Hey everyone!

Since nobody is reading those long a** introductions, I'll try to keep it as short as possible.

Introduction

• Married 28 year old, became a dad 6 weeks ago.

• Working full time as a flight attendant. However due to this corona virus situation, our fleet is grounded in our base and employees are being sent to holiday, first paid then unpaid. Therefore, no flights - no tangible salary.

The extent of this is quarantine still unclear. Bottom line is that I am not in position nor need to change jobs yet, however my family needs income*.
*
As a result, until at least May I can see myself having a lot of free time. A lot of it I am going to devote for poker.


Poker background

All ego aside, I am probably one of those guys that midstakes crushers feel sorry for. In short, forever stuck at micros.
Been playing since 18 years old, mainly as a hobby. Sometimes more, sometimes less, however my biggest achievements are very modest: shot taking 100nl and some MTT success. I was never a loser, deposited just once and kept this same BR from the very beginning, however I was never a big winner.

One of the reasons that might have prevented me from bigger success is my mental game. It's quite unstable. If things do not go my way, I turn into passive regfish who just feels like being outplayed by every reg. I start to question every spot, doubt myself, call in spots I should be folding and fold where I should be calling. Also, frankly I never considered myself being talented enough for poker. I sometimes have a hard time combating my emotional side of brain which obscures my logical, rational thinking. For example in big pots when pressure is applied on me or when I run bad. However I still like poker a lot and one of the good qualities I have is that I hardly ever give up.

Having said that, I managed to at least breakeven or better for the vast majority of my "career".


Current situation

Playing 25NL. Mainly at stars, some at gg.
Have ~80 buy ins for this limit. However, I definitely would not feel comfortable @ 50nl yet.

These are images since 21 of Feb when I got HEM3. All 25NL stars, zoom mostly.




Have already 46k hands in March, so quite happy with the volume.


Goals for the blog

• Meet some like-minded lads who may be in similar situation as poker players.

• Post HH's to discuss spots that cause trouble.

• Update constantly until the time when I'll have to return back to flying a lot, so playing plenty of poker becomes unsustainable.

Goals for the rest of March

• 80k hands by the end of the month

• Retain at least 5bb winrate

Guess that is enough for the first time, see you around!

I'm a pilot for a regional in the states. Not good for us, either. GL at the tables.

This is cool. Good luck mate

Good luck sir, and impressive results so far

I've always wondered how much a flight attendant makes? Do you make more money if you are doing longer international flights? How do you get into the industry? Is it a good job to get to meet women?

@MicroDonkYT Yeah, it doesn't look good for aviation in general. I think many airlines are going broke atm. Especially some of the charter ones or those which were struggling even before this virus. Thanks for showing up.

@Shipnickle I constantly check out your thread, good stuff in there! I especially like your solver insights / tips. Keep it up. I think you'll be playing 50nl in no time!

@CrunchyBlack Nothing too impressive, but thanks man.

@snowie963 Salary really depends on your country and airline. I guess with some research You can definitely get a general idea. As a rough guide, I would say the pay is quite better than average. In my case, I am from Europe, quite small country, so we don't even have domestic flights. And I am already a senior cabin attendant (the one who has to solve all the sh*t gone wrong on board ) so salary wise I really can't complain, even though I am working in a low cost carrier. To put it shortly, I think the pay is not going to be a problem most of the time. Unless You have a pretty solid income already.

You usually get into the industry by applying directly for the airline or going to their open recruitment days. Most of them have a dedicated page in their websites. Usually having customer service experience is an advantage. You send the CV and if everything's okay, they invite You to the recruitment day. There they test your teamwork skills, appearance, communication, all those things. And if they see you as a good candidate, they sign you and send to initial training. You pass it, pass exams, get licence and off you go.

That's a funny question, cause this is how I met my wife. So I would say it definitely is.

5380 hands on the clock yesterday, also went out for a nice little 9km walk with my ladies, so nice day yesterday. Did not mention this in the OP but I am very much into sports. Been going to the gym quite regularly (3x/week on avg) for the last 3 years. Now that all the gyms are closed, gotta find the ways around it to stay active.





