That is quite a story. I've had a similar experience, but not nearly as high of stakes and I certainly wasn't doing it for a living. I grinded from micro stakes all the way to 200NL playing up to 6 tables at a time. After getting slaughtered by these tight aggro Russian players I was forced to move back down to 50NL.

It sucked... it bothered me so much. I took a long break from poker, probably over a year. I think it is something to seriously consider doing. There is a lot more to life than poker even if it doesn't feel that way sometimes. Poker can be pretty depressing when grinding for long sessions and not having anything significant to show for it.


I find that focusing on volume too much can actually be a bad thing because then your focus becomes fitting enough hands in to a certain time period rather than thinking through the hands and play can deteriorate as a result. So maybe a better thing to focus on, is a specific time frame rather than a certain # of hands. Also multi-tabling will make it hard to find leaks in your game and certain aspects of it could get sloppy especially if your play becomes robotic. At least, this is what happened to me.

As for your hands, it looks like you may be barreling too much. For example, in that first hand with A6o, your opponent has stats that may suggest he is a station so barreling there seems like burning money to me. He may even call you down with something weak like Q5o. Though that board hits your range hard, in his mind he sees a pair and thinks it may be good.

I think I've actually played you before at BetOnline, but not completely sure. Good luck on whatever you plan on doing next in life, whether it be poker or something else entirely.

How many hours a day to you study?

I generally agree with you and I think the best way to do things in terms of overall improvement is lower volume. I've def used that somewhat as partial justification for playing 6-8 tables when other regs were playing 10-12.
If you're playing part time and trying to improve, less tables is waaaaaay better than more. But if you're playing full time, you need to get enough hands in a certain timeframe (1 year e.g.) to make sure that variance doesn't ruin you.
This is what I've failed to do personally.

Not enough.
Probably 5 hours a week of legit study (running sims, asking myself questions about the sims, node locking, also working on writing a population report on Ignition 200z) and 10 hours a week of assorted forum browsing. Really need hours on forums to go down and hours of legit study to go up.

It would be super easy to exploit you looking at those stats, pretty sure any 25NL reg would have an easy time exploiting the **** out of you.

Go play another session and call every river bet vs regs and tell me the results

That's the biggest leak you have, the rest of stats aren't even close to optimal either.

feel free to right it off as trolling but maybe your attitude is not helping you at all. runbad is obv possible but dismissing everything else is just egotistical

would be the opposite of your redline, which as others have said, seems like a big issue. playing gto > explo is great over inf hands, but playing gto incorrectly > explo is going to be very expensive. no hate on the hustle, just a thought. but hey, gl

You think he calls too much?

lol what is that red line in bb/100?

Na. He’s not calling enough. Dude is only calling roughly 25% of river bets in the HUD sample provided. So regs are just barreling off against him. Seems like another reason for the downward sloping red line.

All 4 of these hands are unnecessary spews.

Really don't know a single thing about cash as I've never grinded cash seriously, but in 2013-mid 2014 I ran significantly under EV and ran pretty bad in CD/setups/etc at the top of my BI range to make for a really ugly 1.5 years. BUT, I had fallen behind the curve and additionally my DS definitely led to me playing worse and it took me a long time to accept/see that.

I got some coaching which brought me back around and I've smashed the games since. Have you done any coaching sessions/thought about that?

Mostly just wanted to post that even though I can't give you any direct suggestions WRT your play, I understand with your situation and hope you get out of it. Smashing some 200-500nl to get confidence back and work on leaks and potentially get some coaching seems like a good call. I started to turn it around once I dropped my highest bi's for a while and just focused on regrouping/booking wins/working on game

GLGl out there

Sorry to hear about your prolonged downswing. It is soul crushing when things are not going your way for any period of time. I often feel down when my results are poor at the end of a single day. It definitely affects my mood and out look.

I completely understand this feeling that you're feeling.

I went on a recent downswing and these things helped:

1) If possible, take a break to refresh your desire to play and learn again. Because you are doing this for your main source of income, even a short break of 1-2 days would be good doing things completely non poker related.

2) Start over. After you've taken a break, drop stakes to NL200-600. Start winning at the lower stakes to get some confidence back.


Good luck, man. Here's hoping for the run good to boost you back up.

going by stats id say you are folding too much on all streets, might wanna check raise flop a bit more especially on paired flops, so peel more flops, peel more turn and dont fold so much on river, you may also want to value bet thinner than you currently are, its not a big deal if you sometimes value town yourself

+1. Also biggest leak i saw is your cbetting way too much OOP, and folding too often to floats on flop and turn (probably cause your checking range is too weak)

Yeah, I don't understand these hands at all. These would lose money at 2NL. OP just NEVER stops betting lol. I don't think I've ever seen someone just keep firing away with air and a weak draw like that. The bet sizing makes absolutely no sense, either. It's like he just bets pot because he doesn't know what else to do. He cbets 35% pot and then bluffs turn at 50% pot and wonders why they won't fold. Kind of shocked that this guy would expect this kind of play to be profitable at the stakes he's playing. I don't see how these lines would be profitable in any cash games anywhere.

