Hello!
Welcome to my thread, after 140 hours at a live cash poker table I've decided on sharing my journey to becoming a regular grinder. Below you'll find a little about myself, my poker history and my live low stakes cash experience up till now.
About me:
My name is Greg, with a Masters in Physics and an analytical, logical mindset the strategy around poker is something I've never got bored of learning about.
Although I do much prefer to play live vs online, I avoid the often fatal trap of making strong assumptions about my opponents and try not to think too hard about the human side of the game, but instead focus on trying to achieve that ideal strategy. Of course the opponents I am up against are taken into consideration.
Poker has taught me not to be results oriented, in all aspects of life, not just at the table. If I'm stacking chips after winning a big pot I'm not congratulating myself, I'm thinking about if I played the hand well. Likewise if I lose a big pot, I think if that bluff was reasonable or if I was just trying to force it.
A glimpse into my poker history:
First introduced to the game at university in 2012, I quickly realised this was the game for me. Spending most of my free time watching ridiculous amounts of youtube content, playing micro stake tournaments and realising with the more I learned, how complex the game was and how little I did know.
Over the years I played in many low stake live tournaments as well as a lot of online poker.
In reality, I'm certainly down over my online lifetime career and up after playing live. A big reason for this is my patience playing live, as it was usually for more money, more thought went into each decision. Playing online trying to stick to solid BRM I'd often find the tiny stakes unexciting and unrewarding affecting my gameplay.
Live Cash Games
Fast forward to 2017, I have a full time career and decide to play my first live low stakes cash game at my local casino. With an initial investment of £200 I sit down with it all at a £1/£1 (optional straddle £2) game. I leave later that night with £200 profit.
The next day I return and sit back down with £200, inexperienced at playing with this amount of money when I inevitably lost my stack I went for a walk to cool off. After thinking through my play and thinking (at the time at least) that my play was reasonable (I can't remember how I lost it) I returned to the cash game back with my initial £200 investment. I then had a ridiculous run and left that night with an £800 stack for a on the night profit of £400.
I downloaded a poker bankroll app to keep track and over the course of about 50 hours of play I was up to ~£1300, I then went on a £500 downswing at which point I stopped playing.
A big fault I made during this shot at starting my live poker career was not separating my funds, all of my profit had dissipated into my spending, mainly on a holiday. This made the £500 downswing tougher than it should have been so I stopped.
A year later I make my return, all my previous results are lost (changing phones, not saving the app) and I start fresh with a £200 investment.
Fortunately, once again I started on an upswing and started getting really comfortable playing these stakes, making the play I thought was correct ignoring the money aspect.
2 months of playing and around 80 hours at the table, I was up £1700. This time, that money was kept completely separate and I tracked all sessions religiously. My final session of the two months was a long session where I eventually made a small profit, however was down a large amount at one point. It was in this session where I decided to take a break because all of a sudden it's no longer my £200 investment I'm risking, there's almost £2k I could potentially lose even if playing perfectly well and I don't think I would of handled that well.
This year I've started playing again, I've picked back up with my previous bankroll and am much more comfortable financially outside of this that losing the entire bankroll, although it would hurt, is not going to have any negative effect.
I've since played another 60 hours with my biggest wins (550) and biggest losses (350) in a session. Starting off with a £700 downswing over 3 sessions I've grinded myself out of it and currently up a total of £1889 (not including my initial investment).
What's next?
It's time I start taking this more seriously, that's why I'm making this thread, I'm going to post regular updates with how I'm doing, some interesting hands for feedback and discussing what I learn along the way.
I'm going to continue playing the same cash games trying to put as many hours in as possible.
Many thanks if you've read this far, I look forward to sharing my journey with you!
Greg