Losing/Breakeven Player to Become a Thriving Pro: My Goals, History, and Progression

I am not a super frequent 2+2 user and have only been on here for about 14 months reading only intermittently, but now once every few weeks I am going to write updates on what has been going on in my poker life. What I have been studying or not studying, how my games are going, and everything else.

At first I was going to keep this to myself, but the more I thought about it, the more I think it should be public. If it falls beneath the cracks or becomes something of a point of shame and embarrassment as time progresses so be it, but I think my goals are more likely to be achieved if I put them out in the world and much of what I have read on here has inspired me greatly so I hope to lead my own journey now.

What will follow below, both today and in the future will not be as clean or organized as it ought to be. The purpose of this is more documentation and publicizing my intent more so than any aesthetic pursuit.

But I will start with brevity (just kidding) and expand in the coming weeks. My goal is to play poker professionally. I am a 25 year old living in the Kansas City suburbs, I work in Real Estate Finance, and graduated with degree in Economics and Philosophy. My desired timeline is around September of 2023, although anything within the next 21 months I would deem as acceptable enough.

My plan is to quit my job next September and play and study for a year in the KC area, both live and online. My heart and skillset are in live poker but for the time being I am focused on getting acquainted with online as I would like to eventually be competent and great in every realm.

To do this I am going to need to perfect the art of living a low cost means. I am not an extravagant spender by any means, but I have not yet cut my habits to the bone, and this is one of the things that will need to be done. This is in part, because I know I am not some insane crusher yet, and despite my strong will and work ethic, I don't expect the first year or so to be smooth sailing. I expect the first year to be a lot of learning, and a lot of growing pains, and to give myself that wiggle room while playing smaller stakes I need to be able to survive on as little as possible so I can pay my bills and expand on my bankroll.

Within 1-2yrs of playing in KC, I hope to move to Vegas. I have already gotten coaching from some pros out there who have made very generous offers to help me get acquainted out there whenever I am able to actually get out there. I choose Vegas for that reason, the other obvious reasons, and because of my passion for rock-climbing. Vegas is one of the epicenters for climbing in the states and that would help me provide my future life with the balance it has so painfully lacked the last 10 months. I have plans that extend beyond the next 2-3 years, but they are muddy and I will leave them for another time.

To begin the end of this first post, I will briefly go over my history of poker.

During covid, one of my roommates introduced me to the game. I grew up an avid lover of chess and my love for poker followed suit. I played for a little over a year, perhaps a year and half, doing nothing other than clicking buttons. I didn't consume any content, I did not know what a range was for a very long time, I did not know there was math involved besides generic hand equities against each other, I did not know there was sophisticated strategy, solvers, training sites, books, courses or any of that. I simply spent 16 months playing very small stakes and consistently losing small amounts for about 16 months.

Jumping to June/July of 2021, I realized I sucked, was embarrassed at how unsuccessful I was, and bought a poker book. The Theory of Poker by Slansky was the one, and I read that and was shocked by how much I learned. Around that time my roommate took me to the casino for the first time ever. I was scared money and also just horrible all around, and lost everything.

I was a very poor and financially pained college student at the time, so $200 was a lot of money for me. Every few weeks or so when I was able to come by enough by working extra hours and sacrifice some meals I would go back with him, but I never really did well and didn't understand anything. For the next several months I read several books, (Like the Harrington on Holdem series, Schoomaker's The Psychology of Poker, Mathew Matteos The Making of A Poker Player, Kill Phil, etc) and saw an ad for DNegs Master Class which I bought and watched religiously over and over again. After this, I had a brief stint in October of 2021 where I went up a little over $1000, but lost it all by the end of November.

It was not until I graduated uni in Dec of 2021 that I realized there was such things as training courses, and being broke, I used my credit card to buy a PIOpro solver and a month of a PokerCoaching.com membership.

