My Last Shot at Poker

Do you feel the same for lower stakes? Also PS vs gg quite a difference in rake since they take preflop as well

Just cameback from like 6day partying/drinking bender and decided to import the hands since start with Dutch GG account to reflect a little. It looks better than it is tbh, because I recieved **** rakeback after paying another 14k in rake. I told you guys already I will not try to complain too much about it and work with it the best I can, but ofcourse seeing this it's pretty demoralizing. Atleast when I finally reach that flat50% tier it will be a bit less bad I hope and also slightly more consistent. Also it's time to conclude there is a new nemesis stake; nl1k. I've Already dropped like 30bi in like 30k hands of playing there. Just every time there is a good spot, I somehow end up getting coolered. On the otherside, I watched some video from Ben about his first 100k hands on gg1k. And he also started with like 30bi downswing. It seems pretty normal, and the money won't have any effect on my life quality anyway. If I put my effort in it, I can regrind relatively easy I feel like. But unless something special happens (like super upswing or getting some jackpot ev back) I'm not gonna play 1k anymore this year. It's not worth the stress. Next year we try again.

Being finally back in the Netherlands and enjoying life again made me realize; it's really easy to let poker completely delude you in terms of money. It's constantly up and down with pretty crazy amounts. Making 5k in a month is considered a bad month these days. But then I zoom out and see I had an absolute blast the last 6 days or so with friends etc. Just constantly going out partying, to the club/bar, going out for diner etc. And I only end up spending like 800 or 900 euro. That same amount I just click away in a split second behind my computer, while being constantly stressed & obsessed about making it big. And ofcourse translating your poker balance/mula on the table to real life is fatal for mental game (rather just see it as numbers on a screen). And not sustainable. But the longer I do this, the more I realize it's all a trap for me (as long as you can afford a simple but comfortable lifestyle). That's also why always when I'm feeling good, mental game is easier. Because I'm not so attached to the money.

And even though it's a trap, it's still fun. And "the dream" is part of the fun. I'm sometimes thinking why tf I'm doing this poker thing the way I'm doing it. But I came to the conclusion the fun part is being my own hero, it's all up to me how far I can go in this. And it's me vs me everyday. Unfortunately, never being able to just grind a limit I'm crushing for 12 months straight is also part of it, because I'm always thinking about the next belugas I'm trying to crush. And also unfortunately, playing like a mad-scientist rather than just playing a solid strat and grind ev is also part of it 😀 And this blog, eventhough 2p2 pcg sometimes seems a bit dead these days, plays a nice part in it aswell!

I'm struggling a bit with motivation and also a solid routine during this summer. And then also last week dropping 10k in a matter of a few days, it doesn't help. So decided to write a little, to appreciate the thing I'm doing a bit more 😀 glgl

For a while it seems I kinda got rid of the supertilt. But then yesterday morning after super bad sleep and obviously not ready for variance I picked up some old habits:

There wasn't any real damage, but still I went back to bed for an afternoon-nap feeling super annoyed.

After some rest I returned to the tables in the evening and had one of my best profit days ever:

I Didn't even play so well (also not bad), just very smooth run and good ev spots I would say. Next time I will try to listen to myself better and not play in the morning (begin afternoon) when I'm so tired and lowkey not ready for variance. It's hard because the less I value sleep, the better I sleep. And also ignoring it goes well plenty of times, but then out of now where there is this overwhelming feeling of emotion and all over sudden I'm super tired behind my pc 6bet jamming J8s vs strong 5bet range (practically 4bet, especially with the way I was going OOL preflop hands before haha) which only makes things worse.... That's the thing, I really made progress with this tilting stuff but I know I can't slip up, but sometimes I don't know when I'm slipping up. Maybe it's also a bit of self-awareness and discipline (as in: Just don't play).

I'm Gonna grind until Wednesday and then gonna take a break again. Some more "normal" hands from yesterday:

H1 I'm not sharp enough right now to think deeply about his call, wonder what you guys think

H2 Probably big big sizing error otr vs rec, again wonder how you guys play river

H3 Scary

H4 Pretty cool bluff from villain

H5 OH LOUIS, JIJ MAN VAN VEEEEEEEEL GEZICHTEN (Maybe Dutch people get the reference haha)

H6 Tiltpunt + show hand (out of emotion) just so I will overthink every decision vs this villain

H1 I don't like it on such a good card for you, assuming you don't really b-b AQ/Q9 with a club and it's not very easy to think of bluffs

H2 I'd just jam hoping they checked back AK or call light with JJ-KK. If they 3b more than most fish maybe XR

I highly reccomend getting a post it note and writing out a pre session check list that you adhere to no matter what, or you can't start a session. I used to wake up, instictively check the lobby for whoppers, see a good spot, sit and proceed to play AWFUL. Just because I couldn't let this spot pass me by. I hadn't eaten, woken up, nothing and I'd lose a couple stacks and feel like I couldn't leave. Some of my biggest and most miserable losing days started this way, stuck there, loading up more tables trying to get even.

