Yeah agreed, most hands weren't too bad, though I guess a hand history without additional context doesn't really provide enough info to say whether my plays were good or not.

I mean the T854 had some kinda dynamics with a crazy reg VIP whom I got some history against, but even with my reads I think that was a pretty big mistake.

Just felt like sharing some bluffs that didn't work during my current good run.

In my situation, I learnt most of these things from my days playing NL, and also spent a good amount of time with different poker mindset/performance coaches as well as seeing a real psychologist. If it;s true that PLO boys are better organized than NL boys (which I doubt is true), the fact that many PLO pros are converts from NL would probably be a factor.

Last 30 days ( includes 60% RB from BBJ tableshare)

]

Still running good and playing good. Best 30k hand stretch I've had in PLO yet. Just averaging 1k hands each day in general by simply playing most mornings.

Now that my birthday is over and parents went back home I'll have a bit more time to grind. Although I realized, I play really well when playing less hours in a day and just focusing on playing my A-game.

I've decided to reorganize my schedule to focus on simply being consistent and grinding every morning and only have one or 2 days each week where I actually dedicate more time to grinding. It's quite a big mindset shift but I won't even be focused on leaderboards anymore. I found that even if I grind a couple hours a day I can still get $100 or so just from rakeback (from both PLO200 and 500 LB combined), so my RB doesn't decrease so much. An added bonus is my schedule isn't focused around leaderboards, if I focus on leaderboards too much I find that I lose motivation to grind if I see I can't win that day, for example if I grinded a bunch the previous day then I wake up in the morning and see the first place guy decided to grind 1k more points past me making it impossible for me to grab that spot. I'd like to basically just forget totally about leaderboards and just grind according to my schedule, playing full focus, A-game poker.




Birthday week was fun, went out a bunch, saw parents, even went to the opera.


Peace

August recap





August 2024: GG PLO200 and PLO500
Hands played: 22978
Hours played: 44
Hands per Hour: 534.5
Hours studied: 54
Hours worked: 98
Net Won: $6167
Net won + RB: $9904
Net Won $/hour: $225
EV: $8009
EV+RB: $11746
EV $/hour: $267

Pretty lazy month tbh.
I was pretty proud of myself for grinding every morning up until like the 19th or so despite a bunch of social occasions due to my birthday week and lots of people visiting me. But after that my fiance had some university camp trip I decided to join in on last second and it was only a couple days long but for a few days afterwards I struggled to get back into a good routine.

Also I am quitting nicotine. Actually I never smoked, I just took some nicotine spray or nicotine gum almost everyday habitually for the past 2 years or so. But I'm trying to quit now, pretty convinced there's not really any benefits, I used to want to try it as a nootropic for brain performance and focus but now I think it's just BS. Although during the time I've been in nicotine withdrawal it's been pretty impossible to focus or concentrate, hopefully it'll get better soon.

Anyways not really too much to report. Good month in terms of run, although I feel kinda lazy and would like to put in more volume next month.
Joined into this small propbet with a few other crushers on GG to see who can make the most money. Well I doubt I'll win since I'm probably playing some of the lowest stakes in this propbet group, but it'll still give me a bit of motivation hopefully to put in some more volume.
Also noticed I can put in a grind for platinum shark. Will have to grind roughly 70k points per week for this. Def doable, so getting this extra 5% will be another motivation for me to put in some more volume.
Also planned a holiday in October right after the deadline for improving to platinum shark is finished, although that's kinda far away still. But basically, all this together and I'm hoping to put in some decent volume until the end of the year.


Hand vs an aggro fish, funny enough, the only part I really wanted to fold here was the Flop



Love when people don't believe you

hey man, randomly stumbled upon your blog. fun to go back through the pages and see the process. always been contemplating to switch from hsnl to plo myself, but still dread going down in stakes so much just to learn for months on end. admire you had the guts though.

i remember you posting in another friend, saying you 100% know S Guignard isnt cheating. guy has been banned on GG, ACR and Winamax, possibly other sites too, ive no clue. have you been fooled by him or what made you say that back then?

keep up the work!

