I just wrote out a whole response to this and something happened with the site and lost it all. But thinking outside the box is definitely something that should be considered.

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Trouble Spots

5 handed, CO limps, BTN limps, Hero iso 99 in SB
*We have option of isolating or overlimping, clearly isolating seems best, CO folds BTN calls. BTN is sticky.
Flop:
A23r
68Ttt
TJ7r
KKTr/tt

What are we doing on these flops knowing villain is going to float lots, assume maybe 25-30% fold to cbet. Also assuming villain will probably call down double/triple barrels fairly light. AND assuming villain will probe flop ~80% once we check to him...

This is just a select few flops that kind of suck, there's a whole range of flops (most with 2 or more overcards) that are just blatant give-ups.

The issue I'm having is, isolating preflop seems so obviously the right play, but it verrry rarely takes it down pre. Once these guys limp, they don't like folding, esp when in position.

ATM I feel like I'm just check/folding at an alarming rate on most boards in this spot. Pocket 88 is even harder and 77 I've resorted to just overlimping because there's even more flops we hate life on.

Let's say we overlimp 77 in SB, BB folds, straddle checks, 4 to flop.
Flop:
552r
863tt
922r
T22r
689tt

Do we play a leading range? Generally I avoid leading in these games with less than clear cut value (top pair+), so maybe the first board we can lead on. The others I fee like we're going to get peeled in at least one spot almost every time.

So what ends up happening is, I can't iso 77 pre, so I overlimp. I can't stab many flops so I end up x folding. What results is very weak/passive overall play and you end up getting done by antes eventually.

What's worse is when CO opens BTN CCs, we overcall 77 in SB, because the open size is usually something like 4-6x, we don't really get a great price to set mine, combined with the fact that a lot of these games seem to play short (people mostly buy in for 50bb so games are very short initially). So what happens now is you have CO opening LOTS like idk let's just say 30%, BTN cold calling LOTS, and we're in SB with 77 and a losing proposition. Is the adjustment to start squeezing super wide? I don't think so considering 77 is going to suck post in 3bps, and I feel population sees squeezes as very full of ****/never value so you'll quite often have someone cold 4b shove or initial raiser will 4b. They love to 4b bluff. But I swear every time I 5b bluff jam they just have the nuts, it's unreal...

I'm going to click Submit Reply now before I lose this post again... TBC

Hahah at the moment it's a ***** ATM that has no money in it.

I'm planning on doing a few more annoying spots, but before I forget I want to quickly do up a weekly forecast.

Weekly Goals - 01/10-07/10

Basically all I care about is,

[ ] - Min 43.75 hours volume
[ ] - Gym 5 sessions
[ ] - In bed by 1am, up at 10:30 latest

That's it. I wanted to be in bed by 1am tonight (Monday) but this bird I'm catching up with doesn't finish work til 1 and insists that she's coming over to drink. So chances are getting up at 10am is going to be an optimistic proposition tomorrow. But I think it's important I have something of a social life - I've basically had zero genuine social interaction with another soul for the past week and it can't be healthy. So I'm going to let myself off the hook tonight, probably sleep in a couple hours tomorrow, hit the gym, and then try cram some longer sessions in (I usually play 1.75 hour sessions but I can definitely do longer). I also have a technician coming at 2pm tomorrow to fix some stuff, so that kind of gets in the way.

What'll likely happen is I end up playing 4-5 hours tomorrow and play catch up later in the week, but I'm confident I'll be able to hit those volume/gym goals even while degenning tonight.

Some less important objectives...

[ ] - Figure out which of the 6 sites I'm playing on are the most profitable and narrow it down to 1-2
[ ] - Have accounts/chips arranged for these 1-2 sites and begin focusing efforts to these two sites.
[ ] - WIN SOME MONEY!!?

That's all for now, I've had probably 1 too many Heinekins to be looking over trouble spots for tonight. Crazy how you can buy these things in 7-11 for $2. :')

<3

not sure if you're aware or not but it well documented and confirmed by many that PM is full of bots...even at the mid and higher games... some of the **** i saw whilst grinding PM was truly hilarious from the bots. they're not hard to spot either, hands played per last month will be an inhumane amount.

