'll improve more in all those aspects since I wasn't sure if I can, but now I'm sure I can.

Performance
Tilt: I tilted quite a lot. Again less often than I used to but the best part is that it didn't change my game a lot. At least not as it used to. Another good thing about it, it's the fact that I could recover quite fast compared to the past.

Technical aspect: My game has changed dramatically and I'm happy that I had ok results during a period of changes in both my mental and technical game. I had not only to understand and implement new strategies and lines, but also to give new battles against myself. I improved in a lot of technical aspects also, which is the part that I like the most.

Numbers:

Grinding: 92/100 hours - Could be better for sure, but I'm kind of ok with that since the actually purpose of the challenge is to be focused while playing and improve when I don't play. So, volume wasn't my primary goal.

Notes: 25.5/60 - During the project, I mentioned that I'll narrow down the ammount of hours i study my notes, because it wasn't so relevant anymore. It was an overkill for me to spend so many hours there.

Videos: 30 / 60 - As in the "notes" the same applies here. There are a lot of times that I know what Nick is going to say in a video, 1 min before he says it. Now that I have access to PDNV vids, maybe watching videos will become more relevant. We'll see after my next coaching.

Drills(hand review, 30sec exercise, x/r etc): 23.5 / 24 - That's good but I should put more hours in general because it's the most efficient way that I've seen. It's where most of my improvement has come from and I really believe that I should take some hours off videos and put them in drill. Again we'll know more after the end of the next coaching.

Meditation: 14/100 - Lol.... I don't have anything to say about that.

Performance Pics :)

How would I rate my "Play each session at the height of my capability " results? 6/10. This will be my new area of focus I would guess.

Thanks Ddog :)
TimDog I'm just using Holdem Manger, nothing fancy :)

Hello guys, I'm late and it's time for a monthly update. I used this as a break because today is the first daythat I had a really bad session and I just finished reviewing all my hands. I didn't really found a lot of mistakes but Nick will let me know soon.

Monthly review

Tough month. In terms of mental game at least I struggled a lot. As I mentioned in a previous post we made some coachings 3 days in a row with Nick and after most of them I felt weird. I can't find any other word to describe it. On the one hand my ego was hurt, and you know how this feels and on the other hand(the non retarded part of mine) felt awesome because Nick found leaks and I had work to do and also because I know how important is to get rid of ego. In both mental and technical aspects. A lot of paranoia in general, sense of injustice, sense of deficiency, fear of failure. All that shit drained my energy and I was tough for me to handle the situation like a pro. My productivity was not good enough and it's difficult to fight all those when you're a 28 old adult and still a kid, trying to man up. But I trust myself and I have good motives behind me, so practically there is nothing to be afraid off, all that shitty feelings are just illusions. They will be solved. I can feel that my context is expanding and those periods are usually tough especially during integration phases.

The only thing that really worries me is that I don't feel that I'm responsible enough so far.

The following picture is about the hours I put the 4th part of the month

It was kind of better if you compare it with the 3rd part, especially if you consider that I took two days off to prevent a burn out. But I'm not satisfied.

Productivity for the entire month

I should do everything more. I did not achieve most of my goals and that was quite a lack of professionalism from my part. When I saw that I can reach the amount of hands needed by putting less hours, I let my self to get lost into non productive hours like at least 20hours of database research(while I had first learn to create filters in HEM) which was completely irrelevant and waste of time. I don't have either the sample either the knowledge to do so but it took me 20 hours to understand. Waking up late in the morning cost me a lot because for some reason I'm not productive at night. Major leak. I did OK with drills and data point recognition (nothing impressive though).

Also into my defense I choose to take 3 more days off (not consecutive ones and maybe that's a problem as well) than I planned because after some days of intense training and grinding I was extremely clouded the next day. I tried some ideas to "wake up" but it didn't work. So as soon as I sat at the tables I made so many ridiculous mistakes that I decided to sit out and come back when my head was clear. But that didn't happen.

Graph since last update

And finally graph for the month - EV WR sits on 7.62bb/100 for 22.5k hands

Generally I feel disappointed by myself because of my lack of responsibility and consistency. I'll work on those. Until the end of the "challenge" for the next 5 days, I'll only grind, train daily in data point recognition and my notes.

Talk to you soon, have a nice month and good luck at the tables.

