Hey all, starting a lil' blog here as a place to document my poker journey.

I'm in my late 20s and have been playing poker seriously since the start of the year. Like I said in the title, I have a career in tech as a software engineer that I'm currently taking a break from. That means I have plenty of cash and more than enough to fund a bankroll at a serious stake. So far I've decided to just start at the lowest micros and move up when I'm confident I'm beating the previous limit. That way I can make dumb beginner mistakes as I learn without having to worry about the money I punt while doing it.

I played a little bit in college like 10 years ago, read some books, watched some videos, but didn't get that serious about it. It was enough that when I was coming back to it this year I was already familiar with a lot of basic concepts and vocabulary, but otherwise I was still bad. This year I started out just consuming a lot of stuff, drilling a lot (mostly preflop), and otherwise trying to build my fundamentals, and playing 5nlz on Ignition.

After working on all this for a couple months, here was my 5nlz graph:



I know 42k hands isn't a huge sample size but by the end I was pretty confident I was beating the limit based on how I was playing vs how my opponents were playing, and I was pretty happy with a 4.62 BB/100 yellow line given I was paying 11.9 BB/100 in rake (lol). So a couple weeks ago I started playing 25nlz (the next highest zoom limit on Iggy) and, well, it's not going as well so far:



Obviously running 6 BI below EV kinda sucks when trying to move up but I'm also just getting owned a lot. Hoping right now that I'm just suffering from variance but the downswing sucks for sure.

My goals/plan:

* Beat Iggy 25z and move up to 50z
* Beat Iggy 50z and move up to ??? (next highest zone on Iggy is 200z which is a big jump, so not sure what I'll do)

Study-wise, I'm grinding out spots in GTOWizard, and my goal is to just do some drills there every day (no specific # of hands since preflop drills are a lot faster than postflop ones).

I have a lot more thoughts on all the different topics I've touched on here but don't want to bloat the intro post.

Thanks for reading!

Hi doing a similar thing as you (same limits) i suggest using GTO base because it's unlimited and free paying $50 a moth for GTO wizard not worth the return when playing micros.

Following. Why not keep your job and play though? How long are you going to give it before you decide to go back to work?

Thanks! Yeah, I guess I didn't make it clear--quitting my job was separate from taking up poker. Obviously it'd be pretty silly to quit a high-paying job just to grind 5nl. The truth is that my career in tech to date has made me kind of miserable day-to-day and I think I would be a lot happier finding some way to make a good living while working for myself in some capacity. Given where I'm at so far in poker it's pretty unlikely that online poker is able to be that replacement; my back-of-the-envelope estimates are that to crack 100k/yr online you probably need to be playing around 1knl online and it seems very difficult to reach that level in under two years or so. OTOH from what I've seen and read about live poker it seems like it's possible to make a decent hourly there with a much lower level of required skill. At any rate, I'm not in an immediate rush to go back to work so for the moment I'm just working on my poker and seeing where that takes me.




A couple HH from yesterday that were definitely frustrating. The first one I think is just whatever but it always sucks to flop the nuts and lose:




The second one actually tilted me a bit:



Besides the whole KK < QQ aspect I don't think villain's play even makes any sense. You're IP in a 4bet pot and you flopped a set... why are you raising? Just call and let me keep firing with my bluffs! Wasn't totally sure about my flop 3bet jam but it's at least solver-approved so I guess it can't be terrible.

This evening's session was another typical one for me lately--won a lot of small pots, stack someone AA > AK, lose AKs < AA myself as well as another KK < QQ, end up in the red at the end of the session. I don't want to be complacent about my game but I still feel like overall I'm playing decently and I've been getting hit with a lot of negative variance. That's just the nature of the game though.

Cool, best of luck to you.

I don't mind paying for GTOWizard, I think it's a pretty good product and it's helping me improve at a good pace for sure. I checked out GTObase a few weeks ago but wasn't convinced to switch at the time, but as they continue improving it it's worth keeping an eye on for sure.

