1) I was single for most of my career but I am in a LTR now. It can definitely be tricky at times. She works a pretty normal 9-5, so one of the things I'll do is spend a few hours with her right when she gets off work, and then I'll put in a session starting anywhere from 8 to 11pm (or hell, even later), play late, and spend much of the time that she's at work sleeping. This mostly works well. I get time with her, I play in the best games, and life is in balance. She doesn't love sleeping alone, but she's gotten used to it.

Sometimes this is not possible, and I just play day games. I expect my hourly in these games is a lot lower, but I just suck it up and play the boring games.

I take off a Friday or Saturday (or both) almost every week to do something with her, and honestly I don't even care. I actually believe a lot of times the weeknight games are better. I know everybody thinks "You have to play Friday night!" but do you know what happens when every decent/good player thinks that? Every one of those players is in the poker room on Friday! I zig while others zag

She's very supportive overall, downswings rarely affect our relationship, and when they do it's almost always tournaments and not cash games. I suppose we handle it in a healthy way, generally. I talk to her about my frustrations when they get severe enough (sometimes I keep it to myself which she gets on my case for). Every job has stresses and I would say this is not much different. Other people have bad bosses, crappy coworkers, and draining work projects, I have 2 outers and 80/20s lost for heaps of equity in a live tourney... It's purely mental, as I'm not losing enough to affect our lives at all.



2) The second part of your question is definitely a set of good, hard questions that bounce around in my head all of the time. I suppose that I am not worried about things in the short term, but yes, it would be silly to not worry about my win rate relative to CoL long-term.

Firstly, while my s/o makes less than I do, she still has a pretty decent job, so if we were to have kids that would be a huge source of stability for us

I would say next 3-5 years I would be *very* surprised if I was not making enough to be very happy with our total income and the amount we're saving and investing. Anything above $70K from me and we're doing more than fine, and that includes maxing out Roth IRA's and bolstering investments. I think me not being able to make 70 is a long way off, and as I said before, I think $80-130K is more of a normal range for me, with small chances at a lot more if I were to bust off a 6 digit tournament cash or something.

If we stretch out to a 10+ year horizon, of course it's possible that conditions start to become unfavorable. By this point I would hope to have well over a million dollar NW, and I'd be able to take my time and pivot to something else. Extremely unlikely, but if we're truly in a pinch, I'll suck it up and find the highest paying job I can and grind it out for a while. I hustled my ass off when I was younger, and I can do that again

I suppose it's a little unnerving because I don't know what I would pivot to if poker became untenable, but I trust myself to figure it out. If there are kids in the mix at that time, then I can simply spend more time with them and let my wife focus on her career for a little bit until I really get my teeth sunk into something else.

There are no guarantees in life, I know people who had good "safe" jobs and then one day they're getting laid off and they have to scramble. If anything, I think poker makes me much more equipped to deal with change and volatility than 99% of people in their cushy 9-5's.

Thanks for the questions, I hope I answered them reasonably well. Definitely ones that I have given a lot of thought on.

Good for you - I have similar stats but more so in the online MTT scene and transitioned out a couple years ago. Biggest issues I see with poker is the scalability and the labor involved. You need to physically be there to make money so your trading your time, and there's only 1 of you so your capped at whatever your hourly is. Taxes are also tough assuming you pay right - the lack of write offs sucks for poker, although if you travel a lot you can get away with a lot more I guess. Either way very impressive - to be that consistent over that many years is a true skill that gets overlooked.

I agree but this isn’t unique at all to poker. Most anybody with a regular job also deals with the lack of scale

I’ve thought about buying or starting a business, or getting more hands on in real estate in the next decade. It’s always a possibility, but I honestly like to take a lazy approach to investing and just pile into ETFs. Also I may buy a primary home, so that will be the priority right now

You said you’ve transitioned into live poker? Cash or MTTs or both? What is your split like between them if so?

Very good point. Easy to forget about the risks and opportunity costs associated with traditional 9-5s and automatically dismiss poker is a worse off option.

Yeah I mean don’t get me wrong, if I could get a job that paid like $90-100K plus benefits, and it was something I would at least moderately like, I’d probably do it, especially if I could still play a little poker on the side. The stability, pay raises, and benefits are worth a lot, but no way I’m landing a job like that anytime soon, so I guess I’ll settle for making this much at poker haha

How often do you

Table change?

seat change?

BTN straddle?

UTG straddle?

run it twice?

pack lunch?

wear backpack?

order food at the table(if allowed)?

Do you do out of your way to be good for the game or just grind it out because 2/5 players will play anyway

.

have you made more from Poker or crypto/other investments lifetime?

