I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the last couple of days regarding my play and my results. I haven’t had a winning month since January and it’s really getting to me. I’ve recently started playing on a site that offers rakeback which will certainly help, but it bothers me that I’m not winning and I’m not really sure why.
I was recently asked to make a video to be critiqued by one of the Stoxpoker coaches to be a video on the site, I downloaded an application called camstudio which is an open source piece of software and really works well for making videos. It’s also pretty quick when processing the file when it’s finished, when I’ve used other software it’s taken literally hours to do. While I was watching the video back I saw a couple of things that were bad and it reminded me of a post I saw on the 2+2 forums some time ago. I can’t remember who posted it or which forum it was in but this guy basically said that if he had his time over again he would record every session he played and watch it back. After watching my own video back I figured that it would be an excellent idea to do that every time I played. I have some concerns regarding file size, the one I recently made was 30 minutes and was 177 MB so I will need to look at compression options, but I think I’m going to give this a try for a month and see if there is any noticeable difference.
I had thought that I might also drop down from NL100 to NL50 for a while, but I’m concerned that any results I have while doing this may be to do with playing at a lower limit than anything else. I haven’t made my mind up on this yet but I still have a reasonable roll for NL100 so it might make sense to stick there for the time being. I have never done any kind of session review before where I look back at hands I’ve played in Holdem Manager as I’ve never been 100% sure what are the most useful things to look at so I feel that watching a video of myself playing might be a better idea as I can see the whole session and see things in the proper context, such as if there was a history with a player at the table rather than looking at a hand “cold” after the fact.
Another thing I’m looking into at the moment is a pre session “warm up”, I’ve seen a couple of posts regarding this so I’m going to try a few things out and see what works for me. The first thing I’m going to do while playing is quit IRC, close Skype and MSN and close my web browser. I normally have all these things open and it may be that they are distracting me. I’m also going to contact the support department of my new site and see if they can ban my chat. I can’t help but comment on how bad people play when they suckout on me and that’s bad, it’s bad if you tell a player they’re bad and it’s also bad for me as it makes me play worse. I got Pokerstars to ban my chat on there and it worked wonders for me in terms of tilt because I knew I couldn’t chat and I didn’t stay annoyed at a suckout long enough for it to have a major impact on my play. I’m hoping that these initial changes will improve my fortunes.