Now I have a check list that consists of questions and actions that I do before a session. Stretching, getting water, watch a quick 45s video for inspiration, get the software ready, get the tunes ready, and lastly quick things I wanna do or want to incorporate into my game lately, like full time banking river decisions, "Do I beat value?" etc....

yeah agree, I should have jammed.... ty for feedback!

Great advice mate! I will definitely try to make some sort of list as you mention aswell. I already have some pre session rituals that work well for me, but I'm not too consistent with them. That's also what I mean with during the summer playing and having breaks of and on I struggle a bit to be consistent with habits like that. But a list will definitely help.

And yeah what you describe I can definitely relate to. It literally happened Saturday that I just needed to briefly open the client to open pokercraft, take one look at the lobby > proceeds to see a table too good to ignore > sits down and without realizing starts a session hahahaha

Results from last 7/8 days. With a bit of rakeback around +$19.5k. They hit me with a pretty nice heater 😀 And so the month seems to be looking decent again in terms of profit. Again it just shows there is not so much need for panic when I downswing a little like I did right before the previous break. Although in the moment I still felt pretty bad about it....

I still played some 1k. I don't want to ramble in a post how I'm not gonna play it anymore this year, and afterwards proceed to play it (was even the same week lol). But I was in a nice flow (I just played it when I was cruising already for the session), set myself some loss limits when I jumped in and didn't put any pressure on myself. And it went alright. But yeah what I wrote still applies that I will just focus on playing it next year and this year keep focusing on current limits (nl500 and some fr). And also hopefully improve a bit.

Month:

As you can see I took a nice free fall but then re climbed quite well. The volume was pretty low because I had a lot of off-days. Right now I'm also gonna take a break for at least 4 days because I have a bunch of stuff planned on the weekend. Also next week some mates go to a festival, so if I still can get a ticket and manage to take care of some camping stuff that means I'm done with poker for this month. If I don't go, I will try to do something similar as the last days and just lock in for a bit. I leave you with one hand, I have thought about it a lot today (without looking up the answer) but I still don't know if it's a good combo. I think it's a mistake. Atleast it looks cool, gn 😀

This is prolly above my paygrade but the jam seems unnecessary? I don't understand what it acheives that a flat doesn't

congrats on the winning week!

Thanks guys 😀

About the hand: I thought he is not really suppose to valuebet anything worse than AQ. There might be some chops we folding out but other than that we just have a bluffcatcher. Now being 200bb deep just blocking the nizzles and a bunch of super catchers is massive. Villain is a competent reg who plays 5k so I assume his split otr contains some stronger flushes (to prevent me from being able to jam and create 0ev situation with too much of my flushes), so the blockers are relevant in my opinion. + blocking AdAx I thought was massive (which turned out to be right assumption in my sim).

I ran the sim and the bluff is mandatory. Just being deeper and ranges more narrow blockers become even more important + it's not that I have infinite good bluffcombo"s in range (I was thinking AdJx aswell). I was suprised to see the bluff was mandatory aswell btw, just ingame the bluff seemed kind of natural. I wasn't sure how bad of a blocker the Q was (in terms of potentially blocking lots of folds). Important take away is to not just call with for example Khigh flushes because if I do that, and find the AdQx pure I'm simply overbluffing way too hard and villain can auto-bluffcatch....

Screenshot of AQo vs b30/b150/b75 (flop/turn/river) in the 200bb sim:

I also ran the sim for 100bb, just to compare and might get a better understanding how strategies shift. Here is AQo in 100bb sim:

Interesting spot for sure. Normally I'm not a fan in digging deeper into snow flake spots with random stack depths but there was definitely some logic hidden in this one.

PS. 200bb sim wasn't perfect so please take it with a grain of salt, think the takeaways will still apply from it

Oooh it's a bluff, that makes sense I just skimmed the HH and thought oh that's strange 😃

very cool hand

It doesn't apply anymore. I'm gonna play some zoom here and there to speedrun the ****ing fishbuffet thing. I know I'm an idiot but I need to have the flat rb tier. At some point I will ask a mod to delete this post and then it applies again 😃

''it doesn't apply anymore''

Lmao.

