This thread will be the opposite of all the "young guy coming up looking to take over the poker world" threads. Instead it's more like "old guy hopes to retain some semblance of his skills as he slowly fades out from the poker playing population."


A few years ago I managed to successfully keep a PGC going for over a year:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...-back-1580469/


That was a different time in my life. In that thread I made my anonymity the most important thing. Now, to reach certain goals, I need people to know who I am.

I'm this guy: https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=43416



I just wrote and released a book called Poker with Presence: Unlocking the Final 15%.

I've been playing poker for 18 years, coaching for 12, and now am transitioning into making mental game and performance coaching my primary source of income.

I still want to be good at poker, though. I'll always want to be good. So this thread is going to be 80% about getting better at the games I want to be sharp in going forward, and 20% about making sure I'm doing things to move the business forward.

Here's what I've got going on poker wise:

PLO: I've played maybe 100k hands of PLO in my life, almost all of them before Black Friday. I'm going to start at .50-1 on Bovada buying in for 100bbs and see how it goes. My wife and I are likely moving to Canada in the next 16 months so I'd like to be reasonably good at short handed and heads up PLO by then.

MTTs: I have a huge lifetime ROI in live MTTs (over 200%), especially huge in the 1500 and below region (over 350%). I never got into online MTTs as they never gave me that same rush, but I'm grateful to be able to use online as a training tool for when live tournaments are a thing again. I'll always enjoy firing live events in the 1k+ range, as it's just so fun to make it to the end.

Mixed Games: I've been a solid winner up through 100-200 live games. Have shot taken 200-400 a handful of times over the years but the downswings always made me sad so I just play 100-200 and below now. These games won't be as big a part of my life going forward I don't think.

Goals:

PLO
- Finish reading Cory Mikesell's book (which is excellent) by the end of August.
- Play one table of 6m PLO while I play in my quarantine mix game (9 hours/week)
- Feel like I have a reasonable understanding of what post flop solver play looks like by the end of that time so that I can exploit properly.

MTT
- Study GTO preflop ranges to where I understand well enough what the equilibrium looks like. From there I can see where people are off and can exploit better than I currently do.
- Play an MTT session online at least once every two weeks through the end of the year (14 sessions)
- Have a coach tell me at the end of that time that I'm a lot better than before

Mixed Games
- Have fun when I play, make sure I'm not getting worse
- Stay sharp enough to continue to give value to my students

Business:
- Sell 500 copies of my book by the end of the year (around 125 sold as of today).
- Start a podcast on mindset and high performance by the end of July.
- Grow my email list to 1000 people by the end of the year.


Unlike my previous thread I will throw hand histories and strategy in here for fun and learning, and there will likely be less philosophy/mental game talk since I did so much of it in the last one. At least that's what I think as of now, but we'll see.

I plan to update one or twice a week. I don't have monetary goals because my volume will be so low. I'll mostly be measuring success based on how much time gets put into active study and whether or not I'm still making giant mistakes six months to a year from now.

More to come.

Will follow. Good luck!

gl will be following

Good luck mate..

Innnn, obviously

Time vs Money

The biggest shift in my poker career came in 2007 when I hired my first coach. A backstory:

In 2005 I binked a six figure score in a live tournament at the age of 21 and thought I was God's gift to poker. A year later my friend was on a Skype call with Vanessa Selbst when I got to his house, getting some 6max no limit coaching. I had never heard of poker coaching, and basically laughed at him for needing someone to help him get better. A year after that, my friend was winning $500/hr playing online, and I was breaking even and hadn't improved my game in any way whatsoever.

When you want to get better and grow at something, you have to invest – there is no other option. Some choose to invest money, but most choose to invest their time. Until I realized how much better than me my friend had gotten, I was always a "time investor" who took great pride in "figuring it out on my own." Looking back, the problem with this path is that I, like most people, am actually not that good at figuring things out on my own. When you go it alone, it almost always takes way longer on average to get where you want to go compared to finding a good mentor. In almost any endeavor, the quickest way from A to B is to find someone who has already gone from A to B, then get them to help you do the same.

