My lifetime graph at 2NL. 5.83 BB/100 over 35k hands. Not the greatest but it is ok I think, rake is pretty high. Also, I had a 10k hand stretch where I was breaking even where I experimented with playing up to 12 tables, which I discovered is not my thing. Anyway, I think my wr is probably closer to 8-10 at this stake, and this has really been with me just messing around and not doing anything to improve my game.

My plan is to start taking shots at 5NL today and hope for a good start at the stake. My plan is to be fairly aggressive with BRM. Before I play I am going to watch some videos on RIO.

Started off the day watching two videos on RIO called "Designing Preflop Ranges" by Steve Paul. I found the concepts and math presented to be very interesting. The videos are certainly difficult to digest on first exposure, but I feel fairly comfortable with the information that was presented.

After watching, I decided to hop into the 5NL streets and ended up winning $1.72 over 201 hands while 2 tabling. This is obviously very insignificant, but still feels better than losing. I then decided to take a lunch break and go for a 3 mile run in the dead heat of the middle of the day (I am training or a half marathon). During my run, I could feel myself thinking about the videos and the hands I played today and starting to develop my ranges and feel a lot more comfortable with the information I got from the videos. This is interesting and immediately made me think of a book I started reading a few days ago called, "The Art of Learning: A Journey In the Pursuit of Excellence." I would go into more detail, but I am itching to watch more videos and hop back into the action. All I will say is that I highly recommend it, and there is a lot of interesting and relevant stuff in there for poker players. I think I will watch a video on 3betting and one on BB defense and then play a few hundred more hands.

Fun first day at 5NL. Only playing 2 tables for time being bc I only have 21 buyins for the level and will move back down if I lose 4 buyins. Played a couple hands badly, but overall feel really good about where I am at for this level. Would like to put in some more hands tonight, but I can feel how tired I am after not getting a full night of sleep last night. I think I will just relax and maybe watch a video or two and continue reading the book I started a few days ago.

I have one summer class Mon-Thurs that I have to go to, but after that it's going to be another day of hard work. I might not reach my goals, but it will not be from a lack of effort. I will not be outworked.

Played 2 tables for a bit today. Started off well and ended poorly. Played one hand in particular very badly, I think. Had an interesting river spot where I bluffed for pot and was called. Going to try and figure out the hand history converter to post some hands in here for more discussion, especially the river spot as I think it is very interesting.

Winning Poker Network Game #693402895: No Limit Holdem ($0.02/$0.05) [2016/08/01 20:54:01 UTC]
Table: (PRR) Cyclops - 13
Seats: 6
Seat 1: Eichel2015 ($12.56)
Seat 2: hero ($9.17)
Seat 3: McCabe ($3)
Seat 4: TxSCARxMOBILE ($13.48)
Seat 6: onetimemoney ($8.28)
Button is seat 2
McCabe: posts small blind $0.02
TxSCARxMOBILE: posts big blind $0.05
*** HOLE CARDS ***
hero: dealt [T 9]
onetimemoney: folds
Eichel2015: folds
hero: raises $0.12
McCabe: folds
TxSCARxMOBILE: calls $0.07
*** FLOP *** [A 2 J]
TxSCARxMOBILE: checks
hero: bets $0.16
TxSCARxMOBILE: calls $0.16
*** TURN *** [A 2 J] [6]
TxSCARxMOBILE: checks
hero: bets $0.42
TxSCARxMOBILE: calls $0.42
*** RIVER *** [A 2 J] [6] [K]
TxSCARxMOBILE: checks
hero: bets $1.32
TxSCARxMOBILE: calls $1.32
*** SUMMARY ***
Pot: $3.86 | Rake: $0.14 | BBJ: $0.06 |
Board: [Ad 2h Jd 6d Ks]
Seat 1: Eichel2015 didn't bet
Seat 2: hero lost -$2.02 [Td 9s] High Card, Ace
Seat 3: McCabe lost -$0.02
Seat 4: TxSCARxMOBILE won $3.86 (+$1.84) [As Qh] One Pair, Aces
Seat 6: onetimemoney didn't bet