The first thing I studied on there was Spin n Go course taught by Ryan O-Donnell, and I got a free trial for Lucid GTO software. Over the next month, I spend 6-8 hours a day studying that course and the solver and began learning what poker actually was for the first time. By late January I believe I was profitable in the format, having worked up from $100 BR at the $2's and had a ROI of ~10% at the $10's-$15's and made a little over a grand. At that point, I had been working my new gig for a couple months and had saved up enough to try a few more stabs at the live cash arena. They did not go so well.

By April, I was down about $4.5K all time and more from that from my peak 1.2K profit and was feeling quite a dark bit. At that point I paused playing and got one of the pros on PC to coach me. I was about to quit as I felt like such a loser. Money had always been tough to come by myself and my family my entire life and to be in this position when I graduated uni with $0 in the bank and a lot of debt felt incomprehensibly bad. Anyway, the coach at first looked at my graph and was quite unimpressed, expectations were quite low. By the end of the session however, I was told that my thinking and play far exceeded what others were doing at my stake and above and she encouraged me to keep playing. I did, and for the next 2-3 months I kept swinging back to even then losing thousands again. I decided to do more coaching, and reached out to some other pros to see if they might help me and one of them recommended I read Ed Miller. I read 3 of his books and also ended up buying a course on live tells from a pro I really admire and the way that I looked at and thought about the game changed almost over night.

For the next 3 months I grinded my absolute ass off. As soon as I would clock out of work I would call to get on this list , would drive 40 minutes and then play until midnight or often later, getting home between 1-3am most nights and at work again by 8:30. Most nights I was only getting 4 hours of sleep, and on days off I would often go to a public library and take adderall and study for 8 hours+ without access to any distractions.

That span of 3 months I made just shy of $11,000 from trough to peak grinding mostly 1/3. At that point, most of the regs at my casino figured I did this for a living given my wr and unfettered attendance. In August, I spent a week out at MGM National Harbor and played 2/5 every evening after work. Most of the players on the weeknights were self titled pros and were not very fun to play with. Ironically, I remember how anti-social and miserable they were, how low their VPIP's were, and how negative their attitudes they were. I had a swingy week there but came out on top after the weekend recs gave me a bit of a boost, but I remember not being very impressed with those "pros" and vowed I would never have an attitude like that myself.

Fast forward a few weeks, and poker had been going so well I had more money than I had ever had in my life. I paid the rest of my year's rent in cash, turned the cell that I called a home into a pleasant place to live, and invested in other training sites and bought multiple other courses online.

This proved to be a bad move, as I left myself with only $3.5K in cash and many of the games I was playing in were of quite variable size. Over the next 3 weeks, I went on a run from hell and lost close to 100% of the biggest 20 pots I was in, and all of a sudden, most of my bankroll was gone.

At this point, I decided not waste the last of my money, and would use this as an opportunity to fine tune my fundamentals and learn the online streets, as I had never put any real volume into online cash.

When I started out I realized very quickly how different live 9h 300bb stack play vs online 6max 100bb play were, and how obscenely bad I was at the latter. I spent a lot of time studying over an adderall fueled weekend and found a small youtube acct from a european pro (who did not claim to be a coach) who's ideas on exploits and online play impressed me substantially. That night, I sent him a very intentional message and wrote my story (in less words than above) and explained that I would be grateful if he could coach me in online cash. He agreed to test things out, and yada yada yada, I have a new coach.

My online cash grind is not quite a success story yet, in fact quite the contrary. But each week I feel I get substantially better and am starting to study more effectively and think more effectively than ever before, and for the first time, I am actually feeling rationally optimistic.

Anyways, I am going to wrap this up now as I have coaching in a half hour and need to finish up some work stuff. I may post graphs or give better context to document everything in the coming weeks, but this is my story thus far. I will update this once a month or more until I either achieve my dreams or give up on them.

If you got this far, thanks for reading, otherwise, goodbye for now.