Hey guys, I decided I'm going to start a new blog.
I'm 34 years old, from Belgium but have been living in Budapest, Hung
Hey guys, I decided I'm going to start a new blog.
I'm 34 years old, from Belgium but have been living in Budapest, Hungary for the past 6 years. I used to play highstakes spins but have been playing PLO since 2022.
I've been playing poker professionally since 2016, so it's my 9th year being a pro now. As expected in this profession, I've had to go through several hurdles and swings. And tbh basically every year since I've started I've took at least 3 months off the year from poker. My longest break was actually in 2021, where I took a full year off from grinding. Poker has been a rollercoaster, and taught me a lot of life lessons. And I wish to share all this with you.
The exception to this pattern of taking long breaks from poker has been these past 12 months. I'm happy to say that in the past 12 months I haven't took any long (over a couple weeks long) breaks from poker. I attribute one of the biggest reasons for this to my current girlfriend, who brings me a lot of balance in life, love and support.
Goals, logistics and the future:
This year's poker goals:
- I want to perfect 12-tabling and possibly 15 table: Adding more tables is a skill and one that anyone can work on. At 12 tables I find a slight lack of performance and it gets hard to keep up with the action but if I keep practicing I'm sure it will get better. Perhaps I could move up to 15 tables. Although perhaps if I move up higher there won't be enough tables running and there wouldn't be much point in playing more tables.
- I want to move up to PLO1k: By the end of this year I'd like to at least take a shot PLO1k. TBH according to some bankroll calculators using the Kelly criterion I may already have the required roll. However as a human I'd like to be a bit less risky, I'm not really in any rush.
Long-term poker goals:
- I want to be a regular in PLO2k+ games: Quite a vague goal, and how I want to move is quite questionable for now. Currently I'd be more than happy if I could play 10/20 as my main stake, but perhaps in the future that would change. Honestly I'm quite focused on reaching PLO2k and then after that it's kind of see where things take us. Perhaps I'd want to keep moving higher, perhaps I'd want to learn a new game such as 5-card or heads up, perhaps I'd want to start coaching again, perhaps I'd want to play live, perhaps I'd want to play on multiple sites rather than only GG. All I know is until I'm playing 10/20+ all of these are kind of just vague ideas of future possibilities.
Tbh poker wise there aren't so many other goals. I have a lot of systems in place to reach these goals, and I guess later in the blog I could explain some of these systems. But my actual goals are not too defined and as the journey continues, some of them are prone to change.
Why I started this blog:
Firstly I enjoy writing. Writing is a form of self-expression and as an introvert I find writing to be one of best forms of it. I'd like to share my poker journey.
It's also about my motivation for poker. If you read my blog, you'll notice that I'm not motivated much by money unless it's simply to get out of a hole. I've done some soul-searching and looked for what truly motivates me. And I've found that my biggest motivation is actually social in addition to the learning aspect.
I love to grow and learn. And this is one of the reasons I chose PLO as my main game. It's such a complex game where I feel I could study it for a lifetime and still find new things in the game.
But loving to learn is not enough. I'm a human with social needs. I got some social outlets. I got my lovely significant other, I got a dog, I got a few good friends I communicate with regularly. But it could be more. This is one of the reasons I started my study group actually. Not only to study poker, but to make studying more fun with others, to learn together with others and share our combined knowledge, combining 2 of my biggest motivations. But I still see there could be more. This is one of my reasons to start this blog now, to share the journey.
In addition it is to set myself up for better opportunities in the future. If i want to play live poker more, perhaps putting my name out there could get me some invites, or perhaps to some apps (I am NOT interested in playing on apps currently). Perhaps I want to start coaching in the future and having a blog could help get some recognition. Regardless, I'm sure until I'm playing PLO2k+ I wouldn't want to do any coaching. If I wanted to coach, I'd want to prove not only to others but also to myself that I'm a solid top reg and in my mind this requires me to be at least beating PLO2k online.
Let's start the blog off with a summary of last month, May 2024.
It was my first month shotting some 500 and it went very well. The volume was quite low, however I was game selecting a bit harder than usual considering it was my first time shotting 500. Also during such a big upswing I kind of lost a bit of motivation to grind. Actually it was my best month in PLO I had so far. My previous best was $11k, so after I hit that amount I kind of wanted to chill a bit. Not exactly the best mindset, but I kind of wanted to book my best month in PLO fearing the upswing may come to an end. Which it kind of did as you will see later this month is a lot tougher.
