Grinding for the Self

Good luck. What format are you going to play? Sticking with spins?

Hi!
Thanks a lot for the good wishes and interest in the blog — I really appreciate it!

To be honest, I never liked spins. For me, it was just a boring grind — something I had to play for time efficiency. I’ve always been more into MTTs. Maybe I’m a bit of a romantic, but deep runs, dynamics, and adapting to different stages — that’s what I enjoy most.

Back in the day, fields on PokerStars were huge, and MTT sessions often meant 10–12+ hours, which was too much to manage alongside real-life responsibilities. So spins were more of a compromise than a passion.

My plan:

Current Setup

• Platform: GGPoker
  
• Bankroll: ~$580 (started from freerolls, no deposits)
  
• Game Type: MTTs — any speed (regular/turbo/hyper)
  
• Max Buy-In: ≤ 1% of bankroll (so around $5.50 for now)
  
• Schedule: Weekends only (working full-time in IT)
  
• Software: I only have an old PT4 license, and I believe it doesn’t support hand analysis from GGPoker. Not sure if it makes sense to invest in other tools at these stakes — maybe just staying sane and disciplined is enough to beat the current limits for now.
  

Main Goals (Short-Term)

• Start with basics
  
• Focus on improving theory
  
• Build a solid foundation for decision-making
  

Guys, I’d be really grateful if you could help with these points:

• 1. Bankroll strategy: Is the 1% rule per MTT reasonable? Too nitty / too aggressive?
  
• 2. Free study resources: Can you recommend some good, up-to-date free content for improving MTT skills in 2025? Podcasts, articles, YouTube, software — anything that helped you or someone you know.
  

Nice to meet you all. Looking forward to learning together and sharing the journey!

Building my toolbox before the first session.
Looks like found pretty convenient push/fold chart site

https://www.mypokercoaching.com/push-fol...

Might be useful for people who forgot those charts or never knew)

Hi guys,
First session is finished basically breakeven (around +$1).

^^ my best ITM today, so no big score this time. Better luck next time.

What I really noticed is that the overall player level feels much higher than back in 2018. Definitely need to dedicate more time to theory — today there was a lot of improvisation on my part.

Next step: try to get hand histories from GG, review them, and at least find the obvious logic mistakes. Right now I only have an old PT4 license and no other software, so I’ll be doing it manually for now.

Hello and good luck on your grind

it is very easy to use PT4 with GGpoker
go to Pokercraft in GG > My Tournaments > download game histories

and then you have to manually import them into PT4, on the view stats site make shure to choose "Hero" with the GGlogo as Player

I hope it helps, if you have any questions about this let me know

As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on coming back to the real me. One thing I’ve always loved is the mountains. I’m not a climber, but I really enjoy hiking in such places.

Here’s a picture of Ushba — I didn’t climb it (it’s considered a “killer mountain, ” one of the hardest 4, 000m peaks, located in Georgia), but I was around it last summer and it was an incredible experience.

I actually traveled to many mountain areas in Georgia — such a beautiful country. I recommend it to everyone: stunning landscapes, kind and hospitable people, and probably the tastiest cuisine in the world.

More pictures:

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Now I’m bringing back my passion for the mountains and planning a hike next weekend to the highest peak in Bulgaria — and, I believe, in the entire Balkans — with an elevation of almost 3, 000m (2, 925m to be precise). I’ll post pictures here when I’m back.

loving the updates bro. keep at it.

Wish good luck, and better later than never.

Great pics OP. It's always good to be in touch with nature, this pics are making me want to start hiking again, tbh haha

anyway, I'll def be following

Hi guys,
Haven’t posted for quite a while — mostly because not much has happened poker-wise. I’ve played a bit since the last update, but it’s been tough to fit MTTs into my schedule.

Since I started doing yoga, Sundays are usually off the table — training takes most of the day — so only Saturday is left for poker. And if something else comes up on Saturday, I have to skip it completely. Turns out it’s more challenging to combine MTT grinding with a full-time IT career than I expected.

From the good news — I recently became a key developer on my project, which I take as a green light toward finally reaching the Senior level. I’ve started preparing for that, and hopefully half a year will be enough to reach the next step.

Other than that, not much new. Time passes. Still trying to build discipline and improve myself. Haven’t found a partner yet, but at least I’ve started talking a bit more with people — at work and in yoga classes — better than nothing.

Couple of pictures from my mountain yoga class trip:

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Hi guys!
Not many updates in terms of my poker life, but still one small thing — since I don’t have time to play regular MTT sessions, I decided to at least participate in some GG promotions that offer extra EV.