Hello again guys,

We did some pretty intense coaching sessions with Nick the last 3 days, so I'll have to change my schedule again since I'll be playing for the next 2-3 days until I watch those 3 videos from our coaching and do the following exercise:

• Watch 2-3 times my vids
• Create an excel file, outlining the 3-4 major concepts/themes(leaks).

Exercise: Run through every hand, while the video plays. Stop it at the critical action of every hand and state which of the 4 themes that hand matches to. Then try to answer the correct action. We need 90% score ++.

So I'll change again that schedule because priorities changed. This is going to be a "drill" exercise so to make it shorter, I'll put half of the hours I'm going to spend in the "videos" section and half of them in drills section.

Talk to you soon :)

Hello everyone I'm late for my weekly update.

Yesterdays Coaching
So things are going smoothly. Yesterday Nick reviewed 293 hands of mine(no kidding!) one by one and marked some of them (quite a lot I would say) so we can discuss today about what leaks he found. The good news is that at some topics I leveled up! Seems like my river decisions are really improved. In addition to good news is that most of the confusion and unawareness that I have, is in topics that I've not discussed with Nick, so even though I would prefer for myself to be capable of learning alone, without waiting for my coach to spot my leaks, I realize that I have a long way to become an independent learner. So no reason to judge myself for the time being, if it was easy I wouldn't need a coach anyway. Another good thing(and bad for my ego) was that Nick found quite some wrong patterns by me, so he realized a number of pieces that is missing from my context puzzle. Always good to have an awareness over your leaks and not searching in the dark.

Productivity
Productivity wise, I've come to realize that my schedule design was kind of bad. I included a lot of volume in topics that were nott relevant enough, so I'm working on some improvements. Study goes well, and results start to show up slowly but steadily. It will seem like my productivity wasn't good that week, but there are a lot of studying I did and doesn't appear in the schedule (like simplifying my notes, looking way older hands of mine for exercise in datapoint recognition, doing db analysis/running filters etc)

Productivity results for the 3rd part of the month

Seems not productive, but it actually was, because it doesn't show any work I've done on my mental game so far.

Where we are so far for the Project- Productivity wise

Grind: 42.5 / 100
That is weird, I calculated 100hours because I thought that this is how many hours I need to play in order to reach the 50k hand mark. Seems that It will be done with less hours. IF this happens, I will ask Nick where he things it's better for me to spend the remaining hours, studying or grinding.

Vids: 20.5 / 60
Maybe that is an overkill again, but I'll see what I'm going to do. I'm in a point that I remember a lot of Nicks phrases before he even talks during the video. I've watched all of his material so many times which it feels like it's better for me to spend time in integration instead of just watching videos.

Notes: 2.5 / 12
That is really bad of me. Maybe 12 hours is really an overkill again, but It should be at least 5 hours. The plan was to first take all the notes I can from Nicks videos and our coaching and then start studying them, which is a solid excuse for why I've put such a small amount of hours, but still I should put a little bit more time.

hh review with dp recognition: 8.5 / 12
That's better, and it's also good because Nick noticed the improvement as well. The only problem is that I had to run back to really old hands in order to continue doing this drill. Maybe I'll ask some students of Nick to send me some hands so I can continue running this drill. And maybe I will also put more hours to that than 12, because it's really beneficial so far since it helps integration and implementation.

30 sec exercise: 7 / 12
Same as before. Those exercises are based on the same concept. This one helps me identify datapoints for river decisions, and the previous helps me to "level up" and it trains me to hold in my memory datapoints from earlier streets so it makes my decisions more accurate. I'm happy with the progress so far and I believe that with those 2 exercises I'll be able to solve the leaks that Nick found yesterday. Maybe I'll put more than 12 hours here as well.

Meditation: 12/100
This will end terrible bad! Seriously that's a big failure, but it needs time for me to solve this. I can't adopt a lot of habits at once without messing everything up. I'll keep trying but most of my focus will be on drills and grinding for the time being.

Graph since last update: - Less than 10k hands left for us to reach the 50k mark.

What doesn't make me happy at all, is the fact that I'm not consistent enough. I've made improvements from 0 consistency to a non zero amount but I know I can do better.

That's all from me guys, good luck at the tables!

Hey guys,

I'm back to update the productivity results for the 2nd part of the month.

