how can you not understand? when you analyze other people's hands you look at it objectively, so your advice isn't as horrible. when you analyze your own hands you make a million excuses why X play is good even though a couple dozen people are telling you it's lighting money on fire, including your backer

this shows how little you understand variance. 60k hands is literally nothing. you aren't running slightly above ev these 100 hours under stake. even a 1/3 crusher would be running pretty well above ev with your results, and you are no 1/3 crusher

If you want a job that uses your brain and skills, rather than your charisma and personality, then you need to learn something that is valuable to employers. A language, programming, learning a skill or trade. Otherwise you are destined for a life of pizza delivery boy/factory worker/similar job for your whole life. Unless you actively improve your social skills, in which case better job opportunities will open up for you.

Still don't understand why you don't ask that multi-millionaire CEO friend of yours for a job.

I think you actually have that the wrong way around.


Should be no problem getting part time hospitality work in a cafe or something, they get paid good wages + tips. She would prob earn just as much working less than she is is now. Also, both of you are 'working' now are you planning of finding a unit of your own, rather than sleeping on the floor in someone elses? Surely you can afford $300 per week.

I looked it up just then. If you have a 17bb/100 win rate (which is about 5bb/hr on a live table), and you play a very high variance style (normal variance for full-ring is 60-80, but I set it to 100), the probability of you losing money after 60k hands is 0.0016%.

So you have a 1 in 60,000 chance (close to impossible) of losing money playing full-time live poker for a year, if your win rate is modest (5bb/hr) and your variance is very high (100bb/100).

If we increase your win rate and decrease variance, it becomes pretty much impossible that such a prolonged downswing could ever happen to you.

It is virtually impossible to go on a 1 year downswing at live poker if you play full-time and you're a decent winner at the games.

You’re a professional poker player yet you don’t track your volume? Any poker tracking app does that automatically. “It changes” is the worst reason to consider not tracking hours. The only valid reason to not track is being a recreational player.

Imagine if a business ran like the way you treat poker:
- it’s ok that our net profit is negative cuz we’ve made more sales than ever this quarter
- no need to track consultant hours since they vary from week to week

Thinking of your endeavor playing poker as a business and treating it with that same level of seriousness is the only way to make it in this game.

I do track my total hours played and my total profit played (well for the first 5 months of the year, I only calculated profit and not hours). I just don't think there's any use in making a "per week" calculation when each week varies a lot. I'd rather do a "per hour" calculation instead.

A lot of people overestimate their winrate a lot.
How many hands do you have to play to get a definite number of your winrate? Nobody knows.

It is pretty much impossible to work out your winrate as your play style and ability would change while working towards the sample to find out.

Also 17bb/100 is not sustainable for any player regardless of how good you are. You should be happy with about 8bb/100 as even the best players probably aren't managed much over 10bb/100 over very large samples.

I'm talking about live poker, not online poker.

17bb/100 is only 5bb/hr at full-ring live.

This is like earning $15/hr on a 1/3 or earning $25/hr on a 2/5, which is definitely possible.

My point is: it's almost mathematically impossible for someone who earns $15/hr at 1/3 NL live to go on a 1 year downswing if that person plays 40 hours per week.

And if my win rate is any higher than $15/hr (which I strongly believe is the case), then that just makes the downswings even less damaging.

I dont hate you. Id say very few in here hate you outside of kelvis, and charisma has nothing to do with it, this is the internet.

I'm not very familiar with live poker but even still 17bb/100 sounds very high

What does 1 year have to do with it? You don't have a playing bankroll let alone a few months of expenses set aside in an emergency fund.

This... AND

His monthly nut is what he needs to profit in order to be break even in life. One nasty swing, staked or not, and this still ends poorly.

Building that buffer is a pipe dream unless OP runs PURE for an extended period without his ego taking over.



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not that high for live poker, recs are often -50 to -100bb/100 losers

One thing I've noticed about live low stakes poker is it just tends to play much bigger than online. At a live 1/2 game people are opening like $10-$16 and so many pots are going multiway and getting so inflated. One thing I often do when I play live is imagine the game is double the actual stakes and most players are short stacked. Once I do that everything makes a lot more sense in terms of BBs. So a $12 open becomes like a 3x open online, getting a $200 stack in is really just like stacking off against a 50bb short stacker, getting a $400 stack in is just like a standard 100bb spot rather than a crazy deep 200bb spot.

