Hello all,

My Sn on GG is THISPLAYISBAD and I am starting this thread to document my journey of moving through the ranks of PLO. I transitioned from NL to PLO almost 2 years ago and started from micro stakes and am now currently playing 200 and 500. Before transitioning, I had never had any coaching or studied poker at all apart from watching youtube videos; I was very much a tough fish, finding moderate success in low and midstakes NL games. When transitioning to PLO, I decided to take it seriously and find out how good I can really get at poker so I enrolled in a CFP and had some private coaching on the side as well. About 8 months ago I had a 500K hand sample of good results at 200 and decided to then quit my job and pursue poker full time. I have found the decision to be a good one but also quite isolating as I have zero friends who take poker seriously and am very much alone in my endeavors as a new "professional" player so i am hoping that making this thread will open some doors in terms of networking and making new poker colleagues/friends. I also believe the thread will simply be tons of fun as I plan on sharing results and the ups and downs for you all to enjoy. Some short term goals:

- Finding more life balance and being more disciplined with my schedule. (I tend to be extremely obsessive about the game and struggle to take breaks and enjoy life as much as I should)
- Being kinder to myself (I am a perfectionist by nature and am very hard on myself when making mistakes at the tables. If I look up a hand in solver and solver tells me my play is even slightly negative EV I obsess about the spot and focus on never making that mistake again and have a very negative inner monologue with myself. I realize this way of thinking is unhealthy and I am actively working on correcting the thought process)
- Lowering the amount of tables I play and focus on playing as well as possible every session. (I have an issue with wanting to plow through hands and variance and will overload myself with to many tables, especially if they are good ones. I can play well with a lot of tables but it inevitably always causes a misclick or suboptimal play and a 50 BB blunder occurs. My goal is to limit my tables to a maximum of 6 and simply play longer hours to get volume in (30-40) hours a week.
- Finish reading "The Mental Game of Poker" by Jared Tendler. I am about half way through it and so far I have really enjoyed it and feels like it has helped me with my mental games.

My goal with poker is to simply be the best I can be, I am highly competitive in nature and foresee myself not stopping until I reach the top OR the top of my ability. I am 36 years old and recently married so i do have pressure on me to make this work which is scary but I also think it is a massive advantage in many ways.

There are no rules for this thread and please feel free to ask me anything and I will answer all questions I am comfortable answering. I will try to make updates with graphs once a week at minimum.

Nice to see a new PLO blog.
Good luck, mate.

Ty! I really appreciate that.

Subbed, GL! Where are you based and what sites do you play? R&C/Zoom or mostly regular tables?

subbed, gl

GL!

I am in New Zealand, I also grind WPN and Coin. On GG I only play regular tables and table select the best games due to the high rake structure.

The results for the past few days have been disappointing, running far below ev and have been down swinging for a few weeks now. To be fair, most of my downswing was on Ignition Poker and I feel very strongly I was most likely cheated over that sample, but who knows, could just be variance. I must admit also that my play has not been where it should be, my mother in law has been sick from lung and brain cancer for some time and was out on hospice care last week. These past few days she took a turn for the worse and it looks like she will pass very soon so a lot of my time has been spent supporting my wife and visiting the hospital to help my mother in law pass as easily as she can. This clearly had some effect on my play and in retrospect i should have taken some time off. However, i must take accountability for my actions and accept I made possibly a slightly -ev decision to play but I still feel that i played ok overall. I am on a limited bankroll so I must drop down to 200 again and rebuild. This is very disappointing for me for obvious reasons but I think the biggest reason is that rake is much higher so I must be even more careful about tables I select. Additionally, this is my 3 third time shotting 500 and even though I am a winner lifetime at 500 I was in 2 separate CFP/staking deals during that time so much of my profit was paid towards coaching so building my bankroll has been very tough. I will share 2 funny hands and well as graph for the last 3 days and a graph for my year results on GG this year so far. When I am down swinging I like to zoom out on the big picture to remind myself that I can win at poker and I am in fact NOT the worst player in the world I am making a decision to restart this journey/challenge as I feel i did not start with my best foot forward and I like the idea of starting at a lower stake and having to grind my way up again. I hope that 2 years from now, i will look back at this post and laugh as I am playing 5/10k with some of the best players in the world.

https://gyazo.com/7ef955b6c08aed676e00d07b2d32fea9
https://gyazo.com/fe3182805e706ab560a56adee58e9d64
https://gyazo.com/a4afcabeb6b3e7ffbd084635edc09721
https://gyazo.com/724878047792c221ad73500243787dae

Quick update- had a very nice run at 200 and found some of my ev returned to me Going to start shot taking 500 again and hope it goes well.

