I love this. I love people continuing to try to get better, not rushing things, looking for solutions. You rule and you being open with your learning journey is awesome. Just a few thoughts I had while reading:

- if you unblock your sharkscope that would go a long way to helping people help analyze your game/stakes/strengths/weaknesses

- you seem to be treating poker like it's a game with one specific correct answer and once you find the person who will sell you that answer you'll be able to make all the money. That's not really the case. Playing winning poker isn't really like finding one key that opens up one lock, it's more like doing a paint by numbers picture. You can color outside the lines a little bit, or use the wrong color a couple of times, and still have a really good looking picture, compared to all of the other people who are just throwing paint against the wall. Learn fundamentals! Play good hands in good positions, size correctly, and pay attention to how the people at your table are playing so you can figure out how to best exploit them, that's a super easy way to print at the micros

- if your goal is to improve your skills, make money, and grow your bankroll, there's no reason why you should be playing pkos or sats right now. Your attitude towards people going all in in pkos somewhat shows your lack of knowledge on how to maximize your equity in those, and sats are bad because you'll just be bleeding money to eventually get a seat in a game that you can't beat, and has massive variance. In fact, I'm not sure why you are playing massive field games on Stars, I'm sure there are small sites with micro games that have 100-200 player fields, playing in those would be way more beneficial for your game and your roll

[Session results sofar today]

I played a $1.10 PKO and a $2.20 Bounty builder. I cashed in the first for $4.53, coming 46th out of 658 players. My bankroll is up by $1, but the great news is that I am cashing in tours again. I am still in the middle of 2 more tours.

Hi EvolvedSavage! Thank you for your good words! I am excited that you like my blog and experiencing my journey along me! I welcome your further comments, suggestions and tips on how else I could improve.

I tried that, it has some old advice about Pokerstars about paying $0.03 to Sharkscope to do it and it doesn't work. Do you have any idea how to do it?

You are right. The reality of my learning is, there is a gap between what I am studying now and how I am playing now. I am learning how to play range, and a lot of the theory doesn't apply as often on the Micros. However, I keep learning it, for example, how to hand read ranges, because I know it will eventually help me get higher up. I am also learning and applying fundamentals indeed, just as you said.

Thank you for this tip! You are right and now I have a bankroll I should look to sign up for some sites in Greece with less players, where, by the way, I can also get sign up bonuses! I will look at that likely this or next week.

I'm in the US so I haven't needed to try to opt in on Stars in awhile, but it should be pretty straightforward. I believe you can also email them to consent to opting in, check the opt in page again maybe and see what it says?


Your goal, especially now at kind of the beginning of your knowledge journey, should be to study things that you can absorb and ideally identify/replicate/use in-game. So for example, you don't really need to be trying to figure out merged 40bb 4b 60%/40% jamming ranges, you should be trying to figure out what hands you should be opening at a 40bb effective stack depth, and the size to open those hands at, and what you should do if you get raised. And then from there, start learning what you should be trying to do on certain flops with various parts of your range.


You keep saying range and I'm not sure if it's something that's not translating well but I'm not sure exactly what you have been trying to learn for 3+ months. A range is just all the hands that you (or your opponents) play the same way. So if you are saying that you are learning what hands you should play and what hands you should fold...that's good, but it's not super intense.

As far as theory not applying at the micros, that's a take that I strongly disagree with. Knowing what a correct play is in a spot doesn't mean that you have to automatically replicate it. If I know how I am "supposed" to play, that means that I know how you are "supposed" to play. If you play in a way that is different from how you are "supposed" to play, that means that it's very very easy for me to make money off of you, because you're making mistakes (that you don't know you're making).


I feel like you are using "range" here to mean ranging your opponents post-flop. Is that accurate?



Great idea.

Hi Evo. I just contacted Pokerstars Support about it, and they said that they will start forwarding my data to Sharkscope within the next 10-14 days. So that's done.

