41 Days--Filling the Time With Study

I plan to devote 50 hours a week to poker during those 41 days.  I've been thinking about how to spend that time. When I am no longer needed as a caregiver for my mother-in-law, poker will be my 50-hours-a-week career. Little or none of it will be spent playing online..  The online options are so bad that I won't be doing much of that until I have the time and money to get a lot of things straightened out online.

Given that we only have one car and that my local poker room is only open four days a week, those days that I can't play will leave me with a lot of free time in those 50-hour weeks. Much of that time will be used to study.  I read online forums and poker books, I use flash cards to memorize certain poker situations. I study, and talk to, other players.  I pick one thing to work on every time I play live--it might be looking for tells, or putting a player on a range, or something else, but I practice or study something every time that I play.  I watch coaching videos produced by some of the best players in the world.

There are some areas where I'm still very weak or haven't studied very deeply, and those areas can now get some attention.  I've really slacked off on the flash cards and I will put in more time on those.  I want to review my pots odds numbers and add some more.  For example, I want to make sure that I know my pot odds to hit the turn, hit the river, and to hit either the turn or the river (I have not worked at all on that last one.)  I should also know how most hands rank against a random hand.

I haven't worked much on equities, and I will be using the pokerlab.com Equity Trainer to become familiar with more situations.  I've messed around with equities a little bit, for example, I might check how TT stands up against different ranges, but that barely scratches the surface.  The Equity Trainer has quizzes for situations like "Big blind defense vs. MP2 [middle position 2] open-raise."  I have done no studying on how position affects equity, so that will be something new to work on.

Many of these areas are too big to tackle in a little over a month, but I can at least start to get comfortable with more study ideas and techniques.  There is always be more to learn.  Some of the most successful pros study 20 hours a week.

For now I would like to keep a balance of at least 25 hours a week playing and at least 15 hours a week studying, because I really need the playing time to practice and learn at the table and build my bankroll.  That adds up to 40 hours.  I'll talk about my plans for the other ten hours in my next post.