GL with the grind. Being backed sounds rough. Over a year without a cash out is brutal how did you live

I mean it varies a lot. Anywhere between 40-10. The lower the BI the more "aggro" I go usually.

Thanks man.It might sound rough but I dont find it rough. I would find rough swinging 60K with my own role or not having the chance to reach my ultimate goals. I didnt really have to worry about the money. I have enough money to live for couple of years that I made so far from poker.

___________________________________________

I came home on Monday right after the sesshion because we were celebrating my sisters graduation and I also have school on friday and saturday. Will come back on Saturday evening. Already looking forward for the grind. Im putting together a month recap aswell as my goals for the next month so stay tuned for that

Ok, so time to sum up October. Overall it was obviously very very succesful again.

Poker
So yea, poker-wise Im very happy with how the month went. I played decent ammount of games, altho I couldve played more but given the other things I had to do I didnt have as much time for grinding. But as I said earlier, I think this might actually be a good thing. Also I reached a great milestione of actually clearing the MU which was very sattisfying and rewarding. It motivated me even more. Funny thing is that even tho I didnt really think being in MU affected my game a whole lot, now I kinda feel it did.

I play much more relaxed and I also enjoy the game even more. I am glad I developed many new habits that I think will help me on my journey. I think the quality of my game increased quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. Again, I think this has to do a lot with the mental state of mind and new habits of studying etc. Talking about studying, Im quite happy with how I did this month. Altho I said earlier I kinda messed up the 1-1 session with Tomi.

Im working on preparing for our next session but I find it really hard to structure a study for the topic I chose (BvB shorstack). This is just such a vast topic that theres millions of things you could study and it is just quite overwhelming. Also most of the stuff is very hard to study because its very hard to find out the optimal strategy. Im having a 1-1 in November with the one and only Goose.Core which is just fenomenal. Very happy to be able to work with him. Im gonna make sure to prepare very well for the session so that I can maximize the EV of those 90 mins.

Life
As far as life went in November, good things happened. I did quite a bit of work to school, mainly conneted with the master thesis. I wrote like 10 pages which is obv not too many but Im glad that I started and did at least something. I now have quite a clear structure and idea of what to do and how to do it. I think thats usually the most important thing because doing it is just the matter of time.

Im also happy about the social life. I met with a lot of friends when I came home, I also had a friend visiting me in Dresden and I spent some time with my family too so very happy about that. Even tho this all didnt really allow me to play as much as I could I think its also very important to not get isolated and only be focusing on poker in life.

I also managed to find a new hobby. One day I came across this chess video on youtube. I didnt really ever enjoy playing chess but for some reason I decided to play with my girflriend when I came home. We both enjoyed it very much and from a poker player perspective I love the war of minds in this game. Really enjoying it.

Also I reached one of my ultimate mid-long term goals and I bought an appartement. Very happy about it because I remember 2 years ago, I saw the appartement and I said to myself that its kinda a perfect one to live in. So another piece of the puzzle is completed. The only thing that worries me is my financial situation. Im a huge bankroll nit and I dont really feel comfortable having only a 1 year reserve. So I am either going to have to deal with it somehow or just bink sth As of now, Im looking forward to going to punta cana. Its gonna be a nice freeroll, hopefully, I can leave a mark behind there.

As far as November goes, I wrote down these goals:

November Goals:
Poker

1. play 450 games (quite low due to
2. punta cana)
3. focus on BvB in studying —> create a study plan and make sure to know what to ask about
4. mark 5+ hands in session
5. use the live tournaments to realize
6. which areas to work on
7. make mistakes & learn from them
8. move up tier
9. aim for 12BB/100
10. write a blog post at least 1/week
11. DO NOT GET COMFORTABLE

Life

1. write down day plan right after waking up
2. Try and obey in allignement with the 4 agreements
   • A) Be impeccable with your word.
   • B) Dont take anything personally.
   • C) Don't make assumptions.
   • D) Always do your best.
3. write 1 page/day of the master thesis
4. every day I play do:
   • A) workout
   • B) cold shower
   • C) meditation
   • D) warmup (pio or hands)

Beast month, congratz

Glad to see that its going well for you

Keep it up!

