Awesome news man, congrats to you and the family!!!!!!!!!

Thanks, brother! Hope things are still going good with your new addition also!!!

It's been a little over a week since my last update, and overall, I'd say a good week for poker. I'm a couple days late on the update because I had a water leak in our house that I had to deal with (on top of helping my wife with our newborn), so poker has taken a back seat the past 3 days. All is fixed now, and I've got some time planned for and set aside to play a lot this weekend. Fingers crossed I get to do so!

Since my last update, I didn't get the results I wanted, but I put in good, mindful sessions for 6 days straight before our little water leak. Not any kind of big volume due to limiting myself to 4 tables, but happy with the consistency. Here are my stats and my graph below:





Again, not the results I wanted, but a short sample size, and nothing too terrible here. I'll run through my goals from the last week and re-assess them for next week moving forward.

Goal 1 - I did a great job here working a minimum of 30 minutes on poker before even playing a hand each day. I even got in some passive poker work on the days I was dealing with that water leak. In between trips to Lowe's, I listened to the Play Optimal Poker Podcast episode with Uri Peleg as the guest. Really great episode here that was actually focused entirely on strategy. More on this below.

Goal 2 - I was able to document what I did each day in my journal.

Goal 3 - Giving this goal an amber. I was not quite disciplined enough to limit myself to 4 tables. As tables start and stop so quickly in the afternoons, I found myself with 5 open at times while trying to decide which ones were the best ones to play. Not a terrible leak here, but it goes against my goal of playing 4 to work on my game because this definitely took away some brainpower at times. Will continue to work on this in the coming weeks.

Goal 4 - This goal of 100k hands by the end of August is definitely in jeopardy. I'm sitting at 68,300 hands right now. It'll be tough with my 4 table limit, but discipline each day should hopefully get me there.

So for my goals this coming week, I'm going to keep everything the same. No need for change really. After 3 days off I intend to get back into it each day with the same discipline and focus. I'll check in on this next week.

For my work away from the table this week, I focused on the flop play chapters in Applications of NL as well as reviewing some of my own hands I played. I also listened to that podcast with Uri Peleg this week and I listened to a podcast on Zenith Poker's youtube on how to balance career, family, etc with poker. The guest there was Alex D'Souza, and this one was phenominal as well.

Both of these podcasts have me excited and a little motivated to start doing some more in depth solver work. As I've talked about before in this thread, I only do a limited amount of solver stuff with the mobile apps Solver+, PostFlop+, and PreFlop+. However, these really only list solved situations and are condensed versions of true solvers. What stood out to me in both of these podcasts is that they suggested that many players use solvers to just look up whether they played a losing hand correctly or not. Unfortunately, that is really what I've grown to just do with Solver+ instead of really studying the situation and the solve.

So with that said, I've decided to give GTO+ a go here. I'm a little nervous about my home computer's processing performance, but from what is listed on the website, I should be in good shape. We'll see. So at some point next week, I am planning on spending the majority of a day on this when my wife takes our kids to her parents house one day. I'll plan on wiping unnecessary junk files from my computer, downloading the software, and jumping right in. Any suggestions for this rookie with this are obviously welcome! My long term plan will be eventually to get a high performance laptop to use for poker and for basic computing when I travel (aside from my work laptop). This would obviously be able to handle GTO+ and any other high performing software I decide I want to try.

Well that does it for today. Here's to a good week and best of luck to everyone!

This was great. I love Uri, watch every youtube vid that he has, it's gold. I have the red line course as well, helped me a ton. He's a really smart guy and good player

glgl

That's awesome to hear that! I definitely want to give that pod episode a 2nd listen because there was so much great discussion in there.

I was intrigued listening about the red line course as well. I was going to mention it in my post but figured it was just overload to look at doing that in the next week with my situation and all that I'm trying to focus on. Don't want to bite off more than I can chew, but definitely want to get this on my agenda.

