It's over. Bricked the entire session again. I don't think I even picked up more than a bounty or two across all the PKOs I played.

I thought things might be turning around in the 2.20 Micro Triple Threat. I couldn't get much going through most of it but managed to win some flips and double up a couple of times to get back in the action. Then came the bustout hand:

PokerStars - 1250/2500 Ante 325 NL FAST (3 max) - Holdem - 3 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

BTN: 27.44 BB
Hero (SB): 24.75 BB
BB: 10.61 BB

3 players post ante of 0.13 BB, Hero posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.89 BB) Hero has K A

BTN raises to 2 BB, Hero raises to 24.62 BB and is all-in, fold, BTN calls 22.62 BB

Flop: (50.63 BB, 2 players) 3 2 K

Turn: (50.63 BB, 2 players) Q

River: (50.63 BB, 2 players) 2

Hero shows K A (Two Pair, Kings and Twos)
(Pre 43%, Flop 91%, Turn 0%)
BTN shows Q Q (Full House, Queens full of Twos)
(Pre 57%, Flop 9%, Turn 100%)
BTN wins 50.63 BB

What's notable about this hand is that I hesitated and thought about just flatting. We were getting close to the bubble (maybe 25 spots away) and I didn't want to shove and bust again. Normally I insta-shove AK here all day. That just shows how this bad run is starting to impact my mindset and my decision making. Of course the poker gods had to do me dirty by flopping me the K and then turn him the Q. Just brutal.

The final tourney of the session was the Winter Series 59-L, a $5.50 PKO. Once again I couldn't get anything going and then I lost half my stack when I squeeze-shoved AQs and ran into KK. I managed to win back-to-back flips to double twice but then went utterly card dead again. Busted out on this hand:

PokerStars - 1250/2500 Ante 325 NL (8 max) - Holdem - 7 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

UTG: 44.41 BB
UTG+1: 28.55 BB
MP: 41.24 BB
CO: 56.23 BB
BTN: 44.13 BB
SB: 11.44 BB
Hero (BB): 6.83 BB

7 players post ante of 0.13 BB, SB posts SB 0.5 BB, Hero posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.41 BB) Hero has 2 3

UTG calls 1 BB, fold, fold, fold, fold, SB calls 0.5 BB, Hero checks

Flop: (3.91 BB, 3 players) 2 7 K
SB checks, Hero bets 5.7 BB and is all-in, UTG calls 5.7 BB, fold

Turn: (15.31 BB, 2 players) 5

River: (15.31 BB, 2 players) 9

Hero shows 2 3 (One Pair, Twos)
(Pre 34%, Flop 18%, Turn 11%)
UTG shows J K (One Pair, Kings)
(Pre 66%, Flop 82%, Turn 89%)
UTG wins 15.31 BB

Caught by a donk who limped KJo UTG.

I have one final day off work tomorrow but I don't think I'll play. I'm feeling incredibly discouraged so it's time to step back. Playing MTTs when you're feeling confident and are actually competitive is a lot of fun. But playing when you feel like you can't do anything right and you'll inevitably bust is no fun at all. So I think I'll spend the week reviewing the session, running some hands through GTOWizard, and watching some videos. If I feel ready to get back to it next weekend, I will.

I don't understand why you would play any of these huge field small buy in tournaments. The variance in these is insane, even if the players are terrible.

With your bankroll, I recommend you only sticked to small field tournaments / MTT-SnGs with no more than lets say 500 runners. Even at a low ABI you can get decent volume playing stars only. They offer many Turbos at 11$ buyin and below with small fields. These games are still very soft, but you will have more deep runs and reach the final table more often. This is not only good for boosting your confidence, but you also get to play more short-handed when few people are left and gain valuable experience.

Playing a Winter Series 59-L, a $5.50 PKO Turbo with 5000 Runners is just gambling at this point and not worth the effort IMO.

Since you cannot grind all day based on your family and work obligations (which are great things), have you thought about just playing cash games? Less variance than tournaments and you can play whenever your schedule allows.

Sent from my Pixel 5 using Tapatalk

I have 2 young boys myself so I can relate. I think I misread your OP but I just felt bad when you said "rock bottom". I don't know where you live or what your options are but playing some live poker might get you some feel good and help you regain your confidence. Good luck!

