An endless marathon with no apparent goal

Pretty cool, looks like you're certainly beating the game. I'm currently at 10nl, looking to move up to 25nl at some point once my roll allows it.

I'm curious how you find the pool at 50nl? I took a shot at 25nl but hit negative variance so I'm back at 10nl until I build my roll enough to take another shot. I think I'd like at least a ten buy in shot. My brief time at 25nl though it seemed very fishy, perhaps even worse than 10nl for some reason. I'm curious how 50nl differs? Does it play similar to 25nl or is there a difference in opposition? I would assume they'd be a more competent players and more grinders at 50nl.

Also what are your goals? Or do you not set them? Like 100nl, 200nl? Personally I'd like to one day reach 100nl and have a positive win rate. I feel it's an attainable goal, I'm not sure if I have strong desire to go past mid stakes however.

Hi!

There is a slight difference between 25 and 50. Also I need to clarify that I play only static regular cash games and almost never play zoom. The difference between zoom games and its pools in my opinion is a way bigger than difference between static tables pools. So I can only tell for that kind of game. NL50 regulars overfold slightly less, 3bet slightly more, barrel slightly more and all that kind of aspects. So I'd say it's almost the same pool but slightly more qualified. The "fishy part" of the pool is exactly the same with only difference (which is common and understandable): they have less money at the table. The higher your go the more shallow fishes you meet.

As for bankroll strategy, there is a common principle: if you can easily earn like up to 2k on a regular job, you can risk more to rush your progress. Because, obviously, it's easy to recover and take another shot. If I lose, for example, 3k bankroll in Ukraine, crawling upstakes, that would be a total rekt, a total disaster. That's why my bankroll management is very conservative. And, to be honest, poker variance can be a bitch and I would never suggest anyone to shot with like 5-10 BI's or so. Variance + blind tilt = disaster. You need to be extremely sustainable to psychological pressure when you're down 50% of your bankroll. Some people just decide to go all in after that. My game loses a tonne of quality when I'm down 10-15-20% of my bankroll. This is always an important part of the whole strategy.

To play higher stakes with positive winrate is an actual global goal, yes. Whether it is nl100 or 500, it is always a matter of bankroll, theoretical level, experience and psychological sustainability. As for now, I fit maybe in theoretical aspect but I can't even guess my imaginary winrate at nl100. I'm not ready to deal with its variance and risk a lot. It is still a lot of things to understand and to learn to move ahead. Of course it's always better to earn more and increase your EV or $/hour, but I chose more conservative method. My current income let me exist, cover my spendings and collect bankroll. So it's fine, so is the way.

Also thank you for the first post here and I wish you best of luck on your way to desired stakes and winrates 😀

(if my English is not clear sometimes somewhere just point it and ask for clarifying)

Your English is pretty good! So you're from Ukraine? You have regular job also? Trying to grind up from 10nl is a little tedious, I have done it before however. During lock down and covid I had 3 months with no work and managed to grind 100 bucks starting at 10nl into 4.5k, I also feel I was a way worse player back then, so I feel it's possible. But still, it takes time. I have considered boosting my bankroll on payday, I'm confident I can beat 25nl, so perhaps that's the way to go, or I can continue to grind it out until I have enough to take a shot at 25nl.

I'm curious which site you play on? I'm on stars. Also I assume you're doing some kind of studying? How did you learn the game?
I've tried lots of things, reading books, watching coaching videos, thinking about the game, I use gtowizard and the coaching videos there as well as the solver. There's just so much to learn, and I'm just the average guy with perhaps average intelligence, I may have a slight aptitude for poker but I feel to succeed I'm going to have to work very hard. My game is probably full of leaks that I'm yet to discover.

If you ever want to share hands and discuss spots I'm always eager to see things from a different perspective. At the moment I'm just trying to figure things out on my own through coaching videos and the solver.

I shall follow your progress

I don't have regular job, poker income is enough to live. I play stars 99% of time.

I mostly use gto wizard to study optimal plays and ranges, how they construct and what kind of deviation I should go against specific kind of opponent. And then I try to implement it at the table. That's pretty much it. I also have a huge "books, articles, videos etc" background since 2009 but the most effective way to understand the game is definitely studying gto. You don't need to play gto at nl25 table. but gto will help you to understand what you need to play.

I will follow yours too 😉

For sure that's true, I don't believe you need to play gto at 25nl or even 50nl, however understanding it is helping spot where I can make deviations. I'm not sure how I did it before, perhaps intuition through playing a lot, I think even without studying gto if you've played enough you can develop an intuition for where people are unbalanced and start to exploit them. At least that's how I feel, I'm also finding the coaching videos useful, particularly the ones by Saulo Costa.

