Study Habits

Having both Attention Deficit Disorder and a problem moving information from short- to long-term memory has profoundly effected my life.  My IQ said that I was a genius.  My grades said something very different.  My high school GPA was a very average 2.6.

I didn't put the entire picture together until, at age 40, my ADD was diagnosed.  I managed to graduate from community college, sometimes only taking one class a semester.  I failed to get degrees from two Universities, in computer science and political science.

Once I realized what I was dealing with, it took me until about age 45 to beat back a lot of the bad habits.  It took me until about age 50 to start building some good ones.  It's a battle that I will fight every day of my life.

I was studying flash cards yesterday.  When I was done I realized how far I have come, even though it will always be a struggle.

I have been working on memorizing the top 10%, top 20% and top 50% of hands.  I need to know each of those ranges for different reasons. Most of the top professionals play about 20% of their hands, so I decided to open up my game and get comfortable playing that many hands.  I couldn't do that unless I knew what hands were in that range.

I opened my equity calculator (available free at equilab.com) and found out which hands were in the top 20%.  Then, as I have for top 10% and top 50% of hands, I put those ranges on flash cards.  For example, my flash card for suited hands in the top 20% shows the following:

A4s+ (ace-four suited plus, an ace paired with a four or higher of the same suit), K8s+, Q9s+, J9s+, T9s.

I have three flash cards for each percentage range: suited, unsuited and pairs.  Yesterday I worked on the 20% range for half an hour, then I added the cards for top 50% of hands and worked on those ranges for another half hour.

After I was done I realized what a big deal it was.  I pounded away on the flash cards for an entire hour!  Flash cards are boring, and people with ADD are very easily bored.  Memorization is very hard for me.   I told my wife, who for a while was a member of the Bible Memory Association, that  she could memorize in a day what took me a month, and it wasn't a huge exaggeration.  A few months ago it was a chore for me to work on flash cards for 15 minutes.  I'm a lot more diligent with my study, but I can never let my guard down.

I can only study when I'm in control of my environment.  There can't be any distractions.  If I hear just a few words from the television, my concentration is gone.  I study in a room by myself, with the door closed, wearing earplugs.  If I'm watching a coaching video, I listen to the sound on headphones. If I was getting a house built from scratch it would have a soundproof room.

I'm typing this between online SNGs and the time is 2234.  It's quiet outside, my wife is in bed and even the cats are sleeping.  I don't always have perfect study conditions, but I do everything that I can to control my environment, or failing that, to study or play poker online in as close as I can get to complete silence.  Most nights I play or study until well after midnight.

It is after midnight now.  It's 0142 and I just finished proofreading this before posting.  Time to play another SNG.

Laying The Groundwork--Part Two

This isn't going to be one of my usual posts where I talk about a subject in detail.  It is entitled "Laying The Groundwork" because that's what I've been doing.  I've been learning a lot of new things, experimenting with playing different ranges of hands and studying different things.

When I look at the numbers it doesn't look like much is happening.  I'm not making any money, in fact, my online play in 2016 has me -$6.76 online over about 250 SNGs. There is, however, a method to my madness.  I'll list of lot of different things that have been going on.  There won't be much detail, because many of those points are worthy of their own post individual post.

There are some of the things on which I've worked so far this year:


Study
1. More emphasis on flash cards.  I'm memorizing the math in a lot of different situations. I'm not in my comfort zone making certain plays unless I know that the math backs me up.

2. I'm learning new concepts that are beyond the level I usually see in a local charity room.  I do occasionally run into a professional player who frequents the smaller circuits such as the Mid-Stakes or Heartland poker tours.  It would be a lot better if I could handle some of those situations without just avoiding that player. I have to learn those advanced concepts, such as optimal frequencies for 3- and 4-betting, at some point.


Time Management
I now seldom just do one thing and stop.  If I finish a SNG and have a few minutes before the next one, I do something else poker-related during that time.  I'm writing this a few minutes at a time between SNGs.


Money Management and Tournament Selection
Most of my play hours are online now and might be for a while..  I had some money already sitting on two poker sites, so I decided to spend some time there and grind up my bankrolls.  I'm only playing live about two times a month, picking only tournaments with the structures which give me the best chance to get some big cashes.  When I have a decent live bankroll backing me up I can be less choosy.


