Hi all,

New member of RIO here just wanted to get your thoughts on the best direction for the restart of my poker journey.

I played a decent amount when I was a grad student back in 2009-2011 (well 200k+ hand at NLHE NL 50 and NL 100 6 max, probably 50k hand HU, 50k+hand PLO and probably around 20k hand of the mixed games. I didn't do as well as I should have done down about 0.1bb/100 (before rakeback) in NLHE won about 2BB/100 in PLO and won some in the mixed games). I think the reasons were a bit to do with FPS (I always thought people were adjusting), playing too many tables without concentrating and a bit of winners tilt. I did play quite a laggy style (probably too much) although I guess that was en vogue at the time.

I work in quantitative trading now so I am not looking to make poker a career and I am doing it for the enjoyment and I like the challenge. Been playing NL 25 and up about 4bb/100 over 5-6k hand the last few weeks (probably run good :)) playing only one table and really focusing on note taking on the players etc. I am rolled to play higher but don't really see the point and want to see myself win at each limit before moving up.

My PhD is Maths so I am very interested in the game theory side of things, have glanced at some of the solvers and have some idea of how the algorithms compute Nash equilibria. There is also an interesting recent paper my Deep Mind on reinforcement learning approaches to poker games.

My concern is that I don't have the time to put in huge numbers of hours specialising in a game like some of the guys on here.

I played an 8-game tournament recently on Stars and thought some of the play was pretty awful in the limit games (I thought that back when I was playing mixed game before, could just be that I am awful) and actually enjoy all the different games.

In a weird way maybe I am more equipped to do well in the mixed games as (my opinion) it is more about your worst game than your best and I am capable of writing my own code to analyse the other games rather than having to rely on the (mostly) HE tools.

I guess the disadvantage of mixed games is you can't really scale the # of tables quite as radically and so it is hard to be sure that you are winning at games and get hands in before you move up. Also harder to track and analyse things.

So I guess my options are:
1) Try to join in with the NL craziness going on (with GTO approaches etc)
2) Go back to PLO and maybe try to lift some of the NL ideas across using my own coding skills
3) Just play mixed game cash and tournaments, enjoy the variety and accept that I won't really have the very deep understanding a single game, but this (might) be the area that is the biggest chance of me having some kind of edge.

Also in terms of building my game I am not really interested in "tricks" to beat a limit, I want to compete. I want to learn about the games in a way that would help me no matter who I was playing.

But whatever I choose the main goal is to have fun. I accept this may mean that I don't have the same hunger as some of the guys who are really trying to make a living from this and that this may ultimately stunt my growth.

Anyway, interested in your thoughts and opinions.