The Humble Poker Player

(How's that for a title? Don't know if it's even close to correct English.)

Anyhoo. "Tilt blocker" is a simple software, which is used to cover your stack size while playing. The idea is that you shouldn't pay attention to your result, but concentrate on playing your best. It's useful, but I don't think that's quite enough. For me, at least.

So what I did was a setup in which I don't even know the size of my bankroll. With the poker client I use, it's doable. The main client shows the bankroll size (though it's not accurate as it's only the money in play), but I can cover that up with a tilt blocker. Also, when I sit down, the client asks how much do I want to sit in with from my X amount available. This I can't completely cover, but I can just not look at it, as it's in small print and I can enter some amount without actually looking at the text field.

During the play, I can just use tilt blocker normally. Not even allowing myself a peek at the final result. Finally, I've shrunk the result columns from the Poker Tracker as I do want to take a look at statistics from time to time. It's a little bit annoying that I can see a glimpse of green there:

Not that I mind it being green, but I don't want to see anything about the result.

I've now played three sessions in which I've not been aware of the results during the play or before or after and I can say that it's been wonderful. It might be just a result of Hawthorne effect, but I don't mind. Damn the results, which I shouldn't even know by know (though I accidentally had a peek during the preparation of this weblog entry), but it was fun playing this way.

Of course, one does have some idea of the results even with the tilt blockers on, because it's really easy to understand that one's losing if every big pot is going some other way. But it's also surprisingly hard to know the exact result after just half hour of play or so. And now that I don't know the result even afterwards, it's even harder to what's the overall result recently.

The idea, then, is to have a look at the results after a given amount of hands. I've set this to be 5000 hands right now, but I don't see why I couldn't go "blind" with even bigger stretches. One crucial requirement is of course to have big enough bankroll so that you don't go broke during this period (how's that for the definition of big enough bankroll?). Also, if I happen to run good, it might have been more profitable to move up limits, but this way, I don't come pre-occupied by the hope of moving up but concentrate on playing the best.

Worth trying, at least.