I'm not sure that it's well documented. Or that the bots are even good/winning. Does anyone have any concrete evidence?

I can boost an account AFK overnight and will get a largely inflated hands played number.

Daily Update - Wed 03/10

So yesterday I failed to update this thread. It was a bit of a write-off of a day to be honest. Didn't get a wink of sleep on Monday night. Had two coffees on Monday so kind of expected it but w/e it was my day off.

This lead to me sleeping in to about 2pm on Tuesday. There's simply no way I could have functioned getting up earlier and starting the day sooner.

This lack of sleep thing is really getting to me. I'm going to go to a pharmacy tomorrow and grab some melatonin so I can hopefully rid myself of this problem ASAP.

Today and yesterday combined I've played about 8 hours for a profit of $2,030.63. Today I would have played more than 6 hours but my blender exploded with 2 liters of protein shake in it. It absolutely drenched my entire kitchen. Everything smells like vanilla and oats still. Took over an hour to clean everything and then I had to drive to the shops to buy a replacement blender. -_-

Anyway, I've realised that it's unreasonable for me to grind 7 hours + gym on the day after my day off - during which I'll probably be out drinking/partying and will be hungover/want to sleep in the next day. I'm going to jiggle my schedule around a bit at the end of the week to give myself more time to recover. I doubt I'll get close to my 43.75 hours this week but I'll try to recoup some of the lost time for sure.

At the moment it's a fine line between sleeping in and giving my body rest (which seems pretty +EV because of all the gym), I actually feel most tired in the morning/when my alarm goes off. And on the other hand get up while completely exhausted and go about the day. I'm sure this melatonin **** will hopefully do something so keen to give that a whirl tomorrow.

Leg day tomorrow, gonna try not sleep all day and aim for 6+ hours of volume again.

Why can't you play these apps on a laptop?

Most laptops will struggle running 5+ tables as the emulator software is very resource heavy.

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Daily Update - Thur 04/10

Got absolutely bummed today, -$2.5k or thereabouts. Just got coolered over and over and also ran a bit under EV too. Very frustrating how much button clicking I see in these games and yet find myself constantly running into the nuts. Anyway, I've decided I'll continue playing these alternative apps til the end of the week and then revisit what I want to do. If there's no marked change in results by Monday, I'll switch back to my bread and butter on Pokermaster and regrind at 2/4/8 to get some confidence back and pad the bankroll a bit.

In other news, I found some melatonin today. It's about 12:35 am now and I've just popped a 3mg pill. Will experiment a bit with dosage over the next week or so but really hoping this helps me get some sleep.

Day off gym tomorrow, so should have plenty of time to grind.

The main thing for handling more tables is the strength of your processor AFAIK.

GL

Alcohol causes sleep problems aswell as being late on phone can cause nightmares and waking up. Skipping evening snack helped me alot aswell as replacing lunch with oatmeal and proteinemilk which I buy from 7eleven. Eating alot of noodles and rice can't be too good for system.

Changing your exercises to more cardio oriented might aswell be a game changer to your overall wellbeing, atleast it was for me. Obviously it means you can't be the biggest guy at the gym unless you stay in thai where you'll be the biggest anyways :P

you are essentialy saying population is hyper aggro but my impression is that most of the players are super loose passive, idk

Regarding flop strat. Isoing clearly good, some flops playing bad for your exact hand is fine. Unless villain is raising flop a lot I think small cbets do quite well on a lot of those textures, folding out 25-30% isn't bad given you can bluff certain turns/hero some rivers/are ahead when called some of the time.

Vs 80% flop probe you probably just want to work out an exploitative flop check/raise strat and print.

Multiway limped pots with weak PP just a tough spot a lot of the time. Leading 689, 864, 544 etc. almost definitely best. T22 type flops are interesting.

<3

Cool username btw, the author of the book in the title of this thread mentions the 'Eudaimonia Machine', not sure if that's something you'd be familiar with or not...

Yes, I recommend a minimum of 16gb ram (for me uses 80% of that with 8 tables) and core i7 8700k processor. The more cores the better because of how virtualisation works.

There aren't many laptops that will offer 16gb+ and the right processor unfortunately.

Yeah, I only drink once a week though. I don't have nightmares either.