I've probably spent over $70k in my lifetime on coaching, and continue to get coaching to this day, even though I don't play that much anymore. It's a big number when you look at it, but when you consider the amount of time it saved me in learning huge poker concepts, the additional money earned from quickly plugging leaks, the confidence gained to move up to higher stakes sooner from having someone already up there say I'm good enough, the network of top end players I have access to, and never needing to worry that I'm falling behind, the only thing I would change about that number is that I wish I had invested more early on.

Quick Progress Report

So far this week I've logged 4-5 hours of .50-1 PLO on the side while playing in my 3x a week mix game and plan to review all those hands this weekend at some point. I think I'm getting a better understanding of how to use blockers not just in bluffing turns and rivers, but also in terms of how to choose combos to cbet flops with the recognition that I will get check raised substantially less often with certain blockers in my hand. I'll continue to parse through Cory Mikesell's PLO book and do my best to implement along the way.

I have played zero tournaments which is no surprise given what my average workday currently looks like.

On the business end, books continue to sell at a slow but steady pace that I'm happy with. Tonight I'm finishing a five part video series with Christian Soto and Matt Berkey for the Solve for Why subscription site, and I was interviewed for the Chasing Poker Greatness and Thinking Poker podcasts this week. Excited to see how those turn out.

Readers right off the bat, that's a good start. Thanks to all of you for riding along with me.

Enjoyed your previous thread. Subbed.

glgl

Nice, snap ordered your book and am looking forward to reading it.

GL on your journey!

Dub directed me to your old thread and am very glad I read through it all. Also snap ordered your book and am looking forward to applying some of the concepts to my game. GLGL

BTW, is there any way to pick up the Mikesell PLO book? It's not on Amazon and looks like his site is down too.

Yo, it's been a while since you've updated yourself. Hope all is well and always enjoyed your thread over the years.

Tyty

Happy to hear that, please let me know how it goes.

Appreciate you reading through all those words. Cory's not on social media, best way to find him is probably by sending him a PM on Run it Once, that's how I was able to contact him initially. If that doesn't work let me know.


Resources

As a follow up on my last post here are what I think are the best paths to improvement.

Training Sites

Online Cash and MTTs - Run it Once. The only issue is that you're going to experience lots of different voices who all internalize the game in different ways. I would suggest picking one person who seems to say things in ways you understand easily, and stick to that person's videos for a good while. For instance, six months ago I got huge value and made great improvements to my game giving multiple watchings to Sam Greenwood's MTT videos and Cory Mikesell's PLO videos, and never really watched anyone else.

MTTs in general - Learn Pro Poker is also excellent, and a fraction of the price of RIO. Ryan LaPlante might be the current hardest working man in poker. I've gotten to play with him live and he's an absolute animal in every spot.

Live Cash and MTTs - Solve for Why. Here you get access to a group who is operating with a single voice, which counts for a lot when it comes to retaining the information you take in. They're no slouches at poker either, and the production quality of the content is very high end (with the hilarious exception of my course, which we have been filming on Zoom during lockdown).

1 on 1 Coaches

As I wrote in my last post, getting coaching has always been the thing that ensured I could be successful. When a coach is good, it's almost impossible for it to not be worth it to pay them to tell you something you don't know. While they're getting money for their time, you're getting back something that you get to use for the rest of your life. The key is to not find a dud who will set you back. Below are a list of people who, if you apply what they tell you, will undoubtedly be worth much more to you in the long run than the money you pay them.

Online MTT

If you're looking to get better quickly and beat small to mid stakes tournaments online, YugiohPro and Elite Rounder are both excellent value. They each have a long track record of success, explain things well, and are just all around good guys. You'll get the fundamentals you need with either of them.

Mixed Games

If you're pretty new to mixed games my friend Kevin Haney aka ScotchOnDaRocks would be a good choice to start. He's the guy who enjoys doing the dirty work of making spreadsheets and grinding probabilities in new games where nobody has any kind of information yet. When I was starting out he gave me so much good advice, including sending me a book on Badugi that he wrote on his own that was way beyond anything that existed. He also has written a ton of articles on 2+2 Magazine on different mixed game concepts.

