It's time to begin

The title of this post is from the start of the chorus of a song I love named "It's Time", by Imagine Dragons. It's a song I often listen to while playing poker. What do I mean by "It's time to begin"? Simply that it's again time for me to reboot my poker thinking and reexamine my goals. I need to adjust my poker philosophy, and come up with a new set of goals. This will periodically be the case throughout my poker career.

I realize that my poker goals have drifted, and are no longer very clear. I took a walk on the wild side with sit and go tournaments, and that experience spoiled me a bit; I got used to increasing my stack in huge chunks, which is not the norm for cash games. Since quitting the sit and gos, I've played 10 cash tournament sessions, and have lost six of them. That's standing the golden ratio on its head. That trend has to stop. My immediate goal is to get back to the golden ratio, counting just the sessions I've played since the sit and gos. An adjunct goal is to recalibrate my thinking to appreciate sessions where I've won what my current thinking is telling me is a measly amount of chips. If I'd had that recalibration in place on Tuesday night, I would have quit playing when I went up $7,899, which would have represented nearly a 20% return on my initial investment of $40,000. Instead, I continued playing, and ended up hitting the felt.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 79 hands and saw flop:
 - 10 out of 15 times while in big blind (66%)
 - 9 out of 16 times while in small blind (56%)
 - 18 out of 48 times in other positions (37%)
 - a total of 37 out of 79 (46%)
 Pots won at showdown - 5 of 10 (50%)
 Pots won without showdown - 6

delta: $-40,000
balance: $6,212,387