Managed to win a ticket to a $150 tournament, which is nice. Would be great to sell some of it, but I doubt anyone would be interested in buying a piece considering I don’t have much of a track record on GG. So for now, I’ll probably just keep it.

Planning to spend some time watching MTT theory and refreshing my fundamentals before deciding whether to play it. Honestly, I don’t feel ready yet — $150 fields are full of theory monsters.

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good stuff, going be following along, as for the 1% BR thing

sure, but also noticed u play only GG n turbos n hypers - good thing to keep in mind is
lets say u have 400BIs for reg speed, u generally want more for turbos ( 600 ) hypers ( 800 ) ( all approx ) 200 BIs is also fine reg speed w edge, but GG structures / AFS i would want 400 min. - and yeah be cautious when trying to apply " theory / gto " to anything ABI 15/20 < like u said in OP just need good fundamentals, aggressive strat
player pool is too nitty GLGL

i have a blog for while now MTTs ( canadian85 ) but sometimes switches me to this new 2p2 format n has me as poker4me lol havent figured it out yet - but yeah, some regions / countries only have so many clients avail ( GG n others )

i would look into other ones as well if avail in your region - alot of soft soft sites out there

good rule of thumb - the worse the software / n or sportsbook connected = soft soft sites = printing EV

Hi guys, long time no see.

It’s been about 4 months since my last post, and honestly not that much has changed, although a few things did shift in my head.

I’m still working as a software engineer, but I changed projects at work. In a way, that experience opened my eyes. It was my first and only project in my career for more than 4 years, and then one day they just said that after New Year we would stop working there. For a long time I had been stressing about needing to work hard all the time so I wouldn’t get fired, and then it turned out I got removed because of politics and project circumstances, not because of my performance.

At the same time, it was also a confidence boost, because due to my good performance I was invited to another project almost immediately, and then even to a second one. So objectively things worked out well. But I still notice that whenever work gets hard, I get stressed. Even now, when I understand that sometimes things can end for reasons completely outside of my control. So this is definitely an area where I need to grow: not only becoming a better engineer, especially in this AI era where everything feels unpredictable, but also learning how to manage stress better. I’m still not sure how to do that, so if any of you have experience with this, I’d be glad to hear your thoughts.

As for poker, I barely played during this period. Around Christmas I played mostly to complete the GG Advent missions. I didn’t win anything directly from the missions themselves, but while doing them I hit an x50 in $3 Spins, so at least that was a nice surprise.

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Then last week I took a short 3-day vacation and played one full MTT session, probably my first real session in I don’t even know how many months, and in one tournament ended up finishing 3rd.

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I also bought Flopzilla to analyze hands together with PT4. While I was playing, I honestly felt like I had forgotten everything. A lot of spots felt hard and I often wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. But after reviewing the hands today, I think I actually played reasonably well. Of course, that’s just my own analysis, and my understanding is probably still not good enough, but still, for me it felt like a decent result. More importantly, it feels like the poker dream is starting to wake up again.

To be honest, I still don’t understand how to fully combine these two paths. In IT, I need to work hard and study hard because that’s what brings me money right now. And these days it’s not enough just to study technologies — now you also have to learn how to work with AI and adapt to all of that. At the same time, I want to study poker properly and play MTTs seriously. Unfortunately, there are still only 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week. So if any of you have experience balancing a demanding job with serious poker study/play, I’d really like to hear how you approached it.

One more thing I realized is that in almost everything I do, I’ve spent years moving fast but shallow. In poker, in IT, in a lot of areas of life. Now I want to go back to fundamentals and build real understanding instead of just memorizing things.

So in IT I started going through the basics again, working through roadmap-style fundamentals, and I hope that helps with my impostor syndrome a bit. Same in poker: I realized I don’t properly remember things as basic as pot odds or combination counting, so I started a Poker Coaching course focused on mastering fundamentals. My plan is to rebuild from the ground up and then move forward from there.

On the travel side, I also didn’t go anywhere special during these months, but I did visit one beautiful place: Bachkovo Monastery in the mountains. It was founded almost 1000 years ago. The place itself is really beautiful, and the nature around it is amazing — forests, mountains, rivers, waterfalls.

I went there partly because I wanted to get a feeling for how monks live, but honestly, it wasn’t exactly what I expected. Some of them were smoking cigarettes, there were TV antennas around, and it made the whole place feel a bit more modern and less mystical than I had imagined. Maybe monks have just changed with the times, or maybe I need to visit other monasteries that have a stronger old-world atmosphere.

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Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now: still working, still searching, still trying to build myself properly both in poker and in life.