Welcome to my PG&C! I'm a 26-year-old software developer and I've been playing poker semi-seriously since 2011. My main goals for this thread are:

- accountability/feedback to prevent the spew inherent in being a computer-programmer-type who is semi-serious about poker

- to act as a personal diary, as I've had some pretty cool experiences over the past couple years and I'd like to start documenting them.

My Background (tl;dr at end):

In January of 2011, I was a newly minted mechanical engineering grad beginning my first semester of grad school, when I had the realization that I hadn't done a very good job planning my life. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but it absolutely wasn't what I was doing. I decided to get serious about my two main hobbies, poker and programming, and see if I could make a living at either. Long story short: I learned that you shouldn't try to teach yourself two pretty complex skills at the same time, (especially when you're in grad school/doing research 50+ hrs/wk), and it's a lot easier to become a computer programmer than a professional poker player.

I had made about half my money in high school from home games and playing during school on a debt system, and I periodically played home games during the leaner times in college for beer money. In the months leading up to Black Friday, I read 'Let There be Range' and about 2000pp of other books. Literally the week before I was about to make my first deposit since 2005, the hammer fell, so if I was going to play poker it would have to be lollive. However, all of the 6max material I had consumed would only serve to make me a self-levelling spewmonkey in a live setting.

I had about 2k on hand, but was only making 16k/yr as a grad student, meaning I was going to have to get on my grind. The closest casino was the riverboat in Lawrenceburg, IN, a little over an hour away. I started my first few sessions on a mini-heater and was convinced that this would be as easy as it was in high school. Then I began losing at almost exactly the rate of rake and gas and realized I would need a different approach. I discovered the club poker scene in my hometown, but, even though the games there were 1/2 and 1/3, they played with a cap of 75% of the deepest stack--way above my BR or skill level. I found a dingy hole-in-the-wall 0.50/1 game at the only club in town that let people BYOB and drink at the table and was able to break even.

It became clear that if I was going to take this seriously I would have to move back home where I played and commute to school. I started winning slightly and broke into the larger club games, though I still played at the BYOB club a good bit. In January I took a dealing job there. I got terrible hours, mostly dealing tournaments, but the experience watching terribad live players make decisions without being in the hands was instrumental. Seeing how they responded to one another, without my table presence affecting them, helped me learn to quickly profile players and fuzzily range them, where before I had had a lot of trouble taking into account the heavily mixed strategies employed by bad players and relied solely on combinatorics. I also learned to weight information according to the corresponding bet size, since players often do things because they're bored or who knows why when it's not perceived to be overly costly.

About two months after I started dealing that terrible, bankroll-killing monster reared its ugly head--PLO. One of the other clubs spread a 1/2 PLO game that played very deep. The min-buy was 300, with a 1k/75% cap, and typical effective stacks were 750-2.5k. After a decent NL session cut short by being must-moved to a terrible main game, I discovered the reason the main was so terrible: all the whales were sitting PLO. I min-bought and within an hour had run up over 1k, and I was instantly hooked. Clearly it was reasonable to play a game this size with a 4k roll. I quit the dealing job because of the money I was heatering and went broke by the middle of summer.

Going busto combined with quitting tobacco led to a couple months of depression and halted productivity in all of my endeavors (poker, school, and my programming job). I was able to alleviate this to some degree by getting more serious about running, and by the end of the summer I was doing ~20mi/wk. I put poker on the back burner, finished up my classes, and started working full-time at my day job. A few months later a poker buddy and I went to visit one of my college friends. His personality had completely changed since the last time I had visited. Instead of neurotic, he was coolly self-confident. His secret: bodyweight strength training. I was intrigued and started training handstands, planches, and levers.

Now that I was working full-time I played a few times per month, driving an hour to play an uncapped 1/2 NL or a 100-500 1/2(5) PLO game but barely putting in any work away from the table. Last fall I put together a few buy-ins and took a 'serious' shot at a capped 2/5 game, but the undisciplined habits I had developed combined with a stretch of runbad led to me going busto once again.

At the beginning of this year I did some hard reevaluation, which led to two major changes. I dropped the self-directed bodyweight strength training and started doing yoga, and took a break from poker to build my savings and gain some better perspective. My mental health improved a lot, and I had my first relationship since undergrad. I found a couple friends who wanted to move with me, and we started renting a house in a city with a casino at the beginning of August. My re-initiation to live poker began around the beginning of July, and I now have 20 sessions under my belt. For the first time my finances are in order, my head is straight, I'm ready to put in work at the table and away from it, and I have the flexibility to do this for real.


tl;dr: 'Let There Be Range' turned me into a spewtard, and it's time to fix that. Also, I'm full maniac, so there should be some decent chip porn.

ps: I won't make it a main focus of this thread, but a lot of people on 2p2 seem interested in self-directed programming study. Feel free to ask questions ITT or PM me.

My favorite memory of playing poker with you was the hand where you exposed a card on the turn to a rando, who didn't see it for 5 minutes, and tanked the turn and the river for so long that I fell asleep on the river, woke up and was like "this hand is still going on?", before he folded and showed top set.

Yeah, that was a super crazy hand.

Tbf, there was both a flush and a straight possible OTT, and he was a scared money pizza delivery guy who had just gotten off work and apparently never played poker before.

Session report for 9/8/14
Duration: 2:11
Net: -29

I sit a little after 9 pm, buy 300, and play taggy for about 40 minutes.
Super boring stuff, I play a few 'interesting' hands like

Hero (400): QQ
Hero opens UTG to 20, 4 calls
Flop (95): QJT
check, Hero bets 75, folds through

and

Hero (650): AKo
Villain (475) - Whaley old white guy: ~75%
Villain straddles, two limps to hero in SB, Hero raises to 65, BB folds, straddle calls, limpers fold
Flop (148): TT6r
Hero bets 100, Villain folds

Then I play one of the types of hands I tend to bungle terribly

Hero (700): KQ
Villain (900) - scared money late 20s hick with tattoos and a pencil mustache: AKo
Villain opens UTG to 15, two calls, Hero 3-bets to 75 from HJ, only Villain calls
Flop (170): AJ2
Villain donks 100, Hero flats
Turn (370): 9
Villain bets 125, Hero raises to 300, Villain tanks about 30s and calls
River (970): 8
Villain checks, Hero thinks about 10s and rips, Villain tanks about 3 minutes and calls

Villain always has AK or AQ here, and I weight him toward AQ due to the small open UTG. If I'm going to stack the gutty here I should just rip turn, these scared-money types of villains get too sticky when pots get big. Fold is still way better though. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

I'm still happy with the flop float w/ gutshot+bdfd.

Anyway, I reload 300 and play kind of a weird one about an orbit and a half later

Hero (240): AQo
Villain 1 (150) - early 30s white tournament hobbyist: TT
Villain 2 (~900) - OMC: ??
Hero opens UTG to 15, Villain 1 raises to 30 UTG1, Villain 2 calls OTB, blinds fold
Flop (90): T74r
Hero shoves, Villain 1 calls, Villain 2 folds

Awesome. Villain 1 has pretty much 88-QQ, AK, AQs. He folds 12 combos of AK, 2 combos of AQs, 6 combos of 88-99 (discounted at 50%), for 20 combos folded. I have 16.3% equity against his 12 combo calling range. Villain 2 was completely uninterested after the flop fell.

EV = (20/32) * 215 + .163 * (12/32) * 340 - 125 = 30.2

I'm sure there's some EV in checking and evaluating if it checks through, but i think the only hands he checks back OTF are 88-99.

Finally, as promised, some chip porn:

Nice stack. My losing cash-outs usually contain fewer black chips.