Steve's PLO Journey

Hi Everyone,

Warning - this is going to be a somewhat length read, I'm going to try and highlight the key points of my PLO journey so far that started about 3.5 years ago.

My name is Steve and I'm from 32 years old from Canada, this is my first 2+2 post as well as the start of my poker blog/journal and journey. I have a regular 9-5 job where I work from home, but I'm able to commit a lot of time to poker as well, typically at least 30 hours most weeks and sometimes more. Been playing poker since I was 18, saw Poker After Dark on NBC and was hooked. Used to play mostly $5 home game one table freezeout type stuff with some buddies, watched a YouTube video here and there but back then there wasn't much out there, and probably was just the old books in video form. I don't even know if training sites existed back then, solvers certainly didn't yet. Discovered PLO eventually after a couple years but would just deposit a couple hundred onto Full Tilt (pre black friday) and 888 and usually would just try to run it up. Never had real intentions of cashing out, was more just fun to see how high I could get that $200 to go!

Anyways, about 3.5 years ago I discovered a YouTube video from Jnandez, saw more of his content and thought PLO might be fun again to play, didn't realize how much strategy there was and heard the term GTO and Solver for the first time. I think the Mastermind site had just launched a few months before that, and it was $99/mo which was a lot at the time to me considering I had no roll and didn't even know what a bankroll or bankroll management was. I didn't have much extra cash, but I thought about it for a long time and decided that I'd always loved the game and played with buddies as often as I could, and maybe this was something I could take seriously - either to play full time someday, or make some good cash on the side. I bought a one month subscription to the PLO Mastermind, and sold some MTG cards for a starting roll of $500 or so.

I started at PLO5 with 100 BI trying to follow strict BRM - but in the beginning I'm not ashamed to say I was really bad, thought I knew more than I did and was still susceptible to mega tilt. I played exclusively on stars zoom, roll fluctuated and eventually I had lost all but $200 or so. Was getting extremely frustrated by the results and decided to just play 200z with 1 bullet and see what happened, planning to sell more cards to replenish the roll if needed. As luck would have it, I ran that $200 to $1400 or so over a long night into the early hours of the morning before the pool broke and I decided to quit. I immediately reflected once the software closed and thought about how dumb that really was and how lucky/thankful I should be. The next couple of days I didn't play but bought a book about treating poker like a business and watching some Mastermind videos about tools and software away from the table to use (HM3/PT4, PokerJuice, ProPokerTools to name a few).

My computer was from 2007 (we are in 2019 at this point in my story) and it was starting to lag hard, would randomly freeze and just wasn't going to cut it. I decided to take out $1000 from that $1400 and invest into a brand new custom build computer and HM3 to take it more seriously. For most of 2019, i was playing PLO5 and wasn't winning. I had a side job over the winter that gave me a few hundred a month I could afford to reload my roll and just continued to play PLO5 into 2020. Fast Forward to April 2020 - I wasn't improving on my own that much watching content and taking notes, for sure I was improving marginally but not enough to stop the bleeding. I decided to hire a private coach... this wasn't cheap for me, nearly everyone I found was around $200/session for a minimum of 5 sessions, but I ultimately decided I could go on playing the rest of the year with marginal improvements and still losing and i'd be better off investing in myself in order to improve.

I won't mention the coach as I don't think it's that important, but I definitely learned a lot. Up to that point, my RFI ranges were super static and nitty, and my 3-bet% was super low and only included good Aces. We would usually do 30ish minutes of a topic, then 60 minutes of hand review or so from hands that the coach selected in my database rather than me picking them out. We only did 1 session every 2 weeks or so and he'd give me something specific to work on - such as 3-betting IP and then we'd compare my stats between coaching sessions to see if I had improved. The coach had me playing PLO10 on RIO because their rakeback was way better compared to Stars - it was in the same timeframe as the 1st Galfond challenge so there was more traffic than normal. I wasn't winning in those games even though they were "soft". In hindsight years later, looking back over some of the hands and sessions I'd recorded, the games were brutal. Half the tables at any given time had half the people sitting there with sleeping dynamic avatars and it was mostly full of nitty tight regs all grinding for the higher RB and splash pots.

After the coaching was done and I still wasn't seeing great results (roughly July 2021) I reverted a little bit into old bad habits. I can't remember what my roll was at the time, but I decided to shot some 25z and 50z, and eventually busted my roll again. I felt really defeated, but at the same time slightly relieved that I would be forced to take some time off. Around that time the PLO Mastermind hired a mental coach for the team (Jan Phillipi) and I thought that investing in some mental game coaching would be really good for me. I setup the mental coaching starting towards the end of October, and used September and October to rebuild my roll at the same time from outside money. The time off definitely helped, I had been going really hard and intense (even if I wasn't seeing the results) with my study and play. October 2021 I started my mental coaching with a fresh and positive outlook, and loaded $400 onto GG poker (with an additional $600 available if I needed it in a virtual wallet as part of my roll). I had that side job again which would pay for 100% of the mental coaching (I can't remember how much that was, maybe about $1800 CAD) and I could reload a bit into my roll if I needed it.

