Hey guys, I had a thread previously Learning PLO and I feel like it wasn't quite structured well towards the end of it. I decided to make a new thread that is more relative to my goals now, and will hopefully have better structure. In the "Learning PLO" thread I've gone from 50plo to 500plo. Now my goal is to go from 500plo to 5000plo, a much more difficult task, in a much tougher poker climate. I'm not sure when I will achieve this, could be a year, could be three, but I do want to try my best to achieve this. Even if I'm playing 5k live I think it's still a victory to my goals, since online 5k is insanely tough, and I think maybe 10-20 people in the world are beating it. I have set some goals for the year in my previous thread, but i'll re-post them here.

So for my goals in 2016:

I. Health

• Workout 3 days a week.
• Meditate 1-2 times a week
• Eat healthy

II. Poker

• 20 hours or 2500 hands per week (more of a focus of quality play rather than quantity)
• 2-4 hours studying per week

III. Misc

• Increase giving by 50%
• 4 blog posts on meaningful topics
• Work on my site (helpchipin)

In poker, I think it's important to have other things going for you while playing, or it can drive you crazy. So I have a focus on 3 areas I think are going to help me achieve all my goals, while keeping a balanced life.

My PLO goals are fairly simply. To get in 500 hands a day of quality play. I'm focusing on increasing my win rate rather than getting in hands. With the new changes i'll need to be able to beat 5/10 and 10/20 heftily in order to reach 5k now. I think 100 buy-ins is required to play a level professionally, so when I reach roughly 50 buy-ins i'll take a shot at 5k only if I feel I can beat it. If I can maintain a winrate at 5k for over 100k hands, I'll consider this a challenge completed. It will be tough to get 100k hands at 5k however, and I hope that it's achievable in the future.

I will try and update this at least weekly. I'll include a monthly graph and update on how I'm progressing. I hope having this thread will keep me more accountable for what I want to achieve.

So far:
Jan 4 - Jan 11: 688 Hands| 318 minutes. Very far off task, but there was Mixed games running and I wasn't In a good mindset to grind.
Jan 11 - Jan 18: 1204 Hands| 459 minutes. Better than last week, still building up to over 2500 hands. It's only Friday though, so I still have 3 days to do it.

Thanks for reading!

gl

Good luck, will follow

I will be following your thread. We have the same goals and the same method to try to reach them (low quantity, high quality), so it's going to be interesting to read your posts. Good luck.

This will be interesting to follow for sure, good luck!

Week 1: 1/11-1/17

Played a bit of HU 3/6, in which I ran very poorly. I'm not sure I played my best either. While playing HU I need it to be my only focus, and take time making decisions.
The Zoom pool went well this week. I ran good, played good, felt good about everything.
My PLO during mixed games, could be better. I often don't give other players credit in 8-game PLO, so I often take exploitative lines that potentially get me in trouble. I think it's OK to do this since exploitative play will earn me more than Theory based play vs weak players.
Overall I felt good about the week, but could have gotten in more zoom hands.

This week I'll focus on getting 2500 zoom hands, and paying more attention to PLO in 8-game.

is 500z noticable tougher with the new rakeback?

also GL

In gl, enjoyed you on JI's podcast

Not really. Most regs don't drop down if they weren't already playing that stake.

Subbed, gl

Time for the weekly update! This week was filled with variance. I played quite a bit of high stakes, and took some big shots. There were a couple of fun players that decided to play high, and I was in there with them.

This week; I tilted hard, I upswong, I kept to my fitness goals, and I ended the week feeling good. I even played a little bit of 5k PLO as a shot. I started off playing one table, and I ran pretty bad against bad plays, this tilted me a little bit, and I took a quick rest, came back and 2 tabled with a vengeance. I thought I played great, and was happy with it overall, but unhappy at how I felt during the session (a bit angry in the beginning). At the the beginning of the week I played a fun player at 3/6 hu PLO and I got crushed, even tho he was awful. I tilted hard and even gave away maybe 2 buy-ins. At that point I quit, and was surprised at how hard I could still tilt. It was a rough start to the week for sure. I gathered my **** and calmed down over the next day and was able to recover nicely by studying quite a bit the next day. I feel like when things aren't going well on the tables, studying is the best remedy. It regains my confidence and puts things in perspective.

I'm not ready for 5k still, the swings are too big for me. I still have a long ways to go before I feel comfortable losing 5 buy-ins in a day which is easily possible.

So for this week I'm going to keep focus on studying PLO.

I played quite a bit of HU from 2/4-10/20 this week, which is where most of my earnings came from.