Weak as ****.

Dear diary,

Things were looking up for me recently. After many relapses and ups and downs I finally received my 1-month sobriety chip. To celebrate this small victory my therapist had developed a plan for me to reintegrate to society, and boy was I excited! And boy did I have no idea how bad this would end up going....

But before I talk further let me take you back to how I first got in touch with what became my addiction, and the beginning of this emotional roller coaster all started. I remember the first session how it all started like yesterday. I was fresh home from a year partying abroad when covid struck. And here I was sitting in my bedroom at my moms house thinking "what on earth to do with my time?". Bare in mind the world was in lockdown mode. I ended up finding some card game, it seemed exciting, adventurous but also innocent. I played tournaments where I bought in for real money to get chips, with the objective of outliving as many of my opponents as possible by playing the best strategy possible. I had some ups and downs and at some point I got bored of it. But then one day when I was clicking through the lobby when I found this one format... It was the same card game, but in this game I sat at the table with cash rather than chips. But it wasn't just a regular table, it was the type of format where if you fold your hand you would immediately get seated with a new hand on a next table. I think they called it ZOOM poker. Some people say that a certain addiction grows on them, but for me it was love at first site. I was hooked the first minute I played it. Just action all the time, financial and emotional swings up and down and dopamine spikes to the roof! There were also these losses, in which I would desperately attempt to earn my losses back. These were the first indication I might be developing a problem.....

Now here I am, 3.5 years later trying to fix all the mess that I made in my life. Countless of group meetings, detox and relapses I'm back at home playing poker. The grind goes decent, I'm just playing regular tables. The clinic advised me to put some pressure on myself by publicly stating the person who catches me with my pants down and sees me relapsing in one of the many zoom pools gets $500. And for a while this seemed to go fine. It was effective at least. The urges were still there. I remember waking up one night bathing in sweat sprinting towards my pc just to have a realization moment while loading up the client. By dodging such a bullet, you would think this would be the turning point. But nothing is further away from the truth.

Last night was the 4th day in a row of down swinging. I'm becoming more and more fragile and when I woke up this morning I broke down completely. Once again I sprint towards my laptop, but this time the voice of doing the right thing was talking to me a lot less loud than the previous time. I open my blog on twoplustwo just to shamelessly write "the bounty doesn't apply anymore"" in a post. I snap-open my client, load up 4 tables of ZOOM poker and the next thing I remember is waking up with a heavy headache next to my desk and pc. I don't know which feeling was taking the upper hand, the shame or the guilt... As I feel absolutely dreadful I randomly receive some motivational insides in my brain and I decide to face my feeling of shame and open my blog on twoplustwo.com just to see this message:

As I read it a cocktail of emotions arises.... Thanks for calling me out Betraisefold22! I'm on my way back to the rehab clinic!!!

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Nah all banter aside, I have deposit limits and I'm down-swinging. I just wanted to briefly take care of this stupid spin (needed like rest 20%) so I could have enough funds on my acc for tonight"s grind. This bounty I made was more for impulsive/tilted playing zoom. But today for the current struggles it seemed like the perfect solution.

This underwhelming $360 spin was not worth getting my fragile ego hurt for 😃 😃 😃

Atleast made also like $700 while playing it so I can atleast play some 200fr tonight and deposit more next couple days!

I'm not planning on playing any zoom anymore, so the bounty can continue untill I'm weak as **** again 😉 and tell you guys it doesn't apply anymore

There we go. It worked.

Good luck boss.

Kinda downswinging last couple days. It's been a while since I experienced this insecure feeling about my play (relative for the limits I play) but the runbad is making me doubt everything. Especially just getting absolutely crushed by recrationals and then when I check back the occasional 8high they showdown with 9high.... Feels like everything I do is wrong. I know it's only like 5 playing days of downswinging. And it's not that big of a deal, I already started the regrind (didn't import hand yesterday and day before but went well) and will be back soon. And also I checked my databass and the winrate this year is still big, especially considering the ridiculous bb/100h rake I pay this year. But some bad habits are re-appearing again. The main one being that I started growing a passionate hate towards my opponents again. Honestly, I'm a positive person. And I genuinely understand people being nits/shortstackers/toilet regs, variance is a tricky thing and everyone deals with it in it's own way. And I (try to) respect them for going through the same pain as me everyday. But the last couple days I'm spamming the "You suck emote" on repeat. Or type in chat in caps lock out of rage just to delete it and not send it. I'm swearing behind my monitor as I go out of line just to put an virtual enemy in it's place. I'm making it way too personal again (resulted in some nice clicking/leveling wars again hahaha). So yeah, from now I will try to be more positive again and stop this crybaby behaviour. I know this is not how it works; countering your emotions by "just being positive". But writing and understanding that they go through the same **** as me, and that I only make myself miserable by being so toxic, will hopefully help. Ofcourse if someone grims or does other unethical behaviour a bit of healthy emotion is not more than normal 😀 But just seeing everyone as the enemy unfortunately doesn't work for me and just creates a toxic environment.