My general philosophy for improving at poker or any other hobby (I've had a number of others, all cognitive-based), or a career for that matter, is that your primary goal when starting out should be to improve as fast as possible. You want to optimize for future success X months/years down the line, not short-term results. So I'm not so concerned about being profitable in poker in the short term and if spending money on a tool like GTOWizard helps me improve faster it's a no-brainer to me.

I play/played a few other competitive mindsports like chess and bridge. In those it's general wisdom that playing against tougher competition is best for improving. In my local chess scene, there are a lot of tiger parents who take this and really push it, so that if a chess tournament has one section for players rated 1400-1600, say, then a lot of kids rated like 1200 or 1300 will play up in the 1400-1600 section and a lot of kids eligible for 1400-1600 will play up in the next section, which kind of ruins the rating divisions a bit.

At any rate, I do wonder if maybe this is good advice for poker too, and I should just play the highest stake that I can afford to lose at because it'll be better for improving. My reasoning so far is that there's still a lot of value in being able to beat weaker players in micro- and low-stakes. Unlike in other games, success in poker relies on the ability to crush the bad players, not just the ability to be competitive with the good ones, so it's good to gain experience in how people play at different levels. The other component is morale--it sucks getting beat up and losing all the time to stronger opponents and I know from non-poker experience it can be pretty demoralizing. Add in the natural variance and downswings in poker even if you aren't losing and psychologically it might be best for your long-term success to just build confidence in your abilities.

A couple funny HH from a recent session:

Hand 1 is so ridiculous that all I can do is laugh:



Hand 2 is some fun aggression. V's turn raise really made me raise my eyebrows. I should have just overbet turn myself though, that's the solver line and it's obviously very logical. Haven't really studied these flop x/r continuations much yet:



Hand 3 solver says I need to just jam river (luckily didn't miss any value vs my opponent's actual hand). I felt like my options here were either jam or check and wasn't sure if my hand was too thin on this runout. But the solver is fearless in these 3BP. Instructive one for me:



Hand 4 was interesting. Need to run my own sim because villain's tiny 3bet screws up the SPR for using a GTOwiz solution. River is just about the worst card in the deck for our hand. On most other river cards I just get the money in but with over half a pot size bet left can I really jam here? Even if villain is underprotecting their checking range (definitely true), are we really getting called by many worse hands on this runout? Feels unlikely to me but what do I know. The more interesting problem was what to do if villain jams river instead of checking. I hate these 4-straight boards, feel like I play them terribly (along with the rest of the pool).

Been running well the past couple days, have gone around +$250 (10BI). Variance is pretty nuts but I'm glad to be coming out of the downswing.

A couple notable hands:

Hand 1:



lil' donky donk on this board. The raise was pretty surprising since I didn't think villain should have any raises here (yeah yeah, it's 25nl, people do whatever they want). Wasn't sure how best to punish that so I went for the 3bet but looking back I think that was a mistake. My hand is really suffering if we get jammed on, might be best to just call the raise. As played after I 3bet flop I think calling the shove was a mistake. Against villain's specific holding here I have enough equity, but I'm guessing villain has a bunch of nut flush draws here that my hand is in bad shape against. My intuition is that a hand like A7hh is better to 3bet/GII with than 97hh but not sure.

Hand 2:



Getting a little fancy here. I've been studying this configuration (3BP SB v BTN) a bunch since I think it's one of the most important spots for EV and I knew I was playing them like ****. I knew that on these wheel boards with a flush draw we can just jam flop with our vulnerable overpairs (esp hands like 99 and TT). I thought I could do it with QQ unblocking the FD too but when I checked it afterwards it looks like JJ is the limit. Good to remember that. I think I was just chuffed to break this one out at the tables, lol.

Overall feeling a lot more confidence in my game than I was a week or two ago. Crazy how much it's affected by short-term results even though I know that poker is a high variance game where short term results don't mean much. But I'm also running into a lot of just awful play and people punting off and it feels good to take advantage of that and to remember that this limit is extremely beatable.

