Journey of a Thousand Miles: 1/2 to High Stakes

Good Luck!

In about 10 days the challenge will begin - although new year's celebrations will definitely prevent any actual work put in for a couple of days. During the no man's land week and a bit from now though Christmas and New Year's I will begin some poker study to quickly refresh my memory, although nothing too strenuous or time-consuming, go to the gym a couple of times to build back up to my once daily routine, but also just sit back and do jackshit for a week or so and enjoy a proper holiday

For the first couple of weeks I really want to focus on beginning taking my fitness seriously again and just warm up in terms of poker gameplay and study, which can reach a steady rate in late Jan/early Feb. I plan on being on a 500 calorie daily deficit for January, which I will track using MyFitnessPal, alongside being active in some way for at least an hour each day (of which this will include weightlifting 5x/week). I am relatively fit right now but want to get down to a lean baseline before attempting to bulk up from there. With a 500cal deficit I should lose 0.5kg/week and am hoping to be close to my leanest by the end of February but obviously this is flexible and could be a longer or shorter process than expected. I will be taking photos as well to gauge body fat %.

In terms of poker, I am more focused on getting into the rhythm of live poker again, studying hard, and clocking in some initial hours than maximising my hourly win-rate for the first couple of weeks, while probably staying on the nittier side until I get used to population tendencies again (tbh this is probably sound given high rake anyway). I am a decent live player - or so I think - especially in comparison to the average 1/2 reg, but undoubtedly I need to stop being sloppy in my execution and discipline in lots of spots where I'm just giving away little bits and pieces of EV that will add up to cost me, so no opening ATo UTG or calling 3-bets in EP with KQo. I plan to back this up with a complete review of my game, starting with preflop. I'm fairly confident preflop, but having sound RFI, vs RFI and 3-bet ranges that I'm 100% sure of as a baseline will be really important for 1000 hours of gameplay. It's much harder to be sloppy with my game if I know an exact strategy that is optimal.

Every regular weekly update I post to this thread will have both recordings of the previous week's goals and creation of the next week's goals, as well as a record of total hours played, money made up to that point from the beginning of the year. Further, I will write some general comments and jottings as I see fit, about what to improve on, some potential life events, or anything else I find generally interesting or that I might want to document for my future self. I will also post the occasional hand history, but I promise there will be no bad beat stories.

Study has been going ok so far, most common preflop spots are still fairly well in my brain but can definitely continue to improve over the next week or so before getting back to playing. However, this is largely more of a vibe about what is right than actual certainty about what my ranges are/what they should theoretically look like in certain spots. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to effectively and quickly learn preflop ranges? The biggest wakeup call so far is to be playing much more tight and aggressive facing raises preflop. It's so easy to slip into the habit of calling a raise on the BTN preflop with a hand like 99 or AJo all the time and having a weak flatting range.

I've also been measuring my weight to get a rough average for the beginning of the challenge, and it seems to be roughly 82kg to begin with. So the plan will be to get to 77kg by the end of February and then reassess to see if I need to lose any more fat before I am at my leanest. To be clear, I'm not fat right now, I just want to be at my leanest to be able to bulk effectively for a few months starting in March without getting too fat.

Also, adding to the fitness goal I am going to go without alcohol for at least January, and depending on how things are progressing, Feb as well. Heavy consumption of alcohol has been one of my vices in the past year and hasn't exactly helped with the fitness goals. Weight loss should be a lot easier without all the extra calories of 5-10 beers on a Friday night, and hopefully I can be more moderate with this in the future following my 1 alcohol-free month (I am not counting new year's eve and new year's day in this because **** that the year starts on January 2nd as far as I'm concerned).

In the meantime with 1 week left until the new year, although this will be very relaxed, the warm up to the challenge begins. I'll count this as week 0.

Week 0 Goals (25 Dec to 31 Dec)
[ ] 3x Gym sessions
[ ] limit calories to max 2500 (except for Christmas day) to prep for the cut
[ ] 10 hours of preflop study over the week

How tall are you?

191cm, or about 6 ft 3

Wow quite weird you should be already very lean at 82 for this height no? Gl anyway

Typo im actually 190 but still, yeah I am fairly lean already by American standards, have some ab definition and vascularity so probably about 13-14% bf but want to get down just a little more before beginning the bulk to give me more time and also just for aesthetic reasons. I may not need to lose as much bf as I thought but can reassess and stop if I reach a desired amount.

Thanks for the luck

damn I've forgotten how much of a pain in the arse eating not like a pig is. Will surely adjust in a while but first couple of days of not pigging out suck

following your thread OP and gl on the challenge.

For your question, "Does anyone have any suggestions for how to effectively and quickly learn preflop ranges? "

Can you elaborate further what leak your looking to plug preflop? Charts are widely available so anything outside of this you may want to explain and see if people can help.

Preflop in general is about weighting your value and bluffs properly so you are not easily exploitable one way or the other. For ex: if villian is known to 3bet too much pre, you can use that to your advantage by not rolling your 4bet range and just full frequency 4betting them with your best bluffs

Hope this helps mate

Thanks mate,

I was more talking about how to memorise preflop but thanks for the advice

Feeling pretty good in the warm up to week 1

Goals almost already achieved.

- Gym 3 times already, plan to go a couple more before the new year given endless free time.

