Hi Everyone,

I’m new here and this must be my first proper post in this forum.
I’m a 23 year-old Lithuanian guy living in the UK. At the moment I am working in a multinational manufacturing company as an engineer and it seems that it could not be any better… However, I cannot get poker out of my head…

I started playing poker a bit more than two years ago and it has been constantly on and off since then. When I started I couldn’t beat nl2 for a long time, so in my first year of playing I just managed to reach nl10, where I was a losing player… I read few poker books, watched a lot of training videos and could not figure out what was wrong. I got fed up with it and it happened that I almost didn’t play any poker last year. It was also, my final year in university, which did not help me either. But now university is over and I want to get back to poker stronger than ever and my plan is to go all in this time – all or nothing. I am doing this to clear all ‘what if’ and ‘maybe’ thoughts out of my head, so that there would be no regrets whatever the outcome will be. I cashed out $1k of my bankroll and left just $100 for this shot. I did this because of two main reasons. Firstly, it helps me to feel much better mentally as I know that I already made $1k from the initial $10 deposit, so I will be still a winner even if I go busto. Secondly, with smaller bankroll I will have to start from the very bottom, which is a good thing as my win rates at nl2 and nl5 were kind of embarrassing and I know that I need to do way better that that to be able to move forward comfortably.
So, I started with ~$100 at nl2 and will try to move up as quickly as possible as I spent way too much time at micros already… By the way, my challenge started on 03/03/2016.

This is going to be a difficult journey and I want to share it with you guys, maybe this thread will even turn out to be +EV for me, who knows. I will try to update you with my results at least once a week and will also post some troumblesome hands.

Just a short intro this time to get this things rolling. Some graphs and pictures to make it more interesting.

Overall graph & stats – before 03/03/2016. You can clearly see where the problem was.





Graph and stats after 03/03/2016 – after I made some serious adjustments to my game. Still a small sample but it seems to be working quite well.





Also, I need some opinions from you guys regarding zoom and normal tables as I have a hard time choosing between these two formats. You can see that currently most of my volume is coming from zoom but I feel that normal tables are way softer.

This will make a good story for the one of my future posts, if anyone’s interested of course.



Until next time!

eww micros for newbs and waste of time #thnx

Hey, glgl. On a similar path myself right now so have probably played with you a fair bit.

I feel standard tables are softer but obviously way less hands per hour and I personally dislike the whole table selection thing and seeing queues of 20 waiting to sit at a table with one fish so I'm sticking to zoom for now.

Plus looking to the future and wanting to beat higher stakes you will have way more experience in spots against somewhat solid opponents in the zoom pool rather than focusing on finding/beating weak players at standard tables.

Well, everybody has to go through micros, there's no other way around it, unless you can afford to spew your money around when learning at higher stakes.

Hi, thanks, gl to you too. Probably you're right, which limit do you play? And how is it going so far?

I tried out standard tables today - it did not go too well, still made 1.5 BI though. The biggest issue for me with standard tables is table selection, I cannot be bothered to be looking for new tables when fish leave and end up playing with regs (even though some of them can still be clasified as fish).
I will probably stick with zoom for now at least.




Today’s update:

Short zoom session before gym:



Standard tables:



Not happy with how I played today, it definitely wasn't my A game, more like C, maybe B-, made a couple of horrible spews.



Few hands from today's session:

Villain had 0 fold to 3bet, 0 fold to flop and turn cbet, so hoped to shake him off, tried to represent AA, KK or QQ. But it ended up as a horrible spew...




Villain was overly aggressive post flop hence the call down, but looking at it now I should have folded on the river.






Don't know if this was played correctly. First of all, I am not sure if this was even a value bet on the river. From his line it looks like a slow played 9 or 88.

Chilling at 2nl for now, took some shots at 5nl but getting too tilted when I run bad mainly because a couple of stacks at 5nl still feels like a substantial % of my roll (~$100).