Nice that's good to hear keep it up!

Trying to. I got punished by some regs in my last session because I cbet too much and lost a buyin over a couple hours. The regs at 100 are a lot stronger than 50. From 25 to 50 no difference really.

I also got into a weird spot where I 3bet an UTG open from UTG+1 w AKo to 8bb and had a 2 4 5 two tone flop and the guy donked into me for 1/2 pot and I was very confused. I didnt know if I should raise so I just called but then he donked full pot on a turn 10. Maybe he just has jacks and queens there and is never folding and doesnt want to risk a free card to AK. I couldnt remember ever seeing that play in a 3bp in a tight configuration like that before though.

Beat: Got laid off.
Brag: 6 months severance + benefits covered for those 6 months.
Variance: I'm a 200NL pro until I land a new job.

Dang. That sucks. What kind of work were you doing?

Engine calibration/emissions for an auto company. Despite the transition to EVs, there's still plenty of work out there for dinosaurs like me. I think the company I was working for was planning to outsource my job to a supplier, so I'm trying to get in with that supplier and functionally get my job back. If it doesn't work out though, I've got options.

I hope it's one of those things where it sucks right now, but you look back 10 years later and are like "Damn, I am so glad I got fired! I never would have (insert cool stuff) if I still worked that lameass job!"

Yeah that's partially what I'm thinking. I'm definitely at a crossroads career wise. At 40 I can either keep doing what I'm doing and hopefully ride it for another 20 years into retirement. It's unclear if internal combustion engines will last that much longer, but my gut is at some volume yes. Or I can use this time to try to land a job in a different part of the auto industry or get out of it altogether into something different. I might take a slight step back in pay but I can stomach that for a while. We shall see. In the mean time I am actually looking forward to the most time I've had not either working or in school for the past 23 years.

There's a casino in my town and I've gone and played some €1/€2 live there on a few occasions. I'd play there more often except that the games don't really start up until late at night. The difference between the standard of play there and online is really remarkable. Most of the players are just degenerate gamblers who don't seem to understand the fundamentals of basic strategy. I'm certain that they'd be incapable of beating 2nl online. Then you have guys audibly commentating on other people's plays who don't seem to be very good themselves. It's nice to know that whenever online poker really does die that there will always be action out there in venues like that.

There's a reason that good low stakes live players tend to have winrates north of 30bb/100.

95% of poker players probably couldn't beat 2nl

this

95% of live players? Probably 99.9% tbh.

The first time I went, when I sat down at the table, they told me that that night they were playing PLO bomb pots on every dealer change. I don't have much PLO experience so I sat these out. What I soon realised though is nobody else seemed to have much PLO experience either. They were all paying €10 to get a PLO hand and have 2 flops dealt. Then betting commenced as normal. The guy sitting next to me had literally never played PLO before. At one stage he got dealt AAxx and stacked off unimproved on either board cos he assumed that that must be a powerhouse hand. He went on to lose about €1,000 over the 2 hours that I was there. Total degeneracy.

From a numbers perspective, it is pretty incredible that playing 30 hands/hour live can yield as much money as 400 hands/hour online at the same stakes. I feel like live 1/2 can be summed up as:

"You have been playing tight for 5 hours straight, you never bluff, and I know you have me beat. But I gotta see it... I call!"

I just recently got a nice poker room in my town and its been amazing. It gets frustrating and tiring grinding online. I can go to the poker room and play 2/3 and the level of play is just so insanely bad. A lot of times I actually fold the best hand on bomb pots and some regular hands too because people are just betting like they have the nuts with bad hands. But its so easy to get paid off with big hands. I wish we played double board PLO for the bomb pots because i do play PLO too and have a good grasp of the game and it would be so profitable, but they just do NLH double board. Still people stack off way too light on these bomb pots.

Anytime a new poker room opens, and this is also true for online poker in ring fenced areas, the games are absolutely amazing at the jump. Not that 2/3 games even in mature markets are tough, but there's definitely an initial surge that seems to last 1-2 years, where even 2-5 and 5-10 games are just fish fests. Most economies just can't support whales at those stakes for very long. My room almost never spreads 2-5 anymore but for the first two years the room was open it usually ran and was like 1-2 was everywhere.

This is very true, and probably part of the reason NLHE is moving to private games nowadays. It's much easier to sustain a weekly/biweekly private game than a casino where degenerates can gamble 24/7.

Im so sick of grinding and grinding and trying to get better and grinding some more slowly building up my roll to then just get dealt cooler after cooler and lose days and weeks of hard work in minutes. All my efforts unrewarded time after time.

I spend all this time grinding up on 50nl and as soon as i move to 100 its nothing but coolers and then its back to 50 again. Flopped flush vs better flopped flush, my AA got cold 4bet vs maniac w JTo and he flops trips, AKs ran into aces, QQ on button runs into aces. Over 8 hard fought 50nl buyins gone in an hour.

Im just beyond frustrated. Im stuck for a year now with no end in sight. Every time I think its over and i start moving in the right direction it only lasts a few days and then its back to getting my head bashed in again. Im not a bad player. I just dont have it in me to keep grinding stupid 50nl to get back to this point again.

Sorry that is all. Just needed to put my thoughts down. Nobody in real life I can tell this to that understands.

You can PM if you wanna talk man

Thanks buddy, appreciate that. In better news I am doing very well live since i have a nice local room now. Online is just so hard to deal with. The level of committment and attention thats needed and no room for error. And even playing perfect the rewards are little. At least at 2/3/10 live when I win it is for meaningful amounts of money.

Man this is definitely the truth. Outside of this community people generally fall into one of two buckets. They either think we're all degenerate gamblers destined to lose our houses, or that we're either MIT level geniuses or savants that can see cards like Rainman, or just suckers at the table constantly losing to our better opponents. Like every single piece of poker media portrays it.

No one who hasn't done it realizes we're just constantly studying our asses off while playing for small edges and enduring gut wrenching swings and losing amounts of money that just doesn't happen outside of poker. I suppose stock traders might have some idea but many of the ones I know are quite delusional with regards to their abilities and actual profits.

this is generally what makes poker so popular

I like the way you put it, so true. Ive traded options and futures too but im not very good at it. I lost quite a bit of money trying that. It comes easy to some. For me poker came easy. I thought i could bring my skills from poker to trading but it didnt translate for me. So here i am struggling and struggling at poker but im actually a long term winning player. Just been a really rough run online for about a year now.

I think the ideal mental state is like you're playing Tetris. You're trying to win always and always improving but the day to day losing is fundamentally irrelevant. You know you have to die a gazillion times to get gud. It shouldn't hurt at all. Hurting is a leak in the same way feeling bad about dying in Tetris doesn't help your tetris game. Feeling good about PLAYING Tetris is the best mental state for your Tetris game.

Damn stoners driving up the bitcoin transaction fees yesterday