Hello to everyone who opened this post.
I'm new here and this is actually my first post. I recently set a bankroll challenge on myself so I decided to write here goals and progresses in order to keep track of those and eventually get some advices and opinions. So let's give some background.

Poker-related infos:

Last couple of years I've been playing NLH online recreationally. Basically I started playing MTTs and Spin&Go (yeah, yeah, I know..) whit buy-ins spanning from 5 to 10, 15 and a couple of times 25 euros (btw I'm in europe). Rarely I dumped some money in cash games with the same buy-ins.
Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost, at the end of the day I ended up barely breaking even/down max € 100. I was playing with total absence of bankroll management and things like that, so I guess I'll never know exactly.

Anyway, by the beginning of July 2019, I finally decided that it was time to start playing more seriously, so I deposited € 10, downloaded Poker Bankroll Tracker to keep the results recorded and started playing mostly € 1 MTTs. From that day I played a total of 85 MTTs equivalent to 182 hours, and my tournaments graph looks like this:

https://imgur.com/rus6mjT

The buy-ins are mostly € 1, € 2, € 5 and one € 11 (the last one I took a big shot).
Unfortunately, my actual roll is not € 727, but € 515 because in that same time I had some life expenses that I nedeed to cover (the difference € 212) and the best and only option was to use this money. I know this is extremely bad for the growth of my roll and it shouldn't happen, but I am that poor. Anyway I promised to myself that I'll do everything I can to make sure it won't happen again, so that the bankroll is fertile.

Some other numbers relative to MTTs are those

Total Buy In: € 328
Total Cash Out: € 1055

€/hour: € 4.00
€/100 hands: € 8.16

Avg Buy-In: € 2.44
Avg Profit: € 8.55
Victories: 6 (7.1%)
Runner-up: 3 (3.5%)
Final Table: 14 (16.5%)
ITM: 22 (25.9%)
Rebuys per session: 0.6

The actual roll being € 515 right now.

About cash game, I will not bother you the graph, let's just say that in about 80 hours mostly at €0.02/€0.05 I broke even almost exactly (up € 1.64 for what is worth) with swings in the order of 10 max 20 euros. I'm obviously not good enough to be a consistent winner, at the hand of almost every session I felt like I missed something in the game. For that reasons I decided to not play CG anymore until I start some serious study and set up a good strategy. Also I started thinking to wait until I'll be rolled for some €0.05/€0.10 or €0.10/€0.20 for rake motivations and the type of pool. Does this make some sense at all?

Non poker-related infos:
I'm 23, living with the family and doing some occasional job. I'm actually trying to (successfully) end a bachelor degree in Physics.

The idea is to get the degree by July 2019 while playing poker in the time I'm not doing university-related things. At that point I would like to move to Netherlands or Spain, get a part-time job and continue to build my roll until I can try to take a shot at becoming pro , but let's see what happens first.

The absolute goal is € 10,000.
The actual next goal is € 1,000. I'll play €1-€5.50 MTTs keeping the rebuys per sessions at 0.5.

I'll try to update every week or every X sessions, now I ran out of inspiration to write. Thanks to whoever will take time to read all this post and leave some thought or advice.

glgl

Here is the report of the first week:

Bought in 9 tournaments and played a total of 9 hours.

x6 € 1
x1 € 1.50
x1 € 5
x1 € 5.50

Min-cashed in one of them (€ 4.14 10th of 85 in a € 1.50 buy in), but the total for the week is still red:

First Week:

-€ 14.63

Total Bankroll: € 500.34

Played a pretty small volume this week and not always my A-game, but I'm positive. I'm very happy now with my choice of keeping it small, busting 8 tournaments in a row is the standard variance, and the small impact it has on the roll si somewhat reassuring.

About the cash game, I arrived at the conclusion that waiting to be rolled for higher stakes makes no sense. If I can't beat the lowest stakes I shouldn't be moving up. So I'll probably start playing some 0.01/0.02 (maybe zoom) and see how it goes.

I've also a question for some good soul that will eventually read this tread:

What do you think about satellites? Should I play a more volume of them trying to hit a good entry? Keep in mind that where I play, in my experience, the skill level of people playing € 10 - 50 tournaments is not so different from the skill level of people of playing micros.


tyty

I would set aside 10% of your winnings into a emergency savings account. Don't ever touch that if you don't really need to. Every mtt you cash do that. Cash game you could do it after so many hands. That's just my advice. Sats are fine to play too but just be aware it's higher risk higher reward. And your paying more rake too. More tax lol. You also wanna save from your job as well.

So another week is gone. Again played a very little volume with little success. Good news is I started reading "Applications of NLH" by Mattew Janda, and I'm really liking it.
I constructed some preflop ranges and started playing a little cash game (0.01/0.02 zoom and one session at 0.02/0.05).

Results for the week:

MTTs:

Played just one, busted in about one hour:

x1 € 5

Cash Game:

Played many small sessions, so I'll put a screenshot of my App:

https://imgur.com/a/IO5IG6j

buy ins are € 2 for all the 0.01/0.02 except the last one (€ 1.40). In the 0.02/0.05 I bought in for € 3.50.

