Hi, my name is Andrew and Ive been living in Japan for the last few years.
Ive decided to take a shot at poker and will be moving to Henderson next month.

Ive grinded solely pokerstars online for the past year and became struggling 25NLz reg to 100NLz winner (2.5BBs/200000 hands). I have about 600-800 hours of live poker experience in Vegas/LA/Asia.

My current liferoll is around 60K and am going to start out as a 2/5 grinder, hopefully ending up grinding 5/10 very soon, and am aspiring to go higher than that.

I have rented a house in Henderson from a well known friend of mine for 500 USD/month plus utilities.

I have never lived in the Vegas area and also this is my first time taking a shot at poker as my sole income, so I have a few questions for people grinding (whether pro or not) in LV:

1. Approximately what is your monthly nut? Tips on health/car insurance?

2. What do you normally do about buying cars/renting houses? Is having a well credited co-signer enough to get good finance on these issues?

3. For online background players: any advice for adjusting to the live arena? I haven't played live cash for a while in Vegas and am expecting the games to be very different from online 6-max zoom. GTO lines a thing or do we rely more on pure logic to exploit weaker players? Any type of advice is appreciated.

Thank you and will be posting updates here as I get started on this journey...

Why choose Las Vegas? It seems like Texas or Florida have purely better games right now. (Granted, I could understand not wanting to live in those places.)

Apologies if you don't want to answer that question, but I'm curious if you have thought about it and what your reasoning is.

If you want to play like 1/2 1/3, or super high, then Vegas seems good. For 5 or 10 dollar blind games I'd rather be elsewhere

GTO can be helpful against strong players, and a solver is always a good sanity check. But very few players are strong at 2/5 and not many at 5/10. I would use logic to select explotive plays inside the support (rate > 0% per solver) any time there appears to be an opportunity, but less readily exploit with plays outside the support.

Also be aware that live tells warp things a long ways from GTO. If you re-ran your solver, but with tells of varying accuracy built in, you'd see the plays change drastically.

Thank you for the question!
1. Having the 500USD/month house is huge.
2. Ive spent maybe about 6months in total and I just have this love for the city.
3. Some Japanese fellow pros live in Vegas, and I want to at least some social life..lol

That being said, I wasnt familiar with the Florida/Texas areas and will definitely start making a lot of trips to explore out there.

I am going to be on my own for around a year or so until my wife/dogs arrive so having a lot of freedom in that sense.

Thanks a lot for pointing that out, I really appreciate it.

Thanks for the advice!
Yes it seems like I should be exploring more parts of the country.
Going to start out in Vegas, and maybe spend more time elsewhere after finding out more!

Thank you!
From my experience a lot of the pots run multi-way live so expecting a lot of spots to rely on logic, but will be putting in constant work. My GTO game is far from optimal and I still need a lot of more study time.

Reading live tells is very much my weaker point and would appreciate any advice/any recommended books.

Initially I will also be very nervous playing 5x higher than my usual online game (although not exactly that size) lol. Been taking very few shots at 500 zoom but my hands are always sweaty.

Good luck man! Keep us posted on results, almost did this about 7 years ago didn't have the balls to haha

1. I don't have health insurance as I am single. I guess I'm 1 hospital bill away from a major financial crisis. Car insurance in Vegas is higher than the national average. Geico seems to always have been the cheapest option for me no matter how much I shop around. I'm currently paying roughly $1k/year for car insurance on a 2020 Hyundai Sonata typical coverage.

2. Just buy a cheap used beater car for cash. You're here to grind not show off your ride. As long as the AC works you'll be good. Recommend hondas or toyotas obviously. Seems like you're set on the house rent aspect from your friend though. 500/month is quite a good deal. The housing market and rental market in Vegas is quite hot recently. A typical decent 3 bedroom 2.5 bath house will probably be renting out for $2k/month. Use that as a loose reference point. Poker players can't get loans so you'll typically need a co-signer to buy.

3. Live poker is extremely different from online poker. PIO/monker theory lines are just not ideal in a live setting. The most common thing you'll notice is that online, raises are 2x-2.5x preflop and live its 3-5x. You'll see a TON of people who just open limp live as well. If you can beat 100z on pokerstars, you are more than qualified for 5/10 live. From my personal experience though, 5/10 in vegas is a bit reggy (especially at bellagio) so you should be pretty happy to play 2/5 NL to start off. Get to know the players, the regs, the whales. If a super whale is at 5/10 then take that opportunity to take a shot.

Live reads are pretty reliable and not as complex as you think. Just pay attention to primarily a person's personality which generally dictates their tendencies. They range from the typical gentleman who is proud of being honest and nice and will never bluff, to the wannabe try hard who is super paranoid and always thinks a reggy looking guy is bluffing them and over thinks spots and levels themselves into spewy calls/ bluffs.

