It’s been a while! I’ve been so busy with other things lately and, as a result my blog here has been sooo neglected. But SO much is happening right now. It’s so exciting!!!
The biggest thing I did recently was leave the $200 hyper heads-up division this past month. This was an extremely difficult decision for me and one that took me months to make.
I decided to leave mostly because of my Twitch stream. It’s not easy to stream heads-up because of the waiting times in between games (have to sit in lobbies and wait for people to sit). It’s also made more difficult by the fact that triers can sit me at any time while I’m in the lobbies. I like playing regs, but I don’t wish to play them live on stream. Not only is it ten times more difficult to play poker while streaming, I also don’t want the general public to know all my reg ranges.
For these reasons, I decided to leave. It was a very sad day for me, to be completely honest. I worked on my hyper HU game A LOT over the past year, and I had gotten infinitely better as a result. It was just time, though. I have new goals, and heads-up just wasn’t fitting in.
Most of the time I spend playing poker these days is on stream. I’m really loving Twitch! It’s fun to interact with people and it really motivates me to play longer hours. It is distracting and therefore it forces me to play around 50% of the tables I would normally play, but I really think it is worth it because I enjoy poker so much more this way. If you want to watch me play, you can find me at twitch.tv/courtiebee. I stream every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, as well as some Sundays.
I will say that streaming live is a lot harder than I thought it would be. The number of mistakes I’ve made while live on Twitch is actually quite staggering, haha. And people are often VERY quick to jump on mistakes. For example, the other day I accidentally folded a straight flush draw to a flop jam. I got absolutely BERATED by one guy in chat for doing this. He told me couldn’t understand how I was ever in the $200 division and he couldn’t understand how I could possibly be a pro.
There’s a lot of reasons for making mistakes on stream. The main reason is that I am simply more distracted and much more likely to make careless mistakes. I’ve checked back straights on the river due to being distracted and not realizing I had the nuts. I’ve incorrectly said my opponent donk bet when he was, in fact, in position. In the case of the straight flush draw, I didn’t realize he had a straight draw and completely neglected to see half my outs.
Sometimes the mistakes are inexplicable. I’ll be chatting away, see my hand, know EXACTLY what I have, but still do something stupid. And then I’ll think about it later and say, wtf, why did I do that? I’ll also just simply run out of time to make decisions because I’m spending too much time talking. I’ve timed out of huge pocket pairs and top pair situations too many times to count.
The good thing is that my mistakes are getting fewer and that streaming is getting easier. Like all things that require practice, I know it’s just going to take time. The experienced Twitch streamers can all play tons of tables and chat with their viewers like it’s walk in the park. I hope that soon I will be there too!
I’ve been playing mostly spin & go’s on stream, although lately I’ve also been playing MTTs. I have work to do in both formats, since both games are slightly different from HU SnGs. Like streaming, slowly but surely I’ll get better!
Life is so busy because my husband and I also launched a DFS website! It’s called Stack & Fade and it’s all about news and community. We have a daily fantasy sports forum for discussions and we’re really hoping to build the best DFS community around! If you have any interest in daily fantasy sports or you want to learn about it, please visit the site and have a look.
I’m definitely going to start updating this blog on a more regular basis. I have a lot of stuff to do, including setting up more social media and my YouTube. But it’s all coming. I’m so excited!
P.S. I feel so much better this year. Infinitely better. I think I’m overdoing projects slightly because I feel like I have to make up for lost time. But that’s the thing: I don’t want to waste this time that I have feeling good. I’ve learned that life is precious, gotta gogogo while you can.
2 Comments
Enjoy your blog and stream. I wouldn’t worry too much about the chat section- if there are haters, then you are relevant. To reduce mistake, maybe try reducing the amount of tables during stream.
Thank you Mike, I really appreciate your watching and reading! You’re right about haters, it’s just taken some practice getting used to them 😉 Thanks again and see you around!