12bb/100 ytd or on the same month? sounds very impressive

Good luck with the cold showers

I really like your personal lifegoals under point 2, I think its much harder than it looks like, gl with that

Thanks ma man

Thank you I didnt say I am at 12bb/100 I said I wanted to aim for that number as I think I am certainly capable of it. Right now YTD is 7.6 and last month 9.8.

Thanks bro. Actually todays shower was waaay more bearable than the other. Perhaps Im getting used to?

As far as the 4 agreements go, I totally agree I think Im definitely gonna struglle with points 1-3. Point 4 I think I always acted in that way so its good.

Seems like I neglected the blog a bit recently. Ive been super super busy the past couple of days. I want to play a lot, study poker a lot and do some stuff to school each day before I leave to punta cana. But it seems like I cant really do all this stuff. I havent got to do anything to school yet, hopefully I can start with it asap so that I dont fall behind too much.

Poker
Ive been doing decent ammount of studying. Ive scheduled numerous reviews. Ive reviewed a tournament of a fellow badger but we havent got to go through it yet because we could only do mine so far. Then there was this coaching with Grafftekel where he was going through my 22$ Monday 6max deep run. I was super happy that it was my HH that got reviewed, on the other hand I would have prefered it to be another tuornament, not one where its pretty hard to make mistakes and its more about exploits. I think Id have preffered reviewing my performace in a tougher field.

As far as the sessions go, last 2-3 days were pretty rough. One of those days where the runouts were super ****ty. Im also gonna need to figure out if my performance is very bad when playing 10-12 tbls or if its just a coincidence. In the graph below I played 8-12 tbls till hand 1659. In general I dont feel I play bad when playnig 12 tbls, its more about missing some spots but i dont think they are that crucial.



Had numerous deep runs despite the overall run. Couple of close calls, came 10th in the xtase, 30th in monday 6max, 32nd in title fight. One day I will get that big bink tho.

Graph for last couple of days



"Life"

I also started a whole new routine. I used to work out during breaks but obviously thats not consistent. So Ive started working out right after I wake up. Also right after the workout I tend to have a cold shower. I accepted this challenge from Elmerix and let me tell you its great but also **** horrible But the way you feel fresh after it is just great.

Have tried the cold shower thing a few times and you're right - you feel great after.

Something I found that gives me the exact same feeling but without the pain of the shower is this stuff - not sure if it's available exactly like this where you are but something similar I'm sure.


if you get some, here's my tip. Don't rub it all over your balls.

Maybe that + cold shower would = $$$

Yeah cold showers are cool. I sometimes also do this and it works for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW1C_3OXhEs&t=

Wim Hof also have a morning routine what includes cold shower and kinda this, you can look it up.

Last couple of days were super super busy. I like the way my day is organised. The routines I developped seem to work very well and it seems like my day overall is just very nicely planned. Altho I could use like 20h of more time each day lol. I managed to squeeze in couple of pages to my diploma thesis at least.

Coachings

Theres been a bunch of coachings this week too that I scheduled. I didnt get to go over my marked hands even because I used coachings as a warmup mostly. I finished the review of his 700psko with Marc where I found out I was a bit off with calling ranges in certain scenarios. But in general I think I was happy with my thought procces and I also learned other things. Its always nice to see others perspective. Then I also had the coaching with Elmerixx. We talked about BvB play and he did a very good job preparing for the coaching. He gave me the most important information which was basically just guiding me in the correct way to approach studying that topic or any other topic for that matter.

He challenged me for creating "perfect exploitive" bvb ranges within 2 weeks, so thats what Im working on right now. Should be fun and educational. There was also supposed to be one group coaching with Apotheosis which got cancelled but instead we had a group review as a stable which was nice too. Within cuople of hours soem guys sent hands and we went over them discussing it together. I also got offered to start coaching again for the dev stable and I accepted the offer. Even though I liked having more time when not coaching, this time it should be different. I wouldnt have to do as much content and there would be noc pressure on me. Hopefully I will also get to chose my topics so this could motivate my overal study process too.

Poker
Poker has been fun and not fun too. I enjoy playing a bunch recently. Im obsessed with finding leaks in my game and mastering my overall decision making procces. I noticed there are certain spots where I tend to overthink things and there are also spots that I face where my 1st instinct instantly knows the answer but then somehow I "talk" myself into doing the wrong decision. So this is something I want to work on aswell. I also made couple of decision based on instincts that later on were not in allignement with coaches opinions but to be honest, I still think they were good decisions.This also might be quite a problem in my game, as I think I have very very good population reads and I base a lot of decisions on trusting them. But sometimes people have different opinions and I cant see myself accepting those because I beleive the population reads I have are correct. Again, this is just a part of mastering the decision making procces.

As far as results go, there were not many deep runs worth talking about. I had bunch of them yesterday but I basically busted f2t most of them with ridiculous fashion. I am happy with my performance as of now tho. I am also trying to do something with my red-line. I understand that this might seem like not an optimal way of thining about poker, because some people dont get how this work. But I found out that my red-line being quite bad is mostly due to playing from blinds. And it would just be stupid not to have a closer look into it since we play most of our hands from blinds. So I created bunch of filteres to find out where it is that I am leaking the most. Im gonna filter position by position, stack-size by stack size and see where the problem is. Then I will focus on mastering that area. Should be tons of work but I think its definitely gonna be worth it.

Graph

Life

As far as life goes, its keeping me busy aswell. Theres a lot of stuff to deal with in connection with the contract of the new appartement. Obviously theres master thesis and then some other things too. Cold showers are becoming super nice. I think I already got used to them and I actually enjoy them very much. They give me that energy that I lacked before. I used to be super tired in the morning but now it seems to be way better.

Also we are 1 week away from Punta Cana. So Im trying to play as much as possible online and Im looking forward to binking a live one finally

Sunday

Well this one was special again. Such an emotional rollercoaster. Its pretty hard to describe but I guess everyone can imagine looking at the chip graph below.


Session started of perfect. I was very very focused and everything went well. Then it somehow totally turned. All funny spots such as people getting there with disguised hands when I have top range etc or just people randomly floating the flop with 9 high and backdooring into trips and then slowrolling me otr Not funny. Couldnt really build any stacks in the higher end of buyins except in the title fights where most of them I busted very close to itm in flips. Made day 2 in the winamax main and main event on party at least with a good stack so gl me in that. I did manage to final table the party mini high roller where I came 6th after a huge rollercoaster aswell. I was chipleading with a massive stack with 13 people left.

Then it just went downhill in like 4 hands. I have 77 in the BB, sb jams 17BBs with 88. Very next hand I jam bvb 15BBs eff A2s he snaps ATo, very next hand I raise call 12BBs eff AK vs QJo and lose that aswell. Bustout hand was bvb AK<A3s so that wasnt fun at all. Then I only had the 11$ payday on stars. My specialty I would say. There I was comfortably chipleading from 100 people down to 11. Was very comfortable, played well I think but then this spot came up:


It might seem like an easy spot in the first place but there was numerous things inluencing the spot. Let me describe

The villain is probably a rec. He was shorststacked for quite a long time and just won 2 or 3 huge pots to put him into 2nd place. And right after that this spot comes in. In game I honestly didnt even think about it too much because I felt I was printing with a jam. My thought procces is that people generally narrow their flatting ranges quite a bit when blinds are short and instead of folding more, they put those hands into their 3betting ranges too so suddenly their 3betting range is even wider.