With respect to the Winter Series events, it's just shot-taking. The allure of a big score. That's why everybody plays them. SnGs are terrible - they may be lower variance due to smaller field sizes, but the structures are also much quicker. I haven't seen the kind of smaller field tourneys you're talking about but maybe that's because of my schedule. Or maybe I've just ignored them because paying $11 to play a tourney with a $2k guarantee doesn't seem worthwhile. But I'll have a look again. It's an interesting thought and you're probably right.

Honestly? I hate cash poker. I find it mind-numbingly boring. I fell in love with poker as a game of strategy, and tournament poker adds a whole layer of strategy that doesn't exist in cash games.

I've played cash on and off over the years and it always seems futile. The same thing happens over and over again: I slowly build up a stack and then give it all back on a bad beat or running KK into AA. Rinse, repeat.

No worries, appreciate the sentiment. I love live play but don't have much opportunity where I live. I played in a local home game league for years but COVID killed it. I did win money to put towards a live event last season but haven't had the opportunity to use it yet.

There are on-demand PSKO MTT-SNGs on pokerstars 3-11$. Also 5$ FO on demand MTT-SNGs. There are also some sub 11$ Freezouts with very small fields with a normal structure (still faster than Bigs etc.) that you could register at the start of your session.

Never really understood this approach. Your ROI is maybe slightly lower in tournaments with small field size but you actually get to realize it without depending on a lot of luckboxing.

You went down from BR 1200$ to 300$ or whatever from what mainly seems due to poor game selection. How was that worthwhile?

Hi,
Thanks for posting. Feel like I have had the same feelings/history. No kids so I have gotten in more volume and that might effect slightly better results. You definitely have a lot more discipline than me. I will typically jump into $20-50 after telling myself only <$20. I've stayed away from pko since it seems like flip fest you describe(that AQ<93 hand is brutal). Also, I don't have stars so only ACR/Bonition experience. I usually cash live dailies in Vegas so online is just bad software or game selection; how do you do in live tournaments?

Random thoughts on your blog:
Top tip(though scummy) would be to max tank once you have a stack and getting near the bubble. Also, tank whenever you don't have a full table. It will be mincash or bubble boy a lot, but gets results.

TPE is one of the worst sites. IMO Poker coaching is ok if you take notes on the masterclasses then cancel sub. Matt Affleck and girafganger is good on there. One of their young coaches Tristan got a bracelet this year. Run it once is awesome so far but solver heavy.

I try to review all my hands >1.1bb won/lost from week before right before next session. So I see what I did right and wrong without going through every hand. I also check the hand graph chart to see how out of line I was preflop.

I like to open 3.2 when my opens are getting called by trash. Not sure if that will get ripped apart by pros here.

After going deep but not hitting final table doesn't seem to make much more money(3-4x buyin vs 2x buyin for mincash), I started looking at cash. Chip Reese preferred cash over tournaments so there has to be something to it. I have been going locally and a lot of regs bluff happy but not many super pros and plenty of fish. Bets/raises are so big compared to tournaments it is very +EV when you have a hand. I put in two hours and leave once I win a buyin. I love hyper sng and spinngo, but variance can be extremely tilting. I saw one rec guy on party in Pennsylvania with 70k graph from pure SNGs. I am assuming you are in one of those closed markets

I've played some of the on-demand ones, but the structures are much faster. Starting stacks of 75bb with turbo speed. Turns into a very shortstack push/fold game pretty quickly.

But your point is valid and it might be a good idea to shift my focus to smaller fields. I did have some success on 888 with 150-200 person fields, but they just didn't offer enough games to keep me on the site. I also tried GG but for some reason couldn't find any success there.

Anyway, thanks for the input.

Never had a chance to play a large field live tourney, I've only played local home games. Some success there.

I have been very disappointed with TPE. I'm a big fan of the podcast and of Andrew Brokos specifically, but the site seems like it's just collecting dust. I'm absorbing what I can from the content and then plan to cancel. Maybe I'll try some free trials on other sites if they're available. Some of them are crazy expensive.

I've actually just started playing around with larger raise sizes myself. I've been questioning the smaller raises for a while and finally decided to try something different. Alex Fitzgerald was an influence on me in this regard. I had this lightbulb moment when I realized how annoyed I get when people use large sizings and how it impacts my decisions in response. It may not be solver-approved, but success in poker doesn't come from doing what everyone else is doing.