I guess that kind of thinking can be applied to winrates too. You could be winning at 17bb/100 in a 1/2 but given the fact that as soon as someone opens the game instantly doubles in size it's more like a win rate of 8.5bb/100 in a 2/4 game.

I'm no expert on standard deviation but intuitively, I'd think that playing lots of pots with a low spr lend themselves to a much higher sd which would make 6b overestimate his wr atm and 1/60k losing player analysis. Perhaps I'm wrong on that.

For the NEXT year. Which is technically true, but the more relevant topic is how likely you are to lose for a year out of a career of playing. It's still very misleading. I would like to confirm the calculation by hand but it is tedious. Using the same poker tool I believe you did ( http://pokerdope.com/poker-variance-calculator/ ) I ran many sets of 1k simulations using 17BB/100, 60k hands and 100BB/hr standard deviation. And I got many results where the worst run was around break even (most simulations). This suggests more like a 1/1500 chance of breaking even.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the calculations in the table below the charts. I may do them manually if I have time later because the graph does not mesh with the chart.

The guy said 600 hours by the way. The first one who started this back and forth. Using 600 hours the chart says 1.12% chance of losing over that period.

It is virtually impossible to go on a 1 year downswing at live poker if you play full-time and you're a decent winner at the games.[/QUOTE]

That just isn't true for reasons stated, but there are even more reasons it isn't.

Most pros don't play 2000 hours a year. More like 1000 to 1500.

Your SD is also almost certainly higher than 100BB/100. Mine is 111BB/100 and I play much less aggro than you do.

There is also a fundamental problem in using an observed winrate (the sample mean) as the actual winrate (the mean). We don't know the actual mean. Say you play 600 hours and have a sample mean of 17BB/100 you then go on to use that as the true mean in statistical calculations, but the results of these calculations are almost meaningless. Why? Because of sampling bias. We have no idea if 17BB/100 is even close. You might run above average and your true winrate is 8BB/100, but naturally you assume it's 17BB and use that for future calculations. This makes it much more likely you can win a lot one year and lose or break even the next.

And again the question is not so much "how likely am I to go on a 1 year downswing next year" but "how likely am I to go on a 1 year downswing ever?"

Probably wasting my breath here but I find this subject interesting so even if you don't get a word of it, oh well.

6b, you say people overestimate their winrates but are completely confident in your own after what is still a relatively small sample, do you not see the irony here?

You've also seemingly ran very well and after chopping with DL you're making minimum wage. How do you plan on making it off stake doing this if we presume you're running above EV which seems to be fairly agreed upon itt?

Do you honestly not think you'd be better off just getting a job for 6 months, 1 year or w/e and using that money to pad your roll so you can play off stake and have significantly better living conditions (ie a place to yourself). There are other jobs available than delivering pizzas.

6b is also not understanding how downswings work for most people, which is odd because he had one himself. Unless you have a job or are insanely overrolled, you just cant lose for 12 months straight with high volume. You probably can't even break even. What happens to most people is they get crushed for 2-3 months, then their volume decreases as they take a mental break. They then come back, their roll is smaller and it is tough to grind out of the hole they got into.

So many grey zones at 25nl online

Played a quick online session today. Won $60 in about 2-3 hours playing 25nl zone. One of the reasons why I'm not putting much volume in online is because whenever I play a session, even a very short session, there's always like 10 hands that I'm not sure about. I'm the kind of guy that obsesses over a lot of hand histories, so if I get "stuck" in too many spots without a clear plan on how I should proceed in the hand, then I gradually get tilted and have to quit my session early.

The good news is that I don't get stuck in too many live spots, mainly because I play so few hands per hour, so I can play really long live sessions before the tilt kicks in. But online, it's just so easy to have 10 confusing hands over a 1 hour period, and it soon gets overwhelming.

I think that once I become more experienced, I will be able to play longer sessions, but at the moment, there's so many grey zones and unclear spots that I would rather put a small amount of time towards playing and a large amount of time towards studying those spots than I would do it the other way around.

