Around 2 years ago I heard rumours that a few different companies were looking into combining aspects of computer card games like Hearthstone to aspects to poker, with the intention of creating a competitive environment where money would be wagered.

As a heads'up cashgame player this was exciting. As my games were dying at a very fast rate, it was clear, that I needed to adept to the changing times and learn something new. I spent the next few months learning and playing Hearthstone relentlessly and was able to bring a free to play deck to legend rank. (Don't ask me why I didn't pay for some packs, I guess I wanted an extra challenge).

Around that time the game holdem x was released and I spent a bunch of time learning and playing the game but ultimately it was a huge disappointment. The gameplay and game mechanics just felt broken and once they introduced deck building the meta quickly turned into everyone having exactly the same cards. It really wasn't fun...

Presuming then, that this format would not work, I shifted my attention to Hu hyper and spin and go's with the help of some friends, where I quickly moved up to the 50 and 100 euro spins on Winamax. The 7% rake and high jackpot payouts made for some huge variance though and I ended up switching to hu hypers which, whilst being a lot tougher, felt a lot easier on the mind.

Roll on to August of last year and I saw that PokerStars had added a new game in Alpha called Power Up. I played a few games but had lots of problems with bugs and left it. Over the next months I had a bunch of health problems (I have epilepsy which is now under control with meds) and was not really in the best state of mind to be able to play poker for money. So I turned back to Power Up and found a game with tremendous amounts of strategy and was pretty much hooked on figuring the game out. The huge number of variables at first glance seems like a complete swamp of information that is hard to process, but after a thousand hands or so you can really start to understand how the powers can be used to maximise your winrate.

The next few months (due to travelling) I was only able to play the play money games on the .net client but with the help of my buddy Nick we spent a number of hours reviewing hands and going over strategies. We ended up deciding at some point late October to create a dedicated site with the intention of creating a community that the best players would want to join, where we could share strategies and get one step above the rest.

It's now mid February and our website, called Op-poker, has turned into a hub where we have been able to actively talk to the game developers with the intention of improving the game. Thanks to one of our members suggestions, the Power Up team at PokerStars managed to create a new blind structure that allowed for much more playability and ideas are constantly being shared on how to take the game to the next level.

Since that point I have got myself some tracking software in the form of PT4 and have been logging my results with the hope that I can quickly establish myself as one of the best regs currently in game. I'm a few months behind in terms of actual playing but thanks to Nick, I have been actively involved in the strategy side of things that I felt comfortable enough to jump straight into the highest current buy-ins ($7's) and (so far) get off to a winning start.



My short-term goals are fairly simple. Get in a fair amount of volume and share ideas. Whilst the game is still only low buy-ins I'm quite happy to experiment a bit and see what works.

Week Goals:
25-30 games per day
1 Youtube video

GLGL!

Wow.. what a week it's been..

So to start with I managed to get a game against Andrew “Good2cu” Robl and remembered to hit the record button when we got headsup. If you want to see the video I'll just plop it here. I got told off for spam before but hopefully in my own blog it's fine..



On Tuesday Stars released the $15 stakes that I jumped straight into. Outside of a few hours in the evening these games have been an absolute regfest meaning that I really needed a solid game if I was going to survive in this environment being a few months behind everyone else in terms of dynamics I struggled a bit at first understanding player tendencies and something that would seriously crush one player can be an absolute disaster vs another.

Overall i'm a slight winner so far on the 15's but there is a lot of room for improvement and I could for sure run a little better



A few days after the 15's were out I decided to ask the players on discord for a top 5 and top 10 reg list. I was fairly sure that I wouldnt be in the top 5 (yet) but felt I was probably somewhere in the top 10. After hearing a bunch of peoples opinions I might even struggle to be in that list too.

So my goal for the next 1 or 2 weeks is to get into the top 10 and by April to be considered top 5.

I feel it'd be good for the blog to list players that are currently considered better than myself and maybe next month I'll bring up the conversation again and see where I stand

Vokero4ek
Ayhshhh
Filiok
Jayseven
Paha42region
srgpanov
Trewqq
Aamentalist
juice_man6
rustttam86

Other than that, the Op-poker stream got hosted by PokerStars On Tuesday by over 1.2k viewers. I managed to miss the actual moment (busy on excel creating an roi calc for power up..) but I did get on stream about 40 mins later and play a few games which was nice. I've never really been infront of a crowd for anything. But given with twitch you are behind a computer screen, I didn't feel at all uncomfortable which is a great confidence boost. I hope we get many more streams like that one it was quite a rush.

Last weeks Goals:
Play 25-30 games a day (I managed 34 on avg!)
1 youtube video (See up top)

This weeks Goals:
Play 30-35 games a day
1 or 2 youtube videos or 1 video and 1 piece of strategy.

@anuj22 Thx for the GLGL. I hope to not see you on the tables anytime soon

This past week was tough. Very tough. Except the games, those were soft

It seems as though over the past week the traffic has picked up significantly on the games with an influx of new players and possibly some new regs. While these players are only testing out the waters and trying to figure the game out you would expect the games would be easy pickings for an already established player of Power Up. In my case, at least, you would be very wrong.