Following GL. When do you think you'll take shots at 5/10?

Thanks for your words.

Well about Seb. I still don't believe he ever cheated.

I was one of his main coaches and saw him rise from a lowstakes spin and go player and quickly move up from the lowest to highest stakes in those games (with the help of staking) in only a years time. I was sort of a mentor to him in a ways, back when I actually coached some people. In fact, while he was playing spins, I was contemplating quitting spins many times, as I wrote in this blog, and I would talk to him about it, and in many ways I believe I had a big impact on his decision to also leave spins and start playing cashgames. From a very early stage I recognized the talent he had for the game.


When I know how hard working, and how much of a talent this young man has for poker. It was no surprise to me when he immediately started crushing those shortstack games on Winamax (which are very similar to spins), giving him confidence to start playing shortstacked on other sites, where he had a huge edge on the competition. Well, coming from spins he knew exactly the GTO solutions at 0-40bb deep, while most other regs playing cashgames don't study these stack depths and it is only fish who sit at such shallow stacks. It is no wonder that he took a lot of money from regs by exploiting them (not by playing GTO).

Obviously when some new reg shows up out of nowhere crushing everybody, it looks quite suspicious. But having coached him, spent some time with him and talked a bunch with him on how he views the world and knowing where his beginnings come from and how he grew into the player he is today. I really doubt he ever cheated, I mean he has no reason to cheat. Why do I think he got banned from these sites? Well probably because he got mass reported by all the regs losing to him (including yourself of course), and as he wasn't already established such as Linus or Stefan or Makeboifin or whatever AND since he was playing shortstacked which is kinda "ratholey" I guess the sites saw that as enough reason to ban him without any evidence of him cheating.

So yeah, I still talk to Seb a bit, actually a bit of a coincidence you bring him up since we kinda stopped talking for a long time, but he got in touch recently and he told me about all this. Well IDK exactly what to believe. Poker is a pretty dark world sometimes, everybody out there trying to take from others constantly, only trying to do what's best for themselves. It's a zero-sum game and while it's a beautiful game, sometimes I dislike the fact that it's so predatory and cut-throat. Well Seb wanted to take all the money by playing honestly, holding the lobby and battling, and he was doing that, and then a lot of regs decided that if they could group together and all mass report him then maybe they can get him banned, which is obviously good for their own bottom line, but how is this fair? It's just politics.

I'll admit, the sites all banning him shows evidence that he did cheat in some way. However, knowing him personally and him insisting to me he didn't cheat, well I believe him on that front. So I'm not going to take sides here.

All I will say, is that I care about integrity, and I care about justice. This is because of certain things happening to me in the past, where people should get what they deserve. Perhaps he got banned on those sites, but the future can bring good karma if that was undeserved.

Well there's no telling what will happen. All I know is that Seb insists he didn't cheat and that he is filing a lawsuit against Winamax and GG to get unbanned and he seems quite confident in his case, so I guess, we'll see what happens from here.

-----------------------------

Anyways back to PLO.

Uhm, if things go well prolly Christmas period. If things go poorly then I guess sometime before Summer next year.





Well in this hand I enjoy folding with 1bb left behind, oh beautiful redline

The first hand you should fold pre flop. It doesn't play well vs a 3b. Your utg so hes going to be very strong when he 3b you and you don't have any big suited cards here. His range just crushes your hand here. If your not utg and maybe in co or btn its fine to play but not this particular spot. I like your blog. Nice results nice to see someone whos real grinder at plo on here.

Trainer only has 150bb deep on PLO500 so not sure how much of a difference it is in terms of EV, but folding AKJTss (suited to JT) would be a 9bb mistake.

As the other guy mentioned, it's basically a breakeven decision with our specific combo, but with any Single suited combo AKJT just isn't really being folded much, in general I wouldn't focus on these minuscule innacuracies but rather focus on big heuristics that I can implement.

