Thanks G, and congrats on your new role at FTR. Yeah, 25nl can be pretty nitty post-flop and certainly worth bearing in mind and adjusting to in good spots.

So April has been going reasonably well so far and I’ve been happy with my play in the main part. The week I sat out from the tables watching some GrinderSchool videos of live play and basic spreadsheet and Equilab work seems to have straightened me out and I’m absolutely determined to keep this fresh mindset and discipline going. Grinding back the bankroll to its previous state after a fair few sessions of spew is painful to say the least.

Beyond returning to a more balanced frame of mind, I think there have been three key changes that have resulted in a change in fortunes this month:

1) Dropping the number of tables I play to 9, which seems to be my sweetspot between not getting bored and still being able to take and consult with notes and think through decisions adequately. I’ve made some good calls and good folds in spots where I previously would have done the opposite without hesitation.

Dropping the number of tables has also enabled me to spot just how exploitable some of the regs are. Just like my recent approach to poker, these guys are trying to run before they can walk by playing far too many tables, static ranges and consequently never adjusting. For example, there is one bad reg with an 80% btn opening range and 90% fold to 3bet stat that I've 3bet at least 30 times in a row now from the blinds and he's only 4bet me once. Before, I would have folded and 3bet a fairly static range in the blinds against this guy.

2) Decreasing my session lengths to between 50 and 75 minutes and setting an alarm to go off after 50 minutes to make me pause and consciously check if my mindset is strong. It’s clear from some analysis that I play poorly during sessions longer than this (see post 30 above) and it’s clear post-session too - sometimes I cannot recall the past couple of hours at all after a longer session, which surely can’t be a good thing.

3) Reminding myself that each poker hand is ultimately a puzzle that we can attempt to solve to the best of our ability given all of the information available. I’m sure this is something that Soupie was big on in some of his classic articles that first brought me to FTR and it is key to being a consistently winning player (fantastic articles if you’ve not read them btw and almost solely responsible for me winning a couple of decent micro mtts).

tl;dr