Good luck!

My initial thoughts are to focus on one game.Its takes alot of time to get good at one variant.Going full-time is a big transition, focusing and working on PLO exclusively will reap its rewards and allow to print money.I like having a system where 5% to 10% of cash game profits can be used for mtt shots

Mtts are profitable but it will so often eat your profits from PLO.It would definitely worth playing some mtts during the series

Best of luck with everything,if you want any advice on Vegas, where to stay for different budgets and where to play reach out to me whenever

So, my first update is a quite happy one:

I final tabled two MTTs today, though one is a more modest achievement than it sounds:

Ignition has a $75+7 PLO MTT every Sunday (which I had the good fortune to bink just a couple of weeks ago), but it doesn't get many runners. (Small fields are nice in a way, but so are big prize pools.) Today I didn't win it, but I did come in 7th/65 (12 paid). It's actually a fairly disappointing result, as I got all in as a 2:1 favorite preflop on my final hand... and I also entered the final table 2nd in chips, but lost like 80% of my stack 4bet shoving AKKT single-suited on the button versus a pretty loose BB, who had 3bet AJT7 double-suited and won after calling me.

The more significant final table was coming in 5th of 779 in ACR's $40K GTD. I was able to ladder up pretty nicely through the final three tables, and then I simply lost a flip shoving 66 as the short stack.

This year I've been making final tables at a really satisfying rate, though it's often been in tournaments with fields in the low three figures. I'll probably write about some of the details in a later update, when I'm looking back on my year.

Having a pretty good month with MTTs: hit another final table in a small tournament today. 6th of 151 in a $30+3 ~turbo-ish MTT on Ignition. Unfortunately, in my final hand I ran TT into a very loose player's AA, AIPF... and the flop came AA as an extra insult! Villain had AA just a couple of hands before, too.

PLO is hard.

It's interesting, reportedly profitable, and hard... even against populations that are so plainly poor at the game (Ignition PLO50).

I'm almost 16 BI under AIEV this month (being down significantly more than that regardless of AIEV, which most folks know is an imperfect measure of how the deck is treating you), and I just seem to find a way to lose almost every big pot I play, one way or another. (In all frankness: it's not like my EV line would save me. I just feel like I've been allergic to flops all month and running into the top of loose players' ranges constantly when I do make a hand.)

I've just had very few winning PLO sessions this month (and usually not for much when I do come out ahead), and it's been extremely discouraging.

Last month, I was struggling at PLO25 and—after lots of RIO study and some great coaching—I started to beat it more comfortably and was able to move up to PLO50. I had a ~25 BI upswing almost immediately at the new level, which was then followed by the ~45 BI downswing I'm now at the bottom of.

It's just felt like it doesn't matter how I play; I'm just going to lose. And I know it's an irrational belief, but that's a tough mindset issue to crack when the results bear it out over an entire month.

I have to admit that I'm not the most stellar volume guy: I've only put in about 11k hands this month... but that sort of makes this downswing even more challenging. After being in the black for the first 2k hands this month (creating the peak of the aforementioned upswing), it's just been a steady, horrible, sharp decline for 8k hands.

Despite my MTT success, I'm pretty much bound to have a losing month. Again. I'm not sure how to respond to it, either. I really expected to have grown my bankroll over the past few months, and with all the work I'm putting in... I don't know. I don't know what more I can do.

I can either keep sharpening my game (which, I don't know, I already feel pretty good about... it should be able to produce better results than this) and keep putting in volume, or not.

I considered laying off of PLO, but playing only MTTs is a pretty unattractive option for a few reasons: first, I just think I would eventually have a hard time with that grind, motivation-wise. I like MTTs and I think I know what I'm doing in them, but playing 1-2 street poker every day... I dunno. And it's not like MTTs are somehow low variance!

It's also just really hard to put in MTT volume in the US even across a number of sites, and I'm not really comfortable with how an MTT schedule would weigh on my home life.

Since my last post, I've lost way more than I'm happy with. I'm in deep learned-helplessness territory. It's so hard not to be with hands like this one I played at NL50z, which I sat down at just to try to play for a little while and book a win to get a taste for winning again (it honestly feels so unfamiliar this month, outside of some final tables that haven't even been able to buoy me into the black):

Dealt to Hero: Js Tc

UTG Folds, HJ Folds, CO Folds, HERO Raises To $1.50, SB Folds, BB Calls $1

Hero SPR on Flop: [16.67 effective]
Flop ($3.25): 7c Jd Ts
BB Checks, HERO Bets $2.75 (Rem. Stack: 58.13), BB Calls $2.75 (Rem. Stack: 51.44)

Turn ($8.75): 7c Jd Ts 4h
BB Checks, HERO Bets $6.75 (Rem. Stack: 51.38), BB Calls $6.75 (Rem. Stack: 44.69)

River ($22.25): 7c Jd Ts 4h Ah
BB Checks, HERO Checks

BB shows: Jc As

BB wins: $21.14

My river check wasn't even a "woe is me, beat again" tilt check. I just calmly decided they didn't have enough worse to call with by now (is worse Jx calling again? not super often), and KQ could check-raise.

There's also the possibility of slow-played 77, TT, JJ, and 89, unlikely as they may be (TT & JJ are blocked and 3bet more often than not, I'd suspect). 44, A4, A7? Probably not; I'm not too concerned.

Stubborn AT gets there.

And, of course, AJ also gets there.

Because, I swear, 85%+ of the time I've been 85%+ to win on the turn this month in a medium-sized or big pot, I've lost on the river. I didn't specifically think this during the hand, but when BB turned over AJ I was not exactly shocked (or happy).

Not pictured from this 33 minute fast-fold session (I just couldn't stomach any more after the above JT hand): running KK into a half-stacker's AA. Always a nice punch to the gut on a downswing, even just for half a BI (below my normal stakes, no less).

It's just so hard to find motivation to play when I'm so strongly associating poker with losing money and frustration at this point. I've got a pretty workable mindset when it comes to losing in poker in general (losing players need to win sometimes; you can't win 100% of your <100% equity spots; this is all fine by me intellectually and, normally, viscerally), but I'm having a really hard time enduring the sheer percentage of losing cash sessions I've had this month (very few of which have been SMALL losing sessions). It's just been absurd, and—even if I remove any pretense of being a winning player—losing players need to win sometimes!

Dont give up on plo. I have read some of your posts on low stakes plo forum and I can say you have good understanding of the game. After reading your last post, it feels like you are on some sort of tilt and you have some accumulated emotion (there is more stuff about this on Mental game of poker). But basically your negative emotions carry on to the next session and you are allready going to uphill battle on first hand of your session. I would take one week off from poker, it definetely would make good for you and then come back. After that start playing again 25plo for while to get confidence back, mental game back on track and build bankroll for shot to 50plo.

All good to you, hopefully you can crush 50plo asap.

Protip: complain about running bad on the internet.

Did my typical 5-6 tabling MTT grind today.

Noteworthy results...
15th of 213 in Global's Sunday Teaser.
11th of 247 in a BetOnline $22 with rebuys.
4th of 118 in an ACR PLO8 $22.

Last, but not least...
So, I came 5th of 779 last Sunday in ACR's $40K GTD.

I got heads-up in the same tournament this week (!!!), and then this happened:

NL Holdem $35000(BB)
BB ($764478)
HERO ($2845522)

Dealt to Hero: As Ad

HERO Raises To $97500, BB Raises To $764478 (allin), HERO Calls $666978

Flop ($1528956): 3c Ks Tc

Turn ($1528956): 3c Ks Tc Kc

River ($1528956): 3c Ks Tc Kc 2h

BB shows: Ts Kd

BB wins: $1528956

But...

God, I wish these forums had spoiler tags so I could put the following inside them:

NL Holdem $40000(BB)
SB ($630956)
HERO ($2979044)

Dealt to Hero: 9c Jc

SB Calls $20000, HERO Checks

Flop ($90000): Tc Js As
HERO Checks, SB Bets $45000 (Rem. Stack: 540956), HERO Calls $45000 (Rem. Stack: 2889044)

Turn ($180000): Tc Js As 2c
HERO Checks, SB Bets $90000 (Rem. Stack: 450956), HERO Calls $90000 (Rem. Stack: 2799044)

River ($360000): Tc Js As 2c 7d
HERO Checks, SB Bets $450956 (allin), HERO Calls $450956 (Rem. Stack: 2348088)

SB shows: Qs 6s

HERO wins: $1261912

So uh I guess nevermind that "losing month" stuff I was yammering on about...

(I had to tank before calling the final hand; I just figured it wasn't enough of my stack, the upside was too great, and they would have just enough bluffs. Wonder how good or bad a call it was in theory... HU NLHE isn't my specialty, so.)

Tonight I put in an NL10 6+ and $11 NL 6+ MTT session on ACR, in what I think might be the online debut of tournament short-deck hold ‘em for US-based players.

Short-deck (6+) NLHE really screws with my head. With the increasingly standard re-ranking of flushes over full houses and trips over straights, I feel like there are some really wacky visibility issues that I’m still trying to grapple with. (Speaking of, I still have trouble seeing A6789 straights!)

Because a set beats a straight, any straightened board leaves a straight vulnerable to a pocket pair… which makes me never want a straight! Haha.

And more generally, the full-house > flush > straight > set dynamic informs so much of my ability to mentally process poker situations, and these changes to short-deck rankings make me really confused about a variety of things, primarily preflop implied odds and starting hands.

My instincts for 6+ are that pocket pairs go up in value due to their deceptive nuttiness (especially as full-deck NLHE players’ mental habits are stubbornly attached to straights beating sets), suitedness is more valuable due to flushes’ increased power, and connectedness goes way down in value due to straights’ new vulnerability… but I’m not sure how to take that and build preflop ranges out of it. I feel like I’m playing super tight in general but perhaps overvaluing off-suit broadway combos?

I also feel like anybody could check-raise me off of just about any hand, haha. I’m terrified of sets!

But! I also feel like blocker effects become more interesting than in full-deck NLHE. But! I also don’t have a feel for good bluff spots other than when I block a straight.

Like, is there such a thing as a range advantage on any board given the condensed range of possible ranks...?

Finally(ish), in large part due to the visibility issues I mentioned, I’m 100% sure I’m vulnerable to missing a ton of value in what will turn out to be mega-standard spots.

All that said, I’m also vulnerable to being super spewy just because the population playing short-deck on ACR is so loose, from what I can tell.

(Hint hint, RIO pros…! Spoon-feed me some winning short-deck concepts so I don’t need to work them out independently! :P)

Another interesting wrinkle: the blind/ante structure on ACR seems very non-standard across both cash and tournaments, but nothing is truly standard just yet. ACR’s cash games just have a big and small blind like their normal NLHE tables, but their MTT had a BB sized ante (!) from each player (!) in addition to that. That ante size (which I honestly had no idea about before the tournament) really does interesting things to the dynamic of the game, especially when it’s 6-handed tables and even more so when you’re approaching the final table and stealing blinds and antes relatively cheaply becomes the lifeblood of running deep.

