Background

I'm a part time dealer in Las Vegas where my annual salary is around $5000-$6000 a year.

I was up to a 2k plo reg online (Under the SN ChristIsLORD) as of last year and my main live game was 5/5/10 rock games at Aria/Wynn. The majority of my online volume was battling everyone in HU including a few battles vs Phil Galfond and Jnandez which I posted on my now defunct YouTube channel.

Had my first losing year in 2023 largely attributed to a 25/50 session on WSOP.com where I lost 82k lol. All in all though, came out of 2023 down around -50k which wasn't too bad. I took a 1 year break from poker to go make content and pursue a trading card game (Lorcana) but I've quit that now and find myself starting to play poker again but I'm extremely rusty. I had taken most of my online bankroll and put it into stocks and I refuse to touch that. My live bankroll is perfectly healthy and I'm probably just gonna sit on it unless the market crashes and I'll yolo it into more stocks.

Anyways, I am no longer going to be playing any HU and I want to focus strictly on 6 max and studying 6 max stuff as I am EXTREMELY rusty after taking a year off. Thought it would be fun to rebuild a roll online starting at 1/2 PLO and studying everyday so on June 15, I put in $9,000 into the new WSOP client and have played every day since.

Progress

Currently at ~$32k and will probably move up to 2/5 around a 55k-60k bankroll (I'm a bit of a BR nit).

This thread will just keep track of my progress.

The new WSOP.com has merged with a few other states now so the player pool is bigger and the fish are still very fishy at least at the 1/2 stakes.

Here is a link to the new rakeback system on WSOP.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?gid=0#gid=0

Basically, your level resets every month but once you get to level 85, you start getting around around 40% rakeback. I can easily clear 30-40 levels a day so the rakeback is quite good.

Stats
As I said, I started with a 9k bankroll on June 15, 2024 and I went on a pretty big 3 day heater where I went +10k from 1/2 plo. I decided to keep track of my stats on a spreadsheet on July 5th and I will make all those stats public. WSOP.com has no huds or ways to track hands so I just track my start and end times manually and keep track of my bankroll size. I typically 4-6 table as anything over 6 tables will usually crash the client.


PROGRESS SPREADSHEET
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

All numbers on spreadsheet include rakeback that I redeem every day.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty good at abandoning these types of threads so we'll see how I do with this one. I don't really know what I'll post here, maybe some hands, strategy, random fun stock picks, musings about dealing poker...we'll see...

First! Hope all is well with you man

Subbed GL

u too, room still open, just sayin...


Tagging Regs




So this spot came up today blind vs blind vs a player i consider a weaker reg.

Preflop: I 3x in the SB and he calls
Flop: I 3/4th pot and he calls
Turn: I POT and he calls
River: I check and he checks back


My river intent is to just check fold here. Having KK is pretty bad for bluff catching as it blocks the high straight draw of KQ and I don't have a single diamond.

The shocking part of this hand is that he had the naked Ad and ended up on river with A high and did not bluff here.

I understand that I arrive on river here a decent amount with my own flushes that I will need to check call but given the cards he blocks, its more likely that I have JT or set type hands here that he needs to at least try and blow off.

Anyways, this hand basically lets me slap a tag on him that makes me probably overfold vs his river bets in the future as I think he's just very clearly going to be value heavy in his bets and will have too few bluffs.

Getting owned with quads



Preflop:
UTG raises something weird like 2.6x, i have an easy flat call and SB squeezes and we go 3 way to the flop

Flop:
SB cbets 1/3rd and UTG flats and I have no line here except to flat. I need someone with QQ KK AA JJ to bink the miracle 2 outter to get them as we all started the hand fairly deep.

Turn:
Miracle A and SB who 3 bet should sometimes have AA here. He checks and UTG checks. We have our first major decision point.

A is a great card but its simultaneously a terrible card since no bets went in on the turn. If i choose to bet now, I will likely scare away KK QQ JJ hands and give up the opportunity for them to 2 outter their set. My flat on the flop also seems fairly strong so betting turn will probably get most flush draws/wraps to give up in a 3 way spot. I elect to check.

