Another standard new year thread to keep myself accountable

Currently grinding a number of sites mostly between 100-200PLO5. I have been playing poker for around 6 years, PLO for 2 and PLO5 specifically for around 3 months now. Bring the pain!!

January Goals:

• 25,000 hands played.

• 40 hours studied.

• PLAY AT LEAST TWO SESSIONS SELLING ACTION AT 400 OR 600.

• GYM/WORKOUT 16x.

Current DB:

A lovely session to start the year...

Ouch . GL for the year pal

TY M8!

MAYBE TOMORROW....

ON A NICE UPSWING THE LAST COUPLE OF SESSIONS, RUNNING HOT AND THE GAMES ARE GOOD!

PLAYING MOSTLY MIN-VPIP DEEPSTACK GAMES RIGHT NOW SO RUNNING INTO A LOT OF HUGE SPR SPOTS WHERE I FEEL LIKE I COULD BE MAKING BIG EV MISTAKES. LUCKILY FOR NOW MY OPPONENTS SEEM TO BE MAKING EVEN BIGGER MISTAKES. UNFORTUNATELY THERE IS NOT A LOT OF DEEP STACK 5CARD STRATEGY CONTENT AVAILABLE ONLINE SO WILL HAVE TO HAVE A ROOT AROUND THE 4CARD LIBRARIES AND TRY BUILD SOME HEURISTICS.

(chips are in INS so roughly 3.5INS=1$USD)


A COUPLE OF THE BIGGEST HANDS FROM YESTERDAY. (FIRST ONE WE WERE GETTING KICKED NEXT HAND IF WE DIDN'T VPIP, MAYBE SHOULD JUST FOLD TO THE LIMP RAISE BUT HEY-HO

Hand History driven straight to this forum with DriveHUD 2 Poker HUD and Database Software

PL 5 Card Omaha 6(BB)
BTN ($1575.83) [VPIP: 93.3% | PFR: 26.7% | AGG: 28.1% | Flop Agg: 48.1% | Turn Agg: 25% | River Agg: 0% | 3-Bet: 25% | 4-Bet: 0% | Hands: 31]
SB ($1814.55) [VPIP: 51.9% | PFR: 33.1% | AGG: 40% | Flop Agg: 50% | Turn Agg: 38.6% | River Agg: 38.5% | 3-Bet: 8.8% | 4-Bet: 20% | Hands: 155]
HERO ($1272.97) [VPIP: 39.5% | PFR: 23.8% | AGG: 25.9% | Flop Agg: 26.2% | Turn Agg: 30.2% | River Agg: 29.5% | 3-Bet: 8.1% | 4-Bet: 9.9% | Hands: 9345]
CO ($1783.13) [VPIP: 38.7% | PFR: 25.8% | AGG: 16.7% | Hands: 31]

Dealt to Hero: A Q 8 6 4

CO Folds, BTN Calls $6, SB Calls $3, HERO Raises To $12, BTN Raises To $42, SB Calls $36, HERO Calls $30

Hero SPR on Flop: [9.77 effective]
Flop ($126): 5 7 3
SB Checks, HERO Checks, BTN Bets $93.60 (Rem. Stack: $1440.23), SB Calls $93.60 (Rem. Stack: $1678.95), HERO Raises To $378.36 (Rem. Stack: $852.61), BTN Calls $284.76 (Rem. Stack: $1155.47), SB Folds

Turn ($976.32): 5 7 3 T
HERO Bets $852.61 (allin), BTN Calls $852.61 (Rem. Stack: $302.86)

River ($2681.54): 5 7 3 T J

Players agreed to run it 3 times.

River #2($2681.54): 5 7 3 T 9

River #3($2681.54): 5 7 3 T 8







Hand History driven straight to this forum with DriveHUD 2 Poker Tracking Software

PL 5 Card Omaha 6(BB)
BB ($798) [VPIP: 43.3% | PFR: 26.7% | AGG: 45.5% | Hands: 31]
UTG ($4840.16) [VPIP: 55.6% | PFR: 27.8% | AGG: 50% | Hands: 18]
HERO ($1837.89) [VPIP: 39.5% | PFR: 23.8% | AGG: 25.9% | Flop Agg: 26.2% | Turn Agg: 30.2% | River Agg: 29.5% | 3-Bet: 8.1% | 4-Bet: 9.9% | Hands: 9345]
CO ($227.09) [VPIP: 41.2% | PFR: 30.8% | AGG: 30.7% | Hands: 214]
BTN ($587.40) [VPIP: 43.4% | PFR: 27.6% | AGG: 24.1% | Hands: 147]
SB ($2331.98) [VPIP: 46.7% | PFR: 32.4% | AGG: 33.3% | Flop Agg: 40.8% | Turn Agg: 33.5% | River Agg: 29.5% | 3-Bet: 14.6% | Fold to 3-Bet: 18.2% | 4-Bet: 9.1% | Hands: 726]

