It's been about two years since my last challenge which was the 500 hours in 31 days at live poker. This time around, I have a much different volume goal. Paying $50,000 in rake for the month of online play. I already have an idea of what I need to do to accomplish this, and felt that a challenge/post like this would motivate me enough to hit that target. Though to be honest, this is gonna be hard considering I put in less than 30 hours of poker the previous month.

The stakes will be anywhere from .50c/$1 NL to $10/20/40 PLO. I will be posting weekly updates on the graph every monday. While I assume my EV line to be up after everything, I can only hope and pray the green line is up there as well.

I might consider streaming some of this, perhaps once a week for like two hours or so, but I'll have to think about the consequences of exposing such at these stakes.

Hopefully this journey sticks for a while cus that'll generally mean sunshine and rainbows. See you guys at the end!

Starter post. From here on out, every Monday probably.



Already behind schedule, taking the day off most likely. With fourth of july coming up, I'll have to double up volume on the following days which seem impossible.

Interesting goal. What site are you playing on?

Met you at LC good luck my bro!

I'm playing on a few platforms, most of this will be through pokerbros, pokerrrr and pokertime.



Hey! Yeah it's been a while since I really put in some volume at LC haha. I heard it reopened recently. Thanks gonna need some run good to get the energy boost to complete this challenge!

Played for 30 minutes yesterday before I had other duties and think my upswing is occurring. This is probably my top 5 bad beat ever given to someone in PLO history.

Hey guys, we're nearing our first week of the challenge and here's my thoughts so far. First off, I didn't realize we had the 4th weekend coming up, so I lost about 2-2.5 days of grinding, spending it with the gf and cats instead. PT4 will say I played all those days, which is true since I sneaked off to grind a 30-60 minute session here and there when I could. That resulted in me playing quite poorly. I was multitasking watching Criminal Minds (old series, just started), hearthstone and 1 tabling... Just not gonna get my A game out of that circumstance. I'll be trying to dedicate my month to hitting this $50k rake goal from here on out though.

Last night 12am ended the holiday, I was desperate to put in hands. Did get in about 4 hours before all the games died, went heads up for about two of them which took forever to grind the guy down since we were playing small ball plo (virtually there wasn't a single 4 bet pre, nor did he ever raise his AA for some reason - which btw thank you!.). I think one of the biggest problems that lay ahead for this challenge is that "good" games just won't run often enough for me to hit the rake, but I could be wrong.



Days Played including today is at "4". We need to pay about $1800/rake a day... I did about $1300/day so far. One of my problems is I don't want to simply just open 10+ tables and then get crushed by making horrible mistakes. Nor do I want to lower my stakes to do so. And I feel like covid has me slacking in a way where I just can't grind 70-80 hours of poker a week like I used to be able to.

Overall I didn't put in much volume over the holiday. My EV increased about $1.5k since the last graph update, but my green line kicked in and went to about $17.5k. Poker results are great, can't complain at all. Rake attribution to $50,000, seems far...

I basically spent the entire day grinding till 11:30 pm (now). With a can of 7up, a few sips of a Moscow Mule, and a light breakfast I'm dead starving. That being said, my body was motivated by the run-good and the fact that I would establish probably my highest rake paid in a day for the challenge!!! This should ease the average rake per day needed to hit the goal.

Today's Graph:



I was playing a mix of $1/2 PLO, $3/6 NL and $20/40 PLO which is why my ADJ BB/100 sometimes is weird per day since I'm bouncing between stakes.

Today's Challenge Accomplishment: Rake Paid - $3007.90 over 1283 hands, running above EV is pretty sweet though!

I'll randomly post forward some HH vids that are interesting/unique. Hopefully they work out in our favor.

$10/20/40 HH:

https://gfycat.com/polishednewbufflehead

Can't tell if Villain just thinks I'm really light (with a rundown repping AA) and hero-calling me with AJ. Or misclick.

LETS GO!

Alright today is definitely not good for the challenge; after yesterday grind I just felt super exhausted and it didn't help waking up at 6-8am from the gf/cats. Games didn't start till much later... sadly I put in about 232 hands, paying a total rake of $672.78 (far cry from our average we need).

Pretty straight forward hand, but it was one of the bigger ones. Generated heaps of EV because he 100% cannot fold rivers, while I can fold nearly perfectly.





Graph for the day:



Doing bad for the challenge. But doing good for EV. Running slightly below for yesterday's run.

I'll post overall graph 2mr.

Week 1 of Challenge Finished:



$41,577.67 rake still needs to be paid. So thats $1732 rake/day going forward.

Doable. The problem is not enough good high stake games run often enough and I don't want to mass pump $1/2 NL to get there either (not even sure if that's possible with the lower rake taken from those).

Well I'm on track to having my first $100k month ever. LFG!

Idk about the rake goal but absolutely sick results.

GL m8

amazing! what did you learn first, nlhe or plo? You do this well in both?

Good luck with the challenge!

Life duties and game availability is limiting me more than I expected for the rake goal. But putting in hours right now feels great. Thanks!


I started with NLHE at $1/2 NL (at the casinos). But my first dabble was as a 15 year old lmao on fulltilt/stars busting rolls left and right at the 25NL games. I didn't really play mid stakes and higher PLO till 2-3 years ago. I think in a normal casino lineup with 6 pros + 1 fish, my NLHE game is far stronger than my PLO.

