My WR over the 575 hours was around 8BB/hr with most of my volume in 2/3. Honestly I didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect wrt winrate but I was shooting for 15BB/hr. Sick part is the last few sessions resulted in over 25% dip in my WR. To think about the effect of just a handful of hands/pots on the entirety of my results kinda makes me sick looking back.

LA is not good for low-mid stakes starter because of not only the high COL but also the insane rake structure I guess? It would be more playable for 5/10+ games imo.

Shooting for 15bb/hr is pretty unrealistic for anyone other than the top .1% of players. That seems to me to be your down fall.

I mean, you have to add your wife's income to your expected income to determine if the goal of playing poker is realistic or not. If you needed 15BB/hr playing 2/3 ($45/hr) to make it work, then you set yourself up for failure from the get go. It can be done but only for the best of players.

8BB/hr in nothing to sneeze at and you definitely shouldnt consider yourself a failure for hitting 8BB/hr. You just set your expectations too high.

15BB was more of a lofty goal than one I used in calculating how much I'd need. I'd say that number is closer to 10BB/hr, but even that would be cutting it close in 2/3. My initial plan which led to my downfall was contingent on the idea that I'd be able to transition to 5/5 as my main game fairly quickly. In that game an 8BB/hr WR (which I think is achievable given the difference in level of play between the two isn't huge) is doable and would be a solid starting point to making some actual roll-building money while mitigating the effects of high CA rake. I could also have made more efforts to lower my monthly nut but I largely chose not to do so as I value certain experiences more than saving a few buyins (#EntitlementTilt). Making the best of my time out here is important to me.

I also went in knowing that I'd need to run quite well overall to start if I had any chance of building my roll instead of just staying afloat. Some would consider my risk tolerance too high for my endeavor in the first place, but I knew what the risks are and that pushing too quickly could very swiftly torch my roll. While I don't like that I couldn't sustain off my roll alone, I'm actually fine with going out in a blaze of glory rather than reverting to an ultra-nit style and hoping to win small amounts slowly. If I wanted to do that I could have stayed in Chicago and just grinded the day shift in Hammond.

I still think that number is achievable by one who has good a) focus at the table, b) off the table study, c) game selection, and d) rungood. I do think that a short roll puts a severe handicap on (a) and (c) to the point where it's prohibitively difficult to come out ahead significantly without hella (d).

Bump!

Merry Christmas, hope you are doing well!

Thanks, Merry Christmas to you as well! Not much to update at the moment, still on the job search grind doing phone screenings and interviews. ****ty time to start though with the holidays and all so it’s slow goings. Been having some success playing online tournaments binking a first place and a few final tables over the last week. Also took a weekend climbing trip out to Vegas where I made some solid profit playing a couple 1/3 sessions at the Wynn. I’ve been focusing on study, reading, physical training and nutrition. I’ll update once the job search is complete and I have some time to solidify my routine. I’m also smoking my last batch of green today and will be quitting for a while. All signs pointing upwards!

New Year Updates
-------------------
Hello all, happy 2019! I've been heavy on that job search grind, blasting through cycle after cycle of phone screenings, phone interviews, coding challenges, onsite interviews, etc... It's pretty annoying how long the process is but overall it's good as it lets me know the companies I've chosen to apply for have a thorough vetting process and are less likely to result in me hating my life as soon as I hop on board. What I've learned about the tech landscape out here is that a bunch of companies are severely shorthanded on the QA side of things and are desperately trying to build out their automation solutions. Good for me.

I stopped smoking bud the day after Christmas for a few reasons:

1. I'm over it - I've been an almost daily smoker for years and I think it's time to give full sobriety a try.
2. Habit trigger - I've realized over time that smoking has acted as a trigger for me to resort back to habits (namely playing videogames and jerking off) that are prohibiting me from improving at the rate I'd like to.
3. Cloudiness - it's easy to convince yourself that you're more "in the zone" or focused when you're high and although I think this may be true for individuals with significant chemical + emotional imbalances, I don't think this is the case for me and instead limits my cognitive abilities.

I've been significantly more focused on adding high-value daily habits and routines into my life. I'm already seeing results, specifically in the areas of learning and fitness. Reading and working out every day allows me to channel what was ultimately boredom into something productive. I started using Habitica to gamify the experience as I'm an avid gamer and have an affinity for games like Elder Scrolls. Turning dailies and to-dos into quests has helped me reorient my priorities away from endlessly grinding levels for my virtual avatars to doing the same for my real world one. Kinda silly but it works for me.