Not able to figure out the HH converter, but I tried to clean it up to make it viewable. Anyways, I 3 barrel here with Td9x and bet 93% pot on river. After I finished my session today, I watched a couple videos on RIO, one being "Intro to Bet Sizing", again by Steve Paul. Very math heavy video where he solves a game he calls Nuts/Air vs Bluffcatcher or something of the likes. Very interesting concepts, and again today, similar to the other day with the preflop range video, as I was going for a run I could feel myself thinking about and trying to solve this spot based on the information he presented in the video. This spot is a lot more complex than preflop and so I feel like I really need to dig into this spot, pen and paper, and try to really get into the math behind it and what my ranges should be here for a full pot bet and maybe also a 2x pot bet.

This also kind of leads me back to the book I am reading "The Art of Learning." The book is an autobiography/philosophy book by Josh Waitzkin. He was a child chess prodigy and then became a world class martial artist. One thing he talks about early in the book is how his upbringing in chess (wild park games vs street hustlers combined with training sessions focused on endgame rather than openings like most of his peers) played a critical role in his development as a player. He was able to survive his opponents complex openings/traps on his intuition and force them into the endgame where he was vastly superior and far more comfortable than them. This is a parallel to poker, preflop vs river. So tomorrow I think I will spend as long as is needed to try and solve this spot. I think spending time on spots like this is a more effective use of time than solving for preflop ranges. I can survive on my intuition preflop (although I made a big preflop mistake today that cost me 100 bb) and, hopefully, be far superior in the endgame.

Adding this to my list of subscriptions. Good luck!

Thanks for the sub!

Also subbing good read so far. Definitely adding that book to my read list.

Thanks!

Time to get to work today. Going to try and tackle this T9 hand from yesterday and come up with a good range and bet sizing. I expect this to be a difficult and tedious process for me considering it is my first real attempt at doing math heavy theory. As someone who played live poker for a living for 3+ years, theory was not something I have put any time into. Mainly because all you have to do in live poker is value bet vs the fish, I always kind of shrugged like why bother when I can just easily exploit bad players. Because of this my game never improved and poker was becoming something that excited me less and less (hence why I decided to go back to school).

I definitely have the capacity for a more math/theory based understanding of the game, it is all about motivation. This is a critical step for me as it will help me develop and be able to solve problems more quickly and efficiently in the future. I think being able to effectively manage and use time is an extremely important component of being successful in any field. I am certainly going to be faced with many problems along the way if I am going to reach my goals, which is why it is so important to know how to solve them quickly and efficiently.

I was struggling yesterday in my attempt to solve for my ranges on the river in the T9 hand. Without going into too much detail, I'll just say that it became clear to me after working on it for awhile that I would need some help. So I started looking around and found/remembered about PokerSnowie. For those unfamiliar with PokerSnowie, it is basically a one stop GTO shop for No Limit Hold'em. After checking out all of its features, I decided to try out the 10 day free trial and wow it truly is an incredible tool. I ended up playing around with it for hours and I have to say PokerSnowie is probably my new best friend haha. Snowie did think my T9 3 barrel was ok, saying that hand should bet turn 47% of the time and pot river 60% of the time for balance. Most of the spots I messed around with were not split this way into %'s, telling me that this particular spot is really close/not cut and dry which makes me feel good about my poker intuition that the one spot I was not sure about is one that needs to be bluffed half the time and given up half the time. I played around too much with it last night and used up all my free range analysis tool, otherwise I would post the ranges Snowie recommends in here. If anyone reading this wants to get serious about poker than I can say I highly recommend checking it out. I just have to figure out how I am going to pay for it when my free trial expires considering I only have 12 dollars in my bank account.

My plan for today is to watch a couple videos on RIO as I continue to go through the NLH learning path. I am not going through the videos in a linear fashion, rather jumping around to different topics each time as I think this is the optimal way to approach it, and it also keeps the videos fresh and more interesting rather than watching 5 in a row on the same topic. Then I will 2 table 5NL for a few hundred hands and import them into Snowie and check out the results. Should be fun, let's get to work!!!