Ultimately, I had mixed results in my session.

At NL10 6+, I basically threw away ~150bb on a pretty questionable decision, and had a mundanely unimpressive session otherwise.

In the tournament, I fired two bullets late, mostly folding into oblivion with the first. With the second, I snuck into the money and then treaded water a bit. I then realized that my table was playing very tight and tried to find spots to chip up without showdown, but it’s so hard when I don’t actually know how wide I’m playing (or even how to size my opens given the size of the ante!). Because of firing two bullets, I had to finish at least 27th (of 321) to not lose money, despite 63 spots getting paid. Thankfully, I got there and was 17th in chips when that pay jump was hit. After that, I was just able to win a ton of chips without showdown as well as a few (frankly somewhat lucky) showdown pots, climbing up to 3rd of 20 at one point. Unfortunately, I ran AK into JT on an ATT flop to finish 15th.

I doubt that short-deck is going anywhere, so I want to be able to at least hold my own at it. But right now—despite the modest success in this tournament—I feel quite lost! It’s called a big-action game, but I feel like—in my limited experience (which is barely more than tonight’s session)—I’m just folding a ton. We’ll see...

Took my first shot at PLO100, with mixed results. I played okay, but not my best. I got bailed out of some <50% equity all ins, but I also found myself in a ton of situations where I was running into the very top of loose players' ranges.

PLO100 is still high enough for me that, while I'm fine with how I played this following hand, I kind of had to quit immediately-ish after it because my hands were shaking from how the real-world money element of it feels:

Dealt to Hero: As Jh Ks Kh

CO Folds, BTN Folds, HERO Raises To $3, BB Raises To $9, HERO Raises To $27, BB Raises To $81, HERO Raises To $243, BB Raises To $255.83 (allin), HERO Calls $12.83

Flop ($511.66): Jd 7c 7s

Turn ($511.66): Jd 7c 7s 5s

River ($511.66): Jd 7c 7s 5s Qd

BB shows: Ad Ah 5c Ac

BB wins: $508.66

It especially sucks because I wouldn't have been so deep effective with BB if they hadn't doubled through me in a total setup: I had T986ss and they 3bet me IP. I called, closing the action heads-up. Ac6c6s flop. I check, villain bets, I raise pot (I didn't want to mess around given the cc draw, which I didn't have). They call, Qh turn with an effective SPR of about 0.35, so I just shove. Villain has AA obv -_-.

Prior to both of these hands, I saw villain reraising preflop absurdly wide, so in the above 500+bb hand I was just feeling like I had to ~shove AKKJds for value against their range.

And even when they turned over AAA5ss (good thing we exhausted every ace in the deck?), I was kind of optimistic about how many runouts could win me this huge pot (my equity is better than you might expect), but it wasn't meant to be, sadly.

Despite the AKKJ hand erasing a lot of success, I thankfully still ended up profiting slightly in my shot at PLO100. But I still don't quite feel comfortable jumping into 4-tabling it. (I 2-tabled today and set a 2 BI stop loss for myself... very nitty stop-loss for PLO, but I kind of needed it psychologically.)

I think I'll play some more PLO50 before I take another shot, but my bankroll management scheme has me above the floor I need for PLO100... so it's just a matter of comfort rather than strict number of buy-ins (which I'm conservative about anyway). I don't know when I'll take another shot. I don't want to be stuck at PLO50 for too long, but with September going so poorly at the PLO cash tables, I'm not mega confident, so it's all just a mental issue.

In other news, I'm going to be heading out to the WSOPc in about a week. I haven't played live poker in months, and I've sort of been looking for a good opportunity to do so.

And when I found out that not only would a trip to Horseshoe Hammond be pretty affordable but also that their WSOPc stop included a HORSE tournament (which—if you know typical WSOPc schedules—is pretty unusual), my interest was more than piqued.

Even before winning the ACR tournament at the end of September, I'd been considering a trip out to Hammond (or maybe Wynn's Fall Classic) despite my downswing, but I kept talking myself out of it due to the negative impact it could have on my bankroll and, consequently, my psyche!

But with the ACR winnings transforming my bankroll pretty significantly, I feel comfortable treating myself to a short WSOPc "grind-cation", especially when my trip allows me to play a big weekend multi-flight NLHE event as well as smaller PLO and HORSE tournaments afterwards. The schedule makes for a nice amount of variety, which is a big part of what I like about being in Vegas during the WSOP. So, to have that on a smaller scale for a few days in Indiana is very appealing to me.

I'll be in Hammond Oct 12-17. The weekend's multi-flight NLHE tournament runs Oct 11-14; the PLO event runs Oct 14, and HORSE is Oct 15. These are mainly what I'm expecting to focus on, but I'll probably play some cash and maybe one other ring event too. (The double stack NLHE event on the 13th is probably worth a bullet or two, especially at $250.)

I may also just enjoy Chicago proper for the day on the 16th if I'm not still playing HORSE; who knows. I built that day into my itinerary to be able to comfortably play a HORSE final table without needing to think about a flight out of town at all, but—if that's not what I'm doing—I don't really expect to play the $600 NLHE 6max event on that day instead (in part because it could complicate travel on the next day in the way I wanted to avoid!). I'm happy to play by ear once I'm in town, though.

It should be a fun trip one way or another, and—while I wouldn't be going out if I wasn't okay with the possibility of batting 0.000 in both cash and tournaments—I sure hope it goes significantly better than that!

Rough going in Hammond so far. A somewhat fatigued and definitely rambly post on it:

Fired 3 bullets at Event #1 (multiflight NLHE). First flight (of mine), I busted a couple of dozen players from the money. Annoying. Second bullet was in the flight after that the next day: I just couldn't get anything going and didn't even last two levels. I fired a third bullet in the same flight and stuck around for a good while before 4bet shoving into the top of what I thought was a pretty loose 3betting range.

Then, I fired a bullet at Event #2. For all of my Event #1 bullets, I really felt like I played my best and just wasn't getting what I needed to do any better... but I do feel like I kind of blew it in Event #2. I ran up a pretty nice stack and then made some overly aggressive and ill-considered plays to drop back down to the starting stack late, and even though I lost AIPF with JJ vs A6o vs 88 (8 on the flop obv), I'm not thrilled with how I played in #2.

I just got back to the hotel after playing Event #5: PLO.

For hours, I was at a really tight table (which—frankly—for my bankroll, wasn't so bad: I would have been annoyed to lose early to a maniac, as I wasn't firing another bullet here due to this whole trip honestly being shot-taking at MTTs just above my BR). Fun note: I got my first live royal flush, backing into it all in with KKcJc on AsKsTc. (That all-in sounds loose on paper, but it made sense in the situation.)

After getting 12 levels deep in a 13 level day and a stack that peaked at a very workable depth, I busted with AA and a sub-10bb stack. I got accidentally slowrolled on this final hand, which added to the irritation of losing. (Guy had QT on QT flop; I wasn't doing anything but GII when the SPR was as low as it was. I spiked an A but a heart flush came in too and he was like "oh, I have hearts" and spread his hand better than he had before.) Losing this tournament was the most irritating one yet due to not only the combination of the slowroll and losing with AA short-stacked, but I was also very patiently building a healthy stack only to have lost most of it all in with top two pair versus (I think) a naked-ish flush draw and (I think) ace high. (I was in the 2 seat and the maybe-ace-high hand was all the way across the table and mucked quickly after the hand was over... I re-raised to isolate them on the two-tone board... and the third and final player, behind me, called with I believe just the flush draw and a gutshot... I wish I was more sure, but stuff can be kind of quick and hard to process in live poker, especially when you're not in the money and it's a 30-minute level tournament... dealers tend to keep things moving as fast as they can.)

Despite frustrating results (not that losing this many consecutive tournaments is anything but standard), I feel like I've been playing really well, especially in the PLO tournament.

But, at risk of making an uninteresting complaint, I feel like I've been getting a lot of easy decisions due to getting dealt just so few playable hands preflop. I don't think it's just having been conditioned by how often I'm in a hand multitabling online; I swear my VPIP on this trip has been like half of what it would be on average. It's kept me out of trouble, but it's been kind of frustrating to not even get dealt many suited connectors to mix it up with in NLHE.

Speaking of: for someone who has played almost exclusively online, I really don't find live to be dull or slow. I enjoy the comforts of playing online at home and I'm always listening to a podcast or music when I do so, but I haven't even been tempted to pop in my earbuds once on this trip. Without a HUD or another table to play, I just find that I'm honing in on different details to focus on, and I don't want to be distracted.

So... wrapping up both the trip and this post, I have the HORSE ring event tomorrow, and maybe some PLO cash? I'm not sure. I played a little 1-2 PLO after busting event #2 (and lost a bit; nothing too hard to stomach though), and it just played so big and wild that I'm not super comfortable with it (however profitable it may be), compared to the online PLO50 or PLO100 online grind that I'll return to soon (and need to make up any losses at).

We'll see... this isn't looking like it will be a profitable trip unless HORSE goes great, and I may want to just limit my potential losses to that one remaining tournament. The more I can have for returning to my online routine (and then maybe Cherokee WSOPc in November-December?), the better. And it may just not be worth what 1-2 PLO could do to my bankroll (in either direction), even with a strict stop loss. (I'm very comfortable with the risk level of 1-2 NLHE, so that's an option... but I'm just not feeling super motivated to play that.)

Oh, and just as a "P.S.": man, there's basic live poker stuff that I still really need to get my chops up with, due to inexperience. When I can't just look at a number on a screen to know the pot or max raise (in PLO) or any player's stack size (including my own), I'm really not where I'd like to be with keeping track of that stuff.

HORSE did not go my way.

I take it as a small sign of encouragement that, in all but one of my tournament entries, I've been playing for a pretty long time. However, with the HORSE tournament structured the way it was, it would be hard for anybody to bust especially quickly.

I have to say that, yet again, my ability to survive felt largely determined by tons of easy decisions preflop and on third street. I honestly don't know that I saw a flop or fifth street more than twice an hour today, on average. Even fourth street was a rare visit for me.

I took that as license (perhaps foolishly) to 3bet 5d3d on the button in a LHE round. I flopped a flush draw and semibluffed two streets, hitting the flush on the river. So that was nice, if out of line. But I'd folded for practically four hours straight previous to that, so I felt like I almost needed to do something out of line (as there weren't a lot of players at my table coming and going; I knew I looked very tight).

I was only above the starting stack for like 15 minutes total in this tournament, and it was many levels in after a couple of big pots. At the first break I had 19,975 down from the 20k starting stack and it was mostly just a steady decline from there. Just nothing to work with.

I busted after being dealt (3h8h)Kh in Stud Hi and just deciding to go with it when I only had 2.5BB. I believe one heart at most was dead, though Ks was behind me.

I got all in on fourth after catching 4d (blech) when Ks caught a black T (I'm not sure which; we were on opposite ends of the table), and unfortunately they already had KTKT. I did have a gutshot and flush draw on 6th and caught the straight on the river... but then villain turned over the case K and that was it for me. (Kind of a second accidental slowroll in a row, if you saw my PLO report. This time, I turned over my river 7 for the straight to the 8 and the whole table thought I got there, but villain hadn't looked at or turned over their river K yet. Ow.)