But this assumption didnt really make a huge role in my decision. I thought its a perfect spot for him to go crazy, because he suddenly gained chips and he wants to play etc. I estimated he could easily be 3betting in 15-20 so I decided to jam and he slowrolls for 5 seconds then calls KK. My last 9BBs went with AKs<JJ so came 10th. Felt very disgusting and still unsure about the spot. Did the math behind it and he basically has to have 2.5x bluff combos for each value combos. So if he gets it in with AQs,TT+ he has to be 3betting around 10% to make my shove profitable. I also think he sizes AA differently, but thats debatable. Anyways, gg maybe next time.

sunday graphaments


Today Im still thinking about whether or not to play. I think Im gonna take it easy and study instead. Will work ont he Elmerixx challenge quite a bit and then maybe fire a late session.

gto sunday meal

tbh i don't mind takign the lower variance route in such a soft tournament where we have such a big edge. fwiw i think it's close between all options, but seems slightly unnecessary when we are pbb gonna be able to chip up with much better spots. oh well gg

Totally agree altho as I said, this decision was influenced hardly (70%) by in-game reads. Also this timbey has super fast structure late so chipping up at this stage is super important but yea, probably lower variance to flat/fold.

Seems interesting aswell! Altho as of right now I dont see I can add much to my routine

I think I will stick to the showers bro, thank you tho

Tuesday

Oh well. Im probably gonna call myself master of FT bubbling major events. Just finished 10th in the party main event.

Today has been like probably one of the most enjoyable sessions up until the end. I literally ran up stacks everywhere, played well, setups were in my favour etc etc. I was just overall in a pretty good minsdset and was enjoying the game a lot. Think I was in the zone again, after a long long time. Had numerous deep runs, came like 30th in b44 AT vs T9o on T52r for huge pot. Then came 18th in BB109 J9 vs QQ on 938ccx 3 J BB vs CO I x/c flop, turn goes x/x and river I jam because I cover he calls. Then I came 10th in the TOP 50 on Winamax QJ vs 88 and T9 on QJ8hhx 30BBs eff. And in the main event obviously it wasnt going well either. I was chipleading with 20 people left and then it just went downhill. I didnt have any spots. Only spots I had was I opened KQo 8BB shorty jams I call and lose to AQ. That put me into 8/14. If I win that one Im 2/14 so the structure wasnt that great. Final hand I 3b jam A4o SB vs BTN open he calls KQo, flop goes 239r 3 and river is a queen. GG. Super super frustrated at this very moment.


graph

wow gross!

it seems like ur playing v well and getting nice runs. keep it up!

Dude are you playing Party Poker Caribbean atm?

Yeah, will do a bit of a writeup of the whole trip once I come back.

So its time for a little summary of the whole Punta Cana trip. Seems like its been a long time since my last post but basically it was only due to Punta Cana.




Prior to PUnta Cana
I came home I think it was Friday in the morning. I picked up my girlfriend as we agreed on that She was super excited so I promised I would pick her up right after session. I think I ended up coming 4 or 5th in the B55 for a profitable session so that was nice. I also finished 2/3rds of the “homework” of working on max epxlo strategies bvb at certain stack depth.

So I picked Denisa up at like 5 a.m. Poor little thing couldnt sleep more because she still had to go to school I woke up at around 13:00 because I had this appointement about signing the reservation contract on the new appartement. Unfortunately I couldnt settle for moving in before June 2018 but still, very happy with it and looking forward to it.

Day of departure

Sudnay was a bit bitter. I remember missing the Sunday session but at the same time I was super excited to play live. I very much enjoy playing live events. For one, they are high buy-ins which makes them very interesting, two, they are soft, three I get to think and focus at one spot at a time which is something I like the most about live games.

