A quick bit about me.  I have just come back from a long break, my mum played playmoney poker online.  When she passed it was pretty hard to carry on with my hobby.  But eventually I stopped caring that she had died and was able to play again.  I know that might sound very harsh, she was my best friend for 50 years, so maybe compared to a lot of people I still care. But everything is relative, and compared to how I was a year or so ago... I do not care... as much

Tip number 1. 

If something is stopping you from enjoying playing, wait until you do not care.

I have restarted by playing freerolls mostly.  They are fun, and as I write this I have just woke up after being knocked out of the $33 ($300k guaranteed) WPT 3 day event... at pretty much the end of day one.  I freerolled the ticket through sattys.  I got knocked out because AJo called my AKs.  The best player won.  His stack was about 100bb, mine was closer to 10bb.  I just did my own thing, made a ton of errors, and as such I pretty much maintained my stack for about 5 hours or so.  Now I can not say for certain the other guy was better than me, but it is my first week back and he would have had to be the luckiest player in the world to be worse than me with that stack.

Tip number 2.

If you lose a tournament to a worse hand, you need to get better at poker.

In the meantime I will continue bashing the freerolls and micros.  The micros are of course being played with their money, not mine.  I like to focus my time on what my strengths are.  I am a bankroll nit that likes learning, so I should be a great bankroll nit that learns a lot.  I am not really into stats any more, I know that a lot of players are and I know some players will spend all day and night looking at stats of their own game.  I have done that, I did not enjoy that, I just enjoy learning in my own way.  When I think back all those decades to when I was in school I am sure I learned more from the teachers that I enjoyed being in class with... mainly because I didn't even go to classes I did not like.

Tip number 3.

Learn in a way you enjoy, there is truly no other way.

I suppose I should add how much I have earned in this first week back, I am not totally sure... I am a bankroll nit but not possessed by decimal points.  I guess it is around $20 in cash and around the same again in tickets still to be used.  I intend to update this thread with more of my mental thoughts as time goes on. 

Total profits this week, I dunno, about $40 in cash and tickets is a rough guess.

The more I play, the more I study, the better that I get at poker, the easier it is to deal with bad beats. You just learn to except the good with the bad in poker. Whether they hit a 2-outter, runner-runner, whatever. It doesn't matter. Nothing is going to change the result. The one positive thing, regardless of results is knowing whether or not you made the correct decision. I am learning that that is far more important than the result. So now, when I am in these situations, I am constantly looking at the decisions I need to make. Reviewing later, and figuring out whether they were correct or not. Do I get mad? 100%. Not so much because it's "unfair", but because I made an incorrect decision. Make the wrong play tilts me more than getting 1 outtered. The 1 out on the river I have no control over, but making correct folds I have 100% control over.

I am glad you are playing great, I too feel like my game has drastically changed over this past year. I am constantly studying away from the tables, working on my game, and I feel great. I have a long way to go, but I am LOVING this journey. A nice $100k win on the way, along with a guest appearance on the Thinking Poker and Tournament Poker Edge Podcasts  would be nice too, but in due time. For sure.

Why? I'm not entirely sure, but there are probably a couple of reasons. One reason is that I feel like I played some of the best poker of my life throughout the final five days of the series. It felt like I was reading hands and situations well, finding ways to exploit villains' leaks in ways that I often wouldn't consider, and making a lot of disciplined laydowns.

However, I think the more important part of the equation is my perspective. I can only put this into words thanks to KB sharing that Gary V video, it really crystalized a vague feeling that I had.

I had to take a break on the final Monday/Tuesday of the series because I really burnt out and felt like I wasn't playing well the previous weekend. I was having a bunch of the typical 'downswing' thoughts like: 

"How often can I make a good 4-bet shove and run into the top of their range?" and "How often can I check-raise shove a 12-outer vs an aggro player's turn cbet and not only get called but miss my draw?"

