Shoutout to Brokenstars coaching.
I am an older player who started to like the game right around the time Durrrr was playing on high stakes poker. I was amazed at his game and wanted to play like him. Before I got coaching in mid-march of this year, I had a lot of false beliefs like it doesn't matter what 2 cards you play before the flop, what matters is your postflop decisions. And the way to win was to play weaker, well-disguised hands and suckout by cracking my opponents bigger pocket pairs (kind of very reminiscent of Dwan would do when he was sunrunning back in those days). In spite of these beliefs, I was still a winning a player, but i would go through periods of 200k-300k breakeven stretches and would run so horribly bad for so long. My poker instincts, like my feel and my hand reading abilities, were good; but, I had no mathematical way to justify my play and I was prone to these brutal and quite honestly mentally-crippling stretches where i doubted if i was live in reality or a bad simulation with never-ending coolers.
Before i had reached out for coaching, I was in a middle of 300-350k break even stretch (probably the longest one ever for me) starting in late November of 2023 and I was growing more and more frustrated. I was getting ready to take a long break, but decided I just needed to accept that maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was and i need to do something about it. I read the reviews in this thread like the one you are currently reading now, and decided to take a shot. I've only ever received poker instruction from watching HSP and sometimes the YT poker streams, so this was new to me and didn't know what to expect.
Our first session was a database review. To put it nicely, he pointed out that I was playing far from optimal. Quite literally, I was choosing to play worse hands than my opponents. We went over some adjustments, and the improvements were instantaneous. Which has motivated me to learn and try to catch up with the modern poker theory. Seeing consistent results made the game more fun, and added a boost to my desire to want to continue improving.
I am a lot better than I was before I started coaching, but if I were being honest with myself, I'm just scratching the surface of what I could be if I put in the work in and learn to study better with Brokenstars help. With Brokenstars' coaching, I have the confidence I can reach that point.
This graph below starts Jan 1, 2024. I usually put in 100k hands/ month, and you can see the graph start to ascend right around when I started coaching in mid-march.
https://imgur.com/ZJ8DbZf