I’m 29 years old from the UK and I’ve been playing poker on and off for about 10 years. I’m currently working full-time at law firm and I’m looking to qualify as a solicitor in the next couple of years. My goal is to earn the £12k to do the Legal Practice Course to qualify as a solicitor from my earnings at MTTs in poker. I’m aiming to start this course in September 2018.

I started playing in January and I’ve made over $1k so far, playing about 800 tourneys with an average BI of $7. My starting BR was $750 and I’m currently on $2100, including bonuses I’ve taken out and staking other players. I’m playing a mixture of regular and turbo MTTs, all NLHE. Obviously working full time I’m not able to put in massive volume but I try to do poker 2-3 evenings a week and grind at least one day every weekend. I try to spend 4-5 hours a week properly studying alongside my grind. You might also have seen me on the MTT threads quite a bit – I like to see what others are thinking and how they approach things.

Goals from now until SCOOP:

[ ] Do 5 hours of quality study per week (e.g. interactively watching videos, breaking down ranges in my hands)
[ ] Do one big overall leakfinder session per month
[ ] Build my BR up to $3k before SCOOP so I’m properly rolled for $27Bis

Long term goals:

[ ] Play more big MTTs with soft fields e.g. Sunday Millions, Big 109
[ ] Reach $15k profit by September 2018

Profit to date: $1190.66
BR: $2136.74

Graphs and bio to come!

Graphs

Profit


BB


Stats

A brief bit about my life and poker career so far:

I started playing at Newcastle University when doing my law degree about 10 years ago. However I was just messing around with mates and playing for fun.

After I graduated I had a Training Contract with a law firm all sorted out – however the financial crisis took hold and this was cancelled – screwing up all of my plans and forcing me to do something else. I took a couple of different jobs but in 2013 I was made redundant and I thought I’d give poker a proper go.

In 2013/14 for about 6 months to a year I took poker very seriously and it was my only source of income during that time – I was playing some MTTs but was mainly playing 6-max cash games, getting up to 50NL regularly and taking some shots at 100NL. During this time I was pretty into studying with Skype groups, signed up to RIO + Cardrunners. I also did a stint as a Hand Analyzer at Poker School Online, where I met some cool people.

However I wasn’t really making enough money to justify making poker as a profession and I wasn’t really enjoying playing with the pressure of it being my only income. So I took a decent job that I’m still doing now. I also met a girl where I was punching well above my weight. This all led to me more or less quitting poker until we split up last year.

Now I’ve got a lot more free time on my hands and I’ve been playing as much as I can since January and have really enjoyed playing as a part-time hobby making some sort of a side income. It’s nice not to have to cash out some $$ every month from my poker roll!

I’ve played some live poker in my time but not too much – I don’t really play live tourneys at all now, the downswings are just so brutal. I sometimes play cash poker live – the player pool is usually so soft it’s +++EV in terms of money but -EV for time + effort. I made £2k last summer when I went down to London with a mate of mine and played some 1/2 at the Vic and the Empire.

I’m also a keen chess player, about 2050 Elo rating but I’m hoping to cut this down to concentrate more on the pokerz.

GL dude. I'm actually a lawyer myself! It's a brutal job at times but it seems like you have the passion and dedication for it!

Good luck mate got off to a good start. What's your method on dealing with the downswings? I always start doubting myself after a bad run which even though I know it's just variance I can't help doing.

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Clients make that passion and dedication disappear very quickly!

When I first started playing again in January, I ran so horribly, I was losing every flip, couldn't suck out once when I was a 30/70 dog. I nearly stopped playing immediately because I thought I'd completely forgotten how to play and all of a sudden became a big donk.

I became scared to take what I thought were clearly +EV shoves because I was doubting myself and just anticipating that I would lose.

I then gave myself a bit of a talking to and reminded myself that most MTT sessions are going to be losing sessions, you're going to have lucky days and unlucky days.

Don't get too emotional either way. When you bink a tourney, you probably got really lucky so don't think you're Phil Ivey all of a sudden. When you're in a downswing, just try to make the right decisions at the tables and things will come to you.

Winrate looks very solid, esp considering first 15k hands were pretty bad You are very likely a big winner on this abi

gl, will be following!

Thx - I know when I was playing 6-max 50NL, a winrate of 3-5BB/100 was meant to be pretty decent so I'm happy with a 9BB/100 rate in the MTTs although obviously the fields are much softer and it requires different skills to cash games.

I tried playing a live tourney last night - a £35+£6 re-entry. After 6 hours of play I realised why I tried not to do them anymore. Right around the money I went completely card dead for four orbits while everyone was in shove/fold mode. I made a mincash and busted just before the FT.

I then spent the rest of the morning playing £1/£1 cash till about 7am in the morning - it was a pretty juicy table so I couldn't leave! Made £330 and I felt like I played really well, very LAG and was accurately figuring out where people were at etc. I might play some more live cash games in the future.

I'll probably post a few hands from the session in here soon - some were pretty funny. I posted one of the more interesting ones in the strat thread here http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...bluff-1658261/

Looking at your graph I can tell right off the bat that you like to call / shove with hands like 99+ deep in tournaments. It looks like you overplay hands like AQ and AJ aswell.

That's bizarrely specific but I'll certainly take a look at that - what makes you say that?