I think I might want to increase my volume a little bit, I'm playing around 1-2 hours a day but I should be able to bump that to 2-3 at least. I want to build up a decent size sample (40k hands or so) at 25z and then if I'm winning & confident in my game I'll bump it up to 50z. I do want to get to 100nl or 200nl (reg tables or zone, either way) as soon as I reasonably can, mostly in order to justify the amount of time I've spent working on poker this year, but I also realize that I really haven't been playing that long and need to be patient. And I feel like I'm still pretty bad tbh, most nodes & lines I feel like I play kind of badly, and I don't have a good sense of population tendencies since my sample size isn't that huge.

Just got home from a short trip to Vegas which makes for a good opportunity to update this thread.

Online

I've been running well online lately, winning most of my sessions. My 25nlz graph now has almost exactly double the hands as the one I posted in the OP, so let's take a look:



Definitely pleased to have the green line in the positives after that stretch of runbad. I actually came close to redepositing on my Iggy account but in the time it took to move the money around to buy the crypto my balance recovered, hah. I know 22k hands is still a small sample so I'm not going to go overboard drawing any conclusions. Need to put in some more volume!

Live

I actually had my first live sessions about a month ago when I played for a few times at local Bay Area casinos. I luckboxed it up in a short session of 2/3/5 for my first run and then punted away all my winnings in two longer sessions of 1/2/2. I was pretty rattled after that since I played pretty badly in the 1/2/2 and I decided to take a break from live poker for a bit while I rebuilt my confidence and continued working on my game.

This trip to Vegas that I just took went much better. I wanted to just check out a bunch of different rooms and so played four shorter sessions at four different rooms (afternoon + evening both days), just playing 1/3. All four sessions were in the green and I ended up around +$700 in total for the two days. More importantly, though, I felt like I was playing well & making good decisions, and I pretty much always felt like I was the best player or close to the best player at the table, so my confidence was really repaired.

Some funny hands for sure... one where I raise Q9s from MP, get called by SB with a short stack. Flop AsKs7d, I pot it, villain calls. Turn 7h, villain leads out small, I call. River 7s, villain jams the rest for around half pot. I grumpily open fold the nut flush and villain shows some A3o type hand. Another hand at the same table where I squeeze A4s from the SB, get one caller, b50 a flop that's like Q64r, then manage to check the hand down and actually win at showdown against presumably some AJ or KJ type of holding.

What's next

It's pretty clear what's next for my online poker journey. I'm going to keep playing 25nlz for another 10k or 20k hands and then either stay there or move up to 50nlz depending on how it's going. Meanwhile I'm still doing work on my fundamentals every day, mostly via GTOWizard.

Live poker I'm not really sure. I'm feeling ready to head back to playing live but I'm not sure if I want to play 1/2/2 or 1/2/3, or if I want to play 2/3/5 or 3/5. I guess I should stick with the lowest limit for a few more sessions and see if I can make out okay. My understanding is that the flat drop makes these games tough to beat and really incentivizes moving up to at least 2/3/5 though, so maybe I should just bite the bullet and not waste my time?

I'm also not sure how much time I should spend playing live vs how much I should focus on online. I feel like online play & study is by far a better investment in improving my skills, and live is the way to make shorter-term profits. My attitude in general is that investing in yourself is always the right way to go, but at the same time I think it would be nice to put some real cash in my pocket, you know?

Felt like I've been kind of punting online the last few days since I got back from Vegas so thought I'd dig into some of my hands with GTOwiz, which is something I hadn't been doing as much lately. Definitely some interesting ones. This is just from the upload hands feature which will only identify pure mistakes--ideally I should also be going through hands myself because I'm going to be making a lot of mistakes & misunderstanding things in spots that don't get surfaced here due to things like margin of error in the sims.


This hand I first of all made a mistake by even continuing against the flop sizing, GTOwiz thinks that this is one of the hands that I can call for a b50 (with a diamond in my hand) but need to pitch against this big bet. That aside, this hand is a mandatory river bluff--after V checks back turn and river comes, we have a huge range advantage and not that much air so we need to bluff our underpairs.




