Grinding for a pipe dream (NL50->)
Hey,
Thought I should start a blog here just to keep some documentation on my poker journey and share my experiences.
So who am I?
Nickname: AroundEven
Why AroundEven?: Back in the days I was working for a poker site in Malta. This was during the time everyone was speculating about who Isildur1 was. We had a poker player there who was Swedish and hadnÂ’t logged in for a long while but still had around 12k on his account just lying there.
I was always curious about who that person was and saw his name and started googling his name and saw a lot of speculation about him being Isildur1.
When it then was revealed that it was in fact him, I thought it was cool to use his nickname he had on that site, which was AroundEven.
Country: Sweden
Playing level: NL50
Background: Been playing poker for a long time as a recreational player, going to Vegas for month and so on, but never taken it really seriouslyÂ… until now 😀
Pipe dream: To reach 200NL and crush it there enough to one day quit my job.
——
I have had some small achievements like ending up second in the national online championship side event and winning some tournaments, but now I have decided to try to beat the levels of cash game.
I now started out on the microstakes at GG, but was getting crushed. I thought, wow, this is going to be really hard.
Then I moved over to a Swedish site and some higher levels and there I started crushing it after studying a lot, did the from the ground up course, the CORE 2.0 and read POP 1-2 and started to really analyze my leaks.
After that I moved back to GG and started playing NL25 and things were starting to go better.
My plan was always to start with NL50 but I wanted to try just a little bit at lower levels for small samples to see how it went.
The last week I have tried to play when I get the chance and have been going on a real upswing and now it is time to try NL50 with a bankroll of 30BI.
Here is my recent sessions at NL25:
I been running hot, but also been playing pretty good and having some luck when I have had bad days. Win rate is around 43bb/100 hands, so definitely a hot run!
Hope you guys will follow my journey! Would love to find more people to talk poker to!
Quick update:
It has now been a month since I started this blog and my first BR-shot on playing NL50.
I had a really hot run, and then the downswing started and I got humbled.
To be honest, all I want to do all my woke hours is to study and play poker.
It is highly frustrating to have a life where you have to go to work, and then when you come home from work you have to take care of 2 kids and its first when they sleep that you can get some hour of playing or studying. It makes me being stressed all the time, more or less haha.
However, since I am focused on learning more and getting better, that will be first priority.
Doing the Carrot Poker School course now and it gives me a lot of great tips and ideas. Things doesn't 100% "click" with me yet, but most concepts to.
In a couple of weeks I am going to get some more time to play and hopefully I can be better att application then and see if it will affect my graph.
I'll keep you guys posted. Thanks for reading!
Back on the tables today.
Been away from it for a while. Just focusing on studying and really getting the grasps of the theory if poker. I listen to so much podcasts, doing courses and reading books, but sometimes it is like it is not really clicking and now I have taken the time to go back, understand the fundamentals and really try to use it in practice.
"Playing optimal Poker" that I am reading for the second time now has really ade an impact in my way of looking at poker. I think it is so important to not rush through these books, but really take the time to understand, think by yourself and grasping all the concepts and trying to apply the them to real life poker situations.
I've also been trying to think more exploitable. And bringing that to the tables today has really helped my game.
What I also have been doing is switching over to Rush & Cash, instead of regular tables. It was really hard in the beginning, but now it is starting to feel "normal".
During the session today I really found some interesting spots where I could exploit my opponents, and one thing that really worked seems to follow the same pattern and always working. That is crazy how profitable it can be to find a spot where the opponents almost always makes mistakes and you know that you will profit from them.
I have vacation now, so played a tough session for 4-5 hours on NL25, and here is the result (Feels a little bit like it is starting to turn around now):
Hey,
I think I will give up playing for a while now. Need a longer break and more studying.
However, I just noticed something really cool that I needed to share with you.
ChatGPT can read your hand histories, help you analyze your sessions and also give improvements tips on what leaks or spots to work on.
It can give you examples of where you did polarization error, where you should’ve folded and other things.
Kind of amazed actually. Definitely will investigate it more in the future and play around with it.
It also works great to ask theoretical questions and explaining or discussing hands and so on. Really cool.
