Hey all,

Small introduction about myself:
I am 29 years old and I work full time as a software-dev. In 2020 I decided to quit gaming in my free time and started playing NL2 with a bankroll of 50$. Fast forward nearly 4 years: I am currently playing 200Blitz on ACR and eventually want to move up in stakes.

My goals for this blog are:
- to write about my journey to move up in stakes as a part time poker player
- make more contacts in the poker community
- getting a sanity check when I need it

Poker is my hobby and most of my freetime goes into it. My poker bankroll is strictly separated from my savings and I don't want to deposit or withdraw anytime soon.

For those interested this is my recent 200Blitz Graph:


And my first attempt at NL400 and NL600 regtables:


Also please give me some ideas what you would like me to write about:
- Should I write a proper introduction?
- Do you want insights into how or what I study?
- HHs?
- I probably won't write much about the mental game
- Should i also blog about my vacations, because I travel alot?
- How often should I post? (Perhaps results once a month?)

Any feedback or input is welcome!

sick giraffe, as someone who hopes to one day climb to 200 blitz, and as someone who is also worried about botting / collusion, its nice to see such a sick graph over so many hands to see what is possible. Thanks for sharing bro.
im so in

Wow, great results. What is your nickname?

Also please give me some ideas what you would like me to write about:
- Should I write a proper introduction? Yes
- Do you want insights into how or what I study? YES
- HHs? Yes
- Should i also blog about my vacations, because I travel alot? YES
- How often should I post? (Perhaps results once a month?) YES

^^

Thanks! Keep in mind, it's still a small sample, running quite well, and the pool was very decent in December.


For now, I try not to worry about collusion, botting, or RTA because there's nothing I can change about it and Pool is certainly beatable. I'm hopeful that sites will eventually improve their security systems.


Currently, I prefer not to share my screen name because I'm doing extreme adjustments against most of the top volume players.

I'll start with a better introduction:

I am from germany and I started playing poker in 2020 on GG playing NL2 for the first few months beeing more or less breakeven even after RB. I managed to move up to NL25 until 2021, after starting to watch more theory based videos and working with solvers instead of watching countless of hours Play&Explains by alot of different people.

In 2021 germany introduced a new gambling law, which caused higher rake on most poker sites for german citizens. I thought poker was not an option anymore, cashed out all of my ~1300$ profit and quit the game for half a year.

With the start of 2022 I finally started to play again and moved to ACR with a new roll of 500$. I was more or less what u call a "breakeven rakebackgrinder" trying to imitate a solver. Playing with a winrate of 0-1bb/100 before rakeback and managed to get 50$ from the beast leaderboard on most weeks. When i was comfortable enough with my roll i started the same process with moving up to 50Blitz (25Blitz pool never run) and played around 600k hands with a sensational winrate of 0 bb/100 winrate.

In September of 2022 i finished university degree with a Msc in Physics and started my fulltime Job as software-dev in November. I was giving myself a shot of 5 buy-ins at 200Blitz in October 2022 and got crushed in a few hundred hands. I decided to move to BOL and start playing there more NL100 and NL200 as i heard it was a lot softer. This was also the time I tried to understand more about population tendencies and finding/fixing my own leaks (which where all over the gametree). I drilled alot of Flop and Turn defences and Cbetting. I read alot of blogs and watched videos on Youtube and RIO about simplifying strategies. I started with writing a "Playbook" for the most common situations. I tried to capture most heuristics for many spots and improved them over time to be always a bit more complex but still manageable to execute.

This is what it looks like nowadays:


And for example Overview of 3BP OOP Aggressor in SBvsBTN:


At this time I also won a freeroll of Pokercode which earned me a month of their Membership! I binge-watched their cash libary and learned alot about poker listening to go0se.core explaining how to think about ranges and strategies.

I had decent success on BOL and won around 6bb/100 on a 108k hand sample over the next few months:


Then I decided I wanted to move back to ACR due to lower Rake, having more Rakeback and most importantly more traffic. I took a month break from playing and only focused on studying what exploiting really means and invested in a month of Deepsolver. I developed a big passion to understand and form strategies and exploits on all the most common spots. Furthermore i saw the usefullness of drilling with Anki-Flashcards and made a bunch of them theory-/exploitative-/actual hands-based. Over the month, I probably averaged about 8 hours study after working for 8 hours in my job.

Fast forward to now u see my Blitz200 Graph in my initial post and my current bankroll is about 31k$. I don't have a monetary goal in mind and will try to move up in stakes that i will feel more comfortable playing bigger.

Currently my Playing to Study ratio is about 1:1 (Pool never runs when i finish work) and I purchased a month of GTOWizard AI just before they increased their price.
My study consists of Strategy development, exploit-understanding, reviewing myself, pool and top volume regs.

In terms of vacations, I managed in 2023 to visit Spain, Italy, UK, South-Korea, Oman, Chile, Bolivia and Peru and hope 2024 will continue just as well!

Took me way to long to write this post down and I probably forgot to mention half of my journey up to now...

Excellent post!