Yeah difficult for me to not eat late at night currently. I'm only eating 4 meals a day, all very high carbs. Usually eat last probably 2-3 hours before bed.


Not quite sure how doing more cardio will help with the sleep issue. Activating the anaerobic system instead of the aerobic system and potentially burning more calories I don't think would have much impact on my sleeping. Besides, FK cardio.

On pokermaster or the alt apps? Definitely would agree re Pokermaster but for the alt apps it's a real mixed bag. Lots of loose passive guys too but the main difference I've seen is tons of button clicking Post. Lots of flop raising and floating, something you hardly see at all on PM.

Hey mate, good to hear from ya. I'll reply to you on Skype on Monday btw. Re this point, idk how much you played but it's a little different to Stars where if you bet 1/3 pot at high frequencies it's fairly standard part of people's strategy. Here, if you're betting 1/3 pot, pop thinks you're weak and will raise /spazz a very high amount. They even go crazy vs 1/2 pot.

But the main issue is the floating. If ranges are wide and you cbet 448r oop, you're going to get floated near 100%. If you have K9o and turn is a brick, how do you proceed? Either X giving up feels weak, dbarreling feels spewy.

Yeah it's just super difficult separating the nits from the button clickers. It's hard knowing whether to cbet your value because the float so much or xr because they probe so much.

The worst part is that it's never a "cheap" flop. On Oh Poker I was playing 10/20/20 with 10 ante. So what happens is people open to 130 as a standard. That's 6.5x. There's almost no way you can profitably set mine vs that RFI range with any small pocket pairs. Even with hands like KTs, 3betting an open gets you in trouble because the 3b has to be huge relative to stacks, this combined with fact that people peel anything post flop, bottom pair in 3bp, means you have very little maneuver ability post flop. Cold calling oop gets squeezed a ton and with 80% pop cbet you end up folding flop too much.

All very spooky stuff.

People opening that big prolly means you should be folding 77/88, squeeze 99+ (I assume, haven't been on apps in forver). Live the happy nit life

Your cash games play pretty much identical to the low blind part of my STTs.

You want some coaching...I'm cheap as ****

and on a slightly more serious note this...

...is not a million miles from my low blind stt preflop strat, 'cept I'm even nittier.

Which stakes do u play now?

Yeah, pretty much what I've been doing. Feels wrong though since a lot of these guys are opening so wide to just be folding all of these mid pairs.

Yeah, 99 at some stack depths will be very awkward to 3b/squeeze given they 4bet a lot.

Well, more on that in a minute!

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So there's a couple things I want to touch on briefly. Today I made the decision that I will quit these alternative Chinese apps and return to Pokermaster for a couple reasons,

A) The idea initially was to try these apps and stick with them if they proved to be juicier than PM. Well I've basically made no money over the past 70 odd hours (think my hourly was $4 or something :') )
B) I've been on a downswing at 5/10/20 for a while now and with my recent move to Thailand, my bankroll has been somewhat depleted. I've had a bunch of unexpected expenses: had to buy a motorbike here, had to fork out $1.3k for a desk to play on because zero of the 5 furniture stores I went to had anything big enough for what I wanted, had to replace my GPU in my PC which was damaged in the flight over, buy a new monitor, birthday gifts for family, punted off way too much partying a couple weeks back, had to buy a blender and then buy a replacement blender when it exploded with 2 litres of protein shake all over the fkn kitchen, had to buy a rice cooker, and now I'm forking out about $140/month in Pokermaster assistance software. Have had someone who owes me >$3k not pay me back, which will cost a chunk to get that back as well in debt collector expenses.

Basically, I need to start making some money and fast. To do that I've decided to move back to 2/4/8 on PM (roughly 150-200nl equivalent depending on your currency). I've just got Poker Grandmaster so I'll have a HUD and hopefully the lobby feature will make life a lot easier in terms of finding tables/seats.

The game plan will be to grind 2/4/8 for the next ~3 months for 40 hours a week to pad my life/bankroll a bit. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if I had some extra cash in the bank being in a foreign country and if something goes wrong like I get denied entry after a visa run and am unable to work for a bit.