I'm curious now about trying regular tables to see if I notice a difference, I gravited towards zoom as it allows me to fit a lot of volume in quickly, I also anly need two or 3 tables to do this. Having just my laptop to play on atm I'm not sure I'd be able to fit enough regular tables on to get the same volume, but I am curious.

Not too much to tell about the start of the month. Pretty much nothing to cry about. I donated like 3-4 BI's to the whales and made a couple of really bad bluffs. Still going fine.

22.06 Checkpoint 2

yes, that's an absolutely 100% massive upswing, not gonna pretend like it's not
i'm trying to enjoy the moment

the month was wow 😀
now a break for a couple of days

Gl gl with the grind.

thanks!

Hello, folks
It's been a while

A year actually. And this is why.

(yet again sorry for no oxford english)

That year I started this topic to track my results and studying process, but then a couple of things happened that changed everything and knocked me out of the game for 6 months

As for now, I almost hit my step 5 check-point. I feel more confident and strong in game but 6 months ago I was the most pathetic plant at nl50.

Let's start from the beginning. 6 months ago I started teaching a guy from local forum. I was pretty confident and motivated to show the other monkey where bananas are. The deal was: I back him for 100$ and we grind up to 2500$ nl25 where we split the bankroll and he starts his own career. It started pretty fine. He played a lot, he was highly motivated too, learned things fast etc. He was destroying nl10 with like 35evbb/100 and was about to start playing nl25. But things were slowly changing. Despite playing with an unreal winrate, he started arguing and disputing a lot of spots and hands. Suddenly, the man who didn't know **** 15 minutes ago and was cbeting every oop flop started having his own opinion. He didn't want to learn sims, he did want a moneyprinting magic buttons. It was turning worse and finally when we were watching my own session, he told me something like "Do you take me for a dumb****? You told me not to donk in this situation but you donk in this situation". Despite the fact it was a completely different spot where donking is an option, I decided to drop this cooperation. I was 100% exhausted and felt kinda scamed. I gave the guy like reeeeaaally a lot of info, a tonne of info. We studied sims together, I was teaching him a tonne of solver decisions. In general, first 7-10 days would be enough to not need me in further self education and grinding up to nl100. So it all looked like he started being a ****ing baboon do drop me to prevent his future bankroll from splitting. I was really friendly and polite, I was giving him much more then I supposed to give, even gifted him a starscaption license. But that dude decided to be a ****ing baboon in response. Now he is kinda crushing nl25 but it looks like he has a different coach either different approach on the basis of what I gave him. But it all doesn't matter now, I gave up being mad on this situation. **** it. But back then it almost destroyed my everything.

I suddenly found that the more I was teaching him, the more he was arguing my hand reviews and logics. The more we were arguing, the more I was losing confidence. I started to doubt myself. The dude was not satisfied with me pointing at his punts and bad moves and I started avoiding confrontations, justifying his stupid moves. I was llike "mmmeh well I could probably play like that maybe 10% of the time I don't know probably okay". He didn't want to learn anymore, he wanted to print money with the info he already has and his own interpretations of it and the game. Basically, studying process stopped at some point and then he was mostly arguing what I say. I lost all the motivation, was disappointed, I didn't like how he treats me, I started to doubt myself and my knowledge and went completely exhausted. And as a result of this, I completely lost my poker mind(idea) and was frustrated and disappointed in general.

As a result, I stated playing breakeven shitty poker, I even adopted some of my student stupid ideas, moves and mistakes. It felt like I lost my own personality, it drowned and disolved into the pool of not my ideas and not my thoughts. It was really hard to separate my own thought process from that weird mix of what I really think and what I think to not make someone sad or angry. And it took my a whole half of a year to get over it. I have never ever imagine something like this to happen. I was always thinking of myself as done and complete identity which will change only in time by its own evolution process. But it turned that someone can rush into your identity starting ruining everything inside like a hurricane. And it wasn't even a woman lol!

That weird effect of teaching someone made me really disabled in poker sense. I couldn't even do my own studies. Wizard training turned into brainless button clicking with saying "oh wow okay" periodically.

But now I'm fine. I play again since March, destroyed nl25 yet again and moved to my native nl50. Also played a little bit of nl100, like 5k hands or so, but decided to not go there yet while my bankroll isn't deep enough. I'm financially very conservative.

Also I got very lucky with this:

It helped me to get back on track too. My bankroll was about 1300$ at the lowest point and that bbj helped a lot, right in time.

My results since March(for March, April and June, I didn't play in May):

I feel okay and ready to move to that damn nl100 in a couple of months. I hope this autumn will be spent at nl100 only, but we'll see. You never know.

Hit my
checkpoint#5 ✅

June

Could be better, tilted A LOT

July-August

Took a couple of weeks to rest in August and started playing nl100 after (5k hands in the end)

I'm going to play PS nl100 further to observe my possible winrate