What's more important though. Is that I mentioned this guy is an aggro fish. Well I didn't give his 3b % but it was over 15%. Against such stats it would be a big mistake to fold.



TBH most of the hands I'm posting aren't super interesting in terms of analysis. Lots of standard stuff where neither player would/should play so different. Although maybe I'll try to post some more value in terms of hand histories.

Here's an interesting hand where I misplayed OTF, and from the turn I'm in the streets.




In this hand, I realized, sometimes it is nice to have AAxx in your flatting ranges.


And sometimes it is worth it to jam preflop without AAxx

It's been quite a tough month so far.

At the start of the month I was dealing with nicotine withdrawal so I found myself tilting and getting quite anxious frequently. I made decisions too quickly.

After the first week, I was mostly over the nicotine withdrawal and I started to play quite well. However the run hasn't really been so much on my side this month. Just a very swingy month with money flying in every direction.

Quite happy with my play, also feel like I've improved significantly since I've started playing PLO500 in May and more in tune with population tendencies and how some other regs are playing at this stake now.

I'm game selecting much less now, which may be a slight mistake, but I enjoy playing vs the other regs. One thing I'm very happy with myself about is that I've been grinding basically every single morning. Other than one night when i went out with a friend and had some drinks which made it hard to wake up with drive the next day, I've simply stuck to my routine and grinded every morning. Additionally I put in some extra volume on certain days. And I'm very proud of myself. I hope this sort of lifestyle can keep going, as it is sustainable and pretty much impossible for me to fail as long as I keep going.

I've been reading a new book by Ryan Holiday called Courage is Calling. It touches on a lot of topics I think can be relevant to poker tbh. Playing poker requires courage, and there isn't a single sessions where I don't feel a bit of anxiety or nerves. In the past I would even avoid playing any poker altogether due to such anxiety or nerves. It's good to be building my courage. Some methods I am doing to improve this is through the use of daily cold showers. Cold showers are quite uncomfortable so I face my fears before entering one, but when I'm finished I'm proud of myself. And my brain is filled with dopamine.

Been watching a bunch of Andrew Huberman as well. He touches on the topic of Cold showers quite a bit in some of his podcasts. Also started doing daily meditation and NSDR. TBH there's a bunch of **** I've been doing recently contributing to all of this. The run hasn't been good. But the habits I've installed and my consistency has been excellent and I couldn't ask for more. And I'm sure the results will come.

September recap

Poker


September 2024: GG PLO200 and PLO500 -
Hands played: 39350
Hours played: 76
Hands per Hour: 529.5
Hours studied: 56
Hours worked: 132
Net Won: -$3640
Net won + RB: $2600
Net Won $/hour: $34
EV: -$2372
EV+RB: $3880
EV $/hour: $51
YTD: $61727

Well, I've just completed the worst month of my year so far. And the truth is, if my worst month of the year is having a slightly positive month, then I can't complain and I'm more than happy.

Looking at the bigger picture and more than just the results, I feel kind of great tbh pokerwise. I've been showing up every day. This has been my highest volume month of the year and it would be higher if I hadn't fallen sick this past weekend. I've been sick with some cold now for the past 4 days or so and it feels crap. I haven't had much motivation to grind the past weekend due to this illness. But other than that, my routines this month have been as good as they can be. Basically grinded every morning apart from like 4 mornings (3 because of illness, 1 because of maintenance). I feel very confident and comfortable at the stakes and feel like I'm one of the strongest regs on 500 now. It's funny because I'd expect to feel like my confidence is shattered and low after such a bad month, but in reality I feel more confident than ever because I know I've been running bad. I'm so excited to keep grinding and see what the rest of the year has in store for me.

I've been playing PLO500 since May now, and at this point I've kinda gotten used to the swings. Whenever you move up a stake you feel a bit of fear, a bit less willingness to gamble, or to risk an entire stack, at least I do. This fear is now gone at PLO500, winning or losing a buy-in or 2 no longer means much. As we see in the graph, this month has been incredibly swingy and lots of fun. Getting over the money swings at this stake also fills me with more confidence for the future as the money no longer means much and I can focus on the strategy and playing well. I've also identified several leaks in other regs at PLO500, it's a great feeling.

