Sup! Used to grind poker back in the day, but stopped almost fully at 2014.
Never had much succes grinding micro cashgames even during 2010-2014, so its not too promising to win at the games now!
I did some preparation to come back, watching current pokercontent, looking at ranges and such. Trying to do things that are basicly required to win these days!
I hope to come with stronger mindset and better more professional approach to the game now. That being said this is more of a fun project to check how current poker climate looks and just enjoy playing the game.

Starting BR: 300€
I'll start NL5 - NL10, playing more NL10 on a softer eurosite with smaller trafic and starting NL5 on pokerstars, maybe some zoom there too.
Looking to move up aggressively, if it seems like I'm beating the limits by enough. Comfortable enough with around 25bi ish BR for example for these stakes.
Hope to play over 20k hands monthly, as poker is clearly not my main focus.
Going to be posting some hands, thoughts and my results along the way.

Play to improve, leggo!

Nice first session regarding run good, +6 buy ins at stars NL5.
Bad news is, I was timing out on hands with only 6 regular tables. It's gonna take a while to get in to the rythm. In the meanwhile I won't try playing over 3 zoom or 5 regular tables.
Autopilot and poor play because of it, or just plain timing out on hands that are +ev to play is something I'm definitely going to avoid! Seems like recipe for tilt and all kind of problems.

Some bigger pots, no losing hands this time. I didn't manage to get stacked once and not that interesting losing hands in general.


BTN 4 tabler, SB 1 tabler on Zoom. Somewhat confusing turn lead, but I wasn't going to herofold a hand like this to a likely rec. I doubt it would be an option anyway.





If I remember correct MP was likely rec and CO likely reg. I was quite unsure of my sizing plan here. River some hands make sense to shove and some bet smaller like 1/2 or 1/3rd I think, so probably fine. Same thing on turn I could be convinced to only 1/2 pot or something. Anyway I can't see this being too bad and its defo nice to get called by Ahigh that I'm targetting, it could easily call a 1/2 pot too though.





This one seemed close on the turn against unknown rec. Turns out its winning a huge amount vs. him





Managed to induce a reg, so nice to have the JJ here. Definitely possible my 1/3rd pot flop is a range thats "too weak". Because of not caring all that much about balance at stakes this low. My 3bet flop can be a silly semibluff heavy range too easily, but its not a concern untill playing much much better players imo. Atleast I have bunch of QQ that I would always 3b shove, but adding bunch of Jx vs. agro good players should be also done?





Nice to see hands like this, means you can still beat the micros for sure.





80/2 rec opponent. Not folding any Kx here I think. Line seemed very bluffheavy and great odds.

thought of the day: playing zoom is ******ed in micros.

if you like to play maybe 10% of your hands go for zoom :P.. No false just they are going to be a lot a lot tighter. even the fish know they can just fold and wait for a better than average hand.

Yup, this! Also not having many stats or reads on people should cut down winrate. On top of that I'm pretty sure the games are more reg heavy than normal tables. Zoom in convinient and you can get a bit more hands in sure. But when you could just table salect from sooo many normal tables at micros, it starts to make very little sense!

Disclaimer: might have had a bad session at zoom.

Not sure I'll find energy to play today.
Wanted to post some hands that I suspect were poorly played or that I'm unsure of from yesterdays long zoom play!
Feeling pretty confident about most big hands, so thats good. Not to say I didn't make some obvious mistakes, that I clearly noticed right after or after going through the hands later.



I thought raising some Kxdd hands on the flop would be fine, but maybe its just clearly bad?





Multitabler villain, raise or call?





Some rec looking people behind, can it be justified to just call flop and raise AI on good turns? Looking at this now I'm leaning towards just always raising flop, no matter what type of players theres involved. Unless theres some absolute maniac.





Mistake to not raise bottom 2 here on the flop vs. this sizing?
Also pre too loose or right on the edge (btn rec, others regs)?





Reg villain, fold / call river according to reads right? Not AI sizing is very odd too.. Might sound stupid, but seems like hes clearly a weaker player who might be stronger here because of that size. Not sure about my levelling game though ! Especially stakes this low.





Reg, raise or call?






Call or shove? Seemed close.

This month is done! I could have played better and stayed more calm and sharp while playing. Much to work on and I need to improve my game a lot too of course.
Lets see if I can hit decent volume next month while upping the quality of play..
Majority of my hands were NL5. I will try to move up quick though. Definitely playing NL10 and might even shot NL20 as soon as I hit 20 or 25buyins if I feel good about my game.

Starting to take shots at NL20 / NL25. Only 20 buyins atm, but level of play has not impressed me so far. Its manageable BR, if I happen to have enough edge over the field. Dropping down if I lose 7 buyins / have 25bi left for NL10.

Two quite ok small sessions today. For some reason I did some silly nit folds (mistakes) on the first one. 2nd was first NL20 session, where I probably played quite a bit better. More decent regs and more agro players, so way more bigger pots there as well.

Three hands that seemed somewhat interesting:

Recish villain




Reg, table just broke . I wonder if I'm just getting called here all the time. Not that I mind his call. Also my sizings are probably off. Obv trying to rep like weaker trip aces+, but meh can prob go bigger with that range?
Also regs are generally too stationy in spots like this I think.




Agro whale, 13% 3bet over 220 hands. As played maybe bigger 4b / shove? Bailed out by a good flop!