Sure, I am not doing any of that unnecessary learning. At the moment I am learning things like what is Range Advantage, Nut Advantage, and also Range Morphology (ie what are "wide", "narrow", "strong", "weak", "capped", "uncapped", "linear", "polarized", "condensed", "merged", "elastic", "inelastic" ranges etc). I am also learning Hand reading of a range, currently using the Hand Range Funnel approach by Alec Torelli. Finally, some basic GTO concepts, such as the Minimum Defense Frequency. I also think maybe I need to learn how to consider blockers, and Stack-to-Pot ratios. For all of these, I am mostly studying material in blogs and videos from Johnathan Little, Upswing poker by Doug Polk, Conscious Poker by Alec Torelli, and blog posts from sites like GTO Wizard.

I find Micros are different because people don't even play a proper Preflop strategy, most only play up to the Flop ie don't know Turn and River strategies, they underbluff, they don't consider ranges at all, and don't know of any GTO concepts. It is much more basic poker with a lot of mistakes and randomness!

Thinking in ranges is different than just thinking about a single hand. It is about both my playing ranges and, as you also call it, ranging my opponents ie considering my opponent's range. Those involve, for example, considering Nuts, Strong hands, Medium strength hands, Weak hands and Air in a range, and even going down to hand reading of my opponent with Poker Combinatorics. They are also about all the above I mentioned. And I am also trying to learn how to do that all the way from Preflop.

Another important point: Poker theory is much broader than the part that intersects with game theory, and that part is still broader than just calculating GTO outcomes. I stand by my view that GTO in live small stakes (basically = online nanos) takes up way too much of people's attention, because opponents' deviations on each street are so dramatic that you often don't need a solver to perceive them. But GTO is not congruent with poker theory!

Here are examples of theoretical topics that you can reason out in your head without thinking explicitly about GTO:

• Should you always value bet the river when you think you have the best hand? Or what range should you vbet?
• What happens if you never bluff in a situation? If you always bluff? Do your opponents react as they "should"?
• What are frequencies? If you decide to take a certain action with a certain frequency -- say, calling the turn 70% of the time -- how do you choose which hands make up that frequency?

[Session results]

I played another 4 games, 2 satellites, a $1.10 Bounty builder, and a $0.55 Bounty builder, which brings my total to 6 games today, together with the previous 2. I cashed in the latter 2, but just got my money back. I am no down $4 for the day.

The good news is I am cashing frequently, but the bad news is I am not making it as far as before, and haven't won any yet. I guess I am just impatient and need to practice more to get back into my zone.

Love your motivation to study. Just a bit of information about poker volume in MTTs: if you play tourneys that have 1k+ players on average, you will not be able to tell with good certainty if you are a winning player or just getting lucky based on your financial results before at least a couple thousand tournaments.

To give you an example, if you are a losing player with -10% ROI, there is a 33% chance that you are in the green after a thousand tournaments. I hope you understand now the importance of volume to gauge your own performance, especially when playing big field MTTs and satellites.

I got that statistic from here https://www.primedope.com/tournament...ce-calculator/ . You should spend a bit of time on that website, try some scenarios to get a better grip of variance.

A (slightly flawed) way of gauging your performance that requires a lower volume is looking at your big blinds won per 100 hands, it is a statistic available in any poker tracker. should be aiming for higher than 3-4 bb/100 to beat the rake from experience.

Hi lean! Thank you for your advice, and I am excited that you are enjoying my blog!

1. I have some doubts about this method of predicting future results. I am learning better poker so as to win top places - as in, come 1st/2nd/3rd, or at least final table - and not just to live off low ITM cashes! The former should be an indicator that I am doing great. How does that fit in with the above variance? And am I just setting the bar too high for me or am I being realistic?

2. I run the software, and entered the details for the $1.65 tour on 31/3/2023, where I came 2nd out of 2571 players, and won $330.82, with my ITM success at 21%, which is about how much I have on that type of tournament. Below are the results. However, I have no idea what they mean. Can you perhaps explain the key points here? And does it take into account the fact I may win top places?





3. Also, below are my ITM stats from pokerprolabs.com (https://pokerprolabs.com/tilted9042/pokerstars/2023/mtt). Can you use those to provide me with any useful info about my future profits?