Relatively happy with grind to study ratio too, if I could keep the study around the same and put in slightly more volume in general it'd be good. Although at this point I'm basically sure I'll complete the promotion to Platinum Whale or shark or whatever it's called for that extra 5% rakeback.


In life, things have also been quite good.

Finished reading Courage is calling by Ryan Holiday:
Honestly not my favorite book. Pretty boring with a bunch of quotes meant to help you be more "courageous". Didn't find it so helpful, would give it a 2/5, and would not recommend.

Just started reading The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco:
Love it so far. Shows the difference in mindset between the wealthy and poor and how to get into the "millionaire fastlane". Think this might be one of my favorite personal finance books I ever read.


Passed a Hungarian Language exam. Stayed in touch with some friends.

Next month in October I'll be going on a week long trip to Paris. Will visit: Disneyland, the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and St Germain, Arc de Triomphe and Champs Elysees, Palais Garnier, Montmartre, Le Marais, Jardins de Luxembourg, Boat trip on Seine, and Latin Quarter, and lots of other stuff. It's all fully planned, and anything that can be reserved or booked has already been paid for already so I'm really looking forward to a holiday next month. It gives me motivation to put in some work until then, to realize that I could pay for this due to my hard work through poker.

I actually feel like travel might be one of my favorite things, a new hobby or passion of mine. I'd like to travel more in general. Probably won't do much travel rest of this year but hopefully next year I can plan a bunch of fun things and take true breaks from poker during these periods but then put in more focus and work while I'm at home.

Not trying to be rude here.

But what is the point of having an extreme schedule like that and then barely get in 30kish hands/month?

What is extreme about his schedule?

Thx for the book rec, i will buy it

Not sure what you mean by "extreme schedule".

The fact that I sleep early and wake up early? That is just personal preference and I find it best for my personal circadian rhythm, and I have the most energy during the day, not at night.

I dont grind particularly many hours, I think my schedule is quite chilled, healthy and balanced. And that's what I want. I don't want to double my grindtime in order to put in double the volume or whatever. I'm looking for balance, consistency, stability and sustainability.

I'm not necessarily doing things in my life to optimize my poker, or to optimize my $/hour. Rather I play poker to live a life I love and enjoy. So IDK what could be considered so extreme about my schedule, other than the fact that it is well organized and I wake up early, which are both simply personal preference.

extreme in the sense that every hour of the day is planned/scheduled.

That schedule and discipline is admirable. It’s a key to success for poker.

It's simply in my personality to plan. I love planning, I probably spend too much time "planning" and too little time "implementing". Everytime I take a MBTI test, I always fall into the INTJ category which is the most visionary and "planner" of all types. The plan above is simply an ideal scenario and living close to that gives me a lot of happiness and serenity. But real life happens, things don't go according to plan all the time.

And I don't think it's really so meticulously planned tbh. From what I heard Elon Musk has every 15 minutes of his day planned or something. I have plenty of downtime and periods of times where I can do more than one thing. At least that's just my opinion and how I feel. I def don't feel it is extreme, but perhaps that is simply because of my personality and I have pushed myself much harder in the past and know of people who are much more organized and strict.

Thanks for the bloggy thread, enjoy your reflecting posts.

What takes place during victory hour in the morning?

How often do you meet this schedule?

Do you adjust when you don't meet it. Or just chalk that day as over and tomorrow back to the schedule.

How frequently do you find an activity is wanted or required that isn't scheduled?

The Victory Hour consists of:
20 minutes of exercise as soon as I wake up. I use X3 bar resistance bands and I do it outdoors to see the morning sunlight and feel the cold air. Quite powerful stuff and high intensity every morning. This is my only form of intense exercise I get daily. This immediately wakes me up and provides me with a boost of energy.

13 minutes of focused meditation - According to Huberman there's different types of meditations with different types of benefits. This is not a guided meditation practice I do, I simply close my eyes and focus on my breath and my 3rd eye and keep bringing my attention back to this. This trains my focus muscle.