Happy with the last coaching I had with Nick because he didn't find any mistakes that we've already discussed, which is good because I don't seem to waste anyones time and also because that is the only metric we can have to measure improvement for the time being. For sure he did find mistakes, but they where not in my context yet. That should make me feel more secure, but it didn't because I want myself to improve constantly and not only when we discuss something with Nick. This would accelerate my progress.

Mental Game

I really don't feel confident as I made it very clear in my last post, but at least I insist on improving. That's all I can do. Now, the variance wasn't in my side (for the 2nd part of the month) which is unfortunate, but I try to not think about it because I can't really change it. Stoicism is helpful IF you can think like that. I train every day, to solidify my mental game, by doing drills and asking my self questions. Also I try to be as focused as possible during the game, and I have focused on drills that target datapoint recognition 100%.

Productivity

I've shown a good improvement since the last week, since I was able to follow my daily routine a little bit more disciplined. Not time wise but volume wise. And by volume I mean that I put in the hours of both playing and studying. Well, not 100% but this is what I'm working on. I changed my schedule a little bit in terms of where I will invest my time when it comes to studying, trying to make it more effective.

Productivity Results

I removed the x/r drills because I believe that I'm ok with that and as mentioned in the previous post I put those hours to data point recognition. In short I review almost 100% of the hands I play every day, trying to spot data points.

The 3rd part of the month, I've already taken 2 days off which is going to make difficult for me to put enough ammount of hours and hit my goals, but I'm confident that I'm gonna make it and bring better results from the 2nd part of the month.

Grinding Results

Can't say anything about it :)

That's all for now, I'm going back to study(this was supposed to be my 30min break).Thanks for reading and good luck at the tables.

Quido and Zenfish thank you both for your advises guys, I really appreciate that.

I apologize if the following text makes no sense at some point, but I'm very tired.

One of my mental leaks: I do NOT understand variance.

As said in previous post, I was slacking. In reality I really didn't. I just didn't spend my time effectively. I really tried to spend 8 hours working, and I ended up spending 15 hours in my computer trying to work, ending up working for like...5-6 because I was subconsciously trying to avoid studying. And I was crushing(every time I crush for a short period of time I want to play and not study).But, the thing is that my confidence wasn't high enough. I didn't think that I suddenly after 1.5 months I became a crusher. It just felt too easy to be true even if it was a "crushing period" of 6-7k hands, which is insignificant.

The last 4 days I keep loosing session over session. Not big sums, even for my stakes the sums are normal but mental situation though goes straight down to hell. Something keeps pushing me to watch my winrate going down. The ridiculous part is that even if I'm aware that in a total sample of 30k hands, my WR is as important as a turd, I don't feel like that. I do not feel indifferent. I'm afraid that the same shit will happen again and I am more afraid that this approach will maybe lead to a self fulfilling prophecy. I should not be giving a fuck, but instead I feel very cloudy. Lack of clarity. I don't understand what kind of damn bias is that, which doesn't let me have peace of mind.

On 9th of January we did our 5th coaching with Nick. He found 2 mistakes. That's all! I didn't really feel safe and I only had 1 loosing day. There are definitely a lot of conflicts in my mental game. Even though I trust myself and my ability to think and learn, I don't trust me when it comes to execution and identification of a cause. If you ask me why my graph is messed up atm, I don't know if it is variance or not. This grows my insecurity and doubt shows up again. And fuck I feel so guilty. The last 4 days I study until I feel exhausted. I'm doing what I didn't do last week+what I should do this week. But since I'm loosing the last days as I said I feel guilty. Because I don't want to blame variance like so many times I've seen people do.

The most annoying part is that I know that I shouldn't give a damn about my WR 1) because sample is shit 2) because my game changes every day. But I don't feel like that, this is why I believe that I do NOT understand variance. If I did, I wouldn't care. Another prespective is that I don't trust myself enough, this is why something insignificant like that, gets into me.

On the bright side I changed some parts of my schedule, and I've decided that I will approach it like this: put a specific amount of volume (in HOURS) on each topic until the end of the 1st part of the challenge. I removed the x/r drills and focused more on Nicks videos and data point recognition.

100 hours of grinding
60 hours of watching Nicks Videos
12 hours of studying my notes(or rewriting/simplifying them)
12 hours reviewing HHs focusing on data-points recognition
12 hours of 30sec exercise drills
120 times(averaging 10mins/time more or less) of meditation.

