Stephen Groom Taking a shot at becoming a Poker Pro

Wow. Turns out I’m pretty degenerate

This week has been pretty fun.  I went and visited an old friend down at her new place in Brighton and met alot of cool people down there.  A few drunken nights spent with a bunch of squatters and students in Brighton taught me that I really do enjoy travelling, meeting new people and broadening my horizons.  I am 100% going to travel more in the new year and I am going to go as far as making it a new year's resolution, with some goals and targets too.

As far as poker is concerned since I last blogged I have played very little.  I continued with my roll on 888poker for a couple more days and probably lost about 1bi but then I decided to cash it back out for the following reason.  I am a tablegame degen!

I realised this as a result of a number of events in the past week which has taught me that I definately have a problem, leak or addiction which needs addressing.  After a brutal losing session in Teesside I was seen spinning my change to the nearest £100 on blackjack and letting it ride.  I did about 5 spins in excess of £50 and let the original wager ride for about 5 in a row until I finally lost (not letting profit ride unfortuaneltly) and I thought that this was totally out of character for me.  I put it down to stupidity and decided to forget about it.

The next time was on Tuesday at the circus £100 game.  I played in a deep 1/2 game (with an unbelievably soft lineup) and couldn't win a pot due to being totally carddead.  I lost about £200 by blinding out, 3bet folding and folding lots of failled c-bets and left the game.  On the way to the cage to cash my chips back out I was again seen playing £50 blackjack hands and higher.  This was starting to look like a problem.

So I was playing on 888poker, had one of those sessions again, couldn't win a pot, couldn't get a 3bet or cbet through and lost a few bi.  As I felt my mouse sliding to blackjack on the way to the [x] button to close 888poker I realised I was in trouble.  I resisted, went straight to cashier and cashed out the remainder of my roll.  Having $1k sitting right next to a high limit online blackjack game is totally unsuitable until I am sure that I can resist.

Now that I have recognised that I have a problematic tilty-degenerate blackjack streak in me I must think of a way to address it.  I have a pretty good group of friends who travel with me most of the time when I visit casinos and I am damn sure that they would give me a slap around the head and ask me WTF i'm doing if they saw me spinning £100's on blackjack.  I don't want to rely on this though.  I need to convince myself that I have the self control to have £1k+ sitting in an online casino and know that it will never be exposed to negative expectation table games.

I think for the mostpart this will just require willpower and there will be no quick fix for putting a stop to this.  I think that the longer I go without touching tablegames the easier it will be for me not to play.  My friend Ben has a philosophy that he won't play table games at all.  While I respect this I don't think it is completely healthy either.  I believe that often it is fun to play micro-limit blackjack or roulette in a casino whilst drinking, waiting for a game to start or whatever but I need to address the problem of playing so high.  I think that I will attempt to adopt Ben's ideal for a little while and set a target to not play tablegames completely for a period.  Maybe another new year's resolution.

With that in mind, if anyone would like to lay me some money for a prop bet about me not playing tablegames for 1month, 3months or maybe even 6months to a year in 2012 then I'm all ears.  We should discuss it in private however.  No silly £5, £10, £50 wagers though.  It would have to be a figure which it would hurt to lose.

Back to poker... On sky this month I have stopped tracking my progress via pokerjournal and the only measure of how well I have been doing is my cashout history.  I am very happy with the amount of money I have made in the last 30 days to date but not too pleased with the volume.  I don't know for sure how much I have played but I am pretty sure I've fallen below my 120hrs/month target.  I think that I will begin tracking meticulously again in december either via PokerJournal or find a way to do it online (suggestions anybody?).  This way I will know if I've been excessively lazy and know how short of my target I have fallen.

I think that is about all I have to say this week so please leave a comment if you want to discuss anything I've wrote.

Cheers
Stephen