I have mixed feelings about this trip. Other than some hours of frustration (especially today) at needing to fold at an absurdly high rate, I think I generally enjoyed being at the tables and—other than like half a dozen questionable hands total across the entire trip—I think I played just about as well as anybody could, given what I was dealt (that is, not much).

But it's very hard not to be extremely disappointed with my results, even if going this many MTTs without a cash is perfectly standard.

The impact of this trip's expenses and losses on my bankroll is significant but tolerable. It sucks to have taken these many steps backwards but I always knew what I was risking and I've got more than enough money to keep me in my regular online games.

Tomorrow is my last full day in the area. I'll probably either visit Chicago for the day or play cash. The latter may be a nice change of pace and a good chance to end the trip on a high note. I'm also sure that I'll want at least one day with no poker whatsoever after returning home, so I may want to put hours in tomorrow in order to relax with less guilt back at home. We'll see.

For a variety of reasons, I decided to play 1-2 PLO at the Horseshoe, and it went pretty well.

I lost all in as a favorite more often than not, but even despite that I was able to squeak out a +$236 session, which included dragging the biggest pot of my modest live poker career ($700+, AA AIPF multiway) and having the most cash chips in front of me that I ever have (just under $1k). (Don't laugh! My live experience is limited and NL200 is the biggest I've ever played online!)

When I was sitting there with around a grand (and at least 3-4 players nearly or totally covering me), I had the nitty (if responsible) thought of, "oh, hm, this represents a significant percentage of my bankroll, I should probably actually get out of here with my ~$600 profit" (I had bought in for $200 twice).

Well, I won what should have been my final hand and was distracted from my plan to not post my next big blind. I quickly threw out my $2 while stacking other chips and then realized a little bit later "oh wait, I was meaning to not do that... okay, THIS is my last orbit".

Of course, in this last orbit I got dealt AcAs6s5s in the HJ (I think; my memory for this stuff needs to improve) and I raised after multiple players limped (super typical at this table; SO few folks open raised). I believe I got three callers, and we saw a KhQc8d flop. I cbet half pot and it went heads-up to the 2h turn. I checked, and villain went all in for like half pot at most. I'd been playing with this guy for hours and my main read on him was that he was super happy to gamble on naked draws. So I figured that I was actually ahead often enough to call, not that I was thrilled. I didn't get a good look at all four of his cards (this continues to be a frustration of mine re: live poker) but I think he had no pair, a JT open ender, and three hearts in his hand. He may have had JT9. Either way, his flush came in and I lost yet another pot with AA when I was actually (I think) a favorite.

Which leads me to the theme of this entire trip: folding nearly everything but AA! I folded so much at PLO today, and the majority of my playable hands were AAxx. It was really weird. And four out of the five times I got dealt AA, I lost all in as a favorite (assuming I read my opponents' hands correctly the two times I wasn't AIPF; see above for the one example, the other I'm pretty sure a short stack went all in with a naked OESD when I had a gutshot wheel draw and nut flush draw to go with my AA). I was just getting so many T-high badugi hands or middle three-straights with an off-suit ace. Not super playable combos when the table dynamics dictated nut peddling.

I'm actually kind of eager to get back to live PLO. If my two Hammond sessions are any indication, it is exponentially more beatable than even microstakes online PLO, even if it's a lot slower and duller, in all frankness. There aren't so many opportunities to bluff (though I actually did get two big-ish river bluffs through, which was fun), but my god do people VPIP with some horrible combos... very profitable games, if this one was representative.

Overall, it was nice to end this trip on a winning day given how every other day was a much more disappointing experience.... even if I totally meant to leave the table with almost $600 in profit and brainfarted my way to a much less lucrative session!

Tomorrow is a travel day and then I think I'll allow myself to do absolutely nothing to do with poker on Thursday. I'll probably head back to the PLO100 6max online tables on Friday, take Saturday off like I usually do, and then go back to online MTTs on Sunday.

I think my next live trip will probably be late November for WSOPc Cherokee. I'd considered staying the whole circuit stop, but I think this trip taught me a lot about how long I'm willing to be alone at a casino doing almost nothing but playing poker. I think I'll just play the opening multi-flight tourney and the PLO tourney, maybe with some other stuff to fill time depending on how things go.

But until then or something else noteworthy... that's all for now!

Putting aside my horrific MTT ITM% this month (which has blown a really unfortunate hole in my bankroll, after my WSOPc shot especially), I've been having a solid hourly at PLO100 since moving up to it, which is nice.

However, that doesn't make this hand any easier to stomach:

PL Omaha $1(BB) BB ($258.81) UTG ($106.98) HJ ($283.32) HERO ($149.27)
BTN ($46.5) SB ($98.85)

Dealt to Hero: 8h Kd 3h Ks

UTG Folds, HJ Folds, HERO Raises To $3.50, BTN Folds, SB Folds, BB
Raises To $11, HERO Calls $7.50

Flop ($22.5): Kh Ts 3s BB Bets $22.50 (Rem. Stack: 225.31), HERO
Raises To $90 (Rem. Stack: 48.27), BB Raises To $157.50 (Rem. Stack:
90.31), HERO Calls $48.27 (allin)

Turn ($318.27): Kh Ts 3s 7c

River ($318.27): Kh Ts 3s 7c Ad

BB shows: Ac Ah Qc 2h

BB wins: $295.04

Just venting a little. I just get so frustrated sometimes losing as a 2-to-1 or better favorite all in in PLO, as those spots aren't mega common and ideally they'd be more lucrative for me.

But again, super grateful for the hourly I've had this month at the new, higher level overall. Perspective!

I'd really like to not drop back down to PLO50, and I'd like to at least be taking shots at PLO500 sometime in 2019... so just the fact that the green line has been going up and to the right is somewhat helpful towards all of that.

Running pretty good in these deep-stacked pots sometimes! :D (Villain was just super spewy; no way I'm doing anything but GII on this flop.)

PL Omaha $1(BB) HJ ($100) CO ($767.78) BTN ($93.11) HERO ($206.93)
BB ($241.91) UTG ($87.75)

Dealt to Hero: 5d Ac 8h Ah

UTG Folds, HJ Folds, CO Raises To $3.50, BTN Folds, HERO Raises To
$11.50, BB Folds, CO Calls $8

Flop ($24.0): 4h Th 9c HERO Bets $24 (Rem. Stack: 171.43), CO Raises
To $96 (Rem. Stack: 660.28), HERO Raises To $195.43 (allin), CO Calls
$99.43 (Rem. Stack: 560.85)

Turn ($414.86): 4h Th 9c 2s

River ($414.86): 4h Th 9c 2s 5s

CO shows: 4s 8c Jh 6h

HERO wins: $410.86

Running less than pretty good in these 70/30 all-ins!

PL Omaha $1(BB) SB ($119.36) BB ($96) UTG ($142.38) HERO ($99.4) CO
($106.64) BTN ($98.5)

Dealt to Hero: Kh Qd Ah 9d

UTG Folds, HERO Raises To $3.50, CO Folds, BTN Folds, SB Folds, BB
Raises To $11, HERO Calls $7.50

Flop ($22.5): 9h 2c Kd BB Bets $22.50 (Rem. Stack: 62.5), HERO Raises
To $88.40 (allin), BB Calls $62.50 (allin)

Turn ($195.9): 9h 2c Kd Ac

River ($195.9): 9h 2c Kd Ac Td

BB shows: As Qc Js Ks

BB wins: $188.5

Running good overall at PLO100, though! Double digit bb/100 since moving up is nothing to complain about, and—even though I'm still making stack-sized mistakes here and there sometimes—I'm really starting to feel pretty great about my PLO game. I feel like I'm making a lot of intelligent bluffs and putting together a really effective overall strategy.

Still running terribly in MTTs, though! I've now gone dozens of tournaments without even cashing, which is always entirely in the realm of possibility but super frustrating when I don't play a ton of them. Came close tonight in both ACR's $55 Stud8 and their $88 NLHE. The latter was especially disappointing; I was chip leader with just a few levels before registration ended but ended up finishing 50th with 36 paid. Couldn't have played much differently; just totally ran out of cards and went from chip leader to the average stack in less than an orbit at one point by losing a couple of 3bet pots with premium hands that just couldn't get to showdown.

I'd planned on playing ACR's $88 PLO 6max tourney tonight (and every Wednesday night moving forward), but I guess it didn't run due to lack of registrations? It starts at like 9:05 and I sat down to late reg at like 9:15 and it was just totally absent. Irritating! I guess I'll need to register earlier moving forward just to make sure it doesn't get canceled.

Tomorrow night, Ignition is running a $125+10 $25 bounty PLO tournament as part of their current tournament series, so hopefully I can put in a strong showing there and end this horrible streak of MTT losses. If nothing else, hopefully I can pick up a bounty just as a moral victory over this losing streak.

But it's bink time obv I'm due right? ldo imo

Whew! Wow, what a day!

The MTT cashless streak is over, with an exclamation point!

So, after batting 0.000 last weekend and the impact those results had on my bankroll, I decided that today I would reduce my ABI. Part of this meant not buying into Ignition's Sunday $162 tournament directly, but rather firing two $38.50 single table satellite bullets instead.

The rungood started early: it only took one STT bullet to get me into the $162.

Unfortunately, I busted the $162 in mundane-if-annoying fashion: after just kind of blinding away for most of my time in the tournament, I found JJ on the button with 12 bb and open shoved. The BB called with A3o: AK3 flop obv.

But that's not all I was up to today: I busted Ignition's weekly $82 PLO tournament out of the money after running up a huge chip lead early; I just ran out of cards, basically.

Now to the successes:
I finished 25th/386 in a $33 NLHE freezeout on Ignition to basically just double my buy-in, which was a modest but welcome break from the cashless streak (whether or not you count the satellite).

I then finished 10th/827 in ACR's $55 $40KGTD, in fairly "tragic" fashion: I opened AK UTG and got called by the blinds. A97 flop, low SPR: I bet, SB folds, BB jams, I call. BB has 99 booooooooo. Decent profit here but I would have liked to make the final table...

...like I did in ACR's Sunday $215 PLO tournament! I just started playing this game last Sunday, and today was my first time cashing it. I frankly got very lucky in a marginal situation (in which I had way less equity than I had hoped) with two tables left, and then I just kind of maneuvered and outlasted my way to... heads up play! That's right! :D

Now, I didn't win the tournament (2nd/183) but I cannot complain at all: I entered heads-up play with about a 5-to-1 chip disadvantage... which then turned into a 10-to-1 chip disadvantage... but I somehow turned it around and was a 2-to-1 chip leader at one point... but I just couldn't find my way to the win and I ended up just going with a fairly marginal (if live) hand AIPF when I was down to a 5-to-1 disadvantage again (this time with higher blinds, of course). It was a tough, fun battle and it's hard to be disappointed with the result when the chip disparity was so big to begin heads-up play, and I really only expected to come in like ~5th once I made the final table, given how the stacks began.

