Goood morning.

Wanted to make a thread more for future self to look back at documenting my journey through the stakes.

Short intro about myself: 23 yr old guy from Latvia a little bit obsessed about this silly game of poker and looking to see where it takes me.

Starting balance: 750EUR (+30BI for 25NL)
Goal: +40BI for NL100 and at least some HHs on there with positive win rate.


Goals for 2024:
- Move up to and establish myself at NL100
- More or less healthy lifestyle (Working out regularly instead of my broken regime now and better sleep schedule)
- At least 60hrs a month of play time
- Move up to 3 R&C tables at a time (Currently at 2)

Short term goals for this month:
- Finish reading "The Inner Game of Tennis"
- Actually start to structure my game by developing a default strategy for different flop textures
- Diving more in depth into XR


I've kept the goals reasonably low to be able to achieve them and not burn out.

Currently grinding it out at NL25 R&C on GG, looking to stay at the fast fold format at least for now, but I have considered moving to reg tables, might do that at NL50 or NL100 depending on how it's gonna go.

Also looking for people that want to study together and overall build a network since the "job" of a poker player can be somewhat lonely. DM me if you're up for that.

Blog will be updated twice a month (1st of the month and 15th of the month). First half of the month update in the post below.

July 1st - July 14th update:

Starting: 750 EUR
Currently: 993.14 EUR



Playing in USD, but my GG provider here is in EUR, so for the simplicity sake I will keep everything in EUR.

Graph:

Stats:

Sessions:


Some thoughts of mine: Tiny sample, but happy to be in the green. Running very well being quite a bit above EV, but feel like I can do better than 8.2bbEV/100. 3bet% looking quite high, but at this stake where players are quite nitty and with the GG rake I am fine with it, don't need to worry about being balanced right now. Grind only really started from 10th of July so sample size is so small, I expect to see at least 15k HH sample size for the 2nd half of July. Also lol at my session times, can clearly see my broken sleep.

No tilt or other mental problems, but that has never really been a problem for me.

good luck

That looks really good. How long have you been playing, how did you start out? Just r&c nl2 and grinding up, or did you do specific studying? Im currently trying to gain a br and become better (25 bi nl2) and though thats doable I find it difficult to see what to study and stuff.

Gl on the workouts too btw

Thank you!


I've been playing on and off for a few years, but never really committed to it, now is really the first time that I've started to take it serious and play consistently and do some studying. I do need to commit more to studying I will say that.

Started out playing bunch of freerolls, every once in a while would play some micro cash like nl2/nl5/nl10, but as I said never really committed to it.

I played some NL10 like almost 2 months ago and felt like I am quite good against the field with basically 0 studying. So I decided screw it and deposited 750 starting with NL25 with 30BI and see how I do.

I will say though that I wasn't a complete newbie, I knew about GTO, I've dabbled a bit into preflop ranges and knew some very basics of playing vs fish etc, had the RIO Clarke's course bought (Never fully completed it, max I went through was like 50% I think). What helped me the most though was just watching streams of other NL200+ players play such as KomodoDragonJesus, he's great at explaining what he's doing when playing. Lurked 2+2 and some discord communities as well and have gone through some HH reviews. Watched like every episode of MoP podcast, so I've listened to experience of players that have made it as well

Now I am just trying to be consistent with playing and will be trying to structure my game from the flop and really going with the solver.

And thanks for the wishes!

July update

Hey, a bit late with the July update as I was away for a bit, but better late than never.


Started with: 750EUR
Currently: 1400EUR


Profit from Tables: 395.95 USD
Fish buffet: 108 USD
Leaderboards C$: 37.5 USD
Flipout C$: 94.89 USD
Total: 636.34 USD

While I did profit over 650EUR (For some reason I had a bit more in balance, might have missed something. Also withdrew a little rounding down to 1.4k), I am very disappointed with my play and results.

Also very disappointed in my discipline and work ethic, bought both GTOW premium and RIO essential and barely spent any time with them and that reflects in my results. Didn't even start making the flop game plan I had in mind with the goals I specified initially.


July graph for all stakes:

25NL R&C:
50NL Reg:
Results by stake:

While I felt like I am actually playing quite good, the graph shows a different picture. Running very good with being above EV, but super disappointed with the EV results.

You might have noticed that I switched from 25NL R&C to 50NL reg tables at some point. I decided to do so after reading advice from various people who've gone through the stakes and a lot of them have said that if they could go back in time they would just go with reg tables only, and I can attest to that. The reg tables at 50NL GG are super soft, a lot more whales who are happy to give away and fishes and weak regs. While I did notice the massive difference in the field I still produced quite bad results compared to what I expected.

To become an "expert" at poker like any other field requires work and dedication to study, which I unfortunately lacked. So if I want to move to decent stakes and be profitable I have to work just as much if not harder than the good regs there.
Also ever since 9th of July I've taken just 2 days off from grinding online and 0 days off from anything poker related, even when I had the 2 days off I still either played some tournament live or had my mind in some other way occupied with poker such as reading forums, watching videos related to poker etc and I felt the results of that at the very end of the month. One of my last sessions I ran into AA > KK twice and KK > AKs in the span of about 3 min and lost all 3 stacks and I immediately closed all my tables and had to really fight the urge to go and play in 100NL tables to make it back, which was the very first real crack to my mental game that I saw. Thankfully I avoided the higher tables that I was very much underrolled and likely underskilled to play at. Which I am happy about.

Positives:
- Still quite strong at mental game with only one iffy moment
- Happy with my volume especially at the 50NL reg. Started on 21st July and played almost 17k hands till end of month.
- Started playing 3 R&C tables for the 25NL portion and 6 reg tables for the 50NL portion.
- Satisfied with my workout regime, only missed one workout in July since making the thread.
- Profit

Negatives:
- Super lazy and lacking work ethic. Didn't complete any of my short term goals I had for July. Very disappointed in that.
- Barely any study and the "study" I did was quite lazy such as passive video watching.
- Still fked up sleep times (Sleep at ~7AM and wake up ~4PM)
- Pretty much always feeling tired and lacking any motivation to do anything other than scrolling social media and binging video after video on Youtube.
- Minor signs of poker burnout.

With that in mind I need to get my sh*t together and get to work if I want to achieve something. So I will use the same short term goals I had and try to achieve them in August:
- Finish reading "The Inner Game of Tennis"
- Actually start to structure my game by developing a default strategy for different flop textures
- Diving more in depth into XR

Especially focusing on the flop game plan point.
Also I've noticed that I am quite a fish when it comes to playing against fish and other weak players. I am trying to play too fancy vs them and apply too much GTO logic to it, if that makes sense. But most of the time they are playing quite obvious and face up. So I want to improve on playing against fish as well.

Also a fish when it comes to playing against Chinese players, I can never seem to understand what they're doing ahaha.

Also considering visiting a doctor and implementing cardio workouts such as running or anything else to help my lazy ass.

Hi bro, I recomend very much if you wish to read the book: "Flow: the psichology of optimal experience". To help avoiding the bad rutine habits. Good luck!