Played 252 hands today and won $0.46. Loaded them into Snowie for review. Snowie said I made errors on 6.71% of my decisions, giving me "world class" status. Guess all my hard work is done and I've made it! Haha just kidding. As amazing as Snowie is, I would hardly say that I played at a world class level. While I think 6.71% error rate is a good starting place, I think it is not a difficult a number to achieve considering a vast majority of decisions are just folding or opening preflop. Also, it does not count a play as an error if it would make it with any frequency. For example, if Snowie would cbet 15% and check back 85% on a certain board, and my action was to bet, it does not count as an error. This was a common theme as I was betting nearly 100% in spots where Snowie was randomizing between betting and checking. I was also a few % too wide in some spots pre. Overall, I am pleased with how this first Snowie review session went and think that it will be an amazing tool as I develop as a player. So right now my plan each day for the next couple weeks as it relates to poker will be to watch 2-3 RIO videos, play a few hundred hands, review them with Snowie, and try to digest all the information. I am obviously not going to skyrocket through the stakes playing a few hundred hands per day, but I think it is very important to get a solid theoretical framework to my game right now. Once I feel that I have achieved that, I will turn my focus more to volume.

In other news, I am training for my first half marathon in October. I did virtually no exercising for 5 years up until a few months ago and was in terrible shape. I also was abusing alcohol and drugs on an alarming level. These factors had me starting to be very worried about my long term health, which led to my decision to leave my life as a live poker player and move in with my parents and return to college. Well this and I burned through all 50k I had to my name, all while I was, for the majority of the time, staked for live games, not even losing money on poker. Literally spent 50k on alcohol, drugs, table games, eating out, etc in less than a year. I realize how lucky I am to have such an incredible support system and I am really focused on being the best version of myself I can be from here on out. I am still only 23 years old so I hope that I have really learned a valuable lesson from my experiences and am able to make the most of every opportunity that presents itself in the future. After being away from poker for a few months and being (mostly) sober, the fire to play poker and be the best really started to burn inside of me. When I started playing online I realized how little I really knew about poker despite having a solid win rate for 3+ years of live poker. So I know I have a long road in front of me if I truly want to become a world class player, but I am ready and committed to putting in the work everyday. And one of the most important things in poker is to only worry about what you can control, so that is what I am going to do.

I really went in a different direction with that last paragraph than I was planning. My initial plan when I brought up my half marathon training was to talk about my breathing while running and how it relates to "The Art of Learning," but it does feel good to get that out in writing and I can save the other stuff for tomorrow!

this

You're overthinking waaaaaaaaaaay too much. Pokersnowie/GTO will get you broke in no time on anything below 100NL.

The T9 hand shouldn't even be at the river. As played, x/f OTT imo

In "The Art of Learning" Waitzkin talks about how a key component of his development in Tai Chi was the coordination of breath and mind. He says that external distractions cause an interruption to our natural breathing pattern causing shallow breathing patterns that result in our cells not having their full capacity of oxygen. I have made focus on taking full deep breaths a main focus in my training as I prepare for a half marathon. And to Waitzkin's point, I have noticed how easy it is to let an outside distraction throw that off. On recent runs every time I am distracted by someone walking by or whatever it may be, my breathing falls out of coordination. This leads me to feel as though my entire flow as a runner has been lost and it takes some time to get back into that zone. The same may be true for poker. Improved breathing habits can only have a positive impact on focus and concentration on the tables. For this reason, I am considering taking up some form of meditation, most likely yoga as it seems like the easiest way to get started. Anyway, it is time for me to get started on my poker for the day as I am already a little bit behind. Let's get to work!

Thanks for your input. I am aware that GTO is not the strategy that will make the most money at 5NL. However, it is very important for my long term development as a player, and my goals are much more focused on the long term than the short term. To understand how to properly exploit, it is important to first understand GTO.

Also, I don't know how familiar you are with the 5NL on ACR, but it is a nitfest. In my 1,249 hands (LOL sample, I know) at the stake, my opponents are playing 25/18/6, and the players I have played the most against so far are reasonable opponents. I have only encountered a small number of actual really big fish that you might expect at this level. If I should deviate from GTO, it is by making big folds because my opponents are not bluffing enough, but not by unbalancing my own betting and raising ranges to where I only have value because they simply are not paying off. The T9 3 barrel is fine, especially considering no one is trapping turn at 5NL. I just happened to run into AQ instead of something he would have folded like QdJx. And he was correct to call (although against other players at 5NL he is always losing).