One habit I've introduced into my routine is studying programming concepts and working on my technical skills. I never prioritized my career-specific skills to the degree I am now, partly because I didn't have to and mostly because I was lazy. Being in the throes of a bunch of different interviews has opened my eyes to the stuff I need to brush up on, not only due to gaps in knowledge but simply because I'm rusty after doing nothing but poker for the past 6 months. I'm essentially re-discovering how fun programming is and it's a great change of pace compared to looking at range charts all the damn time.

On the poker side of things, I took advantage of the discount offered by Upswing to give it a shot. Overall I enjoy the structured layout of the material but plenty of it falls short, specifically anything with Ryan Fee doing the instruction. At the very least I can say I was able to extract from the site a study guide or template of sorts that identifies interesting spots to look at on my own. On top of that I've just been grinding online tournaments with reasonable success. I actually started off this year with 2 deep runs on BetOnline and Global, finishing 3rd in a 7K for my biggest online cash to date and a top 18 finish in a 10K. My tournament game has improved leaps and bounds beyond what it was even a couple months ago, mostly due to me focusing on building my poker thought process moreso than accumulating distinct nuggets for very specific spots.


Moving Forward
-------------------
My top priority at the moment is crushing these interviews and finding a company that's a good fit for me. Other than that and the associated study involved, I'll be focused on working out, cooking good food, reading all the books in my bookshelf, playing online tournaments, and studying poker. Motivated by Charlie Carrel's recent debate with Chris Kruk regarding GTO play, I've started tinkering with the free version of PIO that allows you to analyze turn and river spots. I'm finding it to be really helpful in identifying not just the equilibrium, but how various deviations from that point look. Although trying to memorize these equilibria is a fool's errand, I do see that it's building my intuition in various spots that have historically given me trouble. Naturally, turn and river decisions are going to have a high effect on your bottom line as the pot is biggest, so the free version is sufficient for plenty of study atm. Once I'm gainfully employed I think I'll drop the $250 or whatever for the full version so I can go into flop play.

Besides playing online, my next live session will be the 500K GTD LAPC kickoff event. I'll also make it a point to update the thread with new developments as they come up. Until next time!

OMG if you have automated testing infrastructure experience (as in setting up the infrastructure and maintaining it) you should be in high, high demand. We need that experience soooooo bad.

Based on the companies I've been talking with, your assessment is spot on. There's a massive demand for automation engineers as a bunch of companies are investing heavily into test infrastructure and looking to build scalable CI/CD solutions. Good for me as that comprises the vast majority of my experience in the field


Life Updates
-------------------
I've been focusing heavily on the job hunt and it's finally come to an end! I'm currently waiting for offers from two companies in Santa Monica that should come in either at the end of this week or sometime early next week. I'm about 90% sold on one particular company unless the offer from the other is outrageous in comparison so we'll see. I'm excited to get back on the career grind for a change of pace and to really build my technical skills in a way I never really focused on before. I saw my last position as a transitional one because I was so pumped about going down the poker pro route; because of this, I put virtually no effort outside of work to build my technical repertoire or push myself in the field. Now that I've traveled down the poker pro route for the past 7 months I can honestly say I'm over it and have rekindled my passion for development and getting my career back on track.

Quitting smoking has helped immensely in really focusing on how I'm spending my time and ensuring that I'm getting the most value out of every hour of the day. I'm already down to 165 after being closer to 180 for probably a year. I think this can be largely attributed to re-prioritizing my health regiment and not snacking while high as balls. I'm seeing significantly more muscle definition and overall leanness as a result of keeping the lifting and cardio routine consistent for the past few weeks.

I'm spending more time in the kitchen experimenting with cooking techniques and recipes, a use of time that has paid dividends in both a) building my culinary skills and b) eating significantly healthier. I'll be starting a self-directed course of sorts in cooking by utilizing the following texts: The Professional Chef (essentially a culinary school textbook) and The Flavor Bible (a guide on how flavors blend together). The former provides structure and rigidity along with recipes that I can try to work on my techniques, and the latter provides more of the theoretical and creative basis behind how and why recipes work. The combination of the two should comprise a good primer for taking my cooking to the next level. I'd like to get to the point where I have a strong repertoire of recipes as well as a deep enough understanding of ingredients and spices to create my own in an effective way.