Some hands of the downswing, and yes I will use this opportunity to share my pain about some super coolers:

One winning hand, haters will say this was luck and not all skill:

Sorry for boring you with sharing coolers only.

Gonna chill with the 500fr for a bit, there is a good winrate and ev is big. But it's emotionally unhealthy for me, because the variance is so massive. When I'm back from this dip, I will start playing it again.

Edit: Oh and I forgot, I also got stacked by our friend Stefan. Maybe the call pre is emotional, but he is 3betting/4betting the **** out of me especially when we are deeper (which wasn't the case in the hand. And yeah postflop is just standard:

My man. I watched a youtube video of your hands last year and it was very beautiful poker. Have faith in your skill and just realize that variance is one of the invisible costs of the game that everyone has to pay and it is designed to weed out the weak from the strong. You either blossom from it or die at the root. Stay focused my man.

What video? I'd like to see that as well

ty man, gl to you aswell. Good to see you back on 2p2 😀 And about the variance, sometimes it drives me mad, sometimes I deal well with it.....

I wonder too, can you link maybe mrPeru?

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Decided to play a madman 12hour/12tabling session yesterday. Ran pretty well 😀 With rake (too lazy to import hands) but also with leaderboard moneys around +$8k day.

SirJoost1679the3rd of the 500fr pool

There were a lot of crazy hands, I'm not gonna bother looking through them all right now but couple fun ones:

missclick pre = autostack off to prevent showdown proceeds to show cards

Poker wasn't going so well this week & last week, so hopefully I can use this as motivation to regain myself and have a bit more professional approach again.

Tried to find it but couldn't remember the channel and of all the usual replay channels none had it. Might have been deleted.

Month was going very well:

Untill doomswitch was turned on again:

Total month so far:

Got like 6k in rakeback, and lost 5k on untracked site. Ofcourse I can't complain, but losing always hurts. I hope to be able to end the month positively and I also hope to play well again despite the bad run last couple days. I was playing with a lot of confidence, but it backfired a bit. Couple massive bluffs on 1k went wrong (literally ran into the nuts 3times with 150bb+ eff all in bluff)....

h1 My thought process was flawed ingame, I thought I can have raising range with strong Ax+, therefor villain can still 3bet with strong non-straight hands and that's why I like to unblock pairs (and block straights). But in hindsight think villains 3betting range is way more polar than I thought....

h2 punished for opening slightly too wide :/ btw ran the sim to ease my mind, 88 is folding range and villain is not suppose to have random non-full house Ax in super polar range otr so better to turn random Ax that block boats into a bluff according to professor pio

I'm far from a super genius and easy to conclude a certain play is bad when you run into the nuts, the same stuff was going through in the days before the doomswitch started. But still with this in mind I don't like both plays, but I need to accept my (potential) mistakes and learn from them (the cliches). Feel free to give your opinion on the hands.

No more 1k this month! Despite the bad feeling of last couple days it's still a +20k month and I don't want to completely ruin it 😉 Time to regain confidence at 500nl and 200fr.

fwiw this only applies for gg 😃 I'm thinking about depositing a little on certain site and for certain reasons I need to run it up. I was just about to play and thought it would be awkward if some sort of dispute breaks out about it, hence this post to make sure 😉

wasnt this freeroll because zoom format triggers some addictive behaviors from you?

hahaha more or less

It's mainly just because I lack discipline sometimes when I'm a bit tilted and stuck, and it's really easy when the action is a bit dead to load up 4 tables of rush and cash instead and for me this is just a waste of time for multiple reasons: Goes way too fast for my poor focus, lots of stress and tilt in those awful pools, supernitmeta where I only run into the nuts so could only be slightly +ev when I'm calm/super focussed. Hence I came up with that bounty post. Zoom on for example pokerstars I also experience too much stress and waste of time compared to current ev but at least there I'm probably +ev, had like 3-4evbb there or something last year (and then with some rb it's decent because lots of hands/h) so wanted to play that on the side (mainly heads up zoom) to run up a small roll there. But yeah I couldn't deposit anyway because of my location, so ended up not doing it.