Hi everyone,

Welcome to my PGC, i have decided to start this as i am already posting my thoughts/blogging on a study group discord that i am in so thought why not cross post to here, i feel like a lot of PGCs have monetary targets/stake targets and whilst that is all good i think that mine is a little bit different and can maybe benefit some people. Whilst i do have stake targets that i want to meet and will discuss in here in the future, i am mostly going to be posting about my process that will get me there.

Reflecting

So overall I'm really happy with my game, I've played poker for a while but only actively been studying and taking it serious from about April time this year. Before that i would do some half arsed hand reviews and run a few sims and maybe post it on my instagram story but it was all a load of bollocks. I wasn't getting better and more importantly i wasn't trying hard enough to. Since talking to someone about this and understanding that most of the best players in the world have got to the top through insane amounts of hard work and focused study i decided to change my study habits and my general process overall. As most of you know most of my focused study has been through PIO, mainly running aggregated reports and trying to get a wider view of the game and build a simplified strategy where possible. In addition to that I've also been giving a 2nl grinder some free coaching to help him improve and also test my own understanding of the game. I've also joined sessions on here with you guys and these have helped me loads, however i do feel that my attendance on these calls could be improved.

Moving Forward

So originally my plan for the next month was to play exclusively 25nl whilst i implemented what I've learned off the table and apply it in game. I planned to play 65k hands and really get the reps in playing a few of these spots whilst also hopefully increasing my bankroll to over 65 buy ins for my return to 50nl. However i have decided against that idea, i have decided that instead of increasing my bankroll which i don't really need to do at this stage, i would be better off increasing my study whilst playing 25-50nl and just getting a little bit better at playing every spot and increasing my understanding. So with this in mind and also being aware that just sitting in pio doesn't help get the reps in, I've decided to switch from reg tables to playing two tables of zoom where i will play for 30-45 minutes and then sit out and review my play in depth for the following hour or two. I'm hoping that with this sort of play/study ratio i will greatly improve my thought process and understating of the game and my own strategy whilst playing.

Since i don't have any graphs to post, i will post a clipping of my pre session warm up and explain a bit about each as it may be of some use to someone.

https://gyazo.com/8d485f48b397605cd12ae60d2b03edaa

So this pre session warm up is the minimum that i expect to do before i play each day.

Exercise: usually consists of running around 2km a day I've found that since doing regular exercise I've felt a lot better overall and more focused in game.
Studied 45: just studying hand reviews each day for 45 minutes before i play. This is the bare minimum and i usually do more in depth study on certain days without playing that day.
Gratitude: just thinking about how lucky i am for various things and then comparing that to poker (hard to get upset about a bad beat when you put into context how lucky you are in life)
Meditate: usually only for about 5-10mins but i just focus on my breath and try to not lose focus, also good to not be critical when your mind does wander
Look at HHs: these are mental game hand histories of areas of mental game that I'm currently struggling with, i feel its good to remind yourself about these each day so that hopefully you can spot when the leak is creeping in.
Timer: this is just a 45 minute timer that i set just to check in with myself and run through a separate checklist to examine how i feel I'm playing
Affirmations: just affirmations about my game and outlook on poker.
My goals: this is just a quick look at my poker goals to remind myself what all this is for.
Goals for session: Just a quick sentence about what i want to be mindful about/implement that session.
Happy with play: this is based on a separate excel sheet that i fill in every 45mins that has questions about how I'm playing and then a 0-10 mark, i take the average to fill in this box after I've finished with my session.

As most of you know i don't currently look at my results and instead have developed the mindset of not caring about the results whatsoever. I've found that detaching myself from meaningless samples and just focusing on the process is what's important.

''Poker is a game with random outcomes of which I can’t control, but I can control the quality of my decisions my process and my mental game which over time will decide how much money I make'

Good luck and glad you've moved over here to post as well. I am also going down a similar route of not looking at results, I just look at the end of the month to post results.

I like the look of your pre-session warm up, I think a lot of people could take something from there that would improve their performance.

Thanks, yea i think not looking at results and just focusing on playing your best as long as your rolled for the stake is the best way to go and hopefully not many people bother to do it cause i think its probably better for us if everyone gets annoyed by 3k hand samples haha

The best downswing of my life, so far...

So when I first started practising gratitude I learned about how we should appreciate all the good things we have in our lives. I felt like this was a pretty easy thing to do (as I’m quite a grateful person anyway) and a good reminder when things aren’t going great, that indeed your life as a whole is probably pretty amazing.

However the first time I really questioned gratitude and what it meant was when I was listening to a Bencb podcast where he expressed gratitude for a hateful online comment. I had never practised being grateful for something negative and found the way he was able to do exactly that quite interesting. Bencb expressed how at first he was saddened by the nasty comment but took the time to think about the situation and became grateful that he had never had these hateful thoughts towards someone else like the online troll did and that the online troll likely had some big issues of his own. I found it quite amazing that Bencb was able to recognise this and turn it into a positive for himself whereby he sympathised for the other guy’s situation and was grateful that he wasn’t like this himself.

I think it shows a great attitude when you can take something negative and turn it into a positive for yourself, and that’s where I’m going with this, the positive side of my worst downswing...so far.

As poker players it’s easy to find sick graphs of people crushing, these graphs are all over the internet of people’s sickest stretches of positive variance (sometimes mixed in with great play) but it’s a bit harder however to find people’s sickest downswings. You do get some pretty honest results from long time crushers who know they are beating the games and have little to prove (shout out benabadbeat and D7 as two examples). However these graphs are from known crushers, people who know they are beating the pool and have nothing to prove to themselves/anyone else about what the swings in poker look like. It’s a lot harder to find these graphs from people playing 10-100nl, most of the people taking the game seriously and playing these stakes have a lot to prove. Maybe to friends/family, maybe to study buddies or coaches, however they have the most to prove to themselves. They are trying their best to work their way up the stakes and beat each pool along the way, often with no clear understanding of their win rate actually is.