- calories slightly varied but avg roughly 2500 cal per day, going to reduce this slightly more starting in Week 1 to 2400 as a max per day aiming

- preflop training going well, now just need to have enough discipline to play that way in game

I've been using GTOwiz free prelop solutions to drill myself on preflop and has been going really well so far. Feel comfortable again in the basic spots and excited to start playing again starting on Jan 2, hopefully not too hungover by then.

To finish off this week ( and finish off the year lol ) I will go gym for weightlifting 2-3 more times, and continue studying preflop in more advanced spots to round out my revision. I also might play one session tomorrow (sunday dec 29) to get my feet wet if I have no other things going on with friends/family. I want to prioritise just enjoying this time completely off to do nothing this week so I'm not too fussed if I don't end up playing for whatever reason and I will only play if I am 100% eager to and have no other potential things to do, I will be playing literally 1000 hours in the next year and that one session will be a drop in the bucket. That being said I certainly feel ready to start playing again. I am 100% certain I'm a winning player in these games (it isn't close based on my past live poker experience and the average IQ of a 1/2 live player being about 85), but I think there is definitely room for improvement in execution and adapting more to specific player types and players that will definitely come with time.

going to play later today for hopefully 5+ hours, but if I'm ever feeling unfocused/on tilt/lacking discipline I will just leave and come back another day

will be making notes on any plays I am unsure about to review later, and track any tilt/discipline issues as well. This will not count towards the challenge for hours played or profit counted but should be a good warmup and preparation.

feeling ready to go.

Good luck!

still playing, but just completely dusted off 200 with the nut flush draw and a gutter in a weird spot.

playing 1/2

Preflop I raise BTN to 6 with A4cc villain raises SB to 25 and BTN vs SB this is an easy call (I would also mix 4-bets against more aggressive opponents but didn't know villain too well so went with population read of 3-betting slightly too tight deciding just call instead)

Flop 522ccs (Pot 52)

villain cbets 30, I ship it for 175 effective villain snaps with JJ and bricks on the turn and river.

Preflop seems standard
Thoughts on jamming vs calling flop?

overall apart from this 1 hand everything else pretty simple this session. Happy with how disciplined i've been so far (folded 66 UTG and folded lots in the BB to larger preflop raise sizes that call to a standard size).

No spots I've been truly unsure about except the above HH, lots of iso-ing pre followed by small c-betting and taking it down has been working effectively as expected

I don't think the shove is too bad since we are doing quite well against TT+ which opponent is most likely to have.

But you might consider just calling and playing it lower variance for the same reason you would never 4b preflop against this population. When they bet this flop they most likely have an overpair that they are not folding. But our actual equity is still fine.

Yeah this was kinda what I was thinking as well, jamming just depends on how often they have random cbets like KQ, QTs etc or better ace-highs like AK that fold to a jam

things to go into for future study:

- iso-ing ranges vs limps or multiple limps
- BB defence vs massive open sizes (right now I just nit up but unsure of thresholds)

I overall felt very confident about having an edge and beating the rake in this game after my session before, but winrates can certainly be increased.

Here are my goals for the first week of the official challenge.
Note: the first week will be just 5 days given the new year starts on a Wednesday, and will not be too strenuous given it begins on New Year's Day so only 4 days of "actual effort" can be put in

Week 1 Goals: 1 Jan to 5 Jan
sleep at least 8 hours every night
2400 calories/day of food (no alcohol as well)
Gym/weightlifting at least 4 times
15 hours of poker play
Note down all unsure/interesting hands to study later
Review other identified study areas

The sleep target won't be doable year-round with having a busy poker, academic and social life but need to recover my sleep schedule from what it is right now, if you couldn't tell by the timings of my posts my sleep schedule is all over the place right now. Taking a few days to actively put it back in place should be helpful. The cut has also begun, so down to 2400 cal of food for the first week and may go lower in the future if I start stagnating, supported by continual weightlifting.

Poker-wise, my first week is very exciting, and will probably split the 15 hours into two or three sessions to prevent any tilt, discipline issues. However, in order to achieve the 1000 hour mark in a year as a part-time player I want to be playing longer sessions as the challenge goes on so I can hit my weekly goals in a day or two each week instead of a few hours each day. I'll need to have about 19 hours avg play time per week in order to hit my 1000 hour goal, so this first week is just a warm-up but as I get into the swing of things I'll definitely need to be playing 25+hour weeks sometimes in the future to account for times where I end up being on holiday, or during exams where I can't get my hours in effectively. I also think that now, at the beginning of the year is the best time to get the bulk of my poker study in, to yield the additional profits over the whole year.

At your live 1/2 tables, are you seeing that many people 4x 3b SBvBU with KQo and QTs?

I think there's some there, but maybe not as much as I initially believed. I'm not blindly defending my play though, I defnitely didn't put nearly enough thought into calling at the time and just thought "I have decent equity when called by overpairs let's just jam" which was sloppy. This player was unknown, but a young-ish white guy so not an OMC or complete nit off of appearance

Also tomorrow for beginning of te challenge looking real unproductive based on the beer count so far

and so it begins

just played the first session for 3 hours, before leaving a little earlier than expected. Was up 90% of the session but lost 20 overall after a 4-bet pot with AK vs AA, happy with how I played and very happy about my winrate, now just need to get more hours in.

Hours played:
3/1000

Profit:
-20

just played another session, 3 hours. Went well, won 150 overall but left earlier than I had hoped due to boredom tilt sfter being carddead for a while. I opened A9o from EP and then knew it was time to leave based on that.

Hours played:
6/1000

Profit:
130