Started off very poorly. Don't know about You guys, but after as few as 2 days off I tend to come back to the tables rusty. Could not get into the flow, the usual thought process. Basically for the first hour I was just clicking buttons, feeling anxious about my decisions, made all sorts of mistakes and before I knew it, 4 buy ins were gone. Good thing is I recognized it and stopped to take a break.

After that tides turned, got myself into the zone and ran very very good on top. Just one one those plain sailing sessions where You are not getting coolered once in 2.2k hands.

Time for some hands.

1) Std?



2) Gross. Villain's some random guy, 26/0 in 60 hands. Feels like a misplay but not sure where? Check flop? Him just calling flop, though, made me call turn, cause I would expect his sets or 9Ts to raise at least sometimes.



3) Call or fold?



4) Call or fold v2


No significant sample on both.

Reached 60k hands this month. So, well on pace for the 80k goal. Who knows, I might even push myself to 100k. Would be my all time high.

Nevertheless, month so far.



Quite enjoying the grind. Still learning to adapt to the high rake environment. HEM3 shows 6.60bb/100 rake @25nl. Hurts to see this, luckily though I managed to clear a bonus at Stars and got $200 back. Guess will have to wait like ~5 years in order to get another bonus like that.

Also, learning to exploitatively overfold in many spots. Sometimes I feel like a complete nit, but in the end I should be feeling good after folding.

Would love to be more consistent, my WR would thank me for that. Sometimes the level of play fluctuates and in the "bad" moments I kill a chunk of my expectation.

Also should be studying GTO more in order to better exploit the pool. Nowadays I am focusing (too much?) on volume. Good thing that we have some more diligent folks like Shipnickle who shares insightful things from the lab.

Hey there ladies and gents. Since I've just been successfully pranked (April's 1st) by my wife that we're going to have a 2nd baby and my bloodflow has been kind of activated, time for...

March review!



Productive month I would say. Crushed the goal of 80k hands and made it over 100k. Reached it without any sacrifice IRL, so happy about it. Obv 4 tabling zoom makes it not THAT hard, but for me who's not used to putting in big volume that's a step in the right direction.

Monetary-wise, not too bad. 1k$ raw profit, 200$ cleared bonus, also managed to luckbox two times into 20+ leaderboards for 175$ in total and then chests w all this free spins stuff. If on 1st of March someone would have told me that I'd make 1450$ in a month playing 95% 25NL, I would have been quite happy about it.

Had two ~15BI downers, though. Second one has ruined my beautiful graph as it's still ongoing, but eh, what can You do. Given my relatively low WR, I guess some correction was due to come. At least I ran well in all in pots!

Winrate isn't the best. Even though since the middle of the March until the recent downswing I felt pretty good and comfortable 4 tabling zoom. During those bad stretches, though, I gave away lots of unnecessary bb's. I have an excel sheet where I try to track all my obvious big blunders made in game. It says that I could have saved at least 6 bi's had I played better. And that's only the biggest, most obvious mistakes. Then I am ofc subjective and biased, so this number can definitely reach 10+ buy ins wasted.

So there's A LOT of room for improvement. I am not even talking about those tiny little edges. Of course, to think that I'd go ahead and play 100k hands of poker without any major fcuk-ups, for a regfish like me, would be delusional. But a few less bad calls, bad bluffs and my winrate would get a nice little boost. On a positive side, I think that consistently playing decent volume kind of gets You into the rhythm and this practice helps in recognizing bad spots.

YTD:



April Preview

Still unsure what to expect as far as flying goes. Therefore it's hard to set smart goals for this month. No signs of improvement in aviation world as of yet, though, so I can assume I'll be able to play quite a lot again.

Bankroll currently sits at 66 BI's for 50NL. However, my winrate at 25NLz is not big enough for me to take that move to 50nlz, yet. I don't want to be very marginal winner at best and then be exposed to sick downswings and BE stretches. Might need to cashout some of the BR, too. So if I had to play Zoom only, I'd stay at 25NLz.

