My situation

Hi there, I’m a 24 year old kid from Belgium who has been wandering through life without a purpose or meaning for the last 7ish years. I’ve never really known what I wanted to do with my life. Tried University, didn’t like it and got outta there pretty fast. Then i decided to start working in chemistry. It was an awesome job for a while, I loved working in shifts (cause **** 9-5), made a decent amount of money but after a while it started getting really boring, so I quit like I always do when **** stops being a challenge. I thought to myself: “hmm maybe now I’m ready for some education again” and so I started an education in Computer Sciences. That was 1 year and a half ago.

At first it was pretty nice, I always like learning new things and being knowledgeable in different fields is pretty important to me. Until I started to realize that all it’s been doing is preparing me to work a 9-5 job for someone who happily takes all the profit and tosses me a few crumbs every month… No thanks!


My poker story

So this is where poker comes in! When I was 16, poker was a pretty big part of my life, I used to play homegames with my allowance, with people who had no clue at all about poker… I’m not saying I was some sort of genius, but at least I knew which hands beat which… This allowed me to breeze through life without ever having to do some sort of real job while i was studying! Win! Anyway, after a while I quit (probably tilt issues, I had a pretty horrible temper).

But when I embarked on my Computer Sciences journey, I fell in love with poker again. I love the depth this game provides, how challenging it is and I can totally see myself studying and playing this game full-time for a big part of my life. The only problem is, I feel a bit lost in this giant sea of poker knowledge and while I was playing, I felt a bit lost as well. I just went in without a strategy, did pretty well cause I’m a pretty perceptive person. There’s one problem though, I have no network of poker players, none of my current friends have any notion of how to play and I felt that I was going to progress way too slow without some outside help.


Why I want to join CFP

I found out about the CFP program on the 2+2 forums and it immediately caught my eye. I like a no bull**** approach to learning new things (unlike the people in the educational system…) and it looked professional, definitely +EV for the situation I currently find myself in. I am currently enrolling in the micro stakes program even though I have enough money to start the 6-max crusher program, I’m pretty sure the micro stakes is where I currently belong. I do however plan to continue with the crusher program as soon as I finish this one!

My goals are to finish this micro-stakes CFP program (duhh..) and subsequently the 6-max crusher program in a total of 18-20 months. I’ve made sure my other obligations are at a minimum, so I can fully focus on this. I’ve already had access to the no-bs 6-max guide and have already started studying these lines. It’s quite a change from the styles I tried playing before, so I’m drilling in the lines first, one table at a time before I start trying to use them while multi-tabling.

Which actually brings up another one of my goals. Since I haven’t gotten that many hands in yet, I still struggle paying full attention as soon as I reach 6 tables+. At the end of the course I want to feel comfortable playing more than 8-10 tables, which considering my set-up shouldn’t be hard at all. It’s going to require practice though, but I’m fully commited to that!

Anyway, this is enough for now, I’ll post my current graph (which is only 6k hands, I only purchased PT4 recently, loved it ever since!)



I will also be keeping a vlog about my progress as soon as I figure that stuff out and as soon as I have anything useful to update about! You can find that HERE.

Thanks for reading guys, happy crushing to all of you!

Matti

Yo matti, if you want help im a young guy from belgium haha! Namur and you?

GL broooo

I'm from up north, near Antwerp, I need to polish up my French a bit, so I'll keep that offer in mind! I'll send you a pm as soon as I'm able to.

Thanks for the GL, you too!

Np mate ! Ah anvers nice ! Yeah cauz in my university im in elementary level in dutch lesson rofl.. Nice to meet some belgian young grinders like me on 2+2

awesome, look forward to reading about your quest. I really question the merits of playing a lot of tables, but it looks like you have a pretty solid approach and I hope you do well. One of the most important things in poker are the quitting decisions, so this is one area you might want to work on. There is a fine balance between putting in volume, and quitting sessions in order to make sure that you bring your a game to the table every time, and if you can master it you will go a long way to being very successful.

Thanks for the information, I haven't put a lot of thought into quitting decisions yet, but I've read in other blogs that they teach a stop loss formula so I think that'll be fine! Good intel though! Bringing your a-game is definitely more important than volume, I have to agree, especially when you still need to learn the ropes.

A stop loss formula is a great idea (stop win is not).

Update

Alright, so after a lot of paperwork, watching video’s and reading the no-BS 6-max guide, I finally managed to wrestle through all the things needed, and officially got added into the program! Step 1 complete. I’m getting used to the new CFP layout on the website, installing all the necessary programs, calculators, HUDs, etc. so I’m almost ready to start the grind!

I will use my time before dinner to study, update my blogs, do my homework and process all of this information which has flooded my brain the last few days. Thank god I can deal with processing a lot of information fast! There’s a lot of information though, and I mean a LOT really so I’m kind of in a dilemma. I always want to do things right, but I don’t feel I can master the no-BS lines this quickly… Oh well, practice makes perfect I guess, as long as I keep putting in a good amount of hours into studying on a daily basis, I’ll get them down pretty quickly. Can’t expect to be perfect from day one!

