How's everyone feeling today? hopefully not feeling sorry for youselves with bad heads?! lol..


I'm pretty much alcohol free these days and at 40 years old i don't miss waking up feeling half dead and losing 2-3 days trying to recover lol.


One of my new years resolutions is to go back and train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu so hopefully i'll be back on the mats by March. I love training BJJ - it doe's wonders for my mental health and being surrounded by a good bunch of team mates that are motivated to improve / help others really doe's have a possitive affect on me. If you're looking for a way to get fit then i'd highly recommened trying a class. My gym is Gracie Barra

Got up early this morning and there was still plenty of drunk passive fish on. Couldnt believe at 730am how crazy the games were. Only this time i did make a bunch of hands. Only problem is they were really good 2nd best hands every time and i lost 3 stacks...

I had one guy on hu table telling me his hands in the chat.

At first i thought was just drunk or high on drugs and ****ing around, however after like the 5th showdown of calling his own cards i realized he wasnt lying. Took him for 2 buyins at 200nl.

For December...

24,585 hands of 200 Zone at -6.11 BB/100, -3.52 EV/100 (gross)

17,523 hands of 50 Zone at 1.96 BB/100, 1.65 EV/100



I decided to move back down even though I am still slightly up overall at 200 Zone. I have a lot of changes that I want to make to my game, and trying new things at a higher stake where I have a very low winrate is no fun.

December was the first time since switching to NL from FLHE that I really didn't feel like playing. I took a couple days off and played less when I did play. I also didn't feel like studying much. It really sucks that it takes serious skill to beat 200 Zone. I mean that's just not very high stakes. We need another poker boom.

1) 3.87 EV/100 at 50 Zone over 428,920 hands, so I missed this goal by quite a bit. I did run over 5 EV/100 for the last 300kish hands or so though, so that was cool.

2) .43 EV/100 at 200 Zone over 154,162 hands, so I missed this goal as well. 200 Zone is significantly tougher than I expected. I thought that the rake drop would compensate for the tougher games, but I no longer believe this to be the case.

3) I exceeded the volume goal by a good bit, but I don't think I got nearly 100 hours/month of studying in. I have gotten progressively less excited by poker this year, and I need to be somewhat pumped about things to want to study a lot. But ultimately, I do need to study more since so many regs are studying a ton.


2023 Poker Goals:

1) Let's try for 5+ EV/100 at 50 Zone again.
2) Let's try to permanently move up to 200 Zone and win at 2+ EV/100 again.
3) 45,000 hands/month sounds good again, but let's reduce the study goal to 80 hour/week. Hopefully I get more motivated and study more though.


Good luck in 2023 everyone!

Where are you from? And what sites do you play? Guess with lots of people off work still it's a great time to collect those donations from the recs.

I play stars and when i'm not at work my grind begins around 10.30am.. Cant say i've noticed much difference in the games..

If live poker could be sped up significantly that would be the ticket. Someone needs to build a table that still gives you real cards but they shoot out of a hole at your seat and then when you fold you put them back there. And then instead of real chips though you just press buttons at your seat and it shows in the middle of the table what is happening via a computer dealer. So just mix online and live together

Florida and i play on bovada 100nl. Yea being on east coast time zone i guess there was still west coast people partying. Last night was awesome too. I actually made it all back plus 3 more stacks. So i made 6 stacks on new years day night. Finally ran well, really well actually.

How is Bovada in terms of traffic and software?

Traffic is pretty good overall. During weekdays mornings dont have a lot of activity, but theres usually enough to play. I like the software. I use the mobile app which is very good and you can play up to 2 zone(zoom) tables and 4 reg tables. I dont have a desktop, so i don't have tracking software and all that stuff which i wish i did but i do the best i can without and try my best to keep my frequencies in line with a mental system using suits.

There isnt as much activity at 10nl and 100nl as there is at 5, 25, and 50 in my experience. I play 100 now. Im not sure about 200 i havent taken shots there yet.

If you're playing in games you have less than like 5bb it's mostly just gambling barring heavy volume, i wouldn't worry too much about 25k hands

If I could offer you a few words of advice it would be this:

- I know it is tempting to check your results every month, but realistically, the variance in poker is so high that 40k hand sample is completely irrelevant. Not only it doesn't reflect the way you are playing, apart from preflop spots, but the winrate number in bb/100 is more inaccurate than you can probably imagine. Just play around with the Primedope variance calculator. You will soon realize that you can be a 10EVbb/100 winner and STILL lose more than you lost in your sample. Variance is extremely underrated in poker, and most players just think about variance when they lose a couple buyins in a session, or when they lose a few flips. The reality is that even at hundreds of thousands of hands, lets say 500k hand sample, your bb/100, depending on your actual true winrate (which you will never know) can be off by 4-5bb/100 EASILY.

- Stop playing zoom if you want to be a professional player. There are definitely players who are pros and play zoom, and I would guess plenty of them, but fastfold completely removes the element of table selection from your game, which is, quite frankly, probably the number one most important variable when it comes to your winrate. Not even talking about the fact that fish play tighter preflop in fastfold games, which significantly reduces our edge.