After taking a break, those thoughts stopped troubling me. I would ask myself the same questions but with a totally different perspective. I realized that if I keep making good 4-bet shoves, it doesn't matter what happens in this hand, or the next 20 hands, as long as the shove is good. How often can I run into the top of their range? A bunch of times in a row, but sooner or later the opposite will happen.

It is very helpful to realize/remember that whatever happens today is completely meaningless in the long run (assuming I am playing within my bankroll) as long as it doesn't make me play worse. I can simply focus on "how well am I playing?"

I can safely say, for someone down ~8k over the past 3 months, I'm playing fucking great. That's all that matters.

I doubt that would make me apprehensive on its own but two other things may be weighing on my mind. I'm in a small (~100 ABI) downswing over the past two months. Nothing unusual but it inevitably plants a seed of doubt in the back of my mind when I have back-to-back losing months. More importantly, I've been studying new material which tends to temporarily make my in-game thought process much more complicated. I also find it more difficult when reviewing hands to notice/understand where I'm making mistakes. I've gone through this process many times, and although I'm quite sure it will make me a stronger player eventually, my edge is lower than normal as I learn where and how to implement the new strategies.

I had a mini-realization this morning, namely that I've been way more stressed than normal over the past few weeks. Before the series even begins! Mainly just putting a lot of pressure on myself, second-guessing my skills and even my lifestyle in general.

I've heard about gratitude rituals in the past and tried a couple of times, but never did it with any regularity. Sitting quietly for 5 minutes in the morning and focusing on the things I am grateful for. Noticing how much more important they are than what I tend to worry about. I did that this morning and I feel more energized and calmer than I've been in a while. I actually found a ridiculous amount of things to be grateful for and I'm currently so free of worry about the next few weeks that it's a little unsettling.

As you can see, I tend to get overly anxious. I just started to worry about how I'm not worried... Anyway, I've committed to doing the gratitude ritual every morning, at least for the duration of the series if not much longer.

Has anyone else tried this or something similar? Preliminary results are encouraging but I've no idea what to expect from doing it every day.

For a long time I have been interested as to why they say people good at poker make good traders on the stock markets, because it is a similar skill set. I have very limited experience with stock trading, but I have come up with a theory which might explain the link between the two.

Disclaimer 1: this might be a very obvious thought, and totally unoriginal. Disclaimer 2: Quite possibly, it really is just a load of horse shit...nevertheless, here goes:

NLHE, or any poker variant, is a closed market. It is a market where players come together to trade with one another. What they are trading is probabilities, and odds. In effect, therefore, each player is setting him or herself up as a bookie. I set myself up, with my avatar of Cindy Lauper in 80's pose, as a business, as a bookie. My job is then to take odds, and give odds to other bookies, on the probability of certain outcomes occurring. The reason great players are so much better than others is simply because they know the parameters of this market better than others. The better you know the probabilities of certain outcomes, the better placed you are to set a correct price. Crap players don't understand the market at all. They take ridiculous odds from better players, which are mathematical mistakes. They have no clue about the likelihood of different outcomes, so the prices they offer are ridiculous. In effect, they are a crap bookie business. The good players are the good bookies, and they are successful within the market place.

So there it is...either another piece of Riceman genius, or another theory of the Riceman to rank alongside the GTO Bet Sizing Dice TM from a few years back...in other words, a load of old bollocks, and a waste of valuable TPE web space.

Be interested in anyone's thoughts, either way!

I recently went through a small downswing myself where I was losing some incredibly unlucky hands. However, I recognized that I was playing well and that it would eventually end so I kept playing. Five years ago, I would have probably chased those losses and made it much worse, possibly even losing my bankroll. Because I was playing well, it was a quick and easy recovery of the part of my bankroll that was lost during the downswing. Maintaining confidence and staying positive is critical to fighting your way through a challenging part of poker that happens to us all.