10-15 minutes of reflection - This includes tracking my finances and financial budget, I'll jot down what I spent money on the previous day. I'll also quickly look at my schedule and check what are the most important tasks to complete for the day. Finally I'll write down in my mental game journal, which is basically asking myself questions such as How my sessions went yesterday, what I learnt, what I could have improved, etc.

Finally 10-15 minutes of learning - I like to do this in the form of preflop training. Not particularly fun, but it's very important to have preflop down. I have a long list of spots I want to train and over time I will train one spot each day until it is completed then repeat (it takes several months of doing a different spot each day to go through all of them). I'll train GTO sims for every spot, as well as my own personal exploit sims I have studied and prepared.

I find this victory hour very important for getting the day started right, and honestly I noticed after completing the victory hour it's hard for me not to have a productive day. Where-as the opposite is also true, if I don't complete the victory hour, I am less likely to have a productive day. There's something about neuroscience that can explain it, well I don't want to explain too much, but watch stuff by Huberman about morning routines or read some books about morning routines, such as the 5-AM club (where this victory hour basically is inspired by) or the miracle Morning.

--------------------------------------------------------------

How often do I meet this schedule?

Do you adjust when you don't meet it. Or just chalk that day as over and tomorrow back to the schedule.


Well the past 5 days I have been sick, so I have not met this schedule at all. I've been waking up without alarm to ensure I get enough rest, I've been taking warm showers, I haven't been grinding. I've been focusing on recovery etc. Today is the first day I finally feel quite decent and I'm going to start grinding again from tomorrow.

But assuming I'm not sick or on holiday, then my schedule I'd say is quite simple and easy to follow. These are big time blocks, and for example I won't always study an entire 2 hours, but I'll probably study at least one hour. Another thing that can happen is ahead of time I can change things. Maybe a friend wants to meet me on Tuesday when I'm scheduled to grind, well I'll allow that and I'll meet my friend and just change it in my schedule. Scheduling downtime and relaxation time is important to do too, to make sure you will actually relax. It is better to make sure to schedule relaxation and time off (daily, weekly, monthly and also by planning vacations) to prevent burnout, etc.


I probably follow 90% of my schedule if I'm not sick or on holiday (considering that I also change my schedule a bit each week depending on what other activities I have planned, usually social). And the truth is, if I'm on holiday, I plan quite well what I will do on holiday. For example for my Paris holiday at the end of this month, I already have a very full itinerary, I have a plan for each day, that doesn't mean I'll be overly busy as I ensured that I'll have plenty of downtime. If things don't go as planned, well that happens, I wouldn't start my day over, just continue with whatever is next. No point trying to make back lost time, rather just get back right back on track tomorrow or with the next thing on the schedule.

I think some people can look at my schedule and think it is extreme because it has a lot of colors and everything. But what they don't realize is a lot of the stuff in here is intentional planned downtime and relaxation and it includes long time blocks that can include mini breaks such as a short period of doing nothing or whatever.


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How frequently do you find an activity is wanted or required that isn't scheduled?

Quite often. Mostly this only happens due to social pressures.

My fiance wants me to accompany her to some event.
My friend wants to see me.
My friend in another country wants to have a long phone call.
etc

If we consider that I want to have a long (3+ hours) call with my best friend outside the country at least once a month, and see my good friend at least once a month in Hungary where we'll enjoy a full afternoon of time together, I'll probably have some "unplanned" social obligation come up roughly once a week. Which is quite often. I will simply look at my "default" schedule, and change it to include the social time. So if I am meant to grind on average 25 hours a week if I follow the plan perfectly, I would grind maybe 20 hours on average instead because I have one day when I won't grind in the afternoon during that week. As mentioned earlier in this blog, if I can grind an average of 20 hours a week, well I'd be super happy with all the other stuff going on in my life. This is quite a regular occurence but kind of included and understood to be part of the plan.