I've always noticed that my red line is just complete sh!$. I put in a session this afternoon and was just aware of it in the back of my mind in spots where I cbet flop and gave up and other spots like that where I gave up too easily. I think there's obviously a lot to be gained by looking into this and I appreciate you bringing that course up!

Have you seen any noticeable difference in your red line since getting the course, or too soon yet to observe?

It's been a great week of poker in both personal development and results. I did what I said I was going to do this week (for the most part), learned a thing or 2 and put some of these learnings into use. I kept up with my study habits each day this week except for 1 day where I did not play at all due to yet another home crisis, this one with an appliance..... #facepalm. However, I worked through that and managed to stay on course with poker. I took a day to download GTO+ and become somewhat familiar with it, and I was able to get in a little over 5k hands. Not bad for a guy with a 3 year old and a 3 week old in the house! Let's check in on results and my graph for this past week:




What's really awesome and obvious this week is that red line is actually somewhat linear this week. A drastic improvement if you look back at all my graphs in this thread. I know it's only been 1 week, but as mentioned last week, just becoming more aware of it, studying theory, and diving into solver study all definitely did not hurt my red line this week. It's a small sample, but let's see if I can keep this up next week. I debated listing this as a goal for the next week. Not sure if it should be listed as a goal or not because it's not 100% within my control, but I feel like I took actions this past week to make it look a lot better.

Let's check in on my goals from last week:

Goals 1 and 2 - Great job here once again. As stated above, I did miss 1 day of study due to an appliance issue at the house. But other than that, I spent well over 1/2 hour per day away from the tables and documented everything.

Goal 3 - Once again goal 3 is amber, but not for bad reasons. I found myself able to keep up better and still play focused with 5-6 tables at times. I'll keep this goal at starting sessions with 4 tables and only adding more if I'm playing well and focused.

Goal 4 - I'll move this goal of hitting 100k hands by August 31st back into the green. I'm now sitting at 73.5k hands.

For next week, I'll combine goals 1 and 2 into the same "goal 1". That said, here are next week's goals:

Goal 1 - will be to spend a minimum of 30 mins working on poker away from the tables and documenting everything in a journal.

Goal 2 - start sessions with a maximum of 4 tables and if I'm playing focused, increase to 5-6 tables maximum.

Goal 3 - Continue to show improvement in my red line. Try to maintain a somewhat linear red line this week.

Goal 4 - hit 100k hands by Aug 31st!

I think these are achievable goals for sure. For Goal 3, I plan on continuing to slowly work through all the theory in Applications of NL this week. Once I finish that in likely 2 weeks, I'll plan on starting that Red Line Course from Uri Peleg.

Another thing I plan on doing this week is next Wednesday, the kids will be with Grandma all day. So I'm planning a full day, morning and afternoon, to just work with GTO+ and better understand how to use it. I found some great tutorials on the software from Michael Lukich on youtube. I watched the 1st video, but was somewhat interrupted half way through it by the kids. I felt his videos were very informative, so on Wednesday, I plan on working through all his GTO+ tutorials. That is unless someone can recommend anything better that is out there to learn GTO+?

Anyways, that about does it for this week's update. Here's to another strong week coming up. Cheers everyone!

Nice weekend, the Red line course really doesn't require you to have too much solver knowledge, although good understanding of poker in general is a prereq.

The Michael Lukich series is great and is very practical. That being said, it's not always the best idea to run your own sims, instead downloading a library from a site like zenith could be best.

Fair point on using a library vs running my own sims. This early on, i'm sure my sims are not the best. I feel like the Solver+ app probably functions similarly to the zenith library when it comes to pre-solved solutions. I've been working with that app on and off for a while now.

However, part of me likes the challenge of becoming familiar with the solver software and understanding it enough to study the game and improve. I have a lot of energy around it right now...... we'll see if the feeling is still there in a few weeks

It's been an up and down week for me poker wise. I'm a day late on this update, but missed 2 days of playing out of 8 due to making the conscious decision not to play on those 2 days due to fatigue, mindset, etc. Just over 6k hands in a week, so not bad.