A couple of you know that I've struggled with depression, but what I haven't shared before is that I have bipolar disorder. Not the kind where my mood fluctuates frequently but the kind that requires a police escort to the psych ward when things go bad. I was hospitalized due to manic episodes six times in my 20s, for periods of time ranging from four days to four weeks. Luckily, I've been blessed to work with an excellent psychiatrist over the past twelve years and have finally found a balance of medications/lifestyle that has kept me relatively stable (and not requiring any trips to the funny farm) for nearly six years and counting. Aside from moderate seasonal depression most autumns and some winters, my main difficulty now is being able to differentiate between the feeling of happiness and the feeling of "too happy" which inevitably leads to mania if I don't take extra medication for a few days.

I'm literally afraid of being happy. The most important goal I have in life is to never have another manic episode. I can't put my family and friends through that again, and it completely derails my life when it happens. My last episode was minor by comparison (I was hospitalized within a few days of it starting), but the one before that tore apart my fledgling painting company, permanently alienated at least half of my friends in Montreal, lost me the girl of my dreams (at the time), and nearly got me arrested. I'm not saying "poor me." I'm (mostly) grateful for this adversity because it's made me a better person, but I want to illustrate how fucked up things can get. I have many goals and plan to accomplish all sorts of things, but nothing takes precedence over staying sane. If I accomplish nothing else meaningful in life but manage to avoid going crazy, I'd be okay with that.

All of this to say that after winning 63k in a $20 WCOOP last year, things got a little unbalanced. It took a while to develop and was very subtle at first, but something was off in my head. It wasn't the money necessarily or any illusions about suddenly being an excellent poker player (it's kind of embarrassing how many mistakes I made that turned out ridiculously well). I think it was the sudden lack of pressure on me. Ever since turning pro, I put a lot of pressure on myself to work hard and be very aware of my finances. Suddenly having 3x more money in the bank than ever before destroyed that drive.

Working hard at something is one of the best ways for me to maintain my mental health. It can be anything. Putting in 12 hr days at poker or past jobs, practicing writing, getting in shape, trying to master a champion in League of Legends, it literally doesn't matter what I'm working at as long as I'm working hard. I lost sight of that by the start of October, and that matched up perfectly with the time of year that I'm most likely to get depressed.

I always take most of October off from poker because I know I won't play well, but last year I didn't want to come back. Not because I stopped loving poker but because I didn't trust myself not to blow all of my money (I can be pretty self-destructive when depressed) and/or start heading down the slippery slope of happiness that leads me to the funny farm. All of my manias have started during a depression. It's almost as if my mind detaches from reality to escape feeling bad, and stress amplifies the chances significantly. Poker isn't usually stressful for me in a negative way, it's typically the very definition of eustress, but any stress can be problematic at times like those.

I played a little throughout the end of November and most of December but I couldn't take it seriously. I logged on to the forums a bunch during those months but I was so full of self-doubt that anything I wrote seemed shitty and was quickly discarded. It eventually became too painful to look at the green and white of the TPE forums. I tend to avoid most things that I enjoy when I'm depressed, as weird as that is. I instinctually seek comfort and simplicity. Anything remotely social becomes terrifying.

The past 6 months haven't been great, but it's child's play compared to the despair I felt in December. There's not much to say other than "bleh, not very much fun." The good news is that I've finally turned a corner. There have been many times that I felt like I was reaching the end of being depressed over the past 3 months, but this one is different. I recognize this feeling from past episodes, but I couldn't remember what it was like until I felt it again. Things are truly looking up. It will take a while to get back to 'normal' but the road ahead looks pretty sunny.

Anyway, I've missed the TPE squad. I don't know why I needed to write about this here, I hope nobody minds me spilling my guts. I guess I had to write about it somewhere, and TPE felt like the most natural place. If you've gotten this far, I would genuinely like to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I know this isn't always an easy subject to read about. Don't be shy to ask if you want to know more about any of this, I'm not sensitive or at all prone to being offended. If I wasn't wary of making people uncomfortable or being a Debby Downer, I wouldn't ever purposefully avoid talking about my struggles. I'm a much happier person when I live like an open book.

I hope you've all been well! I look forward to reconnecting and discussing hands and all things poker.