I had variance and EV catch up with me which is quite nice as we started out on a 20 buy in downswing. I feel very confident in my game and hoping the good run will continue so i can continue to shot take and move up stakes as fast as possible. I had two other things happen that were very nice and will help our results going forward, I had a BBJ table share on GG but more importantly I reached general status on ACR which is essentially an immediate 40% boost to the RB I have been receiving all year and should but huge value for me. I will post graph of all hands from all sites but can not post hands from Coin Poker for obvious reasons.

All results for all sites not including RB:

The upswing continues and with rb and rewards we are up about 13K since I updated this blog two weeks ago. Still running below ev on all sites and hoping we can catch that ev soon as I would like to shot take 1K again as soon as possible. We did shot take 1K during this mini upswing but it did not go well so I decided to move back down to pad the bankroll a little more playing 200 and 500. I am always amazed at how truly complex the game of poker is, especially the format of plo. It truly feels like a game that can never be mastered by humans which I think is what draws me towards it. It seems that on a weekly basis I discover a node within the game tree that I assumed I knew what I was doing but come to find out I was terribly mistaken and my play was very bad; but you don't know what you don't know. Over the past couple of weeks I discovered that multiway 3 bet pots were a major weakness of mine and I have a tendency to get the money in way too light. I spent a good amount if time on the spot and now I feel much more comfortable in that node and feel like I am hemorrhaging way less money which is great. I will leave an updated GG graph below as most of my volume last couple of weeks was on untracked sites.

I just rage quit my session. I pride myself in not tilting due to session results and I have not rage quit a session in a very long time, probably over a year ago or so. My only form of tilt generally speaking is when I make plays that are bad and my internal monologue says very nasty things to myself but this session did it for me. Over the past 2 weeks or so I had a nice upswing of about 15K on all sites combined so I hopped into some 1K games that were very very good given the fact that today is Friday. Playing a mixture of 1K and 500 I managed to lose 12K over the course of 90 minutes while running 17K below ev. This session frustrated me because I have been stuck at 500 now for about 250K hands and have taken several shots at 1K and it seems that every time I shot take there is a doom switch that gets cut on and I can simply not win a pot no matter the site I am playing. I know this is just variance and I know this feeling I am having is a form of entitlement tilt which is not logical. I feel very confident in my abilities and table select well and I feel strongly I am a winner in the 1K games. It is so frustrating to be in such amazing games and have to quit because I do not have the bankroll to keep playing. I am glad I noticed the rage and instant quit my session or it could have cost me much more money. For now, it is back to 500 and mixing in 200 as necessary as I can not afford a huge downswing right now financially. I will post an updated graph here:

