Thanks for your reply!

2. I could reload, but wouldn’t want to. I plan to set aside X for poker and that’s it.

5. I agree with that, actually. Exploitative poker should be much better at live low stakes.

7. Thank you!

Hooray just completed hour 305 post covid 2/5 and still down 5 buyins. Biggest losing session was 1k (once) have doubled up only twice. Avg session has been <5 hrs due to lousy game conditions in a local that used to be a gold mine. Plenty of games, just tighter fish.

1. Difficult 2/5 games don't really exist as a standard, especially in areas that regularly spread games higher than 2/5.

2. For your goals, it's probably fine. 20 bi's isn't safe if you're not willing to finance your bankroll but it's probably enough to determine if you're a winner or not, even if you run bad. Just have to have self-awareness.

3. I like pokercoaching.net but from what I've seen and heard they're all pretty solid.

4. Games are different and generally more profitable during those times. Variance also tends to be higher as well.

5. If you want to be good at this game, you need to commit yourself to understanding the theory of the game, and right now poker theory is dominated by gto framework. It's important at all levels, even the fishiest of 1/2 games, and avoiding it will put a very low ceiling on what you're able to achieve in your poker career. Committing to ignoring gto concepts is a commitment to mediocrity.

7. Study more than you play right now, especially preflop charts. Good poker often looks like a flow chart with preflop being the first branch in your decision tree. Therefore the decisions you make preflop will dictate what you're able to do postflop. Be mindful when you play, you should detect your own leaks far quicker than any of your opponents. Study with a purpose, when you detect these leaks focus your study time on how to specifically fix those leaks.

That is the opposite of my experience. When my local cardroom reopened in April, games were off the hook. This has eased off somewhat, to the point where the games are merely very good.

Thank you!

I like the way you worded it - 20BI should be enough to discern whether I’m profitable or not. I’ve decided to use that as a stop loss/bankroll - whatever you want to call it.

I’m familiar with GTO in that I’ve read and understood it as presented in the books I’ve mentioned. However, I haven’t done any solver work yet. Definitely agree - GTO is the base in which one can build an exploitative strategy if desired.

I also think I will start at the 2/3 game to get my feet wet, despite the higher rake as a percentage of max BI. If the game feels natural/easy, perhaps I’ll do a one time increase to my stop loss/bank roll and switch to 2/5.

Ya poker is super easy. Study hard, play 5 hours a week, and you will be on your way to making this an awesome side income.

Something to keep in mind, especially when looking at paying for tools/training/coaching/etc...

~5 hours a week is equivalent to about ~260 hours per year. If you were to beat your local limited BI / high raked / low steaks game for about $15 - $20 per hour (which may be somewhat on the upper end of both "reasonable" and "attainable" depending on your experience and steaks), that would mean you would ship about ~$4500 in a year (assuming you run at expectation during that ~shortish 260 hour sample size, which you may easily not in either direction).

So with that in mind, just make sure you don't go overboard in spending on tools/training/etc. Frankly, for those smallish amount of hours (noting that I'm also just a rec player myself although I get in about twice those hours per year), I would be very wary of spending almost any money whatsoever. A $20 book here and there should more than suffice, plus some free posting/grunching of hands in a poker forum (such as this one), free YouTube/etc. stuff, etc. Expenditures much more than that might not make a whole heckuva lotta sense when you compare that against even pie-in-the-sky expectation, imo.

Ghavefun,imoG

Just doing a one or two month sub to upswing poker should easily pay for itself over the year if not in the first few sessions. Grind the live poker and beyond the basics section hard (watch more than once, take notes etc.) and memorize their live pre-flop charts.

Reading the live low stakes nl section here and reading all of Limon’s 2000 thread are easily the best free options. Throw in Tommy Angelo’s elements of poker and whatever recent live strategy book is popular now and that would be the best cheap option.

The cost of the training sites is a consideration. I can always just use it for a few months to make sure it’s truly adding value on top of the books. I can also binge the content to maximize the value. What book(s) and YouTube channels do you recommend?

Yea, I agree. Do you think upswing is better than crush live poker or red chip poker? I’m having trouble picking a training site

Honestly, most of the books that I have in my collection and that have helped me are likely considered outdated (PNLHE, HOC, NLHE T&P, etc.). The best method is to get a book or two, try to figure out the concepts in those books (whatever they are) that you find most useful / applicable, watch some YouTube videos (whatever they are), play some hands, post/grunch in threads, critically think / re-think (being very wary of taking anything for gospel because in the end you'll have to play your own game), and then repeat.

But for the amount of hours you are getting in, I would simply be extremely wary of spending too much. I've spent < $100 on stuff and done perfectly fine; spending anything much more than that at this stage (i.e. the rec stage that both of us are in and likely will be for life) is meh.

Gbut,alsodowhatyouwant,it'syourlifeG

Can’t imagine anyone who would study for hours & finally get 5 hours to play poker and not spew.

It’s hard enough to play tight and fold for people who can play daily.

But serious poker means not folding, right? Good luck.

Same concepts apply whether you play x hours a year versus 100x hours a year (and this can be all relative depending on your time schedule versus someone elses). Now whether OP has the discipline / will power / rust proofing / etc. to execute, that'll be up to him.

Ggoodluck!G

Even 'outdated' books have a lot of value. They give you concepts to think about, but more importantly, they teach you how people think about poker. Live poker is all about being maximally exploitative, and the best way to do that is to understand what set of poker knowledge someone has, and exploit that knowledge's weakness. Did they mostly learn from mid/late 2000s poker / live poker advice? They're going to bet more then they should on the flop with their medium strength hands, and they're going to bet/fold more then they should on the turn.

Focusing too much on learning 'optimal' poker is how you end up with people going to the casino and opening to $5 at $1/$2, and having the whole table call, and having no idea what to do, because 95% of 'optimal' strategy is focused on heads up pots with strong ranges.

FWIW, I'm a 'rec' player (I played for a living for a year, and I've won six figures playing poker, but it's not my job and never will be), and I've spent at least a thousand dollars on learning poker, probably more like $1500.
And I didn't need to do that, to get to where I am. But I wanted to do it, cause learning poker is fun. And I'm rather confident that I've made back what I spent on learning materials through improvements to my game

I definitely feel like I have gotten more patient with the knowledge that I have the ability to play more sessions on a regular basis. Back when I could only play like once every other week or so I sometimes felt like I would play hands suboptimally, both too fast or too slow at times. Also knowing that a loss would potentially be the last poker session on my mind for weeks was brutal from a mindset standpoint.


Poker is unique from a hobby perspective in that you can pay for training and turn around an make money from it in pretty short order. That’s very difficult to do from many other hobbies. (I know you’re (Ranma) aware, it’s more a comment for the people asking questions)

I would argue that you could simply study a lot of free / extremely cheap material and still do just fine. And if you're getting in very small hours overall, I'm not convinced that paying for material is really going to be worth it; you'd have to prove that the benefit of the paid material took you from "just fine" to "crusher" (and that without it there was no way you could have done it).

Course, everyone learns differently so whatever floats your boat. I'm obviously a cheap life nit.

GcluelesscheaplifenitnoobG

have invested healthy four figures into poker in last 12 months and plan to invest exponentially more w every passing year

sure it’s not quantifiable but pretty sure I got my $ worth (and more obv)

But you're doing that as a full time professional cranking out the hours as your ~only source of income.

OP is going to put in 250 hours per year as a rec.

Gdoesn'tmakemuchsensetospend$2Kongolflessonsifyoug etout6timesayear,imoG

Poker is a pretty unique hobby from the standpoint that you can make money off of it without any additional "work" relative to the hobby itself. You don't have to go out of your way trying to sell things that you make, or find clients, or anything other than just going to the table. I have no idea how I'd monetize hockey.

IMO most rec players would get the most bang for the buck just buying a bunch of poker books from 2008-2010. Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'em, Professional No-Limit Hold 'em: Volume I, etc. Pretty much anything from Ed Miller, some Sklansky. Would NOT go all the way back to Harrington.

For most of the players that I encounter at $1/2 $1/3 tables, that era of material is still super relevant. At $5/each for used books you can get a LOT of value for the equivalent of one bad river call.

I should hope that the recs in your game are making bad river calls that could pay for those books new.

I played my first live session since covid began, today. It has been about 18 months since I played live.

I played 1$/3$ NL.

The casino had increased the table maximum to $400 (133bb) over the course of the covid shutdown and reopening (it used to be $300). In fact I had withdrawn $400 from the ATM thinking the table max was $300 and that would give me a little bit to top off with.

Second issue, the pot was frequently straddled. I would estimate that at least 1/3 of the time the pot was straddled. One guy to my left always straddled my bb for $6 (2bb). Another guy always straddled his button for $11 (pot size). I think that the result was that the game played bigger than a normal 1/3 game.

The average raise was larger than normal also, most raises were either $10 dollars or $15 dollars.

So, question, ... does the frequent straddle and/or larger than normal raises impact the number of buy ins we bring with us? It seemed like I was burning through money fast. How many buy ins do you normally bring to a game.

If we are going to need 2-4 buy ins per game, does this impact our bankroll strategy?

Thanks.

Your approach is going to be a personal decision. I went through the same thing when I switched rooms to seek out bigger games. Now my main game is an uncapped 1/3 game that is almost always straddled. Stacks can range from $200 to $5k on any given day. I decided I wanted to be rolled x buy-ins for this game so I divide my roll by x and buy in for roughly that amount. Sometimes I'm the 300bb short stack at a deep game or sometimes I initially cover the table until it gets later and stacks get deeper.

I think game conditions affecting your bankroll strategy is a backwards way to look at it. The best approach is to first define your bankroll strategy and then see if this game is one that is a good fit for it. Or maybe think of it as how the game conditions affect your bankroll REQUIREMENTS.

Amount of buy-ins to bring per game I think is more of a mental thing, if the game is great then ideally you want a decent amount of buy-ins in case you run bad in the beginning. But if your in a game for 4 buy-ins and tilted because of it and that causes you to change the way your playing then its pointless.

My 1/3 NL game plays exactly the same way. A $400 max BI (as of 2018 iirc, up from the previous $300). Also a lot of pots are straddled, especially since both UTG and Button are allowed the $6 straddle.

Way way way back on June 27, 2011 I booked my all-time biggest loss in the game for $1200, which also happened to be all of the money I had in my pocket at the time. I played the last 2 BIs horrible and punted them.

I took two things away from that experience.

One, it opened my eyes to the fact that I absolutely can not afford to go on tilt when things aren't going my way. This really helped me identify a spot where I most likely now handle way better than my opponents.

Two, I might not play my best when I know I have no more money in my pocket to play with and have the last of my money on the table. My solution? Since then, I now bring $2000 to the game. I've never come remotely close to this in-pocket limit, in fact only losing $1000+ just one other time since then, with even less of a chance of that happening since I went to BIing for just $200 in early 2017.

So, *if* you believe you play ok when stuck a bunch and things aren't going well (and definitely do not not punt stacks in this state), I believe it is best to have a ridiculous amount of BIs in your pocket (so long as you aren't worried about being jumped in the parking lot). Thus why I have a ridiculous 10 BIs in my pocket when I go to the casino. I think Tommy Angelo might even discuss this in-pocket money idea in Elements of Poker.

ETA: Also, withdrawing poker money from an ATM that has a withdrawal fee is a fish move, imo. So long as you feel comfortable with it, I would recommend keeping a decent poker stash in your house. I typically keep about ~$3K in the house; I top this up when it drops to ~$2K, and deposit excess when I get to ~$4K.

Ghello,mynameisGGandithasbeen565dayssinceI'velastp layedahandofpokerG

My bread-and-butter game is a 2 (on the button)-3-5 game where a $10 straddle can be posted in any position. Four times out of five, the table agrees to play "winner straddle," where the winner of the previous pot posts the straddle for the next hand. Basically, the game becomes 2-3-5-10 played with a rock.

The buy-in cap is $1000 (200 bb before straddle, 100bb counting the straddle). The game gets a lot looser (which it should, but only a little, because effectively the [double] big blind has absolute position preflop), and the fishy players limp way too much, call too much when their limps get raised, and pay too much on the later streets with their lame-ass hands.

I buy-in for the max, top up when I drop below $1K, and get $2K out of the cage when first show up in the room. That's my stop-loss, and circumstances have to be special for me to get more chips out of the cage.

Sounds like a game I know in the Bay.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

Thanks. that is what I was thinking of doing, is just bringing 2 buy ins. I play online poker every day and you know, I don't have to put any thought into buy ins or top off money because the money is already on the account and it auto tops off.

2 questions.

1. Do you think that since my game is 133bb max buy in that I should bring more than more than 2 buy ins? You are basically bringing 400 big blinds and if I bring 2 buy ins it is considerably less, 266bb.

2. Do you think this should impact the way I view my bankroll strategy?

(Just so you know, if this isn't apparent, I am basically a rec player, live. I used to play live quite a bit when I was single (4-5x/month). Now, I'm married with kids and I haven't played in 18 months because of covid. I would like to start playing again 2-3 times per month. I have a good job and make decent money but what I DO NOT have is a $20,000 roll that can be devoted exclusively to poker, nor do I have the kind of discretionary income where I can lose $800 dollars twice a month and not feel it, nor do I have the kind of wife who is going to think that is ok if it goes on for too long. Haha.

I was going to set aside $3k for a 1/3 bankroll to start with, with the ability to add to it. 10 buy ins has always been sufficient for me when playing online stakes. But, they have raised the max buy in to $400 so now I am putting together $4k.

I completely understand that most people recommend 20 buy ins and that pros recommend significantly more than that. I am not trying to go pro obviously. I also understand that lowering bankroll standards causes me to play a little more conservatively until I build up the roll a little bit. Understood. Over time, I would hope to build my bankroll up to 20 buy ins for $1/$3. That would be my goal.

****My concern is that if I am really going to liberally top-off and be willing to lose $800 every time I show up at the casino, maybe I should be considering 20 buy ins of $800 dollars as my goal, not 20 buy ins of $400, liewise, starting out-comfort money should be 10x$800, not 10x$400. What do you think? Thanks.