Dealt to Hero: A Q Q 4 2

UTG Folds, HERO Raises To $27, CO Folds, BTN Folds, SB Raises To $111, BB Folds, HERO Calls $84

Hero SPR on Flop: [6.85 effective]
Flop ($252): 2 3 Q
SB Bets $126 (Rem. Stack: $2094.98), HERO Raises To $630 (Rem. Stack: $1096.89), SB Raises To $2142 (Rem. Stack: $78.98), HERO Calls $1096.89 (allin)

Turn ($4120.89): 2 3 Q 7

River ($4120.89): 2 3 Q 7 7

Players agreed to run it 2 times.

Turn #2($4120.89): 2 3 Q 9

River #2($4120.89): 2 3 Q 9 8

Good luck man. Im gonna follow. You are probably a full time player. I am a rec player with a thread here but winning every year so far. Mostly playing 50-200PLO6 and PLO5 from time to time now.

Maybe we ll run into each other, good luck sir !

TYTY !

Aye, i actually commented on your thread haha! Know some players who do very well in the 6 card games, not for me though, 5 card painful enough. GLGL!

WEEK 1 UPDATE

Normal week in terms of volume and study. I also sold some action in a higher stakes game which went really well as I absolutely sun run The backer has given me free reign to play that stake whenever I like so will just keep an eye out for when the games are juicy. These games are uncapped and super swingy so nice to be off to a good start.

January Goals:

• 7122 of 25,000 hands played.
• 12 of 40 hours studied.
• 1 played - PLAY AT LEAST TWO SESSIONS SELLING ACTION AT HIGHER STAKES.
• 4 of GYM/WORKOUT 16x.

Profit/Loss after stake: $3457.81
Rakeback: (roughly) $1943.70

Total: $5,401.51

2k per week in rakeback? That's insane. What % rakeback would that be?

I think the RB number is slightly off, probably closer to 14-1500 per week. DriveHUD can't recognise different currencies and I play a few different clubs with different chip values so hard to get an accurate estimate in database. I am on 55-60%, but am VPIPing 40% and playing in high rake environments so it adds up quickly.

WEEK 2 UPDATE

Been a mehh week for volume as have had some social events the last few days - also finding that in the games I play in, if I want to grind 4 tables I need to start at least 2 or 3 of them, so hard to hit a steady 300/hph when grinding. I am not complaining, table starting almost always ends up with a softer line-up than sitting on waiting lists, just tilting in term of getting the volume in, which in 5card is must.

Went for dinner last night with a friend and then hit the live £1/2NL streets, which was as much fun as you can have with two cards. I actually ran into two of the guys I started the university poker society with in 2014. One is hustling out a side income from live NL now and the other is playing for a living with over 200k in tourney cashes. It is funny thinking back about how we used to battle so hard in the weekly 5p/10p game in our student halls while drinking £3 three litre bottles of cider out of mugs. But then there were at least 20 of us in the society at one point - I wonder how many have lost a lot to poker, I know for sure a couple of them have had a bad experience with poker and gambling in general since leaving uni. One of the guys told me that another old friend of ours is out in Vegas being staked by JNandez playing live PLO4 2-5-10. As part of the PLO Mastermind I do find it strange that the head coach brought out a 5card solver, a whole separate 5card course, a load of 5card content and then fires over to Vegas to grind soft 4card live games. At the time I took this as a sign that 5card probably isn't as profitable a game as 4 card - surely if the dude who literally commissioned the first 5card solver isn't grinding the game then it can't be a good idea for me to, right? Now, I am almost certain that 5 card is more profitable than 4, at least in the current meta of the games, so not too sure what Nandez' reasoning is, have heard him being fairly vague about the subject when asked on stream. Anyway, ranting...Results have been pretty good this week.

January Goals:

• 12360 of 25,000 hands played.
• 21 of 40 hours studied. (realised recently 1.5 hours is my sweet spot for processing information, anything more my retention rate drops off drastically. This means 6 days studying instead of 5, which is fine.)
• 3 played - PLAY AT LEAST TWO SESSIONS SELLING ACTION AT HIGHER STAKES.
• 6 of GYM/WORKOUT 16x. (need to get back on track next week, only hit 2 workouts this week)

Profit/Loss after stake: $1411.78
Rakeback: (roughly) $872.50 - have definitely been overestimating my RB by 20-30%, hard to anticipate when mixing stakes.

Week Total: $2,284.28
Year Total: $7,492.48

On a side note, my namesake has got caught up in some scandal again. Terrible bringing down our reputation like this, Lee.

Some highlights from the article:

• 'Lee Ryan told the BA flight attendant, "I want your chocolate children".'
  
  
  
• 'Ryan, who denied all charges, said his behaviour had been "playful".'
  
  
  
• 'After the hearing, members of the press saw Ryan, who was given unconditional bail, running into a nearby primary school to avoid photographers.'
  
  
  
• 'Police footage showed Ryan "snarling" and swearing at officers after biting one of them.'
  
  

FORGOT GRAPHS:

Good luck with the grind!

TY

JANUARY UPDATE

Have been in the process of moving house in the last couple of weeks and so volume hasn't quite been as high as I'd hoped. However, in the whole month I don't think I've missed a day studying so feeling happy with that. Need to get my arse back in gear in terms of working out too - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are no worries, Thursday, Friday, Saturday I am too soft on myself and like Doritos too much.

January Goals:

• 23124 of 25,000 hands played.
• 40 of 40 hours studied.
• 10 played - PLAY AT LEAST TWO SESSIONS SELLING ACTION AT HIGHER STAKES.
• 12 of GYM/WORKOUT 16x.

Profit/Loss after stake: $3,893.01
Rakeback: $4,018.17

Year Total: $7,911.18

QUICK UPDATE

Have been running really good recently. In the last couple of months I have only had one losing week pre rakeback and with rakeback it has been a very nice year so far. For the firs time in my poker career I feel like I have got studying the game down in a way which works best for me (happy to share if anyone interested) and I can definitely feel it. This 5card game is so complicated but slowly but surely I am finding myself in less and less spots where I have no idea WTF is going on.

Hit 7BB/100 for the first time in my 5c sample and very hopeful to achieve higher in the future with further study and game selection.

What’s your study look like?

I will have 3 types of study sessions in general. Almost all are 1.5 hours long exactly at the start of each and every day.


1. Drilling

Most sessions (7 out of 10) are straight drilling with PLO trainer - First half of session I focus on preflop, second on post flop. Most important is structuring this study in blocks for 4-5 weeks. I have heard Stefan Sonteimer talk about treating poker study like a Decathlon athlete, so first block would naturally be RFI from all positions preflop, then playing VS 3bet from each position etc. For post flop the same, SRP IP, how to play vs x/raise on the same board etc, before moving on to SRP OOP. I will usually split a post flop block into something like 4 unpaired boards, 3 straight boards, 2 paired, 2 mono before allowing myself to move on.

Keeping all my trainer results in a google spreadsheet (will share below) gives me a tangible feeling of progress and I think is where a lot of people **** up with studying. Most players who bother to study (and myself in the past) will jump around spots depending on what they struggled with in their previous session. I think there is definitely a place for hand review but for 5card at least, finding the answer to one spot on one board will make almost no difference to your EV in game. Even if I know I am struggling with 3bet pots OOP for example, I am never moving on to it until I have studied all the previous parts of the gametree effectively. To move on to another board I need to hit a predetermined accuracy goal 2 days in a row. For example if I am aiming for 85% accuracy over 150 hands drilled C-betting on K44r IP, if I hit 84%, 86%, 83%, 86%, 87% on consecutive days only after the last 2 days of reaching the goal in a row can I move onto the next board.

For 5card specifically I believe this is a much, much better way to study than trying to learn heuristics from the trainer or from coaching videos. There are way too many tiny subtle heuristics in 5card that trying to learn them all and apply them to each hand is almost impossible. I think the way to get around this is drilling so much that these heuristics just become a subconscious part of your game. 5card is way too dynamic a game to have hard and fast rules like 'we always check top set here,' or we get in all wrap with FD here, because our sidecards vary so much. I think it is more valuable to just expose your brain to so much solver that you start to subconsciously implement all of these mini heuristics without having to verbalise what they even are.


I use a colour code system to keep track of progress: green is when I hit two days and a row and so can tick that board off, blue for all the failed attempts of that board before hitting green, and yellow if I am on track to go green if I hit accuracy goal next session.





2. Coaching video review:

As there isn't much 5card coaching content online (one new vid a week on PLO mastermind) this is a much smaller part of my study regime. But when I do watch a video I watch it and take a load of notes, so much that I wouldn't need to watch the video again to glean the same info. This basically turns a 20min video into 1.5 hour of watching and note taking. I collate all of these in a OneNote file which I will use in any hand reviews to quickly understand a spot without having to go to the trainer. I know I spent a **** load of time in the last few years just watching videos thinking I was studying and retaining almost no information on what I just watched past 1 or 2 days. This is a boring but good way to cement that info in my brain.




3. Group study and hand review:

The only time I do hand review is when I am studying with other people. I have definitely had a habit of tagging a load of hands and 'confirming' whether I played it correctly or not based on sim outputs after a session. Although I am sure this will have a little bit of benefit I think there is very limited value in it unless you have other players to bounce around ideas about the hand. Very rarely is a prerun sim gonna give me a good applicable output to a hand I find complicated enough to review. Many times I will have my mind changed by talking with my study group about a spot, even if I have already 'checked' it's correct in PLOtrainer. Learning how other players think and how they perceive population I think is just as valuable as any paid coaching and would highly recommend finding other players to talk with deeply about hands.

Thank you!

Nice post, thanks!
I have two questions about the drilling-part:

1. How do you choose the spots you are going to drill?

2. I personally need a overview of a spot (how often are hand classes betting; what components in a hand class lean towards betting...) before drilling. Whats your approach? Do you just start drilling?

1. For the most part the spot selections are pretty linear. For postflop I just started with SRP BTN vs BB, like i said in the post something like 4 unpaired boards, 3 straight, 2 mono, 2 paired in order to get a good idea of how the spot works. Then CO vs BTN for the same/similar boards. The 3bet pots OOP and IP with the same structure as flop drills. Then barreling after flop Cbet SRP and so on and so forth. There are a load of cross over in certain nodes too, like leading in SRPs is gonna require similar hand components to cbetting OOP. There are a lot of patterns which carry on further in the gametree so just makes sense to work your way down the tree i think.

2. I started doing this for the first few weeks of study, looking deep into different hand classes and trying to write down heuristics, but because each hand is so unique with 5cards I found it more confusing than helpful. Maybe its individual to me but i definitely learn better through constant exposure than learning loads of heuristics. The most I will do now before drilling a spot is look at the overall frequencies, see if there are any close to 100% freqs for certain hand classes (maybe top set on A high boards after 3betting for example) and get an idea of my strategy that way. The problem is that so many hand classes in 5card mix so much that this kinda macro analysis is really hard to apply to individual hands. The impression I get from 5 card is that how many turns can we continue/ give up with my current hand components is much more important than learning how to play all the different combos of top two pair.

Hope that kinda answers your questions.

APRIL UPDATE

Not updated in a little while as have been moving house in the last couple of months which has taken up a lot of playing/study time.

I have still been putting in some hands/hours and still feel my game improving little by little, particularly in finding 5-card exploits to compliment my theoretical study. As I am trying to keep my sessions to morning/afternoon UK time it is sometimes hard to get really great action, but the time spent on other pursuits and hanging out with family in the evening is overall +EV for my game/life regardless.

We have been discussing moving to somewhere where more PLO cash games run, especially 5card. I think my hourly in a live 500 game is gonna be significantly higher than grinding 100/200 online. But that is something that won't be happening for a good few months and a lot of research. So if anyone knows any live 5card games which run regularly in Europe please shoot me a message.

Results have been okay, mostly splitting between GG and the apps. It would be great if Pokerstars managed to start promoting the 5card games as it would be nice to play in an environment without a crazy rake structure.

I will try and update more regularly now that I have my office set up to grind properly.

Year Total: $15687

Overall Sample:

Crushing it mate 👊

MAY UPDATE

Been a decent month in terms of results and soft skills. I have consistently studied for 1.5 hours every morning except Saturdays and grinded at least 100 hours. I am now in the habit of playing without any music/distractions. I have been guilty in the past of listening to podcasts/music/Youtube while playing and didn't think it affected me as much as it did. I guess it is hard in game to quantify mistakes made because of distraction, but it becomes very evident when drilling spots - my accuracy when drilling and simultaneously listening to a podcast is significantly lower than when not. I can only imagine that my win rate was taking a real hit when my attention was split between grinding and listening to something in the background.

I have began coaching a little - one student so far. It is definitely something I wish to continue and believe my approach is teachable and could be effective for other players who want to progress in 5card. I would like to add one or two more students to my schedule in order to get more experience, therefore I will be offering very competitive rates. So if anyone reading is interested please feel free to shoot me a message for more info - either on here or Discord (LeeFaeBlue#8833)

This month I am gonna focus mainly on the GG 200 5card pool. Apps are great and I enjoy playing on them but I would like to see how my hourly compares grinding full time on GG for the next month. The pool seems decently soft at most times of the day and the rake is lower than on apps. Even the regs in the pool seem to be making pretty egregious EV punts so I believe a decent WR is possible even before rakeback/leaderboards.

That's all for now I think. Will update again soon.

Year Total: $24,649.97

Overall sample:



GG sample so far: