WSOP-2013: Week #6

It's Sunday, so time for a recap of this week's prep/progress toward WSOP-2013:

• Preparation:
• Pregame. Put together the rudiments of a pre-game MTT checklist. Still has a long way to go, but it's a start. Also, I'm thinking of modifying it a bit for the different stages of a long MTT. For example, as I sit down to play the early game portion of an MTT, stealing blinds isn't generally worth doing, but in middle game, stealing should be a bigger part of the game, so the pre-game checklist actually will be 2-3 checklists that get pulled out at different stages of the tourney.
• Postgame. Hardly played any poker this week, so there wasn't any real post-mortems to do.
• Off-Table.
• Forums/Hand-of-the-Day. Read a couple of MTT forum threads and all of the hands-of-the-day, but didn't post anything. Work is insanely busy this week (and next) so little accomplished.
• Books. Picked up a couple of books this week to a) improve my live game; and b) provide fodder for the long biz flights I have to take on a regular basis. The books are: 
• You Can't Lie to Me, by Janine Driver. I've got Navarro's book on tells, and frankly it's confusing and a bit of a mess. This one by Driver is not poker-specific, but has gotten really good reviews, so I figured I'd give it a shot on my Kindle.
• The other is Reading Poker Tells, by Zachary Elwood. This one is poker specific, and is getting a lot of very good reviews. I bought the e-book version.
• Also read some of Snyder's second book on Chip Utility.
• Videos. Watched some more of a grinderschool video series on a $215 MTT.
• Podcasts. Listened to the second Thinking Poker podcast. I really looked forward to this one, as they had Tommy Angelo scheduled to be interviewed. Tommy is considered by many to be the best poker coach on the planet. I own both of his books and am a fan, but this interview was, for lack of a better word, lame. I'm sure hoping the next podcast will be better.
• Health. I finally got around to dusting off my bicycle and gave it a tune up. The plan is to start riding it into work again. For the first twenty years of my career I commuted at least some of the week on my bike, but for the last five years I've hardly done any pedaling at all. Time to get back on it. The other good news to report is I'm back on the straight and narrow diet-wise. I'm a believer that diet is--by far--the biggest factor in weight loss, much more so than exercise. And the biggest factor by far for this fat bug is carb control. For example, this week I limited my carbs to under 100g per day, and I made sure I had zero of those after 2pm in the afternoon. I've not really increased my total exercise this week, but I've shed six pounds without really trying. The trick of course is to keep on this path of discipline.
• Technique:
• Preflop. I had planned on working on my starting hand stuff again this week, but work is kicking my butt. I did manage to think a bit about some starting hand ideas, including a crazy notion of limp-opening all pairs preflop early in a MTT. If I get anywhere with this idea, I'll blog about it... and then wait for the email flames to come in.
• REDi. The main thing to note here is I took a bad hit in a $100NL cash game I played early this week, and it was a direct result of me not fully thinking through a hand. I had AQ and got it in on a Q-high flop against another player who had AQs, effectively free-rolling me. Of course he got there on the river and stacked me. The main takeaway from this is that I put the villain on basically the range he showed up with, but still made the bone-headed call. In other words, I R'd really well, but my E, D and i steps sucked. 
• Emotional Control:
• Tilt Control. My aforementioned AQ vs. AQs hand put me on a bit of tilt, but I managed to quit tha session and walk away. In fact I didn't play for two full days following it (partly due to work and life commitments, but also partly due to this hand stinging so badly).
• BRM. Bankroll is in good shape. I'm playing a little outside normal 'roll limits in cash, but that's OK.
• Discipline. With the exception of the one cash session I mentioned above, the few other times I played I did a decent job of focusing and playing pretty well.

Results:

• Tournaments (Online). Only played two SnGs, and busted out in both.
• Tournaments (Live). None played.
• Cash Games. Played only a handful of sessions. Lost a few bucks overall at NLHE, but more than made up for it at 6max PLO. The bankroll is mostly where it was where I started this week.

Summary: This pesky thing called my Real Job is a real time killer, sucking the life out of my free time this week. We've got a big review coming up in a week, so things are necessarily difficult and time consuming. It will be at least two weeks before things settle back down. In the meantime, I'm still reading and studying, plus I'll play a little here and there when I can. Also, this coming week is my monthly live tourney night, so I'll at least get in a few hours of real poker.

On to the next entry in the WSOP-2013 journey....

All-in for now...
-Bug