Today's profits are obviously very nice (they put me comfortably in the black for October after I thought my failures in Hammond were going to guarantee a losing month), but I was just running (and mostly playing) so well that it was a blast just to have everything going so great. It's a nice experience when it comes your way! Poker's a lot more enjoyable when you're making hands, getting bluffs through, and laddering through tournaments.

And honestly, I'm glad to be able to share these successes if only to provide some public documentation of how things can turn around pretty dramatically if you just keep yourself in the game!

Puke, puke, puke. Frustrating day, but I've been running so good lately that it's far easier to stomach than if this was part of an extended downswing.

Five times this afternoon, I lost a 200+bb pot all in as a 2-to-1 favorite or better. The most frustrating example:

Dealt to Hero: As 6h 4s Ah

BTN Folds, HERO Raises To $3, BB Raises To $9, HERO Raises To $27, BB
Calls $18

Flop ($54.0): 8h 9c 3h
HERO Bets $54 (Rem. Stack: 73.96), BB Calls $54
(Rem. Stack: 143.96)

Turn ($162.0): 8h 9c 3h 7h
HERO Bets $73.96 (allin), BB Calls $73.96
(Rem. Stack: 70.00)

River ($309.92): 8h 9c 3h 7h 9d

BB shows: Qd Qc 8c 9h

BB wins: $307.92

Oh well.

For all of the big lost pots, the net result ended up not being as bad as it could have been. I really expected to have my first -$1k cash session, and the damage ended up being far more modest than that overall.

Ugh.

Playing PLO100 and mid-to-high stakes online MTTs, I need to be able to stomach four-figure swings, but I've lost about a quarter of my bankroll this month and it's so frustrating, especially heading into an extended WSOPc grind (which I started the month comfortably—if only aggressively—bankrolled for... but now I'm really getting nervous).

It's just been such a rough, unforgiving, and trying downswing from the high point I posted about at the end of last month, when I came in 2nd in ACR's weekly $215 PLO MTT.

Two weeks into November, I'm more than 14 BI under EV this month at cash tables, and that doesn't account for legit coolers (not "I'm still super new to PLO" coolers, as I may have misidentified them as recently as August) or what I swear happened half a dozen times today: flopping the nuts on a super dry flop and needing to fold on the turn or river. (Top set? Nut flush? How about the worst runout imaginable after putting in a ton of chips? Great! Sorry, bankroll!)

I'm really glad I'm still making those necessary folds rather than spite-calling or steam-shoving, but... between missing flops in 3bet pots, getting horrible runouts like the above and others, and running terribly all-in... it's all just so hard to take in a relatively condensed time.

And that's just cash. MTTs have just been brutal for me this month.

It's only taken two bad Sundays and the above PLO woes to really put a hurting on me and my finances.

Okay, deep breath. Perspective exercise: my bankroll is greater than it was three weeks ago. I've averaged four figures of profit per month across September, October, and November (the first three full months I've played since joining RIO and getting coaching).

But it's so easy to feel insecure when that profit is almost totally from two MTT final tables. It's not like they don't count, but I honestly don't love the rhythm of "bleed money until the end of the month, when I get rescued by a good MTT result". I don't want to count on that MTT result! I want PLO cash to go better, because I've worked so hard at it and I feel like I'm playing really well. Some mistimed aggression and some bad calls here and there, but by and large I feel like I have a really profitable gameplan and good decision-making.

I was really hoping to have the wind at my back heading into Cherokee, and right now a poor Cherokee result could easily force me to move down to PLO50, which—as math experts will recognize—would cut my earning ability in half until I could move back up.

I'm not sure how to process all of it, or how to adjust my Cherokee plans (which can't be abandoned at this point due to now-non-refundable travel expenses). The trip now represents a much bigger percentage of my bankroll than it did less than two weeks ago, and it's a pretty sudden shift in the grand scheme of things.

One positive is that I didn't have concrete plans to take many more live MTT shots in the months following Cherokee (the one exception is a modest December trip I'm going to take to the WSOPc stop in Biloxi to play their PLO event and maybe one NLHE event), so I'd be able to spend a few months rebuilding online until Cherokee runs the WSOPc again or until my bankroll allows me to travel again (which I'd really like to do once or twice a month, outside of a summer Vegas schedule).

I don't know. Maybe I should limit my losses a bit between now and Cherokee by playing PLO50 and reducing my ABI on the final Sunday before I travel. By my bankroll management scheme (which is thankfully pretty conservative outside of live MTT eagerness), I'm still rolled for PLO100 by an okay margin, but I may want to slow any potential bleeding that could continue.

This hand from today is my month in a nutshell:

PL Omaha $1(BB)
SB ($108.41)
BB ($61.65)
HERO ($106.63)
HJ ($200.60)
CO ($29.38)
BTN ($116.66)

Dealt to Hero: Ah 6h Tc Js

HERO Raises To $3.50, HJ Raises To $12, CO Folds, BTN Folds, SB Folds, BB Folds, HERO Calls $8.50

This is a loose call, but a villain-specific one. This player just 3bets way too wide in a significant sample, with specific overloose 3bet hands in my history with them. I've seen them 3bet some really trashy double-suited stuff, so I would have 4bet an only slightly stronger hand here. Therefore, I'm not folding, especially when I've seen their similarly loose postflop tendencies and know I can get them to make a really bad decision if I flop well.

Flop ($25.50): Kh 9h Jh
HERO Checks, HJ Checks

I don't donk bet often, and I didn't want to here. I was going to check/call.

Turn ($25.50): Kh 9h Jh 5d
HERO Bets $13 (Rem. Stack: 81.63), HJ Calls $13 (Rem. Stack: 175.60)

That's enough checking. Betting the virtual nuts.

River ($51.50): Kh 9h Jh 5d 9c
HERO Bets $20 (Rem. Stack: 61.63), HJ Calls $20 (Rem. Stack: 155.60)

Oh neat a paired board! Still, I don't want villain to check back or put in more than a certain amount (I'm bet/folding here).

HJ shows: 8h 5h Ad 9d

HJ wins: $88.50

Joy. This player is just running like a god against me over the past few days. Just infuriating.

Over my past 35k hands, my graph is an extremely discouraging cycle of "two steps forward, four steps back", and I don't know if I'm willing to fight through whatever this is symptomatic of: just plain old PLO variance or something I'm more responsible for.

I'll see how I feel once I've had some time to digest yet another awful session.

Hey devwil - I'm sorry to hear you're on one of those ugly downswings. Trust me - I have been there, as have many of our pros and members, I'm sure.

It can get so difficult to remain confident enough to make the right plays. If you've hit the stage where you're expecting that you're going to get sucked out on each hand, it's especially tough to recover from.

Would you be up for sending me your database and me making a series of videos reviewing it? I'd like to help you, but I'm very busy - this is my idea to kill two birds with one stone, as I'll be making videos anyways.

I'll almost surely spot some leaks for you to plug, and hopefully give you the confidence (or reality check) that would come along with my assessment of your skill edge vs. your competition.

Let me know if you're interested and I'll get right on it!

So, at risk of spamming my own journal, I did want to quickly share that this whole saga of "oh god I'm running so badly and Cherokee is coming up" has come to a head in a specific way.

I've decided to re-arrange my Cherokee plans in order to reduce both costs and the amount of money I'm risking in tournaments. When faced with the options of playing the schedule I'd planned on when my bankroll was considerably healthier, skipping Cherokee altogether, or trying to piece together a more modest approach to the WSOPc stop... the third option became more and more obvious as the most responsible option. (Especially because I already skipped the August Cherokee stop due to my bankroll being even more modest than it is now. I didn't want to miss it again, not totally.)

When I was in a much more successful place a few weeks ago, my Cherokee plans (including expenses) represented ~20% of my bankroll, which—spread across my entire schedule—felt like a reasonable portion to use for taking shots at a WSOPc stop (especially when—outside of a couple of days in Biloxi in December—there aren't any obvious live MTT opportunities for a few months afterwards, for me).

Now that same itinerary represents more like 33% of my bankroll, and—as evidenced by the anxieties described in past posts—I'm just not comfortable with that.

So I've cut my planned expenses and risk by more than half (even after eating an Airbnb fee; thank goodness I booked a flexible place), and it all represents about 15% of my bankroll now. It's much more comfortable, and—frankly—much more professional of me (which seems important, as the goal of all of this is playing professionally).

Partly inspired by Galfond's offer (which I'm still skeptical of the technical viability of, unfortunately; waiting to hear from DriveHUD support for confirmation), I'm spending my Saturday looking through my PLO50/PLO100 database.

I've come across some interesting things, though I'm not sure how consequential or instructive my findings are.

One of the things that's sticking out to me is that, when I look under my Population tab, the worst players (as auto-classified by DH) are running like gods (which frankly and frustratingly matches the impression I've been getting).

Both "fish" and "whale" players (again, as classified by DH tags, which I hide when I play... so I don't put TOO much stock in them) are running way above expectation: "whales" by about 29 bb/100 (!) and "fish" by about 14 bb/100... which actually makes these "fish" small winners in my database (1.3 bb/100)!

Good for them, I guess!

Obviously, that's some of the least useful information I could possibly get from my software, though it impressed me anyway.

As you might imagine, I'm primarily going through my September (-33 bb/100 over 11k hands), October (+22 bb/100 over 9k hands), and November (-27 bb/100 over 15k hands) tendencies/results and trying to see what in October that was so different (either in approach or result) from the other two months. (I'm not looking at August, as that's the month where I really got dead serious about transforming my PLO game.)

Trouble is, any of these individual months isn't a huge sample. I don't play a ton of tables or put in a TON of hours (I try to balance play with study, RIO forum activity, and a healthy non-poker life). As a result, there's a lot of noise and variance to try and see past.

Just to account for some differences real quick: in September, I was trying to play as much Stud8 as I could and I was playing more MTTs outside of Sundays; in October, about a quarter of my month was taken up by my WSOPc Hammond trip; this month, I've played a much less interrupted schedule.

Anyway, one remarkable thing in regard to results and variance is that my bb/100 has diverged pretty significantly from my EV bb/100 in each of these months: the gap between these two numbers has been in the low teens each month. This has exaggerated my results a ton (positively in October, negatively otherwise).

But that's all just results. How about the stuff I have more control over?

Across all three months, some things have stayed eerily constant: my cbet% is virtually static (and healthy, I think... my EV bb/100 when I cbet is 217, which seems good but I don't know what to compare it to, really... it's much better than zero, at least). My AF is also largely unchanged, though some other stats suggest I've gotten steadily more aggressive over time (which I think is both good and to be expected: I've gotten more confident as I've played, and I've started getting more aggressive in some specific situations, too).

Some things are less static, though. In October, a variety of stats were tighter than in the other months: VPIP, PFR, 3bet, call 3bet, steal, fold to steal, and resteal are all lower. The difference isn't huge in most of these cases, but it's legible.

