I'm in control baby.

First day of self control went fine. Felt like a couple of beers, but stayed away while playing, and eventually had one after the session. The only interesting thing that came up was after I'd sat down for a while, surfed a bit, forum searched a bit, I noticed an urge to crack open Pokerstars and donk around a bit. Fortunately I understood the danger of doing that just one day into my self control phase and opted not to, which felt good I guess, pretty standard really.

I'm trying harder and harder to get real reads before playing players, but it's really taking way too much focus off early game. Even with just 2 tables, I'm really only concentrating fully after about 20 hands once I have had a look at the history. Then I'll notice two of the original players have been replaced by other guys I have datamined and try to look through their history. There has to be a quicker way. Ideally, this is what I want. I want to be able to sit down, and within an orbit or two, have specific goals for how to deal with all players on the table, knowing as much about their post flop tendancies as possible. Then I want to be able to specifically say how I'm going to crush a couple of them... or if I have nothing, then leave. "If you can't spot the fish then you are the fish" type of thing.

It comes down to how do we effectively play the player at poker. We doing it by knowing how he plays hands and acting accordingly. It's one thing to know a player plays tight, but a whole other thing to see how they go broke and how they play in tough spots, like facing aggression with a draw or top pair. If we see someone cbet then 3 bet shove a flop with a bare flush draw, we know he can play flush draws aggressively. If we see someone donk lead then shove, or donk lead then fold, then we get a better idea for what they are doing that with. Now lets say you have datamined 450 hands on a player playing on your table that you just sat down at. His stats say he's a reasonable player, but there are weaknesses/trends I'd like to know. So far, finding these out takes too much of my playing time, and I don't see people on a regular enough basis to put my history of reads into practice.

Oh and my session last night was break even. I played fairly solid, but felt a little timid due to my brain putting much more emphasis on post flop tendancies rather than just going with a hand, which is probably a good thing. Like I isolate QQ OOP and the flop comes out Axx, and I check folded. Firstly, his range indicated he limp calls Ax hands sometimes, but also I just had no postflop reads, so didn't know how he'd play if I cbet, or if he'd be honest if I checked to him, etc. I probably missed an easy cbet, but I just don't feel fully equipped to make certain choices now.