My Journey to High Stakes Poker: A New Chapter Begins
Hello, 2+2 community!
I’m starting this blog to document my journey toward high stakes poker (1000NL+). I’ve
I would consider your approach smart. It's a lot less stressfull to play when you are properly rolled and dont have psychological load because of your short term results.
WEEK 19 RECAP
In the next 3 weeks I will be moving to a new country and I will be able to increase my volume significantly which is the worst part of my game right now. I need to at least double it. The current timezone Im playing in is not the best for this but I believe I will be able to do it once I move. Also will be able to play on some sites which Im not allowed right now.
Pretty good week overall in terms of results and performance when playing. Also ran pretty good.
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OVERALL RESULTS FOR THE WEEK
For everyone reading this thread.
I’m looking for a small but elite group of poker players who are looking to become really good at poker.
My goal is to create a group of people who constantly improve each other in every aspect of life.
The end goal is to reach a final number of 10-15 members in the group.
In the beginning I will be accepting almost everyone into the group but eliminating people who are not following the rules which I will post below.
1. You have to be active and proactive. If you are not actively participating in the group and putting effort into it, you will be eliminated.
2. Strict no degenerate policy. If you are some kind of degenerate who likes to gamble in -EV games, take hard drugs, etc, this group is not for you.
3. Strict no scamming/begging. No begging inside the group. If you try to scam anyone in the group you will be eliminated.
When you first contact me on discord expect to send some information about you like age, where you are from, stakes you are playing and some recent results just to understand your background. Then you will have to present yourself to the group.
Again, it’s really important that you actually participate! If you don’t, you will get a warning first and then deleted.
It doesn’t matter what stakes you are playing!
If interested shoot me a dm on discord: ascend.poker
WEEK 20 RECAP
Tomorrow I leave the current country Im in and start the process of moving to a new country which will allow me to finally put more volume in because of a better timezone.
TOTAL RESULTS FOR THE WEEK
WEEK 21 RECAP
in my home country until the 29th to take care of the documents I need for the residence process in the country so literally no time to play at all.
only played 1 session this entire week.
got the affiliate rakeback from last month.
TOTAL RESULTS FOR THE WEEK
MONTH OF MAY RECAP
Well, this was a very bad month but the fact that I did this extremely long country move didnt allow me to play nearly enough volume. Moving with a kid is really really hard! I didnt even reach 40 hours this month lol.
Anyways, Im already settled and played my first session in the new country. Pretty happy with it. Like I expected, my volume will increase significantly from here on out.
TOTAL RESULTS FOR THE MONTH
Profit tables +$3720
Rakeback +$1546
Total +$5266
Hours 36h
Hourly +146$/h
WEEK 22 RECAP
subbed, GL OP
Currently I paly part time NL50 and try to build a career through poker, you current status is my next target, hope that day will come soon
Im established in the new country and will start putting in more volume which already started.
I started playing on 2 new sites and unfortunately got my account blocked unfairly on pokerstars which stressed me a lot to the point where it affected my personal life and game. Today it got unblocked again, finally.
Will take the day off today.
Bad results for the 3rd week in a row which is expected especially after playing so little volume in these weeks.
The graph is not accurate because I forgot to configure hand histories in the 2 new sites im playing on so the first session is not included.
TOTAL RESULTS FOR THE WEEK
WEEK 25 RECAP
As I finish this week I want to share some thoughts about the situation Im currently in.
Im on the worst downswing of my entire poker career in $ terms. In BB terms, its close to the worst one.
First I will share my results quickly and then I will share some thoughts and some of the things I will be doing moving forward.
The graph might not be 100% accurate. I dont understand why this is, some hands give errors when importing etc. Not sure how to fix it. In the spreadsheet everything is 100% accurate.
One last thing, Im very close to getting $4k on WPN in rakeback which will offset most of this downswing after rakeback.
On to my ideas now.
First of all, my downswing, after rakeback is currently -$6.5k and -$7.8k before rakeback. This all started in week 21.
