Hey everyone, I'm starting this blog for accountability purposes. I'll probably just post my results and hands played every couple of months, maybe even less frequently. I am pretty bad usually with this kind of things.

I've been playing poker for around 4-5 years, semi-seriously online, and more seriously for past 2 years playing NL online cash. Recently, I've realized how much time I've been wasting, especially in the early days. I’m treating poker somewhat seriously, but still half-assing it, viewing it more like a fun video game than a profession. I’m playing around 80-90 hours a month, with long breaks of 1-3 weeks when I just don’t feel like playing, but not really doing anything useful in mean time. I need to grow up and treat this as a real career with an uncertain future — but perhaps with some potential to build something for myself if I just apply myself properly.



Last 13 months, with 10-15k in rakeback/untracked winnings. The year before was a bit less, but pretty much similar. It's ridiculous that I played one-third of my volume at sub-NL100 stakes in this sample. I am not taking any risks, and my biggest downswing in the past two years was probably 4-5k (maybe 23 BIs EV), just a joke. Finally banned myself from NL100 this year — never going back to that stake.

I’ve got a few leaks in my game that I’m not happy about, but finding them pretty hard to fix, might not even matter that much and maybe the real leaks are somewhere else. Sometimes it feels like I need to fix all my leaks or at least in the top 10% of a limit before I move up, but I haven't been studying as much as I should. Maybe like 20 minutes to an hour a day of ineffective study, often just messing around with stats. Feeling like you need to be better + not putting much deliberate practice in is not a very good recipe for enjoyable poker life.

Right now, my hourly rate is probably around $60-90 playing mostly NL200, with small amount of NL500 mixed in. It's tough to get volume at NL500, and I have some confidence issues despite having +5bb over 100k hands at NL400+ over the past two years and no real reason why I would be losing there. Just sometimes I feel like I have no idea what's going on and make blunders all over the place/or feel I just play exploitatively wrong/have some stuff that might get exploited real hard.

I’m thinking of increasing my playing volume to full-time work hours, around 120-160 hours per month. I’ve got plenty of free time, nothing better to do and I really need to start compounding instead of just saving 1-3k each month. I think there are some real outsized benefits in trying a bit harder to get to a point where life expenses don't really matter much at all. I think there might still be some alright money in euro mid-stakes, and I could probably double or triple my bankroll in a year if I semi-nolifed, without changing my game as long as I get the volume in and games don't die off.


Goals:
Slowly increase my volume to around 120-160 hours per month.
Study 30 minutes to an hour daily, more if I’m in the mood.
Play more NL500, and play more especially during evenings and weekends (currently playing mostly during the day).
Improve my game and seat selection/multi-site more.

Long-term Goals:
Save up enough money and get good enough to consistently play NL500-1000 within 1-2 years. I might think about joining dark side of GG NL1000 then, if I am good enough and if it's significantly better hourly than playing midstakes on other sites/only way to get volume in. Trying to enjoy current, variance-free playing more though, hopefully without stagnating, because I might miss these times later.

Man you are crushing it. $60 an hour? That's inspiring. Will be following.

GL to you.

Month is almost over and 30 days since thread start so ill just post update now.



Played 51k hands in tracker, maybe 55-60k overall this month. I think I probably put around 120 hours in playing.
I played way too much and way too many tables some days. I don't think really that your game changes too much if you play distracted etc./too many tables honestly,
but playing too passively common spots and just going back to my tendencies + autopilot and again not fixing what I should fix.
Studywise I think I put around what I intended, I also tried to learn preflop of a new format, but not sure if I will ever do anything with it.
It's kinda funny how clueless you are the instant you leave 100bb 6max preflop realm.

I am/was not really burned out, but I took a monday completely off and it kinda spiraled as usual and suddenly I didn't play at all for rest of the week.
So I kind of played 40h/week for 3 weeks and couple hours for last week. I think I just had some IRL stuff to do, but I think I am already done with it.
Something I should try to avoid though, because obviously feel kinda guilty for it even though month went well otherwise. I am not even running bad or anything so I don't have that excuse.
I think 160 hours is a bit too much right now so might just try to hit 120 hours next month with evenly spread volume and feel happy about it.
I tried to fix sleep schedule, so that I wake up at 2-3pm and can just start playing basically instantly/can play evening/night games fresh, but it's maybe a bit too unhealthy so back to 11-12am.

This month I had my first downswing in a while/biggest downswing in 1-2 years, volume suffered alot i was kind of frustrated and didn't feel like playing at all.
Still played 40kish hands in all, so was not a total disaster month, and ran well untracked.
Probably made like 10k in total after everything, which is pretty ridiculous compared to how bad the month felt, just needless negative emotions again.
And again its ridiculous the dollar amount of downswing is just insignificant to complain about, like 2-3k with rakeback + probably not even negative with untracked results. I mean..
Going through a rough patch where when I play poker, I think I should be doing something else, and when I don't play poker I feel like I should be playing poker. Not great lol.

Been through a lot of these periods where I feel like I suddenly play super bad/differently, but I know this was mostly variance/coolers etc. + some bad play, but not to the extent it feels.
When redline + blueline suddenly tanks it's just variance usually for me. Still lots of leaks though. I studied reasonable amount, but mostly preflop of another format +
started exercising more consistently, but pretty light effort, always been skinny, tall guy type so will see what happens.

I wish I had some cool hands to show, but I really dislike hand histories, don't really ever see anything interesting in those and not really point of the blog for me.
But man, I have some disaster timeouts recently, sometimes I think what would happen if i just tried to play 3-4 tables and focus instead of looking at other screen while playing etc., but hard to play more volume without doing that recently, and honestly I don't really buy the "3 table = crushing winrate 6 table = mediocre winrate" argument at all.