To be honest, I am not sure if the rake at 5NL is beatable, given the state of the games that I just described. Yesterday I played a hand where I got QQ in vs JJ pre for 50 BB each and the board ran out a straight and we chopped. The rake was $0.25, 5 BB from a single pot. Imagine if you were playing a 5/10 game at your local casino and the rake was $50. Certainly there would be concerns that the game was not beatable. Most of my experience live is at 2/5 NL with some 5/10 experience and I have played higher than that a few times also. I am certain that 2NL on ACR is tougher than the live 2/5 I have played. There are lots of bad regs at 2NL and from my small sample at 5NL as well, but there simply aren't many really big fish that are playing 50/5 or really spewy bad aggro. Even with this in mind, I will continue to play these stakes as I am learning optimal play. When I feel more confident in my own abilities and have a better gauge of the rake effect, I may consider an alternative route to build my bankroll, the most likely choice being MTTs.

I think that you're going to have to figure out an edge beyond playing GTO. Think back to the jacks vs queens hand. If the rake is that high, do you think that it's viable to beat those stakes playing a GTO strategy?

As I said, GTO is not the best way to play at this stake and I am unsure about the beatable of the game with the rake. The best way to play at this stake would be to make big folds, bluff with lines my villains would consider value lines, and take unorthodox lines for value. This would exploit their unbalanced betting ranges and take full advantage of their unwillingness to pay off. However, as my entire poker experience as a live player was figuring out how to exploit, this is something I already feel comfortable with. My main goal for the short term at these stakes is to become more comfortable with GTO, even if it costs me money. It will be a rather cheap lesson that will go a long way in my poker development for the future. I only have a week left on my Snowie trial anyway, and I will not be able to afford to buy it at that point, so I want to get the most out of it while I can. After that my approach will change to trying to build my bankroll as fast as possible, which in all likelihood will require switching to MTTs and SNGs because of the basically uncapped rake. If I am able to build a bankroll big enough for stakes with a better rake structure, GTO will be key at these stakes. Hence why I am try to get comfortable with it for cheap.

After examining the rake structure a little bit closer, I have decided that cash is not worth it until 50NL. At this stake the rake is 5%, and it maxes out at 1BB of rake for a heads up pot. So much better than 5NL where it is 5% up to 10BB for a heads up pot. Taking this into consideration, I have decided to stop playing cash until I am able to build up a 1k roll. I will continue to work on my 6 max game by playing vs Snowie and continuing to watch videos everyday. Until I have a 1k roll though, my real money volume will come from MTTs and SNGs, with an emphasis on HU SNGs. If Doug Polk can go from 100 to 10k, why can't I go from 100 to 1k

About to start the MTT grind. Starting BR is $99.41, let's go!!!!

Only played 4 MTTs last night. Cash 2 of 4 but lost about 30 cents. Plan was to go all out today, but after running 6 miles this morning, I don't know how realistic that is right now. I am exhausted. I will most likely just watch videos, play around with Snowie, read, and relax today.

Long grind today. Have gotten in 25 tourneys and 1,842 hands at the moment. Been a frustrating session, but currently on my last table and we are at the FT of the $0.11 $100 GTD sitting in position 3 of 8. Would have been nice to run good in the higher buy ins, but I won't complain if I bink and get a nice $18.80 boost to the roll. Let's go!!!

Chip Lead

TT < QQ... 6th for $4.25

No poker for me today. I have a couple projects to finish for my summer class before the end of next week and got a lot of work done on them today. Of all my goals, making straight A's in college is still the most important. My current plan is to put in volume every other day. This will hopefully allow me to keep a balanced life, and keep me fresh for every session.

In an effort to keep a balanced lifestyle, I planned on taking my first yoga class today. I have a 24 hour fitness membership and they were supposed to have a yoga class tonight, but nobody showed up. I ended up playing pick up basketball games for a couple hours. Oh well, maybe Saturday someone will show up to teach yoga at the scheduled time.