May 2024: GG PLO200 and PLO500
Hands played: 28782
Hours played: 48
Hands per Hour: 600
Hours studied: 108
Hours worked: 156
Net Won: $8560
Net won + RB: $13,000
Net Won $/hour: $270
EV: $5792
EV+RB: $10,292
EV $/hour: $214
By far my highest $/hour, and I'm sure I couldn't sustain this at PLO500 but I can't complain.
Anyways in my next few posts I'd like to give a bit of background on my poker history, I'll be uploading one post a day until we are up to date. After that, not sure how often I'll update. Definitely monthly updates, but more than that not sure yet. We'll see how much time I have for this.
I think you mean how much I study?
I study a lot, in fact this year I have spent more time studying than grinding. Almost 2/3 of my time have gone to studying and not grinding this year. Studying is very important to me and I see it as a huge form of growth and improvement, however I'm not proud of the fact that I haven't grinded much and I've made some changes in my study routine to put in more hours. I think studying more than you grind is simply too much. Part of the reason why I spent so much time studying was as I said, a result of me spending many hours in spreadsheets, which is in fact not so productive. With my new study routine, I'll have much less spreadsheets to take care of and more focus on deep work and learning.
Regarding methods of study. I like to use monker, lock some nodes based on data or personal assumptions, and then train it using PLO trainer custom sims, I can do quite a bit of training sometimes on various spots sometimes pausing to look deeper into how ranges are constructed.
I'll occasionally watch some training videos, although I don't think that's too useful.
I'll attend my study group meetings 3x a week.
I'll train preflop a bit quite often, maybe only like 15 min/day.
I'll mark some hands I play and quickly review them in GTO. If it's particularly interesting I might run a monker sim.
Hope this answer helps.
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This month I've been running particularly bad. I've never run so bad in PLO.
If we look at my overall graph on GG we a relatively steady climb up with the yellow line (that includes 47% rakeback):
The past 70,000 hands have been quite horrific.
Despite this, my mental feels quite good. I have many other things in life to look forward to and when I judge my own play and performance, I'm overall quite happy. I'm being put in a lot of tough spots and I feel this is making me a much better player. I'm confident this will come to an end soon. However my confidence is lower and I realized I need to set up a few "rules". These rules should help me to stick to my routines, stay off autopilot, and get my confidence back.
Ecology rules:
1. I will play a maximum of 9 tables! I notice that when I play more than 9 tables I start to lose focus, miss some actions and play worse. It's also harder to table select when you constantly have to make a poker decision.
2. I will start by opening up as many tables of PLO200 as I can. Only after that will I look at PLO500 tables and sit into the softest ones! For now I think I should mainly be playing PLO200, after some confidence and roll comes back I'll tackle 500 again as my main stake.
3. Never play any heads up! My heads up winrate is just atrocious, not worth it to play heads up simply to try and get more leaderboard points. The fact is on GG the rake at heads up is way too high, maybe if I specialized in heads up I could beat it, but as a short-handed specialist, it feels like every time I play heads up I burn money.
4. Game selection is important! Pretty general rule, although this is especially important for when I do decide to sit in 500 tables.
5. Never play longer than 3 hours long! After this period of time, my focus dwindles. I need to take a break before resuming the grind.
The 5 core rules or grinding (inspired from Phil Galfond's 5 sticky notes):
1. Always ask WHY!!! Why is he taking this action? Why am I taking this action. Poker is story-telling. Don't autopilot or simply play according to "theory".
2. Patience, some pots are not mine! Don't think about how I can win this pot; think about how I can make the most money! Sometimes that means conceding the pot.
3. Keep it simple! If I have a read, and someone takes an action that is different from my read, don't overadjust!
4. Discipline and Power! This means sticking to our guns. Following through with our plan if we know it is +EV, and making the disciplined folds (or calls/raises)!
5. No protection! People overvalue protection and tend to fast play too much with a merged range. A weak hand on the Flop or Turn is unlikely to become super strong on the turn or river later on.
Despair and facing reality
I'm in the midst of the worst downswing of my PLO career and probably my entire poker career ever.
Here are the results so far this month. It's hard to post results like this in public but hey we gotta be real sometimes:
After this doomswitch, I'm now not winning any money for about 150k or so hands (after rakeback), or basically since September I've barely made any money at all (though I'm running a good $13k under EV since then).
Poker has a funny way of showing you the truth. It has a funny way of making you face reality.
I went into this month full of confidence, ending November nicely, and thinking I would hop into the Rush games and just crush from the get-go, looking forward to making lots of rakeback money and pushing the volume. Thinking December would be filled with fish just donating me their money. The reality has been completely different. My face got smashed by the facts and here I am facing the reality, the reality that I'm not as good as I thought I was, that I still have a ton of work to do, that I have no control over the results...