Anyways, I was not really looking forward for the flight as Im kinda tall (2.02m) and at the time we were booking the flight, there werent many options to book a larger seat. But after all the seats were great. We had the back seats where there were only 2 so that was good. Decent leg room etc. Also there was a pretty good interactive screen so I spent half the time playing chess and watching movie, the other half playing battleship and eating We met with one of my friends who also qualified at the airport. He was one of the guys who I lived in Germany for a month or so last year. He was the one beating me in chess during the whole flight #SoSad

Explo strat in battleship



So after like 8 hour flight, we were approaching Punta Cana. And I dont think I mentioned this but I absolutely hate turbulence. And guess what, there was a storm above Punta Cana so when we started descending, there were couple of really bad ones, where people started screaming and crying. That wasnt really enjoyable for me either. Hate these things

But obivously we landed just fine and it was time to get to the hotel. We spent like an hour at the airport before we managed to get out and we headed to the hotel. I have to say I was super impressed by the whole complex. Definitely the nicest hotel Ive ever been to. The room had its own jaccuzi which I love.

Jaccuzi <3


After the check in, we spent some time thinking about what to do, when to actually play the main etc. We decided we would play Tuesday, so that there was no rush. Monday was a nice chill day for me. Even tho the weather wasnt great, I was just enjoying myself. One thing I was a bit dissapointed about was that I wasnt able to do my daily routine so after like 30 consecutive days I didnt do the morning workout, cold shower and meditation. But I thought it was fine because I basically treated this trip as a holiday except the days I played.

Anyways, the guys decided to late reg the main event on Monday, which I didnt really like because I just hate changing the plans at the last minute and I wanted to get prepared the way I like so I just spent the whole day chilling with Denisa and having some good time.

The next day tho, I sticked to my routine I prepared really well for the “session” and I went to play the main that started at 12:00. Pretty nice start, I got dealt QQ in the first hand but didnt put more than 3bbs into the pot. I had a really really nice table during the whole day but I guess I got somewhat unfortunate. Basically what was happening is that I just tried to play solid poker, I was chipping up without showdowns and was then losing big pots with premium hands. I also think I made bunch of mistakes (not big ones but I think I shouldve played different). For example this hand:

Some sort of weak reg (young guy) opens MP and I 3bet him before like twice already and I get dealt AcAd on the BTN.
I 3bet
small blind - whale calls
original opener calls

Flop came down KT8hhc. They both check and I decided to bet 45k into 120K.

SB calls and MP decides to go 225K.

By that point I was puking already. I would usually just fold here vs most but then again my image was pretty active (people were even joking about me not opening BTNs and that sort of things, I had couple of 3b spots) so I imagine people thought I was crazy where in fact I just got dealt the mid-top end of my 3b range etc. Anyways, in game I decided to call without having the Ah as I think those would be the first go to bluffs that villain would chose.

Turn is a 9s and villain jams and we snap fold. Villain lets us chose a card and its a T.

Now what I dislike about this hand is that I think I should just fold OTF given how people will play these early stages of the live 5ks.


Other than that there were not too many interesting big spots. I had a spot vs a recreational player where I rivered nut flush and lead like 3/4 pot and he calls top two. After that he just went completely ballistic vs me. It was obvious he took things personal and was on tilt. Im judging by him going 5x pot allin vs me in HU pots in the next 5 or so hands.

Then the crucial hand of the tournament probably came up where I open CO TT off 100 bigs or so and the above mentioned gentleman decided to jam like 46BBs from BB. Now even with all the reads in game I took decent ammount of time to figure out whether I want to take such a spot or not as I think I usually just spend less time on crucial decisions than I should. I end up making the call and lose vs 88. Pretty frustrating but whatever.

Since then, I basically just folded downto 20 bbs. Then another interesting hand came up where I probably made a big mistake. I got moved to another table like 5 hands ago and it was very close to end of day 1. There were supposed to be 2 more hands of the day.
I get dealt J6o in the BB with 19BBs.
BTN (young guy with like 100BBs+) decides to limp
SB (young guys with 100BBs+) completes

I spent some time thinking about what to do. I was quite sure jamming atc here would probably make money given how people construct their ranges at this stackdepth and in this spot in general. I decided not to pull the trigger due to being unsure of the EV diff between checking and jamming. Not being sure about BTNs and SBs ranges made me doubt my first instinct. Anyway