I feel like What you end up with is a skewed outlook on poker at the 10-100nl limits. We don’t get to see many down swinging graphs from the guys putting in the work at 10-100nl which i think is understandable, nobody really wants to put out into the online world that they’ve been getting crushed for the last X amount of hands and losing X amount of their bankroll, when they have everything to prove. So instead of starting this blog out with graphs (rumour has it I don’t have a pretty one to even show) I’ve decided to post my downswing graph at 50nl and all my thoughts and gratitude associated with it. Hopefully it will help some people rising through the stakes to see that the sickest graphs don’t happen all the time and that everyone goes on downswings.

https://gyazo.com/eea13cc5b6089bc4f597c3a9162040a7

So as you can see over this stretch I managed to win around $1.8k in EV and then proceeded to lose until I was only up roughly $300 in EV. That's roughly 30 buy ins won then lost in EV. With my final win rate showing as only 0.84bb/100 all in adjusted.

When I first seen this graph I had all the negative emotions that comes with seeing a graph as ugly as this:
• How could I lose so much money (in EV terms)
• I run so f*cking bad
• what’s the point in studying if I still lose like this
• Should I just quit
• Am I even beating this stake
• How come everyone else runs better than me

I think the important thing to start off with is to accept that all of these thoughts are understandable to feel as a human with emotions, but to also recognise that they aren’t productive. Feeling like this isn’t going to get me to wake up at 7am to meditate or get me back in the lab studying or back on the grind. It’s difficult to see something that’s very negative and what feels like such a big setback in your journey, but I think for me it was massively +EV to recognise what good has come from this downswing and that it has actually become something that I am grateful for.
So why am I grateful for this downswing? Well I’m grateful because:

• it taught me how valuable bankroll management is
• it opened my eyes to the reality of variance and sample sizes. (No longer will I look at a 50k hand sample and take very much from it in terms of results).
• Having this downswing opened up a bunch of mental game leaks that were present but not noticeable until I experienced this downswing. This downswing helped me recognise them and going forward learn from them.
• Without this downswing I wouldn’t have put the amount of study into my game as I have over the last couple of months and would have been a far worse player overall.
• Through analysis It showed me areas of my game where I lacked understanding (and where I probably could have saved a few buy ins).
• It prepared me for the swings of the future.

and finally it showed me that even if this was my true win rate I am still beating the pool by roughly 0.84bb/100 which is pretty decent considering how high rake is and building upon this foundational win rate is better than not having one at all (which ironically could actually still be the case cause ya know sample size)
Hopefully this downswing has taught me enough that the next downswing I encounter has less of an impact on my emotions and confidence as a player but I’m sure when the time comes to lose even more buy ins there will be much to learn and much to test about my mentality and my process.

Since this graph I have revaluated where I am in my journey with poker, I feel like I’m happy with where I’m at, despite my results not looking great at 50nl I feel like I do have a stronger win rate there then is being shown (not yet proven) however I also now understand how important bankroll management is and although 25nl is a bit of a rake trap I have decided to drop down to implement things that I’m studying, experiment with new ideas and hopefully build up my roll a bit more. Whilst I think taking aggressive shots is a good thing I also think that 1-5 buy in shots just depend on how lucky you flip if you get to stay at that stake or not and so I’m going to mostly keep myself from playing 50nl again until I have enough buy ins for a bigger shot where hopefully if I do have a significant edge I am more likely to stick the landing.

Thanks for reading and if you aren’t already practising gratitude daily/weekly I highly recommend it.

Confidence

So for the last month i have been struggling a bit with my confidence on the tables, for a while i didn't really know why, i went through a few days of just wondering why i wasn't feeling confident without any real answer. I had recently put a lot of study in, been meditating warming up and checking in with myself during play to make sure i was playing well, yet i still felt like i wasn't good enough. As you all know i don't really check my results and have my balance hidden, so it wasn't as if i was losing and unhappy with myself or had seen a bad graph and got disheartened, it was like i was questioning if i was good enough without any real reason to. After a few days i realised it was because i was questioning my strategy, there were times where my play was solver approved but when i looked at the HH i just hated my play against the pool, i realised that this was what was affecting my confidence.
I didn't really know what i needed to do to improve my confidence and i began wondering if the strategy i was implementing was just straight up bad against the pool. After a couple of days i got talking to Lewis about it, i explained about how i felt and we got speaking about a certain spot where in game i felt like i should do something because PIO would approve of it, but against pool it may not be great and in game i actually took the line that i thought was best against pool. When we looked further into the spot we could see that my play without any nodelocking was fine in PIO and probably even better vs pool. Lewis helped reframe the way i thought about my strategy and ultimately helped me realise that it wasn't actually that bad, i just needed to trust myself in some spots and have confidence in myself and in other spots recognise where reverting back to ''GTO'' was probably a better option.
Within an hour or so of initially talking to Lewis, i was off the call and making a play and explain which we went over in the next hour. I have to say i was really thankful to Lewis for giving me his time and just having someone to talk to and get their perspective was a massive help and so begun a period of reviewing each others play every few days. Something like this is exactly what the study group is for and its times like these that you realise that in this solitary game you're not alone and there's always someone in the group that can help you, even if its just reframing some thoughts or giving straight up honest feedback.