4. Note, I am using Hand2Note, not PokerTracker, so I can't find this stat of BB/100 in it. I can only see graphs. Is it available? And is it for cash only or also for tournaments?

Thinking this through, I am currently playing PKOs and Bounty builders almost exclusively (that is, I am also playing some satellites). I think those tours may have lower variance. Either way, I am getting my money back often, which is significant for me to survive, compared to Knockout tournaments. However, the above calculator doesn't take bounties into account. It is for Knockout tournaments only. So, I can't use it atm as it doesn't apply to me.

My question would be this: let's say you're playing today, you get down to 20bb, MP opens a std open, and it folds to you in the CO. What hands are you shoving?

A question like that is very very basic, it's one of the first things you should learn when you are starting to get serious about poker skill/strategy. Knowing the correct range in a spot like that, and being willing to actually execute it in-game, is going to make you FAR more money in the games that you are playing that learning about range morphology or funnelling chips to alec torelli.

Hi Evo. You are right- that is a key thing to learn. I am not so sure what exactly I would be doing in that spot.

I have found a way to play short stack which has worked for me, and I haven't thought it through to describe it yet. I definitely choose my spots, and almost always go first in. I sofar haven't spotted problems with my method so as to work on that. I think I know what to do in general.

However, if you are asking me to learn all the charts with BBs and positions is massacre. I don't think I could ever do it and it would work counter-productively. Is there a shortcut to learn that?

[Session results]

In this session, I played 8 games, made it ITM in 2, and cashed in 5 in total.

I did best in the $2.20 Bounty builder. I came 47th of 2891 players, which is my best performance since I started playing again after 3 months, and cashed $20.63. I lost with a JT vs KQ. I went all in on the flop with a pair of Ts, and villain called unexpectedly with absolutely nothing, and then hit a K on the river!

I also won an $11 Sunday Storm ticket from a satellite event.

I also played the $11 Sunday Storm, but I was card dead and finished early on. However, it was a good experience to finally play this one too.

The counter-argument to that is that if you don't know what hands you would fold/shove in a rejam spot, then you probably don't know what to do, and are choosing your spots randomly.

If you could remember your times tables in 5th grade, you can remember starting hand ranges/3b ranges/rejam ranges. It wouldn't be counter productive at all, because it's knowledge. The more knowledge you have, the better decisions you can make. If you were trying to solve a differential calculus math problem, you wouldn't say "oh I don't need algebra knowledge for this"...it's a building block that gets you to where you want to be.

Also it's a little odd that you are trying to study range morphology and MDF but not starting hand ranges.

[Study updates: Buying Doug Polk's Postflop playbook]

Yesterday I bought "Postflop playbook" by Doug Polk (https://upswingpoker.com/postflop-playbook/) for $7. It consists of a few videos. I reviewed it today. It is very simple to learn, and slightly more primitive than Johnathan Littl'e "Mastering the fundamentals: Postflop strategy", which is free. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1JjmsekmqI).

It isn't about playing range, but it doesn't exclude doing that. It doesn't refer to hand reading or Poker combinatorics or any of that. It also does not refer to Range Advantage, Nut Advantage, or blockers/card removal. However, together, these 2 give me a great theoretical understanding of postflop play.

What I love most about Doug Polk's video is, that it is like a "cheat sheet", meaning, I can review the Postflop playbook anytime, even after a long break of not having played any games, and immediately remember how to play properly.

Hi Evo! Thank you for caring so much about my improvement. And you have nailed it! I do need to improve at particular area ie 3bet ranges and rejam ranges! (I already have found some Preflop/RFI ranges to study)

The reasons I have been studying things like Range morphology are:
1) I have been playing poker since 2005, so that is about 18 years now, although on and off, and have been a winning player since, so I do know some of my stuff, although I learnt it empirically, by playing a lot. There are a lot of things I never studied formally. However, I only turned to full MTT play in the last year, and, started wanting how to play range more recently. However, indeed, I only ever specifically studied preflop ranges. I need to add 3b ranges and rejam ranges to my ranges study.