But the regular tables... Man, that's a different story. When doing the 20+ leaderboard challenge I went ahead and fired up some 50NL with a bit of table selection. Holy crap. Long story short, I believe I should have a decent edge there (if my exploitative game is any good, that is).

So I am considering to throw in some 50nl reg tables into my grind. Which will of course reduce my volume compared to 4 tabling 25nlz, but could improve hourly. I'll be experimenting with number of tables, might be mixing stakes too. We'll see. Going to do what I feel is best to make more money these days. If anybody has any tips on that, I'd appreciate every one of them.

Having said that, goal for April is at least 50k hands.

Gl everyone!

Hey guys, just a quick mid-April update.

Basically been playing 4 tables of 50NL reg tables and 1 table of 25NLz on the side to keep things not too slow. My hands/hour dropped, so won't be reaching 100k hands a month anymore, but I am on pace to hit 50k which was the initial goal. 30k played at the moment.

Month so far:


Obviously EV line is a bit concerning. But I am not too worried about it, yet. Felt like I was running bad in setup spots before the money goes in but then extremely good when it's all in the middle. And winning coinflips helps, too.

YTD (since 21st of February):


Have been trying to stop keeping an eye on results during sessions or after them. Tried to do it for 3 days, succeeded, and have to say - wow, what a relief! I am a big fish when it comes to not caring about short term results, to the point that approaching the red after being in the green for the session starts to cause some form of anxiety; I also tend to keep playing longer hours when down and vice versa, relax too much when winning big, etc. So honestly, not knowing how much down/up I am made it far less stressful, I enjoyed playing more and felt less unnecessary tension.

I know it's quite a popular goal here in PGC to stop taking care of results. I won't be an exception. Goal is to take a look at the results only once a week, on Sundays. Excited about this one, cause honestly, I feel this is going to improve the overall quality of my game and I'm very confident I'll stick to it. If this goes as expected, plan is to prolong those periods to two weeks, etc.


As far as real life goes, shite has, unfortunately, hit the fan in my company. 20% of employees in our base have been fired. Luckily I am not one of them, YET. With the situation that we have, I am more than sure there will be more sacking and honestly I would not bet on myself to be in the company when times do get better. Even though in theory, I should be one of the last ones to be let go since I hold multiple positions, have good reputation, etc. Corona is just incredibly dire for civil aviation.

As a result I've started looking into options in case my flying is over. Besides playing I am studying JavaScript with the plan to one day re-qualify to IT. Obviously it would take a lot of time for me to acquire knowledge good enough to apply for junior positions, so in the worst case scenario I might actually be forced to try and play pro for some time. I'd probably join some cfp stable and grind my azz off if it comes to that. But that's too many "ifs" for now.

Cool thread OP, great volume and results thus far, have a somewhat similar story to your original intro. Few years ago, self taught myself JS and successfully landed a job as a dev, can be done within a relatively short time given the right work ethic and commitment which I’m sure you have.

If you were to choose poker then a cfp seems a great option nowadays

Thanks for kind words.

Wow, that's inspiring. Well done!! May I ask how did you go about it, what was your learning like? Any good resources you would advice? I am mostly using udemy and codecademy atm. What would you say is a realistic timeframe to learn from the very basics to landing a junior position?

Also, how do you like the job, was it very difficult when You just started out? And how was the interview?

Sorry for this pile of questions man, but I am genuinely very interested to hear it all.

hey, yeah no problem. I started out with Udemy too, I think the main course I found useful was web developer zero to mastery, but I actually did not finish it. The course was great for the basics, but the fact is barely any course on Udemy will go into the detail you need, but it does help you know what you need to be learning and from there you can dive deeper into anything you need.

I think juts as important, perhaps more so than the skills is your networking. Once I started on the path I was connecting with everyone I could local to me on linkedin, asking them what they were doing on a daily basis, what they suggest I learn etc. From there I met with a few companies just for a chat la while before I was ready for a job, again this gave me great insight into what companies were looking for in a junior and put me on the radar for the future.