Not sure which looks worse, bitcoins daily graph, or my todays poker graph?
Still got 5 buyins to shottake 20..

Last 4 sessions 11,5 buyin's under EV, with majority of big coolers not going my way. Most of this runbad happened in NL20 as well.
If this continues much more I'll have to reconsider continuing the grind. Only played 17,5k hands so far though and up money so cant be that bad... still sucks!
Hopefully this post gives me the rungood again!

Whining helped, Mr. Run Good appeared!

Last two NL10 sessions:



Should start looking at NL20 again!

Most interesting hands from todays NL20:


BB reg, SB big station fish. BB snapped my turn jam, which seems not that great (would defo think it through, not saying that I would always fold). Very hard for people to bluff enough on this spot here imo! 2pair+ probably get shoved always and QTs, maybe T8s only natural bluffs. I'm certainly not just gonna start piling money in on flop with all KQ KT + shove turn, that would be terrible if you ask me. But what ever, I'm feeling very good about shoving this hand here in general.




50/10 moderately agro rec. He seemed to be tilting at this point and constantly raising back my isolates. I think calling atleast 7x+ is nice here.
Showdown seemed to agree!




Bluffing a tightish looking rec. So many mega stations that I don't know, maybe only bluff this with reads that its not one of those guys..

Assdddfsgfdfdg, cashed out on the euro site. Today 800 hands and 7 buyin's under EV again.
The run feels unreal, I literally can't win vs. some big recs, that give me even HU action. Weird players too, using all sort of different preflop sizings, from 2x, 3,5x to 5x opens, and clear ranges for different sizings. Also doing random sitouts very often, I don't see normal regs sitting out even close to the amount that these guys do! Wouldn't be surprised if few of these guys are bots. They play very bad, but probably beat the fish heavy games.
I was beating one guy who played like that the whole session, but couldn't win any AI pots when it mattered.
If this is just extreme variance I'm giving up huge amount of EV not playing on this site. On the other hand I will destroy my mental game, if I keep running abysmally bad and thinking something ain't right.

Hands from session are very meh, heres a 450bb pot:



Even better, almost a 600bb pot!
Rec that I had the pleasure of playing HU with. Biggest pot in bb's since starting I'm pretty sure. Not much to think on the river, since he can easily "valueshove" so many worse hands and bluff more than 0% of the time. Would have been devastating to lose this pot too tbh, with the way this session went..

Meh, I probably overreacted hard to standard variance. Especially when it was so many hyper agro players (semifish) and deep stacks, HU and all that. I'll redeposit to the euro site and continue trying to break to NL20 comfortably.
The bot thing can definitely be real though, but it shouldn't be a major issue. If some of these are bots, they are really bad ones. That probably play only NL10 and under. They are likely losing at higher (don't see them there) judging from how I've seen them play.
Actually I'll shot take NL20 again, when I've won 10 stacks at NL10 from today!
I'll try to get to 20 fast, from 20 to 50 I'm planning to take my time. Unless I'm somehow doing really well there too. I would expect that to be a significant skill jump, compared to NL5 - NL10 or NL10 - NL20.

I think that I have two major issues in my game atm, that badly need addressing!
1. Handling variance and all the problems that might rise from over reacting to bad run.
2. Quality of play / autopilot, playing far from my actual potential too often.

To clarify the 2nd point: I noticed many times now, that I make quick decisions on some spots that are very difficult. Almost like I need to rush the decision, to avoid really having to go through the hand to avoid mental work or something.. I don't look at the hand like I could with longer time. I base my decision on few points that I think are key, but can miss too much important factors that should be accounted for. It's spots where it would be essential to think those hands through as well as possible. How previous streets actions form villains range? Maybe counting combos on the river even to get a better view on the situation. Weighting ranges according to villains sizings, timings, reads. So common for most to have sizing tells. Especially the worse they are in general. Obviously that needs to be exploited hard.

To hopefully fix these things, I will rate the level of my tilt and quality of play from 0-5 for the next ten sessions at least. I'll post them here at the end the latest or along the way if I make other posts too. That should help me to keep my mind on these issues. Also in general I think having clear goals for your sessions, to focus on some thing(s) helps people play closer to their full potential. It encourages you to really try and give your best performance, it's like you're working towards something not just "grinding".

Maybe if I can fix these issues well, then next step could be to add a table or two more. See if I can handle that.

This hand kinda blew my mind today!
Vs. reg, no special reads or weird stats.
Ingame I thought it's wp and moving on. After looking at it post session, I'm convinced turn is clear mistake. Looking at it even more, I'm now convinced flop + turn are both misplayed. Poker is hard!
So note to self on this flop spot, raise a small very capped range of mostly vunerable "value" and some weak bd stuff that plays poor as call. Or alternatively raise nothing prob next best thing?
When ever this happens it's a positive thing though, gotta keep improving.
One thing that I could have touched on in my last post is lack of study, it's something I need to do a lot more. My strat is very outdated in some places and I should get a lot out of study at this point.

-14 buyin day at NL10 (mostly zoom). Gonna be it for this challenge. Pretty epic how bad I managed to run overall and today especially. Nothing even close to this kind of rungood any other day. 27,5 buyins under EV in only 32k hands too. Even though this biggest losing day was on stars, I'm still amazed at the euro site and how many coolers went to villains. Also the all-in run that was so much under from basicly just there!
Special shoutout to pokerstars and their 5% rb and the idiotic zoom games too. Peace!