grinders future outlook
High-stakes is like just a dream few people succeed getting into , the variance will mostly crush you at around nl2k which happened to me and therefore I sort of gave up on something which seemed rather fueled by illusion rather than reality.
Realizing this was one of the important turning points of my career where I came more aware on the EV of the seat I sit at rather than trying to "battle" at whatever the game is.
In poker you pay a fee called the rake. This means if you are not having a very significant edge over your opponent you are losing money playing that game.
You might perceive yourself very high but if you run in your game hundreds of buy-ins below your EV would you view yourself the same?
I encountered a period like this and I did also look back into hands played in the past judging them terribly misplayed.
My favourite game is a game of headsup with an OMC who folds as many of his buttons as possible.
We can play plo , plo5 or holdem and it still remains my favorite game.
You get old.
You grow a bit of a beer belly.
You get a bit banned from the 2+2s.
But your still the same guy you want to give something back.
You won a lot of money.
I won a lot of money.
Its a great thing.
I only won half a million max over this time and most of it is gone already.
Life is expensive.
Life is expensive.
Being stuck and being just not interested in are two different things.
If you want to crush you need to have good habits and study 2-3 hrs every day. I did not do it which is why I did not get where I wanted at that time.
Nowadays I think playing nl50 on a chinese app against some idiot headsup can be fun. Playing stars nl1k in a super tough online line-up waiting for some 15/30 nitt fish to show up eventually is not like really fun , its rather low EV and stressful .
Take a look at how much the guys who sit at stars have made from that site on average in recent years.
Have a look at the GG winners and winrates at up to 1k.
There is few big winners but the rest made hardly anything when guys with same skill set who just game select to sit some 2/5 ring somewhere or play chinese app nl100 make more money than majority of those guys who want to battle and become the best.
This year zoom 200.
Pure variance.
All samples below several hundreds thousands of hands are just variance.
This game is a lottery and the only way to really to fight it is to try to play games where you are the best player and aim at having a massive winrate.
zoom200 is not game like that but some live 2/5 ring somewhere might be.
The live-poker thing is obviously just money perspective.
One can make some friends there but its not like something I would consider appealing to go to some casino. See guys who go there with a backpack and use some plastic turtle as a chip holder.
Its like the online table people you don't really want to speak to suddenly are in front of your face.
Then you need to listen to fish telling of how much they win etc. Listen to fish analyze hands and you can just troll them and have to but it gets kinda boring.
Playing live it makes a person more social and more adaptable like you need to cater more for the needs and interests of other people unless you want to sit there hiding behind a hoodie on your phone headphones on. I do see that too.
I am able to speak to randoms and have those uninteresting conversations of hands and losses/winnings etc. jackpots. but honestly it depresses me and just feels very silly.
I'm an introvert primarily enjoy being alone or with my gf. Therefore I'm lucky with this job but there is also many other jobs which are nice. As long as not working customer service its all good.
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There is a contradiction in your rhetoric of the A7 play.
You mention that you would fold every hand weaker than an ace to villains bet OTR, implying that the spot is massively underbluffed. I think that is a correct observation.
If that is true, then why do we check this hand down to the river? Since we induce little value from bluffs, we miss out on a potential valuebet on the flop but especially the turn. So the only benefit of a double check is pot control in this case at the cost of missing
But you analysis is also on point accurate.
Thx for free coaching.
yo dude make me a cheeseburger.
Silly hand.
My biggest spew in a while.
Given his timings and overall line I knew by very big certainty that he beats me with a one pair Ace and there is not much 2p in his range.
So I took it and turn to bluff. In theory this is just massive blunder as it should have ton of showdown value and be at upper end of showdown range bluffing it being silly.
In theory you get to bluff bit of 78s and some stuff like that. He kinda guessed whats happening and called me off.
Sometimes my brain goes to a mode of doing something stupid. It is not tilt. Its different. Its like trying to get some extra edge or trying to exploit with something funky.
Guess its part of the game. A4s play would not happen to me though.
Its about 12 years when I started playing.
First year or two went to play nl50zoom. Played like 1M hands and broke even. Bonuses were good at the time so the rb was still good for sure.
I didn't study anything really. Solvers did not exist. I posted hands to forums and friends. Watched some gurus playing and it was like not comprehensible of how like nl200 regs played when we were nl50 level.
Then only after read stuff like "mental game of poker" and "theory of poker" which both are good books I start win slowly.
Then moved to nl100 and surprisingly it was much easier to win than nl50. I never beat nl50. It must be the rake.
I think nowadays those games are having such a high rake and there's less fish and more regs and you need to do some whatsoever solver work. So to really beat the stakes now... Its probably harder than what it was but it was not easy.
Environment was just so different, nowadays its all these coaches selling their products when back in day it was like regs being friends and studying together to get better.
Everyone was posting hands like beep beep beep beep ... then u studied them... nowadays its like as if everything would be like be a big secret , lol
Online poker is just dead / alive that is the reality.