River:
SB bets 1/4th pot and very surprisingly, UTG finds a raise here. SB should be the heaviest AA player here although I don't believe they usually have AA with that river lead sizing. In my mind, UTG seems like he should have quad 8's or something and I don't even think A8 can really raise this spot.

I end up shoveling in all my chips and SB folds and UTG tanks his entire timebank and folds AA face up. (on wsop.com you can show any numbers of cards when folding)

Very unexpected fold but also very logical fold if you consider the situation. I should be scared of SB having AA, there are 2 quad possibilities on the board, and UTG raising SB is also crazy scary. Shoving AT from my position would be a huge overplay so the right conclusion is that i can only really have 88 or TT here. This is also a button spot where i have 0 bluffs.

Still... I did not think too much of UTG's game (i mean, he didn't 4 bet AA utg here but maybe its ok if they're really poor quality as we're quite deep), but after this I may have to reconsider my perception of him.


I do reconsider whether I missed a turn bet but I still believe allowing some KK QQ JJ flushdraw opportunities to river is probably generating more overall EV, and I also need to consider if I need to jam river or go for something weird like a min raise. Jam is probably still best vs the majority of the field here though.

I think jam is fine and most ppl don't find the fold there. And that same player might find a fold often enough even if you raise smaller. Though, I have also noticed more of a live player thing on wsop where they like to make hero laydowns so they can show them.

The small sb lead definitely lost you money there.

Worst session so far

For whatever reason there was almost no 1/2 running today. I really wanted to purely put in 1/2 volume but since there was very little action the whole day I decided I'll just move up a bit earlier than scheduled to 2/5.

As fate would have it, I went on the worst run I've ever had since despositing on the new client. I started the session off losing 6 CONSECUTIVE all ins. But no one cares about bad beat stories so I'll leave it at that. At one point I was stuck almost 5k but after fighting back in a 5 hour session til 3 AM, I ended the session down about 2k, and finished about -3k on the day which is gonna wreck the beautiful hourly I had this month. Oh well.

Jnandez was also grinding for a couple of hours at my table. I've made 2 videos in the past for his PLO mastermind course and I've played him HU but I don't think he knows my new screen name. Coincidentally, someone seems to have sniped my old screen name (ChristIsLORD) and I ran into this guy at all my tables today so I was thinking maybe Jnandez thought this other guy was me the whole time.

I wonder who this imposter is...




This was a super annoying one to lose as I'm a 51% favorite both preflop and a massive 72% favorite on the flop. But I guess the ChristIsLORD screenname is super lucky as it was a massive 4%er on the flop and ended up scooping the entire pot.


1/2 vs 2/5

Although at first glance, 2/5 seems like it would be only 2.5x bigger than 1/2, I'm of the opinion that it actually plays about 3-4x bigger and thus the swings will be 3-4x bigger as well. The average pot for 1/2 seems to hover around $25-$50 while 2/5 avg pots over around $100-$180.

I remember a few years ago when i was climbing from 0.5/1 to 1/2, the old site had 2/4 and 3/6 on the way and even those stake jumps felt pretty big. Now that its just 1/2 straight to 2/5, the swings feel a lot bigger and I think its a pretty significant mental hurdle to overcome for a 1/2 player trying to move up. But if the 1/2 traffic is as bad as it was today, I might be forced to move up to 2/5 earlier than I wanted, which isn't a big deal I guess. It is annoying though to start off on a really bad session on the first move up.

Subbed, GL! About the hand where you had quad tens, what's your opinion on betting the turn small, around 1/3 pot?

Arriving at the turn, my range looks pretty strong because I overcalled a flop bet and utg call. So betting turn will look really strong multiway and will fold out JJ-KK and probably most flush and straight draws, and even some 88. Betting the turn basically only targets AA which is a very unlikely holding as AA should probably be incentivized to bet turn.

SB is most likely to have AA as he is the 3 bettor, and probably should always bet turn with AA as with 2 over callers, one of us is almost guaranteed to have trip tens.

So I think check is probably still the highest EV line although in this case, it ended up costing me a lot.

Gl!! I still remember how you gave me a place to stay during my Vegas trip a while ago and let me use your car! That was awesome! Gogogo!

