1 year into poker summary from NL10 to NL200 on ACR

Started taking poker seriously last summer. Had only played recreationally at home games and a little online previously. Bought GTO Wizard and spent a lot of time studying. If I took a big hit to the bankroll or lost it, I would take a few weeks off only studying and then start playing again. I thought the strategies of the solver were really interesting to learn so I enjoyed that part a lot. Also helps to maybe take an edible or two before learning, makes it more interesting. It sounds like horrible advice but playing high also illuminated a couple deficiencies in my game and helped me to think about the game from a different perspective.

The year started at 10NL Blitz with very little knowledge. I honestly don't remember a ton about this time. I would basically only play for a few weeks and then only study for a few weeks and back and forth. I was definitely overconfident in my knowledge of the game at this point though. I didn't realize it, but now looking back, my winrate was 3.8BB/100 over 80k hands there.

Went to 25NL regular tables for a while, had very little success. I made a lot of tilt calls and general mistakes during this time. I had no real bankroll yet and even lost my bankroll once at 25NL, but grinding out 10NL sounded like a waste of time. I was convinced I was a winner at this time, but looking back, I very likely wasn't. Things started to go well when the 25NL Blitz game started running on ACR. Finally made some money there to build up the roll. TheBeast and rakeback on ACR are very nice for building it up. Up until 200NL, the rewards usually accounted for about half of what I was up.

Thanks to that, I was able to move up to 50NL. That's where my game really improved as a result of improving my study methods and in-game thought process. I had thought I won pretty consistently at 50NL but going back and looking at the results, I actually struggled for a little while. I lost at an insane -10BB/100 over the first 39k hands.

I now remember that the bankroll only survived because I went down from 50NL regular tables to 25NL Blitz and went on a huge sun-run where I made 23 buy-ins in one day. Went back up to 50NL after and started feeling better and better in-game as my roll built as well. Won at about 8BB over 16k hands there before moving up to 100NL which seems aggressive, but I can't remember what the bankroll was. I started out very strong at 100NL winning 27 buy-ins and moved to 200NL Blitz. I won about 5 buy-ins there before losing about 7 buy-ins. I moved down to 100NL after this and went on a big downswing. I got a job and decided to quit playing.

Well, got bored a couple weeks later and played a couple hours of $200NL Blitz where I made $1k. Same thing happened the next night, so I got back into poker. Since then, I am up 23 buy-ins at 200NL. It seems like a crazy amount of money to play for, but I've basically adjusted to it. My mental game is stronger now and I feel very confident in my game, but, at the same time, that's easy to say during an upswing.

It does feel crazy to play for this amount of money, but I think I've pretty much adjusted to it. I would hope to play in the 200NL Blitz pool for a while, but I could also easily go on a downswing and have to head back to 100NL. However, I do feel like I can easily beat this pool. Call it crazy ego but I do think I am one of the best players in the pool, maybe the best. We'll have to see what happens.

Last thing, here is the biggest pot I have played which was today. It's my favorite hand.