the legend of flopmarley
today officially marks the second anniversary of my poker playing career.
absolutely smashed a high hand playing limit hold'em two years ago gambling for the first time in my life, thought I discovered an infinite money glitch, fast forward 2 months I quit my job to play 1/2 live for a living, fast forward 8 months I torched just about everything playing too high for the roll, took the rest of the bread and went abroad for a few months, came back broke and ran up a roll again, fast forward 2 months torched it again playing too high, took a hiatus from poker for 4 months, came back ran up another wad of cash and it subsequently, you guessed it, found itself in the ether. here we are today, once again, at a big fat $0. bankroll management, not my thing
online over approximately 100,000 hands I've been able to beat NL5 and NL10, but I've never played a substantial amount above those limits. as a live pro I saw these limits as practice for my normal game, which I believe translated well into live low limit games. however, I have never shown a large, winning sample at NL25 or above, which is frustrating. I've learned that I love the game for the strategy of it, not necessarily for the money. I want to prove to myself that I can grind up through the depths of the micros and into higher limits online and live and hang there with that crowd.
i'll be updating this thread at least once a week on Sundays but probably more in the beginning while I'm still jumpy and excited about sharing my poker thoughts online for the first time. I want to use this thread as an opportunity to get better and as an opportunity to entertain all of y'all with some absolutely beautiful punts along the way. see you Sunday 🤙
3 Replies
as promised, here are the results from week 1. i'm expecting to play about 5,000 hands a week given my schedule right now. happy with how the challenge has gotten started, although I feel that my winrate can be pushed much, much higher. I limited myself to playing one hour sessions for most of the week and today played two sessions that lasted two hours. overall i think these short sessions help to improve the quality of my play, but I think I need to get more comfortable playing longer sessions. I used to play very long sessions and it was shocking to me how hard my play dropped off after just a handful of hours. i'm curious as to how long you all play for and what you all do in order to keep yourself in the right mental frame for poker.
alright here's the most interesting hand of the week in my opinion. solver thinks river fold is a blunder losing 33bb in EV but in the moment, I was thinking that villain would shove all his 6x which there is a lot more of than solver would suggest on this river. I believed that villain would have A6s, K6s, 76s, 56s, but crucially 86s and 64s which solver doesn't have effectively doubling the amount of 6x available. I also imagined that villain would call with AKo at least at some frequency given this is 2c/5c, which is something solver never does BTN vs. SB 3b. all things considered, although villain doesn't have any flushes outside of Kxs, he has a higher concentration of 6x and AK than the solver would suggest. I think the line is also reasonable from villain as something he would do with both AK and 6x. solver wants villain to bluff 22-55 and 54s here which I again just don't think is happening. really interested to see what you all got for me
last post from me tonight but another pretty interesting hand. pre I think villain is just going to be super linear and under 3betting. vs. b25 on the flop, real easy continue as we'll be good quite often vs. this size. in theory this hand plays best as a pure call but still gains EV by raising small to 15bb. in practice I think small x/r will perform better than expected as villain is supposed to pure continue with everything apart from offsuit broadway combos and the worst 3b bluffs. when villain doesn't have these combos and we are over x/r-ing, I'd imagine villain's reaction would be to call with virtually everything and punish us by 3betting the flop more often which again I don't think happens enough.
ok, moving past that rant, 33 is a pure x in GTO on the river, however I think we can get most villains to fold virtually everything OTR since villain doesn't have sets imo for this flop sizing or any 7x after x-ing turn. in this instance we run into AK which is a mix between call and fold OTR but I think most villians are just going to find the fold button vs. the 3x OB. and of course, if villian doesn't have sets and straights like it does in theory, it'll need to reach lower in the range to meet a proper defense freq, which I'd imagine makes AK closer to pure call which again, I don't think happens. and to add onto that even further, when we bluff with hands like 44-22 which are pure x in theory, villians rrreally gonna have to dig in and call down with stuff like QQ, JJ in order to exploit us. curious to see if my thought process is alright here or if i'm huffing on copium to justify a punt.