Predictably, what was bad were my results this past weekend and unfortunately my red line. After bragging about my red line last week, it completely went down the toilet this week. What's funny, is I knew this before I even pulled up the graph to verify it here a minute ago. I know I made some tough folds in big pots this past week. A couple tough folds and had to fold some hands where I had no business getting that deep into the hand with what I had.

Anyways, here are my results this past week:




And here's a rundown of my goals from the past week:

Goal 1 - all good here as I'm working and documenting everything I do away from the tables each day.
Goal 2 - I think I jumped the gun on the 4 table thing and often found myself with 6 tables open.... especially when I was having a bad session "chasing losses." Definitely not the time to be opening more tables.
Goal 3 - ya this was a complete fail, lol. My red line got way worse this week.
Goal 4 - I'm sitting on 79.7k hands, so well on my way to hit 100k by Aug 31st.

One good thing this past week is that I did get to spend a full day working through the Michael Lukich videos on GTO+. I'm planning to re-watch video #4 on data aggregation this week as well as go back and watch his previous video on "How to use a Solver for Study." Very happy with my progress here and as stated above, quite excited about learning something new with GTO+.

What I have not mentioned previously that seemed to have an effect on me is right now I'm playing towards unlocking the $500 reload bonus that PokerStars offered. I have until Aug 14th to clear it, and I really only have 2 weeks to do it because I have to be out of town next week. So it's this week and the final week of it. I have $140 unlocked, so I probably will not make it, but that's ok. I'm starting to come to grips with that because in the past I've worked like mad to earn all the free money I could on things like this.

So moving forward, I am going to keep my 4 goals the same. I can absolutely get better at goal 2 and keep it to 4 tables unless I'm extremely focused and running well. I can control this and I chose not to last week.

For my red line goal, I do not expect it to get better this week. I think that while I am gone the following week, the Red Line Course will be something good to work through while I'm out of town and away from the tables. Then hopefully when I come back I will have somewhat of a focused strategy on how to tackle this goal and improve my red line. But for now, I am aware of it while I play, and I'll try to consciously limit red line losses when possible.

Well, that's all for this week. I'll plan on my next update on Sunday night as I'll be out of town starting then. Cheers!

I'm about a week late with this, as I did not get the chance to focus much on poker while I was away for work last week. Somewhat unfortunate, but I'm back at it now. I had another "break even" week last week before leaving, and I was able to put in a solid session last night, so with that, here are my stats and graph since my last update:




Nothing too extraordinary either way. What is nice though is that last night during my winning session, it's nice to see that somewhat linear red line. Funny how that correlates with success, sometimes anyway, lol.

So I've got just until this Saturday until my re-load bonus runs out on Stars. I've cleared $210 of it so far, so it would be nice to see if I can clear $300 this week. I'll try not to let that affect my play and stop my sessions short if it is.

I'm not going to set a volume goal here for this week, rather I will focus my volume goal for the rest of the month. I am sitting at 84.5k hands played since starting this thread, and my goal is to finish my challenge by the end of August. A little more than 15k hands in 3 weeks should be more than a reasonable goal to achieve, and it will be nice to look back at the whole 9 months or so that it will have taken me to do it and see what I can uncover and where I can improve as I set goals for my next 100k hands.

So for the next week, I am going to keep my weekly goals the exact same:

Goal 1 - Continue to work away from the table everyday and document what I do.
Goal 2 - Start with 4 table sessions and only add more tables if I am focused and if I am playing well - ie. not when frustrated mentally
Goal 3 - Take measures to improve my red line - more on that below.
Goal 4 - 100k hands by the end of August!

For my red line, I want to focus on the red line course this week. I've casually watched a little of the videos, but I want to do a deeper dive this week to see where I can immediately improve. I had wanted to do this while I was away on business travel last week but I just did not make the time for it. Somewhat disappointing, but I have the time now while I'm home and re-focusing on poker for the next 3 weeks.

Well, that's about all I have for today. Thanks for reading and GL everyone. Cheers!

