thx for that post too. nice read.

i think its all got something to do with the way a plaer's brain works. some, i believe, are reaaaally extraordinary crative and make up al sorts of crazy lines and rep the craziest things all the time (giev money for example or isildur for that matter), while others are a lot more 'Matrix'-like.

i think all of those have their merits and which one we land on depends mostly on what our goals in poker are. i think to succeed at the highest limits, one needs that creativity a lot more than to build up a quick roll or make some variance-free income. the latter certainly benefits from volume while at the highest stakes, ABC poker will not work because fish are so rare and all the otherhands are between regs

update#32

alright today was a valuable lesson: success is not a guarantee.
after a couple of insanely good days my mind kind of started assuming instead of thinking. i started autopilotting bigtime and that caused me to give up on too many pots, forget to cbet, forget to 3bet, instafold to obviously great bluffing spots etcetc - i was just clicking buttons and that screwed with my head. fortunately i was able to regroup and focus during my last session and managed to run up my results today from a 6BI loss to a 3BI win.

and as for the redline... notice how drastically the gradient changes at about 10700 hands? thats all less money lost= woney won. crazy how autopiloting will cause losing lots and lots of small pots that often go unnoticed

always focus when you play or it will cost you!

hands: 13588
profit: $34 (21 from rakeback sattys)



br: $759

5642 VPPs. 40189 hands played during this challenge.

How do you NOT autopilot on 24 tables? Great job so far, so I guess you have something figured out in that regard.

i do once i get tired unfortunately. hope that wont case a huge spewfest by tomorrow or the day after. optimally i would play about 4-5 hour sessions and then i would be able to focus close to 100% at least at the micros. havent had the br to do that above nl10 tho

its just practice really. i started with 5 tables last summer then played 9 most of the time until i started playing turbo mtts where i started tiling up to 25 tables. ( last january i actually got my first experience with stacking- was playing turbo stt 9mans then- up to 33 but i sucked. guess that has had a great effect tho)
i have to give the advice of not pushing that too soon. get ur basics right at few tables and THEN start adding more tables, not the other way around!

update#34

again longest session ever but not exactly happy with my play today, at least with the first 75% of the day's play. speewed away lots of dollars. not proud of myself. however it did have some nice side effects. regs are hating me like hell. and they ve begun shoving all kinds of random squadoosh vs me which i was able to profit from in the end. gonna try and play more solid from now on.

hands: 17671
profit: $42
br: $822

Not trying to derail the thread, but how gradually was the transition from few tables to many?

1->2->4->9->12->24 while the first 3 jumps were quite quick i stayed at 9-12 for what feels like an eternity.

before last june i had no clue about cash games so i guess thats a time frame

i would suggest trying out every new amount at 2nl first to get a feel. honestly, about ten days ago i tried stacking 24 2nl tables and failed horribly. then i tried it again and voila.

i have to repeat tho, volume is not the most important thing.

I'd like to make the point for fewer tables over 24 tables.
If you play 2-3 tables you can 1) make loads of notes about each player thus playing nearly perfectly vs them, 2) you can think about each decision more. A point made earlier in the thread that most decisions are made within 2 secs. You can increase your bb/100 loads by thinking through every decision, making better bet sizes and better hand rangers for opponents.

You can also increase your skill faster with less tables, as your thinking through each decision. This allows you to move up stakes more easiler as at the higher stakes you need to think more about decisions.

Each method, 24 table or 2-4 tables have merits and bad points in conclusion, it's mainly up to the individual.

p.s Dusty "Leatherass" gave up poker recently because multi-tabling got too much got for him.

i absolutely agree that the overall quality of decisions made while masstabling is way below the quality of 2-6 tablers for example. BUT as far as my play at the micros is concerned i am confident in saying that this impact is by far outweighted by the 4x-12x volume i am able t put into the same timeframe. say you focus like crazy and are able to grind out a winrate of 20bb/100 on 2 tables taking notes and stacking dem fishies and regs the same. you will probably play 120 hands an hour, thus winning about 24 bb per hour. pretty decent AND your game wil improve heaps. BUT you will be subject to shortterm variance a LOT more that way and this can cause a lot of frustration if yu re not willing to put up with that.
then on the other hand take a DECENT (net a crappy 12/10 breakeven but DECENT) massgrinder like LazyAce (or hopefully me too ) on the stakes we play we are able to grind out a winrate around say 4bb/100 over large samples. however we play 1500 hands per hour thus making 60 bb every hour pretty much consistently. i think you see where i am going with my arguments. the big issue many people (myself included before i started playing lots of tables) were overlooking is that it is possible to make decisions at about 85% of your maximum ability even while playing insane amounts of hands. i think Lazy has covered a lot of the thinking process that is involved here and wht it essentially boils down to is thinking about the big decisios WHILE clicking away making 'standard' raises, folds, cbets etc.

