Zero to Hero Journey - 10NL to 100(0)NL
Greetings ladies and gentlemen,
My name is , and I’ll be writing this blog to mark the start of my (hopefully someday professional) poker journey.
My (realistic?) goal is to reach a point where I can comfortably beat 100NL, however after that sky is the limit (man can dream). I’ll be doing my best to try to reach 100NL by the end of June next year. Currently I have a full time job, and I am dedicating most of my free time to study and play poker. That leaves me with about 3 hours of play and study over week days, and 6-8 hours of play and study on an average Saturday / Sunday. I had previous experience playing recreationally on Unibet, where I was comfortably beating 10NL, and was somewhat breakeven / slightly winning at 25NL.
I recently found a poker coach who I will be working with in the coming months, and to prepare for my first coaching session I played 10k hands on GGPoker as I needed the hands to be tracked (no hand history on Unibet). My experience on 10NL RnC was quite different from what I was used to on Unibet, as the players were significantly tighter, and there were no people occasionally showing up and donating their stack for no reason by going all in with K7o preflop (Unibet 10NL can be very fun 😀). My results after the first 10k hands on GG poker looked like this:

As you can see, nothing to write home about, however I was happy I was not loosing too much money and that I had a foundation based on which I could start working with my coach.
The coach seemed very well prepared for our first session and we started off by him pointing out some pre flop mistakes and spots I should be focusing on / drilling in the upcoming week (mostly RFI late position spots/BB defense). After the quick preflop analysis, we moved on to the PFR SRP IP play. The strategy I was taught is a simplified strategy that tries to retain as much as possible EV compared to pure GTO, while still being somewhat simple to learn and execute. I was impressed by the amount of information covered in our first session (which lasted about extra 20min). With this new PFR SRP IP strategy under my belt I moved on into the next week to generate 10k more hands for our next session.
This week felt better than the previous 10k hands, i definitely feel more comfortable in SRP IP PFR spots. I liked having a game plan and feeling like i know what i want to do, as previously I was mostly playing off of intuition. Overall I think I am bluffing too much, especially in the first 2/3 of the hands i played (took some time to adjust to GGPoker RnC pool). I think people are calling very freely and i feel like i need to be much more careful with bluffs in the future… Also, I tried to increase my WTSD this week, however i feel like I probably called some spots that i maybe should not have… My results for this week were the following:

Slightly better than the first week, however this could be due to variance (even though I am hoping that it is because of the most recent upgrades to my play :fingerscrossed: ). In the upcoming coaching session we will be focusing on some questions I had after this week of play, as well as building upon the strategy with BB defense postflop.
My goal with this blog is to post weekly updates (after every 10k-ish hands that I play), sharing the experiences and results along the way. For now I will continue playing Rush and Cash just to help generate volume in the time I have for play, however as I move up the stakes I will strongly consider moving to regular tables in order to face softer players / achieve higher winrate. Hopefully someday I will be able to look back at this blog, remembering the times when I was a young poker newbie aspiring to beat 100NL…
Peace and love everyone, and good luck at the tables!
Yours truly,
4 Replies
Something to note… I am currently not concerned about the high rake at micros as my goal is to learn the game and move up the stakes when I feel like I’m ready (I can luckily afford this due to my full time job). The graphs that I am including display pre-rake winrate, as this is what I will be taking into account when deciding when to move up the stakes. For now, as long as I stay somewhat break even post rake, I will be very happy. I'm hoping to see that graph climb more and more as I continue to add additional upgrades to my strategy.
Can you tell us about the strategies you're implementing?
I would understand if you don't want to, but since it's "pseudo GTO", it can't be exploited anyway.
GL dude, 10k hands/week seems somewhat lazy or? thats like an evening/night session or something on a site that has games 24/7?
Can you tell us about the strategies you're implementing?
I would understand if you don't want to, but since it's "pseudo GTO", it can't be exploited anyway.