After almost 3 months since my last update but I am back. Here is what I have been up to since my last post. Immediately after my last post I decided to put effort into acquiring a coach to help me with my game and I found PokerNinjas stable. This stable stakes and coaches you for app games and provides a very large amount of resources for you, not to mention handling all the back and forth politics that goes on with app games, testing the clubs, moving accounts and money around, exc. My experience with them was very good but I have decided to not continue the contract because I simply hate playing on apps. In order to be successful you must use a hud efficiently and it seems the biggest winners use a highly exploitative strategy, both of which I am not personally keen on myself. I would say that if you are open to play app games and are good with using a hud and making exploitative adjustments I would highly recommend you try them out, they seemed very trustworthy and put together as a group. I had a couple coaching sessions with one of their coaches, Johan, which i found really helpful and I thought the coaching was very good. Since I have decided to not pursue the app games any longer I have searched high and low for a good coach, I have messaged several high stakes players but it seems that their one on one coaching per hour are out of my price range (average session is 2K per hour) and they are not interested in a cfp arrangement. I find this situation very frustrating because I know who I am, my work ethic, loyalty, drive, exc. and I know I would be +EV for anyone that has the ability to help me rise to high stakes simply because I have had to work for everything I have had my entire life. In high school I joined the wrestling team in 10th grade and in only 2 years by my senior year I was top 10 in the country. After that, i moved into professional cage fighting and was once again successful in that arena, then moved onto Jiu-jitsu and again found success. I was not naturally talented at any of these things but what i lacked in talent I made up for in work ethic. The same goes for poker, I am nearing only 2 years playing plo and went from micro stakes to 200/500, I suppose that counts for something. I have a fire for success that i can not quite put into words but suffice it to say i will not stop until I achieve my goals of making it to the highest stakes of online poker. It appears that i will have to do that journey alone and that is ok, may take me longer but I know i will succeed. Now back to poker...Johan, one of the coaches of Poker Ninjas, advised me to check out the A Game Master Class from Run It Once as he saw that the weakest part of my game was my mental game and I must say I highly recommend it. I feel like a new version of myself and looking back on my last blog entry made me laugh out loud. The fact that i felt entitled to win because I was playing in great games is laughable, we can only control what we can control and variance is not one of those things. Looking back at my last post makes me realize how weak minded I truly was, very susceptible to tilt and overall very weak mentally. The course taught me to control my emotions much better and to form a proper schedule which I look forward to implementing going forward. I feel like I am much more control over my life including poker and I think that will show in my results. As for now I will spend the next week playing strictly only 200 as I want to instill firmly my new schedule and other soft skills I am working on. Depending on results I will start to shot take 500 as my BR allows. I will leave a GG graph here for the month of October as I just started playing the site again, all results are from 200/100. I will also leave a spreadsheet of current BR for all sites and update a total graph/results for all sites once a week. I will also leave a bonus screenshot for your viewing pleasure of something great that happened to me since my return to gg, running hot so far It is really nice to be back writing this blog again and I thank you for viewing and any support you may have for me, i wish you good luck in life and great health.

Quick update, cash games are going well and I feel as I am in complete control of my emotions and other soft skills such as table selection, limiting hours played and ensuring I am studying efficiently. I saw some good tournaments I wanted to take a shot at and it went well, tournaments definitely seem super soft with ICM punts left and right by both regulars and weaker players. I was able to win a $525 for $4,875 and had some winnings from cash games which brings our BR up to $24,668. I plan to start shot taking 500 and will invest 10 stacks or so, let's hope the shot sticks and I do not have to move back down to 200.

subbed gl!

Ty!

Came down with covid this week and was feeling pretty ill but still managed to get a little grinding in and it went well, very thankful for this upswing and hoping my 500 shot will stick. I feel very comfortable in the games and feel that I can hold my own and then some, but it is easy to think and feel that way when you are running good. I will post my money won results for the past 99K hands below. These are my most recent sample and even though I am in the red i am very happy with it because I was down almost 20K at one point and I am almost out of the downswing, ran below ev as well but I can not control that and after RB we did just fine, keep in mind the vast majority of this sample is from 200 and 100 so still down around 30ish buy ins in ev. Going forward I have decide to limit my tables to only 6 at a time as I want to ensure I am playing my best and able to table select correctly. In the past I have always played to many tables and it has really cut down on my win rate, rightfully so. I want to not get ahead of myself or have another nasty downswing so for now I will play 50/50 volume at 200 and 500. The jump in rake is very steep from 500 to 200 on most sites so the goal is to get out of 200 for good as soon as possible, but again, do not rush things I can not control. I have decided to forgo the GG games due to recent changes made there but will still play some tournaments from time to time, it seems really tough to find tables I am excited about playing there now. New BR is at $31,433 with $7,000 sitting in bitcoin and a wager on the upcoming election. Thank you for taking the time to read this update, I appreciate any support and I wish you well!

You're WIZOFODDZ on coin?

Correct

We played yday. What do you think of fields on coin? GL with tourneys!