Rakeback

So from the start of December up to this point i was playing all my volume on GG, the reason for this was that i was getting 0 RB at stars and after going through a long B/E stretch i
really began to realise how important rakeback is, especially at the micros. Stars must have noticed my absence during this period as they decided to stop being tight ****s and offered me a RB deal.
Whilst i enjoyed the software and RB of GG the software and games are just too good on stars to turn down with RB and so I've ended up moving my volume back there. One thing i want to ensure going forward though
is that i don't become a slave to RB and a zoom zombie. I have decided that if i am offered another RB challenge then i will complete it at least twice next month to take full advantage and hopefully grow the roll
enough to be taking some 100nl shots.

Glgl to everyone in the new year

(This blog is posted on a study discord, Lewis in this blog is Lethiferous on 2+2)

Subscribed - gl mate!

subrcribed. appreciate the shoutout and really enjoying your reflective stance.

good luck on your journey!

Thanks mate

Thanks Ben, glgl for 2021

Since the last post i have been on a bit of a mental game rollercoaster, i was mixing play between 25/50nl in order to complete my RB challenge, everything was going pretty well and i was up a few hundred $ on 25nl and breaking even at 50nl. I was generally happy with my play although i knew it could have been better, but i was also putting in 3k days where in the past ive averaged out at around 2k/day. Putting in the extra volume wasn't too bad, i was mostly playing 3 zoom tables and so the extra hands were easy to come by, however i felt like i was running pretty poorly and could feel my mental game starting to slip. I first noticed my routine slipping when I stopped exercising, i started to
rush any study i was doing in order to get back to playing, I had this anxious feeling of needing to put in a load of hands and also noticed during my meditation that it was taking me over 30 minutes of meditating to feel as relaxed and focused as i usually feel in 10 minutes.
Then after a few days came the blowup...

The blowup

https://gyazo.com/4b92dfc8d9c34f8e554a34bd8d798e11

To be fair to myself i haven't had a blow up playing poker in a very long time, however during this session of 25z i reverted back to being a mental game whale. I played way too fast, had 4 tables open, didn't think about spots, called down way too light, shoved way too light and just generally spewed. It was such a horrible feeling at the end of the day looking at my graph and knowing that a fair amount of buy ins were wasted due to mental game. I wasn't really surprised though, i had noticed my mental game slipping and had done nothing to stop it. On top of all that i realised that despite how many hands i had played that day, completing the challenge was going to be impossible at 25z and i would have to move all of my volume to 50z in order to complete it at a time when my mental game was at its worst its been in nearly a year.

Benabadbeats impeccable timing

So about a day after this had happened and trying to put the pieces of the mental game puzzle back together, i noticed this post from Ben:

https://gyazo.com/910f2353debaba1fba16cac92df696ef

The part that stuck out for me was that instead of trying to dissipate feelings of tilt, we should fully embrace them, wallow in them and try to think about what we are actually feeling/thinking during this tilt. The question i felt i should be asking myself after reading this statement was:
What is currently being activated within our emotional experience of tilt/anger/frustration?
Well inevitably during this period of poor mental game it didn't take me long to feel the sensation of tilt and so it was time to put into practise my new question. I played a hand vs someone i had tagged as a bad reg which went quite badly for me and given Bens advice i took the time to wallow in how i felt, and subsequently came up with these four statements:

1. Feelings of not knowing what im doing and making the wrong decision.
2. Feeling angry that a worse player has played a hand badly but still benefitted from my play. Put bluntly i don't want a worse reg to beat me.
3. Feeling like i keep treading water on this stake and i just cant get a good momentum going of playing well and playing well vs pool.
4. feeling that i just spazz out without fully thinking through my decision.

So i had come to the point of knowing what i was feeling but i didn't know how to tackle these feelings or where to begin. Was i supposed to just rationalise why my thinking was bad? Was i supposed to further explore those feelings individually? If so how? I didn't really know and decided to just bite the bullet and ask Ben if he could give a quick bit of advice on how to further investigate these feelings. To be fair Ben gave a really detailed response to my question and pointed me in the direction of some useful sources. His main point was that rationalising at this point was a bit premature and i needed to further explore these feelings until they reveal deeper aspects of self which could lead to core ways of being.

So that's what i did, i tried to think about what each statement meant to me and followed a link he had sent on conditions of worth. After following this link i tried to pair up the reasoning behind each statement with what i think could be having an impact/causing the feeling. Whilst i will detail here what i currently think each one means for each statement i do want to stress that I'm still in the exploration of these feelings and research into them and so my thoughts on each could eventually lead me to a different cause/reasoning.
So here we go

1. Feelings of not knowing what I'm doing and making the wrong decision.

This currently feels like a locus of evaluation problem where I'm worrying about what others think rather than trusting in my own thought process and standing by it. I have this weird voice in my head sometimes when playing which isn't asking useful questions, instead its asking what would someone else do. I often recognise this and try to get into a better thought process but I'm sure i also miss these thoughts on occasions too which will have a detrimental impact on my play.
I think this could also be related to low self esteem where i assume i will make the wrong decision and so that's what i end up doing.

I think this feeling can be worsened through playing 4 tables of zoom where we rush decisions and don't have the time to construct a solid thought process.


2. Feeling that a worse player has played a hand badly but still benefitted from my play, put bluntly i don't want a worse reg to beat me.

I think the way i wrote this originally is very close to being polarized thinking/dichotomous thinking in that i originally wrote the reg played the hand terribly and i only edited it to badly before i sent it, obviously in poker a lot of actions are similar in EV and absolutes such as terrible
aren't helpful to myself to the way i should be viewing EV in poker.

3. Feeling like i keep treading water on this stake and i just cant get a good momentum going of playing well and playing well vs pool.