The way I see it from my limited understanding of the game there are 10 important spots to learn:
- SRP IP PFR
- SRP OOP PFC
- SRP IP PFC
- SRP OOP PFR
- 3BP IP PFR
- 3BP OOP PFC
- 3BP IP PFC
- 3BP OOP PFR
- 4BP IP
- 4BP OOP
In most other spots we can generalise / adapt based on our understanding of how these 10 spots work. These spots come in raiser / caller pairs, so we can kinda approach them in pairs of 2, so atm i’m focusing on
- SRP IP PFR
- SRP OOP PFC
I’ll refrain from discussing the strategy in too much depth in this blog, however I can share some interesting findings that I come across on the journey. Also, keep in mind that what might be new and interesting to me might be common sense to most more senior grinders, so don’t expect to find extraordinary pieces of wisdom here.
For example, did you know… That defending range from BB differs quite significantly depending on RFI opening size? There’s quite a big difference between 2BB open and 2.5BB open. I was aware that there was some difference, but the actual difference surprised me. In UTG 2.5BB RFI - BB defends 18.3%, while in UTG 2BB RFI - BB defends 33.8% (guess how much BB defends vs 3BB RFI…😉 Might seem like common sense to some, but 15% difference in defending range by increasing the opening size by 0.5BB is nuts imo. I think that at the moment my BB defence play has quite a few major leaks allowing my fellow 10NL grinders to soak up quite a lot of EV… Not for much longer though.
GL dude, 10k hands/week seems somewhat lazy or? thats like an evening/night session or something on a site that has games 24/7?
The current approach looks like this: Learn theory / strategy for a spot, then drill it in GTOWizard until I’m comfortable with execution, and then apply the strategy in next 10k hands. If the results are sufficient, move on to the next piece of the strategy and so on. When it comes to volume, I am currently playing 2 or 3 RnC tables when I play. If 1 table = 220 hands/h, 3 tables = 660 hands/h, 10000/660 approx= 15h of play. If i add 10-15h of study on top of that, that seems like plenty of time invested to the cause on top of a full time job, so i’m quite content with 10k hands per week. I think that in the early stages of poker life, when there is so much to learn, it is much more important to invest the time into studying rather than generating volume. Once i am satisfied with my basic knowledge of important spots, then it will make more sense to go for more volume in order to identify leaks that require more data. As for now there is still so much i need to learn, I will be sticking to 10k hands/week.
However! At the moment, both my coach and I are on Christmas / New Years holidays, so I wasn't in that much of a hurry to complete the 10k hands. That’s why I decided to try out playing regular 10NL tables just to feel out the difference between RnC and normal tables, and I can say that the difference was quite noticable. People were opening much wider, and it was common to find an occasional straddler / player with over 50 VPIP. These are very rare / nearly non existent in RnC, so this was an interesting change of dynamic, which creates an opportunity for a higher win rate. However, it took nearly double the amount of time to play these 10k hands than it did to play 10k RnC hands, so I am very much undecided on whether to continue playing regular tables or to switch back to RnC. I would assume that if my goal was to pursue as high win rate as possible that it would be better to stick to regular tables, however as my main goal is to generate a hand sample to analyse my execution of the strategy with the coach and to correct mistakes, I might switch back to RnC for now. I’m happy to report that the results of the last 10k 10NL regular hands were the following:
Slightly winning over the small sample. I’m happy with the result as I have currently learned the basics of 2/10 important spots, and in rest of the spots I’m pretty much improvising and feeling out my way through the hands.
Also, I refuse to post updates without a graph (as graphs are sexy), so every future update will need to wait until I play the next 10k hands (no hard 1 week cap). If there is no update in one week, it probably means that the hands are still being worked on, though this shouldn’t happen too often (outside of holidays season). For now, I’ll get back to holidaying so the next update should be dropping in about 2 weeks.
Peace and love, thank you for the good wishes, and see you at the tables!
EDIT: And Happy New Year 😀