OP keeps mentioning Americans being so weak, too but yet how he's playing is worse than I really see any Americans play on any of the US facing sites. He's not even beating Ignition so obviously, the American sites aren't as soft as he likes to think they are. These ridiculous pot sized river bets that represent nothing? The constant bluffing but with undersized bets? The super loose preflop ranges? You wouldn't even profit at 10 or 25NL like this when you take the rake into account.

You could open a winter resort with all those ski slopes. You said you study GTO yet those hands you posted was just brainless barreling with air. I suggest you move down to 25nl zone and rebuild your game.

He should probably post the player pool stats before you start going at his leaks. This is ignition right?
Like how often the pool raises the flop when you c-bet OOP. Filter flop textures, positions...

The A6o from the SB hand is unreal. I have no idea why he posted that other than to show us that he's on tilt and throwing money at villain for no reason.

If you look at the VPIP / PFR of all those players in the hand examples, there are no fish. Poker is all about game selection. Of course you are going to have big down swings if you are constantly playing bad games.

Well, that's not really the OP's fault at all. You can't game select on Ignition. It's entirely a quick join structure and you're not allowed to see what games are currently running. On WPN - Every table is all regs/bots. On BetOnline? That's my favorite network but still, table selection is of a relative minimum. We literally have nowhere to go in the US market where we can freely table select and bumhunt like you can on Stars.

5NL on WPN is all 33/27/19's and 17/14/11's. Now and then some 67/14/3 will sit down but he's extremely tight postflop. I mean, that's 5NL. I see comments like this from ROW players quite often about table selection and scratch my head because what I'm saying about the US market is common knowledge and has been for a while. Still: There are players profiting significantly in many of these games. There are regular, full time pros on Ignition regardless of it's anonymous/no table select structure.

Sure you can, just join four tables and play 20-30 hands then quit the bad ones. Then move up or down a limit and rinse and repeat. Or play lower stakes where the games are softer. If you can only find 1 to 2 good tables at Ignition, mix in some Chico network action. Or play live. Where there is a will, there is a way. But playing against five other regs is a high variance losing proposition.

Damn man sorry to hear about what you've been going thru. Something I've learned from the time I've spent playing poker is to find your workhorse stake-- a stake where you have demonstrated over a significant # of hands a solid winrate that generates you an hourly that you can be satisfied with as a professional player and then put your head down and win a ton of buyins. Bank those up and then take shots but always know that you can go back to your workhorse stake. I'm not sure where that is for you or on what network etc but I think it's something that is important for mental stability during the grind, especially when playing bigger, to know that you can always go back to your workhorse stake and succeed. For me, I had an issue because my workhorse stake is 2/5 plo. So when I was playing below 2/5 I felt like I wasn't being compensated appropriately and I kept attacking 2/5 trying to shot take it underrolled etc. Everything started to click for me with poker once I got to my workhorse stake and stayed there for a long time. I also recognize that I've run on the other side of variance than you have so I'm not trying to explain my results solely from this method but I think finding your workhorse stake and spending a long time there is extremely important for success GL

Ok guys, on page 1 of the thread there was a discussion brought up about my red line, so I quickly went into PT4 and fished out a couple of hands to just to quickly show that the red line issue is not from a lack of barreling.

I agree none of these are standard barrels and are LOW frequency plays for me.
Ac6 and J9ss are particularly aggressive imo, the others can be river follow thrus at some freq. If someone wants to actually discuss the hands, I'm totally open to that.

That said, I completely understand all of the points brought up.
- folding too much flops, turns, RIVERS
- cbetting too much OOP (?)
- not xr'ing flops enough (?)


Has anyone done a paid hand review with someone they respect recently? I wouldn't exactly know where to find that, I'm sure there is coaching in the 2p2 forum, but not sure if 2p2 is the best place to search for these kinds of services in 2018.

As you can see in the HHs, it's fast fold (called Zone on Ignition), and those are stats of the pool.

J9 is good, just go smaller OTF with your range that wants to bet, for that sizing you can't put J9 in there and probably can't valuebet 99. By using a smaller sizing you weaken villain's calling range and can barrel way more often on turns, specially like this one. OTR just go for a normal sizing, you're not valuebetting Kx for that sizing, right?

Also if villain is a fish, it's better to just jam river rather than bet small if you want folds, some people never fold a pair vs a 75% sizing, but vs 2x they call you with 2p+.

Major +1. Jdawgs been around forever, take his knowledge to heart. Especially to the move down and regroup part. At he margin, you probably have some aspect of your game that needs updating. Showing stats to a bunch of anons and randoms on 2+2 is likely not going to help.

Also, it's been said but 120k is a really small sample in the grand scheme.