I'm not sure how significant these differences are, though.

In PLO, there's a lot of variance simply in the starting hands you're dealt. When I play on Ignition, within one session there are tables at which I look like a nit and tables where I look way looser than I am on average. So, when you zoom out even to a month (especially a modest volume month like mine), there's still going to be some noise in preflop stats.

Also, my October stats being tighter than my November stats can be attributed to some changes outside of what I totally control strategically.

Up until the end of October, I pretty much only played PLO on Ignition. In order to break free of Ignition's 4 table cap on cash game play (as I got more and more comfortable with playing those four tables), I started to add in some ACR PLO tables. The ACR games—while entirely beatable, imo—are significantly more aggressive. On Ignition, it's not extremely uncommon for a pot to get one or more limpers (and no raise) before it's my turn to act in the blinds. Therefore: on ACR (vs Ignition), my VPIPs (especially from the blinds) are more likely to be 3bets than the first preflop raise, and for me to see a flop in the BB will more often take a VPIP rather than a check.

Similarly, the ACR regs 3bet much wider than your average Ignition player does, so my call-3bet% increased significantly as I played more ACR hands. I still think it's a judicious frequency, but to fold too often to the players who 3bet at least as wide as I do (sometimes significantly wider) would be a big mistake.

And finally, you just see way fewer limped pots on ACR, so I'm actually put to a BB defense decision more often, which I think has increased my VPIP against ACR reg steal frequencies (though I err on the side of playing too tight in the blinds; this is something I intend to keep working on). The ACR regs also play tighter in the blinds than the Ignition pool, so I think it's reasonable to steal a little wider myself. (Against a lot of Ignition players, stealing their BB wide is just a fool's errand.)

All that said, I'm not already such a tight player that I can't tighten up more preflop. However, in scrolling and sorting through my sessions, there just doesn't seem to be any correlation between how tight or loose I play and the EV bb/100 that results from it. As I mentioned, any one session can vary a lot in how many playable hands I get (so going session-by-session looking for a correlation isn't super likely to show anything meaningful), but the month-to-month changes I see in my preflop stats don't strike me as hugely significant in terms of October being proof that I'm currently playing too loose.

Now that I think of it, I also ended up playing a lot more heads-up PLO in November trying to start tables (that is, until I got sick of it and decided to only play 3+ handed as I really haven't studied HU PLO enough to want to play thousands of hands of it against anybody decent), so that's certainly affected my overall stats... let me think out loud, filter out 2-handed play from this month, and see what happens (editing is for suckers obv)...

Okay, yeah: my 3-handed+ VPIP/PFR are way more similar between October and November than when HU play is included. Still a little tighter in October, but given the above considerations I really don't think it's too significant. If nothing else, I don't think a low single digit change in my VPIP/PFR can account for a difference of almost 30 EV bb/100.

I also didn't get looser postflop between October and November, overall (I don't think). Quite the contrary, by the primary metric: my WTSD has fallen a little bit every month (no doubt from increased experience of knowing when a villain's range has me beat). It's frankly still higher than it could be, but—as I've complained in earlier posts—I feel like this month has been so many cases of getting hands that I can't possibly get away from for one reason or another.

I'm still going to do more digging and maybe write another post on what I find (not that I assume anybody is half as interested in any of this as I am), but this post is more than substantial enough as I try to work though this downswing somewhat publicly.

I will say now that, between looking at all of this data and using the PokerDope variance calculator, I'm increasingly confident that my results are entirely within the realm of "theoretically winning player running both horribly and within the bounds of the mathematically reasonable". My result after my last 38k hands is frustrating and discouraging, but PokerDope's tool is really good at keeping in perspective what is entirely possible in 6max PLO.

This is probably the best way I can digest it: my current bb/100 after 38k hands, assuming a solid single-digit winrate, is more likely than me spiking my reverse-implied-odds overfull in the AA vs 77 hand I complained about yesterday! Knowing that the latter is so very painfully possible, I need to be able to weather the former (even if one hand is far easier to get past than thirty eight thousand of them across three months).

That's not to say that I'm definitely a winning player (though I'd really prefer to think I am...!), but I'm sure that neither my October result nor my November results to date can possibly indicate my true win rate on their own. Hopefully my true win rate is closer to 22 bb/100 (my October EV bb/100) than -27 bb/100 (my November EV bb/100 so far), but that's such an enormous gulf in EV winrates (when my game hasn't changed enough to explain it) that it's just going to take time to figure out where I actually land.

In the meantime, I just need to protect my bankroll, put in volume, and keep working away from the tables. (Heck, that's obvious, but it's also worth saying.) I also just need to get used to PLO being far more feast-or-famine in its results than what I experienced as a NLHE reg so many years ago.

Cheers, all. Back to the database, for me.

I just found this thread. I'm a mid stakes PLO player too, so I'll drop by and post some random thoughts every now and then.

Good luck in your journey, man.

Really frustrating Sunday, even with some cashes.

I ran great when it mattered least and really poorly when it mattered most.

Stone bubbled Ignition's weekly $82 PLO tournament after having an extremely healthy stack for most of it. Just so frustrating how it went; I'm not going to write out all the boring details.

Busted a $22 PLO8 tournament in 4th/134 (which is, like, okay obviously, but it didn't help me have anything like a winning day) after getting AIPF crushing this one clueless player multiple times and them getting bailed out like you wouldn't believe.

Blech. Just super annoyed with my result in both of the "major" US-facing Sunday PLO tournaments (aforementioned Ignition MTT + the ACR $215).

I was just really cruising along nicely in both and then busted really close to the money after running out of cards.

Whatever. Gotta put it behind me.

I'm going to fire my first WSOPc Cherokee bullets on Thursday and Friday (two shots at the $500k GTD multi-flight; going home for a couple of days if I don't make the Sunday Day 2)... and at least today didn't go worse. Even if cards really did not fall my way at crucial times, I feel really good about most of the decisions I made, and I feel like my NLHE game—while not the sharpest tool in my kit—is in a pretty good place heading into a NLHE-heavy schedule.

In the meantime, I'm going to get back to PLO50 tomorrow and hopefully I can string together some wins before Cherokee.

This month has just been miserable results-wise, and if I can reduce the losses even a little bit in the next two weeks, I'll be grateful.

Continuing to look through my database for answers to my PLO problems, before I head to the tables for the afternoon.

Here's a simple answer:

When I check the river after VPIP'ing, my result over all of my PLO50 and PLO100 hands is -$X.

Across all of my PLO50 and PLO100 hands, I'm down less than $X.

Obviously, this isn't as useful as it first looks. A lot of these are unquestionable check/folds that will lose me the pot. And the sample size is small enough that it's entirely possible that I'm just running bad in value-checking and bluffcatching spots. (I mean, that's what it's felt like.)

So I'm not totally sure how to respond to this information. I feel like a lot (not all) of the games I play have enough aggressive players that really nitting it up on the river could be a costly error. But I also know that my WTSD is on the higher side of reasonable and I've historically had a tendency to bluffcatch relatively wide (going back to my NLHE days).

If nothing else, I think I should lead for value a bit wider, as well as check-raise for value a little thinner. It's entirely possible that my river checking results have less to do with paying off too wide and more to do with missing value when I'm trying to value-check or assuming that villains can't call with worse.

I'm quitting PLO cash for the foreseeable future.

Being a double digit EV bb/100 loser in my last 40,000 hands either means I've been the victim of some really brutal and increasingly unlikely non-all-in variance, or all of the work I've put into learning PLO just wasn't good enough anyway.

If it's variance, I'm frankly just not willing to ride this thing out while I'm trying to build a bankroll that I can actually draw money from for real-life expenses.

And if it's a problem with my game, I'm just demonstrably at the point of diminishing returns, especially considering I'm merely trying to beat PLO50 & 100 (against opponents who, by the way, I still rarely feel outclassed by... especially on Ignition).

I've just spent SO much time on videos, books, coaching, and forums, and if this is the actual, expected result that follows from all of that (and it isn't necessarily, but it could be!), I just have a really hard time investing any more of my time into studying PLO. Because if I put in more study and start doing proportionally better (or even more than that; let's say it has an exponential effect), it's still probably not going to be enough to make me a winner in these games (if I'm not theoretically already a winner).

So, I'm going to start mainly playing NL50 alongside my normal (or perhaps increased) MTT proclivities (which will still include PLO tournaments, few and far between as they may be).

I'm sure that, at this point, there will be some NL50 regs who have me totally outclassed, but I've played enough soft NL100 online even just this year to know that I won't be in hopeless shape, at least on Ignition.

And, because I play a non-trivial number of NLHE MTTs, I've been working on preflop ranges and postflop strategy enough that I have some semblance of a NLHE "playbook". I'm not assuming that I can coast on whatever skill I have leftover from beating online NLHE pre-Black Friday, but I'm not brand new to the game by any means.

As horrible as this month has been on my bankroll, I'm overrolled for NL50 by almost any imaginable BRM scheme, so—if nothing else—this new direction is unlikely to break me entirely. And if things go well and I get more and more comfortable (and take increasing advantage of the NLHE resources on RIO), I should be able to move up in stakes pretty quickly, just by being a little more aggressive with my bankroll management (nothing extreme or reckless).

Not that I have no chance of encountering a long downswing at NLHE immediately! I'm certainly no stranger to running bad at NLHE given my tournament results this month.

I'm sure that, from the outside, this may seem like like "mental game spew", but I hope folks reading this will show me a little more respect than that and appreciate that 40k hands (after study/coaching/etc) of losing is really hard to keep fighting through when you're so early in an honest-to-goodness attempt at a poker career.

Because, in all honesty, I'm really happy with my mental game. I'm always going to try to work on it, but I think it would be a stranger decision psychologically to keep abusing myself at the PLO tables when—either due to bad luck or insufficient skill—it's just obviously not working right now.

Emphasis on "right now". Note how, to open this post, I said "I'm quitting PLO cash for the foreseeable future".

As I said, I'm trying to build a bankroll that I can actually pay life expenses with moving forward. And PLO has not been giving me that, over a decent (if still somewhat uncertain) sample.

To put it concisely: I could theoretically be a PLO crusher already, but my credit card issuers really don't care about that. There are temporal and financial constraints that I need to answer to.

So rather than just hope that the same process will eventually produce radically different results, I'm going to shift gears for a while. If nothing else, a change of pace could be good on its face, and it's not like I'm deciding to take up sports betting or a drug habit.

This is, at worst, a small mistake. And PLO will probably still be there in the future, when I'm feeling less financially vulnerable.

Not to belittle your effort into PLO games, and I know it's not easy to put in a ton of volume on American sites, but 40k hands in any form of poker are considered an extremely small sample. Just because you have a winrate of -10bb/100 or worse during those 40k hands doesn't mean you are actually a loser in the games.

I don't know anything about your current BR or financial needs, so take this with a grain of salt, but if your primary concern is to quickly build a stable roll, you have to be very selective about your game. This is often times way more important than working on your game itself, or putting in enough volume.