I absolutely agree that playing less tables and thinking about every decision is key to improving as a player though. and i did this myself for a long time starting last year. there is no way one can jump straight into 24 tables and win. it takes practice and it is up to every individual what they want to achieve.
I myself would be very happy to become a rg at 25NL or maybe 50NL and grind out a solid incoe with as little variance as possible. I do understand that this may look scared or not baller-esque enough but to be honest here, i dont care.

i hope you get my points and feel free to add points, i like the discussion

he gave up poker to go back to golf afaik which he was crushing at long before he decided to win a buck ber hand

sry for the tl;dr.. i tend to ramble a bit it seems

You make good points.

I'm currently 2-3 tabling 6-max 25nl. Just my prefered way to play I guess (get annouyed when I don't make the near exact right play .

I find 2-3 tabling doesn't tilt me as much as i'm very rarely making mistakes due to fast button clicking/decisions.

A quick point to make: I've just read Tri "SLOWHABIT" Nguyen's book "How I made my first million" (great great read btw, helped a lot). He says that if he was 18-19 now and was just starting out, he would 4 table only, mkae loads of notes, use a 25 buy in rule and take aggro shots.

tri would go broke in a week today.

sry for the short comment was trying to get my session to look promising but meh...

as far is i kow tri is a scammer claiming more than he is actually capable of proving. sure he may have made a milly back when even blind mr. hal lobarsky wouldve managed too eek out a profit just clicking buttons but since then he has not been able to provide any evidence that his game is up to date. i dont really like listening to people who claim but dont prove if you know what i mean.

i m sure some of his mindset attitudes are useful but i dont feel like supporting him so i ll just stick to other material instead.

bah my brain is liquid i think

couldnt quite get my goal fo the day done so tomorrow will have to be hardcore 20k hands yo!

overall i played really bad today to be honest, just didnt get into the right mindset until very late in the session where i managed to go on a 10BI heater but soon after i lost focus again started spewing and called it quits before losing more

still a very decent profit for the day though

hands: 16024
profit: $58
br: $880
6952 VPPs <------ sooooooooo close



i think i might switch to nl10 for the last couple hours tomorrow if i see that i am behind pace at around 2 am or so. gonna be one hell of a massive day tomorrow!

gl all and thx for following. been a crazy week yo

alrighty i just finished my first 20k hands day and thus, i just completed my challenge and made platinum star on top of that so feeling pretty good right now (dead but good fwiw)

[X] 100k hands of nl5 fullring in a week
[X] made platinum star in the process
[X] 7 winning days in a row
[X] HULKSMASHED uNL!!!!!!




well this has been one hell of a grind guys
once again i have to thank everybody for following and encouraging me to keep grinding, it was hard at times but winning evryday made this a whole lot easier to complete. had i not gone on this insane heater today i am ot sure how on earth i wouldve ended up scratching 20k hands together but this way it was just smooth sailing.

this week brought my most successful month of grinding cashgames to a very nice end and i think i have been able to improve a lot during this period. at least i have learned that i play my best during the first 6-8k hands of a session before stating to semi-autopilot, unless i am heatering

anyways, here is the garph from this challenge:


the sexiest semilongtermgraph i have ever produced.





i m very very braindead right now so i probably forgot to mention lots of things that i was meaning to write in the end so thats it for now.
all my fellow uNL grinders waiting on that strategy thingy: it s coming within the next 12 hours i promise

oh yeah just forgot....

Challenge details:

hands played in 7 days: 100009
profit: $521
bankroll: $$1031

aaaaand PLATINUM STAR weeeeeeeeeeee

so the bankroll has grown to over $1k which i am very proud of. however i will have to cash out a bunch of that so i will have to see where that will leave me limitwise. would be nice to have enough left for nl10 but i am not sure. worst case i jus grind 100k more in like 3 days and move up then, cant be that hard right ?

since january is over i might just as well post my monthly results:

