Hello everyone, I need some guidance when it comes to learning. Been playing poker for past 3-4 years for fun, managed to sometimes go on hot runs, destroyed NL50, NL100, NL200,.. hell, I even played NL600 vs regs and done great short term with the right mind frame.

The thing is I always cashed out and looked at poker like short term thing, I'm going to college this year and decided to give poker a try as a side income. The problem is I have a hate/love relationship with poker and really can't find balance long term, since my brains simply root.

I'm currently going to work for few months, save up, get proper BRM and invest some money into a coach to guide me, but until then, I want to learn on my own. I think with my playing history, I have certain things and spots vs certain opponents and their style down already.

However, this is 2018, I haven't played for a whole year and I want to deconstruct my game and learn theory from scratch. Where do I begin with? Let's assume I beat NL25/50 with 4bb/100 and want to move up. I also always struggled with my redline, since I was somewhat of a bumhunter, but I also knew how to put on pressure at right moments and play slow and calmly, taking notes and exploiting regs left and right, breaking them down and their tendencies, while exploiting them heavily.

You are in for a run of good and bad. It’s what gets me pumped up about poker. Haha.

The fun of poker is short term but having a poker game become income is a whole different ball of wax. The advise I can share is this, short term will kill you in the end. All it takes is when simple variance takes you over.

One thing you have is that you aren’t using poker as you main source so that is key. Try looking at your volume and look at it with a bigger set of lense and you will see that your crushing in the 600NL against regs takes on a different level. Looking at it in the perspective as the reg looking in is they have variance controlled where as many of the fun players do not. This gives them a head up on the pool of fun players.

Example AKo < JJ and finding these spots. A fun player will not fall into these spots as often as a pro that has more sheer volume. So a fun player may run into this a few times and win and that’s awesome but a reg will find these spots more so and print money. The weird thing about variance is this. The reg will lose a bit and still come out ahead of the fun player just because of sheer volume.