Flop comes down Ac4d5d and it goes checked through POT IS 4BBs
turn is 7s
SB checks and I decide to bet 4BBs
BTN folds, SB calls
river is Jh and SB checks

Here I made some probably too optimistic assumptions and decided to bet 6BBs into 12BBs leaving myself 6BBs. I thougght at the time that SB doesnt really have any incentive to start checking nuts or 2p+ hands OTT 3ways in limped pot. He just definitely wants to start putting money into the pot. So I ranged him to mostly have a weak pair + draw or mid pair kinda hand. Just generally a mid strength hand. So my decision to bet the river was based on him having tons of bluffcatchers, not too many better hands and almost 0 bluffs. Now the latest part I obviously cant be sure about.

Anyways, villain checks my stack real quick after I bet and jams instantly and I fold. Discussed this hand with couple of guys already and they all seem to think river is ambitious so I learned something at least again. But yea, we made day 2 with 6BBs which obviously is rather sad than exciting.

To make things short, I bust day 2 in 3rd hand KK vs AJs so again, no spin. I was quite sad about it all because I just simply didnt get enough of playing. I wanted the experience to continue but it couldnt. There were no other tournaments for me to reg so basically I just spent the rest of the week chilling with Denisa and the guys, railing them etc. Didnt play online at all.

Seafood <3



We had very very good time with Denisa and the guys, the food in the hotel was absolutely amazing, beach, pool, bars etc just everything was great. Unfortunately I got a bit sick final 3 days and it doesnt seem to go away just yet. We arrived home today, so I missed another Sunday but honestly I dont think I could play very well in these conditions. So for now Im deciding whether or not to go back to Dresden to play tomorrow or just spend some time here to get better first and then go back.

Also another thing worth mentioning is that I finally got my review from the investors. I got pointed out some good/bad things but mainly I just confirmed my thoughts of what to do next and how to do it. Im also receiving quite a lot of extra support which is helping me just so much. I have huge huge plans for the upcoming year so lets hope it all works out.


Next couple of weeks

As I said, I might go back to Dresden asap and start playing or I might just get better first but I miss playing atm so much that I will probably just visit a doctor tomorrow and head to Dresden right after. I will come back to Prague on December 8th to play the live series. Really pumped for that. Anyways, good luck everyone, hope it wasnt too long.

Nice write up!

In the AA hand, when u call his flop x/r...

do you continue on any turn cards? obv ace but do you expect him to shut down to a J/Q/heart? At that point do you turn your hand into a bluff? Seems like a spot where he pretty much only has TT/88 right? I know you say you have been 3betting a lot but can't imagine he calls there with KT?

I would not continue on any turn card no. My call otf is based on the assumption that he has bluffs and will shut down decent ammount of them. I would never turn my hand into a bluff as I think people will never fold 2p+ because they will always think I still have AA

Makes sense.

So if villain checks to you on a total brick, do u ever bet turn, and if river bricks do u value bet river?

obviously, all of this is speculative but I faced this kinda line a couple times an I'm completely wtf on what to do.

It very much depends on the exact turn and timings etc. But mostly I would check turn and possibly bet river super small if checked to again.

Great post buddy, Punta Cana looks amaze.
Live poker is tough, Feels bad to bust.
The hand with the AA seems close on the flop, def easier to fold AhAx vs most of the puplation but still i think vs this sizing we should fold with no extra info about his postflop style.

With the J6 how about make it 6bb-5bb and fold? seems to me like the best option. (wont go crazy post) think its better than jamming.

GLGL in Prague

Hey man, thanks

The AA hand I agree should be a fold OTF vs most. As I said in the post, I was influenced by the table dynamics.

As far as the J6 hand I think going 6BBs and folding doesnt make much sense. But it depends on how is BTN constructing his limping range. I assume its mostly playable hands, that donst really want to call a 3bet or a jam from me and I dont think we can target that range with 6BB sizing, since hes just gonna have an easy call with most of his range. Its not like he has A5o in his limping range. So imo its either an All-in or check scenario