This hand I apparently need to bluff (!) even these bad two pair hands on the river. Turning 2p into a bluff is definitely outside my skill level right now but I'll keep a note of it. Obviously it makes some sense, I don't have any air and few hands with even 1p here.




Got completely owned here paying off a value bet that's too thin. Just need to fold most of my pocket pairs, except QQ and JJ since they block AQ and AJ (have definitely seen this effect before in 3bp). The fact that I have a heart really doesn't matter. Interestingly this is another spot where OOP needs to turn their own 77 (and other underpairs) into bluffs on the river.




This one I have to confess I don't fully understand. First the solver thinks I should mainly check with my hand on the flop. In my studying of 3BP SBvBU I think the 99-JJ region on these low boards are the hands most incentivized to bet & that makes sense to me--we get value and protection, whereas KK and AA don't need as much protection and can be slowplayed more. Indeed if I look at this board in that configuration I see a b75 cbet centered around TT which is about what I would expect. But in this spot by contrast we have the AA-QQ overpairs being the overpairs that are most often bet. I guess it has to do with the ranges-- in HJ vs CO, HJ should have a bunch of JJ-99 themselves, whereas BU vs SB the button is 4betting TT+, so in this configuration our 99 doesn't have as much equity and can't value bet as comfortably. Interesting and shows I need to keep studying 3BP in other configurations.

Anyway on the turn I need to fire a second time with my hand if I do bet flop, which is a nice merge--V is supposed to fold a lot of JJ/TT and continue a bunch of flush draws. I think I probably checked this turn because I recognized that this turn card should be good for OOP. OP is supposed to donk this turn really frequently and when you take away that donk (since my opps at 25nlz are not finding these) I have to imagine I check back a lot more. Might need to play around with this one a bit in a solver.




Not sure why I bluffed this combo on the river. When the flush completes here my bluffs should all contain hearts and I should give up all non-heart air.




I need to be more aggressive on the river and raise here. Solver has me shoving most of the my Q high flushes (not going to try to figure out why it just calls with QTs...).

Cool thread, subbed. I'm in a similar spot where I'm losing interest in the tech / engineering stuff in my late 20s. Hope things are going well and your time off has been good so far!

Hope to see some killing it and more volume in the short term. Good luck my friend I will stay up to date.

It's been about a week and a half since my last update. I've put in another 10k hands since my last graph and am up another +$100 in yellow line (slightly more in green line). Overall I'm feeling positive about my skill level and feeling more confident. Right now my Iggy account has $800 in it and my tentative plan is to try to grind that up to 1k and then move up to 50nlz. I hope I can do that before the end of the month, but it'll all depend on volume obviously.

Study-wise, I've kind of been all over the map. The postflop spots I've been spending the most time on are still 3BP, I still think those are the highest ROI spots given the size of the pot. Here's an example hand from a couple days ago that I struggled with:



Flop and turn I think are standard so the interesting spot is on the river. I wasn't sure exactly if my hand was a mandatory calldown or not but the solver says all my Ax one pair are 0 EV bluffcatchers and mixing (even though IP is value betting their own AQdd, which I find interesting). On the other hand, is pool finding enough bluffs in this line? The solver is mainly bluffing QTdd, KQ no diamond, and KJo with the Jd. I really wouldn't be surprised if not enough of those bluffs are making it in there and I should at least consider pure folding my hand, which I didn't really take seriously in game.

I continue regularly drilling preflop. GTOWizard recently released a bunch of sims with different preflop sizings and rake structures so I've been studying with those a bit. The BB defense in particular is interesting and something I've been drilling vs different open sizes--I think previously I was overdefending vs 3x (a common size in this pool) and underdefending against 2x (which I also see a bunch).

In my prime years, I was a software contractor in Northern California and played poker very seriously, thinking that by the time I burned out, I would play full-time. (I am 66 yo now and retired) but I could not make a steady living from poker. I was just too impulsive and easily tilted. Do not mind what your chart shows because when you have no income, then you will be under pressure which will have an impact on your play. I suggest just working and playing. Why not?