As said, I will not sacrifice social time, and I have date days with my fiance scheduled twice a week already where we'll organize a certain activity during this period, however other things can come up and in these cases I will simply change my schedule to not work but to socialize in such a time block.

Socializing and time with friends and family is some of the most important and proven to give humans satisfaction and happiness, and I have certainly felt this. Rather I would say, choose your close friends and loved ones wisely. They must be aligned with what you want and how you want to live.

If they understand you have a dream you are working on, and they are aligned with you, then they will support you and not try to take away your time. My dream isn't too "make as much money as possible quickly", "to be the best poker player", "to play the highest stakes". My dream is simply to be balanced, be able to support myself financially and live healthy and one day retire financially free with a happy loving family. This is a slower more relaxed approach which requires consistency, and a lot of poker players would say "oh but poker is going to die, you need to grind a lot now before that happens", well I don't believe that, I believe poker will remain here for many years to come, decades even until I am old and so my approach takes this into consideration. I'm in no hurry and I plan on playing poker for many decades to come. If it turns out I am wrong and poker does die in sooner than expected, well too bad, but it is only then when I will be looking at the reality of the situation, not now, when things are going perfectly fine and aligning with my longterm vision. Maybe a bit more boring approach than many others here, and very different from how I was in the past. But I've learnt from the past, I'm older and wiser now and this is why I take this approach now.

Was having my first session of the month after recovering from my cold and got very lucky



It was also in the middle of a lovely session



Thanks to this I have already made 2.5x the amount of money I made last month in 770 hands xDDDD

Certainly my biggest winning day in PLO so far.



TBH, I have played almost a million hands of PLO on GG (not counting more hands from other formats), and this is the first BBJ I have ever hit, and it was still for the small prize, obviously would much have preferred the big one. But this little prize came at a really nice time as I spent a lot of money last month on my Paris trip and buying a 1 year supply of CBD oil and also buying my Mindlabpro supps, (last month I actually spent wayyy too much money), maybe could do a post on what supplements I take in the future. Anyways, definitely very grateful for this. Not sure if I'm running under EV in BBJ EV anymore with all the table shares and this small win I got today and in recent months.

Time to have a great month

I greatly appreciate the detailed reply on my schedule questions; am asking you as I have been asking myself if I need to have a schedule in spirit just like yours to keep myself on target for daily and weekly goals. Thank you for the insight.

You're welcome thanks for the thought-provoking question

Well, after winning the BBJ (winners side) this month, the month has been quite terrible. If it wasn't for the BBJ I'd be breaking even right now.


GG made changes to 4card PLO, making it 7-max, they also introduced 6card PLO. Overall, I'd say not great for ecosystem.

Games have seemed more reggy, maybe just because a table will still generally run with only one recreational player, although there's been slightly less tables running. Hands per hour are slightly less and it's much harder to table select with this "7th seat". Also even less point in starting tables. Slightly more multiway pots, and needing to play even nittier isn't fun.

Overall the change to 7-max hasn't been my favorite and I hope they revert it or even make it 5-max. I'm not sure why GG made this change anyways, nobody asked for this.

Well we'll see how it goes, but for now I'm not feeling great about the changes.

On the other hand, I've been a pro for about 9 years now. September and October have always been historically my worst months of each year, and well, nothing seems to be different right now.

Only got like 10 more days to grind this month before going on holiday, so will be happy with anything over 30k hands this month.

Excited to see how the month ends.

I'm in the camp that GG Poker is a rake trap that shouldn't be played, but I do follow the actions being taken by all poker sites. Coin Poker at some point changed to 7 handed tables also. I never saw a word from players on GG Poker or Coin Poker asking for 7 handed tables so there is every indication this is a pure math related money grab by GG Poker where they think 7 handed is even better for them. I did a light search but haven't seen any math on how this will work out for different player types. But I will say out of curiousity I also did a rake cap search to see if this helps hit the rake cap and therefore be able to play above te rake cap. But the rake caps on GG Poker are above and beyond just about every other site and are a ****ing disgrace. GG Poker is a rake trap.