Session review - All-in shoves with eff stacks 15BB and less

I did a decent session review tonight - reviewing spots where the action is folded to me and I've VPIP'd with effective stacks 15BB or less. I did two separate reviews, one with where the effective stack was between 5-10BB and between 11-15BB. The analysis below is taken from the 11-15BB review but the same sort of observations also apply to the 5-10BB range.

This chart represents my shoving range when it's folded to me with 11-15BBs when I'm in MP, CO or BTN.



Most of this is fine, however there seems to be a pretty clear leak in the bottom left corner highlighted in red. According to the Jennifear charts, in most spots I should be folding these offsuited hands with one high card. Instead focus more on shoving suited hands including suited connectors.

This was a general trend of mine across all my different short stack sizings and from all positions.

However my overall win rate when between 11-15BBs and it's folded to me seems to be OK.



Using the Jennifear charts as a reference, I'm shoving much too wide from the BTN, a bit too wide from CO and a bit too tight from the other positions, including the SB. Interestingly when I'm less than 10BB I'm shoving from the SB close to optimally.

Conclusions

• Stop shoving stuff like Q2o, K3o and concentrate more on shoving suited hands.
• Widen shoving range from EP and the SB

I'd be interested in people's thoughts about this analysis. Is this too small a sample to be judging how well I'm doing? Is there something I'm missing or not taking into account?

Time for my first update on how things are going. I haven’t been able to put in much volume over the last three weeks and when I have been playing, I’ve been trying to cram some sessions in which hasn’t led to good poker. I only played 200 tourneys over the last 17 days. I’m probably going to keep going at roughly this rate until SCOOP.

I’ve booked some time off work to play the SCOOP events I want to take part in so I really hope to hit the tables hard for those couple of weeks.

Results
I’ve lost a few hundred this month so I’m down to $900 profit on the year at an ROI of 11% – this is fine but not spectacular. I think if I can tread water and play with small but steady winrates for the majority of the time, at some point I’ll bink a couple of big scores that will propel me to where I want to be.



I’ve started to spread out where I play – I recently joined Party Poker and 888. Pokerstars seem to want to turn every tourney to PKO or 100% PKO so I wanted to test out some other options.

Party Poker doesn’t have a great selection of games for my level – they’re also falling for the PKO trap but the software is pretty decent and they have a decent player pool.

888 poker has a nice range of tourneys. The software is crap but the player pool is really soft. I’ve played about 15 MTTs and final-tabled 3 of them usually with people donating their chips.

Study

I’ve bought ICMizer – I’ve started using it for a few spots but I hope to do some deep analysis in some of my FTs and see where my strengths and weaknesses lie. I’m also considering purchasing Flopzilla but I don’t know if I’d use it too much – it seems like a tool that’s more suited for Cash players.

I’ve been hitting my target of 5 study hours per week – watching some RIO vids and doing analysis of my own play – mainly shove/fold spots so far. However I want to go more in depth with this.

Goals Update

I'm going to amend one of my goals slightly. Because I've started on new websites now, I've just deposited on them with my real life roll so it's tricky to comment on my bankroll as a whole. I've therefore decided that I can go for a target of $2k profit before SCOOP.

Goals from now until SCOOP:

[x] Do 5 hours of quality study per week (e.g. interactively watching videos, breaking down ranges in my hands)
[ ] Do one big overall leakfinder session per month
[ ] Amended - Have $2K profit before SCOOP so I’m properly rolled for $27Bis.

Long term goals:

[ ] Play more big MTTs with soft fields e.g. Sunday Millions, Big 109
[ ] Reach $15k profit by September 2018

Hey man, best of luck with your grind. I'm trying to win enough to pay off my LPC loan lol!

Cool - hope you manage it! Are you doing your LPC now or are you working?

Oh I completed it about 6 years ago, took me 4 years then to qualify after slumming it as a paralegal to gain "experience". A career in law is its own grind it's not too late to get out my friend! The course itself is very good, however. As with all things it's always far better when you can apply theory to practice.

I got a quarterly bonus this last payday so I'm donking that off on the Sunday Million Anniversary and the Party Poker Title Fight, both for $215. Let's hope for some rungood!

Hi! Recognized your name from PSO right away


Used to follow your live blogs of your grinds on PSO - guess you were sometimes selling shares? And it seemed like you were making final tables *all the time*! Was pretty active with share buying back then because it was right after my big tourney cash, and would always try to buy some of yours, but wasn't always able to grab any before they sold out, because they were so popular. It's fun to by shares when they turn a profit

Guess PSO's gotten a lot more quiet, now that they don't have paid hand analyzers, and fewer live training classes. Checked in a while ago, and it looked like they were paying someone to make posts on the message board because it had gotten so quiet?

Cool to see you've picked up the grind again - best of luck with everything!

Thanks for stopping by - I remember you well! In fact I see quite a few of the PSO crew on here quite a bit.

PSO really helped me out a lot in terms of nailing down the fundamentals and being able to beat the micros to move up to low stakes. I still recommend that people watch some of the old videos on there, TheLangolier has a good way of teaching and he's a decent player.

After a while though I was spending too much of my poker time hand analyzing etc which was detrimental to my own study at the higher games. With all the changes that Pokerstars was making I decided that I poker wasn't going to be a career so I lived life a bit more normally!

My volume at the moment is a lot lower but I really look forward to playing.

I've booked some time off work to grind SCOOP and I'm likely going to be running some sort of package for that.