Singing while I Swing!!!

So to start off 2015 I am on a 2k downswing over 45 games. I have busted my account on Bovada and will need to redeposit. Felt pretty gross last night after firing the last money in my account in the Thousandaire maker, I went from 1/18 to out in 14th for $0 where 1-7th cash for 1k. Probably missing a few marginal spots and checking back one river would have allowed me to basically fold to the money. Oh well. 2k is nothing in the long run, and a very reasonable swing for what I'm playing. 

I'm feeling pretty great today after a good morning at work. Today I very successfully wrapped up a project that has been a work in progress for ~2 years. Heading out to grab some lunch with the girl, then a 4mi walk to clear the mind before starting tonight's grind!!

Update:

So after my fourth session of the year I was down over 3k. Yesterday I decided to cut out the 109’s,82’s, and most of the 55’s, and only played a few 55 and mostly 33 and under. I had several deep runs, including a 17th,18th in the 30k, 9th in a $22 10k, and 11th in a 4k turbo. It was a little frustrating getting all these deep runs in with no top 3 or even top 6 finishes, but it was nice to book a small profit. Tonight I added some bigger stuff back in and had a decent profit- shipping a 3k GTD and 8th in a 2k 6max.

Volume so far: 93 MTTs

I’m pretty happy with this volume since I’m still working full-time. This puts me on pace for over 360 tournaments this month, which is actually more than I had expected I would get in. So far we are down about 2.4k, but the last few nights it was nice to get some momentum back. I probably won’t be playing again until Sunday, and am excited to put in a hard grind.

Rungood

Nervous Mike said:

I wish you the best of luck! Will be interesting to follow your road to the top!

Thanks Mike!  Really appreciate the support.

Update: 

Continuing to downswing. Feel like overall I have played quite well so far this year and happy with my volume, but honestly really not happy with my pre and post game routines (or lack thereof) and mindset late in sessions. I think the downswing is finally starting to get to me a bit and near the end of the last few sessions I have felt fairly weak mentally. Whenever I get it in pre on a flip I find myself thinking like “OK he's obv gonna hit the A or Q but probably not until river” and crap like that, seems like a clear sign that I'm getting fatigued/frustrated. 

Had a deep run in the Sunday Major on Bovada but ended up busting 30th after losing a 3way AIPF with QQ vs TT and A9. It's kinda sick because that one pot could easily have made the difference between me being breakeven or up a few k and being down several thousand and continuing to downswing. That's variance!

I'm planning to not play for the rest of this week (have to travel to NY for work Thurs-Monday so can't play the weekend anyway). Gonna try to focus on work and also get a bunch of studying in. I think it's gonna be very productive to focus on specific goals for my away-from-table work, so I'm gonna start posting my study goals and how well I'm progressing toward them. 

Study Goals- Present-Mar.1: 

-Mental Game 
-Routine setting/productivity 
-Meditation 
-under 20bb play and push/fold concepts 

I have been getting a little better about meditation and tonight purchased a post-session cooldown MP3 from Elliot Roe and used it after my session. I think it helps a lot with letting go of frustrations and relaxing, and should help me sleep better. I'm also gonna get some pre-session material and get to work on developing a consistent pre-session routine. I think it's gonna be really important for me to establish healthy routines NOW before going full time in March, so my main focus will be on that. 

Planning to get to Foxwoods on 1/30 for the CPPT Event #1 (100k GTD) $600 NLH re-entry. May try to sell some action at low or no MU, but haven't decided yet and may just end up taking the shot on my own dime. 

Rungood!

@Jimmy2tymz- Right now my volume is pretty light since I'm still working full-time.  I plan to play at least 500 tournaments every month starting in March.  So far in Jan. I've played around 225 tournaments or so.  I think I will be able to meet my goal.  Regarding variance, I haven't done anything to reduce variance until today.  I decided for now I am going to cut all Turbos out of my schedule for a while to try and have a little less variance. 

Thx for the rungood!

@Hawkeye- Thanks for the support man, def appreciated.  I will for sure add you on Skype soon so we can chat.  I've been doing a lot of HH review and watching videos this week, and also reading non-poker books on productivity.  I am very confident I will come out of the DS and crush the games, but in the moment it does kind of suck.

@JD- agree with what you said.  Sattelites are great and I probably don't play enough of them.  Pretty much the only sattelite I play is the 100k special qualifier where 50 seats are GTD.  This sat is insane value and the field makes a ton of over-tight mistakes all the way through.  I will probably start adding in a few more sat's on Bovada.  Will definitely be firing a lot of sat's once the BDPO series starts. 

