The Zone pool was decent for a Sunday, but ya... we need some wild holiday action ASAP. I've been a little surprised to see such tight tables in the hands you post. I expected 100nl on Iggy to have 2 50+ VPIP recs per table lol.

I was 2-tabling, and ready to end my session. I was already sitting out on one table.

On the other, I open QQ UTG.

Nit cold calls in MP, and a fish calls in the BB.

Flop is 722tt. BB checks, I bet 1/2p, nit calls and BB folds

Turn is a 9 which brings a double FD. I start to close the other table, but accidentally close the one I'm on instead. Gifting the nit who was probably going to pay me off with JJ a nice sized pot.

I doubt it will happen again, but just in case, does anyone know if it's possible to reopen a closed table (if you were still in a hand) on Bovada?

What I meant is that for most of the time I’ve played 100nl, basically everyone but the fish opens for 2.5x, and is clearly attempting to play something resembling GTO (obviously failing wildly). I played 700 hands on reg tables yesterday, and all of the non-fish were opening for 3x and cbetting every flop for 1/2 or 3/4 pot (instead of like 1/3).

Like obviously these are people who don’t normally play online, and are worse than the GTO-aspiring regs, but the way they play is annoying to play against, since once the cbet they don’t really fold

Have you tried Ctrl + Shift + T
Doubt it'll work on Bovada, but it's a very useful shortcut!

A lot of the vpips have normalish preflop stats. The guy who made that crazy play with JJ was like 20% vpip

Not sure if he's any good, but he has a lot of videos playing on Ignition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28Hek7Wkmf0

Charlie Murphyyyyyy

He hasn't posted in a while but yeah his videos are good. I suspect he's in the MDA camp. He plays really well.

11 years ago toysforkidscharity.com started here in the 2+2 forums when a bunch of regs pooled money and gave away toys during the holidays. Over the years it has grown to giving away tens of thousands of toys at an annual event in December. We've moved from 2+2 to using mostly social media, but I wanted to drop by and give a quick reminder for anyone that might want to donate. You can check out the website to watch a 15 minute interview on the Daniel Negreanu podcast for some more info, to ask any questions and to donate. Deadline is this weekend.

This years plan is to buy presents for the up to 50 kids at a local Children's Hospital that are expected to be too sick to go home for the holidays. Remaining money will be used to fill their newly built play room with toys for the current and future kids to use during their stay in the Hospital.

https://toysforkidscharity.com/

really happy to see this still going! it's such a great thing.

i've donated. happy holidays!

Patrick Howard is giving away copies of the poker detox course, if you retweet/follow and dm him about your poker journey.

Ignition being down has given me some extra time to do practice mode in GTO Wizard. I am consistently amazed at how much EV I bleed all over the place. Some of the errors are probably spots where I am playing decently against humans, but bad in theory. But a lot of the errors are just... really bad. Like I sort of suspected that when I call a 3bet after opening on the BTN, my horrible lossrate was mostly due to a small sample size and variance. But no, I am just pretty clueless in this spot. I am going to stop watching videos for at least a month and just do practice mode instead. Active learning is awesome.

I’m with you here, been taking the rest of the year off from playing to just study some problem spots in GTO Wizard and it’s been very eye opening lol.

100nl update

Are you pleased with your progress?

Can’t complain too much about 6bb/100. Been running slightly bad recently but also ran insanely good for a while too. Hoping to converge closer to 10bb/100 longterm

That's pretty interesting. I always expect the 3x raisers in the Zone pool to be bad recs, but it makes more sense for a lot of them to be bad TAGs playing a 2010 style. Whoever they are, they are indeed a pleasure to play with.

Damn, you're gonna miss out on these holiday games? I expect the next 2 weeks to be full of bad recs. I am still trying to go 100 hands in practice mode as BTN vs. BB without punting 10 BB of EV lol.

Lol yeah life’s been a bit crazy for me lately, so just taking a few weeks here. In the meantime just have been working on a lot of spots in the GTO Wizard practice mode and sine definitely surprise me. I’m getting some together to post and discuss soon.

That’s great, congrats, keep up the good work!

Merry Christmas everyone.

Hope I haven't pissed you all off too much this year, if I have, that was certainly not my intention (well maybe a little if I thought you deserved it)
I can assure you I'm here to learn and improve and that I'm never trolling in strategy threads.

Anyone else think Elton looks a bit Grinchy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_yuO8UNGmY

It's because he knows there's no need for anymore new Christmas songs to be written ever. Must have had some sort of contractual obligation to do this.

Playing through all of my hand histories and seeing my opponents' hole cards is both educational and quite painful. Every session, I find at least a couple spots where I thought I made a sick fold, but instead I got magnificently spazzed by a rec. And then there are the sessions where I thought I just ran bad, but nope... I got bluffed like 10 times in big pots. Or maybe I won 5 buy-ins that session, but it would have been 8-9 if I could just learn to soul read better lol. Ouch.

Sounds both very interesting and painful.
This is not something you can do on PokerStars I guess?

It's a feature that is only available on Ignition/Bovada/Bodog as far as I know.

Guys I'm getting back to the tables real soon, but quite literally having to start again from scratch. I've got the funds to deposit and start from 50z, but I need a full setup (had to sell my old rig for life expenses).

What's a minimum spec laptop (will be using 28" monitor) you would advise I get until I can get somethibg more high end in a few months.. Primary usage will be for poker (PT4, GTO+, training videos) and occasional gaming (old rig ran most games on high settings with ease, but gaming is a very small part of my time so not a deal breaker). My budget is £500 - I'll be building myself a gaming rig over the next few months, but id like a decent enough laptop to keep also..

£500 is probably just not enough for a gaming laptop, unless electronics prices are very different in the UK than in the US. That’s probably the floor price (or maybe below the floor price) for getting a laptop with any sort of graphics card, and you’ll be sacrificing other specs to have that in there. You probably won’t be able to run any AAA game made in the past 5 years on it, and even 10 year old AAA games probably won’t run that well. Another con is that having a gaming laptop is pretty overrated IMO if you also have a desktop, since having a gaming laptop means it will be bulky and heavy.

I would say either increase your budget or focus on something that will last in its function as a non-gaming laptop (£500 is kind of a low budget even for a non-gaming laptop). I would try to prioritize something with an SSD, 16 GB RAM, and a decent CPU. With CPUs, you have to DYOR a bit since there’s plenty of i5s that are better than i7s and vice versa.