I'm happy to say I've successfully reconstituted my reading habit, starting with the small library of books my wife and I have bought but never read over the years. Some of my most recent ones include The Spider Network, The Martian, and currently a collection of Lovecraft short stories. I'm reading at least an hour every day and am building up my vocabulary nicely (I've always had the habit of writing down words I don't know while reading and looking them up + utilizing them consciously later). I'm also spending more time listening to podcasts instead of music and have been deep diving into philosophy.


Poker Updates
-------------------
With my life roll being taken up by expenses and rent, I haven't had the opportunity to play any live poker until this last week where I fired a bullet at a 500K at the LAPC. I've been on quite the heater playing online tournaments and figured I'd parlay some of those winnings into playing live again as it's been a while and it's some damn good value for $120. I ended up mincashing for a whopping $40 profit

Online I've already had 8 deep runs in Global and BetOnline tournaments that have culminated in some solid profit this year. As mentioned in my previous post, I've put a bunch of work into my shortstack game and it's paying dividends, especially with how soft the fields are. That, and I'm running pretty damn good in key spots


Plans
-------------------
Right now, my priority is to continue building up these good habits that I've stuck to over the past month and really focus on learning during the first few weeks of my job. A key hurdle to overcome early in a new development role is building familiarity with the system and workflows so that you can onboard quickly and reduce the amount of time you're a liability as much as possible. This means not d*cking around at work like I was used to in my last position, passively doing the bare minimum while binge watching poker videos at my desk. Outside of career-specific study, I'll be on the health grind (keeping the workouts to 4x/week minimum and having a steady supply of meals prepped for lunch/dinner) and putting in some decent online volume. Once the paychecks start coming in I'll be looking to get some live cash sessions in ASAP. Until then!

Onwards and Upwards
-------------------
First week of work in the books, and I have to say I'm quite happy with my decision to go with the company I did. I'm able to bike to work with a 30-minute commute and some sick ocean views along the way. The company is pretty small and everyone I've met is about as friendly as it gets, likely a product of their thorough vetting process. There's definitely a lot of work to do as there's quite the QA backlog and not a lot of resources to handle it but I'm excited for the challenge and being able to contribute from essentially the ground up and build the skills necessary to do so.

On the poker side, the graph is on the steady incline as I'm seeing a lot of success in online SNGs and MTTs. I've stepped up my ABI for SNGs since my roll is no longer non-replenishable and the results have been very solid. Global adding $15 18-player turbos was a great decision IMO, they're super juicy and run pretty consistently. Although I punt occasionally (mostly with being overly aggro against opponents who are underfolding) I'm making some really good decisions overall and I'm happy with my decisions lately.

In terms of the mental game, my confidence is at an all-time high, I think due to the following factors:

• Nutrition + Exercise: I've switched up my schedule to get my workouts in before work and fasting until lunch. It's definitely a grind and I need to go to sleep earlier than usual to accommodate but it's paying dividends. My mental endurance and thought clarity is getting noticeably better by the day.
• No financial pressure: I didn't realize (or perhaps didn't want to believe) the fact that having to maintain a poker + life roll put me into a weird mental state where I may have made sub-optimal decisions for the sake of preserving instead of going for it in a lot of spots. Now that I have an income outside of poker I'm firing with no fear and it's putting me in prime spots to make deep runs.
• Detachment: since I've spent so much of my energy over the past month focusing on interviewing + studying career-related stuff, I've spent considerably less time playing poker. Because of this, the times I do sit down to grind I'm way more focused than when I was fully immersed. I feel like there was a bit of burnout going on with how much I was playing and studying. Being forced to balance makes it such that I'm more targeted with the time I allocate to each and it's really showing.

I'm itching to get on the live felt again but that'll have to wait at least another week while I a) continue getting into the work rhythm and completing my onboarding and b) get my financial house in order. In the meantime I'll be firing at these online tourneys/SNGs and perhaps get back into the 50NL cash streets. Until next time!

I made a 2+2 account just to ask for that 1 year later update.

Fantastic read, hope all is well.

Yeah I agree. Would like to know what happened to you buddy. I really enjoyed hanging out with you. Hasn't been on 2p2 in a long while though. =( Hopefully all is good in Sensimuse land.