News / Imper1um / 31 December 2008 / Leave a comment

Passing the million dollars mark in live tournament earnings, winning my first major live event and being just one river card away from winning a WSOP bracelet all meant 2008 was a pretty special year for me at the poker tables.

The improvement in my live game can be put down partly to cutting down on mistakes which I talked about in November.

When I was in my online poker prime and was learning key fundamentals of NLHE I'd always look to find what I was doing wrong and correct it. I would get well respected pro players on AIM and every time I felt that I played a hand in a sloppy way I would message 8-10 people on my AIM and ask them how they would play it. After about two months of playing nothing but tournaments I felt that I made an average of two or three mistakes per tournament. These weren't mistakes that everyone would recognise as mistakes either, these were any way that I played the hand that WASN'T perfect. If I didn't play the hand as best as I knew how then as far as I was concerned I had made a mistake. Mistakes had nothing to do with results either, one thing that was pushed on me really early in my poker career was not to be results oriented.Just as an extreme example if I have 23o and decided that after being reraised preflop a shove is the most profitable play, it's not a mistake to me even if he wakes up with Kings, as long as I was doing it for the right reason. After about 2 months of playing tournaments for up to 20 hours a day, I finally came to a point where instead of averaging three mistakes per tournament I would only average one or two mistakes per three tournaments and eventually I would be playing almost exactly perfect, in my mind. I'm still in the stage of my live tournament career where I am on average making three mistakes per tournament... You may be wondering, wait a minute Sorel, online tournaments are obviously tougher than live tournaments, how can you possibly be making more mistakes in live tournaments than you do online? Well, the answer is that there are so many more options in live play that should effect every one of your decisions.

With dynamics of live player being so different to online, I know that as well as cutting down on mistakes, I also have to learn to extract tells from players by engaging them in some sort of way.

My ultimate goal in live poker is not only to play every hand correctly but to also engage my opponents in a manner that gives me as much information as possible. Since I'm inexperienced in knowing which of my actions render which reactions, it's something that I will get better with, with experience.

I wrote that post about the WPT in Niagra where I was pleased with a cash after an up and down tournament. Perhaps that post ultimately proved cathartic as not long after I landed my first live event at Bellagio in December.

As said above I'm not that results orientated but it was still a good feeling to take down a major live tournament and made up slightly for the disappointment of not winning my first WSOP bracelet at Betfair's own World Series of Poker Europe tournament in the PLO event. It would have been great to repay Betfair for the faith they had shown in me and the atmosphere that night at the Empire was electric.

Random thoughts throughout the year

In June I won my weight loss prop bet with Roland De Wolfe but more importantly I realised the importance of a healthy lifestyle to my poker game.

I feel incredible... my mind is as clear and focussed as I can ever remember it being and I can only credit this to regular exercise and a healthy diet. As a poker player, having a healthy lifestyle will do wonders for your game... decisions will become a lot more clear and it will help bring your game to the next level. It's just so much easier to play when you're not constantly in a state of fatigue. I never even realized I was in a constant state of fatigue until I started exercising again. After exercising I'd have an abundance of energy and my focus and concentration would improve drastically. I think this and several other obvious reasons are much more of a reason to stay in shape then any direct monetary gain.

I use this blog to let off a bit of steam occasionally, so don't take all I write too seriously:) - see what really ground my gears here and my thoughts about soft playing and collusion in Italy here. I also got a bit wound up by some clock issues in the PLO event at the WSOP in Las Vegas. Read about that here .

Hopefully 2009 can prove as interesting and as successful as 2008 and best of luck to all my readers and special wishes to the other Betfair pros John and Annette.