Pokatleta - Poker Pro's IronMan Journey. Balancing Life and Poker

Not starting the year very well. I came back from holidays on the 19th of January and have been struggling to put in the hours.
I also played quite poorly to be honest. But well, C game is part of the game.

There is actually a great podcast from Patrick Howard about how to reach our volume goals. I'll watch it again and try to apply his suggestions. I'll leave the link here :

Podcast Ep. 11 - Crush Your Volume Goals

Key points :

• We often rationalize into avoiding to play which we regret later
  
• Minimum viable action : take the easiest step to build momentum. Aim to play a 30min session. Then I should be more motivated to keep playing. Just focus on starting
  
• Schedule sessions. Don't allow myself to do anything else than play during this time
  
• Plan out my day, have a routine
  
• Track time and volume
  

Massive props for posting a long term graph, hope you crush your goals 😀

Thanks, if I put in the work it should happen !

Building my daily routine

It is so hard to build a good routine and stick to it but the reward is great so I'll try (again).
I will plan 9 hours sleep to make sure I get 8. Otherwise I always end up with 7.
And I'll put a gym session everdyday but it'll be mostly about mobility, stretching and functional stuff.
I'll plan 3 sessions of 1h30 for now. With my warmup session it should result in 3khands+ per day.
I believe the warm up session will often end up being 1 hour once I get momentum.

I'll try to list every important parts of the routine I want and see if I can fit it all in a day :

• Dead Hang 2minutes (to decompress the body)
  
• Get sunlight in the morning
  
• Quick Run (goes with getting sunlight)
  
• Breakfast 1
  
• Yoga
  
• 30min playing session to build momentum
  
• Breakfast 2
  
• Session 1
  
• Session 2
  
• Quick Gym or Swim (getting outside here again)
  
• Lunch
  
• Session 3
  
• Afternoon snack
  
• Cycling (indoor)
  
• Study
  
• Dinner
  

This is a first draft. And I plan to be flexible with my training and study. If I miss some there is no issue.

I would follow Donald John Trump. Eat big Macs and diet coke with KFC chicken, play golf, dance to the YMCA, and don't exercise like a maniac. Focus on your poker more brah.

Following!

Hi,
since I will talk about triathlon I thought I'd post a video of one of the first I've done. Triathlon is not the most interesting thing to watch obviously but it gives an idea of how it is.
That was a very small event organized by a university in Bacalar, Mexico. We're really far from those huge Iron Man events. But I actually enjoy much more when it's relaxed like this.

I'm not a great video maker haha but i often edit small ones like this to keep memories of what I do. So I though why not sharing them.

Here's another about my recent trip in Argentina. We've done the 7 Lakes Road by bike with my girlfriend. That was really amazing. Here is a sneak peak :

This part of Argentina was amazing, stunning mountain lakes everywhere :

We were travelling around Bariloche, Villa La Angostura and San Martin de los Andes. I really recommend these places. It's a bit expensive but definitely worth it.

All right now you have an idea about what I do during my free time. I promise next post will be about poker haha.

Big leak from BB

So I thought I was exploiting regs pretty well from BB vs IP in SRP. But it turns out I was burning money.
Identifying leaks is pretty hard and time consuming as there are a lot of mistakes one can make and come to the wrong conclusions.
But I could see how i do in this situation compared to regs and then I've checked specifficaly for which stats I was deviating.

Me

Good regs

I did not identify this leak at first because I wasn't filtering vs regs only.

Basically I've been playing vs Cbets terribly (one of the most important node of the game tree), especially for the larger sizings. And recently regs started using different sizings to make it harder to play against them. So it's mandatory to play well against every Cbet size. Which implies a lot of turn and river stuffs as well as ranges are very different.

I've been deliberately overfolding vs bigger sizes, for exploitative reasons, but I've been overdoing it.
Me

Good Regs

Anyway the best way to improve vs Cbet is to drill with a GTO trainer.
I'll first drill specificly vs Cbet and then drill full hand.
I also think I can improve a lot playing after check/raises.
So I'll make drilling part of my routine for the next days.