2) I am creating my study content on my own. My method is, I discover whatever flaws I have, and whatever I think I need to learn, and then research on the web and books, and put it in my guide. While this approach is very flexible, and I can learn exactly what I need (and not what I don't), sometimes I find things in the wrong order. I think I will be ok with finding my 3bet ranges. But do you have any ready guide with jam/rejam ranges to suggest for me, or should I work it out on my own?

[Game results: Another big win]

I just came 2nd in a $1.10 Bounty builder, and cashed $97.08.!1st and 2nd place were paying about the same, and the only difference was the bounty of my opponent (about $30)! My opponent was very experienced, with a JJ mark on his profile, meaning he had played 2,500,000 hands. My bankroll is now up to approximately $490 (€450.15 to be exact), which is the highest I have ever reached (My previous highest was about $400 (€362 to be exact). I am SO HAPPY!

I'm back in the game, baby! Crushing it, and killing it! Hurray!

[Study material: Shoving ranges]

Following Evo's advice, I searched and found shoving ranges. Here is the best of what I found:

• https://www.mypokercoaching.com/push-fold-chart/
• https://upswingpoker.com/push-fold-t...rategy-charts/

This is the first time I ever read shoving ranges. I had a read through them, and realized that I had recently adjusted my play to be very close to them. However, it is better when I actually have the real thing to study!

[Bankroll management & Game plan]

To manage my bankroll, I am now following the advice from a website which claims you need roughly 200 buy ins to play MTTs. The reality is, I am playing Bounty builders, so the required bankroll may be lower, but I will still follow that advice.

That also means:

• I now have €440, which is about $480. This means I can play up to $2.20 Bounty builders.

This further means that:

• I can move up to play $3.30 when I will have $660
• I can move up to play $4.40 when I will have $880
• If I fall to $220, I will move down to play $1.10 only

However I will mix it up playing all Bounty Builders for $1.10. $2.20, $3.30, and $4.40 (as those are averaging $2.20).

My game plan therefore remains as I posted it earlier, which includes satellites, so I can also take shots at the Sunday Storm and Sunday Million ie:

Game plan

Regular games:

• $1.10 Bounty builders
• $2.20 Bounty Builders
• $3.30 Bounty Builders
• $4.40 Bounty Builders

Satellites:

• $1.10 Satellites to the $11 Sunday Storm
• $2.20 Satellites to the $11 Sunday Storm
• $1.10 Satellite to the $109 Sunday Million
• $2.20 Satellite to the $109 Sunday Million

[Study progress: The Mental game of poker]

Today I felt like I should read something different. So, I headed over to have a look at Jarret Tendler's book "The Mental Game of poker 1". This book is about how to not go on tilt. I rarely go tilt any more. That is because I am comfortable with my strategy and I know what I should do and what not. I am paying myself to play a specific strategy, and not to mess with my emotions.

However, I found 3 cases where I might go tilt:

• Hate-losing Tilt: Many players hate losing even though they realize how much variance impacts results in the short run. Wanting to win is not
• the problem—the problem is how you handle the inevitable losses.
• Mistake Tilt: Making mistakes is frustrating for many logical reasons; these reasons just happen to be flawed because of inaccurate views
• about learning.
• Entitlement Tilt: Classic Phil Hellmuth tilt is caused by believing that you deserve to win for X, Y, or Z reason. Winning is a possession and
• you tilt when someone undeserving takes it from you.

Specific lines from the book which actually go through my head sometimes:

• “How is it possible to lose like this again!” = Hate-losing Tilt
• “I knew that! Dammit, how can I play so bad?!” = Mistake Tilt
• “I’m too good of a player for this to happen. How can I keep losing to this donkey?” = Entitlement Tilt

My problem is, I feel that, after the study work I have done, I should be winning tournaments way too often. On the other hand, the reality is, I am way too conservative in how I approach MTTs, and specifically in how many tables I play at a time, and how I move up and down stakes.

I play way too few tables at a time (4 max, and 1-2 most of the time). Also, I have already calculated which tournaments I should play. I bet many people in my situation would be moving up to low stakes already, whereas I didn't.

