So I’ve been keeping book on stuff that I’ve either

a) learned, or
b) already “know” but am bad to apply, or for whatever reason misapply.

The very first thing that ended up in my notebook is this:

“Winning pots that are too small is also a leak.”

This is certainly a mistake that I’m guilty of making, or have been guilty of making. I haven’t been aggressive enough in pots that I ultimately end up winning. While it could be argued that this is not the worst leak for someone to have - to call down a little too often where a river raise would have been more +EV - it’s certainly enough to cost me a lot of money over a large sample of hands. And last year, I certainly played a large number of hands, by my standards; close to 150k. An extra dollar per 100 hands would have made quite a big difference for me.

So that’s part of my new focus: Finding spots in LHE where I can be more aggressive. Value bet more often, bet/fold more often, raise more often on the river.

This is in no small part related to my third note on the first page: I’m sometimes too impulsive. Especially when I’ve been running bad and I can’t feel like anything but “goddammit, they outdrew me again” so I just call down. A few more seconds of thinking - rational thinking - could have concluded that there was value in a raise, but fear of being beat made me simply call down, expecting to lose. Again, in any particular hand, the value might be small, fractions of a bet, but over the course of 150k hands it adds up.

So one - of many - things I’m working on at the moment is finding and dissecting hands where I feel I could have won more. My plan is to go over AK/AQ in spots where I have one pair on the river, which is often a delicate situation where I may be giving up value by only calling if someone leads into me, fearing that he rivered two pair or some other hand that beats me. Sometimes, maybe often, I’d be right to call, but this deserves a closer look. Once I find some key hands, I need to compare them with each other and identify the key properties that make the difference between a call and a raise. The texture of the board, the size of the pot, whether or not I can fold to a 3-bet, and - of course - the tendencies of my opponent.

I don’t know how well it translates through text, but I’m very excited about all the stuff I’m learning, and I feel better about poker than I have in a long time. Of secondary importance is the fact that I’ve been running very hot so far in 2008, which naturally helps with the confidence.