Technology
I'm putting a lot more emphasis on technology, including setting aside time to study some of the tools that help me track my play as well as that of my opponents. I'm constantly tweaking or upgrading my recordkeeping system and I'm thinking about using Quickbooks next year. I'm making more use of study tools available online such as equity calculators.


All of the above changes have been happening at the same time, and there have been some stumbles on the way.  For example, I've been using flash cards to memorizing the top 20% of hands so that I can open with all of those hands in live tournaments, instead of the usual 10-15% with which I have opened in the past.  At the same time I'm cutting back the number of hands that I open in a SNG to no more than 10%, so I memorized that range as well.  I've done the same thing with playing the top 50% (more hands than most players, amateur or pro, would play) from the button.

There have been a some proverbial train wrecks during my tournaments because of this.  At the point where I had the 10, 20 and 50% ranges memorized (more or less) I had to keep all the different ranges straight and remember in which situations and in which types of tournaments I would play them.  That didn't always go well, and I screwed up more than a few SNGs playing more hands than usual when I actually needed to play fewer hands than I did in the past..

The combination of learning and trying so many new things at once, combined with whatever statistical variance may have been involved, brought my online results this year down from a high of +$52 to a low of -$7.

It's time now to take a break from learning so many things so fast.  I study almost every day and I will continue to do that, but I definitely need to slow down the rate and intensity at which I'm feeding myself new information.  I've been on information overload for the last month.  I need to slow down a little, consolidate what I've already learned, and grind my online bankroll back up.

I'm Feeling Much Better

It took me a long time to recover from my illness.  I got better day by day and I would say I'm about  90% back.  I didn't leave the house for several days. I didn't let it stop me from playing online, but I did have to cut back my hours and get some extra sleep.

The first half of April has been eventful.

My son and his family came back from Germany and we took a 300-mile round trip ride to bring them back from the airport.

Someone was shot and killed about 100 feet from our house. Our neighborhood is always, well, interesting, but we haven't had any serious problems on our block, no doubt partly due to a law enforcement presence in the area.  My next door neighbor is a captain in the sheriffs department and for several years, when my wife was the neighborhood president, our community police officer was a regular visitor.

Two poker-realted items:

1. I'm up $12 for the month playing $1 SNGs.  I should be able to play better and more often now that I'm feeling better, and grind my bankroll up a little faster.

2. I'm planning to play a live tournament this weekend, and I've been working on memorizing the top 20% of hands so that I can get used to increasing the number of hands in my opening range in that tournament.  I open between 10% and 15% of my hands in live tournaments, and since most of the pros open with around 20% it's time for me to get comfortable doing that.

I was surprised that A4s (ace-four suited) was in that range.  I'm uncomfortable playing hands with weak kickers--but when I thought about it, A4s being in top 20% made perfect sense.  Not only could the ace take down a hand by itself, but it's also a hand that can make a lot of very big hands like ace-high straights and flushes.  I play a lot of speculative hands when effective stacks are large, so that hand should most definitely be in my range.

I find myself doing this a lot as I work to improve at poker.  One of my strengths is that I'm honest with myself about when I'm good at something and when I'm not.  When I identify a weakness I often find that bring structure to the issue will force me out of a my comfort zone and help me turn that weakness into a strength.

I never run out of things to work on, in fact, the number of things I have to do to improve my play somethings seems overwhelming.  But in my plodding, one-small-step at a time learning style, I eventually it.done.  The elephant in the room that I will have to deal with soon is bluffing.  I have no feel for it at all.

I've taken some small steps, such as opening with a lot more suited connectors as semibluffs--but there is a lot more to be done.  Fortunately, as with any aspect of poker, there is a lot of study material available.  Many poker books discuss certain spots or conditions that are good for bluffling.  The math nerds are on the job, talking about game theory concepts like Optimal Bluffing Freqeuncy.

For anyone who wants to get better, the information is out there.  I just have to take advantage of it.

I've Been Sick

I've been a mess for the past three days.  I've had diarrhea, a hacking cough and sneezing fits.  At one point I wasn't able to sleep for more than 24 hours except for one short nap.

I'm slowly bouncing back now.  I still have the cough and the sneezing but it doesn't hurt every time I do either.  I slept more than 12 straight hours, taking care of that problem.  I'm way behind on my work hours and and  I'm still not in great physical shape.  I haven't been outside for three days.  I'll try to make up some of the work hours that I missed.