I think this could be down to not having clear objectives/goals that i want to achieve, if my only goal at the moment is to get to 100nl whilst I'm currently breakeven at 50nl then I'm not going to recognise all the short term
progress i am making and what progress needs to be made in order to get to 100nl. I think in order to overcome these feelings we need to set SMART goals.


4. Feeling that i just spazz out without fully thinking through my decision.

This has a link to ADHD, one of the questions that is always asked during ADHD testing is if the person feels like they make decisions quickly and fail to think through the consequences. I have always felt like i have some form of ADHD due to the number of ADHD symptoms i exhibit and when i have completed online assessments for ADHD i have always been in the region of being advised to have a full assessment by a trained professional. Going forward I'm going to get a private assessment for ADHD as i think self diagnosis/medicating is dangerous and not something anyone should do.

Funnily enough whilst looking at recent online assessments for adult ADHD they mention trying to get a hold of old class reports to see if there was ever any indication from teachers about lack of focus etc. I managed to find one from year 11 and below are a
few comments from it:

https://gyazo.com/d34c5812bb793ca6468432e332112e84

https://gyazo.com/00810a211a14c34fc4dd7753975aea9e

https://gyazo.com/c1ad54a5ff2a861bc421e063185f6d6c

Related mental game topics

Whilst trying to come to these realisations i also came across the following topics that i believe could also be some sort of a factor or could also be of benefit to anyone else reading that hasn't thought about these topics in regard to mental game and poker.

Toddler brain

If we are too tired, or feeling emotional its very easy to resort to using our toddler brain instead of our prefrontal cortex which helps us focus/process information.

Learned behaviours

This is usually used to describe behaviours we have picked up from our parents such as a parent who makes rash decisions.

Low self esteem

this leaves us assuming we will make the wrong decision and so that's what we end up doing. Or it could be we make 'safe' decisions that actually hold us back.

Depression

Can leave us with negative doom and gloom thinking, we can try to avoid making any decision at all as it all seems pointless.

Adult ADHD

We can be very impulsive and make decisions before we've thought things through leading to us living in a cloud of regret which then further drives bad decision making.

Conditions of worth

Conditions of Worth are conditions we believe we have to meet to gain acceptance, love or positive regard from others. (These seem to be quite unique to individuals and so further research into your own conditions of worth is needed)

self destructiveness

What usually happens is that they feel bad, but they don’t manage to identify exactly why. So, they develop behaviours that hurt themselves. We all have this side to us somewhere inside.
A self-destructive person boycotts themselves. They can do this in an unconscious way.

Dichotomous thinking

The tendency to think in terms of polar opposites, that is in terms of the best and worst without accepting the possibilities that lie between these two extremes.


Going Forward

So moving forward it feels like i have a lot to work on, but i feel by firstly identifying what's happening deep down, it will give me a greater understanding of what i can do to get better.
In addition to that i have also created a few SMART goals to tackle statement 3 which are:

1. Achieve a 1bb/100 win rate over the next 50k hands (by Feb. 28th) at 50nl
2. Complete all parts of my pregame warm up before playing from now until the end of January.
3. Finish my UTGvsBB report by February 1st and have a call with Lukas to discuss.
4. Start and complete my RB bonus by the deadline without ever playing 4 zoom tables.


and that's all I have to say bout that

P.S.

lol that i called another reg bad and yet im hoping to achieve a 1bb WR

Wtf man just found your PG&C. Why didn't you just shamelessly promote your blog when you posted in my thread? Good ****ing stuff man.

I'll write something less shallow when I have time.

GL and subbed af

I am very pleased I stumbled across you PG&C and actually had the patience to read every post fully!

I have never related so much to someone's poker journey (Maybe because I'm also from the UK and their was a lot of nostalgia seeing the GCSE school reports ) . You articulate many challenges extremely well, and actually formulated a plan on how to tackle them - something I have never managed.

The quote below stands out as something I have experienced time and time again.

On these downswings I always try and cheat my way up. Playing more tables and playing faster to try and dig myself out. I think it's obvious to most people this only compounds the issue.

I hope you keep us updated on the journey and I'm definitely going to adopt the way you are approaching a lot of these challenges. Gl gl!

I'm playing 50 R&C on GG and some 50z on stars so maybe we've even had a few hands together.

Haha, thanks man, i was too busy enjoying your thread to self promote thanks for subbing

Thanks for taking the time to read through Bossman, yea looking back through the reports made me really nostalgic, also made me realise how much time i wasted in school lol


Yea i used to be very guilty of that, to be fair i haven't done it in a long while due to being able to recognise my early warning signs, the only downside of that is that i never play a lot of volume due to quitting before tilt takes a hold, i think i average around 30k hands a month when i could easily reach 50k. I guess having this period where i had to grind regardless was very good as it opened the leaks back up for me to actually fix them instead of ignore them.
If you find yourself only realising after the session has ended that you tilted i would really recommend meditation as it was for sure the thing that helped me recognise the early warning signs.
Yea I'm sure we have played a few hands together then, hopefully more in the future too as we climb

Yeah definitely will. I recently got the Headspace app - it seemed like a good way to get into a routine of meditation.

I think its really valuable for poker and just to destress generally - but have never got the habit to stick.

Hey guys, so after not posting for a while I've decided to come back to this, the main reason is that for the next 6 months i really want to push myself
and see how far i can get in poker with a proper routine and dedication to the game that i haven't tried before.

At the start of this year i was breaking even at 50nl and not really improving, i was hardly playing/studying and tbh that's continued through the year
(i currently have an average of 18k hands a month which is awful). Since February time however i have had about 5/6 sessions with a coach who has really improved my thinking about the game and made some things really click and made me think that i understand a lot more about how poker works. With the advice of the coach I decided to move from stars over to app games.

