My Last Shot at Poker
Hi all,
As you can see in the title this will be my last shot at poker. I have been playing poker for the last 8 months (I know I’m relatively new to poker, I started in the beginning of the pandemic) and I’m a winning player. I have never been able to build a big bankroll because I’m starting to panic at the smallest downswing which results in me withdrawing 75% of my bankroll when this occurs.
Recently I started grinding NLH 6-max cashgames and I'm slowly starting in being a decent winning player in this format. One problem, I keep tilting away all my winnings. Also when this happens I experience issues with me thinking I’m just not good enough to make it etc. In the last few weeks I made several small deposits on stars and every time when I had reached the point where I tripled/quadrupled up I tilted away my whole bankroll in one session. I also recently had COVID-19 which resulted in me being extremely tired and not been able to focus, problem is I still decided to play sometimes when actually not able to play.
Again this will be my last shot at poker, this time I will try to be very disciplined and set some goals to make this work and avoid punting my money away, posting this (the pressure of you guys ;P) will hopefully help me in achieving my goals.
Life/poker goals and rules to myself:
- Take a break after playing for 1 hour
- Go running 3 times a week
- Go to the gym 3 times a week (gyms are currently closed in my region due to COVID-19 so I will start off with some pushups etc.)
- Study 30 minutes before playing
- Stop playing for at least 1 hour when losing 3.5 buy-ins or when on tilt
- Strict BR management which I will keep you guys posted on
- Consume alcohol ones a week max (I am not an alcoholic but alcohol really affects my focus and sleep)
- Try to see my friends at least ones a week (I’m dealing with depression for the last 4 years, recently I started to feel very awkward around people which results in me avoiding my friends and not going outside, I’m trying to work on this in general)
Tomorrow I will start the challenge with a deposit of around $20 on stars. I will be playing mainly cashgames but maybe some SNG’s/tourneys in the future as well.
I will be posting graphs and hands daily. Feel free to leave a comment or suggestion!
Also let me know if anyone wants to study with me. Nobody of my real life friends play poker and I have basically no one to discuss hands/strategies with.
Long time no see bro, or it feels like it anways 😃 Happy to see your killing it
Yesterday was a pretty bad day, I run a bit under ev and also had some insane coolers (full house vs straight flush). I also had 2/3 stacks punted away while on an old fashion tilt:
This is the graph of the challenge so far:
I'm still up 2 buy-ins and hopefully today I run and play good again 😀 I have won 30bb/100h in 2NL over a decent size sample before so I am confident I will move up in stakes quickly
But untill that time I will try to improve a bit and fight the uncomfortable feelings of my mind not allowing success and hapines
How could ive missed this diamond.
Subbed . GL op
Yeah man, hope you are doing alright! nice to hear ♥
Yesterday was a pretty bad day, I run a bit under ev and also had some insane coolers (full house vs straight flush). I also had 2/3 stacks punted away while on an old fashion tilt:
This is the graph of the challenge so far:
I'm still up 2 buy-ins and hopefully today I run and play good again 😀 I have won 30bb/100h in 2NL over a decent size sample before so I am confident I will move up in stakes quickly
But untill that time I will try to improve a bit and fight the uncomfortable feelings of my mind not allowing success and hapiness
Hahaha yes they play alright but can they say they beat nl2 with 30bb/100h in a 1700 hand sample????
Nah but I see what you mean Swerbs, and ofcourse I acknowledge the cool journey so far. It's just that **** about my mind going in panic mode when I reach any type of point outside of my self-believe system and can't wait to go back to the comfort zone of being a failure is pretty deep (And here is also correlation with the mad self-sabotage I've shown in this journey). I want to make a more detailed post about this at some point, but I just want to say the awareness alone has helped me so much. Now at times when I'm doing well in life or with my career and my mind attacking me with non existing problems/stress/emptiness I acknowledge what is happening (that the fictional problems or stress are just a sympton of this) and I can just say to myself I deserve to be happy and enjoy the moment without beating myself up too hard.
