When things fall apart!

For my birthday my Aunt bought me a book, pictured below. 

Maybe she'd been keeping an eye on pocket fives, or maybe she's friends with one of the cashier's at DTD who've been worried about my lack of visits to the cash desk lately. 

Either way, despite it being rather an unusual gift, she's bang on the money - it's been a bad time lately. Problems both personal and professional have made it a tough time. 

I try and keep my head down when going through a bad patch because that's generally the best way through it. Nobody likes reading about it, and it doesn't really help much at all to vent and moan - and you always regret it later and when you look at the bigger picture (and you look silly when you moan in a ridiculously lucky bink the week later!). Also the variance police are always about to tell you that you haven't actually been running bad, you ran well in x tournament or in x cash game, they run worse etc - it's just not very helpful all round.

So what does the book say? What do you do when things fall apart? 

Well, I haven't read it yet. But my answer would be "Put them back together again!". Do whatever you can, or whatever you need to, to get back to winning ways.

Here's a few things that work for me-

• Having a HH review /coaching /sweat session with someone you respect and who understands you. Done quite a lot of that this year already. In fact a lot of the material of this blog is advice given to me by others! 
• Dropping down stakes, playing smaller field tournaments - more manageable and softer fields make it easier to win, and although 1st prize might not be what you're used to playing for, it's still a very nice feeling to actually win something, and very good for the confidence.
• Taking a break or choosing a different form of the game to play for a while. I switch regularly between tournaments and cash, live and online and generally find the low variance of say a £1/1 game where I feel really confident at any table is really good for confidence and just winning a few hundred quid in a fun live game feels really nice after knocking it in online. 
• I watched the PCA live stream for many hours this week and found listening to Ike Haxton talk extensively about hands and his constant reference to GTO play was really interesting and inspiring. And it's also nice to watch sickos battle it out and seeing all their hole cards and see that they're not doing anything massively out of the ordinary or different to what you would do.

What doesn't work

• Cursing, shouting, slamming the mouse down, telling your friends bad beat stories, whining, moaning and just generally feeling sorry for yourself! 

Since a coaching session on Monday, changing my schedule a bit, watching the PCA stream and doing some personal work on my game (and improvements on the personal front) - I've booked 3 winning MTT sessions in a row! Might be a personal record streak for online tournaments!

Now I'm not one for incorrectly linking correlation with causality and being results orientated - but the some of the results have come from tournaments I've never played before - a lower buyin or a site I don't usually play on. And although I could have easily lost every day this week and not done anything wrong - I feel like the things I've adjusted and the work I've done has definitely helped my confidence and I'm enjoying it a lot more. Playing with confidence and running well - a powerful combination - just ask Simon Deadman!

Another little thing I did today which I don't normally do - cook Vegetables! Now I'm not saying that they made me run well, but they might be the key ingredient...

In short, don't get mad at the things you can't change, look at the things you can. Good luck at the tables! 

Run better everyone!