If you're already beating mid stakes and want to make the next leap the play is definitely Benny Glaser aka HeroValue. He goes for a top five price in the WSOP fantasy draft every year for a reason. Year round online grinder who really lives and breathes the game, and just always knows the right play through a lifetime of volume in playing and discussing hands with elite players. When my friend and I have a dispute we just ask Benny, then say, "God has spoken".

Live NL Cash

This is the only guy on this list I haven't done actual one on one coaching with, but I'm very comfortable advocating for Christian Soto. I've gotten to talk some hands with him in the last few weeks in our videos and he just has a really nice way of connecting to the most important piece of the hand and laying it out in a clear and simple way. When a coach has a natural feel for this it's a very valuable skill to the student.

PLO

Cory Mikesell is the only PLO guy I've done any work with, and he's excellent, but likely won't be in the price range of people who are just starting out. He gave me some great strategies a year ago when I was prepping for a summer at WSOP where I was going to be playing a lot of 40bb Cap PLO in the Bellagio 100-200 and 200-400 mixed games, it gave me a lot of confidence knowing that I was going to have a nice edge in those rounds at all times.

I highly recommend watching all of his Run it Once videos to get a feel for understanding how solver ideas apply to PLO in general, and how to find clean exploits versus the people who don't understand those theories very well.

I'll leave it at that for now. Maybe soon I'll write something up about ways to make your study time more efficient and consistent, as it's something a high percentage of the people who are reaching out to me are wanting to improve.

Progress Report

PLO - Played about 5 hours of one tabling 100PLO last week while playing my regular 14 game mix game, which was about half of what I was hoping for, but the third session I was drinking whiskey with my friends while we played mix so there wasn't going to be any learning going on that night. Finished up for the week and thought I played okay but need to get better in so many ways.

PLO study plan moving forward:

1) Mix in some 200PLO to get more samples against tougher pools on Bovada, and review every hand I get dealt using the very handy feature on there where I can see everyone's cards in every hand. That's a huge development tool. It not only allows me to analyze my own game for leaks, but also see how the winning players tend to play in all sorts of spots. I played 200PLO tonight and it was substantially tighter and more aggressive than 100PLO. I want to play both because in soft live games the play will more resemble the lower stake, but I want to also challenge myself and get into spots versus better players too.

2) Sign up for the Upswing PLO Matrix and just plug in tons of preflop spots of my own as well as those of others that I see while reviewing hands. The biggest increase I can make to my overall level of play right now is preflop, just like when I'm learning any other game.

3) Continue reviewing post flop solver based concepts from Cory's book.

MTTs

I had a session with YugiohPro a week ago and we had a very helpful discussion about preflop fundamentals that I can absorb into my game. Other than that no games played, and don't see any happening any time soon either.

Business

My interview with Thinking Poker came out and I thought it turned out well. Link for anyone who cares to listen:

http://www.thinkingpoker.net/2020/06...-327-jason-su/

Started doing work for a stable whose culture I really respect in terms of how they treat their players and how they emphasize emotional intelligence and stability in order for their players to not just win but feel satisfied with their experience of the game as well. Did a presentation for 25 of their guys yesterday and thought it went very well, and I'm excited to work with many of them individually going forward.

Having played probably 200+ hrs against Jason, I can say he's nothing but a class act and his mental game /composure is top notch. Playing against him sucks, he's very good and you cant get a reaction when you needle him. If everyone read his book and ended up like him, all of us who take advantage of tilt at the table would be f**ked.

I'm very impressed with your trajectory once you decided to enter the public eye in poker. Good luck in everything my friend, except against me in poker of course

Thanks man, you are easily in the top five people most fun to gamble with that I know, even though you're way nittier than you come across as being. No matter how hot I run against you for the rest of my life I'll never make back what I lost by forgetting to reply to your text offering to sell me some of your main event action last year

Quick Update

I got to play a few sessions of PLO both heads up and 6max at 1-2 on Bovada in the past couple weeks and look forward to studying all the hands with all cards face up this week. Also got to play a bunch of hands last week in the world's greatest poker game ever invented, limit holdem. If you don't know why it's the best game, consider things like never having to fold, getting double the hands per hour, fish actually having a chance to win, people laughing and having a good time at the table, and the overall longevity of great games. States that have betting limits tend to have the best games, and it's because they play limit.