Many times, it's not the specific hand I play that confuses me, but rather, I think about all the things that could possibly go wrong if villain decided to take a different line, or I think about what I'd do if I had a different hand instead in that same spot, and I realise that, whilst the specific hand worked out fine for me, I could've been in a gross spot if all the stars didn't align in the perfect way they did.

So some of the spots I'm unsure about:

Hand 1: Imagine if I faced a flop or turn raise...

$25 effective
UTG raises $0.75
Hero 3bets $2.50 CO with KJcc
UTG calls $2.50

Flop ($5.35) Js 6h 2h

UTG checks
Hero bets $1.67
UTG calls $1.67

What's my plan here if I get raised on the flop? Do I just blindly call down 3 streets?

Turn ($8.69) Js 6h 2h Jh

UTG checks
Hero bets $4.59
UTG calls $4.59

If villain decides to x/jam turn, do I just call it off, knowing that I'm only going to boat up 20% of the time and knowing that I'm crushed by AJ and boats? Or do I have to fold this combo?

River ($17.87) Js 6h 2h Jh Jd

UTG checks
Hero jams $16



This is a classic example of what I'm talking about: all the stars aligned perfectly and the hand turned out very simple and easy for me to play. But if the runout was any different, or if villain decided to make a move on the flop or turn, I honestly have no idea what I would've done instead. It's not enough for me to just win the hand: I want to have a clear strategy on all runouts facing all different possible actions, and I don't yet have that.

Hand 2: Took a scared/passive line here

$36 effective
Hero raises $0.60 CO with Jc Jd
BB 3bets $2.15
Hero calls $2.15

Flop ($4.40) Td 3c 2d

BB bets $2.95
Hero calls $2.95

Turn ($10.30) Td 3c 2d 5d

BB bets $6.15
Hero calls $6.15

It's easy to call with my specific hand, but would we still call if we had JJ (no diamond) in this spot? Also, is there any merit to jamming turn with our specific hand?

River ($22.60) Td 3c 2s 5d 8s

BB checks
(We have $24.50 behind)



Is this a spot we want to thin value bet? If so, how much should we bet? If we face a river x/r, what do we do?

Hand 3: The lesser of 3 evils

This hand forced me to choose between 3 options, all of which suck: do I make a really nitty fold preflop when I probably have the best hand, do I cold call a raise out of position with an extremely vulnerable hand that is difficult to play postflop, or do I cold 4bet and bloat the pot with a non-nutted hand?

$25 effective against UTG
$21 effective against BTN

UTG raises $0.85
BTN 3bets to $1.45 (wtf is this?)
Hero cold 4bets to $4.80 SB with TT
UTG folds
BTN 5bet jams $21



Is it worth obsessing over all of these small intricacies, or should I just do a brief "line check" and then move on to the next session?

Stop injecting knowledge into this sesspool 😅

Right now, I think it's better if I focus on 2 things:
1) Improving technical skills (mainly for 25nl online)
2) Putting in more volume

I don't think it's a good use of my time to spend hours discussing possible downswings, life budgets, figuring out my win rate and statistics, dreaming up where I'll be in 5 years time, etc.

Every hour that I spend doing the above is an hour that I could be playing and/or reviewing hands. So I apologise if it feels like I'm ignoring some of the above comments, but time is money and I really need to focus specifically on those 2 things.

- None of those 3 hands are tough and they should eventually become automatic when you finally beat 25NL.

- Pretty bad sizing on the 4bet-fold with 1010 and significant mistake.

- More importantly : how do you go by your studying and how are you going to learn these spots by yourself, is the question...

1) If I got 3x by KJs every time I opened from UTG I'd be rich
2) No, you don't need to go for thin value on the river
3) Seems ok, but you could consider just set-mining or just play poker post flop (as well as keeping your range wide), as you'll be put into some really tough spots if you get flatted and find yourself OOP against a strong range

Well they're tough for me. So what would you do in those situations with various different parts of your range?

What's a better sizing to pick in this situation? Should I be 4bet/folding at all, or is there a better line?

My usual way of studying (I don't know if this is efficient) is to play a very small amount of hands (usually like 500 hands or less), get stuck in about 10 different spots, then pick like 3-4 random hands out of the 10 that confused me and either message them to my friend/coach, or post them here.