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.