I figure the following numbers seem reasonable,

2/4/8 @ 5bb/100 @ 500 hands per hour = $40/hr
2/4/8 @ 10bb/100 @ 500 hands per hour = $80/hr

I like to be pretty generous with these numbers so the 5bb/100 is basically a 'worst case scenario' winrate. I imagine my converged winrate will be much closer to the 10bb/100 but it's difficult to tell. My current winrate in the 2/4/8 games is 20bb/100 over I think about 35k hands. Sure I've ran good over that sample, but 2/4/8 is a very very soft game, I've had days where I've won 25 buyins in these lineups.

Anyway, after 2-3 months assuming winrate is at 10bb/100 or more, I'll have a much more comfortable bankroll/liferoll/networth/whatever you wanna call it. At that point I'll look to move back up to 5/10/20 on PM and hopefully have it stick this time round... Previously I've played 2/4/8, crushed it, moved up to 5/10/20, crushed it, and then been doomswitched and have to move back down. This is the second time regrinding at 2/4/8 for me now.

This does mean I'll be falling behind regarding my $160k profit goal over the next 9 months... While my 2/4/8 hourly has been well over $105 historically, I can't expect that to be the same over a big sample, but of course we'll see. What's more important now is that I get my finances back to a comfortable position and then I can resume playing higher stakes once that's in place. Even if my hourly takes a big hit over the next 3 months, if I'm able to make a successful jump to 5/10/20 and then 10/20/40 (which plays very similar to 5/10/20 apparently) and maintain a decent winrate there, I should be able to come from behind and save the challenge next year.

But of course, one step at a time. Tonight I'm busy setting up Poker Grandmaster, Poker Minion, boosting accounts, fixing spreadsheets, editing my HUD, and just getting everything in place so I can grind tomorrow.

I'm also making a revision to my play/volume schedule. After my first week doing this, I've realised I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself the day after my day off. Previously I was expected to grind 7 hours the day after my day off. This would be fine if I wasn't doing much on my day off but I'm a firm believer in working hard and partying hard. And this thread needs some more Degen stories anyway. If I'm going to go out partying on my day off, I'm going to want to recover the day after. So here's what an example of my new schedule is going to look like:

Monday - Off
Tuesday - 4 hours
Wednesday - 7/8 hours
Thursday - 7/8 hours
Friday - 7/8 hours
Saturday - 7/8 hours
Sunday - 7/8 hours

Basically I'll be doing 4 hours the day after my day off, to give myself a chance to sleep in and be hungover, go to the gym, and play two 2 hour sessions in the evening... Then each other day of the week will be 7 hours of volume except for whichever day coincides with my gym day off. Because I won't be in the gym for 2 hours on that day, I'll be able to squeeze in another hour.

This is a 40 hour schedule and not 43.75 hours, but I'm happy to shave off those extra hours if it means less chance of getting burnt out and better quality of life.

This also means I'll need to hit a higher hourly rate come June 1 2019 to have achieved my profit goal. But I think a sacrifice was definitely needed in one area or another. I think cutting work hours is definitely +EV because even if my target hourly goes from $105 --> $117 or something like that, it reeeeally shouldn't make much difference once we're on the home stretch. Either I'm still at 2/4/8 just grinding out a living or I'm at 10/20/40 and the hourly is well over $120/hr anyway. Only time will tell.

ZMA and melatonin before bed. Don’t take too much mg of melatonin. 5mg Max. More and I’m way too groggy the next day

Did 3mg yesterday and noticed no change. Gonna try 6 tonight and see if it helps. I'm pretty big guy so hopefully it won't be too much or anything...

I’m 6’5” 215 currently and found 5mg to be my sweet spot. Def look into zma and L-theanine as well.

Ive messaged you on skype.

I take 10mg melatonin every day and have for a few years. I've had and still have sleeping problems since I was maybe like 7 years old, but I'd guestimate melatonin helps me get ~5-15% more sleep/better sleep. It's a subtle change, but noticeable if you don't take it for a while after you have been.

Why the fk are you spending 1.3k on a fk'ing computer desk? and in thailand of all places?

Added you on skype btw in case I need info on the apps or we're in the same place sometime and you wanna meet for a beer.

Melatonin works best when used recreationally, great help for jetlag poor help for long term sleep problems.