I was having a difficult time trying to find something to blog about.. But here is goes, I'll try and keep this short and sweet.

Type in PRIDE in your google tool bar. Click the first link (wikipedia), you'll get this:

Pride is, depending on the interactional and cultural context, either a high sense of one's personal status (i.e., leading to judgements of personality and character) or the specific mostly positive emotion that is a product of praise or independent self-reflection.

Pride and success in poker (or anything in life) simply do not correlate. Poker is a game of failure. A prideful poker is destined to fail. Lets take for example gboro780 (in light of the recent thread) and say that for an MTT player, for sake of argument, the goal is to cash in a specific tournment.

According to bluffmagazine, this "beast of a poker player", has cashed in 951 of 5501 tournaments played on pokerstars. That is a 17.29% cash rate. This means that the best player in the world is failing close 83% of the time.

While gboro is "failing" 83% of the time, he is the best poker player in the world and has been able to turn a 7 figure profit on the most popular poker site around. This poker player got over his pride long before his incredible success.

Poker is a game of failure. Mistakes will be made. Bad beats will be taken. Move on, lose your pride and get it better next time, and keep it mind "its just a game."
GL to all @ the tables.
-Matt

So recently I have been wondering about my poker game.... Asking questions about my abilities to play.. constantly asking for help from others for whatever reason. It was all because I wanted to make money. Everyone loves those $ signs, right? So I have been doing a lot of studying of the game (equity, ICM, volume, etc). I was making plays cause it was +EV and right according to the "book". At the end of the day, I was losing... And yeah I was running bad, but I really just couldnt understand why I wasnt winning. I was hating poker because I just wanted to make money, and that wasnt happening.
Today I was talking on aim with a fellow poker player telling him how I just hate poker right now... he asked me this... then Why would you play?

Ding...Ding... Why would I be showing up to play a GAME where I cant control a certain percentage of the game to make money?

So today I showed up to play some poker, the game that I used to love so much... and you know what, I played some pretty damn good poker and ended even making a little money...I was able to use all the "math" that I learned and apply it to my poker game.

Overall a great success... I laughed for the first time when I lost a hand.. I just laughed how incredibly bad this guy played the hand. The end result didnt really matter because I played it right.

Forget all the math, equity, etc.... and quit complaining about running bad...
Sack up and take the beat and take joy in just completely owning some fool, you might be surprised at how much EV you can create on your own and cut down on this thing called variance.
I sure as hell enjoyed poker today more than anyday in a long long time....

GL @ the tables.

Yesterday I can honestly say that I started the grind of a professional poker player. I played almost entirely $4 180 man tournement on stars. I am doing this for two reasons. One being that I need to build a bankroll on stars, and two, that I want to take this process of turning into a professional poker player slow. I have money to live on at this point, and really want to stress bankroll management. When I played semi-professionally I would often play way out my roll, often sittin down at some pretty big cash games (almost always losing, I might add.) I can't do this anymore as I need to take this more seriously. I have set a few guidelines which I would like to strictly adhere to:
1. Bankroll Management is key.
2. Every $ counts! (meaning I will not give up on any tournement, no matter what the buyin)
3. Don't be results oriented, rather focus on playing every flop, turn and river to the best of my ability.
4. Eat Healthy.
5. Workout daily.
6. Make ample time for freinds/family.
7. Respect all of my opponents.
8. And finally, PWN!
And now I begin my day 2. I am going to put in an earlier session so that I can go out with my friends if there is something going on. -Laterz