Presidential Sun Run

I never intended to play online poker mainly because it went so very badly when I tried it years ago. I was a huge fish on FullTilt before Black Friday. My sharkscope was absolutely humiliating. I got good at live cash games and that has been my chosen form of poker for over a decade now. I only went on ClubWPTgold to "practice" with play money. But I guess they don't do that anymore. I didn't want to deposit real money because I didn't think I'd be good enough to ever get it back. I just took the $2 they gave me as a free gift, and sat at a 1c/2c table.

I doubled up early on. Then I stood up and moved to two tables and bought in for $2 each. I doubled up again. I kept playing, going south with my winnings by moving to a new table whenever I could. By the end of the first night, I had $17 in my bankroll.

Day 2 was an absolute blur. I played mostly 1c/2c, but eventually dabbled in 5c/10c when I started winning. By the time I went to bed, my bankroll was up to $190.

I am not one of those people who think online poker is rigged, but this site has definitely made me think long and hard about it. I still think it's probably a fair site, but I'm about 10% open to the possibility that it's "rigged". I say this because nobody should be able to run that good. My opponents kept showing up with second best hands for big money. I would hit my draws like nobody's business. I felt like freakin' Yoda at one point calling out loud for "Running King Ten" and then watching both cards fall for the miracle suckout.

All the money goes in on a flop of J62r.

Me: I have 22
Villain: Too bad, I have 66
Me: No problem. Watch this

Turn 2

Eventually my luck seemed to flatten out. But ever since then whenever I've seen an insane luckbox runout, I check the user's hand-count (one of the few stats CWPTG gives you) and it's almost always someone with less than 5,000 hands on the site. Like virtually every time. That, coupled with my own experience, makes me wonder if there is some "beginner's luck" algorithm built in. But maybe it's just a coincidence. You can't download hand histories or any data really, so I have no way of actually confirming this. Just vibes and feel right now. Your mileage my vary.

Again, I'm still 90% sure it's legit. I've just seen too much spooky stuff to not be a little suspicious.

For the first two months I played mostly 1c/2c. While I've never replicated the insane run-good I experienced during my first few thousand hands, I have still been crushing. Actually, when I say "crushing", I mean was absolutely murdering the game with the relentless intensity of thousand white hot burning suns. I'm Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and peak Mike Tyson combined into one fish slaughtering poker machine. I'm not kidding. My results at 2NL seem absolutely stupid.

I tried searching up "what's a good winrate?" and the answers were like 8 or 10 bb/100. I'm winning FIFTY. Does that even sound real? It is. I did it.

(Also, I only started tracking my numbers after my initial week of insane run-good. My first 7K hands were played at over 100 bb/100 and aren't shown on this graph at all.)

Word on the street is that the games on ClubWPTGold are far softer than what's normally seen at similar stakes on other sites. Clearly that is true. They seem to be aggressively pursuing the US market which has been largely starved of online poker since black friday. Thus, there are lots of inexperienced fish in the min stakes games. Obviously that phenomenon won't last forever. However, it does give me great hope to know that poker is not dead. If there are enough donating fish for one guy to pull that much money out of the ecosystem himself, then the game should thrive for a long long time.

Gold is wild. Good luck. I put money on it but like Global better. I popped on this week to see what it was like for the first time in months and its just as wild as ever at 5/10cent. Just like 3-4 all ins every other hand. Can totally see a crazy win rate. Just be prepared for the doom of a downswing on that site. Variance gonna hit like a nuclear bomb.

So at this point you're probably asking "Mr. President, how are you so great at poker?"

You'd think with this kind of success I'd be able to point to certain tactics or playing style that explains it. You'd think I'd be able to describe what I'm doing and teach it to someone. I should be making stacks of cash coaching microstakes players and making content about it right?

The problem is that I really can't describe what I'm doing. It just comes to me.

I've been playing poker for a long time. I read a lot of books. I'm not stupid. But I've also never studied GTO, never spent any meaningful time working with solvers, never cared about charts. All of my research and experience over the last 20 years has just sort of amalgamated into "my playing style". Remember, I played ZERO online poker from 2011-2025. I played live low stakes cash, where winning is built on massive exploits rather than disciplined balance. I guess I've just sort of learned what the population-wide leaks are in my player pool, and turned that into profits. This form of play is what "feels right" to me, even though I know it's exploitable and better players would decimate me.