There are definitely moments of happiness and appreciation about the poker journey, they occur in strange moments. The other day I played a long session with pretty meh run, I was fully focussed and fully emerged in any 5.5bb pot fighting till death over it (within my capacity of playing good ev ofcourse haha) and in the end I survived while being up a bit. And while I was sitting out next bb a hand occured where I woke up on the river 3 way with a reg and a superfish 1spr. It's like the typical scenario where I really didn't want the smoke and I just wanted to book the win. It was a spot where the board was horrible for me, and also a unique spot 3way with a fish involved; no shame in checking down hands with 0 showdown. But in the moment I kind of embraced the challenge and fired it in the middle. The fish folded rather quickly and the reg tanked full time bank, spammed a bunch of emotes how sick the spot was, and ended up timing-out folding while probably making a massive herofold. Was already nice to see it getting through but then the fish shows his hand: 77, which was 2nd highest set on a T7xxx board (with a 4straight on it tho). When I saw that I made the superfish make fold range I jumped out my chair and started jumping around in my room celebrating. It was not the type of celebration that you make after making the winning goal securing the championship. But more the type of celebration you make when you make the last-minute equalizer to avoid relegation 😃 😃 😃 When I was walking to the store afterwards I felt such positive emotion and I really had a moment of appreciation of pursuing this poker thing and that I'm happy to be where I'm at 😀
Nice to hear mate, I appreciate it!
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2p2 changed their site a bit, in the new format basically all posts before this year are missing in my blog. If any (new) reader is interested in reading that back I will leave a link to the old format here: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/174/p...
If not bothered in reading it, maybe I can briefly summarize like it's a graph: It's like one consistent slightly-going up-straight line above without any outliners or anything like that :P :P :P
Just played my last session of 2024. And I'm gonna take a break for 2 weeks. I was planning on playing untill Sunday but I wasn't really feeling it last couple days and rather do something else this weekend. But before I give it a rest, let's look at the year results:
$ graph
bb graph
results
With +103k table profit, around 33% rakeback (77k) and -10k untracked it's +170k$ for the year. The rb numbers are a bit of guessing game, I've had periods where it was raining rakeback but also periods where I got fuck all. But I think the estimated 33% is sort of accurate. So yeah very happy with how it went this year, I didn't expect things to go so well honestly.
The year started not so well, Once again I was in a bad spot. I was kind of downswinging and because of regulations (I lost too much according to them, while I was still up on the site and playing with profit) I lost access to my main site. I was spending a lot of the time in the Netherlands and basically had no where to play other than gg. Here I was just unmotivated playing r&c and also blowing money on mtt's (briefly thought about making the switch) and at some point I had only like 35% of my already relatively small roll left with no realistic income. I felt already stuck for quite a while because of the terrible mental game I never got past nl200 basically and literally I was ready to give up. I started looking for jobs and really was on the edge of quitting.
But yeah back in Austria once again I got myself together and with some motivation I found some backing deal to get myself back up on my feet and started out in March with playing 100nl/200nl. This time I really worked hard on mental game side and finally got some sort of breakthrough and made massive progress. This improvement was basically the foundation of why at some point it started to go well. When my roll hit x-amount I continued on my own. I just want to say thank you to "Metal_ouda" and "captainrobour" for believing in me at that time.
Unfortunately I didn't have any luck with jackpots, ofcourse it's quite frustrating to drop like 50-60k on a jackpot pool and get 4k back in return also because I had some painful moments. I posted some in here but I also recall earlier this year where I mucked a fucking jackpot hand in nl200. I literally had to take a couple days off afterwards of how I shit I felt about it. But it's also important to appreciate that I ran very well this year. I'm well aware that 7.7evbb is not my realistic expectation, and despite running so bad at 1k I still acknowledge that I ran pretty well in crucial moments (like for example starting on nl500 or running well when nearly busting deposit limits).
and if I play this year 30% of my volume on tilt instead of the 50% (these are just random numbers haha, but to make a point) of last year. That will be another big w.
hahaha the estimation would be 15% this year, maybe even slightly less. So yeah definitely massive progress. I still struggle with terrible focus and being super impulsive but I really had months of consistent solid performance without angry auto-pilot snapclicking. Hopefully I can keep improving this.