Best of luck in 2025!

Following

So about my goal of improving volume, I've worked on playing longer sessions and it does kind of work. I was struggling playing more than 1h but i decided to push a bit more every time.
Now I can play up to 3hrs sessions. Yesterday action was good and I managed to play 8 hrs. Which is the most I've played in a day in a long time.

Pretty happy with this as I managed to play well the whole time. I was running good so it helps obviously.

Concerning my leak from BB, I've drilled more with the solver vs Cbets. Now I need to work on my strategy after raising the flop (both GTO and exploit) as I can see that I'm totally off.
It's too early to say but if i look at my BB graph it seems like it's improving which is motivating. Let's see

Following up with my BB leak, I've been practicing with the GTO trainer to get a better feeling how to play vs Cbets and it seems I'm doing better now.
This is my BB graph this year with nb of player > 4 :

There's some variance involved, I think I ran good, but we can see the redline improving so i think it really is a consequence of my recent studies.
This is really motivating.

So before starting to go deeper in this spot and practice more turns and rivers I thought I would check if I don't have similar leaks on the flop. As it happens so often and can be fixed easily by practicing GTO. It's important to know when to deviate from GTO though.

Here's a list of what I've found I could improve in my game :

• 4BP IP PFC vs CBet (I'm playing poorly the whole spot)
  
  
  
• 3BP IP PFC BTN v SB vs Cbet (Playing bad vs bigger sizings)
  
  
  
• 2BP IP PFC vs Cbet (Also playing bad vs bigger iszings)
  
  
  

I still believe we should sometimes overfold vs bigger sizings as regs tend to barrel too often afterwards. But still I think I've pushed it too far.

It also seems like i've been playing poorly preflop from SB and overfolded a bit too mcuh vs 3bets.

So I'll keep practicing GTO in these spots until I get a better feeling.

As I had said previously, I need to work a bit on my game after check/raising the flop.
So I've set up a drill in GTO wizard and can now practice it.
From my self game analysis I know that I lack aggression on the river both for RXB and RBB lines.
So I'll try to spot some patterns from the solver to feel confident pulling the trigger and correlate it with MDA study.

Here is an example BBvBTN

We Raise vs B 2/3 flop, check turn, and we have a river decision. When practicing I decided to check.
But our nuts are around 53s/54s/34s so hands like K4s sharing these cards are good candidates to overbet as bluff. Plus regs overfold vs overbets in this line.
Solver goes all in but we can choose a 2x pot size if we want since it's hard to know how people react to huge overbets.

While setting up drills with GTO wizard I came into this spot :

SB 3Bet vs BTN, Flop cbet small, turn the solver uses 2/3 bet :

Clearly this is a spot I had no clue how to play.

Little update since the start of the year

So I played roughly two months so far due to hollidays in january. Even for two months I should I've played more. I've only put in 190hours so far.
I played really poorly at first but now I'm feeling my game is better.
I'm lucky to run over EV but my results disappopint me a bit. I really need to keep improving.

It appears I'm leaking heavily in SBvBB again. I had improved in this spot but apparently i went back at playing poorly again. So this will be my focus for next weeks.
My BB winrate is looking better though so that's a good thing.

Bro you said you were going to put in 25 hours a week. Its 3 months into the year and you've put in 190 hours. Even if you rationalize away January as a 'holiday' (****in euros lol) that's still below your goal. We're 14 weeks into the year and you've played 13 hours a week. Your results are quite frankly amazing considering how little work you are putting in.

I recommend creating short weekly goals that you can achieve and then holding yourself 100% accountable and achieve those goals no matter what no excuses.

Yes you're right. When saying not happy with results I also mean the volume I've put in.
Thanks for your input.

