Finally some insight

Had an interesting few days to do with poker. After just about losing it all the other night play miles over my bankroll, I pulled quite a lot back, mainly from HU SNG's, running miles better. I still got sucked out on, but probably only about the average. Like an 80/20 does lose 20% of the time, and that's how it was going for me, rather than losing 2 out of 3 80/20's.

So I got some pride back and can now say I'm bankrolled for very low levels again. So what now? I still don't have any true answers on that just yet, but amongst all the mayhem of the last few weeks, I've managed to have a major poker click. I'm still getting all the poker podcasts, and listened to a Bart Hansen Cash Plays episode interviewing Gabe Thaylor (sp?). He kept hitting the same point which eventually hit me pretty hard. After discussing a few different hands it was obvious he put a lot of emphasis in table image of you and your opponents. After hearing him say this a few times, I realised it's still a weakpoint of mine. Someone could have stats of 30/25/4 and I couldn't tell you how they've done that yet. They've probably shown down 4 or 5 times so far, but I've missed them all, due to playing other tables, or playing distracted. He also mentioned allowing players to play in a way that suits you. So if they are playing too tight to help you out, raise them a little lighter, and if called, you may have the worst of it, but it may get them playing looser after, which they might not do well. Interesting just how much he focuses on metagame.

So far this is nothing new, but the poker click was yet to happen. I realised firstly that all my poker learning has been do I bet this river, or fold to that turn bet. I've probably learned a lot in that area compared to some, but I've always known I've missed some things like table selection, accurate player profiling and self control. Well, why know these things and then go review more hands? Why not practice improving table selection? Rather than continually quote it as a weakness, work hard to make sure it's no longer a weakness. Set goals, and try to achieve those goals. Table selection for example should be quite easy to improve with some simple guidelines. In fact I might work on this one first.

So I guess I want to profile my biggest weaknesses over the next few weeks, and one by one try to set tasks to help improve that area. I'd say fix, but then you'll never be perfect at every thing, so I'll say improve, with the aim of continuing to improve after I stop putting real focus into that area. So I'll set myself a goal to improve the table selection first. I haven't set full guidelines yet, but it will involve things like not having really loose 3 bettors to my left, tight players on my right, short stacks on my right, table full of TAG's etc. I think with miinimal effort I see my winrate improving a lot doing this, so fingers crossed. I'm sure there are much bigger subjects, but if table selecting correctly, I can still have other major leaks and still be the favourite at that table hopefully.