It's a jungle out there man, even at higher stakes. In the vlog thread, one of the guys went broke in a 5/10/20/40 hand against two villains - one with a 40%+ VP$IP and the other one donk bet. Hero had TPTK and it was a 3-suited flop. Of course the guy with 40% VP$IP has a crapton of sooted (and in fact had the flush). And the donk-bettor probably wasn't balancing in many (if any) donk-bluffs (and had the flush too). So what the solver would tell you was one thing, but I guarantee if you could lock in your opponent's bizarre play, the solver would tell you to fold TPTK to the flop donk bet a good bit of the time if not 100% as a exploit.
I wish I could help you. There are books, but they never seemed helpful to me. The thing I've found most valuable when someone does something you notice is to ask if it's acting or not. We've all seen crap acting on TV/movies. If it's acting, it's usually deception. If it's unconscious/natural, it usually means what it looks like.
It's weird, because 500 zoom is a pretty darn hard game is my understanding. 2/5 live is mostly amateurs and bad regs. So the money is bigger, the pace is slower by a lot (don't crank up VP$IP because you're bored), and the winrate can be huge - 10bb/h (roughly 30 BB/100) is not impossible.

Thank you!
I left a very good financially secure job for this.
The EV is probably negative, but as I approach becoming 30 years old I told myself now or never.

We'll see how it goes...

I kind of wish I'd done it, and I have a director-level job at a fortune 500 tech company.

I don't know if I'd be better or worse off, but there's less bullshit in poker than there is at any normal job.

Not having health insurance seems super scary to me so Ill probably have to find something...not that I have health issues but my bankroll just wont withstand a 20K invoice. Seems like your car insurance is very low; I havent drove in the states for a while so mine will probably be much higher. Jealous!

Thanks! Yeah I was initially thinking of something in the 5-8k range. There are some 2005 Toyota Matrixs and stuff like that out there so Im probably going that route. I hate it but tryna keep my bankroll as healthy as possible... Although having 50K+ is fine for 2/5, after experiencing variance hell online I am aware that this game can eat you up.

Thanks man really appreciate it. From what I hear I expect the 5/10 games to be close to something like 50NLz with 1-2 100NLz regs in there. But the 5/10 regs are probably much better playing deep and exploiting weaker players so theyll have an edge against me.

I was kinda surprised that there were people defending (sympathizing) that 57s fold. I didnt even think it would spark a debate. There are probably zero players folding that even at 5NL.The general way i play in multi way pots is to just play super nitty. Lots more folding and using smaller bet sizes. Its fine if Im folding the best hand once in a while.

Noted. Thank you!

Yeah I dont think Ill find a tougher game than 500z in Vegas. Even 200z where Im shottaking right now is extremely tough. dont know much about nosebleeds but those games probably are completely different, different skillset, mindset, etc.

Boredom Tilt (raising 58s UTG cause **** it) is very well something a lot of zoom players struggle with and I need to be careful. If theres one thing I learned throughout my online grind, its that preflop is the most important street in the game.

Yeah, no ****. LVL is fun, but it's not known for card players

Your career sounds amazing man. I was working pre-director level at a Japanese conglomerate type company. I just couldn't withstand the politics there despite all of the benefits including infinite business class trips, 5 star hotels, etc....found out that my happiness didnt come from those things.

But I do think 98% of people will be better off at your job than playing poker. lol

It's not that exciting honestly. I spend a lot of time on calls. Occasionally I engage my brain. But only occasionally. Mostly it's BS. I'm not a big lover of travel, so that part's -EV for me. When the pandemic is over I'll be traveling to Japan some though which I am looking forward to. Net the job is not happiness causing but it buys the house and cars and stuff.

Playing the big NL games and big mix games I'd probably make more money playing poker. I'm a consistent winner at up to about 5000 buyin games just playing casually, so I'm sure I'd do fine at the nosebleeds if it was my job.

I was in a similar type situation. Just ongoing calls and not really having much time to acutally think about strategy, creative business ideas etc.

Japan is great for traveling. One of the best places in the world. People are nice, food is awesome, clean everywhere, lots of tourist spots, and SAFE. I could be sleeping on the street with my phone and wallet out and 95% of the time they will still be there. Maybe even higher.

To work though,,,,,,hmmmmmm number 1 or 2 in suicide rates....

what was wrong with the poker scene in Japan?

There arent any places to play in Japan (disregarding private games).
We can play online here but it seems like a horrible idea to grind out even NL500 for a living...

However I am planning to go back and forth just to play online.

Playing Stars Zoom really keeps my game sharp.

Hai

You asked about books on tells and I am surprised no one responded. Check out the tells series by Zach Elwood.

In fact, Zach has a section here on the 2plus2 forum. On the main forum page, just scroll down the page and you can't miss it.

Hey, Thanks! Im definitely going to check that out right now.

More seat time... that's the ONLY way.

Does anybody know if there are any short deck games in LV right now?
For the past month or so Ive been playing a lot more short deck (6+ on stars) online.
Extremely high variance but a lot of people still havent figured out much compared to NLH.
Would like to play in some live games.