I was lucky with the company I found in terms of the interview, it was pretty much just a half hour conversation, very little technical stuff, which was more focussed on my attitude and my thought process tackling problems. I think the scary whiteboarding interviews you hear about are not really happening for a lot of small to mid sized companies now, which is the type of place you wanna work initially anyway, the smaller the place the more hands on you are going to get in a short space of time.

I think I landed a job after 8 months of learning, but def learnt more in the first month on the job than the previous 8, so yeah the job was tough initially, but I have now been working about 18months, still learning a lot and still really enjoying it.

Feel free to PM with discord/skype and we can take the conversation there to not derail the thread to much if you like.

@UAC,

Thanks a lot far a detailed answer. Really appreciate your time. I'll definitely contact You at some point with further questions / tips / advice / help. Good to know that I can get in touch.


Recap of the week

First and foremost - I've succeeded not to look at results! Since my last post which was written on Saturday up until now (Sunday) I looked at my HEM for results exactly 0 times. Really happy, since I have tried this thing in the past and usually failed miserably.

Won't lie, the last two days I've been ITCHING to take a sneak peak but held.

Overall, this thing definitely is +EV and one I am planning to never stop doing. Much less anxiety, stress during/after sessions, unnecessary thoughts about short term variance, etc. Makes it that much easier to bring A, B+ game and sustain it throughout sessions. Don't know why I did not practice it before. I guess wisdom does come with age.

Results wise, well, before checking the results this morning, I thought I was up something like 500, 600$ tops. Cause frankly it felt like a good week. Seconds before enabling the "net won$" stat in HEM I was actually super excited, feeling some kind of a rush even. Anyway, what I did not expect was this. I thought I messed up something with the filters at first.



I knew I was doing well this week, but this is 2 times better than expected. Happy days, but won't be making early conclusions. Will just try to keep doing what I am doing. Feels good to be running well, though.

Next update will come on 2nd of May with April recap. Till then, the goal again is not to check results and pass 50k hands mark for the month. 44k currently, so should do it comfortably.

in, gl

is SN outed yet?

Thanks for visiting and no, didn't give it away. But we can talk in PM.
_____


Hey to whoever is reading this. I'm bringing an update a little bit earlier than expected. Just finished my last session in April, leaving the town tomorrow and not coming back till late Sunday, then Monday is my 1 year anniversary as a married man, so thought today is a better day to wrap it all up.

Because of that I obviously had to see my results. Nonetheless, very happy that I am feeling less and less of an urge to check them during sessions. Might try to prolong those no-check-results periods to two weeks in May.


April review

Pretty sick month. Have to say it exceeded expectations. Reached volume goal as planned, with 75% of hands played on regular tables. I was going from March to April with an ambition to look for ways to improve my hourly, in the end managed to more than double it. Also kept the run-good in the yellow line, which, of course, helped.

Not much to add really. Played quite consistently, improved here and there, fixed some mental leaks, won coinflips and punished some whales.

April in numbers




On another topic, decided to withdraw all my funds from GG (didn't play a single hand there since the OP of this thread). I just hate their PVI manipulations and super high rake. Transferred those funds to Party instead. Enjoying it so far.


May preview

Looking at what's to come, the first thought is that it's going to be harder to collect volume, for a couple of reasons.

1) Aviation seems to be waking up and as a result, most likely I'll start flying mid-month. Of course there shouldn't be too many flights right out of the gate, but probably I won't be able to play as much as I'd like.

2) I'll be losing first 4 days being out of town.

3) Planning to stick to playing regular tables only. I can play 5 of them quite comfortably, 6 is on the limit if I want to keep very good attention and quality of the game (funny cause I was able to 4 table zoom without any issues - maybe keeping track of action in 4 rather than 6 windows is easier. Also Party is hudless, so can't really half-ass there). I am yet to decide where I want to play more volume, Stars or Party, but I guess it's not too relevant.

That said, goal I've set for May is 40k hands.

The exciting part is that at the moment I have ~50 buyins for 100NL. So the plan is to return home, play more 50NL and if it continues going well, some kind of a shot at 100 is going to be in order!