What GG has done to it has been just tremendous harm as well.
Recs and regs just raking them money on a site with hardly beatable rake.
Sit in the chinese app and wait for someone worse than you to join you in multiple tables.
Play at a casino ring game.
Today I turned 30 years old.
Its the weekend should be bit better games than on average.
Yesterday was blood in da streets and apps also lost like 800 bucks .
I cant have more than maybe 1-2bb winrate on those day time zoom pools regs playing regs. Machines vs Machines. Bots vs Bots .
...
To win in 2024 :
you need to A) grind at night games barely run other hours
B) study a bit I haven't studied much in many years but I should
C) Have a good routine and stable personal life
D) Bumhunt
E) Never ever ever ever gonu give up
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The value has just decreased from what it was there is no doubt.
I'm just killing time before retiring to live poker fully.
Today I turned 30 years old.
Its the weekend should be bit better games than on average.
Yesterday was blood in da streets and apps also lost like 800 bucks .
I cant have more than maybe 1-2bb winrate on those day time zoom pools regs playing regs. Machines vs Machines. Bots vs Bots .
...
To win in 2024 :
you need to A) grind at night games barely run other hours
B) study a bit I haven't studied much in many years but I should
C) Have a good routine and sta
I feel exactly the same, online poker is not the same as it was years ago, I can’t prove or anything but sometimes i feel like im playing against machines, zoom games are tough but i improved like a lot playing it
I believe it’s hard mainly because we’re not getting enough value with our good hands and need to make less to none mistakes, just like a robot, when winrate is too low crazy swings can happen, coolers, badbeats are more painful
Live poker is great idea but games are too slow, i thought about that too, it’s good for stable, consistent income but it won’t promise like to become next Linus and blow up and get millionaire
im pretty sure i could win at micro with a double digit winrate would i want to.
someone twice as good as me could have like 6bb on the zoom 200 in sample of 1M hands. But its not so many guys in the world who could do that but guys who could have double digit micro wr are many.
im pretty sure i could win at micro with a double digit winrate would i want to.
someone twice as good as me could have like 6bb on the zoom 200 in sample of 1M hands. But its not so many guys in the world who could do that but guys who could have double digit micro wr are many.
micro is the stake where still possible to do that yeah but you need to be super super consistent with your strategy to do that over 1M hands, we're not robots and robots will be always above leaderboards only because they're super consistent
well i did beat mid-stakes (avg stake was nl200 played a bunch of hands above it and some below) for 5ev bb on that graph its posted for 1M hands. Where I ran something like 170 buy - ins below EV. Zoom pools are so much lower vpips that
before it i always played zoom averaging to maybe 2bb /100 at 200zoom and about same at 500zoom and about double at 100zoom. But whatever.
coaches always post these graphs of like 150k hands and winning for 10bb/100 , lol .
also if ur not really grinding for a living like playing big volume its easy to have a nice graph when u never need to play when ur tired etc. just play 300 hands a day x 6 times a week x 24 months = 172800 hands of poker played always amazingly well should give a really nice advert graph
2023 played 20% live poker 80% traditional sites
2024 apps 30% of time volume , online 30% of time , livepoker 30% of time volume, online normal sites getting tougher significantly some sites bot infusions , partypoker cutting rb, stars zoom pools filling up with new grinders who quit mtt bcz no longer beating the variance (being lucky).
Moving forward its easy to say which one I will drop out.
To me and to most regs this has never been about getting rich but about surviving.
Still had I not always moved from one thing that started to suck to another thing and having also done bit of crypto and bit of swing-trading on side I would be near broke. 2022 I experienced it almost already.
This is also a story how a 5bb winrate is not enough. You want a 7bb+ winrate. Otherwise your still on mercy of variance wiping you out if you depend on poker.
I don't want an all-in where I put 1000 usd with AK against someones QQ sooner or later you will have a stretch where all those flips go wrong for like hundreds of buy-ins. If you really crush like 5bb its then a 500k hands breaking even stretch. If you are like 3bb winner its a 500k hands losing stretch.
High-stakes player or a live-poker player will never get anywhere close to seeing their real variance . This is why you want to focus on games where you can max your winrate.
This is some live game 2/5 , 5/T whatever or app headsup game vs fish.
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Amazing to think there is guys who play nl200 on a stake and some people combined trust them for over 30000 usd. I don't get it how it can be +ev to stake people who for some reason cant build their own bankroll how big of % just runs away with the money or just punts it away and aren't really +ev when they start run bad. Maybe it is just charity to give them money. Give something back for the community. Lol .
Past years starting september stars zoom 500 really woke up and it didn't matter if you played good or **** you could win consistently like 20k from that pool between the months of september and end of january combined with some regular table clicking elsewhere.
These days its just regs clickign rngs with one another thinking if their hand is still worth a blockbet on river and pools run less and less.