IN! Good luck, Yeti!

Hi! Whats the software you used for making the playbook?

Sicko in the making, GL OP.

Thanks, guys! I will think about a new topic to write about for next week.

I use and prefer Obsidian, but honestly all note-taking apps, such as Notion, etc. are fine too.

Hi , good luck with the challenge. We have probably played each other a ton.

How many tables are you playing at once? Also use a combination of deep solver to node lock the strategies, what type of note taking do you take on players and how do you make deviations in your strategy.

Have you had to change any of your exploits vs the high vol regs? Or are you finding they just play quite a tight game.

How we do you find drive hud opposed to h2n or hm3?

Good luck sir

The blitz pool is basically who can cooler each other the most. I also have the same redline because the pool plays so face up and you can print with redline but it’s such a boring game because of simply how tight everybody is. 22/19/9 is the normal reg with wwsf of 45 and river bet 37 or something ridiculous. Best thing to do is get out of blitz and play reg imo

Thank you! Probably a ton if you play at EU evening times!

I try to do more focused sessions 2-tabling and concentrate on executing strategies and exploits I have studied. However I probably end up 4-tabling a bit more than 2-tabling. Reg tables I cap at 6 and when shottaking max 4. Most notetaking is done when I review specific players. For example there are some high-volume regs which have extreme sizing tells. (One regular consistently uses a specific sizing for about 90% of his bluffs when stabbing the river and uses different sizes for his value bets) & (another reg has probably a ~150% size button and scrolls a bit up when he has value and doesn't scroll up with bluffs)
Those are extreme examples, which will be very hard for the reg to be aware of and adjust accordingly)

I noticed a few regs went to leveling war against me, which led to some fun HHs and adjustments after!

Can't comment on hm3 - but as far as i know it's quite similiar to PT4? Used to play around with PT4 alot and liked it, when i got comfortable with it and learned how to program new stats. Big downside is population tendencies are not really possible to study. I used drive hud mostly for BOL because PT4 doesn't work without another card catcher and for some reason I was not aware H2N was supporting a free hud for BOL. Never really used drive hud besides tracking hands tbh. Didn't feel right for me when trying to work with it, but was probably just a personal preference to use another software. Nowadays I only use H2N4 since most bugs got fixed and it's still free! Got also pretty familiar with H2N4 in doing DBA, MDA, setting up stats & hud. If you set it up properly you can do proper analysis of a Player in ~15 mins which would take hours in PT4.

I disagree - Imo if it's necessary to cooler someone to get stacks in, you can print by overbluffing a ton in this node.

Fun is subjective. I have more fun, when I do strategic adjustments against regs which they will most likely never notice!

I wish they would have wwsf of 45! According to my sample, the average top 15 volume reg is: 22/19/10 with wwsf 51 and any bet river 43. I can't argue against regtables especially when table-selecting. Unfortunately during my playing-times there are mostly just 2-3 tables running where some of them are bomb pot tables which I tried to dodge in the past. I am definitely sample-biased but I think the blitz pool is good enough to play in and has enough recreationals + regs which are leaking too much.

How many hands do you have in pool and in the Reg’s? My samples are generally low with one player having 15k hands. There are some regs who are far better in terms of aggression however most are just super tight and don’t bluff nearly enough so easy to overfold vs.

Your 60k hand graph with winning mannnnny BI is a nice run. I would suspect 500k hands is enough to get a true win rate idea.

I’m guessing the top regs have 2-4bb wr, 4bb being the top end of the spectrum over large samples.

If we are talking about the top volume regs: yes they are underbluffing rivers in average by a few percent. BUT this is not 'super' tight and it also depends heavily on the node. For example tripple barrel IP 3BP is way underbluffed, but wide formations in broken lines are mostly overbluffed (also by very tight villains)

Thanks! I'm not a fan of thinking in terms of a 'real win rate', which has a lot more influences than just a big sample. I just try to play to the best of my knowledge. Win rates, even over large samples, should always be taken with a grain of salt. I would be surprised, if there are no regs with samples over 500k hands with >4bb/100 tbh.

what does “broken lines” mean?

like bet check bet or check bet bet etc?

I don't have an exact definition to the "broken" lines, but XC-XX-B as OOP PFC is a node where even nit regs overbluff (also because they valuebet not thinly enough in this spot).
Some X-B-B lines are also overbluffed but not all. It also depends heavily on if it's a 2BP or 3BP, IP or OOP, PFR or PFC and positions. I'm also no expert to ask this, since I don't have nearly enough data to confirm this for the 200Blitz pool. But based on specific player type analysis of other pools I tend to believe it will be a similiar outcome.

"In compliance with a notice sent by the Gaming Regulatory Authority to some online poker brand operators, ACR Poker has decided to cease all gameplay and gambling operations for customers from Germany.

As you are a player registered as a resident in Germany, we will remove access to our poker products on January 29th, 2024."



We have nowhere to go now, friend.

I'm shocked right now about this news. I was not expecting this, to be honest. I'm not sure how or if I will even continue playing poker.