One of my biggest leaks before i started working with the coach is that i really didn't know how to play vs fish. I had an alright thought process generally
about how the game was played but was a whale at extracting value from whales, thankfully that's mostly changed.
As you all know i don't usually look at my graph but because of the way settling with the agent goes i had to see my winnings to ensure all figures with RB were correct so below you can see my results from 25-80nl
This is an old graph as i haven't looked at my database since i started to shot 100nl due to not wanting results to affect my play.

https://gyazo.com/d8fb541414aaf6c211f8d64d3fe9c057

Pretty happy with this winrate, especially as having looked back over this database there are loads of blunders in huge pots which cost me loads of EV,
thankfully there was a general over arching theme around these spots which i managed to identify and going forward i'll be working towards correcting.

Goals for the next 6 months:

Daily:

Exercise at least 30 mins every day
Meditate every day
Journal after every session
Maximum 30mins on phone before bed

Weekly:

Meet with M to go over general tagged hands/big pots from the week
Study the topic/concept i've learnt with G and send him relevant hands
Study mental game

Every Other Week:

Meet with G to dive into a topic/concept

Monthly:

Play 100 hours a month
Study 30 hours a month

Plan for the next 6 months

September-October plan:

Play 100nl as maximum stake
Do not look at graph/settle with agent until October 31st at earliest

November-December

If September/October have gone well start shotting 200nl, if not stick to 100nl as maximum stake until December 31st

January-February

If 100nl has gone well shot 200nl if we have been shotting 200nl and its gone well then stick at this limit until the end of February
Plan the next 6 months

I'm hoping that with a clear plan and strong routine that ill be able to get pretty close to 500nl at the end of the next 6 months.
I'm not sure whether to make this a place for me to journal daily or to keep it as a less frequent place to put the bi monthly updates but will figure that out over the next few days.

glgl all

Hey guys, its that time of the month.

Just re read over last months blog and decided to keep this one a bit shorter as just want to mainly address my goals and plan for the next month.

Daily goals:

Exercise 30mins everyday: not achieved, really need to make sure this is happening. I have just started swimming and that will happen most days I imagine but on days it doesn't I need to make sure I'm still exercising to some degree for 30 mins
Meditate every day: partially achieved, I meditate every day I play but sadly not on days off.
Journal everyday: not achieved, this is mostly down to not having the willpower when the my session ends at like 4am.
Maximum 30mins on phone before bed: partially achieved.

Weekly:

meet with M: achieved and exceeded with 2 sessions per week.
Study mental game: achieved

Every other week:

Meet with G: not achieved as he's been unavailable whilst grinding hard in Vegas but has given me a free session because of this.

Monthly:

play 100 hours: should be achieved at the end of the day
study 30 hours: failed miserably

Looking back over this i think its important firstly to recognise the things i have achieved and be happy about them but at the same time understand that i really need to up my efforts if i am to achieve what i want from poker over the next 6 months.

So i had sold 20% of my first 40k 100nl hands as I'm a bankroll nit and I'm pleased to say the shot has gone well and I'm now taking all my own action at that stake.
I am now also playing in some of the softer 200nl games however i have sold 25% of this for the next 40k hands so I'm essentially playing 150nl to make any downswing/mental transition easier on myself.

I've decided to settle with the agent today so that means looking at my graph, so i will post it here. However going forward i am going to try and not settle with the agent/look at graph until around January time as I think that will hopefully give me enough time to ride any swings i encounter and not have it have so much of an affect on me mentally.

Graph since my last post:

https://gyazo.com/81e459783a55ae775fe73fcb7d475890

With 40% RB and rebates it should be about a $2400 month which is great however its also wise to remember that this WR isn't sustainable over a large sample, so just thankful for the upswing but also conscious that the inevitable swings are only around the corner.

glgl all

Yoyo,

Time for the monthly update.

Outside of poker:

So this month we had our first squad meet up which was pretty sick (this group was started by Patrick Leonard back when he offered coaching on Instagram and because of the demand of people instead decided to set up squads of people who all played around similar stakes).

We all met up in Cardiff to have a weekend of food/drinks and rugby, sadly between the poker/drinks/rugby we didn't get to enjoy any of the great restaurants Cardiff has to offer (sorry Tom). I had a great time meeting up with everyone and I think the highlight for me was stacking Rio when I cold called a 25bb 4B OOP with 22 (great play cause pockets 2s never lose) and flopped a set vs his KK.

1am picture all pretty ****ed lol
https://gyazo.com/30080329f02229ef9de8705c0579ef32

Wales Vs South Africa at Millennium Stadium
https://gyazo.com/d286ee410049e1d8f77f8dcec66fb109

Video of a pitch invader at the game who ****ed an attack for Wales for a $30 bet loool (what a degen)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJowsFzivwY


Poker:

Overall i think the month has been ok, I don't think I've been running particularly well but i think my play has been alright and my mental game not too bad.
Study and exercise has been pretty much non existent which im quite disappointed about and if i want to achieve my goals im going to have to turn this around pretty quickly. This month ive also been playing a few sattys to the EPT Prague 1k national event, whilst i havent binked a package yet i have annoyingly finished 8/65 with top 5 getting packages (classic TT<AK BvB for guaranteed package) and a couple of other final table bubbles, hopefully over the next week i can turn this around as the sattys themselves seem soft af with recs punting off when they have a seat locked up etc.