Try to play in the games where your hourly will be the highest, whether this means the highest bb/100 or the highest (bb/100 * # of hands). I'm not sure if live poker is an option where you live, but if it is, you should definitely try the low limit games too, like 1/2 NL.

I'd also avoid MTTs by all means. MTT variance is the worst of all, and it's not uncommon for the top pros to break even for 6+ months. Well, I guess you can still mix in mid-sized MTTs such as the ones on Ignition, because the field is softer and you can make it to FT way more often than you can in Sunday Millions, but still, MTT variance can be very sickening.

It's true that NLHE games tend to have lower variance (=smaller standard deviation) than PLO, but this usually comes at an expense of a smaller edge. And a smaller edge means more variance, so in the end these two factors kind of even out.

Just some food for thought.

-- midori

Hnnnggggggggh.

NL Holdem $0.50(BB)
SB ($29.04)
BB ($50.16)
HERO ($150.85)
CO ($50.97)
BTN ($49.25)

Dealt to Hero: 8s 8c

HERO Raises To $1.50, CO Folds, BTN Folds, SB Calls $1.25, BB Folds

Flop ($3.50): Ks 8d Ac
SB Checks, HERO Bets $2 (Rem. Stack: 147.35), SB Calls $2 (Rem. Stack: 25.54)

Turn ($7.50): Ks 8d Ac Ad
SB Checks, HERO Bets $4.50 (Rem. Stack: 142.85), SB Calls $4.50 (Rem. Stack: 21.04)

River ($16.50): Ks 8d Ac Ad Kd
SB Bets $9.75 (Rem. Stack: 11.29), HERO Folds

I beat literally 0% of villain's range.

SB shows: 3c 3h

SB wins: $15.68

Well, except that, obv.

Wow.

Ow.

I just made a big mistake.

13 left in this $88 MTT, $5k up top. I'm 2nd in chips (but not by an especially dramatic margin over most players).

NL Holdem $20000(BB)
SB ($256884)
BB ($269746)
UTG ($553764)
HERO ($700512)
CO ($628135)
BTN ($507136)

Dealt to Hero: 6h 9h

UTG Folds, HERO Raises To $42500, CO Raises To $102500, BTN Folds, SB Folds, BB Folds, HERO Calls $60000

Flop ($245000): 7d Kh 5h
HERO Checks, CO Bets $80000 (Rem. Stack: 445635), HERO Calls $80000 (Rem. Stack: 518012)

Turn ($405000): 7d Kh 5h 4c
HERO Checks, CO Bets $445635 (allin), HERO Calls $445635 (Rem. Stack: 72377)

River ($1296270): 7d Kh 5h 4c Qs

CO shows: As Ad

CO wins: $1296270

Next hand, I got A9s and shoved it into AA (yep, again; one seat over) and didn't get lucky.

Not folding to the 3bet is probably the single most expensive poker mistake I've made. I really, really almost did it but I was so sure that I WOULDN'T get in trouble like this postflop. I'd also noted that villain was probably playing pretty face-up post, so I felt like I could steal the pot a nice amount of the time if they seemed to not connect.

Stupid flop and turn coming perfect and villain barely having more than the pot on the turn.

I really wish I would have folded preflop or, considering ICM, the turn. I really didn't think carefully enough on the turn; I think if villain would have had me covered (LITERALLY putting my tournament life at risk), I would have been way more likely to fold.

In reality, I'm beating myself up about this a little less than it sounds like, but I figured I would just own this mistake out loud. (Perhaps just to really drill into my head not to make a mistake like it again, especially in the near future with my WSOPc shots.)

ICM suicide self-flagellation aside, I had a really good night putting in a midweek MTT session, which—as long as I just learn from the big mistake above rather than dwell on it—is nice for having the wind at my back somewhat for Cherokee.

Even though I did myself a huge disservice coming in 13th in the above tournament (with a pay jump at 12, let alone the final table), the prize for 13th/306 wasn't so bad (especially when I was very unlikely to cash as the money bubble approached earlier) and I cashed two other tournaments, too: 15th/119 in a BOL NLHE, 8th/170 in an Ignition NLHE (KQs < 97s AIPF, grumble... to be fair, it was the BB calling and I was shoving a very short stack).

Made money overall, which is always nice for an MTT session (as it's so far from guaranteed).

But yeah. Gotta put this ICM suicide behind me. I'm honestly just really surprised at how quickly I called the turn; I was making "player seems ICM suicidal" notes on people all night when I felt like they were making those kinds of mistakes, and then I made a huge one myself. Blech.

I honestly think I "positive tilted" myself into snap-calling the turn, because I was running so good all-in in this tournament. Not getting obscenely lucky: just holding up and winning flips.

Hopefully I didn't waste all of my late November rungood tonight, especially when I didn't take full advantage of it, ultimately!

And despite that huge, embarrassing mistake... I feel like I'm playing NLHE really well right now. I need to make sure this one big mistake doesn't rattle me away from continuing to do what were NOT mistakes. (I think I'll bounce back in time.)

Anyway... got to get to sleep for a reasonably early Cherokee drive, as not to reg the 4p #1A flight too horribly late.

Hopefully in the next week I can keep doing what took me ITM multiple times tonight, without doing what kept me from final tabling the above MTT!

Mixed results so far after two "legs" of this WSOPc Cherokee stop.

By "legs", I mean my individual trips up to Cherokee from Atlanta. First, I just spent one night firing at the #1 multiflight NLHE. Second, I came back for a prospective #1 Day 2, the PLO event, and more. (Finally, my third leg will be returning for the weekend of the main event.)

The first leg was a total bust. In my #1A bullet, I'm not sure that I won a single pot after level 1, and then I squeeze shoved QQ in the SB with 30bb (a little deep for this move maybe, but eh). BB snap-called with very little left behind and EP PFR tank-called. Flop AJx. BB gets the rest of it in with EP. BB has KK; EP has JJ. Turn K. River 9, no matter how much I wanted a T.

I also busted the nightly tournament later on a coinflip. Zzz.

I was going to fire at #1B the next day, but in all of my planning I had written down the wrong start time. I thought it started at noon (an hour after check-out at my hotel) but it started at 10a. And because I also decided to play cash until 3 AM (losing just a bit between 1/2 NL and 1/2 PLO) and was going to need to drive back to Atlanta later in the day... I decided to just sleep and skip #1B rather than late-reg it on a lack of sleep, reg on time with even less sleep, or do anything but drive home early after getting as much sleep as I could.

The second leg (which I'm finishing up as I write this) has been more interesting.

I came back up to Cherokee on Sunday, and decided to just play cash. I quickly won a couple of buy-ins at PLO and cut the session relatively short for some cowardly reasons: mentally, I really could use the winning sessions this month, and financially my stack got to the point that it was both a substantial portion of my bankroll and covered by others at the table. So I got out of there (like I meant to back in Hammond). I decided to take that momentum with me heading into the PLO event the next day, and make sure I was rested up for a strong day of poker.

The next day came, and—in order to reduce my ABI across not only this WSOPc trip but an upcoming jaunt into the Biloxi stop—I had decided to play the $75 satellite into the $400 PLO event (fully planning to register the event whether I won the seat or not).

I had some time to kill before the satellite ran, so I played some 1/2 NLHE. I made $80, which was kind of nice as it made me feel like I was freerolling the satellite.

Unfortunately, the satellite didn't go well. Even for its predictably poor structure, high rake, and players who didn't appreciate that taking more than—like—15 seconds to make a decision was super -EV due to the short blind levels... I actually felt like it was generally a good value due to the soft competition, but I just wasn't able to make hands and I ultimately busted as a small favorite all in.

So I went ahead and directly registered for the PLO event, which also felt like a little bit of a freeroll as I'd made more than the buy-in playing PLO cash the previous day.

Long story short, I busted after folding for like 3 hours straight and then getting all-in 3 ways on the turn with ~60% equity. Ugh.

At that point I could either late-reg the nightly (eh) or wait until the night's mega satellite into the weekend main event.

Seeing as I was at least going to play the weekend's lower buy-in events (had the hotel booked and everything), I felt like I should see about playing my way into a $1700 seat for $250. (This was another ABI-reducing move, as well as a reasonable value proposition.)

I had some time to kill before it started, so I played some more cash: 1/2 NLHE at first until a 1/2 PLO seat opened. I made a little at NLHE then lost most of a buy-in at PLO all in as a favorite. Oh well.

Then I played the mega satellite and, despite being 6th in chips with 6 left and 4 seats up for grabs (with 5th getting $300 cash)... I got the main event seat! I was able to win a flip AIPF versus the player who was 5th in chips, and he was eliminated shortly thereafter. After winning that flip, I was pretty much guaranteed to be able to fold my way into a seat, and it wasn't long before 5th place was decided.

The next day (today), I was debating whether or not to play the $400 8-max NLHE event, as the previous Cherokee stop's similar event went until 6 AM and I need to drive back to Atlanta tomorrow.

But I went ahead and played, feeling good coming off of my satellite win.

More folding for hours. After four levels (two hours), I had all of one big blind more than the starting stack. Then I got AhAc AIPF vs KhQh and QcJc. T9x:hh flop. Heart on the turn. Thankfully, heart on the river. I didn't quite triple up, but I was at about 80 big blinds and feeling pretty good.

Then, I got involved in an extremely frustrating pot like three hands later. The button—quite obviously the most competent opponent at the table—opened into my BB, and I found KK. I 3bet. He called. 964 flop with two spades. I bet, he calls. Q turn. I bet again, he calls. Ace river; fml. I decide I really prefer bet/fold to check/call or check/fold, so I go ahead and bet.

Villain makes, like, a minimum raise and I insta-muck in frustration. Whether they flopped a set, turned a set, had AsXs (or AQ/AK) and rivered a higher pair... I just don't think I'm ever good against a raise, even if they were the one player at the table who I think may try a bluff there.

And just like that, I lost most of my stack and was down to my fewest chips of the tournament so far.

Less than an orbit later, I open AsJd in MP. 3 calls. AhTd3d flop. I bet, two calls (both with position on me: CO & BTN) and a fold. I decided at this point that I have the best hand, despite my middling ace.

Turn 7d. I go all-in for roughly pot. Sort of loose, I know, but I think check/folding here would be too tight against an unknown and capped CO and a BTN who showed himself to be spewy over the previous hours I'd played with him. (And I really didn't have enough chips to bet/fold especially reasonably.)

CO folds. BTN says "oh I don't know if I can fold this; you probably have it". They count out their chips and deliberate. I'm sure they're calling, meanwhile I'm wondering what I "probably have".

They call and turn over A7o, no diamond. Blank river.

Horribly frustrating. I was 100% right on the flop and—while I frankly could have lived with shoving into a flush given the SPR, my read on BTN in particular, and the fact that it's NLHE and not PLO—the fact that I got 3-outered not only in this hand but probably in the BB KK vs BTN hand (all in less than two orbits for all of my chips, after nearly doubling up)... I was honestly angry after this bust.