Do you play PLO or any other games?

Haha, I said I’ve done well with investing but not THAT well! Not sure how much I’m up lifetime from passive stuff, maybe a little over $100K. Some of that is unrealized gains bc I haven’t sold yet. I really only started putting my money to work like 5-6 years ago. My significant other probably has done about as well just maxing out her retirement stuff every year since she graduated college, plus a few other good investments lol

Got hurt in one of the crypto platform blowups of the last 1.5 years tho, sadly

Occasional PLO but probably under 100 hours lifetime. I’m pretty pure NL

I actually transitioned into being a real estate agent. Most of my time is spent in my kitchen on the computer prospecting for more business - calls,texts,emails. I might spend 10 hours a week outside of my house working - the time flexibility is amazing. I haven't played poker in any capacity in a couple years - do miss it to some extent, but I felt my income was dropping/capped as everyone got better. Think I could make 100k in today's environment but where I live that won't pay the bills.

cool thread

Great thread, thx!

What is your typical buy-in at 2/5? 100bbs, 200bbs, or something else?

Also, how do you fight boredom tilt?

I came from online play. I'd much rather play on Poker Bros than live but live is more profitable.

Live poker is just so sloooow

I’m pretty sure most places around the country are $1000 max now, so that.

I just don’t struggle with this as much as guys who come from online backgrounds like it sounds like you do.

Sometimes if the game is really boring or something I’ll mess around on my phone a little. Text people, play a dumb game, do a little music, but I’d say at least 80-90% of the time I’m engaged in the game, either paying attention to the action or chatting with people. I’m not the *most* social guy ever but I usually chat with my neighbors and have good conversation, which helps to pass the time. I’d describe myself as good for the game in that regard, I’m friendly but I also dish out some fun needles that make people laugh and have a good time.

Have you ever folded KK preflop at 2/5?

Nice thread.

As a matter of fact I’ve done it several times. 3 times in recent memory I folded KK and was shown the AA. Twice they just volunteered it, and once because there was a short stack all in.

I think one of the areas I excel is trusting myself to do some pretty extreme stuff when I have compelling reasons to

It’s funny, so many people will make very bad exploits off way-too-small a sample size, and I laugh at the huge assumptions they make, but when I’ve played with certain people for literally hundred or even thousands of hours in my player pool, I understand how their minds work, what motivates them, etc

I actually remember at least 2 of the HH pretty well, and I lost absurdly little in them

Guy opens 20, I make it 70, gets back to him and he just jams like $1100, as I’m thinking a little bit he says to me “I’m leaving in half an hour and I don’t want you to crack me”

I’ve played with this guy for years. Most of the time he’s sitting on like $300-600ish stack because he short buys, and I think he gets pretty uncomfortable playing deep. I also know that he’s giving me a very honest (and useful) bit of info here

I decide there’s zero chance that he’s doing this with QQ or AKs, so it’s either AA or the 1 combo of KK, so actually a very clear fold, which I do, and he shows the AA

Other one was something like open to 25, 1 call, I make it 115, a shorty goes all in for like $325, original raiser folds, and the caller now jams like $1600.

This one was more based on the nittiness of the player, I’m just purely convinced that the trappy flat pre, and this massive backraise is just always AA. Again, super slim chance it’s KK but just 1 combo so I let it go and his AA gets shown down

These spots are rare, you have to parlay actually getting KK vs AA with being in a situation where the villain is unbalanced and bad enough to not have anything else, but they do happen from time to time

Related to my boredom tilt question, how do you deal with many hours in a row of being card dead?

This is probably my biggest leak coming from the online world.

If I'm card dead for hours, I end up playing marginal hands, which has killed my hourly rate.

Great thread. How do you deal with annoying short stacks? What’s the most amount of your net worth you’d place on an 80/20? How do you explain the odd and unpredictable hours to your gf? Do you ever plan on playing for a certain amount of time and then realize game is too good and cancel other plans to continue playing?

I don't think I have much more advice on boredom besides what I already said. Chat with people, take small mental breaks on your phone, maybe get food or go for a walk. These things all help me when the game is feeling kinda lame and I'm card dead. But allow me to address something you said in a way that I can really help.

You claim that you get card dead, play marginal hands, and it kills your hourly. Occasionally coming in with a pfr or a 3b that is a pip or 2 too wide is not going to hurt your hourly too much. What is likely killing your hourly is not only are you doing this, but you are also making huge EV blunders postflop.