As for business, it's going better than I could have imagined. I got hired to work at Poker Detox as their mindset and performance coach, and after two weeks and many coaching sessions I'm confident that my approach to high-level performance is not only unique in the poker world but extremely effective in getting serious players up to where they want to be. It's been great having someone like Nick Howard tell me that my ideas are not only good, but mandatory for his guys to adopt if they want to break through to high stakes. My book has now sold over 160 copies on Amazon mostly by word of mouth, which is more than I thought I might ever sell when I first started writing it. All good developments.

Nice, all great news I was just listening tonight to the very solid Detox files #4 episode on the Chasing Poker Greatness podcast, which (not) coincidentally, got me thinking about you :

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas...s/id1482910877

Listened to it today and think it's great that these conversatons are going public. I'm very impressed with where Nick is taking the direction of Detox. Everything that I've been trained in with regards to emotional intelligence and peak performance are things that he is advocating for. I think the future of poker will trend in this direction, as people will realize that in order to have success with longevity, there needs to be a healthy relationship both to the game of poker and to oneself. Without both of these things, burnout and self-inflicted pain will always win out.

I love PLO but I also love me some limit hold'em. My first experience at poker.

No feeling quite like running super hot in limit holdem, a game where you get dealt so many hands per hour and get to see so many flops.

PLO Updates

This month I've played a whopping 1000 or so tracked hands of poker, and here is a visual representation of how to run good for 1k hands of online poker.



The games are very good at these stakes and I think I'm getting better, but with how little I actually play it's been a slower process than I thought it would be. I finally bought PLO Matrix so that I can figure out what hands to actually play preflop, and I've already found some surprising things from exploring it. Looks like I've been playing too many low-ish rundown hands both opening in late position and also defending the big blind, and also not using enough AK and AQ plus pocket pair hands with a suit as a 3bet candidate. Happy to learn which hands to start 3betting more at 100bbs so I can actually use the advice from Cory's book on 3bet pots in PLO.

Here's a hand that I might have butchered, but it worked out for me:

80bbs effective, I raise KJT5 with KTdd from the SB to $6 at $1-2, BB calls. Flop is Js6d3d, I check-call $9. Turn 9h, I check call pot for around $28, river 2c, I check call for pot, around $82. BB shows QJ85 with J5dd.

My hand seems like a fine candidate to start checking on the flop as it realizes equity quite well and also balances my range on flush runouts. I felt like BB shouldn't have many 45xx combos since many would fold pre and also check back the turn (plus I have a 5), and then on the river he shouldn't be going full pot with any two pairs except for J9, which I block, he should fold most 22/33 combos pre, and I also unblock all the 78xx combos. Add in the assumption that people at these stakes probably bluff too much and don't go for thin value for pot on the river in wide range spots and I felt okay just clicking the call button. But maybe I'm just supposed to bet the flop. If there are any PLO crushers out there reading this who feel like telling me that I'm horribly wrong, would love to get your feedback.

Business Updates

To say things are going well would be a huge understatement. Thanks to some good publicity on Twitter last week my email list has been growing quickly, and I've now sold close to 250 copies of Poker with Presence, which is so far beyond what I thought was possible when I published it in early May. I even hit #2 on Amazon for poker books on Kindle for a day over the weekend.

I've signed several clients to do long-term coaching with me, and continue to coach high-level players every day at Poker Detox, so I'm basically living the dream right now in that regard.

Here's a nice interview that Ben Saxton aka Bob_124 was kind enough to do with me for PokerNews that went up on their site this week.

https://www.pokernews.com/strategy/q...n-su-37526.htm

I thought his questions were very thoughtful and I enjoyed getting to write my responses out over the course of a day or so.

Creating an Actual Process

About a week ago I realized that I've been falling into a pattern I didn't particularly like that much. Now that I'm logging so many hours on the business and for the first time in my adult life don't have the time to play as much poker as I want, I was just kind of using PLO as a way to relax and unwind after a full day, and not fully committing to the study and growth aspect of it. Given that I'm not going to get to play that many hands, every hand really needs to count.

