May

I really want to move forward this month and take my game and results to the next level. So far this year my results haven't been as good as I know I'm capable of so it's hard work time for the next few months.

April
April went well for me... I was away on holiday for half of the month and didn't get any play in, but in the last 2 weeks I got some grind in and had my biggest month yet (although still not breaking five-figures). I'd credit this to really working on game selection and playing a bunch of 5/10 when there have been soft games.

A few poker videos I've watched recently have got me pretty excited about taking my game up a stage, the level of instructional videos out there now is really amazing. Particularly Phil Galfond/PBJaxx/DRGiggy videos on BlueFire are amazing. Allso really liked BalugaWhale's new series on DC, and DearFoxwoodsFiend. Definately check out the recent Eagle314 vids on CR too.

Ranges
All of these videos put a huge amount of emphasis on hand reading and basing decisions on villain ranges something that I don't think I do enough, often due to auto-pilot or playing too many tables. And really something that hardly any players at mid-stakes do enough. I know this is something pretty common that's been said a million times, but it's really clicked with me this month. Watching some of the plays that Durrr and PA are capable of on HighStakesPoker has really made me interested in developing the skills to make such sick plays... and the info is definately out there.

Autopilot - the enemy of creative players
This is soooooo important as it's just not possible to have a high winrate at midstakes without developing reads on players and handreading well. Last month I mostly played 8-tables, often mixing NL and PLO and while I found that I could play that amount pretty well I really didn't have much time to observe reads on players and make notes. I'm gonna limit myself to 6-tables all this month as I think it's the right balance for me. Also, I'm gonna limit my session lengths to 2 hours. I played a couple of 3-4 hour sessions to get hands in last month and really don't feel like my concentration was good enough to be profitable after the 2 hour mark, definately a point where I moved on to auto-pilot.

Day to day variance
I've removed all results and $$$ stats from HM this month and won't be checking my graphs or cashiers. I've also removed all blogs/feeds from my RSS that post short-term results. I'm just sick of people embracing and talking about this stuff like it matters. I feel that it's incredibly important not to take any notice of day to day or even week to week results because they're just so full of variance. All that matters is playing your best game with the best game selection at all times and working hard on improving. It's pretty obvious that spending time looking at results from session to session is pointless, it's time for me to get more discipline and wipe it out completely.

Exercise
This has such a positive effect on not only my poker play, but motivation and confidence that I'll be trying to get as much in as possible. I'd like to run a half-marathon by the end of the year so I'm going to start training for that. I'll be aiming to exercise every day that I'm also playing poker... preferably before my sessions. Will be mixing it up with some squash/bball/footy to keep things fun, and staying away from the gym as much as possible as it crushes my soul.

New students
I'm looking to take on a few new 6max or FR NLH students this month. $50nl/$100nl students would be ideal but I'd be happy to consider anyone at lower stakes or that's struggling to move up to $200nl. Check out my coaching page for more info.