I'm not as good at multitabling as I thought I was
I thought one of my strengths was multitabling. Coming from a background of 9 tabling spin and gos, I figured one of my strengths in PLO could be to play a lot of tables and just pump out the volume. Being able to play a solid ABC game while playing a lot of tables, making good money from rakeback and still beating the games.
It doesn't seem to be the case in PLO. PLO is a completely different beast. The money is more real, I can't just punt off a stack and say "ok let's grind the next spin", every decision matters here. I've realized now that in cash games, trying to be a volume grinder simply isn't the solution to moving up the fastest or making good money.
I've been enjoying this blog post by Mobius Poker: https://www.mobiuspoker.com/blog/the-mon... (and many of his blog posts are great IMO. And I thought maybe I could be different. Maybe I can be one of the volume guys who can actually earn more through volume than through "game selecting and playing with max focus on each table". Well it turns out, this most likely isn't the case.
Certainly in my R&C adventures I ran quite terrible, but I also made my fair share of mistakes. Simply autopiloting, making decisions too quickly, falling into bad habits that are easy to repeat. It's time to step away from R&C and get back to the reg tables. I've realized my edge doesn't come from multitabling, but from playing it smart, thinking through decisions, and taking advantage of other players and creating dynamics with them. This is all stuff that is much harder to do in RnC. The truth is, in RnC I could very well be a loser (maybe if I 2 tabled and paid as much attention to detail as I did in reg tables, I could be a winner). Maybe I didn't exploit hard enough or make the correct adjustments against the player pool, maybe I made some bad river calls vs nits, it's hard to say. One thing is for sure though, I'm a proven winner in the reg tables even at PLO500, and basically every coach recommends to play reg tables if you want to move up stakes fast and not get caught in the "fast fold trap". Well, I guess that's what I'll do then.
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I've been working hard, but I've still got loads of work to do.
I've been working with monkersolver now for almost a year. It was at the start of this year when I started to use it. I hadn't used any solvers in PLO until this year. All I touched were the typical things most people do, some GTO libraries such as PLO trainer, or Flophero, or Vision. But starting to use monker was completely new to me earlier. I had a lot of experience with solvers from spins, but I never quite used them much in PLO. Partly because PLO is much harder to solve, and takes so much longer, and it doesn't seem necessary when everyone else plays so poorly and far from equilibrium. But I can say now, it's been a game-changer. After using monker for almost a year, I'm more familiar with what I'm looking for, and am not wasting as much time with it as I once was. I'm no longer only looking at "basic" flop stuff, but looking into more interesting details. There's always something more to find in solver land. It's fun.
I've still got so much to improve. I do some training by myself, or with study buddies and I see all the mistakes I make. I see all these concepts I don't understand quite yet. This month, I've been putting in a good amount of time into the solver. Been studying with my study group a bunch. Been studying a bunch of stuff on my own personal time too. My strategy continues to evolve and develop at a rapid pace. I find myself in spots I studied and implementing something unorthodox, something the player pool isn't accustomed to. It gives me some confidence, simply executing my plan. And realizing spots where people deviate hard to allow me to take advantage of that.
It's hard to stay confident
It all seems like doom and gloom when your results are so bad. It's hard not to go into a session simply expecting the worst. But you can't let that happen. Your thoughts are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I go into a session just dreading it and believing I'm going to lose big, well that type of thought process spells the end. You have to find confidence.
Despite the terrible results this month. The effort and work I put into my study, provides me with confidence. Knowing that there's many parts of the game-tree where I have an edge over the rest of the player pool. Another thing that gives me confidence is going back to the reg tables. Another thing that gives me confidence is looking at variance calculators, and seeing that once or twice every 2 million hands or so, a 5-6bb winner (which is my winrate post-RB) is meant to have a 50buy-in downswing. Another thing that gives me confidence is looking at my results for the year, and remembering that I'm one of the biggest winners at midstakes GG this year.
I work work work work work, the result aren't here, but I got better.
I just need to keep working and getting better.
The results will eventually come.
Have faith.
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Regarding the blog, don't quite enjoy the "weekly updates format". Rather just keep it kinda spontaneous. Maybe monthly or bi-monthly results updates. Maybe some random update just to share some thoughts regarding general poker, or mindset, or IDK something poker related I guess.
Don't think I'll be posting hands here anymore either.
Not that I feel like I'm giving away any info or anything. It's honestly just kinda a waste of time to look through my database to find a few hands I wanna post on this blog. Would rather use that time for something else.
Anyways, Christmas is coming up. Planning on enjoying that a bit. But otherwise just grind and study and keep working. Hope things can start to turn around a bit. Next post will prolly be an end of year update and plans/goals for 2025.