Just writing these amounts seems insane to me and thats why I need to reset my mindset and go back to the basics. As confidence goes DOWN I start questioning everything. Maybe Im done, I cant win anymore? This is really the hardest part about playing poker full time. When things go bad you start questioning everything - your life choices, your skill and even your own mind. Am I going crazy and simply stopped knowing how to play this game?
When we enter these downswings our mind tends to go into a very bad downward spiral where more losses makes us play worse and getting us even in a deeper hole. This makes our confidence levels even worse, which makes play even worse and the cycle keeps going down.
Now, I need to get back to reality and this is why resetting my mindset is important. I took a long shower and started thinking about everything and how Im going to solve this problem.
First of all, this downswing represents less than 5% of my networth. Yes, this is how conservative I am with my bankroll and why, if you play full time, should be too. These downswings are inevitable for most of us. They will happen and it can break you if you dont have your finances in order. For more about this, read my previous post about bankroll management.
This doesnt mean that Im 100% getting out of this and wont quit poker if this continues at this pace. My plan will always be to quit poker if things get bad enough or if I lose enough money where I think Im simply not winning in these games anymore. I will never go broke in poker because I will simply quit MUCH before that happens.
Whats my plan moving forward ?
1. RESET my mind and ACCEPT. As the downswing happens we tend to focus on how much down we are. How much time it will take to get back to even. How many hands I will have to play and how this will ruin my year completely. This is perfectly normal. BUT, we need a reset.
Accepting my new reality is the focus. There is nothing worse than keep focusing in the past. What happened is done. We cant change. We have to focus on tomorrow. It doesnt matter how much down I am. What matters is that I have to play my best the next session.
I cant rush things. Another thing that is normal for me is to drop down in stakes and increase my table count to make it back faster. This is bad. Again, it doesnt matter how bad things are. We have to focus on playing our best the next session and not try to rush things.
2. Drop down in stakes. I already did this. This is important. As confidence levels go down, we just cant keep digging the hole to the point where its just too much. I dropped to 100nl.
3. LIMIT TABLE COUNT. As I said in the first point, its bad to increase table count just to try to make it back faster. From my next session on, I will limit my table count to 8 tables. This is an amount I can comfortably play. My average table count is probably around 10 for this year I think.
4. REDUCE THE STRESS OF SPENDING. Truth is, playing poker full time is hard because you depend on a variance heavy job to pay for your bills and expenses. As the downswing hits, reducing spending will help since it will reduce the amount of stress you have to go through when dealing with this.
5. INCREASE STUDYING. As our confidence takes a hit from the downswing we need to start increasing our study. This will help us get more confidence off the tables and obviously help our winrate. I will be doing daily drills and also other things to study more. Lacking in study this year has been a big pitfall of mine.
Maybe I will add some more thoughts later but this is it for now.
Consider joining my discord. We are forming a very nice group of like minded people. We have a private part to the group where only a select few people join. In that part we do group weekly study/accountability calls. If you add enough value to the group, I will add you to the private part.
WEEK 25 RECAP
WEEK 26 RECAP
So, finally some positive results.
This last session was hell. Ran really bad in most spots which made my week worse than it should be but thats it.
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MONTH OF JUNE RECAP
Literally the worst month of my poker career. It was extremely hard both mentally and emotionally to be honest. If I get through this downswing I think Im able to get through anything from here on out lol.
TOTAL RESULTS FOR THE MONTH
Profit Tables -$5805
Rakeback +$1211
Total -$4594
Hours 79
Hourly Rate -58$/hour
good news is that im 2 sessions away from getting $4k in rakeback which will offset most of this situation. but i will only be happy once i recoup everything pre rakeback.
We got to a point where our private group is composed of very good and participating people.
If you are willing to put in the work, participate, are not some kind of degenerate and are reading my blog and like what you read, consider joining the group and send me a DM so that I can add you to the private part of the discord.
WEEK 27 RECAP
finally got the $4k in rakeback.
travelled to brazil and plan on staying here for 2 months and took a bit of a break after getting here. Now going back to grinding.
i still want to recoup 30-40 buyins pre rakeback at nl100 before going back to 200nl confidently.