Because this makes me 0 for 10 (not even a mincash) in ring/bracelet events this year (I took a shot at the $1500 HORSE event this summer before picking poker back up in earnest with more sustainable BRM), and I just feel like I've been getting so card dead and then so unlucky when I finally pick up a hand.

As I said after Hammond, I don't think it's just the single-table aspect of live poker giving me this impression (it may play a role, but I honestly don't really get bored yet playing live poker, so I rarely feel impatient): I just feel like playing my normal preflop ranges has given me half my normal VPIP live versus online this year.

Like, my preflop opening ranges for NLHE in particular are really not the tightest by default. But—just as something specific and tangible—I feel like I've seen WAY less than my share of suited connectors in live MTTs this year.

It just often feels like hours upon hours of easy, obvious preflop folds.

And because ring and bracelet events are very much in "shot taking" territory for my bankroll, it's just so annoying when it's felt like a total waste of time and money (not to mention the expense of visiting the circuit).

Including satellites and seat value, my live MTT ROI on the year is still positive and my ITM% is pretty high. (And my online MTT ROI, assuming I can achieve anything remotely similar live, more than justifies me taking shots at live MTTs, even with some expenses.)

But my god can I not catch a break in these ring events so far. I know a 10 tournament cashless streak is relatively unremarkable, but yeesh. Come on, already. I keep sitting at these super beatable tables in tournaments, and then not being able to do anything about it. My tables for most of these tournaments have generally been full of loose-passive, face-up players who should be valuetowned relentlessly, but when I never have a hand I can value bet, it just gets infuriating.

If nothing else, being "due" (I know I'm not actually, but shut up) with the Cherokee main event being my next tournament is... interesting. It would be awfully nice to have that be the ring event that ends my cashless streak, especially if I can manage an even slightly deep run.

Oh, and today after I ate lunch and calmed down after busting the 8-max event, I sat down at 1/2 NLHE then 1/2 PLO and made more than I lost on my 8-max entry. So that was nice. (I hit my second live royal flush, too.)

Which brings me to a point that some readers could be surprised by: yeah I played PLO cash on this trip, despite publicly stepping away from "cash PLO".

Full-ring live PLO is so different from 6max PLO online, though.

First of all, I'm actually winning this year in live PLO, so there's that. Not by a huge amount, but a few buy-ins.

Also, not only are live players generally weaker... but in the live PLO games I've played lately they just play so incredibly face-up and passively. Plus, with the bigger table, you end up in fewer marginal situations because you can play tighter.

Even when deciding to step away from online cash PLO, I figured I might still dabble in PLO cash games when they're available to me live. So I have! But with strict daily stop-losses that I fortunately haven't triggered.

Anyway. Overall, my WSOPc Cherokee experience so far has neither been especially painful nor especially joyous. Busting every single ring event has been frustrating, but being the unlikely winner of a main event seat was gratifying... and any bankroll damage has been mitigated by nice cash game results.

If I include the value of the main event seat, I've made a little money on this trip even after expenses... so I can't complain too much. The cashless streak in the ring events themselves starts to feel absurd, but oh well.

I'll be heading home tomorrow, but I'm coming back up here late Friday or early Saturday to play the Saturday morning flight of the main event, and I had already planned on firing at a couple more ring events (and/or their satellites) over the main event weekend... so if the main event doesn't keep me occupied 100% of the weekend, then those tournaments are also penciled into my schedule.

Here's hoping I can finally get things going in one of these.

This final Cherokee weekend simply extended my cashless streak in non-satellite live tournaments. 0 for 12 in ring events now. Entirely within realistic MTT variance, but completely frustrating too.

This past weekend, twice I lost more than half my stack making a very reasonable and credible river bluff bet in position, but into basically the absolute top of my opponent's checking range (which did not fold). That didn't help things.

Other than that, I just feel like I've been absurdly card-dead.

Thankfully (but "irritatingly", for the extreme contrast), in both Hammond and Cherokee... during cash games, I've been able to get good starting hands and make profitable plays (or at least some decisions!) postflop.

My positive cash results at these stops (four figures in the black) have fortunately mitigated (but not nullified) my MTT-fueled losses, and they've helped my confidence a bit, frankly.

But at tournament tables, I've just felt cursed in terms of starting hands. The medium-to-deep-stacked preflop ranges I've designed are really not that tight, but more often than not I feel like I end up looking really nitty due to how often I'm folding K4o, Q3o, 95o, 82s... just tons of garbage that I really can't take to a flop.

As I complained after Hammond, I feel like my preflop VPIP% in practice in these events has been like half of what it is in theory. It just makes it very hard to win pots with or without showdown when that's the case.

Due to how dismal my WSOP Circuit results have been, it's valuable to put everything in context to keep my head straight. And I think it's worth zooming out to share some details on how my year has gone.

Despite these WSOPc results, I remain fairly confident in my MTT game. Not only are the fields super beatable in most games, but I've had a lot of encouraging results this year.

Shockingly, I still have a (barely) positive ROI in live MTTs this year and a solid ITM%, if I include the value of the seat I won into Cherokee's main event. This is mostly due to final-tabling two of the four tournaments I played on a trip to Vegas during the WSOP this past summer. Neither was in the WSOP proper, but it all encouraged me to reconnect with poker in a more sustained way.

More importantly (that is, over a larger sample), I've just been able to make a good number of deep runs in online MTTs. I've won a handful of MTTs outright and I've final tabled a few more, so my ROI online is pretty healthy.

So unlike with playing PLO cash games online (more on that in a moment), I haven't become utterly discouraged from MTTs.

But I'm pretty sure I won't be taking my previously planned trip to Biloxi for the WSOPc stop there.

I haven't 100% decided yet, but I think I should just stay home and spend that time rebuilding my bankroll online, which I knew I was going to need to do anyway if Cherokee (and Biloxi) didn't go well.

I just don't really have the bankroll to be playing $400 MTTs so frequently, even by a relatively aggressive bankroll management scheme.

It's tough. At the beginning of November, I had an aggressive but reasonable number of buy-ins for the WSOPc. But a lot changed in November for me bankroll-wise (in the negative), and—while I wasn't willing to forego Cherokee entirely—I ended up needing to approach Cherokee quite differently than I expected to (and booked lodging for). So I've learned the hard way that making plans for poker travel is a pretty unique challenge.

But, regarding Biloxi in particular, I don't think I should be taking on the additional (thankfully mostly refundable) expenses of going there, however modest.

Because I'm sort of back at square one (or worse). Just in terms of strict results, I'm still in the black since deciding to pursue full-time poker in June, but it's for a much more modest hourly rate than if I hadn't taken these expensively unsuccessful WSOPc trips. And in all honesty, my expenses this year take me into the red.

These unsuccessful, high-variance shots impacting my results so significantly helps me to believe that this isn't a hopeless pursuit overall (my hourly would be above minimum wage without my WSOPc failures), but I think I need to be more conservative with my bankroll than a trip to Biloxi allows, for the foreseeable future.

Remember my "more on that in a moment" regarding PLO? Well...

Especially since I should be getting some really edifying feedback from Galfond on my PLO game soon, I've decided to jump back into online PLO cash games. This is also because I had a really successful run at the 1/2 PLO tables in Cherokee, so I've just got some PLO swagger back and I'm eager to jump back in online.

Not without some... diversification, though.

I've decided to try a slightly different schedule for myself.

What's not changing is that I'm going to play a Sunday MTT schedule every week. But I'm going to add a Wednesday night MTT session, which I'd already started dabbling in.

The main difference in my cash play from before is that I'm not going to force the issue with PLO in my afternoon sessions. Rather that sit at empty PLO tables or start/sit tables with almost entirely regs, I'm going to put in NLHE cash volume where there will be more games to select from. Then, in my late night sessions, I'll try to focus on PLO volume, as the games seem to be more plentiful and profitable during those hours.

So, I'm driving home tomorrow and I'll probably start this new schedule as early as tomorrow afternoon, but I may wait until Galfond goes over the hands I shared with him. We'll see.

I'm very much in rebuilding mode, having just over half the bankroll that I had on November 1st... so hopefully I can string together some successes in December to get things moving back in the right direction.

I'm so fed up.

In my return to online cash PLO, I was greeted by a 9 BI losing session.

I was optimistic in my last post, but I'm not now.

I was optimistic at the beginning of November, but I'm not now.

I've just lost so much progress in the past four and a half weeks.

Even without thinking of it in terms of what the money could have bought outside of a poker bankroll (this being a compartmentalization that I'm shockingly good at right now given how horrible I feel; I'm 99% exclusively seeing this downswing in terms of an abstracted bankroll figure or even a "scorecard" sort of thing), I just can't believe how badly it's gone.

So little of it can be attributed to tilt in hindsight. I really, really don't think I've been prone to more than like 2-3 extremely limited moments of emotionally-charged spew.

I just feel completely helpless, and I feel totally powerless at the table at this point.

It's been a month since I've had two consecutive winning sessions.

I don't think I'd be so frustrated if this wasn't so atypical feeling for me within poker. This is by no means the first time I've spent a lot of time on poker. Back in undergrad, I was able to steadily (with some hiccups, of course!) build a bankroll. In two completely different episodes after that (one post-BF), I was able to grow a modest bankroll into a larger one before running out of time in my life for poker and cashing out.

Effectively breaking even (worse, after expenses) after six months is just not what I'm used to experiencing, and this downswing is just feeling more and more insurmountable and intolerable.

There's no reason that I shouldn't be a better player now than at any point in the past. I've worked so hard away from the tables.

Yet my results have been so much worse.

Are the games tougher? Sure. Especially at NLHE.

But these PLO cash games online... I'm telling you, I know how to beat them but I just CAN'T. I'm not getting value hands often enough against the recs or call-happy regs, and the more solid regs are just always at the top of their range against me and my bluffcatchers are never good. I feel like I'm always on the wrong side of coolers, and opponents of all skill levels draw out on me constantly.

I just can't describe how frustrated I am. And these past four and a half weeks have just been so hard, and to get back to my online grind today and last night and post two losing sessions is just not encouraging at all. (Last night was also extremely frustrating as my internet went out mid-session and mid-big-hand TWICE... my internet has usually been so reliable...)

It's just feeling impossible. I just can't get any momentum going at all.

And it's starting to look like a really bad use of my time. Without two specific tournament results, I'd be pretty much broke by now. And I just can't wrap my head around it. I've focused so much of my energy (on and off the table) on cash games, but they've just been a slow drain on me financially. I've studied and gotten coaching and it seems like I can think through other players' hands on the forums totally fine, but my own results are just completely terrible over—yes—a significant (but not necessarily conclusive) sample.

And because my current bankroll's existence is predicated mostly on two specific tournament results ($7700 NLHE bink; ~$5k PLO 2nd), it's so easy to feel like those results are the flukes and the rest of the failures are what's real.

But I don't understand! I just don't get it! I feel like I know what I'm doing. I play beatable games and know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

It's just not working! And I don't know if I can take it anymore.