If you've ever looked at the EV distribution of a spot, you will know this is true. Lets say in a given spot the weakest suited connector you're supposed to open is 87s. If you look at the EV of 76s, 65s, even stuff like T8s, 97s, and 86s, they will only be slightly -EV, assuming you play the rest of the hand optimally. The hands that are just outside of being profitable will literally be like -.01 or -.03bb, something like that. So getting a little loosey goosey preflop, in itself, only really costs you pennies, assuming your decision making is crisp postflop

And this is at equilibrium. Agains soft 2/5 competition, a lot of hands that a solver would say are negative EV are still +EV to a person like me because people don't 3 bet enough, and their range becomes very face up across multiple streets because of certain things they do.

So I would actually argue that where you need to examine your decision making is probably mostly post flop. Unless you're doing crazy punty stuff pre flop like cold 4 betting J9o against a nit's 3b, I would assume most of your EV is evaporating on flops, turns, and rivers, and it's likely from bluffing too much.


Short stacks can definitely be annoying at times, not really much you can "do" about them though. Sometimes I am deep with a bunch of fish who don't 3 bet enough, so normally I'd be able to dilate my opening range a bit, but if there's a short stack on my left jamming liberally, then I have to just snug up and play my usual ranges. Thankfully I don't deal with this a ton. Not a ton of shortys in my games, and the ones that exist still play horribly so they don't require as much adjustment.

Hmmmm most amount of my net worth I'd risk on an 80/20? I'm pretty sure the Kelly criterion says I'm supposed to bet 60% of my NW in this spot, but this doesn't factor in stuff like, if I lose I have to sell a bunch of my stocks and trigger taxes, I might not be able to play games I want to play, etc. I also wouldn't touch any of my s/o's money even though we live together and basically share expenses already, so I'm gonna say probably like 40% of my personal NW

My girl is smart and she understands very well why I play the hours I do, and she understands that some days the games are vastly better than others. I honestly can't think of a time I've cancelled any major plans in order to play longer. I think one time I was playing during the day, with plans to see her when she got off, and I had an unusually good afternoon game, but I still just racked up and left when the time came. Maybe I stayed like an extra 30-45 minutes or something and I told her the game was good, but I didn't cancel on her.

One of the reasons for this is that most of my play is while she is either sleeping, or not expecting to see me. If I go in during the late afternoon, she doesn't expect to see me before bed. If I'm playing overnight, also doesn't matter because she's sleeping and won't wake up until 8.

The only issue is just on a macro level, deciding how much to play vs how much time to spend with her, and that's tricky, but in general we're on the same page that I need to be getting at least like 30 hours most weeks in order for us to have the life and the future that we want. I do probably play a little less than when I was single, as I said most months for me are like ~130ish hours, so definitely less than 40 hours a week

Not playing today or tomorrow so I figured I’d give my thread a little bump with my August results

This is probably around the 4th best month of cash I’ve ever had. And the months where I have made more I had quite a bit more hours.

Around $4500 at 5/10, the rest at 2/5.

Poker is alive and well!

Congrats!

Great thread!

What size room (say in # of 2/5 tables) would you recommend is needed for impressive results like yours?

Do you win more against regulars who know you or total unknowns?

How do you make a decision on when to quit?

Ever wear headphones to help focus or shut off irritating players?

Any books you would recommend?

I’ve played in big rooms and small rooms, I don’t think the size of the player pool is super relevant, although if it’s too small you can have trouble getting games, or have long waits, so that’s not good. I think the skill of the player pool, the rake, the promotions, and your personal comfort in the room are all bigger factors assuming your room gets at least like 2 games going most of the day.

I definitely win more per hour against randoms, but I play with a lot of people who are bad and who play multiple times a week, so cumulatively I probably win more off them. There are guys whose game I understand inside and out.

I end a session for any number of reasons. Maybe I have something to do. Maybe I’m playing overnight and I leave before like 6 or 7am to avoid the morning traffic. Maybe the game is terrible and I dip out early. Maybe I’m tired or I’ve already played 8-9 hours. Really just depends on the day.

I definitely listen to music sometimes but I try to limit it! I’m guessing in a month I cumulatively have headphones in for under 10 hours, and possibly under 5. In a single session if I’m feeling bored or something I’ll put em in for a quick song or 2 to get refocused

In general I think the consensus is that most poker books are trash. Applications of No Limit Hold Em is probably good, but in general I’d say look for online training tools in 2023

Great thread

How about waitlists? On average how long do you think you sit idle while waiting to be sat?

A lot of times quickly, occasionally there’s a long wait. I’d guess an average wait of 15-20 mins. Not bad, I take care of other things while I’m waiting. Get chips, use bathroom, chat with people, etc