I realize that entry above is in terrible format. I'll try and organize my thoughts better for the next one.

subbed!

Sick, subbed. Will be awesome to follow

What's your br at the moment?

Rather not discuss specific amounts, but I'm ok playing 10/20 for now, but would have to drop back down if i went on a downswing

Figured I'd start with a picture first for this week. It was a good week. I played a lot of HU PLO and a small amount of 2k zoom, and felt like I played great almost every day. The only shaky part was when I started getting a little too confident and challenging established regs. I feel like it's a bad idea to do this until I have an over-rolled bank roll, which I don't right now. So I need to keep making good decisions, and take it one day at a time. Playing in tough lineups is possible for me, but I feel as far as building my roll, it's still not a good idea. It's easy to let your ego get the best of you when you're running good, as it feels like you have an edge over everyone. I do feel my game is very strong right now, but I don't think I should try and flex vs the better players.

My fitness dropped a bit, i've been so focused on poker, it's hard to get away from my computer during the day, and at night I spend time with my GF. I think I'll make an extra effort this week to make up for last weeks missed gym session.

I haven't meditated once last couple weeks, and I'll also try and squeeze that in this week.

Other than that, everyone is going well, and I'm going to EPT Dublin Next week, so I may take a break from PLO cash while i'm there and focus on traveling and tournaments.

Had an extremely bad day on Tuesday. I played on Monday and there was no action. This caused boredom tilt for me. I have been playing almost constantly every day the last month, and to have absolutely no action, i didn't know what to do with myself. So I grinded 500 zoom plo when I really wasn't in the mood, played my D game and lost a bunch playing terrible. I only lost 3k on the day but It tilted me hard. I knew I needed to take a break the next day since there is never any action on Tuesdays anyway.

Tuesday I end up doing the same thing, I force action and this results in me playing 1/2 8-game in some marginal but still ok spots. Problem was, I was still playing my B to D game, and ended up tilting and losing 30k. This hurt a lot as it was a decent chunk of my roll online, and that's the biggest losing session I've ever had. (I've had a couple -30k days) So now I feel like I took a huge hit to my success, my ego, and my progress as a player. I want to recover and get back to making good decisions, but I feel I should probably take this next week off as I'm going to Dublin for EPT. I'll enjoy some travel and relax a bit, so that when I come back I'll be ready to play again.

For PLO this week went very well. I had a lot of action at 2k hu and also I ran super well at deep 2k 6 max. I won my second biggest pot online. Needless to say, it helped my week out a lot. On the flip side I lost a lot in 8-game and had the biggest losing day of my online career, so it evened out a bit. I still ended up down on the week overall and feel like I need to improve on the mistakes I made in the beginning of the week.

The mistakes I made:

• I played when I was bored and not focused
• I forced action at higher stakes in mediocre games.

Two very large mistakes, that can cost you a large part of your BR if you aren't careful and have a strict stop loss.

Anyway here's the 2nd biggest hand I've won, which was glorious to witness the hold.

Sick hold bud keep up the good work!

Subbed. I really enjoyed your brief twitch streaming back in the day. Glad to see you recovered from your big losing day. Keep it up.

sick thread and best of luck to you dude, I will be reading and rooting for you

So... Had my worst ever day in Dublin. After not waking up from being jet lagged to go touristing, I decided to play some online as 8-game was running. A fun player was playing at 1/2 and I got crushed by variance. Then he proceeded eventually to play 200/400 and again I got hit by the variance train in big bet. So now it looks like I'll have to drop back down and start grinding 500 zoom and 3/6-5/10 PLO and only 40/80 8-game until I regain some of the loses. It's very hard for me to mentally deal with mid 5 figures swings most days that I play, as my roll can't take it. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity with the fun player, and it went south unfortunately. I don't regret it as much, since I feel it was worth the gamble.

UL. GL grinding it back up. It's sick how those spots can define your "career". That's the difference between those who end up "making it" and those of us who continue to grind it on out.

i.e you win 50k there, increase your avg stake, leverage those winnings into more substantial $, and this compounds over the next 3 years making your networth 1 mil instead of 250k or whatever #'s apply. The impact of the session result on future results isn't linear. I feel your pain, this has been my story for years.

Ya it's very discouraging when you take a shot at higher stakes and get burned. Trick is not to shy away from taking shots because of it tho. As long as your game is solid and you're ready to play the higher stakes, eventually you should hit an upswing and move up. It's definitely possible to just be that statistic tho that just gets murdered every time they try and move up. I think being honest with your abilities is one of the many challenges in poker as well.