****JANUARY SUMMARY****

total hands played at nl5+nl10 sixmax: 49220
total profit: $58



total hands played at nl5 fullring: 143292
total profit: $576
at right about 4ptbb/100= pretty solid imo
7 cheeseburgers/hours isnt too bad either haha



i made a total of $170ish from sattys and $100 from stellars in rakeback too.
now lets do some calculations on those sattys i have been playing. being platinum star i have made a total of (750+2250+1125+4500+4500) 13125 FPPs which i spent entirely on those sattys which means i have played 55 of them. statistically i shouldve shipped around 18 if i was BE in them, making me about $195 in cash if i sell the T$ for 97% as i have been doing. i shipped 16 so that s close enough. had i spent these points on goldstar bonusses i wouldve made $150 without having to put up with variance and such. however i do think that after massgrinding for hours a little 6max hyperturbosatty can make a break even more enjoyable and since i got more while still being below ev i think i will stick to them for the time being.

so overall i think i can consider myself a fullring grinder yes?

thx everybody once again for following ,it was great encouragement !

lets cru$$$h february!

obv cant sleep soooo

goals for february:

[ ] 200k hands
[ ] at least 100k hands of nl10
[ ] move up to nl10 obv
[ ] FLATTEN THE REDLINE!!!! <--- = autopilot way less= shorter sessions (about8-10 k a day tops)
[ ] post a huge megalong post about redline flattening by tomorrow
[ ] go through the hands i have written down (48) and post at least 20 until next week
[ ] cru$$$h

Improving the bottom line

I think the common knowlege out there is that as long as you keep winning at showdown and make decent cbets, you will be doing fine is, simply put , wrong. And I don’t make this up – I have learned the game this way myself. I think in today’s games there is SOO frickin much dead money out there to be collected by the good aggressive regular that it would be simply stupid of any of us not to do so. But what can be done to maximize our winnings?
the most important aspect BY FAR is hand reading.

We have to stop making automatic decisions and start thinking of every single hand in terms of ranges. We have to constantly ask ourselves the most important question in all of poker: ‘Why?’
why am I betting?
Why did he cbet this wet flop?
Why does he checkraise me on a JJ2 flop? Why on a 689ss flop?

If we stop thinking in these parameters we will end up spewing money. Poker is ( that’s common knowledge too) a game of limited information. However most people don’t realize how plenty information can be gained if we focus on what we have available.

Since I am playing fullring, I think for me it is a lot easier to put villains on hands. A 4x raise from utg simply means monster from a nit. So I setmine and stack him pretty much every time. If the utg raiser is a reg with a brain and a very stiff range I can outplay him postflop when I miss my set. Say the flop comes 457ss and he makes his standard 80% cbet. If stacks are deep I will almost always get him to fold his overpair if I raise. His one pair hand cannot stand the heat of me firing my whole stack at him. So he will call once, call twice and fold the river most of the time. Redline goes up.

Say we have a regular who we see has a button open of 45% which is quite often the case. Since he s a nitty reg overall he also has a fold to 3bet stat of 70-90% no kidding. What is the obvious move with out A3s? with our 78s? with our 85o even? Not KJo though because this will get us in trouble IF we get action. Redline goes up.
Say we call a raise with a random hand and miss the flop, check and the villain makes a cbet. We see he cbets 75% of the time but folds to a flop raise 85% of th time. What is the obvious move? Redline goes up.

Say we are n position in the same scenario as above but the board is a standard dry cbetting flop like J72r. he cbets. We have two equally attractive options with our air hands:

1: we raise. He will give up a lot of the time. However this is pretty nasty when he does not fold because you have bloated the pot and cannot win. Over large samples this raise itself will show a profit however (if used sparingly).
2: we float. This is even sexier because villains often scream ‘I have AIR’ when you call and they check a T turn. You bet they fold and the redline begins to take on the shape of a beautiful smile.

I do not intend to advocate making these plays all the time because they are only sexy as long as you can credibly represent something. Therefore the best way to find a balance is to see if we have a backdoor draw. Say on the J72 flop we have 65s. this can turn a LOT of disguised backdoor draws that make a second barrel that much more attractive. Look to do this with at least a couple overcards like KQ. Again. Not all the time but more than u used to do.

These ways let us React to our opponents.
How do we make THEM react to us in a redline-esque way?

We are the aggressor. We want to stay the aggressor throughout the hand if possible. And most importantly we want to use statistical probabilities to our advantage. Say we raise from mp and villain calls from the sb.

Flop J72r. check. Cbet. Call.