Hey good to see that you're still doing well and seems you're putting in a ton of volume and found your groove in the omaha streets. I wish I had that work ethic for live poker lol


We got it all back

Played some more 2/5 in the morning as there were only 2 1/2 plos running which I also played.

Roller coaster session but we recovered most of our losses from the night before.



BB is a reg who I don't know much about his game but I believe is a solid winning player. I actually met him and had lunch with him and a friend of mine only a few days ago but I don't think BB knows my SN or who I am. I was a bit surprised to see this line from him.


Preflop
I open KT98, SB calls and BB squeezes with AQJ8

All very standard so far.

Flop

He pot commits 3 way with gutter double backdoor flush draw.

I think this is a pretty big misstep and I checked with the solvers and it confirms.

My flop shove is very standard and I'm shoving all KT98 here although another solution I looked at suggests that I flat the KT98 double suit double bdfd variety which I don't necessarily agree with.

Multiway solutions are a bit difficult to study as a lot of the premade trainers on the market have very limited case scenarios multiway and running sims multiway take a lot of resources to spit out. At these stakes and live though, so many pots go massively multiway and a lot of players who mostly study HU solutions probably misapply their continuing lines multiway not realizing how much tighter ranges have to be.

Result

Turn T, river 9 and we scoop up a nice pot.

July Wrap Up

Played my final session of the month today and lost $759 on the session but I had a really good run the previous 5 sessions.

Had an awful set up at 2/5 where I got quads over quads to wrap up my month.



I missed 5 days of tracking on the spreadsheet but I got 250 levels in the first 5 days so I know I got 50 hours in those days in as I went really hard at the start of the month. So all in all, played almost 230 hours online for the month of July and ended up +12kish. I also ICM chopped an employee event at the wynn this month for 16k so all in all, a +28kish month.

I cashed out 3259.64 out of my WSOP account to start August with a nice round 33000.00 Bankroll. I also started a new brokerage account with charleschwab and will be dumping my cashouts into that account to build a new investing roll to see how it does.

First purchase, 91 shares of BTI with dividend reinvestment enabled.





I don't smoke and I'm very anti smoking but I don't think tobacco companies are going anywhere. Their margins are insane and BTI has decent exposure to international markets (as the US cigarette market is massively on the decline). I've always joked that I just wanna yolo like 50k-100k into BTI if I ever shipped a large mtt so I figure I might as well start now.

At 10% dividend, I think this is a great defensive stock to start the gamble portfolio with.


July Studying
I usually average around 1-2 hours of studying every single day and most of it consists of screenshotting spots and running it by the solver to line check.

I heavily focused this month on creating spreadsheets on how to play AA 3 bet lines on rainbow boards, SB vs BTN, SB vs UTG, and BTN vs UTG to look for heuristic patterns I can apply to my game. I would say I only got about 30% of this studying completed and will need to keep working on this through august although I would eventually like to move towards 2 tone boards, and after that I'd like to focus heavily on donk betting lines.



An example of what I'm looking at is see above. What should equilibrium strategy look like when 3 betting AAxx and seeing a K hi rainbow flop.

As you can see, the betting heuristics differ wildly based on positions, as SB is cbetting extremely high frequency on K high straight boards but BTN in position is checking at incredible high frequencies. We also see how allowing multiple bet sizings will also significantly affect cbetting frequencies vs playing a simplified 1 size strategy.

Since 3 betting AA and facing post flop decisions comes up very frequently and is a common spot where a lot of EV is won or lost, studying these types of spots this month has done a lot to clean up my play lines here. I expect to be very well versed in this particular scenario by the end of August and can hopefully move on to 2 tone board heuristics in 3 bet pots afterwards.

Nice thread so far.
I enjoyed your youtube vids awhile back. Good luck at the tables

I dont understand how this stock buy is a thing. Same price as 5 years ago? The f is this sh

10% dividend makes sense now lol stonks

August Update Online Poker

I played online on August 1 and then basically didn't do anything for the next 4 days. I guess playing almost 50 straight days of poker got me burnt out and also I was feeling not too well so I just decided to take a few days off and re-evaluate what I wanted to. There were 2 days where I literally just stayed in bed for almost 18 hours a day watching youtube videos and napping and being an absolute bum.

