I guess poker never really lets you go
Background: (Optional read)
From a young age, I was enamored with the game and happily deposited, and played from the age of 18 (legal age in my residence). Despite my best efforts, I suffered from huge tilt issues where a string of bad beats (2-3) would lead to 2-3BI spews by taking high variance and -EV plays. Eventually, I found some success in switching to PLO, beating PLO 25 and soft PLO50 games, but never anything meaningful enough to make a career out of. By 20 I stopped playing altogether and moved on with my life.
Fastforward a few years, a group of my friends and I enter a casino whilst on vacation, and while they play slots, I gravitate towards some table games, blackjack and roulette. And after torching some EV (but running hot) I notice that there is a short-hand table running at the back of the venue, a table of NLHE. I approach, enquire about the buy-in, and play some 5-10. Surprisingly, everyone seems terrible at the game, a couple of guys are wasted, there only seems to be one reg who was playing some ABC poker but most of all, everyone was tilting and berating each other. With only one session of live poker under my belt before this, I didn't know if this was normal. A couple of hours pass, I'm up a buyin and my friends want to leave as we have a busy day planned the next day from the break of dawn, I wave them away and say we'll catch up later, we all had keys to the apartment. Another three hours pass and the game breaks up. I came back the next day, and the one after. Running implausibly hot during the sessions, I inadvertently amassed a poker bankroll, albeit a relatively small one. The game I was in seemed softer than 25NL that I played before when I was younger and it led me to wonder if I was simply overestimating my abilities due to variance, or if in fact, everyone there sucked at the game. What caught me off guard most of all, was after playing 15 hours of playtime, I didn't tilt at all. I felt indifferent about coolers, indifferent about cracked aces, and indifferent about running card dead for a couple of hours. Whilst overall I ran well, before when I would play, one AA>KK could be enough to trigger the spew. After the vacation I deposited some of my roll on Pokerstars and GG Poker and proceeded to realise that I am, in fact, a fish.
Mid 2023 Results Online (All 50NL)
Site 1
Site 2
Clearly a losing player, I looked for a CFP and joined the first one I was offered, it was a loose-style contract with a very favourable profit split to me as the player
Results during CFP
Immediately I hit a 60 BI downswing at 25nl, and as much as I sucked, it was a level of variance I never imagined I would hit, after this 100k hand stretch I became conditioned to expect my sets to be stacked by larger sets, or high pocket pairs to be stacked by AA. I could never have imagined it could get so bad. I had and still have many leaks, but the average player in the pool was making much larger mistakes than me(I think). Admittedly there were a few punts here or there, but 99% of the time, if I make a play, even if it is a bad play, I make it because I think it is the right play.
The tilt issues of my youth disappeared, maybe with age, maybe with success in other areas of life, maybe because I feel no need to "prove" anything to the world by winning at the poker tables.
The generous rakeback from the site allowed me to take shots at 50NL which began going well (I even took a 100nl shot), until my results took a nosedive and I hit a 25BI downswing at 50NL.
At the same time I started playing on a second site, which is an untracked site where I have played 55k hands (you can see no. hands played, but that's about it). Up about 22BI at 50NL there.
50 NL during CFP
50 NL on the tracked site
25 NL on the tracked site
Without rakeback these results are not too impressive, even with rakeback the results are not too impressive. I have a 2.2k tourney bink (was trying to play satellites to live packages, registered the wrong one and won it).
Going Forward
Due to changes in my coach's direction in life, he dissolved the CFP, I really wish him luck with his endeavors, he's a great guy. But this leaves me to fend for my own poker progression, the strategy I adapted was very exploitative by nature, an MDA strategy based on 200nl+ samples, which works best when applied with context, i.e not just blindly betting, but factoring in the board, context, positions ect.
I have spent the past couple of weeks mostly studying RIO videos, and I think my game is at it's best. My aim is to play at least 30k hands a month in 2024, balancing my work with poker, but going heavy on the poker.
My study plan:
-3B and 4B ranges Late Position (especially as SB and BB, I think most regs do not 3B enough, and I am one of them lol)
-Go through GTOWiz Cash Course (I want a strong theoretical framework, I am ok at exploits, I think im very good at categorising players, but I dont always know how to exploit them)
- Squeezing ranges vs one RFI and cold call
My approach has been to implement gtowiz ranges pre, with small adaptations once I know player types, and play exploitative post-flop, I want to strengthen my theoretical framework and more or less apply the same strategic approach. I haven't used solvers much past preflop since there are many spots where people deviate very significantly from GTO, but I will be pushing their use in 2024 with nodelocking (I have no idea how to do this at the moment).
Since my site is untracked, I will not be able to post pretty graphs (this site is the softest I have found), but I will share HH's, ideas, questions, and anything else I learn about poker or life. I can't really say my BR since technically I still class my live winnings from the start of the year as the BR, and I am significantly "over-rolled" for the stakes I play, but I want to beat all the limits, I rather not just punt at 200nl but work my way up (50nl at the moment), knowing I am beating the stakes. I will just say, Result: $ x amount (or - x amount), rather than BR amount. I will look to post weekly or once every two weeks. Good luck at the tables!