So that's sort of what this blog is about. I need to start putting things into words, analyzing what I'm doing, and changing it for the better. I have an extremely profitable playing style built on "tricks" that would be considered "leaks" in any real competitive game. So stay tuned to this blog and watch me attempt to transform from "good reg" to "good poker player"

With that being said, I'll try and share what I think are some good tips for destroying 1c/2c

- Huge bet sizes. Your opponents are going to make epic mistakes. Let them do it in the biggest pots possible.
- Overbets. I use them all the time, on all streets. They're great for value bets, and bluffs.

My VPIP/PFR stats are 30/15 over approx 100K hands. That's not super-tight, it's not reckless either. I feel like I'm pretty good at finding imbalanced spots post-flop and attacking them. If you can do that, you can play more hands overall. There are tons of spots where your actual cards don't matter. For example, you call a TAG's raise in position. You totally whiff the flop and turn, but your opponent has checked twice. He's probably done with the hand. Bet big and he will almost certainly fold.

I am cognizant of ranges. I talk to myself while playing and often say things like "That card is better for my range than his" or "he's value-heavy on this runout".

I'm basically playing ABC poker but mixing in huge valuebets/bluffs whenever I find a spot where I think I can attack an imbalance.

So....with all my success at 1c/2c, you might assume my bankroll is spiraling up, right?

Wrong.

For about two months I just yo-yo'd between $150 and $250. Two things were holding me back. I'll save one for another post. For now, I'll just talk about tournaments.

How is this a real form of poker? Who even likes these things? So you play great for hours. You dodge coolers. You catch cards. You win races. You build a stack. Then bam, some turkey binks a 3 outer and you lose 60% of your chips. Then the blinds go up, you get short, you're forced to get it in with A9o, you bust, and you reap your reward of $2.38 for your four hours of stellar poker play. What kind of abject masochist would put themselves through this on a regular basis?

Me, I'm that kind of masochist.

First, what the hell is with the late registration? 10 levels? 12 even? I'm old enough to remember a time when anyone not registered before the cards are dealt didn't get to play at all. When I'm actually elected President of Poker, I'm signing an executive order on Day 1 mandating that late registration be cut off after 30 minutes, and no re-entries are allowed. Freezeouts only. I guess it shouldn't bother me, but for some reason it feels like the tournament changes after registration closes. That lead-up to the bubble is the most fun part of the game for me. I like the suspense. Conversely, I'm absolutely miserable when there's still 40 minutes of registration left and I'm floundering with 18 BB's.

I can often build a stack early, but through the middle stages it dwindles and other players catch up. Then if I'm not getting hands, my chipstack starts to drop below average. I'm often limping over the bubble and most of my cashes were small. To this point, I had yet to make a deep run. Clearly I play too tight in the middle stages of tournaments. that's definitely something I've got to work on.

So I sort of decided that $150-$200 was enough of a bankroll to play 2NL indefinitely. Anytime I got $20 or so bucks above that, I would go play tournaments where I enjoyed a -20% ROI for quite a while. I remained in a cycle of winning $20 in a ring game, blowing it in tournaments, getting mad, saying I hate tournaments, swearing to never play tournaments again, going back to cash, making another $20 and thinking "I could turn this into $200 if I can just ship one of these damn tournaments!"

Tournaments are actually funny. Nowadays you get promotions for "freeze-out tournaments", "experience the thrill of freeze-out", etc. This was totally standard for the majority of human history and rebuy tournaments were different. Those were wild games where people would go all-in preflop until they made a big enough stack. Now "re-entry" or "re-buy" is assumed and standard. People "exploiting" late registrations by registering late and hoping to min-cash, making a small positive ROI each time.

As I mentioned in my last post, tournaments were just one of two things holding back my bankroll. The second problem was that I somehow ran facefirst into a brick wall whenever I tried to move up to 5c/10c. I figured if I just drop down to 2NL whenever my bankroll falls to $200, I'll never go broke. And if I got to $230, I'd take the $30 surplus to play the next stakes up. What could go wrong?

Everything. Everything went wrong.

I'll admit there was some tilting. Some punting. Some leaking. And some fishy play on my part. I'm honest and humble about it, so I'm willing to accept somewhere between 1 and 49% of the blame here. But the rest I can only assume is because the entirety of online poker is rigged against me specifically. I can only assume that Doug Polk, Skeletor, and a team of costa rican software engineers are running ClubWPTGold with the express intent of laughing at my crash out whenever I run KK into Aces.