Good luck on the grind!

I agree with you 100% and I am glad that somebody else other than me is pointing this out. If there is one thing that tilts me about poker players, especially regs, it is their extreme obsession with judging their game/winrate based on completely meaningless samples. While I understand this stems from the lack of understanding of how math, standard deviation, variance and statistics work, I also think it is quite beneficial because it keeps most regs occupied with worrying instead of getting better.

Another thing I would like to add to the post you are replying to is that 200NL zone on Ignition is really not that tough and definitely not tough compared to the "Rest of the world" player pools for the same stake. You just need to use a different approach than the average reg to beat the game - there is plenty of average regs in that pool, and if you keep doing what they are doing, you are gonna be average.

GL on the grind!

Personally I don't like zoom but this is just pure nonsense and coming from a coach just bizarre. I believe that majority of the players get better hourly playing zoom vs bumhunting and trying to find tables that don't brake constantly or a filled with other sitting out bum hunters.

That might be the case if you can only play ignition etc anon games but dude stop saying sheet like that.

Hey man, so first of all I want to say that it is OK to disagree on something, of course.

My argument for not playing zoom is simple:
- the average winrate in bb/100 is significantly lower for winning regulars
- fish play tighter and you can not focus them

These two things combined result in two major problems:
- if you don't get to target the fish, where most of your winrate comes from, you just end up reg battling too much, which decreases your winrate and thus significantly increases variance
- if your overall bb/100 is lower, you are prone to experience much more significant and longer lasting downswings, which is horrible for mental game, which is key to be a professional.

Just my two cents. Not saying zoom can't be beaten and that you can not play it if you want to succeed. I am just sure that playing regular tables will be much more profitable and much less stressful. About the tables breaking - I am playing ROW sites as well as Ignition and I rarely experience such problems. Usually if you play multiple sites you can tableselect pretty hard, which makes up for a nice winrate increase. Also, I don't think the average reg is bumhunting as much as they should.

EDIT:
Mobius explains this really simply and in detail in one of his blog posts. I am not sure if I can put the URL here, so to not break any rules, just google "Mobius Poker Blog" and in the first result that comes up, you can scroll down to find an article called "You should probably stop playing zoom" with good explanation.

GL

I 100% agree with MDACoaching, it's much much harder to move up in stakes playing fast fold games. Of course there are players who move up by playing zoom and eventually make the transition to reg tables, but in my opinion the hourly of reg tables is going to be much higher for 99% of people, and in fact I think it will make you a better, more analytic poker player.

If your main goal is playing theory and getting into reg vs reg spots, zoom is great. But if you want to move up, it's not great.

My 2023 Goals

- Become established regular at 2knl on ignition >50k profitable sample

- Make 200k from poker and build up a bankroll of at least 100k (Sufficient for 2knl ignition, midstakes ACR)

- Move to South American Country and learn kickboxing

- Improve my coaching skills (planning, reviewing, explaining sims) and start charging for coaching

I have a blog - https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...games-1815681/

That's it in a nutshell.

I agree, especially with this part I put in bold - it is exactly what the Mobius guys says in the blog I mentioned in my previous post.

And also one thing I would add here to what you said, a lot of new players have a pretty poor understanding of how to approach poker IMO.

If I talk to a player whose main goal is to play theory and get into reg vs reg spots, they usually tell me they do it to be better at poker (which could make sense I guess) but if your end goal with poker is to be as profitable as you can, and make as much money as you can (which I guess will be the goal of the majority of players), this is a waste of time.

You have to play correctly against regs, of course, but the majority of your winrate comes from exploiting fish as hard as you can, while you have the opportunity. Putting yourself into tough spots versus regs definitely has some merit to it, but I would say it is pretty overrated. Also, if you wanna just play regvsreg and test your GTO skills, you can do so in GTO+, there is an option to play against the solve, where it analyzes the EV of your decisions (although I personally think it is a waste of time for the most part, but it is an option if you really wanna take this route).

Yeah I don't feel like getting in reg vs. reg battles makes me a better player at all, and I avoid this at all costs. I get better from putting in the off table work, like studying solutions and drilling spots where I'm confused. About the only thing playing does is remind me there are spots where I don't know wtf I'm doing and have to study them more off table.

2023 goals.

I improved the most from 2022 to 2023. Let's continue the trend.

1. Keep collecting data on spots I think are over/under bluffed.
2. Move from 100nl reg to 200nl reg
3.. Play at least once a week live
4. At least 150k hands played at reg tables (hoping 200k)

Goodluck! I'll sub too

Goodluck brother!

Went from 25nl reg to 100nl reg in 2022 and made exponential improvement and most money ever.

Same as Doodoo, become 200nl reg this year and play live more. Its just hard to have the time to play live compared to jumping on the app on my phone.

Not sure I could get back to reg tables where I can't immediately fold this 83o I just get dealt and move to the next hand.