Latest 25z graph with another 10k+ hands:



Unfortunately the graph has a 24 hour lag (because I download my HHs from Iggy) and in the last 24h I've gone on a downswing of about 7 BI. Taking a break to update this thread because I can feel my emotions surging. I still have confidence in my game, but I've just been hit with one cooler or suckout after another in big pots. Flopped a set in a squeeze pot and lost after turn and river brought in a four flush, AA < KK, one or two pots where villain spiked a set on the river with a low pocket pair that had no business even still being in the hand, and one hand where I was on the good end of set over set only for villain to hit their one outer and get quads, lol. Oh yeah, and a 3bet pot with a AK77x board where I lost 76s < AA.

Whatever, it's a poker forum, you guys know the drill, we're all gonna run bad at some point. I felt like I was running pretty well earlier in the week (and you can see my green line taking a nice hop above the yellow line) so it kinda figures, although I think this runbad has far surpassed that rungood at this point.

I'm a little disappointed that I'm not managing to beat these games for a higher WR. It certainly feels like there are tons of fish in the pool just based on all the goofy donk lines I run into and the terrible preflop play. So you'd think the games would be beatable for a higher WR than just like 3-4 bb/100. That's reason enough to stay humble and to keep learning and trying to improve my game.

My goal was/is to hit the $1k milestone in my Iggy account (which corresponds to a bit over +$500 in the graph, I think) and then move up to 50z. Unfortunately since I'm down to $738 that's a lot farther away that it looked yesterday when I hit $950, lol, but I'll still keep at it.

I think my studying might be too focused on preflop right now. I think I'm spending almost all of my drill time on preflop spots. It's good to do this of course but I suspect my postflop play has bigger holes in it than my preflop play atm.

Downswing continued with a vengeance on Sunday and I think my emotional state was pretty bad by the end of the day. I lost 6 BI in total. Some of it was just frustrating hands that I couldn't do much about, some of it was bad play. I want to focus on the bad play since that's much more useful and healthy.

Hand 1:


This is an interesting one because even though our hand should have really a lot of equity (80%+ in a sim it looks like) solver just prefers checking back. Presumably that's because villain is going to overfold and then villain will jam on us with some traps a bunch as well. The sim is going to be pretty inaccurate because human ranges here are going to be all over the place in SB's shoes, but the solver is using a split strategy of b150 with the As and Ks offsuit hands as well as a b60 with AXss, KXss, and a little JXss. At any rate, too thin for sure, good to remember. And then when I get jammed on I really need to just snap fold this one. Bluffcatching here is a terrible idea.



A very uncomfortable hand to play on the river obviously. The solver prefers block which I didn't really consider but makes some sense. My thought process was basically: if I check I'm probably going to check/call so I'm not saving any money against better hands, and if I put the money in myself I will probably get looked up a lot by hands like QQ, JJ, TT, and AQs because people (including me) at these stakes have a hard time folding 2pair+. I still don't think this is necessarily a terrible line of thought but it's possible that I should just x/fold.

More interesting though is that the solver would rather just b50 flop and shove turn with my hand. That makes a lot of sense, the board is very dynamic, let's get the money in quick. I haven't studied 4BP at all and I think my very basic heuristics are just "bet small". One to remember.



Hand 3 I really struggled with. The turn card is nasty to see as I'm now behind AJs and JJ. When I hit an A-high board with AK in a 3BP I think I just feel like I should be playing for stacks and certainly can't be folding. I did recognize that this wasn't a great runout for my hand and checked river, but I didn't have the cajones to fold to the shove, figuring I blocked half of villain's AQs. But really, what are villain's bluffs here? Before checking the solver I'm guessing they're bluffing like TT, JTs....KQs? My villains are just absolutely not finding those bluffs at 25z, lol.

