Back to the tables

Played a short 6-tabling session tonight. I figured the best way to respond to the little downswing I had was to CRUSH... HARD. :)

Won all of the money back from the shitty session a couple of nights back, and this 10k hands is now back on track!

Time Out
Taking last night off from poker was cool, reckon I needed a break from the tables to relax. Played a bunch of pool with my Dad and bro after work today too which was fun.

I often find myself getting immersed in poker, this usually happens if I've been playing a lot of volume or I'm on a downswing. I actually like having work the morning after taking a hit at the poker tables, it really seems to put poker in perspective for me. When I wake up the morning after a bad session my mind immediately reminds me of the loss, however when I get into work it's easier to step back and look at the big picture. I can see that how I'm running at the tables really isn't that important... and therefor it shouldn't affect my mood.

Dealing with downswings
I've been reading CTS's old blog a lot recently. It's clear that 4-5 buy-in downswings are going to be really common at the mid-limits... so I'm gonna have to get used to it. It's reassuring to see that as good a player as him regularly dropping 7-8 buy-ins in a session and shrugging it off. I need to be less hard on myself when I have a bad session, and just look over the hands and where the mistakes were. Whether it was in the hands, or if it was tilt, or if I was just running bad. Whatever the reason for the bad session though I shouldn't be beating myself up about it, because it's going to happen... frequently. On with the "not caring about money" conditioning. :)

Studying
Did quite a lot of hand analysis over the past couple of days, had a backlog of like 25 of my hands logged on weaktight to get through. Been trying to give Martyn some feedback on a few of his hands too. Also halfway through writing a wee article on grinding and playing sessions, just a few thoughts from a couple of articles/book I've been reading recently... will post it over the weekend.

$200nl vid
Oh aye, before I forget, I made a $200nl 4-tabling video a few nights back. I think it's pretty good, had good feedback for it so far. Used it to review a session with Messiah last week in coaching, but I don't mind sharing it if anyone would like to watch. If you'd like the download link for it just drop me a mail. I'm not making the video public as I'd like to keep my screenname/etc as private as possible at my current site. Cheers.