Thanks! Really hope to complete this challenge so I dont even consider a redo part 2 haha

thanks for the answer!

do you attribute your success to most talent or hard work? you do a lot of work out of the tables?

cheers m4te

Nice results and challenge. If I may ask;

Decent looking 5/10 10/20 games basically run around the clock on bros ( PLO prob even more so than NLHE ). Can I inquire as to why you don't just put a ton of hours on here since they are easily available? I thought about doing a similar challenge (100k rake in a month ) and IIRC I was generating $500/hr in rake if I was 8tabling 5/10 10/20. I'm not trying to brag ( never did it, lost my ass of first few days I considered it,...), but even if you 4table, then $1700 rake/day would surely be realistic?

I say 'decent looking' games, because even though they look juicy, myself and multiple others I know have never managed to get anywhere near a decent winrate on 5/10+ on bros.

Naturally the only thing I've ever been good at in academics was around logic-train (not mathematics), so it was relatively easy for me to break down hands early on. That and like +10 years playing seriously (1/2 as pro) def helps.

One factor that I may be underestimating is my poker group. We would host tournaments live for like 30-40 people in someone's house for like $10-20 every here there. Then you got your +8 degen friends playing 12 hours every weekend / analyzing hands def help. I was a big fan of crush live poker when I was more entry level into the game. Bart hanson would put me to sleep every night with his soothing boring voice.

I think the main reason is because I'm honestly capped right now. I can't really do more than 5 tables, and generally only 3 of them are like 20/40, the rest are lower fillers for some ev and rake (still highly profitable though). So to address it head on, if I'm in full pursuit of just generating rake, then yeah I'd play like 12 tables, but I feel like my winrate would dramatically suffer and I'm not even sure if I could break even under those circumstances tbh. So yeah, I think I'm near the sweet spot in terms of maxing out tables for profits/EV and rake/RB.

Also not everyday I get to play the max hours I could (or even play at all). Life and gf duties call. Eg; built up a really good reputation today on 3 tables mass jamming, but have to stop at 386 hands - $1k rake generated. Gf's off work!

Yesterday's hands were pretty straight forward. Edit, just went through the replayer. UTG opens to $75 pre, AA guy 3bets to $250. I cold call. other guy flats. Flop is history.



Yesterday's Graph:



I honestly felt I couldn't do super wrong with my approach yesterday in most hands, some I could've just not opened pre and get myself into a sticky mess. There were a few times I was opening hand rankings of 40-50% as UTG because I felt there was no 3bet gonna happen. That's why this graph is a little more explosive than previous in 300 hands.

Rake Paid: $948.67 in 391 hands. Failing the challenge. Woke up at 2pm today. I'll probably get in another 5-6 hours (maybe).

GL 2 us.

Today was semi frustrating, I made a big blunder - I actually got the fish off the table by something I said (it wasn't aggressive or anything, just what I wanted) & didnt comply with him. It was heads up, so probably missed out on a great chance.. next time I suppose.



EV is basically break even. Rake paid: $1073 over 541 hands

The run good continues. As of typing this on my last table closing out soon, ran AA into 77 on A77, but he was short so #whew! Don't have to face a 3-4bet and ponder life.

Woke up really late today, around 4pm. Spent all night previously studying only two boards of PLO. Did not help that I was watching anime (God of Highschool & Black Clover - for you nerds, gotta watch). Anyways, 3 hours into the session rn, probably going to stop for the night in another hour or so after my ubereats arrives. I generally don't like to do two sessions a day unless I'm really into it (prefer 1 long grind for mindset).

This HH was really weird. I pot open to $150. Villain smooths in HJ, I believe 2 other callers. Flop is around $600. I check. Villain checks. Checks through.

Turn: I check. Villain bets $130. Fold fold. I call. We have history and my HUD states small bets = weak, esp on river.

River: he goes full pot $1k

In my mind it doesn't make a lot of sense. There's no reason ever to check back A5 or 55 on flop multiway, and he wouldn't do this value bet with AK (he doesn't go for thin, but it is a safe runout to do so tbf). I block the last 8, so unless he has A823 or something, that's the only hand he's repping. Anyways I call.

Here's the graph of the day. I doubt tomorrow I'll be able to get many hands in, as I'll be heading to Half Moon Bay (Sam's chowder house and the likes) and spend the day there. Probably try to sneak in some hands in the morning, and possibly late at night if there's games running + I'm not drunk/tipsy.



Rake Paid: $880.42 in 220 hands
Feels good to run $4500 above EV.

Week 2 is ending around the corner. Haven't looked at overall rake paid, but I hope it's close to $20k paid at least...

Don't have much time to play today, so got in a quick HU session before heading out.

Anyways I played the following hand into a relatively sketchy board and wanted to confirm some things. While aware I could be drawing pretty slim against sets and 78 combos, given its HU and just combination wise, what should we do? Check the following below.

So villain with his potty mouth got me wanting to confirm. Also I hope I just take like $10K+ from him in the following days.



I lead 1/3, he pots me. Hmmm. Fold or ready to die?



So actually its about +10% EV to check, than bet 1/3 pot. Betting 1/2 and 3/4 is the same EV and loses another 10% additional. I guess as a blocker/preventative bet against fish opponents, 1/3 is fine as long as you don't get bluffed off / put into tough spots. But minus 10% is a lot.



Kinda interesting how it wants us to basically stack off 61% the time. Given this info, I guess against tight(er) villains who aren't capable, you fold. And if he's steamy, insulting you like this guy, you call off. At your own discretion.



Villain and the next villain waiting in line would both win a "big" pot relatively behind and then both quit me. My HU EV was slightly positive, but generated rake. So happy with that. - $1600 for the session though. No biggie.

Hopefully I can get in 1-2 hours later tonight.

awesome analysis!