Guess that is it for the time being. Thanks if You're still reading.


YTD

May so far

Well, no 100nl shot, yet - facing some adversity in 50nl streets.

This hand pretty much sums up my May up until now.



Realistically, it's not surprising since I was considerably over-performing the past two months. So, some struggles were due to come. What I am very concerned about is that in bad times I revert to my C-game, basically thinking that every villain is outplaying me when in reality people just flop more good hands. So I start to look people up -> am shown runner runner flush -> bash myself for stupidity -> still can't find folds later. What's worse is the higher the limit, the more I tend to be that suspicious regfish, thinking that people must be running me over.

IMO this is one of the biggest weaknesses of mine that has prevented me from playing higher than 100nl in my poker journey. To this day I am trying to overcome it.

But, eh, got to keep grinding, be smart about optimizing things like playing times, routines pre/post sessions, mental state and things should get better. No need to lose my shite over a bad stretch of 15k hands.

May:


Ytd:



Let's see if I can turn it around until the end of the month, planning to play 20k more hands.

hey man, I can relate to a lot of what you're saying, whenever a little runbad comes I start to question what I am doing and inevitably start calling more rivers when I should be folding etc.

And yeah I think it is natural to feel like that every-time you shot take a higher stake than your usual because you just assume everyone is better. In other words emphasising the leaks/weaknesses already identified even more.

I think the only real way to overcome this is just to rinse and repeat a few times until we get it into our heads that it's still the same game and not everyone is running you over etc

gl mate

Nice thread man. Where about you from out of interest ? How are you studying at the moment?

Great results man. I've heard the rake on Stars is brutal, and the rewards have been gutted. Why not play elsewhere?

Nice thread, gl with your challenge. Seems you been through some brutal downswings. What was your worst downswing buy ins wise? And how much RB u get? My last downswing the RB + promos helped me out a lot.

Yeah man, agree to the bolded part very much. I find the more consistent I am with the volume, the easier it gets to stop thinking about irrelevant things. Even though I guess it's natural to question our performances when things are going bad - brain is wired in such a way that we tend to directly link our results to our actions. Which is not necessarily very efficient when we play a game this much affected by variance. Cheers!

Hey, I am from Lithuania. Studying mostly by actively watching videos and taking notes. Also I use GTO+ to run sims, but mostly I study 3/4 bet pots since my PC is quite old, so tighter ranges are faster to solve. Even though I probably should do a lot more work on SRP's since it's very often that I find myself not really sure what to do in quite common spots.

Hey sir, thanks for the kind words. Well, tbh the rake is not too bad compared to some other sites, relatively speaking. It's the lack of - or should I say non-existence - of RB that sucks, but because of that rec to reg ratio is quite good. Atm I am mostly playing 4 regular tables of Stars and 1 or 2 of Party. Any poker room suggestions?

Welcome to the thread! Yeah, I have a history of big downers, mainly because I can't handle them too well mentally, guess I just lose confidence too fast. Then my WR plummets further, etc.

As far as buy-ins go I am not exactly sure, but I had one around 50 BI's.

Since most of my volume is at stars, RB is very poor. To be exact, at the moment my rakeback YTD is 12% which in Stars terms is not even that bad. It's because I have received a random bonus from Stars (Redemption points bonus) and then they had a promotion which paid people out if they ran good in card distribution for the first 200 hands of the day. Got some prizes in that one as well.

Looking forward, I expect that RB to go even lower unless I change sites, but frankly I don't see too many great options. I hate gg network for their shady pvi stuff and rake traps, winning poker's thread is filled with various issues, etc. Where do you play yourself?

Thank You all for stopping by, happy to see some interest ITT.

May review


May was awful. I've been cold as ice for the majority of the month in terms of card distribution and runouts. At some point it got frustrating enough to creep into the quality of my game as well. A lot of sub-optimal sessions, too much passiveness. Just couldn't get anything going. Also, did not hit 40k hands goal, even though I did come close by playing 38k.

Most of my losses came from Zoom / Fastforward. Still not sure if I did not adjust to it and got massively outplayed or there was some really tough variance involved. Probably a mix of both, but I did get rekt there. Felt like I've been missing every board and people kept pounding with bets, raises and shoves.

Funny how poker works. After April I felt like a crusher winning 45 BI's; in May I lost 15 and feel quite bad about my game.


May:



Oh well, it is how it is. Have to take in on the chin and keep moving forward, getting better at the game.

Ytd, just hit 200k hands. And the graph still looks decent which does help to put things into perspective, to stay optimistic.

Ytd:



June preview

Having said everything about May, I am confident June is going to be better. I will be staying away from fast fold tables and stick to regular tables which has been going well for me. Secondly, plan is to play 3-4 hours and study 1 hour a day. Hopefully that translates into some success. Volume is not going to be fantastic when averaging less than 500 hands/hour playing reg tables, but hopefully winrate can make up for it.

Wish You all a very profitable June, lads.

Hey guys. Boy, time goes fast. 1 month is gone, so, time for...

June review / life

First and foremost, I have to say that this was the month in which European aviation started its recovery. My company was not an exception. I got to fly again after 4 months of stagnation. Quite a good feeling to be back at it, to have a proper job again.

This means that I have reached my main goal of the blog. As non-astounding as my poker results were since OP, poker has helped me lots in dealing with financial responsibilities during corona crisis, when I did not work at all. During those 4 months I have averaged ~1000 Euros of profit/month. Where I live, this is a decent amount of money from the side. So, that, together with my base salary from work (the one I get even if I don't do a single flight a month) was enough to pay rent, provide my wife and daughter (turned 5 months today, woohoo ) with everything they need and more, go on a small holiday, not owe anyone a single dime and we haven't touched our emergency fund savings at all. If it wasn't for poker, I am not sure this would have been as easy cruise through this crisis as it was. Some of my colleagues who do not do anything on the side had and are still having much bigger trouble making ends meet. This is why I feel thankful for the game of poker. Maybe I am not some kind of sicko super nosebleeds baller, but this game was some part of my life for a long time and now I have managed to get some use of it.

Anyway, I have learnt that being back at work regularly, season being summer with all its distractions, being a dad to a 5 month baby, having a healthy relationship, working out 4 times/week AND putting in quality, consistent volume of poker is not an easy task.

I am not b**ching or looking for excuses, but for someone who wants to take poker non-professionally yet seriously, this is a factor. Basically, I don't want to sacrifice any of those areas and to do that, I'll have to get better at time management.


June review / poker

Played 27k hands. Only. Quite a disappointing number frankly. On a positive side, the end result is in the green, which psychologically is very important after the failure in May. We're back at the highest point.

June:


Also, happy with the studying. I think I have made some correct adjustments to the pool which led to improvements in my non-sd winnings without affecting the blue line too much. At least for the last ~13k hands my redline is flat/slightly positive, which before basically never happened, at least in my current DB. Obviously very small sample and I'm not going to elaborate too much on this until it's confirmed, will have to collect more hands to see if it's continuing. But I definitely feel a bit better about myself as a player compared to 1 month ago.


Blog preview

So yeah, as mentioned, one of the main goals of this blog is now kind of accomplished. Even the thread title isn't relevant anymore. Also, today is exactly half of 2020, so maybe it's a good time to re-evaluate / set new goals for the rest of it and beyond.

I thought about stopping the thread right here, but decided against it as it's nice to document the progress, get a reply or two, writing is both useful and fun, also being public is motivating. So let's carry on, shall we.

The new goal I have set to myself is turn my current BR from 3858$ to 20k$, post rakeback and withdrawals. Quite a long shot, yes, but You have to aim big don't You. To do that I'll probably have to establish myself as 100NL winner at some point, something I could never achieve before. Let's hope wisdom does come with age.


July preview

As for actual goals, I am not going to change much from before.

[] 30k hands
[] 1 hour of study / day (on days I'll be playing poker)
[] Checking results weekly, on Sundays


Think that will be it for this update. Cheers everyone, let's crush July.

Ytd: