Sorry to hear you are done playing! Great run though, was enjoyable to follow along.

2k is not really a bankroll and when you win your suppose to put some of those winnings in your bankroll. No one goes through their live poker career without a 2k+ downswing at some point.

I agree that 2k swings are to be expected, but when Davo opened 54s in the UTG, he burned his money.

The Kings was a funny one. As he was taking in the pot he said “I was just tired of you raising all the time!”

Probably for the best. 1/2 spread limit sounds like a truly awful game and if you can’t maintain a BR winning at ~20 BB/hr then it’s a futile endeavor.

Do you not have any other casinos around that offer No Limit? If I were you I’d get a white collar job, rebuild the BR with income and try to find 1/2 or 1/3 NL home games to get the BR up to $10-15k and then eventually shot take 2/5 NL if there’s a casino within a 2-3 hour drive where you can play a long Saturday session.

Being a “pro” 1/2 player is the absolute nut low. Literal trash collectors are crushing a 1/2 pro’s expected earnings which illustrates where a 1/2 pro fits on the totem pole. The best players I know all have cushy full time jobs which allows you to aggressively grow your roll, shot take, and play a much looser style (I don’t mean LAG I mean loose/confident where you’re not sweating a river bluff that’s also supposed to be your rent payment next week).

The $2-$100 spread-limit is a Minnesota state law—to play true no-limit in a casino I’d have to go to Iowa or Wisconsin, and it looks like a 4-hour drive. (There used to be a no-limit poker room in a nothing town right across the MN-IA border—just a 90-minute drive for me—but it shut down.)

I think I’ll just go back to my full-time career in the mortgage industry—rates are dropping, people are buying, companies are hiring, I have another interview next week—and then play $2-$100 games as a hobby on Friday nights.

This experience has taught me that playing poker for income would not make me happy.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with trying something, putting your heart into it, and deciding it's not for you in the end. It's not "quitting". You're trying things. Life only lasts so long. The balance between becoming dedicated to one thing primarily and looking deeply enough for that something is quite fine.

Good luck in whatever you do next.

St. Croix Turtle Lake is only 50 miles from Aces.

Oh wow--good call, it didn't pop up on my google search! Yeah, it's just an 80-minute drive for me. I'll have to check it out one of these weekends--after I get a real job, of course!

Looked at my 2023 NL cash stats down 1100 dollars after 2 sessions totaling almost 9 hours… the journey to losing player ��

Just hit 1000 hours at 5/5

I'm starting to think it's possible I'm not a losing player at this game

feels good man

(IknowIknowlolsamplesize)

Through off felt study/review, if a light bulb(s) has been turned on, and subsequently implemented successfully, I think you can make a solid case for that specific sample of hours.

Closing leaks like call too often, raise/call 3B oop with weaker part of range, better understanding hand configuration are just some improvements that can be made.

Personally, I worked on closing a few during Covid closure and implemented in a good size (> 2k hrs) live sample. I consider this as my hourly, obviously much higher than previous.

Let's say you're a solid winning player at 1/2 over 10,000 hands and want to make a one-time investment into a bankroll to move up in stakes, as high as 10/25 (allegedly the softest game in the cardroom). What is the maximum percent of your life roll you would invest? Let's say you had a $1 million IRA + $300,000 house at retirement. When you retire, how much would you put into a bankroll?

I was half-joking when I told my wife that, when I retire, I'm going to take a chunk from my IRA and invest it into a bankroll. She wasn't pleased. Any help here is also some marital advice.

If I was going to be seriously playing in a good (so probably high variance) 10/25 game regularly I would want at least $250,000.

I would still want to be able to meet all my other expenses from 3% of my investments.

So it really depends on how much your expenses are.

It sadly looks like I'll never play 10/25. Drawing down 3 percent per year seems pretty conservative, the advice a certified financial consultant gives. I was thinking more like 5 percent. I can tolerate variance in retirement funds as in poker. I plan to keep the retirement funds invested in more stocks than bonds, adjusting living expenses as the value of the retirement funds fluctuate.

You can certainly be more aggressive if you have a high risk tolerance or will have income from other sources.

I for one plan to live much longer than 30 years in retirement and have no plans to eat Alpo so I'd like to save as much as possible.

I would suggest to take out only 25k, play 2-5 and grind your way up the stakes. If you take 250k and go directly to 10/25 you’re most likely the mark at the table and will get crushed.

I'd take out 35k and play 2/5.

It depends your buy in amount. Is the game regularly straddled to 50? I would say 40 buy ins minimum for shot taking. But you don't just start playing 10/25. You play the next stakes below that mostly and take some shots at 10/25, get to know all the 10/25 players, who are the pros, who are the solid regs, who are the recreational players. Get to know their stories. The recreational players are usually independently wealthy or have high incomes. A typical 10/25 game is going to be a mix of pros, recs, and decent recs. The lineups in these games are typically curated so that there aren't too many pros. They will let new blood in, but if they find out you are a crusher they likely won't have you play unless the game is in danger of breaking.

You want to play when there is a good ratio of rec to pro. Sometimes these games can get short handed and it is like 3 recs and a pro and that is the best time to hop in. And for the most part you will play 2/5, 5/10 while you get more comfortable playing 10/25.

If you are seriously thinking about doing this, start making friends in the higher stakes community as an investment for the future. Don't step on toes because you never know who is going to be the one to veto you from being in a game, even if they are seemingly a no one today. And start building your bankroll at 2/5 and 5/10.

I would say that’s an understatement.

If playing poker for medium-high stakes is important to you, then you should "invest" in a bankroll. More importantly, you should "invest" in poker coaching.

The main problem is that you are not good enough yet to play medium to high stakes. But you are insinuating that you want to play medium to high stakes eventually. So you would need to pay for top notch quality coaching.

You missed his point, which was that he thinks 10/25 is softer than 1/3.

Given that as the context, he just needs a roll.

To be honest, it is actually common that a special highest stake game in the room that runs now and then and is one stake higher than the regular highest stake game in the room will be juicier than the regular highest game in the room that goes all the time.

So if 5/10 runs every day. But 10/25 fires off 1-2 days out of the week..10/25 will tend to be a special lineup built around certain big spots with deep pockets. Some of the 5/10 pros and regs will also be refusing to play that 10/25 game out of bankroll considerations too. So it that special 10/25 game could definitely be juicier and softer than 5/10 in that room.

Ray Zee's old rule was that in general the second largest game in the room was the best one to play.

Do you think it's at all realistic for some players to climb up from micros to nosebleeds with no coaching outside of videos, training sites, software, etc? Just left to the internet and their own devices.