Just keep your chin up and keep putting in plenty volume. Your best approach as far as this thread goes is to share some hands where you're curious whether you played correctly or not instead of hands where you get sucked out on or coolered. I understand the frustration, but in the end they're just standard spots. Maybe you can throw one or two in from time to time, but I would mainly throw in hands you want some feedback on if I were you.

The hand where you overbet jam bottom pair on K72r vs an UTG limp and a SB complete is a mistake and a bit of a red flag. You're gonna get called too often here to make protecting your equity against overcards profitable. You might have more leaks in your game than you think. One way to find out is by welcoming feedback.

Best of luck!

By the way, are micro/small stake SnG's still running on Stars? Back in the day you had the 180 mans for a couple of bucks and stuff like that, or even 18 mans and 9 mans. If you want to get a more realistic view of your long term winrate, maybe you can grind those for a while. Will get you into a lot of shortstack spots so you can dive into certain concepts real well, like shoving and restealing ranges at short stack sizes, or ICM adjusted play. Especially at micro/low stakes players will have a terrible understanding of playing in ICM spots, which on it's own will make the games plenty profitable if you develop a good understanding yourself.

Valid point, and I will try to do that more. Things have been going so badly they I just haven't had many interesting spots to review.


Possibly, but I was down to 6.8bb to start the hand and we weren't anywhere near the bubble. I got a free flop and hit BP. Either I take it down there or I get called and have a shot to double or triple, and on such a dry flop I'm never going to be in terrible shape.



Yes but like I said above, the structures are way too fast. Average stacks are like 8bb on the final table. Besides, thanks to years of playing SnGs back in the day, I'm pretty comfortable with shortstack play.

Manage your expectations. Your life situation and preferences led you to choose 150-200 runner turbo MTTs. You've acknowledged this is a high variance game. Playing 200 runner MTTs, with 11% rake, and a 30% ROI, you could very easily be down or barely up after 500 games. That's just the way this cookie crumbles.

You also have a few options for change. Change your format, play smaller fields, play slower blind levels, with everything there's a give and a take, if you don't like the results in your current game maybe it would be worth it to sacrifice more hours and learn to be able to play longer in exchange for better results.

Increase your ROI. Love that you're doing active learning, that's the way to go, and there is a ton of free content on Youtube. Just make sure you're not just repeatedly seeing what you would do then seeing what the content creator would do. Try to learn why we take certain actions, what is the decision making framework, what other spots do these concepts apply. Also be sure to vet your content, there's a ton of nonsense out there.

I definitely agree 1:1 coaching probably isn't correct for your situation, but there are plenty training sites that will deliver you positive ROI if you take the time to really engage the content. I was a loser at live 1/2 (embarrassing) and 10NL online when I started paying for a training site. Have spent $1500 total on coaching and have made significantly more than that since.

Learn to love the game and your results as is. If you're a rec player, and you don't want to change your format because of personal factors, and you don't want to increase/change your method of learning, this is the game you play. You're going to have a lot of swings, you will have long periods like this that feel bad, you'll probably have similar periods of run good that feel awesome, this is your game, enjoy it.

If someone comes to you and says there's an answer where you play the same volume of the same games with the same approach and volume to studying and the same mentality towards the game and your results and how you feel about them change.....they're lying.

Not to pile on but looking at the hands you shared, you really need to consider your perspective on the game. One hand you played AA perfectly and lost the minimum on one of the worst possible run outs for you. You lost AA to AK AIPF. You lost getting AQ in against 93. You lost AIPR AK v QQ.....this kind of stuff can't bother you. In any format of poker, these are hands where there's no reason to feel anything, super standard spots that are going to happen to you super regularly.

Totally agree, and I have no problem with bad beats when they happen at a reasonable (expected) frequency. But it's easy to lose perspective when they seem to happen at a much higher than expected frequency over what feels like a sustained period of time. Now that I think about it, one trick I used to use to avoid getting down about bad beats is to literally ignore the result. I would shove my chips in and then immediately flip over to another table and not watch the runout or result. I should probably start doing that again.

And I can't argue with anything you said in the post above.

Openshoving 99 for 13bb bvb is certainly not optimal. Also donkshoving for overpot with 23o on 7bbs into two players on 27Kr is terrible. Maybe its actually better to first work on your shortstack play and become proficient at it, before working on your 20bb+ game. In this case, a fast structure can actually work in your favor!