Right now gonna take a break, holidays coming up and got a trip planned to Stockholm/Sweden with some friends. And begin next year I will move to Amsterdam so excited for that. For next year I will not set any specific goals for money I want to make or potentially shotting highstakes, I just hope I can keep being somewhat consistent. I made it to 2k on my own but I have to be realistic that with my current approach I'm gonna hit a brick wall in terms of climbing the stakes. Despite having a good network of friends in the pokerworld I simply do way too much of my study time alone and I'm not some super genius. I basically lack feedback and I will stagnate if I don't change this. So for a while I'm in conversation with a respectable coach (don't think he wants to be outed lol) and hopefully we can work together starting from next year. And let's see to how far I can make it in this beautifull shite game.....
Maybe a bit rusty wrap up, I'm a bit tired haha. But anyway I will stop updating the blog from now on, maybe somewhere in the middle of next year I feel motivated to update again. Thank you all for reading and gl in 2025 😀
(in new 2p2 format everything before 2024 is missing you can read full blog in old format here: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/174/poker-blogs-goals/my-last-shot-poker-1785038/)
Congrats dude happy for you wonderful to see all of the success you’ve made
Not a rusty write up at all
Big ups. GL in 2025 and beyond. Thanks for the updates so far, great reading
Mr. Juiced owning the belugas!
outstanding work. keep it up KC!
GGWP, best of luck in 2025!
absolutely huge year bro, congratulations. is that 7.5bb/100 on gg?! or over all sites. either way, even bigger and better things to come in 2025!
Well played!
I don't get how is the rake 15bb+?
Congrats dude happy for you wonderful to see all of the success you’ve made
Not a rusty write up at all
absolutely huge year bro, congratulations. is that 7.5bb/100 on gg?! or over all sites. either way, even bigger and better things to come in 2025!
Thanks a lot guys ♥ ♥
is that 7.5bb/100 on gg?! or over all sites
Yes was like 7.3bb on gg this year, I mainly played gg and 1 other tracked site where I started to play since December so it's data from those sites 😀 The gg winrate is a bit inflated by super run in 200 standard deviation games tho so important to keep that in consideration
I'm enjoying your content and wishing you better run in 2025 mate!!
I don't get how is the rake 15bb+?
For this year the rake in my tracker was like 13bb/100h, I played quite a bit of volume in games where I paid like 17bb/100h rake or something. Allthough even without that it would have still been (slightly less than) like 10bb/100h this year 😃
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Played like 2 more sessions on the 23th and 24th because I needed to fix my sleeping schedule a bit, classic -10bb/100h + all the rungood on expensive stakes type of run haha we take those 😉
Just came back from Stockholm, still completely hangover but also very hyped for this year. I wish everyone gl in 2025!
