We’re a month or so in to this surgical repair of my game and I’ve identified the zones where I’m leaking and have come up with a plan to address each of these zones. It mostly boils down to that I’m a calling station. I’m not entirely shocked that I’m calling off too light but I am curious about what kind of effect it will have on my results once I correct this issue.
The way I see it there are two things to address:
- Technical skills
This should be simple. Drill the nodes of the game tree where I am overcalling. Identify where the field is underbluffing and FOLD EVEN MORE.
- Mental game factors
This will be a little harder to dig into. I must address what it is that makes me respond this way. It’s kind of interesting because it seems to be a mix of both fight and flight happening. I’m calling too light but I’m also not raising enough vs small bets. Is this passive or aggressive? It’s kind of saying I’m down for the ride but I’m not gonna make it too difficult on you.
Clearly the mental game factor is more difficult to address but I think by leaning on the heuristics from the technical side of things I’ll be able to authorize proper actions and behaviours in-hand. I think the root of it is that mentally I considered myself to be still developing/in training for being a poker pro. This causes me to be overly curious about what the villain has. I think I’ve now seen them show up with great hands enough that I can give up being curious.
How bad is it? Well it was pretty bad. What made it even worse is that my pool is massively underbluffing so I’m getting doubly smacked. I’ve overcorrected a bit, but I will need to collect data over a longer period of time to know how it’s truly going. Right now the sample size is too small to make any conclusions as to how my action plan is coming along.
So am I truly finding joy in folding? I wouldn’t call it joy but it is taking a bit of the load off.
