Mono-ments

2010-11-17

Do you have the new Girl Talk album yet? Seriously it is soooooo good, just the best grinding music ever. It came out on Monday as a free download and early listens would suggest it's as good as Gregg's previous album, Feed The Animals. I don't know why but mashups (layered sampled music) are just really easy to listen to while grinding, more than any other kind of music. Even if you're not usually a fan of this kind of stuff I would encourage you to give it a go during a grind session, you may just like it!

The album is supposed to be listened to seamlessly, but here's one of my favourite tracks at the moment. It starts off with Notorious BIG's Nasty Girl over the top of Sunshine of Your Love by Cream, there's everything in there from U2 to White Zombie:

For the first time in a while I decided that I was gunna pull the pin early today; it feels like a really long week already and I think I was just too tired to play this morning and didn't realise it, so after kicking off with the FTP 109/19.5k at 4am I'd stopped reging by the Stars 8.80/12k at 8.30am. I got deep in the FTP 20r but unfortunately copped a huge beat from Gautam with about 20 left....we got it in three ways with AA vs AKo and AKo and he four card flushed me for a ~60bb pot, fun times Anyway after that I was real keen to turn the computer off, but I had a stack in that 8.80 freezeout with about 350 runners left and always feel guilty about punting off stacks so I actually mono-ed the tourney through until 4pm and got third for 1500 - small blessing for pressing on I guess! After that I ended up crashing on the bed for hours, must've really needed it I think.

I spent a little time looking through some of my HEM stats for signs of progression. I think I have made some key improvements in my pre and postflop game over the last eight months that I think are evident when I look at it across the sample. The main things are that I'm opening a ton more, cbetting less (but arguably more effectively) and winning slightly more often at showdown - all of which results in more chips won across a month of tourneys. I've made some other changes to hands that I flat as well; mainly not setmining as shallow as I used to (particularly OOP or vs LP opens where you're less likely to get paid off vs a wide range), calling a few less hands OOP vs EP opens but swapping in a few more hands IP. Big thanks to all the people who have helped me this year with this kind of stuff too.

On the flipside, I'm still not threebetting as much as I probably could be, though particularly in smaller stakes stuff I've gravitated towards scooping chips by opening a ton rather than threeballing players who will often just call and not fold any piece of the board.

Anyway here's a screen dump of my HEM stats from antes (125/250/25) onwards on Stars, filtered for when I have 25bb or more. Sample size by month is obviously pretty lol but I think it's still meaningful enough to get some broad themes.

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If anyone has any input on that I'm always keen to hear your thoughts.