Last 5k hands

Thanks for the support so far, good luck at the tables.

Hello guys,

I've separated my month to 4 parts according to the schedule. 1st-7th, 8th-14th, 15th-21st, 22nd-end of the month. For each part I'm going to make a review, so to keep a track of my progress.

Now according to what my daily schedule says, by the end of the month I should have put:

100 hours of grinding
24 hours of watching Nicks Videos
24 hours of studying my notes(or rewriting/simplifying them)
12 hours of x/r drills and/or data-points recognition
12 hours reviewing HHs focusing on data-points recognition
12 hours of 30sec exercise drills
120 times(averaging 10mins/time more or less) of meditation.

Also I should have played about 7.2k hands and I've only played 6678. The difference is small and I care less about it compared to how tilted I feel about the ones that follow:

Well on average, about 1/4th of those should have been completed by yesterday. And even though, my WR is way higher than the goal I've set, I'm very disappointed by myself because my results look like this:

Even though my results are pretty good, I don't feel like that. I feel super insecure and from time to time I loose control and falling back into some old habits(light calls - a fish still possesses me and I need to get rid of it). What really frustrates me is that I failed to achieve the most relevant piece of my challenge as the win rate is practically the last that I'm interested in because I can (almost) understand variance. So the two excuses that I could use: "My wr is good" and "I started 2 days later" are bs because those are not the point of the entire "challenge". And this is definitely not a good approach when I've been so lucky to have Nick supporting and training me, and not really having any real life issues holding me back.

Anyway, the project isn't lost ofc and I don't really want to dramatize things or make it look worse, but what I want to achieve is build slowly and steadily a disciplined mentality and that was not an optimal start.

As a follow of the last graph(the overall one) this is how things look like since the beginning of the new year:
WR sits at 15.48bb/100 for this graph.

Overall WR is on 10.6bb/100 for about 27k hands.

That's all for me right now, I'll go harder, until I reach each one of these goals. Maybe some things are going to change in case Nick tells me to put more hours on one thing than another or in case I decide that I need to put more hours in something else. What's going to remain std though, is the total amount of hours I will spend and the total amount of hands that I will play.'

Good luck at the tables

Thanks for the support bro. I'll deff take what you said into consideration

Dddogkillah, Robert Harrison Thanks a lot guys !

@dirk, yeah you are right man. I forgot to mention that for the time being, and until the end of the "challenge" the real goal is to just follow the routine. I can't do anything about numbers that contain variance in, and definitely 50k hands are not enough. Thanks for mentioning that, I should clarify it in my previous post.

Thanks KP24, lets do the work! Happy new year to you too

Hello everyone and happy new year!

I took 3 days off in a row which is very uncommon for me, as by default I prefer banging my head to the wall(not working effectively) by just sitting many hours if front of my screen instead of resting. What was also very uncommon for me is the fact that I didn't feel guilty by taking those days off.

I didn't like that it took me so long to come out with a plan but I didn't take into account in first place the fact that it's Christmas period so I can't really be productive these kind of days. So procrastination took the best out of me once more, but at least this time kind of helped me, because, yeah I didn't update my blog or sat down to my computer and work on my plan but I was thinking about it all day long.

Before I talk about the plan, and in order to keep your interest, here is the graph since I started with Nick:

I run above EV as I’m good at it. The sample is just 20k, not much I can say besides the fact that I’m ahead the vast majority of the times I GII pre-flop and also that I’ve not received my fair share of suck outs. For the last 5-6k hands I see a lot of resistance post flop because people seem to hit a lot, I'm missing value bets, facing tough river cards->decisions, late street aggression etc. But I cannot complain since Nick has made it really easy. I’m doing a lot of mistakes, but I have to mention that with those kind of stats I would have already bust my roll if it was like 2-3 months earlier. I was playing a TAG style, winning 10nl by 1.02bb/100 but now by playing a style that I really enjoy it seems more solid. But again the sample is super small and not much I can say about it.

So far, I feel grateful that I’ve been given the chance to work with a person like Nick, and especially under those circumstances. He has helped me a lot already and I believe that the more I move on the more help I’ll be able to receive from him.

