A Very Deep Run

In my previous post I said the following:

I've been playing some of these, noting how the players play in general and I think that I'm getting the hang of it. I started out crashing and burning in the first hour, then I was getting in the top quarter of the field.  Soon I was regularly getting in the top 100 of fields of 600 or 700 players.  In my last two I got knocked out around 50th place.

I just finished going very deep in an 11-cent tournament that is very popular on Americans Cardroom and runs seven days a week.  Like the freerolls, it's not a lot of money but it's a cheap way to practice some of the things I'm working on.  Last night, everything feel into place.  I played for 5 hours and 13 minutes, finishing 4th of 892 players for a cash of $7.45.

I've been working on a lot of aspects of my game and doing a lot of studying over the last few months. Whether I make any money has been secondary.  It's all about being ready to make some real money in 2017.

My goal is always to spend 25% of my time studying, but last week is was 33%, one third of my poker time that week spent in study, and that study emphasis is paying off.  I've been working on a lot of aspects in my game and it's all starting to come together.

I'm working on ideas that didn't exist for me just a few months ago.  In yesterday's tournament  I sometimes defended my blinds with 75% of my hands.  A month ago I would have thought that was crazy, but a week ago I watched a video with Jonathan Little and Alexander Fitzgerald discussing the importance of blind defense and why it was necessary to defend so often.  Several times during that tournament yesterday I was thinking about all of the plays that I was making that I wouldn't have even considered a few months ago.

Another very new idea for me is using different bet sizes depending whether or not you want to be called.  It's not new in the sense that the idea has been out there for a while and I knew about it, as one of the many things that I should learn how to do someday.  I never dug into that because it was just one of many things that I needed to learn..

That video, along with Little's Weekly Poker Hand videos, have really opened my eyes to a lot of things. In the videos Little takes one hand and talks about it for 10 minutes.  What if I had done this instead of that?  What do I know about this player?  What if I had bet a little more, or a little less?  What is the tournament situation?  What if my chip stack was smaller, or larger?

Now that I have my own office and a quiet place (and neighborhood) I have the chance to study all those things, which is a big part of everything coming together.   It's almost 2017.  Now it's time to start turning all the things that I'm learning into money.