The solver prefers a polarized turn strategy of b75/check and my hand isn't good enough to b75 any more, I need around AQ+. I also need to bluff KQ and TT on the turn which is pretty cool but I'm definitely not finding that. After I check this hand I'm actually indifferent to a bet already with no diamond though solver is still mostly calling. These triple broadway boards are definitely tricky to play.



Hand 4 is just a punt, lol. I think I called flop because I had a heart, called turn because of the sizing, and then called river because the sizing looked bluffy (why not shove?) and again I had a heart. But actually I can just fold flop. Solver thinks villain can bet range and in response I need to fold > half my range. I'm indifferent with JJ and fold all lower pairs. Crazy. Like I said, I haven't spent much time on 4BP so my intuitions here are just way off. I would think that the Q is a relatively good card for me. And it is--if it were K32 instead of Q32, I would need to fold 75% (!!!) of my range to a b33 instead of only 52%. Very interesting board.




Some positive news at the end of me losing all these stacks--yesterday I woke up and decided that it was going to be the day I grinded my way out of my downswing. I put in a huge session (somewhere around 8h I think) and decided I was going to make a conscious effort to be less of a station given that pool is underbluffing most nodes. And hey, somehow it worked. I ended the day up something like 11 BIs. Won't be in my DB until tomorrow but yeah--we're back in business.

Another red hot day on Tuesday and +5 BI later I successfully hit my $1k target, which means I'm done playing 25nlz. Here's my final graph for the limit:



Not a super sexy-looking graph given all the swings and the relatively low WR but hey. Winning is winning, right? I'm a little surprised to see my redline flat over the last 10k hands. Not sure if that's reflective of something in my play or if it's just variance.

I paid 9.25 BB/100 in rake over this sample. In my OP I mentioned that I paid 11.9 BB/100 at 5nlz. It looks like the rake structures at 50nl and 25nl are identical on Ignition at a 6 player table so I should expect the same rake figure at 50nlz.

Oh, and in my last day at the limit I hit the royal flush promo, so that was exciting, although the hand itself was not so exciting:



That's my first royal with both hole cards--I actually hit another one (my first in general) just a week or two ago with an Axs hand. 50 BBs is actually kind of anticlimactic a payout at 25nl though, lol. This is a neat HH to put into GTOWiz btw, on the river I'm so starved for bluffs that I need to bluff all my underpairs.

Anyway, I had my first 50nlz day today. Back to square one at a new limit. I haven't played a ton of hands yet but my initial impression was that the regs are a bit sharper (but this could be confirmation bias) but I still ran into plenty of fish in the pool. One wrinkle is that while 5nlz and 25nlz are pretty much always running whenever I want to play (US waking hours), I think 50nlz is less popular and I was surprised when late afternoon I was getting some 5-handed tables. I might have to start being more conscious about game selection, TBD.

The plan is to play like 30k-50k hands or so at 50nlz and then reevaluate where to go next. Onwards and upwards!

A hand I played yesterday that's been haunting me. The curse of Ignition is that I could just download it now and see villain's hole cards:



I figured that by the time we get to the river villain's range is heavy on AQs, KJs, KTs, and some JJ and TT. Meanwhile villain will really struggle to find bluffs, I figured. I thought that AK was just a bluffcatcher now and that in a spot where it's hard to find bluffs I should just fold. But I really wasn't sure at all and it felt maybe too nitty.

Putting this hand into GTOWizard gives me a few different outputs depending on the sim parameters (ie preflop ranges) I use, ranging from 0EV bluffcatch to a printing call. But one thing is clear, if my opponent is shoving KQ here then I need to call AK.

Frustrating hand for sure and I still can't decide if the fold was "slightly nitty but fine" or "terrible" against population.

First 10k hands of 50z played:



Basically breakeven. Overall I do think I'm a winner in these games since there are still tons of recs in the pool. The regs do seem slightly tougher than the 25z regs, which I think is good for my poker development, forcing me to up my own game. I know I could beat these games for a higher WR than I've managed so far. Step one is surely learning to just fold the river to raises, I keep finding myself bluffcatching these and keep getting shown the nuts over and over again.