Seems overall reggy but just like any other site good games run here and there, ty! GL to you as well

All I can say at this point is WOW! Upswing is continuing and I am very grateful for it. I have been working hard on my game as usual but recently it feels as though something had "clicked". I find myself playing spots much better than before, utilizing the right combos efficiently, and fighting for pots a lot more. Until recently I had never used monker solver because I was frankly intimidated by it and did not understand it but I had a good poker friend of mine show me how to use it properly and I must say it excites me to have a way to study almost any spot I want as thoroughly as I wish. Limiting my tables has been essential for progress, as well as keeping a strict playing schedule. I failed a few times on keeping my table count at 6 but I never let it get to more than 8 and most of the time I was successful with the goal of 6 so it is still a work in progress but happy that I am progressing towards controlling my life and poker career much more. I plan to still stay at 200 and 500 for now but will play more 500 as good games arise and I hope to continue the upswing so I may shot take 1K soon. I will leave results of play for month of October as well as updated spreadsheet below.

The hot run continues, this is the biggest upswing of my poker career and I am really appreciating and enjoying it. Forgoing the GG games with the very high rake and limiting my tables, along with having a very disciplined playing and studying schedule is really starting to payoff it seems and it feels as though I have leveled up my game tremendously recently. I think it is extremely important for me to not become delusional and accept that this run is heavily influenced by variance and I am indeed running hot, even though we are still running below ev. I will continue to stay at 500 for some time longer as I still have holes I need to work on and I want to pad the bankroll a little more. I do also realize I have a form of off table tilt in that I am most likely over conservative with my bankroll and waiting for this upswing to end followed by the inevitable brutal downswing that must follow, draining my bankroll and demoralizing me. I know these thoughts are simply thoughts and not reality in anyway but it is something to recognize and be aware of. I am very happy that on tables while playing I feel i have had very little to no tilt at all and I think the short sessions and less table count has really catalyzed that. I will no longer post my running bankroll because I want to keep some info for myself and as I play higher I feel uncomfortable with strangers knowing how much online roll I have. The graph for today will be on poker tracker, my drivehud2 base completely crapped out on me and I am waiting for support to assist me. Luckily I still had all hands to upload to PT4. Interestingly enough it seems the 2 softwares calculate all in ev differently but I suppose both have a margin of error and are accurate enough in tracking winnings.

Hit a minor 5K downswing but quickly bounced back and I am happy to report that the upswing continues. I was most happy about not tilting or being mentally weak during this minor downswing. I definitely had thoughts of impending doom and the illusion/fear that a massive 50 buy downswing MUST occur because I have been upswinging so hard lately. I am very aware that these thoughts are part of my detrimental mental programming and I believe it is derived from deep down feeling that I do not deserve success, even though logically I know that is not true because I work incredibly hard on and off the table. I have always been known by my family and peers to be the hardest worker in the room, it is part of my identity as a human being and I take great pride in that. So, why do i feel this way and have these deep down negative thought patterns? It comes from my childhood, I grew up in an extremely abusive home and was abused in every way you can think of. I grew up with my mother and step father and they were both drug addicts and simply put, terrible people. Out of all the abuses me and my siblings suffered, the emotional and mental was far worse than anything else they could do to us. My mother would tell me EVERY day for years that I was a loser, a ******, I should kill myself, I would never amount to anything, exc. My step father was more of a physical abuser. Point of sharing that is to illustrate where my negative thought patterns derive from, being told these things over and over your brain starts to believe them, even if only on a sub concise level. It is good to be aware of why these thoughts are occurring and more importantly, the fact they are just thoughts and not reality. I would not trade my life experiences or childhood for anything because it made me very tough and resilient. I will be even more mindful to flood my thoughts with positivity and include meditation going forward to keep my thought process in check. As far as poker technically is concerned, i really love how I am playing, I feel that i really understand what average regs are doing at 500 and I feel very comfortable in any lineup I am playing. I have done a much better job at limiting my tables but one thing I am doing that i really do not like is I am playing way to fast. In many spots I already know what my hand wants to do on certain turn and river cards and I am already thinking about that one street before so when i get to the river I am very often snap betting without and thought process or balancing timing. Even though exploiting, hud usage and picking up timing tells has never been something I have found important, I do think balancing timing will be important as i move up stakes so i should start practicing it now. I got my DH2 database working again and here is updated graph: