A bit about me
Hi guys, I think some of you might remember me, I had a journey about me struggling to beat NL2 and join a poker team (you can check out here).
Now I'm already on the team and I recently moved up to play NL25 on bodog. I'm doing poker full time now without all those worries that I had before when I was in the navy, so now I'll work my ass off everyday as never before and see if I can reach NL100 before the end of the year, which I believe is a reasonable goal in my opinion.
It will be hard but I'll do my best to get there for sure, if I fail at least I will know that I did all that I could had done anyway

What is this journey about
This journey will be simple and straightforward, it will be about me trying to dedicate as much time as possible on poker per day even though the problems happens. I think I'm really lucky for having the opportunity to grind/study the whole day without worries as now so I'll use this time the best I can and use this journey to motivate myself to put the work everyday.

The conditions for considering this journey a success
I will only consider this journey as a success if manage to beat NL100 in 30k hands with at least 4bb/100 as winrate before this year (2023) ends.

What I will do If I get there
If I reach my goal before the end of the year as a way to celebrate I will donate $75 to any member of this forum who still don't have a bankroll and are trying to build one from scratch playing freerolls, since I was helped so much by the people from this forum I think this might be a good way to give it back.

What I'm doing now
I'm currently playing 4 reg tables everyday on bodog for 6-8 hours per day while also studying a coaching video from my team or studying on gtowizard for about 1 hour. I'm playing something between 1600-2200 hands per day depending on how fishy the field are. I'm quite satisfied with my work ethic so far since this year started so I'll try my best to keep this good pace for as long as I can.

a gif of MJ (my ps avatar)to start this journey with the right feet



again, wish me luck guys

good luck with the challenge. I'm going to keep monitor on your progress however 30k hands is still a very small sample tho btw.

Good luck with your journey!

Welcome back!

Glad about your progress.

If you start with nl25, then up to nl100 there are only two steps. You have a source of information and time. I think your journey is doomed to success

GL!

thank you guys, much appreciated

it's good to see you again man, thanks for the kind words. I'll do my best to make it happen this year.

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17/01

I started my day waking 6am and taking my dog for a walk, after that I ate my breakfast and grinded on bodog for 3 hours. then I took some time off to have a launch and play a bit of GTA IV (which I finally finished today ) after that. on the afternoon I played for another 3 hours and after that I had a meetng with my team on zoom for 1 hour. so sumarizing, I played for 6 hours and studied 1, not that bad.

I had a tough sequence of losses on NL25 this last days so I decided to recover the losses on NL10 for a while.
I really don't believe that my losses were due to NL25 been harder to beat, bc I face the same type of regs and fishes there.

I believe that ppl overthink too much about the level of regs in microstakes. From NL5 to NL25 all regs and fishes are similar the only difference is that there's more regs and less fishes, you just gotta table select better.

tomorrow I'll try to play for 8 hours and study 1, which I never did so far. If I notice that I'm still playing well with that much volume I'll try to keep putting this volume everyday until the end of the month, however if I notice that I'm not playing well I'll return to the 6 hours of playing plan to not compromise my win rate.

today I played for a total of 8 hours while studying 1 hour in the morning, I think this was great day even though I lost 1-2 buy ins.

I am trying to implement on my game some river raises after x-x turn spots that I learned in one of the last video lessons from my team.
I am calling too much on river with hands that will lose most of the time instead of transforming my bluffcatch on a bluff raise.

I am also calling too much grayzone hands this last days, that's another thing that I believe is killing my win rate and that I have to work on.

Subbed. Good luck man

Sent from my SM-S906B using Tapatalk

Nice blog Good luck with yur challenge!

I really like this concept. Could you elaborated it a bit more?

I am trying to implement the same thing, but it can be tricky... I do it sometimes but my flop and turn actions didnt adds up to river raise The whole story has to makes sence, which may not be the case all the time

subbeed

well, let's say you open from BU and BB called. the Flop is A78, you cbet and BB call. the Turn is a 9 and you decide to check. river card completes a draw (flushed card or 4-to a straight card like 6x or Tx), villain bets 33%.
If you call with a 66 or 55 although you might be beating 44-22 and some bluffs that he might have sometimes there's much more hands beating you in this situation like Ax, 7x, 8x, 9x for ex.

So it's far better to transform this bluffcatcher into a raise 4x and make him fold all this medium-strength hands instead of going to showdown vs him just to lose with a weaker hand.

thank you guys, much appreciated.

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22/01

today I played a lot, a bit more than 8 hours I think. so I started implementing some things on my game to see how the pool reacts, I'll make a list of what areas I'm working on.

1. check-raises from BB: I need to check-raise more than I'm doing now, specially on disconnected boards
   
2. check-raises in SRP OOP (ex CO vs BU): I'm playing really passively in this spot and I need to add some raises.
   
3. folding strong hands vs underbluffed lines: sometimes I stick too much with some strong hands even though the villain is playing a line that almost always will be the nuts or something close, and even that way I call and lose money. I'm doing that a lot having overpairs or two-pairs on tricky boards.
   
4. river raises after x-x turns: I noticed that I was being too much passive on river with hands that have almost no sdv, so I started implementing this river raises this week and ppl are folding most of the time.

tomorrow I'll train a bit of boxing just to put my mind and body and order, it's not good to just play and study everyday and do nothing more than that like i'm currently doing. I'll also try to study some past coaching sessions just to refresh some concepts and go for the grind after that as always.

wish me luck guys

Hi guys, it's been some time after my last post, I will talk a bit about some things I realized/learned in this meantime and I hope something can help someone here also.

