Day 2 of 1-week challenge.

Today was a successful day of poker for me. I played 5.87 hours and won $909 which is about what I can expect to make playing 6-7 tables of full ring 2/4 NL (with a little bit of 3/6 mixed in). I am happy with the length of the sessions I have put in this week, but I am more happy that I think I might have found a leak in my game. I felt myself not playing as well at the end of my session as I was earlier in the day so I decided to quit playing. I have always been really good about quitting when I notice my focus or play starting to slip. I was up about $1600 and ended up losing about $700 in the last hour or so. When I quit playing I was disappointed that I had given some back from my peak because of poor play. Then I remembered that the exact same thing happened to me yesterday around the same point of my session when I went from $2900 winner to only $2300 winner within the last half hour of my session. This got me thinking so I went back and looked at the graphs from a bunch of sessions that I had that were 5 hours+. It didn't happen in all of them, but more often than not at the end of all of my long sessions I finished with a decent size downswing. There could be several causes for that too though. Maybe I am just more likely to quit during a losing stretch than I am a winning stretch, but I think it has more to do with me losing focus and playing poorly which causes me to quit. Sometimes I can still win money while lacking focus and playing poorly, but most of the time it will result in a downswing. So my conclusion is that somewhere around 5 hours is my threshold for playing my 100% A-Game totally focused poker when I am multi-tabling online. This has a strange correlation to the approximate amount of time that my adderall continues to work (its actually not strange at all and it probably the exact reason I only play well for 5 hours at a time).

Therefore, I am going to try something new where I set some type of timer to remind myself when 5 hours have elapsed and if I don't choose to quit right then I will at least be able to make a conscious effort to stay focused for a little while longer. If I continue to have poor results on days when I play longer than 5 hours I will start making myself quit once the 5 hours are up. I have often wondered if I would even be a winning player and/or play for a living without taking adderall. I probably COULD do it, but I think I would be pretty miserable and I would certainly be much less successful at it.

So far after two days of grinding it out towards a 35 hour week I have played 11.23 hours and I have made $3,224. If only I would have had my revelation before these last two days I would have played about an hour and a half less and be up about $1300 more! That is silly to think like that, but I suppose it is possible that I am costing myself that much money by playing sessions that are longer than I can stay focused. Right now, I am way ahead of my 35 hour/$4K week goals. I am actually on pace to play 39 hours and win $11,284. That is VERY unlikely, but don't be surprised if it happens...I feel like I am playing some really good NL right now by choosing better spots to put added pressure on the passive players.

Also, I am trying to decide what I will do with my $36,000 when Jeff wins the British Open this week. He is tied for 15th and only 3 shots back after the first day of play. Even though I had already made the bet without thinking about this....Eric reminded me how Jeff should certainly be used to playing in terrible weather. This is so true...Big 10 golfers are at a huge disadvantage because of the crappy weather they have to practice in during the fall, winter, and spring months....that is until you are playing in the British Open and everyone has to play in crappy weather :) 1 X Jeff...do it for me :)