If your goal is to pro in ten years, it would be good to start practicing being a pro. I think you are the type of person who once you got it in your mind that you wanted to act like a pro you could have a lot of fun doing it. It is really fun to be disciplined and to take care of yourself, to look out for yourself and to constantly be playing your best and making the best possible decision for yourself and your pocketbook. There is no point in thinking about how to play a hand right and agonizing over cold calling here or reraising or should you have folded here and what not if you are also not simultaneously thinking about how to pick the best games, when to play and how to make sure you are playing your best. Those last two things are way more important than any technical skill or how to play a specific hand by far if you want to play as your job. Picking a game, picking which seat to sit in, calming yourself down, choosing when to play and when to go home are decisions that come up every single time you play. Playing a specific hand or a specific kind of situation might come up one in a hundred times you play. It is far more important to teach yourself and discipline yourself to choose good games, choose good spots, play when you feel strong and steady and like you are going to win and get up and leave when you feel bad than to think about how to play slightly better. It would be better that every time you got 97o and T8o that you cold called any number of bets preflop with them than if you decided to sit in a bad game. You could have that glaring hole in your technical game and it wouldn't matter as much as those other things because those things don't come up very often.
Don't sit in bad games. Ever. Let the other "pros" do that. They will be broke eventually and you won't. Save your energy and time for when the games are good. I have used the same excuse you used, that I just wanted to make sure the game would keep going, that I was doing the guy running the club a favor. I was being a nice guy. Really, your first statement was the right one, you just didn't want to wait to play because you drove all of the way there to play. I used to do that all of the time too and then I got stung bad a couple times being stupid and doing that so I stopped. One day, when you get wise, you will drive all of the way to the club, and you will look around and see all of the games suck, or you will look into yourself and you will see you are not ready to play that day, and you will take yourself off of the list and go home without having played a single hand. And that will be an awesome day for you because that is what it takes to really win huge at the end of the year, making great poker decisions like that. Try it out, you will see how awesome it feels to say to yourself, "I am going to make good decisions about how I invest my money and time." You will feel so powerful and confident. You don't have to play. You choose to play. You look at the game and decide to play. You are free to do what you want to do, you don't have to play just because you came there. If people say anything to you you don't have to do anything. You have this quiet kind of confidence and are your own person. If you practice it it will hit you all at once one day and you will never go back to the other way of playing.
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Date: 2006-03-02 18:16 (UTC)Don't sit in bad games. Ever. Let the other "pros" do that. They will be broke eventually and you won't. Save your energy and time for when the games are good. I have used the same excuse you used, that I just wanted to make sure the game would keep going, that I was doing the guy running the club a favor. I was being a nice guy. Really, your first statement was the right one, you just didn't want to wait to play because you drove all of the way there to play. I used to do that all of the time too and then I got stung bad a couple times being stupid and doing that so I stopped. One day, when you get wise, you will drive all of the way to the club, and you will look around and see all of the games suck, or you will look into yourself and you will see you are not ready to play that day, and you will take yourself off of the list and go home without having played a single hand. And that will be an awesome day for you because that is what it takes to really win huge at the end of the year, making great poker decisions like that. Try it out, you will see how awesome it feels to say to yourself, "I am going to make good decisions about how I invest my money and time." You will feel so powerful and confident. You don't have to play. You choose to play. You look at the game and decide to play. You are free to do what you want to do, you don't have to play just because you came there. If people say anything to you you don't have to do anything. You have this quiet kind of confidence and are your own person. If you practice it it will hit you all at once one day and you will never go back to the other way of playing.