1. How much I was overfolding.

One problem that I have and most of the regs here also have is overfolding postflop, specially in 3BPs. I used to fold much more than the gto (who is considering the range of a villain that might bluff a lot less than the avg reg/rec would), so now I am calling a lot more than before and having good results with that so far.

2. How different 3BPs IP and OOP are when you are the caller.

I was basically playing both situations the same way without realizing(specially when multitabling) and losing tons of EV in the process.

3. How to table select like a pro

In one of the coaching sessions I had with my team the coach showed us some data about the best positions on table vs specific profiles of players, how much EV we get from each one of them and how to calculate the total EV of table to know if you are on a table that it's worth it your time or not. This was a big game changer for me since this affected much more my win rate than any other thing.

4. Sometimes you should just let then bluff.

Another thing that really impacted my win rate was allowing some profiles of players to bluff in some situations rather than barrel myself, specially when you know villain is too much aggro, it's the difference between winning 0,5 buy in and 2 on a single hand.

Subbed. Good luck!

I'm also looking to get to 50nl or 100nl by the end of the year so I will be keeping up with your progress! Kick some ass!

heard a lot about BrPC - didn't they rebrand recently? someone told me the deals you get stuck on are pretty ass, what do the cuts look like?

Hey man, good to hear (read lol) from you. Any graphs coming for your fans satisfaction?

Hehe GLGL, really happy with your progress.

Thanks man, good luck for you also

It's called Metagame now, they start with 60/40 as you enter but it can change to 50/50 as you move up if I'm not mistaken.


Hey man, good to see you again. Unfortunaly I don't have since I'm just playing on the apps now and no tracker works there as far as I know, that's the price of playing on a softer pool lol.

Thanks for the kind words btw

3 MAIN AREAS TO IMPROVE ON MY GAME:

1. Have more control over what is happenning on the tables.

Since I started playing on the apps I am still having a tough time with the short timebank they have (15 secs I think) and sometimes I auto-fold good hands preflop just because I was having to take a hard decision on 2-3 other tables at the same time.

When I was playing on bodog I had much more time to think on each decision but since on the apps most of the customers are as smart as a chimp they decided that 15 sec is time enough to think lol.

Anyways, I will put my ego aside and just play 2-3 tables without letting this leak happen again for some time, it's the most reasonable thing to do.

2. Create the habit of checking all notes when sitting on a table

Although I am taking notes actively on my sessions I am not always checking the notes I took on the players and sometimes I overcall or overbluff on a situation where I wouldnt do it if I already had checked the note I did on him before. I am probably losing some serious money with this leak.

3. Apply correctly the new preflop charts

My team already changed our preflop charts and I need to integrate them on my game asap if I want to ask for a move up. The good thing is that the charts didn't changed a lot compared to the old one. Just a few more 4bets here and there and bit more calling to 3bets in some positions, it will not be so hard to learn that thing.

sorry for the lack of updates guys, I had a lot of "life variance" in this last months but now things are a lot better and I will do my best to keep posting here more frequently.

now I am currently on a 9-5 to job along with playing poker on a team, my laptop stopped working for some long time and I had to find a job to keep paying my bills and fix the laptop problem also. The good thing is that I am being able to play 4 tables on my smartphone the same way I was doing on my pc, but for study on gtowiz or watching a coaching video is terrible.

about the job, is not bad at all, I am working with shipping/logistics on a truck with an old friend that I knew on marines. but it still sucks compared to playing poker at home like I was doing before.

my main goal for now is to save as much money as possible to fix this laptop issue and play/study as hard as I can on my free time at home.
I think I just need to change a few things on my game to be able to move up from my stake, when I get there I will save a bit more money and quit this job for good.

I had some good improvement on the 3 areas of my game that I talked weeks ago, I will further explain below:

#1. Have more control over what is happenning on the tables.

I improved a lot in this area compared to weeks ago, I am not feeling overwhelmed by information anymore, even playing 4 tables.
I am also forcing myself to always play in absolut silence(or with white noise) and with no distractions whatsoever, this way things are working a lot better.

#2. Create the habit of checking all notes when sitting on a table

I am not doing that exactly, but at least I am checking the notes when I'm in a tough decision on river, to see if the guy is an overcaller or overbluffer for ex.

#3. Apply correctly the new preflop charts

Although I still need to check the charts here and there at least I am being able to apply then 100% while playing.

Last week I watched a coaching session from a NL1k reg from my team that really changed my way of understanding and playing poker.

I cannot explain much but let's say that I am maximizing my EV a lot more now and reducing my standard deviation a lot as well after a few adjustments on my strat.

I think sometimes we focus too much on what hands we should call or fold after a bet or raise from villains instead of focusing on finding ways of extract as much money as possible from villain when we have the nuts.

I mean, the money you lose by doing a bad call is really small compared to the money you don't extract from villain when having the nuts just because you didn't chose the right line to take against him or the right size on the turn so you can have a good SPR on river to shove, for example.

Now I will dedicate much more attention on thinking about what ways I could have extracted more money from villain when I had the nuts instead of torturing myself about a bad call that doesn't affect my win rate that much.