Hi 2+2. Decided to make one of these to keep myself disciplined and focused. I also hope to generate a small community of players to discuss theory and strategy. Won't really discuss a lot about life here, this will be a very poker oriented thread.

About me

My name is Kris, I'm 23 and I study business while playing poker for a living. I was born in Poland and moved to Canada in 2008. I was introduced to poker in 2012, got really into it and started playing for a living in early 2014.

Poker

I've been going to school full time the entire time I've played poker, which made it pretty difficult to really focus on poker. This in turn made me kinda lazy and I started playing live, which is absurdly easy and unbearably boring most of the time, but made me a lot more money than online at the time. Since studying/reviewing is pretty much unnecessary for live poker I've defaulted to grinding mostly live whenever I don't feel on top of my game, which turned into me putting in 80% of my time at live in 2015. This is the main reason I started this thread. I'd like to keep myself focused on studying and playing online and not live. I will be putting in most of my volume at 6max nlh, starting @200nl, some HU nlh. I will eventually transition into PLO once I learn the game well enough and build a roll for it. I approach poker from a very theory-oriented standpoint, thus any strat I post will be from a theory perspective.

2015 Graph. Mostly at 200, some at 400 and 600. Volume was brutal.



Goals

My main goal is to move up to 2knl as soon as I can and subsequently start crushing plo. I will use this thread to post strategy, keep myself consistent with my studies and basically put a lot more effort into poker. Also improve my understanding of poker theory. I hope to get ppl involved in discussions. I use CREV, Flopzilla, PokerSnowie and will likely start using PIOSolver since it looks pretty sick.

I will still be grinding a bunch of live poker in the process as long as I am making more money at it then online, but I will do my best to transition out of it asap.

Short term goals:

- 10k hands/month online (I play on Bodog, so this is more than it looks lol)
- 80h/month live
- smash 200 and move up to 400 quickly
- Keep sql GPA >3.0
- 2h of poker study every day.

Do yourself a favor, and forget GTO for the live poker. Live poker is all about exlpoiting your Vs huge obvious leaks, which would obviously be counter-exploitable if they were good enough to do so. They aren't, so playing GTO against them is just lighting money on fire.

well obviously you cant play GTO live..

"Exploiting Vs huge obvious leaks" is a thought provoking statement

Well I think theory is still essential to know how to exploit really bad players, but of course I'm not using good balanced ranges in live poker.

hmm I dont think it is essential to know how to exploit really bad players, but it can't hurt

I think your goal of studying poker 2 hours a day is optimistic with all of the other commitments you have. Even just giving yourself a single day off from poker entirely will help immensely with potential burnout.

Perhaps essential wasn't the best choice of words, but it's certainly very beneficial to understand theory when playing with weak players.

Yeah I agree. If I start getting burned out this will get cut down.

Where are u in Canada?

Balanced ranges isn't the same thing as GTO but I get what you're getting at. Garrick is correct. There is zero need for balancing at live low stakes poker. Focus on exploiting people. It's how you can get ridiculous results. I also think it's a huge mistake to assume you don't need to study and review in live poker. If that's your main income source, you should be more ready to put study into that area than the other.

What stakes do you play live?

gl with everything