Now about the plan. Nick proposed me to focus on “Play each session at the height of my capability.” Which sounds awesome and it’s something that I have been incapable of doing but I always had in the back of my mind. So I figured that In order to do so and in order to sustain that, the first step is to make a performance goal. The ultimate goal is for sure to play my A game every damn time and understand why and how. But I believe that my context isn’t expanded enough to do it just like that and also that I don’t have the ability to sustain it. So I’ll start with a series of performance goals which REQUIRE to play each session at the height of my capability. The feeling of achieving goals is going to give me the emotion I need in order to sustain it.

So the main goal is “Play each session at the height of my capability” and I will practically divide it to smaller sub-goals.

Play each session at the height of my capability project
Part 1

Until the 8th of February I want to be winning on 10nl with a minimum win rate of 8bb/100h in a total sample of 50k hands.. I will be playing 4 hours per day (4tabling) and study 4hours more for at least 25days. I would add more hours but I need to include meditation and sports. So I need to play 30k hands more since I’ve already played 20k. I designed a daily routine which I believe that is going to help me in a lot of factors and I already have to admit that it is going to be incredibly difficult for me to achieve for reasons that you can find if you read my previous posts.

HOP: Hour of power from Tony Robbins. Just experimenting with those kind of stuff and see how it going.

Drills: I will run through hands and train myself to recognize as fast(but accurate) as possible specific spots that I have to think as Nick trained me to.

Notes: Studying every note from the excel file I’ve mentioned on earlier posts.

30 breaths- focus breathing-plegma: Those are all breathing exercises which I don’t remember who found them or how they called, they all are written in my schedule in a way that I can actually remember. As I said earlier, just experimenting and see how it goes.

So this is my plan, my thoughts my schedule and my goals. I would love to hear your opinion guys, happy new year to everyone I wish you happiness, love and health.

Good luck at the tables.

Hey guys,

I said I'll update 2 days ago with the plan but 1) I forgot it was Christmas and 2) It's not so easy to make a plan that is actually 100% achievable and sustainable. I've made a progress but it's not ready yet. Nick gave me some suggestions so I'll be back soon

No shit

Okay, I give up on poker. Nothing left for me to achieve :D :D

Haha I couldn't stop my self!

As I said I'll be back tomorrow after I develop the plan.

@Ddog Glad that you found it interested man!
@ Lifeguard22 Hello and welcome .Thanks for mentioning one note. I'll give it a try for sure!
@dirkdiggler Hey man, thanks for your good words. My red line isn't break-even yet unfortunately. It was just for 4k hands, but the reality is that it has been improved substantially. Yeah I recognize all of them actually. See you soon on 20nl!

Hello guys,

Today was coaching no 4 with Nick. It was kind of overwhelming because I repeated some of my "old" patterns like doing stupid calls since I wasn't quite "there" during the hand, because tilt had kind of blurred my mind. Also Nick introduced me to some advanced(for my level at least) concepts which I will need to try really hard to implement. I didn't really like the fact that I didn't got rid of those stupid habits but it was encouraging to see Nick suggesting solutions about them. So one more time the coaching was priceless(I wonder how more advanced guys would react which could absorb more knowledge than me), targeting mental and technical leaks at the same time, as always.

So after a small discussion we had with Nick, and after a lot of days thinking of it literally all day long, I decided to make a goal. In general the goal will be to move up to the next stake but I want to set some timelines. Setting a timeline for moving up to the next stake isn't realistic of-course so the timelines I'm going to set will look like this: "Put x amount of hours on playing/studying/training etc until the end of January". So, I'm going to focus on what I'm going to do, how I am going to do it and for how long. It is for improving my entire context based on consistency. Pretty much what I'm already doing the last month, but a little bit more intense and systematized. Tomorrow I'll develop the schedule/plan, and the result will not be judged by my success of moving up in stakes but by my success to work consistently in both my mental and technical game.

It will include a minimum amount of studying (drills, reviews, Nicks videos, mental game etc), a minimum amount of volume(except if I hit any stop-loss or I feel like shit), a minimum amount of breathing exercises, meditation, boxing / week. The basic purpose is to develop consistency on a higher level.

Graph since last coaching with Nick - You notice a downer, I believe that it's a min-downer and also the bad habits I mentioned earlier.

Tomorrow I'll post the plan, good luck at the tables, talk to you soon.