There was also news that GG is buying WSOP so I wasn't sure how hard I wanted to commit to online on that news and wanted to wait on clarification on WSOP.com changes before proceeding.


Live Poker
So ultimately decided I'd finally go back to messing around in the live poker streets and started by checking out how Venetian's new poker room looks.
I had <50 hours of cash games live this year so I also felt super rusty jumping back into the live felt.



Had a great first day at Venetian $1/$2/($5 bring in, $100-$1000 buy in). Made $1846 on my first session but I have lost every single session since then lol.

Had a spot on Thursday that I just simply misplayed and I'll go over it.

Preflop
UTG Straddles ($10), I (EP) open to $35 with KK46 and it goes 5 ways.

Flop ($180) K T 5
I bet $100 and CO and BTN both call

Turn ($480) K T 5 J
I check, CO($615) pots for 480, and BTN($580) Shoves all in for 580.


The math is pretty straightforward here. I basically have to commit roughly $600 to win about $1700 so I need 26% equity here. I can comfortably give my opponent AQ here and usually both of them will have AQ and I can probably discount 1 out from my boats as its pretty likely one of them will have a T or J. So in most cases I'll have 8-9 outs to make a boat out of 36 cards remaining which is just shy of the 26% equity needed. Running it in a calculator vs 2 AQxx type hands gives me around 24% on average.

So on average this call will net me around -$48. Meh. Ran it once and both of them chopped my money. One guy had AKQ4(bad flop peel 5 ways) no flush draw and the other guy had AQJ3 single (fold pre...) with Q3 of diamonds.


On Friday, the 1/2 plo at ventian randomly died so walked over to the wynn and played a little more 1/2 plo when they finally called a 5/5/10 rock game which I played 4 handed and it ended up salvaging a little bit of my week. No real other interesting hands through out the week to note though. I think the venetian is a very nice room to play in now. Solid traffic, comfortable, bright, spacious, has drink machines in the back for the tipping nits. The dealers are a bit questionable on dealing PLO but they should get better over time as venetian has not consistently run PLO games in a very long time.


Live Winrates thoughts



So the absurdity of live winrates is something I think about constantly. Over 3200 hours in live plo, I've been trucking along at 24 Big Bets per hour which is the equivalent of 12bb/hour and comparing this to a buddy of mine who also plays live plo, he's seeing similar #s over a good sample size.

I've tracked many times how many hands I'm receiving an hour in a live game and its usually around 22-23 in PLO although nowadays with the extremely time consuming double board bomb pots its probably closer to 20.

That means it takes around 4.5-5 hours to play 100 hands so the winrates for a strong player should be the online equivalent of winning about 50-60bb/100.
Online, players are very happy to see 4-5bb/100 and elite players in reasonable rake environments/decent player pools will probably be able to see 10+bb/100 in online ring games.

But I do also think in the current environments its reasonably sustainable as I think online 1/2 PLO is MUCH tougher than live 5/5/10 PLO. Its just funny that throughout this week I've played 24 hours of live plo which is just north of around 500 hands, and last month I estimate I clocked in around 90000 hands online.

August plans
I'll probably keep messing around on the live streets and might hop into a few live tournaments here and there for fun. Since I'm coming off of a strong June/July grind and got most of my confidence in plo back, I don't feel too much pressure to grind quite as hard as I did the last month and half. I will update the spreadsheet to track my live results sometime soon.

Lol the outlooks for the tobacco industry is pretty bleak so its a bit of a gamble.

The main players here are British Tobacco (BTI), Altria (MO), Phillip Morris (PM), and you got other players like imperial tobacco (IMBBY), Japan Tobacco (JAPAY), or you could go straight to the tobacco plant farms like Universal Group (UVV)

BTI had a massive drop after purchasing Reynolds for like $50 billion, and then they did a $31 billion write down basically saying they thought a bunch of their cigarette brands were gonna be worthless in the future. The US is also discussing a potential menthol cigarette ban which is a large portion of sales for BTI but they've been stalling on this issue for a while and I could guess the ruling might be pushed back until after the election cycle.

Anyways, it definitely comes with a bunch of risk and I also think any stock with such a high dividend yield is gonna come with a lot of questions but this is one of my few gamble stocks. I do certainly think cigarettes are going to eventually die in the future but I don't think tobacco will be going anywhere and I think its extremely difficult for new companies to entire this incredibly heavily regulated market so I think the current major tobacco corporations have a strong moat.