I really like the well thought-out guides, the stop-loss formula, the support and all that stuff. Really friendly people in the skype groups as well, they make you feel at home the moment you get added. Didn’t even get time to introduce myself!

Anyway, I’ve met some of my friends from school last night as well, who didn’t know I quit to pursue this yet. They were all pretty amazed but supportive too, so that’s good to hear.

In my opinion it would be good to address your tendency to quit as by the sounds of it, the honeymoon period seems to end pretty fast and leaves you with a desire to quit or do something new. Just my 2 cents.

Subbed and best of luck

I wholeheartedly agree, every time I've made a choice about something in my life, it was out of necessity or a choice I've made without really knowing what I really wanted or loved. This thing is the first thing I feel like I want to go all out on. Everything else I've done in my life was just cause I thought it might have been interesting. Doing this I feel like I'm working on something I love, never had that with anything in my life.

Gl,sub

Hey guys, thanks for the good luck wishes!

Here's a vlog about my progress so far in week 1 of the program.

Link to vlog

Best of luck from another Belgian man. I've only recently started browsing these forums but there seems to be quite a lot of Belgians active here.

Let's crush 2016 together! Don't worry about me, I'm a sng player!

Awesome man, let's do it! Good luck on your journey too. When I started off, I liked SnG's more too, now I'm leaning more towards 6-max cash games, a lot of fun to be had there! Let me know how your journey is going every now and then (or link me your thread if you have one), I'm interested to see how you're doing.

Will do! Actually haven't started a PGC blog yet, but will do so for my 2016 journey. Maybe even start a blog on a seperate site with my 'branding' on it. It'll be hard work, but hopefully it'll be worth it!

Cool, be sure to link it to me when you have it set up!

Progress this last week has been a little bit slow because of family stuff with the holidays and for now, it seems like it's not going to get better until 3/4 january. Cut some studying time last week to get as much playing in as I could.

HERE is the link to my vlog about week #2 of progress!

pretty much my thoughts as well. In many ways I think you may find poker harder than work or school. Best of luck

cool vlogs so far. Keep up the good work!

Agree with this to some extent as well. It certainly requires more self-motivation than most other activities you can pursue, in the end, you are only accountable to yourself for your performance, study, and time you put in.

It can be a wonderful gift or an immense burden depending on the personality. As long as OP understands that at some point, poker may feel more like a job than fun (it can still be fun but it becomes fun for other reasons than it is right now).

GL OP

Thanks for the good luck wishes! I feel like self motivation is a lot easier for something you love than something you choose because it looks interesting. I'm fully aware that poker will start feeling like a job sooner or later, but it will be a job where I can choose my own hours (I'm a lot more productive between 6pm-... than between 8am-11am). This alone is something I'm willing to fight for!

My progress last week was even worse than expected (aka unexisting) as we went on a last-minute trip for new years. I had a blast though, it was nice to take a breather, assess what's been happening lately and think about these last few weeks. Couldn't wait to get back into it yesterday and so I did!

I won't be making a vlog this week, as I would only have my trip to talk about, nothing poker related has happened, so I'll be keeping the progress vlog for next monday probably.

Hey guys, here we are again! Progress this week was kinda crazy, in 2 directions. At the start of the week, I took a hit but I regained my comfort and confidence at the end. Someone on another forum suggested I also talk over some hand replays in this vlog, thought that was a really nice idea so you have that to look out for too if you're interested and can get past my face and graphs. Tough task, I know. If anyone has any remarks or questions about these hands, please do share!

HERE you can find the link to my vlog if you're interested! Cheers.

Best of luck dude. Can relate in many ways, and I also live in Antwerp.
Not really sure on what site you are playing, but I can recommend Unibet as it's alot softer than Stars. But I guess with the CFP programme you have to play Pokerstars?

No we don't, I used to play on bwin, but it's always the same people over there, and I think they figured out some of the facets of our playstyle. I'll check unibet out later, thanks for the good luck wishes!

Hey guys, last week was a pretty interesting one. Decent profit, some nice close spots and discovered a big leak which I will be working on this week. If you're interested to see how I did, HERE is the link to my vlog!

Hiii. Gl matti !!
Hope you reach your goals but you have to know that there are many people who fail with the best motivation and skills so you need to have something to do if poker doesn t work as you want..
As i can see your graph is at his best and that is the easiest moment of poker.. Will you be as motivated after a 30bb downswing ? : / prepare the worst scenario and you never be disapointed and sad when this time come. I hope it won t but I thing every poker player here downswing once or two or more and what make them keeping play are motivation strategy and mental .
I learn a lot about it on kill tilt .fr which is a french based on strategy and mental ..

Also, Im belgian too from Mons-Bergen voor nederlandse mensen ^^
Id like to share with you guys about strategy and motivation : )
For french people. I m learning alone with forum and videos but talking about hand on forum seems to me the next step to my knowledge... I have a job and play poker only 5 or 6 hours a week but if i play i need to be best every day !!