Second Week:

+€ 3.16

Total Bankroll: € 503.50

Ah, FWIW I played four STTs live with friends last four nights. Altough I played out of bankroll (€ 1 buy in) I made three first places and a runner-up, does it count?


Yeah, I really don't like the idea of using my BR for non poker related things, that is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. Anyway I absolutely need a safety net so that I don't have to use big chunks of the BR if I'm in trouble. Thanks for stopping by!

On this note, I cashed a security deposit of my old room for about 400 pieces. I immediately made a prepaid card and deposited half of that. That will be my safety net: I will just deposit money, when I can, and take money from there ONLY IF IT'S TOTALLY UNAVOIDABLE.

The remaining went half in the actual liferoll and I'm undecided about the other half. Should I purchase the license for PT4 or should I put it back in the BR in attempt to cover the previous expenses?

Sooo, I skipped a couple of week reports, but here I am again with some news.

I decided to use the extra money to purchase PokerTracker 4, and I'm actually loving it. I can see how powerful it can be for tracking (who would have tought? ) and post-sessions study. I'm doing very little of the latter so I have to increase the hour of study. Also, thanks to PT i found the holes I left before starting to record, and they're like ~ € 150 more than expected.

Actual overall records:

I'm down ~ € 100 in tournaments and break even in cash game on site #1

I'm up ~ € 500 in tournaments and down ~ € 150 in cash game on site #2

This is just for information, the challenge will remain the same with same bankroll etc. I will not take in count the loss I had before starting to record because I was playing like a donkey so it would make no sense.
Nonetheless I will absorb the mission to transform all the actual red on PT4 in green as part of the challenge.

I slowed down the reading of the book "Applications of NLH", not beacuse I'm not liking it, I'm actually appreciating all the "advanced" concepts, but I'm starting to think that it's not very useful at the stakes I'm playing now (micros).

Now let's talk about POKERRRRRRRR. In these 17 days I played more Cash Game than tournaments. I will not go into detail this time because I'm lazy, but I promise that from the next report on I will be a good boi and post all the stats and graph .

So let's say that I played about 40 tournaments, busted a lot and min cashed a lot, so on that side I'm about break even. (actually up about € 10)

Speaking about cash game though, as I said I played more. I started with 0.01/0.02 NL Zoom, but there was something about Zoom/Fast that really didn't convince me, don't know exactly what it was, let's just say I wasn't feeling comfortable.
So I tried to play some classic 6max CG, only problem was that playing 2 cents a time was reaaaaally threatening my balls into exploding from the boredom, so I started multi-tabling. It was a bad choice because I was back again in feeling uncomfortable as I'm probably not ready to multi-table.
Solution was, I started playing ONE table at a higher level. Started with 0.02/0.05 and now I'm grinding 0.05/0.10 (how big ehh???). When I'll be ready I'll start two-tabling at this level.

Anyway I played something in the order of 27 hours for about 3500 hands (all the previous stake combined) and I'm up about € 45.

"Third" Week:

+€ 54.74

Total Bankroll: € 558.24

So here I am again, late again, but it doesn't matter because nobody follow this thread

I got some news concerning the challenge, but first, as I promised, I brought only for you my CG graph since the last post (and I also learned how to embed it!)






Yeah, I know, it doesn't look so exciting, does it? But if you look closely you can find the session when, after a couple of bad beats, I tilted and sat down at 1/2 with a fifth of my roll (all the other sessions being 0.05/0.10 ).

If you found it, you can also see that, luckily, I cashed out more money than I bought in with, also beacuse it took just a bunch of hands to regain my sanity. But in any case, this is a HUGE red flag

This means that, at very least, I got A LOT of work to do on my mindgame. Tilting after busting a couple of buy-ins is very stupid. In my case I think it has A LOT to do with the (very little) confidence in my game.

I'm guilty of having a (hours played)/(hours spent studying or analyzing my game) ratio so much bigger than 1 (meaning, for those who really need an explanation, that I was spending almost all the time playing and almost no time studying). That's not what profitable poker players do, that's what fish do, and I don't want to be the fish.

So the things I need to do to improve my mindgame are pretty clear to me now:

Improve my game -> gain confidence in my game -> improve mindgame -> no tilt.

This is the reason why I decided to freeze this challenge. I need to figure out a couple of things.
I need to figure out if I want to stick to cash games, in which case I should probably go down in stakes again, or if I want to return to MTTs, where I was having decent success, but knowing that the REAL poker is still in cash games.
I also need to figure out how/when to study when I'll play again, and these are only the poker-related things. I also need to figure out a couple of non poker-related things in my life.

Anyway I'm still up a bunch of tens since I started. While this of course is better than being down or busto, I still don't know how to feel about it.

I'll update here when I'll play again. As usual, any good soul who wants to spend a couple of words about my (so far) small journey is more than welcomed. See you guys

Total Bankroll: € 533.73