I decided to start at PLO25 on regular tables this time, I was feeling much better about my game and willing to move down if I busted the $400 as I still had more than enough to play PLO10 if it came to it. I worked hard away from the tables with activities my mental coach gave me (we primarily worked on energy management, quality of life enhancements and techniques to recognize tilt). I was doing pretty well on the tables, better than I had done before, and it continued through the mental coaching. I would win some sessions, lose some sessions, but the rakeback at the time on GG was decent because my PVI was high and the high hand bonus was adding about 20% in rakeback. I felt better than ever, my mental game was greatly improving and so was my game on the tables as well. By this time the PLO Trainer was on the market and I was using that and Visions to train preflop - most of my off table study revolved around preflop and getting my ranges right.

Some interesting things happened around February - that's a long story in and of itself, so I won't get into the boring details but I ended up becoming friends with some poker players and we would game together sometimes online. We would hang out in discord, talk about life and sometimes talk about poker as well. One of the players was a pretty well known professional PLO player - Suhepx. We hung out quite often online and became good friends over that time, talking about life and poker. In mid April he mentioned to me that he had a spot open in his CFP and thought I would be a good fit, and I thought so as well. We had become close and it made sense to me at that point in my poker career. We agreed on a percentage and a term of one year. By this point, I had run my $400 up to $1300 on GG playing exclusively PLO25 reg tables, so my starting roll was that $1300 (plus the extra I had set aside in case I needed it at some point).

At the very start we reviewed my database and some of my recorded footage to see where I was at - then we had a few 1:1 sessions. The coaching evolved and within a couple months we had a few more students in the CFP all playing similar stakes, so we did group sessions twice a week. Things were going well - in August 2021 my wife was leaving to visit some family for 2 weeks and I took 2 weeks off work so I could just grind like crazy and study as much as I wanted for a couple weeks. On the second day of my vacation - I somehow got an inner ear infection called Vestibular Neuritis that caused extreme vertigo, nausea/throwing up, and loss of balance. I had to have my parents stay with me 24/7 to walk my dog and feed me until my wife returned. I spent weeks and weeks at physio doing exercises at home and it wasn't until about the end of October when I felt good enough to sit at a computer for more than a couple hours and was able to resume my life (somewhat - the symptoms were still there, minor, for the better part of 10 months or so).

This was devastating, I lost 3 months of playing/studying right when I was feeling my best and it turned my world upside down. I got back to it once I was ready around Halloween. I was playing a ton, my roll was increasing and I felt great. My PVI went to **** around December and I started adding in some 5-Card PLO because of the way PVI works to try and increase my roll through the tables and rakeback. By the end of February, my roll was sitting at around $7500 and I had moved up to playing all PLO50 reg tables on GG, sometimes some RNC depending on the tables on GG. I found from the time I had vertigo to the end of January the 50 pools had started to get pretty dry, a lot of the fish/whales moved over to 5-card and my winrate wasn't as high anymore, the tables were a lot more reg heavy.

I had a kid at the end of February as well - a baby boy. That was a challenge I was not ready for to be honest, and I ended up taking about 2 full months off from playing because of the family responsibilities and lack of sleep/energy overall. I started playing again in April - and I set aside $2000 (or 20 BI) to shot PLO100 on GG and see if I was ready for that new challenge. It didn't take long, only a couple of weeks and I had lost $2200 playing PLO100. I ran 20 BI below EV (my EV was breakeven, so probably wasn't playing that well and maybe my game selection wasn't optimal either), so my roll was down to $5000. Not the end of the world, still 100 BI at PLO50 and I was more than ready/capable to continue to play 50 and grind back up some cash to shot 100 again. Unfortunately, my wife got hit with a letter from the government that she owed $2000, and with her being on maternity leave we had no way to pay that back, and also needed some extra money for baby stuff (turns out they're not free!)

I had to withdraw about $3000 total from my roll, leaving me with around $2000. What a blow. Back in February, it looked like the sky was the limit - I was having such great success on and off the tables and everything was amazing. A couple of bad sessions at 100 and some life runbad with the repayment, and I was down to only having 80 BI for PLO25 or 40 BI for PLO50... ouch. My CFP also ended at the end of April (we talked about doing a second year, both nothing concrete yet), and i've been continuing to work and study with a few of the other students from the CFP as well doing group sessions on our own now for about 4 months or so. I didn't play nearly as much in June/July because work was busy, life was busy with the kid, and had an actual 2 week vacation with family but I've been back on the grind this august!

So where do I go from here? I have $2000 and a dream - my goal/vision is to play professionally one day to support my family. My 9-5 job pays my bills, so I have some security there. It took me about 18 months to grind $400 into $7500, and I have every intention of doing so again until I can move up in stakes and play higher limits. I am playing about 20 hours per week, and studying anywhere from 5-10 hours depending on how many hands I mark and my schedule with work. I'll be playing a mix of 25z on Stars (40% RB chests + LB), and then carefully table selecting at PLO50 on GG (both 4-card and 5-card). I won't be playing higher until I grind up the roll again, and I will drop down to 25 regular tables on GG if i hit my stop loss in terms of BI as well. I'll post some results as well in a future post in the near future. That being said - I am also seeking out a staking agreement so that I could potentially play higher (either 100 or 200) on GG/Stars or one of the apps if I need to go that route. I believe I have the skillset and theory to beat those stakes and my coach agreed with me - but I need to be careful with BRM and won't repeat past mistakes in terms of my roll.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my story and I look forward to sharing my journey with everyone. GL at the tables.

Steve