Graph pic


In the first 3 days of this past week I lost almost every match - most of the time against newer players who managed to win with some clear misplays and before I knew it I was down 30 buy-ins. In the long run it won't really matter much if the games stay as they are right now. I have zero doubt that I'll be winning and do well in the current games so it's only a minor frustration this far.

I managed to win a bit back during the last few days but I did move back to only 1 tabling, hurting my total games played for the week.

Last week Goals:
30-35 games a day avg.
1-2 youtube videos or 1 video and 1 strategy

My video this week was more beginner friendly looking at power card combinations. My strategy piece has been all written out but I now need to record the perfect example hand. It might take quite a long time as there is no hand replayer to use currently. This will be the 1st more advanced piece of writing I will have done for Power Up - mainly theory - so I hope some of you will like it

This next week I may be doing some travelling so I will be unable to play that much. But I will look to make a youtube video on cycling cards and start work on the next.

Week goals 1 new video and start work on the next
Bonus goal 2 videos.

A fairly meh week for me personally but thanks to Nick & Eva it was another busy week at Op-poker.

I got to play a small amount of games (mainly the 15's), with good results but of course volume was bad due to travelling.



The discord group also got a few more of the $15 regs joining, which is great. The limit with the emote only feature on Power Up is that it's been hard to get the regulars together. I'm glad that people are finding Op-poker and joining in on the discussion.

My video for last week is almost complete and I'm looking forward to seeing how people feel about it. The subject is around cycling power cards, basically taking concepts from other card strategy games and applying it to the game of Power Up.

This week I will be mostly out of the UK Which means I won't be able to play much Power Up but on Thursday I look forward to having my first proper stream with Nick over on our twitch channel

https://www.twitch.tv/op_poker

I think I will be alright but to be sure I will start on the lower stakes games during stream so that I can comfortably go through my thought processes and hopefully entertain you guys and girls

Other than the stream I will start to create a new and much more dynamic preflop chart strategy, which will hopefully be out in a few weeks with some complimentary videos on how it works.

Hopefully see you all at the tables on Thursday.

P.S. While writing this blog I managed to take down a donkament on Winamax. Woop Woop.

It’s been exactly 1 month since my last blog post so I thought it’s about time I got back on it.

Until this past week I had been doing a bunch of travelling including seeing nick and doing my 1st stream. I only managed 1 hour but in that short period of time I somehow managed to miss the fact I had a straight and fold it to a 1/10th pot bet… Not the best start overall haha.

Other than that I’ve been spending most of my time in Slovenia. It’s one of the nicest places on earth but PokerStars wont let you play there, so I couldn’t play any power up

Luckily last week I managed to get back to the UK for some post Easter with my parents which also had the added plus of letting me get in some volume on the power ups.

And boy did I run good.



I’m feeling pretty good about my game and added some aggression in areas that I didn’t have before. I’m also feeling much more comfortable with the combination of powers that I have to work with.

The only bad thing so far has been volume and this needs to be addressed. Right now im mostly 1-2tabling because i’m too lazy to play on multiple limits. I want to get back into a proper volume grind mode so this is what I will be working on next week.

This weeks Goals will be:
Learn to play sets of 3 games at once and then
Be able to constantly 3 table.

I asked a couple of the regs on the $15 stakes of their top 5 player list (secretly hoping they’d add me to it) All players asked were winning at the $15 games and does not include myself or Nick from Op-poker.

filiok x5
iloveyurmom x5
ayhshhh x4
jlhmac x4 ← (me!)
VoKeRo4eK x3
arrudaneto x2
NrlAndrade
FatJewishKid
Marakvelidze

See you at the tables!

Nice graph that last one. Good luck.

@fahrrr Thanks! I have to say I am quite happy with it

Another week has flown by and the results have been keeping themselves on pace despite the beautiful weather trying to ruin it .



Although I did manage to play up to three tables for the majority of my sessions, I would not say that I could comfortably do it. If, for example I had two of my games headsup, I would be having real problems and making some fairly large mistakes. Luckily due to fairly soft lineups this did not effect my roi for the week.

Now that I’ve really been able to get back into the action, I’ve been surprised at how 2 of the players that have been giving me personally the most trouble were not even featured on my list of last week. I’m still not sure whether this is down to variance, playing styles or other factors but I would like to admit players Isoqqw and Paha42region so far have been able to beat me comfortably in the games we’ve played.

If any of you play power ups regularly, give me a pvt message as we have a chat set up with a lot of power up players and regs in it.

I guess my focus needs to remain on 3 tabling for the next week. I will also aim for 150 games this week (slightly more than last week) as I should have a good 3-4 days free

I can finally comfortably 3 table! Although the results don’t show it that way haha.



Graph pic

I also managed to hit my 150 game goal. Results look pretty bad but upon reflection at the hands im pretty happy with my play and quite happy about the edge I have against the majority of other regular players.

Starting tomorrow (1st of May) there is a Power Up challenge that I am helping to organise to try and emulate my buddy Nicks success in turning $30-$1k playing only Power Up. It seems we have a bunch of people that are going to give it a try and I want to join in. I even bought some side action on a prop bet that’s going on. Can’t wait to see how that goes!

Here’s the 2+2 thread if you are interested in joining. https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...43/?highlight=

I’m hoping to do it in under 1.7k games - this is how many games Nick did it in. That is the goal at least - but we will see if it’s possible.