Cash, MTTs - get better, do better
Thought I'd make one of these to track some progress and maybe/hopefully get something more out of it in terms of being connected to a community since poker's such an isolating solo thing in many ways.
I'm ancient at this point (34) and I've been playing for many many years and I was full-time between 2017-2020 roughly. I used to play live cash primarily since my hourly was just so much higher and I found it less frustrating. In a way it was kind of like giving up since online is where the real skill and test is, but money's nice too and seems like it should be prioritized when doing it full-time at least. Anyway, I've almost played 0 live cash since ~2021 as it's impossible to make meaningful money without being ****ed by society/banks/whatever else. Actual cash is no longer king.
I've made many sacrifices career-wise to have time to dedicate to poker. My current job pays fine and is comfortable/white-collar/soulless, and it's mostly done remotely and gives me heaps of free time to play poker (as evidenced by the graphs below for 2025), but I am not trying to climb some career ladder aggressively or anything like that. Since 2023, my grind is basically 50% online cash, 25% online MTTs, and 25% live MTTs/as much as possible, and I seem to be making exactly around $30-35k each year from poker.
My 2025:
Online MTTs
Spoiler
Live MTTs ended up around $10k, so about $22k in total for MTTs.
Online cash (85% NL200)
Spoiler
The cash results are pretty embarrassing and not aligned with my goals. There were some bad runs in there obviously but I'm probably also just not improving at the necessary rate in games that are quite tough. The big dip at the end was 100% GG too when I decided to try grinding there, and either I don't know how to beat Chinese fish or 11bb/100 in rake is just too much (regs seem to be surviving and maybe even thriving though somehow, so I guess I'm wrong about the rake being too much of a killer?). Not sure what the actual rake ends up being when adjusted for expected rb etc but it wasn't enough for me at least, even if the results weren't as bad if we include all that.
In this thread I'll attempt to at least update monthly and kind of specify my study routine and what I'm actually doing actively to improve.
GL
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I've been very sort of demotivated and struggling with cash thus far this year. I'm obviously not running great (as shown by the AIEV line below) but that's kind of boring to focus on. However, I'm more into MTTs than I've ever been, and the past couple of weeks have been insane. At the end of March I managed to bang off a $30k score on GG, making March my biggest winning month ever, and then earlier this week, I won an MTT for almost the exact same amount on a different site. So in the space of two weeks I've had my two biggest cashes lifetime and also my best months, unless I do something bizarre in April.
GG MTT graph:
This is GG lifetime of course but the year maybe started around the 100-110 mark, so I'm up roughly $25k on GG this year.
Non-GG MTTs this year:
Which puts my MTT profit for the year at around $50k, making my cash results easier to handle:
So in total for 2026 I'm up around $42k, which is pretty ridiculous.
Gonna be playing some live MTTs over the next couple of weeks and then I'll be firing GG WF pretty hard in May. I'll be playing cash too here and there but it'll be relatively low volume.