Done for the month, might be a bit early but I feel like taking some time off. It's strange to complain while sunrunning and making $38k in relatively little hours of play, but I feel very drained right now. On the tables things went great, I played almost exclusively regwars and for a brief period I was completely steamrolling everyone. And I was playing with so much confidence. But yeah outside the tables I had a lot of stress because after a disgusting heater I got the rta-check (kind of a brag lol) and it took all together so long before my account was cleared, meanwhile having (for my standards) an absurd amount of money locked up, and me just overthinking it how this could go wrong.... But yeah today finally got an update:
It's not more than normal to get your acc cleared when you are not cheating or anything like that. But still it felt like a big relieve to be able to use the cashier again after some time, I can give it a rest now 😀
So besides playing with confidence and making great progress, today and yesterday I felt back into some bad habits (because I was so tired) and played like an absolute donk again... Today I had a hu match vs someone who was clearly a couple steps ahead of me and I just made 1 super ev error after another playing this tired semi-tilt style..... So yeah I'm back on earth again, and confidence is stabilizing. And nice moment to take some time off after this and come back fresh 😀
In the match today I got crushed for like 8k, and I don't think it's really fair to start bragging hands when I got owned everywhere, but this hh was pretty fucking sick hahaha see screenshot below what he ended up tankfolding:
$10 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 2 players
Hand converted by Holdem Manager 3
Hero (SB): $950.00 (95 bb)
BB: $1, 000.00 (100 bb)
Hero posts SB $5.00, BB posts $10.00
Pre Flop: (pot: $15.00) Hero has 9♣ A♥
Hero raises to $25.00, BB calls $15.00
Flop: ($50.00, 2 players) K♣ 4♥ Q♥
BB checks, Hero checks
Turn: ($50.00, 2 players) 6♥
BB checks, Hero checks
River: ($50.00, 2 players) 7♣
BB bets $21.00, Hero raises to $210.00, BB raises to $539.00, Hero raises to $925.00 and is all-in, fold
Results: $1, 128.00 pot ($1.21 rake)
Final Board: K♣ 4♥ Q♥ 6♥ 7♣
Hero wins $1, 126.75
ggz
Congrats for 2024 results buddy, and sick start of the year too, keep crushing!!
It's ok, there is still a good bankroll and my game is in very good shape especially for 1k. Also I'm still up for the year and I will allow myself to invest in breaking into highstakes (all of the losses were on nl2k+ in sample above) this year and so this will probably happen again just like this happened multiple times before breaking into lower stakes. But still I'm disappointment in myself because for the 100th time in this journey I've lost my mind again and was constantly on the edge of super self-destruct tilt. Ever since the start of the year I'm really struggling with depression (once again). Everything was going so well in my life. There was a good balance and I felt really alive and so I wonder how it turned around so quick to being in this dark hole. I'm trying to deal with it the best I can but I started to feel more and more empty, tired and demotivated. I'm completely not myself just walking through life being angry at the world (in my head everything is negative) and isolating myself from friends and family more and more. At some point the doomrun started and everything fall apart, grinding whole night with losses stacking up and me just not giving a **** about anything anymore. I'm trying to get myself together and get out of this depressed episode but I keep feeling so empty and sad.
Today I woke up slightly better and found some motivation to write about it. Also I fixed my sleeping schedule and I will try to live a bit disciplined untill I have some rest in my head and I feel like myself again. Also I'm on the waiting list for therapy again and hopefully this brings something. Atleast poker is not suffering so much anymore because I got myself together when the downswing nearly hit $50k and stopped regwarring 2k+ and the restuck is going smooth so far (nothing crazy but just good volume with good winrate).
Still I really hope next time this happens I deal with it better. Because I knew this would happen - and so I took more than half of January off - But it still happened....
All the best for you!
Maybe you lack a best friend in life. The best what happened to me was getting a dog 5 years ago. Now my life feels less useless and he also brings a lot of unconditional love and joy of being in the day to day life.
Nice job recognizing it's time to regroup, and ul on the run.
One thing I'd consider is you don't have to push to play the highest stakes.
Disciplined grinding lower for a period of years can give you financial freedom, and high stakes poker is like top 1% most stressful jobs someone can pursue. If you're prone to self doubt or bleed from poker results into life, it's fine to just take the path which accommodates greater life quality, when you're already in a spot where you can make serious money.
IME, amongst HS regs there are:
- some extremely self confident people who can trust the process and shrug off adversity which would cause extreme self doubt and spirals in others
- some who just don't realize how miserable the game makes them and how unsuitable it is to their temperament and health
Not to say it isn't worth the sacrifice if you are in the latter group, but important to acknowledge the sacrifice you make and whether it suits you specifically.
*would add that even the first group deals with extreme mental stress at the extremes of variance, but just react well generally