I'm on the flop with Pocket 6's on a flop of 4,6,8 rainbow. Villain is a rock with a PFR of 8%. You're expecting me to stack his overpair here, right? No. Instead, Brad Owen and Hans Gruber went to this villain's house and uploaded a software patch that changed his cards to 75s. At least, that's what I'm assuming happened because I can't think of another explanation for how bad I ran in these games.

Finally things started going my way when I had AA and got all the money in against AJ on a flop of AT6. A split second later, I let out a worried chuckle as a Q rolls off the turn. Then my head exploded when a K hit the river. Meanwhile, onboard the ClubWPT Deathstar, Rampage and Darth Vader are taking bong rips and high-fiving. They've hacked my webcam and are laughing their asses off watching me try to put my eyeballs back in my skull.

I'm was winning 50BB's per 100 at 2NL. yet somehow, after 10,000 hands, I was LOSING 50BB/100 at 10NL. I had lost $500 playing this stupid game. How is that possible when I was crushing so hard just one level down. It might sound excuse-y but I really did run unbelievably bad in some of these sessions. The donkey luckbox suckouts were completely asinine at some points. Nevertheless, it's my responsibility not to tilt, not to spew, not to punt, not to overplay hands like a fool, and I did a bad job of that at times too.

Another problem I ran into was the antes. They ate my stack alive while I was patiently waiting for hands. When you're playing 10NL on a $30 roll, you can't buy in deep. You can't top up. You just gotta hope you run good early. Because if it takes you too long to make a hand, half your stack is gone and a double up just gets you even. I decided I really couldn't play these games until I had a solid bankroll over and above my self-imposed $200 floor. I wanted at least $500.

So the only thing to do is grind, slowly and methodically, over tens of thousands of hands, winning a dollar at a time at 2NL until I reach my goal.

Or.....maybe I can bink one of these tournaments.....

And so I kept on grinding 2NL and taking a shot at 10NL whenever I got my bankroll a sliver above my "cushion". As I mentioned in my last post, that's a terrible way to move up. Taking shots with a tiny bankroll led to me playing too tight and "scared". I would know the right thing to do, and then not do it because the variance would be too much for my tiny little stack to endure. I happened to see a Phil Galfond video that says your down swings are a function of your skill edge and variance. If you move up to a game where you have a smaller skill edge while trying to play a lower-variance style, you end up in the same place if not worse with regard to downswings. that's definitely what happened to me.

Fortunately though, I finally ran deep in one of these fricken' tournaments. I finished 2nd out of a field of hundreds and scored three hundred something dollars. That basically doubled my bankroll. With that, I went back to 10NL feeling like a high roller and everything was different. I felt like I was playing "my game" with confidence. And sure enough, the profits started accumulating.

As I stated in my last post, I got down -$500 over 10,000 hands. After this turning point, I was on pace to get even by 20K hands. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way. I hit a bit of a plateau where my sessions would alternate between big wins and big losses. I was basically even for about 7k hands. But eventually that passed too and I finished climbing my way back to even.

As of this writing, I have played 24,680 hands for a total profit of $0.42. That's good for a 0.017BB/100 win rate.

Plus, I made two more final tables in $5 tournaments and scored a few hundred more for my bankroll. I'm not longer a losing player at tournaments either. With my recent wins, my total tournament results show a 10.04% ROI, which I feel is respectable.

I started with $2.

No deposits.

Now I have $1,000

I just gotta repeat all this a thousand more times and I'll be a millionaire

The 10NL journey so far.....

Incredible day

It's been about two weeks since my last update. We're doing fine. I'm told 8BB/100 is a good win rate at online poker, and I'm there.

~48,000 and $424 translates to 8.8 BB/100. However, that's heavily weighed down by my initial downswing caused by issues that have been since corrected. Just for illustration, I decided to call that period "the pre-season". I then drew a trend-line of 20BB/100 from that point and plotted my actual results against it. We're hugging that line pretty closely, so I expect my overall win rate will eventually creep up towards that 20 mark and we'll be moving up to 20NL within another 50,000 hands or so.

Stay tuned. This blog is going to take a very rant-y turn.

Let's just say I'm not too happy about the state of poker in 2026 and I have a lot to say about it.