I will now be reading this chapter to work out how to avoid that kind of tilt.

[Play assessment: My BB/100 stats]

I had a look at my B/100 stats on Hand2Note on 20/06/2023:


It appears I am doing well, beating the rake, although I discovered I am likely playing bad from the Big Blind. I should therefore work on my BB play.

Pretty clean BB/100, despite the small sample size it is certain you're beating those stakes. Don't be too concerned by the number in the BB spot. You are already forced to put in 1bb, which corresponds to -100bb/100, with any two cards. Even for top regs that number is negative, playing the BB is about damage control from a forced losing position.

[Metagame & Psychology: I'm feeling Scared money]

Today I played very bad and lost a lot of money - a few dozen dollars but yet that is as lot for my bankroll. I noticed I felt strange - somewhere between bored and overconfident. I signed up for a $4.40 Bounty builder, and even for an $11 Bounty builder, in the latter where I played it like a donk!! I haven't even played an $11 Bounty builder before before in my life.

I reviewed both of Jarret Tendler's books "The Mental Game of Poker", to find out the psychological reason for that, but it was not exactly in there - although I had some Entitlement tilt. Eventually I had an epiphany: I felt too bored with playing the same games again, and I wanted to move up stakes faster. However, when I tried it, I was feeling "scared money"!

The expression “scared money” means a player is nervous or scared to lose their chips or money. As such, their decision making is impaired and likely to cause them play worse. Scared money is funds that a player for whatever reason cannot afford to lose and subsequently easy to attack and bluff out of pots.

I searched the web and found out how to overcome it (at https://texasholdemquestions.com/scared-money/):

"Scared money only rears its head when you are playing out of your depth financially or technically so these are easy ones to avoid if you adopt a conservative mindset to the games you play.

The best ways to avoid playing scared:

1. Ensure you’re practicing solid bankroll management.
2. Make sure you’re playing in the correct game and stakes that are appropriate to your level.
3. It can also pose an issue when you have problems outside of poker and mentally not with it. If you are in peril financially with your personal life, it can spill out on to the poker table. To avoid this, we recommend taking regular breaks from poker and only returning when you’re mentally prepared.
4. If you’re losing regularly and unsure if it’s down to being scared or something else, it might be worth us reviewing how you play"

I am practicing bankroll management. However I feel like I want to take my shots higher. The reason could be that I got bored, and therefore I should take a break from poker. I am actually afraid to take a break because I am afraid I will forget all my strategy. I most likely won't, but it feels like that. Some things to think about....

[Study update: Doubts about using Shoving ranges from 20xBB-5xBB]

I had a think through Evo's advice about studying shoving ranges. I now recall that my short stack (20xBB or less) strategy has been to keep playing my standard game with raises until I reach 5xBB. ie I have not been shoving from as high as 20xBB, especially late/ITM in a tournament. The reason I did that is that players on Microstakes take the gambles, and therefore I have no fold equity then, which results in me busting out in tours from random weak/medium hands.

I posted a question on this forum about this, although I should say, the example was not the best since I had 30xBB in the hand, although my point is valid (Micro stakes players take gambles, and therefore I have no fold equity).

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...takes-1823532/

I am still in 2 minds: Use shoving ranges from as high as 20xBB, or keep playing my own strategy ie only shove from 5xBB? I am leaning towards continuing my own strategy, as this has worked well for me sofar.

[Setup: Setting up my poker site parameters - Bet slider amounts]

I studied Johnathan Little's "Mastering the fundamentals: Postflop strategy, the "Postflop Playbook" by Doug Polk, and also considered low GTO bets on flop, so I came up with this setup for my bet slider amounts on the site:

• Preflop: 2.25xBB is my standard bet, 4xBB for 1 limper iso in position, 5xBB for standard iso-raise OOP
• Flop: 1/4 pot as GTO probe bet, 1/3 pot as standard C-bet as per JL, 1/2 pot as typical C-bet, 3/4 pot for when opponent has strong hands in his range but I have better