Still constantly working on my fundamentals with GTOWizard. Frankly I have a loooong way to go still. I continue drilling preflop and have been spending some time this week on the flop in SRP, which is something I haven't put much energy into in a while (even though it's so common) because the GTO strats are labyrinthine. But I've been trying to refine my BB defense vs cbets (especially finding more x/r, I've noticed that I don't x/r enough) and refine my cbetting strategy.

The big problem with trying to play Iggy 50z as my main game is that it simply doesn't run as much, the pool is pretty small most hours. Peak times seem to be early evening Pacific, like 5pm - 9pm or so, so I've been trying to play a lot during that time. I've started playing a little bit of 50nl reg tables during the slow hours for zone. They're super soft but I also find them a bit irritating to play. The time bank is too long and it's irritating to keep track of with no HUD due to the anonymity.

Haven't updated my thread in a while! Truth is that I more or less took a few weeks off in July--first a couple weeks travel, then took me a bit to get back into the poker groove again.

The main thing that's changed is that I'm trying to start playing live more. I think I've reached a point where I've put in a lot of work getting better at poker over the first half of the year, and while I still have so much further to go in my poker journey, now I want to try to start turning that into real money.

At the moment I'm targeting a rather modest 20 hours a week of live poker, probably either two 10 hour sessions or 10+5+5 or something. I started playing 3/5/10 at the local casino last week and while I don't have more than a few hours in so far (and am currently down due to torching 1k calling a 5bet from a rec with AKo--in retrospect, probably a call that should be reserved for online games or playing young regs), the game does feel plenty beatable to me right now. There are definitely plenty of recs and I haven't been impressed by the regs so far. I feel like I should be a winner in this game, but we'll have to wait until I build up some sample. Planning on putting in an all-day session tomorrow as a start.

Online, here's my latest Iggy 50z graph:



So at least I'm beating the game for the moment. Red line has been completely flat for the last 10k hands which is a bit remarkable.

My goal for online play is to reach +20 BI at 50z and/or to hit a convincing winning sample (40k hands or so?) and then move up. Might just jump directly up to 200z, since it's the next level of zone, even though monetarily it's a big jump and I would expect 200z to be a significantly tougher game since you can actually make some money playing it. But who knows, we'll see. I was watching a recent Saulo Costa video and he was talking about how the biggest difference between stakes is just the size of the bets, not necessarily the skill of the players, and while I don't believe that 100% it's good to hear encouragement to not be scared. Main thing is that I just need to be responsible with my bankroll.

Study/improvement-wise, one area I started focusing on before my summer break, and am resuming working on, is some MDA-inspired play. Especially bluffcatching, I often find myself bluffcatching the river in spots where I shouldn't (eg just now I found myself bluffcatching XR-B-jam for reasons unknown, a line which is assuredly underbluffed. Working on internalizing these things to make these river decisions easier and more profitable.

Hey good to see a fellow techie and Bay area player. Are you playing mainly at Bay 101?

Heya! I live in SF so I'm playing at LC, it's the closest room. I'll probably play at Bay101 sometimes when I'm in the South Bay but for the moment I don't see the need to drive down. 3/5/10 at LC (officially 3/5 but seems to always run with the UTG kill on) feels like a good sweet spot in terms of stakes: can actually make some real money, but at the same time it's not too high since I'm still fairly new to live poker and don't want to torch all my money if it turns out I'm somehow not beating the game or something.

Do you play live a lot? Curious if you have any tips on the local scene. My understanding is that Bay101 probably has the biggest games, right?

Oh cool yeah I played at LC a few years ago. I remember it being pretty good.

So I actually don't play live that often (time constraints). I play maybe once every couple of weeks on Friday night.

But I have played pretty much everywhere around here at least once over the years.
Most recently I've been going to Oaks Card Club playing the 2/3/5/10

It's the one where the last person who won the hand will straddle for 10 and it's from any position.

Last time I played at Bay was sometime last year. I think most days the largest game is the 2/3/5/10 or they call it the 2/3/5 deep stack.

But they have a bigger 5/10/20 game I'm not sure how often it runs these days. The buy - in was a $7500 max.

But yeah I think Bay 101 probably has the biggest games and also the most volume generally. If I lived closer to there I would probably go there.

But the Oaks game is crazy soft and a little closer so I go there even though the area is quite sketchy.

Hand from a recent session:



There are multiple things wrong with this. One is that it looks like I can probably just bet range on the flop. I tend to just check range to cold callers and really haven't put any time into trying to understand the spot or play it better, but the result is I don't think I play these spots very well right now.

The bigger thing is, why am I bluffcatching this? Villain is a rec judging from the HJ cold call. When he overbets turn and river I should just chuck my hand in the muck. Even on the turn I should probably just fold to this size, but certainly I should fold river.

I played a classic tilting hand this afternoon on Iggy 50nlz. I'm in BB, SB limps in, I check with 22. Flop comes something like QQ7, I b33, he calls. Turn is a 2, I make some b200 overbet, he calls. River is a 9, I bomb it again for like b400, he jams, I call it off and he has 99.

I've posted on here before about how ridiculously underbluffed river raises are, so (after initially chalking it up to a cooler) I was a little annoyed at myself on reflection for calling the raise since I have the worst possible boat. I still think it's probably a losing call given that V can have Q7, Q9, 99, 77, and even sometimes QQ, and I doubt there are enough slowplayed naked Qs in V's range to make up for it (obviously there are zero bluffs).

On the way home from dinner I had the idea to go through my DB at 50nlz to see how much money I was losing from calling river raises. I was wondering if this one spot alone could be having a big impact on my winrate.

There were 45 hands where I faced a river raise out of 33,731 total hands. I went through and tallied up how much I won vs lost the times I called the raises (the times I folded were virtually 100% correct, lol). I was actually pretty surprised when I saw the result of only -27 BB in total (so -0.08 BB/100). The sample size isn't very large and was definitely boosted by this hand:



Still it's a good illustration of the whole effect that calling doesn't have to be correct that often to break even.

I'll keep overfolding to river raises but will try to remind myself that it's also ok to call them sometimes too.

Latest Iggy 50nlz graph:



Like most people I definitely suffer from selection bias when posting my results here, you can see I waited for a heater before sharing, lol. Ran insanely well this past week and the pool has been really good lately as well.

Yellow line has been completely flat since my last graph post one month ago which isn't very encouraging. Green line is still going up, at least. Mainly glad to have climbed back from the downswing I was experiencing between hands # 25k - 40k.

I hit another milestone on my account balance by crossing the $2k line, so that felt pretty good.

Not totally sure what my immediate goals are right now / what my next step is gonna be. The next zone stake on Iggy is 200nl and while 5nlz -> 25nlz didn't feel that intimidating (since 25nl is still really low lol), 200nlz feels like a much more serious stake so I'm not sure if I should be planning on just jumping up there directly or if I should try to play some 100nl or 200nl reg tables for a while as some kind of stepping stone (?) or what. I'm also tempted to try hopping in to reg tables on Global since I don't love playing reg tables on Ignition, the anonymity makes keeping track of player profiles kind of annoying and the timebank is way too long. I also don't feel like I should be in a rush to move up since my winrate right now is super low, feels like I should be able to beat 50nlz more convincingly despite the high rake.

I'm having my first coaching session soon. Feel like my game might be stagnating a little bit / I could use help identifying the places I'm really ****ing up. I have some ideas of my own, I think my play in 3bp is kinda crap, BvB I suck but so do all my opponents so w/e, and my turn probe stat is definitely too low. But we'll see how the coaching goes.

I'll leave you with a funny hand I played a couple days ago that I was thinking about again this morning:



Was pretty unsure in game but solver says I played this well.

River seems like he reps nothing as flushes will very often make some type of bet on the turn
and sets would have gotten it in on the flop.