GG rake is not worth paying and wpn and ipoker particularly are just sites filled with bots.
So for Holdem mid-stakes online I dare to announce its game over.
It was a fun 10 years.
Very interesting read and enlightening, lately i was feeling the same, like playing session for 1-2h nothing happens and then boom QQ vs AK or in worse case your AK runs into AA/KK, low winrate produces high variance which is unbearable even for zoom where high volume is possible right? As you mentioned 500k hand stretch
What do you think if old zoom 500 legends like redbaron played nowadays lets say zoom 200 how would they do?
he played nosebleed high stakes and was like best of his time there nl500 is mid-stakes
sure he would win a lot as long as there is some fish
have an signicant edge vs regs = boosts ur winrate
having fish=having a winrate
no fish = hard to have a winrate
tight fish = low winrates
I played over 10 years and this was first time of running hundreds of buy-ins below EV.
Before this I had a lower winrate but it felt like being a waaay easier game to me.
This shows how much the bottom run can impact you and how long it can really last.
All the card distribution indicators of how good i hit flushes and sets and whatever the Pokertracker shows were at about worst possible on this 1M hands sample as well.
So its ironic to have evolved to be at the top of my game yet have a run like this.
But it is not like something I care a lot about .
There just comes a point of feeling numb when you have again a 10 buy-ins below EV day (again and again and again).
And it makes me ask myself why not play games where you have less of these all-ins and more just situations where you pick up dead money in way or another (over7ebb games) or games where you put money as significant favourite in more often than these online games.
This + the reason of the pools just dieing is reason to move to play live etc.
Headsup on apps graph. Played regs also a lot..
Made a million .
Just not an usd million.
Maybe rupiah or peso million.
Easy game way lower variance than ring ****
If i would be an MTT pro I would filter out to play only max highest max 150 player fields.
Everything above it means you are just at mercy of variance pure.
You need to bink stuff or you will have a breakeven year.
Lol.
Its the scariest riskiest format ever to put yourself into.
How many flips in a row you need to win to get to top 10% in a field of 3750 players?
How many flips more you need to win to be there the top 4 who win real money?
If you run bad you will lose every all-in before you are anywhere close to top 10% and this can go for crazy volumes of MTTs
Being an MTT pro is like same as buying tickets of keno / lotto for volume of 50k when you happen to know 1 number that will surely come. If you dont bink u lost the 50k with hours of max pain sit in pc.
Only time I went broke was 12 years ago when i played MTTs.
Obviously no one knew how to play MTTs I beat those fields up to like 50 usd without any prior poker experience but freerolls made like 10k euros in 6 months.
Then the binking stopped (and I had obviously increased my initial abi from like 5 and 10 to somewhere around 30)
I lost 9k.
Had a ticket to Thailand went there just backpacking for a month.
1000 euros was plenty of money at the time.
I lived nicely.
MTT guys are always broke and need a Stake and Coach - they are the biggest Steaks to their coaches real Rib Eye steaks, they keep grinding grinding if they go busto its okay other horses in the farms just rake the MTTs out - I can only imagine how much the horses collude and softplay in those fields like 80% of a random field in pokerstars MTT is guys who are not playing with their own money but playing for a farm
This must be the reason many have such poor results at the GG MTTs , its just too colluded!
I played over 10 years and this was first time of running hundreds of buy-ins below EV.
Before this I had a lower winrate but it felt like being a waaay easier game to me.
This shows how much the bottom run can impact you and how long it can really last.
All the card distribution indicators of how good i hit flushes and sets and whatever the Pokertracker shows were at about worst possible on this 1M hands sample as well.
So its ironic to have evolved to be at the top of my game yet have a run like
Let’s not pretend that being a live pro is all sunshine and roses either.
First of all, the life hygiene of this grind is oftentimes miserable because you have to play late hours in casino or private games with people who are not your friends no matter what and sometimes even straight up annoying if not scummy.
It’s really a bum hunting grind waiting for the right whale to show up and hoping that he will dump on you among the remaining 8 other players.
It’s location dependent as well, some places are just full of nitty grandpas and tight fish that will not make it worthwhile to play.
There is sometimes politics involved as well to get to the right action table when you are playing another one.
When you play online, you can solve things, post hands and discuss in real time with fellow grinders. It can be quite stimulating to try and play right most spots. Such is not the case live where you play hands more exploitatively and in stupid multi-way pots
All in all, unless you are at a place full of donks and maniacs, live poker is not gonna really save you as a poker pro.
It is difficult. Basically see a lot people sit next to you have full fever and flu coughing on you etc.
people don't wash their hands and you need to touch the same chips, then eat there at casino etc.
you need iron health and immunity to do it.
whenever i start grinding it i start taking daily ice-baths at 0 degree water, exercise , take strong multi-vitamin ... otherwise will get sick sitting next to sick people who spread diseases.