Rough week for me this week - not exactly the kind of results I wanted. But on the bright side, I did what I said I was going to to and just simply had a rough week. From the mental aspect and from the studying and self-improvement areas, this was really a great week. Just didn't work out at the tables. Without further ado, here are my non-stellar results:




Nothing too crazy, but a frustrating week for sure. What is nice is that my red line was consistent to start but then it just fell off a cliff as I started to lose. I can remember 1 losing session playing against a very solid opponent, I got caught and made some bad pre-showdown folds in some rough spots. Just felt like this guy owned me, but the good thing is that I recognized what he was doing and learned a bit from it after reviewing hands.

Here is a good example.
PokerStars - $1 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 5 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

SB: $100.00
BB: $101.20
UTG: $351.43
CO: $112.80
Hero (BTN): $218.26

SB posts SB $0.50, BB posts BB $1.00

Pre Flop: (pot: $1.50) Hero has A 3

fold, fold, Hero raises to $2.50, fold, BB calls $1.50

Flop: ($5.50, 2 players) 3 2 4
BB checks, Hero checks

Turn: ($5.50, 2 players) J
BB bets $3.75, Hero calls $3.75

River: ($13.00, 2 players) 7
BB bets $15.00, fold



Perhaps I could have found a call here, perhaps I could have bet flop, and perhaps I could have done a number of things better. But when he makes this river OB, he knows that my range cannot be too terribly strong with my line, so he's very polarized. And since I have the nut blocker, perhaps this should have been a call. But the important thing is I'm starting to think on this level and make these kind of plays myself. What has been frustrating is that sometimes I make these kind of "thinking" plays against the wrong opponents like someone playing 55/17, and they're just gonna call anyway. So I can do a better job recognizing that.

Anyway, checking in on my goals, I'm green across the board. I'm studying everyday and documenting what I do. I'm really sticking to 4 tables to focus more, and I'm sitting at 88k hands. So I have a little less than 2 weeks to play 12k hands. If anything, that goal may be more in the amber range, because I have a lot going on in the next 10 days or so, so this may not be possible for me to hit 100k hands by Aug 31st. Oh yeah, and I have to leave for work a couple days early due to an extended hotel quarantine that I have to do, so this may not be feasible.

With that said, I am going to have just 1 goal for the next 10 days: make it to 95k hands by playing 7k hands over the next 10 days. I think that is more reasonable than 12k hands for me in this short time period. If I beat that, then that's a bonus. If not, I will easily get 5k more hands at the end of September and hit my original goal of 100k hands in well less than 1 year.

I'll do my next progress check while I'm wasting away in a hotel room for work here after I leave the house. Until then, cheers everyone.

I was a bit lazy at the end of August and did not get around to updating my progress. I had to leave for a business trip and did not have my PT4 stats with me. However, I'm back and pleased to say that right before I left I was able to achieve my goal of 100k hands as described in the 1st post to this thread. Here are my final numbers and my graph for this 100k hand journey:




While happy with the results, I know I can do better and I know that I can be more focused and disciplined in my approach. It's nice to sit back and realize that I've achieved my goal of playing 100k hands much quicker than my first 100k hands, but I am not satisfied.

I never liked how I titled this thread using the word "Casual" to describe my poker journey. That was a poor choice of words, but I've come to realize that in many of my sessions, it was the correct word to describe my approach. With that said, I'll be ending this thread and starting a new, better-titled, thread in the coming weeks as I aim to improve upon these results, my level of discipline with the game, and my journey to the WSOP coming up in November.

It was great talking to a few of you along the way this past year. Talking with you has made me better, but I also realize that talking to strangers online about a game I love is not my strongest area. Perhaps I will grow a little in this regard with my next Goals thread and make myself a little more available and open to those who reach out to me.

So for now, thank you all for reading, and best of luck at the tables. I will be starting a new Goals thread in the coming weeks as I reflect a bit on what I've done and where I want to get to with this game. Cheers everyone!

Congrats man. 4bb/100 is pretty damn solid. Don't be a stranger on discord I'm always around!