The journey of a noob

hi 2+2, I'm Yewth, 27 years old dude from Canada. I want to make this thread to share the ups and downs of the journey, hopefully I will get good results and inspire some. I'm also posting to keep myself accountable, apparently when you say publicly you'll do something your chances of actually following through are exponentially better, so this thread is also for myself.

I'll start by sharing my background and then will proceed with my goals.

Background

I started playing in the beginning of 2019. I discovered poker through Twitch, I stumbled on Matt Staples stream and he was talking with chat about how he saw poker as a competitive video game but instead of winning useless ranks or competitive points (mmr) that will not amount to anything for most people, in poker you win money.

This very resonated with me since I was top 30 NA in Diablo 3 and master (Top 1.25%) in Teamfight Tactics. And I kinda always thought in the back of my mind that being top 1% in anything else like cooking, trading, coding or whatever would have been a lot more useful but these things didn't interest me.

But poker did. A lot.

When I understood you could improve at the game and beat others for money. I really liked the idea.

So I got started.

I bought a subscription to a poker training site and deposited 500$ split into 3 poker sites. And I hit the micro-stakes MTT tables.

Fast forward 2.5 years later and here are my results.

Needless to say it's not really good, basically breakeven/losing player over 2000 Mtts with an ABI of $4.5... yikes!

What happened?

Poker is a game for money, so the average skill level is higher than a free to play video game. I knew that but still couldn't get myself to work on my game outside of the tables. I barely studied anything, even tho I knew I had to if I wanted to improve. I'm guessing my average study time was probably 1h a week. And my method was terrible, I would study for like 20h in 1 week and then not study at all for the other 19 weeks. Obviously this makes my study time a lot less effective since I wasn't taking much breaks etc. I was also tilting a lot and didn't much like MTTs but played them anyways because 2 of my friends were MTT players.

All of that combined and you have: A losing player.

So what now?

Well as you can see I said I started playing in 2019 for 2.5 years. This brings us to 2021-2022, we are now 2-3 years later.

I won't bore you with the details but in 2019-2021 my life was a mess (Covid didn't help) and I wasn't in a great place mentally and financially.

Now I am, everything is completely different in a very good way and I'm ready to take on the challenge.

What's the plan?

First of, I'm switching to Cash Games. I simply don't have the time to play 8-10h sessions anymore. It's not doable for me.

I'm going to start at PokerStars Zoom NL5. I don't see the point of playing higher, my logic is that if I can't beat NL5z I can't beat NL10-25-50z.

I'm aware that I suck at this game, and I will go back to mastering the basics. I'm not making this thread to flex how good I am, I'm well aware that I'm bad and I welcome the constructive feedback.

My goal for now would be to beat NL5z for 6+bb/100 over 100k hands.

Here is what I will be focusing on to achieve that goal:

• Max 1h30 session, can do multiple sessions but I need a 2h break minimum between them.
  
• Study minimum 45 minutes a day (RIO videos)
  
• Review 5 hands per day on PT4
  

So the whole plan is to set habits that are sustainable, my mind really wants to set the goal of studying 2h a day and play 5k hands a day right now, but it's that exact approach I used in my MTT era and it led to quick demotivation, burnout and constantly playing C game. Building a new habit is hard for our brain, so I really want to start small and make sure I don't quit. The goal is to increase study time and play time in maybe 3-6 months.

So I already played a couple sessions, here are the results so far:

It's a good start, obviously 3.7k hands means nothing. But I'm already adjusting to the pool, lots of nits so I tend to open wider than the ranges I have and I also fold a lot post flop since they just don't really bluff.

Will update at 10k hands and post 1-2 hands per update.

Thanks for reading and good variance to you, cheers!