I guess I could set up goals like this :

• Daily : Play at least 3kh or 5hours
  
• Weekly : Play at least 15kh or 25 hours
  

I'l use this blog to stay accountable then.

I did meet my goals today :

Played 5.5 hours effectively for 3161 hands :

Some missing hands I have to download.

Hands of the day :

-

This always feels nice

Yesterday I've met my goals again. Played 5hrs and 3.2kh. Action was good. I wonder if I played well at the end though. I need to be careful with these long sessions.

Big leak from SB

As said before I have developped a pretty big leak in SB vs BB. While this is the most important spot of the game tree.
Here are the leaks I could identify :

• XF way too much on the flop
  
• Not enough XR on the flop but I've already fixed that lately
  
• X-XF way too much (this is unforgivable since regs overfold to delay cbets)
  
• XC-XF too much
  
• Not enough Bets river overall
  
• XF too much river overall
  

XF too much Flop :

I was overcompensating the fact that regs barrel too much after betting bigger on the flop. But they leak when they check so i can still defend around GTO. Against Bet 2/3 I still think overfolding a bit is better.

Here are some overfolds I identified on the flop :

These are all calls.

Wednesday are normally off for me but yesterday I decided I would play because I'll take some holidays later this month. I took it easy though and spent time working on my game SBvBB.

I played 3hrs for 1.8kh.

It was going ok until I got the chance to sit at a great 1knl table :

I find it quite hard to play 1knl when most of my volume is at 200nl since the gap is so big. If I run bad at 1knl it affects me especially when I'm getting tired.

I couldn't play enough hours yesterday as I had various appointments, including one to start a company. In a month or two I should be set and start to developp a small side project.

Played around 4 hours for 2.4kh.

I realize that a lot of my SB issues come from the fact that sometimes I play to many hands and don't focus enough on small pots. I will see how I address this.
Also from one pool to another, regs don't have the same leaks BBvSB, and at 500nl+ there are much tougher so I need to come up with a better strategy.

Keep grinding and GL. Feeling bad 4you at 1knl shot.

Thanks yes I think I need to find ways to play more at 500nl+ otherwise every time I'll play at 1knl I'll get impacted a lot by variance. But it's hard to find good action.

Yesterday I played 5 hours, 2.8kh.

I can't filter out exactly with H2N4 so some hands are missing.

I'm at 13kh this week so far, let's see if I can get to 15kh this weekend.

Not a great week, but I did reach 15kh so I'm happy :

bb wise I'm up 5 buyins though.

I don't think I was playing my A game all the time but that's how it is.
Now I'm going in holidays until friday so this will be a week off.

SB Leak

Today I have some free time to go over my leak from SBvBB in SRP.

I'll focus on the fact that I X-XF too much while people overfold to X-B.

I could identify a few recurring mistakes.
Like this hand :

On 4str8 turns, MP is enough to call

Some Ah on paired boards :

Also I see a few overfolds vs overbets, I need to go check how regs play the overbet sizing, but it's quite possible they have a lot of draws in their range and give up a lot river. I need to rebuild my DB to check this so I'll know it later.

And finally I saw a lot of Kh Ah or LP that should have bet turn or called down.
If I increase my betting frequency, which is what an exploitative strategy would suggest, I should do better in this node. I can easily lower my fold frequency by 10% or more.

I also played a bit this weekend, 1knl is still going pretty bad :

My check turn is not great at all, I should have bet.
River I thought this guy is weak he's never bluffing but he needs only 2 or 3 combos of bluffs given how few boats are in his range. My hand is just too good of a bluffcatcher. Regs will sometimes turn a Qx or JTs into a bluff to make me fold AK.

So last week went well, I ran pretty good.
Unfortunately I did'nt reach my volume goals. I've had a lot of things to do and it took a lot of my focus away from poker. I need to try to reduce tasks that are not poker related. Unless it's for health or activities that are worth it.

I also worked a lot on my SB game. I'm getting much better at identifying my leaks. I'll talk more about it in a post later this week.