The last time I played around with a high dividend yield stock was LUMN (formerly known as century link). They ended up cutting their dividend completely due to debt and their stock tanked from like $11 all the way down to an all time low of like $1. Luckily for me, this past week, LUMN made a crazy run from $1 to like $7 and I had around 1100 shares of it which I sold off half during this pump. I have a few speculative plays like LUMN and BTI in my main investing account but the majority of my holdings are extremely boring plays like RSG (waste management company) Costco, Berkshire B, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Proctor and Gamble etc...

Hey man, loved watching your YT vids from before so it's great to see you playing again. Do you plan on recording any of the live sessions?

Sounds like you live a pretty stress free life with lots of freedom/time, would you say that's accurate? Put in long grinds when you feel it and otherwise just chill and pursue other interests.

Subbed!
Thought your SN was something else.
Quick question on live PLO.. what's the proper BRM you use for 5/5/Rock?

Don't have any current plans to record live but its always on the back of my mind for the future. Was considering streaming some online sessions or making some quick clips of it if I wanna revive my channel.

Yea I think my lifestyle is pretty relaxed and I don't have any financial pressures. I made a good amount from poker and I also own a couple properties that I rent out from the money I made in poker. But the downside is that I've lost most of my poker related ambitions/motivations so I just sort of grind pretty lazily most of the time.

I'm a huge BR nit so I'm typically over rolled for the stakes I play. Looking at my live graph, the biggest downswings I've had at the rock seems to be around about $30k which happened a couple times. So I'd say for most people, try and have like $75k+ to play rock full time. But BRM should be different for everyone based on a factor of skill level, field skill, effective stack depths, and risk tolerance.


I got very comfortable playing 5/5/10 live a lot when I felt like I had a disposable 150k live bankroll. This may seem like a lot but I just did not want to ever have to move down if I went on a downswing. A lot of people will say, oh you just need like 50k to grind 5/5/10 but then if you hit a 30k downswing and have 20k as your BR, wouldn't u have to just move back down to 1/2/5? I know I'm winning in the games and I don't wanna ever move down if I have a downswing so for me, a BR of over 100k made more sense.

A bunch of my PLO colleagues were making fun of me online too because I didn't move up to 2/4 PLO online back in the day until I had like 50k+ in my wsop account. I just didn't wanna move down in stakes in case I hit a downswing was all.

Hahaha I see.. yea I would never wanna move down the stake as well!

swongs are real, swung 20 buyins in 8 hours last month
very understandable and smart from my perspective respect

Live Poker/Spreadsheet Update

I have updated the original post spreadsheet to have a new tab for Live Poker results. My hours this month are pretty pathetic. I've taken a ton of days off to mostly play video games. Fortunately, my buddy and I just finally completed our The Planet Crafter binge so I can go back to doing something actually productive and grinding poker. There are a couple live tournaments I might want to jump into so I might update the spreadsheet link with a live tournament tab as well but my live tournament volume is incredibly low and I mostly jump in when I am in the mood(very rarely) to torch a quick late reg buy in.

I've tightened up my ranges live quite a bit from the old days where I would VPIP like 30-50%. I have officially become the table nit and its boring as hell but I don't want to go back to forming bad pre-flop habits for when I go back to the online grind. I've had more losing sessions live than winning but luckily, most of my losing sessions are just me bleeding a tiny bit running flop/card dead. A lot of my sessions involve just one major hand that doesn't go my way and I end up stuck on the session. For example, amazing spots like this at the Venetian.

HAND 1
Preflop
There is a straddle to $10 and I bump it up in EP to $35 with AKQT and 2 blinds and CO come in with me.

Flop
($140) 983

Old guy in the SB donks out for $120, BB calls, I call and CO folds. Old guy donking here is extremely strong. Usually always a set or top 2 minimum. I have nut flush draw so that eliminates most nut flush draw type donking ranges. BB probably has JTxx or some spades hand here so I can discount some of my outs.

