NJ college kid's attempt to make it to high stakes
I'm a 19yo college student at Rutgers, who loves poker. I'm a math and computer science double major and just transferred from Fordham. I learned about journaling in my second semester and the positive mental health effects it has, so I started doing it for the gym and it helped me, so now I want to do it for poker. I'm a sophomore in college right now, but a semester ahead because of college credit obtained in high school. I mainly started playing poker at the end of my senior year of high school with my friends. In my stats class, we would play on Pokernow for play money, and eventually played home games. After AP tests were done, our teacher had to be absent for 2 weeks so we started playing for real money in class too lol. Basically that whole summer I spent playing home games every other day, and into the start of college, I would come back home every few weekends for more home games.
Eventually, my mom got me a poker table, and that whole winter break I spent playing poker 4-6 hours a day with my friends. Around that time I started playing online poker at school, mostly on ACR since in NY that's where the most volume is. I remember Jlittle did a thing where he made his site free and I binged his cash game course and learned a lot from where I was. I basically never bluffed until I learned from that course, and I think it serves as a pretty good starting point for cash games. My bankroll started from literally zero, the first home game I played I didn't even have the money with me, and basically spun it up from there. It sits at around $1,200, and that's with being stiffed for around ~400, but the people that I'm playing with are so bad that I really didn't care that much. If they paid me 50% of what they owed I was still printing.
For online I depo'd 200 into Acr around February of this year after playing a decent amount of 2nl first. I went from 5nl - 25nl in around 2-3 months and turned the 200 into 1k online. So technically at that point, my br was around 2k. However, I ran into some bad variance at 25nl Zoom where I ran around ~25 buy-ins below all in ev, and that basically sent me back down to $200. At that point, it was near the end of the school year in May, so I took out the $200 because I knew I was transferring schools, and no longer would have a NY address, even though I really didn't in the first place. ACR I know asks for verification if you withdraw too much so I figured I'd play it safe.
This summer, I didn't play that much poker. I had a little MTT arc where I was break even ish, and ran into some bad variance there because the one tournament where I ran deep, which was like a 4.40 1k, ACR had to do some server maintenance so I had to take an icm chop on the ft with like a 2-1 chip lead. The score didn't even register in my tracker or shark scope, which was like $120. I played a pretty decent amount on coin poker, which I already played on previously, and that was the only actual site that was available to me in NJ. However, I don't really like the ante format and don't want to pay the money required to learn it. Especially since coinpoker traffic isn't high and even though there was an ad campaign recently, still is really reg heavy. Basically, 2-3 people would play every table from 10nl - 200nl and win the leaderboard. Shout out S0nofFinches.
That leads me to today and my plan for my future of poker. Right now in NJ the next best option is either risk it with ACR, which I probably can't do now making this thread lmao, pay like 200 ish dollars to buy ranges and solves to learn ante cash games and play on coin poker, or go even less unregulated into app and clubgg games. I am choosing the last part, since like it seems like the only way for me right now. I already am good enough at 6max and 9max to comfortably beat these games at my stakes. Which is 20nl and 40nl. Also at Rutgers, I've been making friends for home games. I know already of 2 but they are running super small stakes like .10/.20, which for a home game is super small. My roommate is rushing a frat, and they run games, but I think they only allow brothers to play in them. So maybe he can get me into some, but he also asked if I can teach home to play, so maybe ill do a cfp thing with him. Also the day I turn 21 I'm playing on wsop and stars but that's a given.
When it comes to bankroll, I usually did 20bi to take a shot at the next stake-up. I might be more nitty with that right now online because getting money in and out of these apps is pretty annoying. I am using poker bros and clubgg. Still deciding if playing in the emulator games is worth it, or if I should just play Pokerbros only on my phone. I am staying at 4-6 tables, even though 12 tabling has worked for me pretty well in the past. I want to play my A game because there will be less variance that way.
Some of you may recognize me because I used to be in swerbs22 study group. If that is still open to join, I recommend for you guys to, I just never got anything out of it. Mostly because of the hours I'm awake and don't enjoy collaborating that much. A lot of people there were Euros, shout out DeeKayBee(really nice guy), so I would never be awake for study sessions because I would play poker till 6am est. Also onepunchpanda(don't know if he is on 2+2) was always open to helping which was cool since he was at like 100nl-200nl on ACR which is a pretty tough pool.
Another reason I'm making this post is to accurately track my bankroll because sometimes I get lazy with that. I'm probably going to do Sunday night posts, and see how to track my Pokerbros hands, and see if I can get them into hand2note. If I can I will post that graph, and if I can't then I will post an excel sheet. I mostly use GTO+, and do my own MDA with math that I find to study. Also, I watch Ceegee Poker (who plays the highest stakes 6max on twitch?), and he has a very educational style which means I learn a lot from matching him. Basically, him and Weazel_1991 taught me how to play bomb pots correctly which is a mainstay on these app games. Hope to able to play a lot since the only hard classes I'm taking is physics 2 and Linear Algebra. I basically have to find out in this next year if I can climb stakes since I might(fingers crossed) have an internship with a pretty good quant firm this summer. From everyone that I've heard aka makepokersimple and just other people's stories, if I don't rise up far in stakes within 2 years, I would just be better off working a regular job.