So a new process has been formed, and it looks like this:

- Every hand played in the month of July will be checked for preflop accuracy on PLO Matrix
- Twice a week I'll watch a Run it Once video to gather better understanding of what leads to winning post flop play. After watching every video I'll come back some time later and do my best to summarize what I learned, and post at least one cool idea I discover in this thread each week.
- I'll review the biggest pots with a coach at the end of the month to make sure that I'm not making large fundamental mistakes.

That should maximize my learning and growth in ways that the last month did not. I felt like I learned and got better last month, but could have done much more. Forcing myself to double check every preflop spot will allow me to play profitable hands much more quickly, and also eventually allow me to play more tables once that part of the game is solid. I can definitely find time for two videos a week, and I actually really enjoy watching videos these days, much more than I used to. After a month or two of this I won't need to be as diligent with it, but in the beginning it kind of always has to be like this if you actually want to get better.

Winning isn't as important to me as learning these days, so it feels good to get back to committing to that above all else.

Solid interview on Chasing Poker Greatness. Just got into that podcast 2 weeks ago, but have thoroughly enjoyed my journey thus far. Luv the part about you wandering around in Asia

Yeah sometimes in life you gotta wander around for a while. I'm not surprised you enjoyed that, and I imagine a lot of your travels have gone in a similar manner.

Definitely the most fun interview I've done so far. That guy got me talking about all sorts of stuff I never thought I'd be talking about on a poker podcast, and it was awesome. He's so good at interviewing that I decided to give him some money to run an ad on his show for me for a while rather than doing Facebook ads or anything else to try and grow my list and business. We vote with our dollars and I vote to keep that podcast running for as long as possible.

Here's the link to my episode if anyone cares to give it a listen:

https://chasingpokergreatness.com/jason-su

So I've been dutifully studying PLO when I can. The good news is that I'm getting better, the bad news is that I've been around long enough to know how much further I have to go before I even start to feel competent.

I switched my study track to the JNandez PLO subscription on the recommendation of a client. It's definitely the most well laid out site in terms of structured learning I've found so far. The quizzes at the end of each video are a nice touch to drill the concepts that you just learned. for 100 bucks a month you can't really do much better than this if you want to get good in a reasonable amount of time.

It's somewhat embarrassing to watch some of these videos and realize how little thought I've been putting into PLO over the course of my life with regard to blockers, slowplays, and backdoor equity. For instance, I have probably up to now never checked the nuts in PLO in position at 100bb+, and while that hasn't been a huge problem against the people I've played against, it does give me a clue about how many exploits I've been missing on the other side of that spot. Granted, 99% of the hands I played were before Black Friday, but it's still quite strange to feel so weak at a poker variant. Between playing almost exclusively limit and cap games for the last seven years and PLO being so different from NLHE, it's quite the learning curve.

I'm happy to cut myself some slack, especially since I'm essentially a rec player now. The work at Poker Detox is keeping me super busy, and other client work is picking up as well. When I was grinding all the time I never thought I would find myself too tired at 7pm to fire up a game of poker for a couple hours, but that's exactly what happens all the time now. I'm tired, but in the best way imaginable.

So all in all, life's pretty good, I'm still growing as a player, and the new dream of being a rec player who doesn't suck is well within reach.

Too tired to accept my mixed game donations, must be nice to be so rich!

It's ok, I made a new personal record by putting 11 entries into 1 tournament on Saturday instead...

Yeah man, I just discovered his podcast in the past month and have gone back and revisited upwards of 20 of them Definitely one of the better poker podcasts out there. He is also in the DGAF community (have you looked into DGAF's podcast?) which is where I encountered his stuff.

I don't do his subscription but have definitely reviewed his content on youtube. I do like the way he talks about the game. Anytime I feel tilt starting to creep back into my game I just fire up a few vids and watch as he calmly talks through situations and doesn't get all fired up when someone sucks out.

If you haven't already done so, make that move to Canada and join us on GGpoker. You won't be disappointed. Its a lot better than Bovada.