Turn
($500) 9834

SB donks pot $500 and has about $110 behind. BB calls all in for less (~$400) I have a very easy call here with double flush draw nut gutter at this price. No point in shoving as I can easily put SB on a made hand here and I don't think he will ever fold any rivers with only $110 giving me near full implied odds.

River
($1900) 9834A

SB flips over his hand immediately forgetting we're not all in yet (lol live poker) and I see 9Txx but I'm pretty sure he has 99. He goes oops and shrugs his shoulders and goes I guess I check then, I check back and he does show 99T8 for flopped top set. BB shows KK25 with K high spades hit his miracle run out to scoop the pot and I just muck. Basically, live poker is just waiting for these high equity spots and hoping you realize your equity or else u just go home stuck for the day. I was up $500 before this hand and ended stuck a little bit after grinding several hours.


HAND 2
I also headed over to the Venetian super early on Friday when there seemed to be an overnight game running. Overnight games are very brittle and easy to break but it also usually indicates a few buried fish/whales trying to get even so I went over to check it out.

Unfortunately when I got there, it was 3 handed and the 3rd guy looked like he was leaving. I asked if this game was going to break and a younger kid at the table said he'd keep playing. I got my chips and when I sat, the other guy looked to be picking up and the kid seemed a bit annoyed and kept asking him to play longer but the guy said he had to leave. Kid asks me if I'll play HU and I'm like ok sure. He seems frustrated and tells me he's in the game for 4k but he has about 2.5k in front of him so I reassure him he'll be fine (I am a bad person).

We play a couple hands HU and then a buddy of mine also sits and its just 2 nitty solid regs and this kid who straddles every hand and is 3 betting constantly seemingly trying to get unburied. A 4th player almost sits but runs away when he sees its 3 handed, but about 10 min in, an indian guy sits down with $400 and we have a 4 handed game but no list.

The total session time for this was 1 hour but the kid ran into AAxx 3 consecutive times and lost all 3 (twice to the indian dude and once to my buddy) and he dwindled down to about $1400. I had $1200 in my stack at the time.

Preflop
I open AAJT in CO to 15 and the kid (SB) 3 bets to $50. I 4 bet to $155, and he 5 bets to $470. I 6 bet jam around $1200 and he calls and he says run it once. He was running it twice before but he clearly just wanted to shovel it in here to gamble (and was likely on tilt after losing 3 times to AAxx) and I was fine with that.

Board
($2230) 972KK

I flop the nut flush and turn it over immediately as an anti-slowroll and he mucks + picks up his remaining $200 looking pretty dejected and leaves the game. The game instantly breaks. I head over to the wynn to catch another 1/2/5 game and the 5/5/10 never starts. I just go home 2 hours later after winning $75 there.


Rest of August Plans
August is the slowest month in vegas by far and the strip is pretty dead after every leaves post WSOP. I dunno why I decided this is the month I'll hop back into live poker but whatever. I felt pretty cursed at Venetian having lost so many sessions in a row but at least my 2 winnning sessions there are pretty big. I just want to get to 75 hours at Venetian to upgrade my player card for free parking and then I guess I'll try and work on getting my Aria player card upgrade after that for free MGM parking. It's been so long since I've put in live volume I've lost my parking privileges everywhere. 7 days left in August, I will put a genuine attempt to play the next 7 days straight.

Booked very strong session

It's been a while but I booked a +6.6k session at 5/5/10 at wynn, bought in for 2k and out for 8.6k. I would say 80% of 5/5/10 games nowadays have the $20 straddle on after the rock which I kind of like since it lets me play 100 BBs effective which is my most studied stack sizes.

1. Started with an all in preflop for 2k effective my AAT4 with s vs his AA73 and we ran it twice and I hit diamonds on the 2nd run and ended up 3/4thing him.

2. Stacked a guy in a 3 bet pot 1200 deep after getting it all in on a K34 flop while holding AA55

3. He rebought full 3k and paid me off on 3 streets in the following spot...

Preflop
I raise $75 preflop with AJ92 and 3 other players defend OOP
($305) Flop: 9T6
I bet $100 and 2 players call.
($605) Turn: 9T64
I bet $600 and the first guy (recreational) tanks forever in absolute pain and ends up folding what he later said was a set. 2nd guy calls fairly quickly.
($1805) River: 9T64Q
I bet $1800 and he calls after around 15 seconds of thinking. This player was a more non believing type and he seemed to be particularly more frustrated/station-y today after being stuck.