What does villain have here? This is a question we have to ask ourselves always. Number one: we cbet why? Because this is a ‘dry’ board. Dry boards miss most hands. He cant continue with most of his range making us a decent profit. What does he call here with? Well lets assign a range that makes sense: all hands with a Jack or better obv. BUT they are the vast minority of his rather wide floating range. The rest is TT, 99, 88, 7x, T9, T8, 89, KQ. And given that he flatcalled oop in the sb his overall range is havily weighted towards pocket pairs that he obv wont fold to one bet. BUT and here s the thing he WILL fold them to further aggression. You have to stop making one cbet and then give up if you have ATs in that spot. Say the turn comes a Q. you bet, he folds. A LOT. Say the turn comes a K. same story. Even if the turn comes a 3 most of his pp’s will hit the muck. However I would again advocate finding a balance by deciding on a second barrel based on the turncard that comes. If it’s a scarecard that hits your range more than his OR if u hit a decent draw, go ahead and take the money thats in the middle.
It is very important to take the ‘one-and-done’ approach to everything and chuck that little bastard out of ourarsenals because he stinks and the black KKK-chapelle hates it!
When I started out with cash games I had fortunately read a LOT of strategy so that I maybe was overdoing my focus on redline but when we think about that all the time, like ‘what can I represent’ or ‘how will he react if I…’ we will instantly start thinking more in depth about our decisions, thus making us better all around players. IMO.
I would like to add some great links that I remember reading when it made ‘click’ a couple of times in my head:

http://www.pokerlistings.com/strateg...s-aggressively
http://www.pokerlistings.com/strateg...g-better-cbets
http://www.pokerlistings.com/strateg...edline-article
http://www.pokerlistings.com/strateg...g-fewer-tables

some of them are very straightforward but we should incorporate all of them in out games I believe.
Also, anybody who has not yet read ‘Treat your Poker like a business’ by Dusty Schmidt, DO IT.
If you have time and money to spare on poker education though, go to bluefire and watch ALL vids of giggy. I mean seriously. Watching him play made me improve tenfold, no kidding.
I think that’s enough for free advertising I m gonna do

One other aspect I wanted to talk about is improving our blue line. I think we all know the situation: we have 89s, raise and get a call from the small blind. We flop the joint on 23Tsss. Sb leads, we raise big, call. Turn Qo. Check, bet, call. River 2. He shoves. Against most people this should be a fold but most of us tend to go into tiltmode saying
‘baaaaahhhh aaaaarrrrggghhhh fmlllllll uuuuhhhhhhh’
click.
‘wtffffff how does he have 33 here? Wooooot uuuuhhhaaaaahhhhhhhhhahhhh’
Discipline and the ability to dissect a villains range here is key. If we make folds in spots where we really cant beat anything with our monster our redline will take a small hit instead of the blueline plummeting. Money saved =money won.

Alright I still haven’t slept and I hope this post has been somewhat useful. I think I will add lots and lots of thoughs as well as hh’s to back up all of my points. Enjoy this bast and go ckeck out all the articles. They really are gold!

also, if bluefire is too expensive, get the latest 5-6 issues of bluff magazine Europe on the iphone. there is a series aiming to improve everones sixmax games based on coaching that Alan Whatshisname from bluefire does. this series is as close to giggy as anything.

the first issue goes into starting hand ranges and then goes deeper into theoretical and statistical stuff, showing where the most common leaks are and showing how to get rid of them. ver well written and guaranteed to make the reader think poker differently

lemme know if you guys want me to talk more about one point that i made or if my writing sucks.

also get your opinions in here as weel. nothing helps a player better than discussing his thoughs with other palyers so even if you absolutely hate all of the above this can make for a nice discussion

Congrats. You're doing great, and I'm sure you'll have a big month. You've shown intelligence and dedication, which can take you far.

very nice post! i was waiting it for days and im glad that my thinking process goes in the right direction.

goodluck dude

what kinda stats do you run? I'm looking to do the same thing as you (albeit with less hands/volume due to time contraints), very inspirational!

my hud goes like this:

hands/vpip/pfr/AF
cbet flop/cbet turn/3b/4b/
fold to cb/fold to turn cb/ fold to 3b/fold to 4f/
float bet flop/raise flop/fold to flop raise/raise turn
steal: Cutoff/steal BU/stal: SB

i may need some improvements here as float turn would be a nice stat to have to check out how often a turn checkraise as the flop cbettor will work on certain boards but so far this has served me well.

the popup is very standard as per default

good luck with ur challenge. drop a link in here so i can follow!

thank you bro thats nice to hear!
hope i ll make a bunch in feb and march before i resume uni and wil reduce the volume to something silly like 20h/week or less hope its n25 by then

hope i could live up to ur expectations sir. i wrote this after grinding 20k hands and not sleeping so i probably wrote pretty crappy but i wanted to get some important points across which i hope i did.

good luck with all of that. i am sure since u show interest in things like that that you will improve man