I'm really looking forward to March, as the BDPO championship series starts in mid-March on Bovada and I will be done with my job and playing/studying full time then.  I'm probably going to focus on playing Bovada exclusively for the month.  I'm also hoping that in February my job will transition to being mostly in-office work so I can have a good schedule of grinding 3-4 nights/wk.  

Rungood everyone!

@NeverAA- Thanks for the post! I agree that exercise before grinding is awesome for your game. I suck at dragging myself to the gym and need to get into a good routine. I do tend to do some sort of quick exercise before most sessions, but need to go harder for sure.

What you said about needing to find a way to make the process better- I agree with this and have been working on it, but also feel that time off and life balance are HUGE and honestly might be my biggest overall leaks right now. I suck at taking days off and regularly go back on my decisions to take a few days or a week off and grind anyway. Some people say that the top players don’t really have a balance and are all poker all the time and that’s something to consider for sure- but most humans need time off to relax otherwise our performance suffers. After reviewing some of my runs recently I’m pretty convinced I’m making some mistakes due to lack of focus caused by burnout. Just gotta keep refining the process and improving!

Thanks again and rungood!

@NeverAA- Having a cluttered mind is a real detriment to our focus and makes it difficult to consistently play A-Game poker!  I will be making it a priority to get into a good daily routine and pre/post grind routine for all of February as I approach playing full-time in March.  

It's cool that Danny is your coach, I got lots of coaching from him last year too!  He's a great guy and it was a very good decision to hire him.  Made a huge difference in my game.  Feel free to add me on skype as well if you want to chat- Douglas Lyford.  I added Hawkeye, maybe we can group chat sometime about setting up routines and pre/post session stuff.  Also would be happy to review some hands. 

Rungood! 

Hey Guys, 

Thanks a lot for the well wishes!!  Still Riding the heater so far!  A few days ago I shipped the 15k on Bovada for about $4200, and over the weekend I shipped a live satellite at the local casino for a $250 ticket and $150 cash.  I also had a small amount of profit online Sunday.  Feeling really good about my game, and counting down the days until I go pro, 3 more weeks!! 

I have thought about going to Foxwoods in March for a series there, but am leaning towards staying home for the month and putting in a ton of volume online.  Bovada has an excellent series going on and it's basically impossible for live play to have a higher expected hourly than online.  I'm really excited to get into full grind mode and put in tons of volume in March, and also to get back to another live event ASAP.

Rungood!

The post below is cross-posted from my new blog.  A lot of the beginning is re-hashing of stuff I've already said itt and in my interview with Carlos in the TPE Meet The Nation article.  I do go into more detail here, and talk about my big downswing starting off this year and a smal degen story 🙂

This post is intended to be a full introduction to who I am, my poker history, and my hopes for the future.  It will likely end up being fairly TL;DR, but read it anyway.

Hello!  My name is Doug Lyford.  I live in New England and currently work as an industrial controls engineer for a small systems integration company.  I do a lot of work in the field and spend around 60% of my time at customer job sites.  We work in many sectors but most of my work is in forest products facilities, so I spend a lot of time in sawmills, chip mills, etc.  I have also worked in everything from large bakeries to wastewater treatment facilities.  Since we are a very small company, I wear a lot of hats and do everything from programming to wiring to project management and quoting.  The job has been really great in that I have learned an incredible amount of both professionalism and technical skills.  

Although the job has been a wonderful learning experience, I work a lot of hours and it can be very stressful.  Last year, I consistently worked 40-60 hours/week at my day job while grinding 20-30 hour weeks and studying on top of that.  For a lot of that time my girlfriend, who I live with, was in nursing school and so she was away most of the week.  This was griiiind time and it allowed me to put in a good amount of volume.  I got really burnt out last year running this insane schedule and it came to a point where I really had to choose between poker and my job.  I've always wanted to take a shot at being a professional poker player, so I chose poker.  On March 1, 2015, I will be done with my day job and playing poker full-time.  I'm extremely excited!

If I had to choose just a few words for what poker has been for me for most of my career, I would say “Sporadic Obsession”.  I started playing at 16 or 17 in home games with friends, and when I turned 18 I started grinding every freeroll I could find.  I probably never cashed one.  Throughout college I played both cash and MTTs and would occasionally deposit some money but never really ran up a bankroll.  In my final year at school I got some cash game coaching and developed solid NLHE fundamentals.  

Fast forward to 2013.  I have a solid full time job and disposable income to play with.  I deposited $200 on Bovada and after playing 6-max cash initially switched to MTTs and focused on them.  I ran a roll up to around 9k in 7-8 months, and then lost 2k on a live trip and came home to lose the rest playing High Stakes NLHE and PLO cash games online.  Oops!  

After this ill-advised shot taking I took a few months off and then in February 2014 I decided to get back on the horse and deposited another $200 on Bovada.  I focused almost exclusively on MTTs all year and had great results.  I made around 30k over 1200 games with a ~50% ROI.  I did lose some money late in the year on some other sites and on live trips, but overall it was a very successful year and by far my best year in poker.  Throughout the year I got professional coaching from Tournament Poker Edge pros Danny Noseworthy, Marc Alioto, and Ben Reason.  I met some great players/people through the forums on TPE and spent time studying with them as well.  Constantly reviewing hands,talking about the game, and getting outside opinions was the real difference for me, it allowed me to improve greatly.

I gave my notice at work on January 1, and in 2 weeks will start the full time grind.  In the first month after giving my notice, I was down nearly 10k.  This is the biggest downswing I have ever had by a good margin, and it's a pretty good mental test to see if I'm ready to grind out tournaments and can deal with the variance.  I'm ready.  Although It's not fun to start off like that, I feel as though I have been able to play through it pretty well and didn't let it get me down.  In the first week of February, I profited approximately 15k.  The majority of this profit came from a 5th place finish at the Cardplayer Poker Tour (CPPT) Foxwoods stop in a 100k GTD for just over 9k.  I won the 15k GTD on Bovada a few days later for over 4k.  The live score felt really good and was a very nice confidence boost at the right time.  If you're interested in reading more about that score, you can see my massive Day 1 Chiplead Here and my 5th place finish Here.  

With a small series on WPN right now and the Bovada series coming next month, I have plenty of stuff to grind and will be putting in lots of online volume in March.  Future blog posts here will include hand histories, general updates, graphs, and probably some random thoughts.  Thanks for reading, and Rungood!

Here’s a sort of interesting spot from last night’s session where I limp/call a 47bb jam HU at a final table with A6o:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s342/sh/4d8e808a-eb7f-4283-b353-930a4510700a/9b0615584b6356f1

Saturday Session: 

Profit/Loss: 

Bovada-$82 

ACR- -$256

Total: -$338

was kind of a bleh session, played my b game despite playing 3 tables and prepping.  Had a shitty morning so maybe that is to blame.  Having a great start to Sunday, about to exercise and meditate just now before firing a 3-tabling session.  GL today nation!

Tues. Grind:

Bovada – 70$

ACR – 265$ 

Total -335$ 

Had a pretty rough session, but I’m feeling really good today because instead of being too frustrated with myself to do anything productive after my session last night I stayed up until 5 AM reviewing marked hands in great detail using HRC and flopzilla.  I only got through 5 spots in about 3.5 hours of study, but I think this type of study is the most productive.  I also won a ticket to the $44 150 seats satty to the 500k on Sunday in a “Freebuy”, which was a freeroll with rebuys/addons.  Took a single $1 rebuy and skipped the addon (because it was unneccesary given my stack).  

Had a deep run in the 4k 8max on ACR but lost a pretty big flip and then shortly after got in AQ on Q74 rainbow vs an sb flat pre about 20bb effective to start the hand, villain had KK.  I don’t know for sure if we can ever get away on the flop here but I felt that its a spot we have to go with.  Busted that for basically a mincash.  Probably just grinding a couple small ACR birds tonight and then off until Sunday to go on a winter weather hike on Mt. Katahdin!

Thurs. Grind: 

ACR: +$320

Ended up firing a session a little later than normal today.  Played about 8 tournaments, shipped a $22 turbo on ACR.  Going on a hike Sat. and next session is the Sundayy grind. 

Grind Update: 

So on Monday, which is usually a day off from grinding, I did some studying and 1-tabled a couple of tournaments, ended up getting one 4th place finish.  Last night I fired a full grind, and for the sake of simplicity I’m just gonna lump the results into a single update here and consider it a night of grinding, so: 

Tues. Results: 

Bovy: – $312

ACR: + $103

Total: – $209