4.
Preflop
I raise $80 preflop with A3QJ and straddler defends OOP
($180) Flop: 63T
He checks, I bet 100 and he calls.
($380) Turn: 63TK
He checks, I bet $330 and he calls
($1040) River: 63TK7
He checks, I bet $900 and he calls and mucks and said he had AQJx with Q high hearts.


Quick solver line checks for hands 3 and 4

3...
Flop: Multiway, it prefers using 1/2 sizing mostly. Guess you don't really use 1/3rd here.
Turn: Pot sizing only. Makes sense. 2 callers. someone probably has a set and someone probably has a flush. Solver does fold something like TT here in opponent shoes.



4...
Flop: mostly is cbetting flop,
Turn: prefers strongly checking turn with my hand though it has low frequency turn barrels for large sizings. I still probably prefer to bet here for the most part vs this particular recreational.

River it also prefers to generally use 1 sizing of 3/4th so nothing too interesting to note for the last 2 hands.


Buying BALENCIAGA

This is something that comes up pretty frequently and it's actually happened my last 2 consecutive sessions. Guy sits down and he looks like a recreational. He's chatty and is assessing the table and he looks at me and goes, "you look like one of those aria grinders... are you?"

I quickly go: "no no, I'm just a poker dealer"

Table mostly laughs and he clearly doesn't believe me.

I go: "no seriously, I'm actually a dealer here at the Wynn"

Him: "what kind of dealer just casually sits down for max buy in. Also you look like you do this for a living..."


...


In today's session, another fun player from L.A. asked me if I did this for a living and I insisted that I was a dealer at the Wynn. 2 players didn't believe me and I had to pull out my employee card to show them.


Anyways, I've thought about this for a long time and the unavoidable truth is... I just simply look like a reg. I always wear a boring hoodie + sweatpants, I look a bit the nerdy type with glasses, I always buy in max. I probably won't do this in my home-base in Vegas but I decided that if I travel, I probably need "fish" attire.

I think there are certain things you wear that will strongly gravitate you towards whether people perceive you as a pro or a recreational so I need to start building a wardrobe of fish attire. From my experience, I'd sum it up as follows.

Fish Attire

-A nice business suit:unless your name is tony dunst, if you sit down with a suit at the table, I'm going to assume you are here on a business trip and are most likely a pretty inexperienced whale. Unfortunately, I've never owned a suit but I definitely like the idea of grinding in a suit every day.

-A very nice watch: I'm also not really into watches at all but I think people with usually nice watches tend not to be super reggy until u get to the much much higher stakes. Too bad a nice watch is a very big investment.

-Hawaiian shirts: I did actually buy 1 Hawaiian shirt a long time ago just to look like a rec but I felt super weird in it.

-Very fashionable well done hair: It's kind of a hassle and expensive to keep up tho...

-Designer clothes: ESPECIALLY Balenciaga for some reason are all fish/whales.

-Jewelry: If I'm desperate enough, I guess I could try and get my ears pierced or something.

-Sunglasses: Not super whale-y but definitely someone trying too hard but has weak overall fundamentals.

-Fedora: I still have not run into any strong fedora players

-A female companion who sits behind them the entire time: certified whale, but again a very expensive investment.

Reg Attire

-Way too comfortable clothes (hoodie/sweatpants): I am super guilty of this attire. It's clearly a guy who is unemployed and just plays poker for a living.

-Plain T-shirt: I'm guilty as hell.

-Headphones: Big sign of someone who's there to just focus and grind. Fortunately, I don't really do the headphone thing at the table.

-Backpack: I used to bring backpacks but I stopped a long time ago. Very very reggy.

-Tablets: Just a terrible grindy look. I am guilty of occasionally bringing my ipad to pass the time but this was back in my NLHE days.

-Glasses: I should get lasik.

-Scruffy/messy hair: Another "unemployed bum/I grind poker for a living" type look.



Too bad a Balenciaga T-Shirt costs like $600+

I have nothing against spending money on nice clothes but man, Balenciaga seems massively -ev ��