Btw, are you using holdem manager / Poker tracker? To get a better picture of your progress as well as run good/run bad, you can check your ev bb/100 and chip ev.

I'll admit the 32o shove might have been a mistake, but given I had 5bb and we weren't even close to the bubble, it wasn't a bad mistake. Certainly not terrible at all. It was a limped pot remember.

But I'm pretty sure 99 is an unexploitable shove in the SB with 13bb effective. The only alternative is raise/calling, but that opens up the possibility that villain just flats and I have to see a flop with 99 OOP. I think I lose a lot of ev in that situation given how likely it is that at least one overcard to my hand lands on the flop.

Finally something positive. I've decided to take the advice of playing some smaller field MTTs for a while to rebuild my confidence and bankroll, so as I was finishing up a study video this morning I fired up a $5.50 turbo with about 300 runners. I ended up cashing in 31st for slightly less than 2 buyins. There were some spots where I was able to apply some of the stuff I've been working on, but the big difference was that I didn't suffer a bad beat. Not one. When I got my money in ahead, my hands held.

One of the things I've been studying is thin value betting on the river. This is something I don't do nearly enough - I tend to rely on checking down with what I perceive to be showdown value without recognizing when I might be able to get some extra value. Here's an example that came from this morning's tourney:

PokerStars - 250/500 Ante 60 NL - Holdem - 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

UTG: 29.13 BB
UTG+1: 75.34 BB
MP: 12.36 BB
MP+1: 5.54 BB
MP+2: 28.79 BB
CO: 13.04 BB
BTN: 20.17 BB
SB: 41.56 BB
Hero (BB): 20.84 BB

9 players post ante of 0.12 BB, SB posts SB 0.5 BB, Hero posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.58 BB) Hero has 9 K

fold, fold, fold, fold, MP+2 raises to 2 BB, fold, fold, fold, Hero calls 1 BB

Flop: (5.58 BB, 2 players) Q 6 K
Hero checks, MP+2 bets 1.84 BB, Hero calls 1.84 BB

Turn: (9.26 BB, 2 players) 4
Hero checks, MP+2 checks

River: (9.26 BB, 2 players) 3
Hero bets 3.24 BB, MP+2 calls 3.24 BB

Hero shows 9 K (One Pair, Kings)
(Pre 45%, Flop 91%, Turn 95%)
MP+2 mucks 8 8 (One Pair, Eights)
(Pre 55%, Flop 9%, Turn 5%)
Hero wins 15.75 BB

Well played! It seems like you got max value from his specific hand.

I've gotten it in my head that <50% river is value so I might have found a fold as V. Solver likes your river size since he's calling with worse and jamming with better.

Trying to make an argument for PFR 3b once SB folds since it bloats the pot. HRC likes a call though and you don't look as strong.

Is this ITM? Do you fold to a raise or jam on river?

I didn't expect to get called to be honest, but part of the rationale for the bet is that players so rarely bluff-raise rivers at this level. So yes, I would fold to a jam.

I actually can't recall whether it was ITM or not but I think it might have been.

As for the 3b pre, I think that's a bit suicidal here. With 20bb effective I can really only jam, and although I have a K blocker there is still too much of a risk of running into a bigger hand from an MP2 open. I could definitely go for a shove pre against a BTN or SB open, and perhaps CO too.

As someone mentioned earlier maybe your just unlucky. That may sound too simplistic but you can be.
Even someone playing far more games than you cant guarentee to be profitable.
Your doing all you can to get better which is good, but its possible to play perfectly and still lose over smallish sample size.

There don't seem to be many smaller field options on Sundays but I'm going to avoid the biggest ones I normally play (like the Hot/Hotter series). Here's what I'm planning to play today:

1) $5.50 heads-up total PKO

2) $2.20, 1k guarantee

3) $5.50, 30% PKO

4) $3.30 zoom, 500 guarantee (I love the zoom format for tourneys)

5) Winter Series 105-L, $11 PKO (this will be a big one, but worth taking a shot)

5) $2.20 Micro Triple Threat

online poker is rigged. In a tournament you have to win every one of your flips if villain has you covered.

I switched to live cash games only, can leave whenever I want and can hit and run so I leave with money once in a while and feel better about myself. I manage to stay even or slightly ahead, online I was constantly crushed.

Another negative: These days playing live might as well be playing in a petri dish full of omicron virus.

Lolriggaments