Hello everyone,
Welcome to my 2P2 PG&C thread. I am currently a 25 year old living in the UK working a 9-5 as an Engineer in the Aerospace industry (not transitioned to the life of degeneracy just yet!).
I have been playing poker since my first year of university which is just shy of 8 years ago. My first taste of poker was seeing 2nd and 3rd year students gamble away their student loans at the poker society and I knew at that moment that had to be me someday. So I got a stars account, learnt how to play poker from TonkaaaP on twitch and proceeded to bust many 100 dollar deposits, never lucky.
I was mainly just playing for fun, breaking even at cash games and donking away at MTTs. I decided one day to dedicate some time to learning cash games properly. Luckily for me my job is actually working in a team designing mathematical models (aka game theory!) to tackle some of the aerospace's biggest challenges. So it felt natural to get my hands on one of these solvers everyone was raging on about at the time and see how they worked and could be used to make me an end boss, spoiler: it didn't. It was certainly very interesting to see how people applied its use to poker and I am very much keen to get stuck in again.
After some time I made the full transition to cash games and met some people I am still close with today, so that has been one of the highest EV things out of poker so far for me.
For all the graph junkies out there unfortunately I don't have anything to offer you right now as I have a new PC and have not actually played poker properly in several months. I had mixed success, growing a roll of $1k to around $10K and then really struggling at the 100NL cash game limits.
For better or for worse I then signed up the ginge poker academy, the first one that ran actually. I had mixed feelings, certainly the best thing that has come out of that for me was the relationship I made with one of the guys involved. From a game and strategy point of view I actually ended up losing a big chunk of my roll adopting the principles outlined in the course. I joined with an open mind but in reality I was throwing away all the hard work I had done over the previous year which left me fairly demotivated. I love poker and I think everyone can play the game how they want to, its why its fun! Each to their own and I am thankful for the life experience none the less.
After this phase in my poker life I had mainly just played on and off for fun, I did not want to go back to the stress that had been in my life during that grind!
Fast forwarding to today, I want to get back into poker properly, approach the game and all its beautiful intricacies in the way I had done previously and rebuild a healthy relationship with playing, with the aim of seeing where it can take me.
I will be starting with roughly ~£500 in my account playing cash games. The aim of this blog is to make me accountable for sticking to my goals (especially when the going gets tough) and to share with the community how I approach poker in 2022 and beyond.
Smart goal setting is key, I have a full time job so my initial goals are going to be consistent but achievable:
I want to play 2 hours before work, so wake up at 6, grab a green tea and play till 8. Then head to the office and work. Evenings and weekends I will keep flexible also, I am an avid climber and keen to not let poker interfere with that or my gf or my friends.
I will evaluate this and report back, some downtime in the evenings will definitely be spent doing some studying, which will be a mix of theory, MDA and studying with friends. I will be encouraging myself to share my approach to studying with the community and hopefully learn a thing or two. As for posting consistency I will decide what works the best, maybe a couple times a week talking about my experiences, both positive and negative.
Thanks for taking the time to read
I am excited to start.