Other news:

As i mentioned my study/exercise routine hasn't been that great recently, whilst there are a bunch of different reasons for this i think one of the biggest impacts has been working at the bar on a Saturday night. What so often happens is that i work on a Saturday and end up going out for drinks afterwards, whilst this in itself is fine, i just really dont have the discipline to have 1/2 drinks and go home. I end up drinking way too much leading to a horrible hangover the next day which means Sunday is pretty much a write off for playing/studying. I also find that it takes me a while to get going on a Monday with lingering brain fog etc. So those Saturday night drinks essentially mean 3 days of no serious poker each week. After trying for a while to be disciplined and just go home after work and failing to do so i have decided to hand in my notice. This Saturday will be my last night working at the bar which means for the next 6 months at least my only source of income will be poker.
I'm really excited about this and i know that if i work as hard as i can study, exercise and create good routines for myself ill be able to succeed. We also have Christmas time coming up which is usually the time of the year when the games pop off so i want to be in the best shape i can to take full advantage of that.
With all that said im going to start posting on here weekly to keep myself accountable for my goals and to make sure im achieving them.

glgl

Hey guys,

With my first week of playing poker full time coming to an end i thought i would post my first post to let you know how its been going.
The week has been a mixed bag overall, i haven't played a lot of poker as my computer was out of action for the first couple days getting a new GPU and then i had a friends engagement party which obviously means a few drinks and feeling rough the next day so i fell a bit behind with actually playing poker. I did however stick to going to the gym/swimming/squash every day so that was a good positive (also managed to win a posture corrector off my brother during a 3-1 battering i gave him).
After attending the engagement party and having a sick time seeing some friends i haven't seen for a while i realised that I'm pretty much done with drinking for a while. I had another night out with the same friends booked for the 4th of December and I've decided to cancel as i really just want to push forward with my poker goals and not fall behind.

I have been doing well recently at scheduling my days and going forward im going to make sure that continues as i think it adds much needed structure.
Hopefully around this time next week i can report back that i have achieved everything that i wanted to.

Glgl at the tables.

Hey guys, that time of the week again.

This week has been a tough one if im honest, the week started off with me getting a trapped nerve in my back/neck whilst playing my brother in squash.
Subsequently i weren't able to go to the gym/swim/play squash all week, it has only just eased up today which was helped by a visit to a chiropractor.
My boy was also off school this week with a bad cough/flu so my routine of playing and studying wasn't the greatest but it was nice to have a few lazy afternoons watching Christmas films together, making paper aeroplanes and despite him being unwell loads of mucky fights (i won...mostly).
On the tables started off well, i won my first ever 1k pot on Monday as you can see below which was fun.

https://imgur.com/a/8J6Kmgx

I also won a couple of other 100nl stacks that night and i was excited for the week ahead.
I guess the poker gods were watching my happiness and decided i was a little too happy as the very next day i had my biggest ever losing session which was
around 1.6k. Every day since has seemed like a losing battle, all of my bluffs get snapped and all of my flopped sets get dicked by the turn/river which has been tough.
I think something like this has been happening for the last 4/5 weeks where i have a couple good sessions and I'm hoping for a pop off but then the rest of the week is just big losing days. Whilst this has been happening one of my favourite hobbies is to look at crushers graphs and see their biggest breakeven/losing stretches in their 500k+ samples and just to remind myself how even players with massive WRs can have huge breakeven stretches. Im hoping this is me putting variance into perspective.
Overall though im still feeling positive and looking forward to getting back into a good routine from Monday.
I have booked a session with a hypnotherapist tomorrow which im looking forward to. We had a good conversation on Thursday where we spoke about a recurring mental leak i have and he seems positive about helping me fix it so looking forward to that.

glgl for the week, and keep it 55th street

Hey everyone,

It's been a long time since i updated this but hoping to keep blogging my journey going forward so have start it back up somewhere.

I guess ill start with where i left off. It was the 5th of December 2021 when i made my last blog, i had not long quit my part time bar job and poker was going terrible, it was just one of those times where all your bluffs get called and all your sets get dicked by the river, obviously not ideal in your first full month of poker. Most of December was the same and i ended up taking a lot of time off around December. I started playing again on the 27th and ended up going on a nice little heater which was really helped by being an incredibly boring person and staying in on New Year's Eve and playing a 15hour session which was unreal. January and February were alright, but volume wasn't the best, most of February i spent looking at the news to see what was happening with Ukraine/Russia this isn't normally something i would do as i try to avoid the news as much as possible but i found the whole situation really interesting and was like others really shocked to see Russia eventually invade. However apparently speaking to a lot of other people close to me being wrapped up in the news around that time was a shared experience so i dont feel too bad on myself for neglecting poker during that time as i guess we were really living through a major historical event.

EPT PRAGUE

So, after firing multiple times to get into EPT Prague i managed to bink a full package for the 1K national event, i initially asked my mum if she'd like to join me as Shes been an amazing support in my poker journey (even giving me my first roll) which i obviously busted)). Unfortunately, she couldn't come due to work commitments so i decided to ask Lewis if he'd like to join me and he agreed. The whole experience in Prague was amazing, i managed to meet a couple of people i had spoken to from Poker for a long time and also really enjoyed spending time with Lewis with whom i had a lot of interesting conversations (even if a few of them were just him complaining about there being no kettle in the Hilton whilst there was in a 3-star hotel). Anyway, i managed to win $2680 in the 1k main event and another few hundred from 2/5cash games so overall was very pleased with the trip.

Irish poker open / Norwegian festival

After that i headed off to the Norwegian poker festival which coincides with the Irish poker open in Dublin, i had been told by a lot of people that the games there would be insane and so i was really looking forward to it. The first night i arrived and won 1k at 1/2 and was told the action would only getting better however to this day I'm concerned that this is just a conspiracy run by the city west hotel to fill their rooms as there was virtually no 2/5 or above running and only 1/2 consistently running. When 2/5 did run it would almost always instantly fill with all the other decent regs who had been fooled into believing there would be amazing action and so instead of reg battling i decided to just stay in the 1/2 games and try and get them to 1/2/5 which often happened (on the last night there was even a couple of hours where everyone was like 2.5k deep and it was 1/2/5/10/20 with the odd 40 added too) apart from this though the games weren't great if you wanted to grind 1/2 but pretty **** if you hoped for 2/5 or anything higher. Whilst i lost a few K over this festival i did have a lot of fun and got to meet another friend from online who had joined me for the festival who was fun to hang with even if most of what i said in my Welsh accent was completely misunderstood or not understood at all most of the time.

Online poker

So, after that i was back to playing online poker and was really happy with how things were going, my volume was mostly 200-400nl which had been going good and so i started to aggressively shot a lot more in the soft 500-1knl games that were running. I also spent a bunch of time playing 200nl HU reg battling whilst studying that on the side and i have to say that so far that's been the most enjoyable game I've played and i think in the future i will dedicate a lot more of my time going forward to that as i feel there can be quite a big edge to be gained battling regs who like to start tables but don't adjust well enough to HU. As you may know i don't ever check my graph but after having some trouble with PT4 i had to try to back up my database and ended up looking at my results which you can see below for my last 100k hands from 100-400nl (200HU and 600-1k is removed cause with those added it would be an almost breakeven graph loool). Overall though I'm happy with how online has gone this year and the shots i did take at the higher stakes i mostly just ran really bad in.



Moving to Bali

So earlier this year my boys mum was told she would be moving with her works to Houston where she would get accommodation and also private schooling if she wanted to take my boy. After a lot of discussion and me initially not wanting him to go with her (he had lived with me for the past 3 years) i eventually decided that it would be a nice adventure for him and as i always wanted to take him travelling in the future it would be unfair to not agree to him getting to see some of the world with his mum too. So once i had the rough dates of when she would be going with him i decided to book to move to Bali as i didn't want to be in Cardiff whilst my boy wasn't there. After spending time in Dublin and having a couple of projects we had been working on together my friend from online decided to join me in Bali too. Below you can see the view from the villa we rented which was amazingly priced and in a really good location. Since being here I've managed to get a lot of side projects I've been wanting to work on started with one of them coming in the form of starting a poker TikTok where i post some interesting hands I've played at 200-1knl. I'm yet to post on there but i have built up a bunch of videos which will be getting posted soon. I've also been really interested in starting a poker community and have restarted getting some content/discussion going on Discord which i hope to grow. I'll leave the link here: https://discord.gg/tN8BnVju and in my bio if anyone feels like joining. I'm hoping that going forward ill branch out into doing some vlogs and twitch too which I'm looking forward to. Whilst being here though i have to admit that my routine has suffered a little and i haven't studied poker almost at all which is disappointing. Going forward when i get back to the UK I've decided that's going to really change as i really want to push on and make 500-1k my main stake and also get a lot more of HU under my belt which will take a lot of study to make me a big winner in.



Closing thoughts

Whilst being in Bali and thinking back on my journey through poker (from quitting my job mid shift taking out a 10k loan the next day and deciding I'm now a pro at 16nl all the way to being able to travel whilst playing 100-500nl and actually making a living from the game) i realised that the best part about this game is that anyone that is serious enough about poker and really wants to make a career out of it can. There have been plenty of people in the past that i talked hands with that were way better players than me but most of them either fell out of love with the game, were too busy in other areas or just simply had other ambitions in life but if you're reading this and really want to be a professional poker player it is still possible (both online and live) if you are willing to put in the hard work, be a good learner and most of all not give up.

Glgl everyone at the tables.

Quick Update

Poker

Its been going really well this last month, currently up $5.4k with an average of about less than 3 hours played each day and with an average stake of about 130nl. Obviously running really well especially in the higher buy in games. (Accidentally regged a 500nl reg filled table and within an orbit i managed to make 150bbs with AKvQQ AIP, ran it twice and binked both boards)

Life

Been quite a chilled few weeks for me, we took a few days off and visited Nusa Penida a small island just off Bali which was pretty sick. Sadly, there was no surfing, but we did go to Kelinking beach which was incredible. i spent about 4 hours in the water trying to swimsurf waves that ranged from about 4foot to about 10foot at times. Got caught in the break a few times and got absolutely battered by the waves but it was so much fun. The climb down to the beach and the climb back up was dodgy as ****. Sadly, it turns out a few tourists have actually fallen to their death on the climb and another had died after being swept out to sea by strong currents. Whilst the place is incredible its crazy that more safety measures aren't put in place other than some wooden rails and in some places ropes that you can use to sort of abseil down.

Going to start heading home from Bali on the 7th and have stops for a couple of days in Vietnam and India which should be cool. After that its back to the UK where im going to try and bink some satties for UKIPT in London and even if i don't im tempted to go and play it anyway and a bunch of cash on the side as im sure its going to be incredibly soft. If this happens i will likely sell a package for the tournaments like i did in Prague so will post that here.

Thought I'd post some hands I've played over the last year.

HU vs a rec after everyone snap left when red busted



1knl shot take and i missclick folded fml. The Charlie Carell in me says he had 55 though so well played of course



Interesting hand played a few months back vs thejericho2, not sure whether he would be overbluffing or underbluffing river, i could see an argument for both as he could go super thin for value i imagine.



Fun BvB hand

Hey everyone thought i would give an update to this blog.

Returning home

I last updated this blog when i was in Bali and had a few days off before heading back to the UK, the plan was to travel to Vietnam and then India before heading back but sadly the Indian government decided to remove E-visas for British nationals and i realised too late and so i had to instead fly to Bangkok losing out on a lot of money from missing the Vietnam to India flight and the India to UK flight. Anyway, Vietnam was pretty incredible, we stayed in Ho Chi Minh for a few days but got to see the chu chi tunnels which were pretty cool. Since getting back i have really got back into a solid routine which has been good, ive been meditating studying working out and doing yoga almost every day as well as playing so I'm glad that's all back on track as it really fell off during my time in Bali.

Poker

At the beginning of this year i had a pretty good deal where i didn't have to deposit my own roll on a site and instead just did profit chops when i needed to. This was fantastic for me as i didn't have money tied up online and i could aggressively shot higher stakes knowing that if it went bad i just had to drop down and regrind before a profit chop. At the time i was playing mostly 200-400nl and shot taking a lot of 500-600nl and even some 1knl games. Sadly since returning home this deal has had to be postponed for a bit and i had to return to playing off my own roll which i wasn't looking forward to. Not only would i now have to be a bit more conservative with my shots but any downswing would now affect my net worth where before it wouldn't. For this reason i decided to start off super conservative, i mixed 50-200nl with most of my tables being 50-100nl.
Thankfully ive been able to build the roll up quite well and im back to playing mostly 100-200nl and back to taking the odd 500nl shot again. I'm hoping that the deal will be back in place and my roll will be padded enough to fully dive into the 500nl games and maybe even some soft 1knl games during the Christmas grind.

Something else I'm quite happy about is that historically I've only ever played 5/6 tables at any one time but at the moment I'm playing quite a lot of sessions with 8 tables, i do find the pace pretty intense sometimes and i for sure miss a few spots but i think the extra EV of extra tables outweighs the EV loss of missing a couple of spots and in the future that should diminish even further as i get used to playing more tables.

Lastly, myself and a friend have tried to build a bit of a discord community, we are trying to get some free content in the discord and today we are running a HH review session so if anyone would like to join you can follow this link: https://discord.gg/sW89TCUtTn

thanks for reading

Hey everyone,

Since last blog:

So since my last update i have to say i haven't really played a lot of poker, i played up until about the 20th of December and then had my boy over Christmas time up until about the 9th of January so that time was spent just doing lots of fun things with him before he headed off to Texas with his mum.
I totalled about 10 hours of poker in January but luckily i managed to sunrun and won about $4.5k so pretty pleased with that for the time invested. Included in that were some shots at some soft 1knl tables which went well thankfully.
On the 26th i then headed to Venice which was my first time visiting Italy, i really enjoyed the time there and the food was obviously incredible.

Venice



Me in Medellin


After Venice i then had to catch a flight to Madrid before my flight to Colombia, i had a 6 hour layover in Madrid and somehow managed to sleep for about 4hours and completely forgot to fill out my immigration form and book a departing flight out of Colombia so unnecessarily gave myself a bit of a sweat entering Colombia but luckily the guy didn't seem to care and just stamped my passport. Have to say that I generally dislike cities and prefer to be somewhere quiet or by the beach but Medellin seems to be the exception, the area I'm staying in is really cool with basically no tourists so it has a very Colombian feel which i like, its also really great in that i don't speak Spanish and nobody here speaks English and so I've been pushed out of my comfort zone in terms of having to get by day to day.

Poker

So after taking a few days to settle into Medellin buying a monitor exploring the area etc. i started to grind poker and it started terrible. I was down about 30 buy ins within the first 10 hours of playing which is about two days or roughly 5-6k hands which was incredible. Luckily I'm quite strict with myself when i have had a break and i drop my average stake when i return to grind so it wasn't as bad as it could have been dollar wise but still not a great experience. I feel like overall (except from having a moan to my friend one evening) I dealt with it pretty well. Whenever I recognized tilt at the table i just took a break and either went for a walk or did something else to take my mind off poker, i also tried to keep framing it as though I'm not running bad, I'm running exactly the same as everyone else i just need to keep playing well and turning up. At the moment I think I've grinded it back to only being down about 5 buy ins but I'm keeping in mind that I'm not out of the hole and tomorrow i could be back in another -30 buy in spot.

glgl to all the grinders

Lol @ this ^ guy

So I wrote most of this update just over a week ago and since then things started to improve and I got back to about breakeven from the start of the downswing. During the last week however i have consistently turned up and lost everyday and in all honesty I haven't dealt with it very well at all. To start with my routine was thrown off by getting a trapped nerve in my neck which meant I couldn't go for my daily walk or do any yoga as it was just too painful which led to me waking up having some breakfast and just diving straight into play which isn't great. I have been studying a lot lately and whilst this is overall a plus EV activity in poker in the short term it can cloud your decision making which can lead to a loss of confidence especially during a downswing. Not only that but i have found my ego coming into play and getting feelings of entitlement which again can happen when you feel like you've been showing up and working on your game only to keep losing. Lastly during times like these i often set aside time to work on my mental game in some form, which usually consists of watching one of Adam Carmichaels videos on YouTube and taking notes, however this time i haven't been doing that and its helped this period of poor mental game to continue.

Going forward

Its clear that during this downswing I haven't approached it the way i would like and regardless of results this needs to change. So for the next week im going to make sure that I'm going for a walk everyday, meditating, doing yoga and watching some mental game videos before playing. Im also going to lower my
table count and average buy in with less 500nl tables. My goal for this next week is just to play solid poker, take breaks when I'm feeling annoyed and try to reframe the situation in a more positive way.

glgl everyone @ the tables