TOTAL RESULTS FOR THE WEEK
WEEK 28 RECAP
one of the most stressful weeks I have had in my life.
baby got sick and we are in Brazil in a town where there is no good health facilities close by.
not really in the mood to write about anything today to be honest.
BANKROLL/FINANCES MANAGEMENTI have some rules that make my day to day life much less stressful and that my career as a poker player will be lasting and also provide me with enough capital to either retire or venture into something else in the future.2. Your official shot taking (meaning you start incorporating games of higher stakes frequently) should start when your networth i
I have historically been a huge BR nit but this is taking it way way overboard even by my standards. Taking shots should be a more dynamic strategy based on the game quality of the shot your about to take and where your baseline BR for your main stakes is currently at/how much above that you are.
A good place to start is getting a good sample size at a certain stake, for you that looks like 200nl. Now I would look at your long term results and see what the biggest downswing you've ever experienced is. I'm going to guess for any decent to big winner at those stakes it will be under 50bi. The bigger your edge the less big your downswings will be.
So lets just say hypothetically you had a 50bi DS at some point and to feel super comfortable you want to play with a 150bi BR at 1/2. So you want to have $30k minimum for your main stakes, I can get behind that. Now when our BR is over $30k and we see good games running at 2/4 or even 5/10 if we are sitting at let's say $40k, we should be willing to take some shots
The main reason is bc it will likely take you years to get to a $200k BR to play 5/10 with grinding 1/2 and waiting to play 2/4 til you hit $80k. And secondly if we lose lets say $5k of our $40k BR we still have over our $30k minimum to play our main stakes so while disappointing, it doesn't actually hinder our day to day ability to grind our main stakes.
Shot taking should be based around having a plan/system in place that when it goes completely against us that it NEVER hinders our ability to play our main stakes. As long as we do that we are still always moving forward. Playing vs tougher regs in bigger games will improve us as a player thus making our winrate in our main game larger. As long as we put ourselves in a position where we literally can't hurt our BR for our main stakes we are playing then we should be willing to take on more risk to potentially move up stakes faster when it goes well/get better at the game when we take some shots that go against us
I have historically been a huge BR nit but this is taking it way way overboard even by my standards. Taking shots should be a more dynamic strategy based on the game quality of the shot your about to take and where your baseline BR for your main stakes is currently at/how much above that you are.A good place to start is getting a good sample size at a certain stake, for you th
I do agree with you that Im probably too nitty at this moment and that taking shots earlier is a good strategy if you drop down quickly if things dont go well.
Thank you for your quality post.
WEEK 29 RECAP
So, this was a week where I dedicated my time to lots of experimentation and study. Basically trying out in strategies which I think will improve my game dramatically. I played lots of zoom to put in volume in order to create a sample in the fastest time possible. Still experimenting so will have to play quite a lot more.
TOTAL RESULTS
WEEK 30 RECAP
JULY RECAP
month of lots of studying, lots of experimentation. definitely ending the month thinking that im a better poker player overall. lets see how this translates in the next coming months.
my plan is to make a bit more money @ 100nl and then go back to 200nl finally.
Total Results
Profit Tables = $2854
Rakeback = $4806
Total Profit = $7660
Hours Played = 62 hours
Hourly Rate = 124$/hour
How are you making close to 80 an hour from RB?
Love the consistency brother, keep on keeping on
Love the consistency brother, keep on keeping on
These threads always confuse me how people never move up.
When you have 40 buyins for the next stake play up to 20% of your tables on that stake. When you have 50 buyin for the next stake play up to 50% of your tables on that stake. Move down if you lose.
Review the sessions you play at these higher stakes diligently and actually improve. How is this new player group exploiting you? Is their strategy good? What should you change in your game to better face these players? What makes these players tougher and can I steal anything from them? If you want to learn something new you need new experience.
Absolutely crazy that you're still playing 100nl without even a 200nl table on the side when you profit like 30bis for 200nl every month. You need a self confidence coach or something.