To have put so much effort into this and to not have any idea of where I stand is just so hard to digest and I don't know what to do. The ambiguity of having practically broken even after hundreds and hundreds of hours is just excruciating when I'm seeing so few encouraging results day to day.

And my personal situation is such that, without revealing too much, I'm in a really awkward place professionally. I don't feel like I have a lot of career options, and poker—which is something that I've (still) historically had success at—seemed like an interesting option that nobody could gatekeep me out of.

Back in June, I figured I would give full-time poker a shot and I wasn't sure that it would work but I was sure I wanted to try it. I had a uniquely fortunate amount of time and money to put towards poker, and I figured that I would be able to tell if it could work before too long.

But that's one of the most infuriating things: I can't tell anything after six months! I've averaged a little more than $100/month before any expenses I've incurred (playing stakes for which that is by no means a sign of success), which tells me almost nothing.

I am sry to here. You have given some good advice to the community.
But there are also a world out side of poker, so not much lost. All the best.

After a pretty emotional day (as you can see) and a real resolution to quit poker altogether, I realized I was missing the forest for the trees.

The trees are online 6max cash PLO, which I am completely swearing off. I'll watch whatever Galfond does with the hands I sent for entertainment and I hope the video is edifying for others, but I just can't play online cash PLO anymore.

My bankroll would be about 50% larger today if I'd never played online cash PLO, and that's a hard fact to build hopes in opposition to.

If I'm playing abstractly/theoretically winning PLO and these are standard results over six months of play, I'm just not interested in weathering the swings. It's just too hard, and I can't take it anymore. Call me a coward; I don't care even a little bit. It's not your money or time; it's mine.

If I'm not yet playing winning PLO, I'm still not interested in persisting. If this is what I deserve after all of the work I've put in, then I just don't care and I'm not investing anything more into this particular game.

I'll still play PLO live when it's available (and not absurdly risky re: BRM) and I'll still play PLO tournaments, but I'm just emotionally completely done with online PLO cash. Completely. It's objectively not been profitable, and it's gotten to the point that I only expect pain when sitting at an online PLO cash table. So I'm not sitting at them ever again. I see no point to it.

And as someone who has successfully completely cut certain things out of his real diet without any "relapses" or significant temptations... having committed to never playing another hand of PLO cash online, I think I can stick to this dietary restriction in my poker life.

Because here's the thing: the frustrations that online PLO cash brought me almost killed my love for poker in general, a passion that I felt tugging at me yesterday in the hours after I initiated my cashouts from the sites I play at. I felt this passion tugging at me as I considered MTT-free Sundays and no summer Vegas visit and never finishing the poker books I have on my shelf.

And I felt this passion tugging at me when I considered the potential that I was throwing away.

Overall, I'm still a winning MTT and NLHE cash player. Outside of online cash PLO, I have a lot of evidence to suggest that poker is a profitable pursuit for me.

And I let my dismal PLO results completely intoxicate my view of that.

My frustration is also amplified by the live MTT failures that I've talked about here. Similar to online cash PLO, if I'd never played the WSOP Circuit stops I visited, my bankroll would be about 50% larger than it is now (even if I'd played PLO).

So as someone who has lost half of their bankroll in the past ~5 weeks, it's important to keep these different games' results in context. If not for online PLO cash and live MTTs, my bankroll would be twice what it is today (that is, twice what it started as in June). And just like how I said my online PLO cash results are a hard fact to build hopes in opposition to, the successes I've had (both this year and lifetime) outside of these two specific, high variance games is a hard fact to feel hopeless in opposition to.

And I really do love poker. From everything I've seen, the poker players with the most sustained success long-term are people who have a sincere, pure love for the game, so I want to give myself another chance.

I say "pure" to distinguish this love from a love for something that is virtually inextricable from poker: money.

I really don't care much about money. While there are some things I would spend more money on if I had more of it, my tastes and lifestyle are both pretty modest. If I cared more about money, the real dollar value of what I've lost in the past ~5 weeks would drive me crazy.

The part of this downswing that hurts me the most is how it's distanced me from my medium- and long-term poker goals, including the ability to play poker in a way that sustains both itself (that is, at least breaking even) and my lifestyle (that is, generating significant income).

So, after thinking about it more, I decided that giving up on poker altogether was premature. I really like playing poker. My WSOPc results have been horribly frustrating, but I really do just enjoy being at the table live. I also enjoy studying the game and making decisions during the game.

And I like that it's something I've tended to be successful at. It's nice to do well at things.

But I haven't done well at PLO cash games online, and they've dragged down my overall poker results significantly. So they're out.

And even though I noted a similar effect with live MTTs and the 0-for-12 streak I have at the WSOPc (in ring events), it's a much different situation. Online this year, I've both gone 0-for-12 at least once (I think I went like 0-for-25 not that long ago) as well as generated a healthy ROI.

And actually, if I count the $1700 seat I won in Cherokee, I still have a BARELY BARELY BARELY positive ROI in live MTTs this year. And my 2018 live ITM% is in tolerable territory, even if it's unfortunately only been dragged down by 12 ring events and 1 bracelet event.

So tournaments aren't out. I don't have an utterly conclusive sample with online MTTs, but my success in those (multiple wins and even more final tables) and the low volume I've put in with live MTTs suggests to me that I have no reason to give up on them. I do want to be a little more careful with live MTT BRM though: I was playing Cherokee pretty under-rolled (even if I was LESS under-rolled when I made my travel plans... grumble), and I'm going to have a somewhat stricter "floor" even for taking shots at live MTTs.

So here's the plan: I'm going to keep going, just without PLO online cash games. It's really annoying that I put so much work into that discipline but—hey—it will just make me more competitive in PLO tournaments, and I actually think it helped my postflop NLHE game too. Speaking of, I'm going to see where I can fit in with NLHE online cash games. As someone who's spent zero time with solvers, I know that there are players out there ready to crush me even at NL100... so I'm going to try to ease my way into it regardless of what I can afford to play. But that's what I'm going to spend most of my time on now, day-in and day-out. Finally, I'm going to put in as much MTT volume as I can stand, using pretty conservative BRM for the most part.

(Additional wrinkle to include as a postscript: so, I gravely misunderstood the damage of the afternoon session I played yesterday. After every session, I plug the balances I have on various sites into a new row of spreadsheet that I keep. I plugged in my Ignition balance without hitting the "refresh" button on their software, and the out-of-date balance shown did not include what I'd just had in play. So I thought I had a much worse session than I did, and—as you can imagine—this contributed somewhat to my initial freak-out and my subsequent calming down. But I did have a -9 BI PLO session: I checked that in my tracking software, as I was playing PLO on multiple sites and had one Ignition NLHE table open too.)

I think it is great that you found motivation again and didn’t let the mental stuff take you down, but you should know that after 5k hands, your winrate doesn’t mean anything.
So saying you want to look to move up after another 5k hands sounds super weird to me. I mean you could be crushing NL50 with 15bb or you could be losing with -10 and we wil never know it, because of the small sample. Especially because your mental game had to bear so much in the last days/weeks I would advice you to stick to NL50 for like a month, which equals ~100k hands and think about moving up in stakes afterwards. Also if you are winning 5bb/100 in NL50, we just assume the winrate will stay like that, which is rather unlikely, you are a slight winner and should definitely not move up.

Keep grinding and gl at the tables

Cashed 0/21 MTTs today.

So annoyed. Not mad, just annoyed. It just felt impossible to win chips today; non-stop coolers, lost flips, and bad beats.

It's frustrating to have more than erased the nice run I had in the latter half of last week, but oh well. Sundays tend to swing hard in one direction or another.

Hopefully I can put together some winning sessions this week to make up for this.

Wanted to post a mid-week update:

Cash has been going okay. I unfortunately played a NL50 session when I probably shouldn't have (due to being too tired), and I think it contributed to a lot of spew. I wasn't thinking straight and I made some big, stupid calls when I shouldn't have. Other than that, it's been going extremely well, but I dropped kind of a lot of money in that sleepy session that I shouldn't have sat down for.

MTTs have really been dragging my results down, and they've been really frustrating. I've been getting close to big results when I do cash but not quite taking anything down or hitting top 3 money.

It's been a real challenge to have the best hand hold up all in otherwise. Tonight was just absurd in that regard: I lost a ton of big pots with 70% equity or more all in.

But even amidst those challenges tonight, I was able to final table a PLO8 tournament on Ignition (4th place). I wish I could just play PLO8 MTTs all the time; they're so absurdly easy. Folks just throw chips in with the most absurd garbage.

I also played the $88 $8K GTD PLO 6max tournament on ACR, which typically doesn't get enough people to run. After firing two bullets, I came in 10th (12 paid), which was really disappointing even though it was still profitable due to the overlay. I was 5th in chips with 10 left, and this hand happened:

PL Omaha $3000(BB)
HERO ($88180)
CO ($95952)
BTN ($139061)
SB ($73994)
BB ($143716)

Dealt to Hero: Ad Qs 6c 4d

HERO Raises To $6000, CO Folds, BTN Folds, SB Folds, BB Calls $3000

I'd been at the table with BB for a lot of hands by MTT rando standards, and they were just playing like a maniac and getting absurdly lucky: 55/37 with a 3bet over 24 and WTSD of 77% (yes, SEVENTY SEVEN percent). (This is a kind of loose open obviously, but 5-handed with the blinds coming around ITM I need to find some raises preflop.)

Hero SPR on Flop: [6.09 effective]
Flop ($13500): 3d 4c 2c
BB Bets $3000 (Rem. Stack: 134716), HERO Calls $3000 (Rem. Stack: 79180)

I have too much equity too often to fold to such a baby bet from a noted spewmonster, and I'm in position.

Turn ($19500): 3d 4c 2c 4h
BB Bets $19500 (Rem. Stack: 115216), HERO Calls $19500 (Rem. Stack: 59680)

There's no reason I can't have the best hand; I'm not folding but I'd prefer to fill up before I go broke on this, if only for vague ICM considerations.

River ($58500): 3d 4c 2c 4h 2s
BB Bets $58500 (Rem. Stack: 56716), HERO Calls $58500 (Rem. Stack: 1180)

At this point, this line feels like a range that I can't fold against. I have a nearly inconsequential club in my hand, but this can be busted cc really often (even with a 4 that I may very well outkick). I block both straights (which villain should slow down with anyway), and this villain was so loose-aggressive (and not with any discernible discretion) that even if they're taking this line for value it could easily include overpairs. This is a full house from villain sometimes but they've just been so damn spewy that I can't fold trips top kicker on such a nothing board when the flush draw missed.

This PSB just felt very bluff-heavy/value-cutty to me, so I called with just a few chips left behind.

BB shows: Js Ah 5s 8d

BB wins: $175500

Oops nope it's like the one possibility I block hardest and I'm left with less than a big blind (a "stack" which I lost the very next hand). Rad.

Anyway.

Earlier this week I came in 15th in a 6max NLHE tournament and 12th in a 9max NLHE tournament, so those were similarly disappointing runs.

...

Zooming out further: it's getting really close to the point that I won't have made money at all playing poker this year, and that's difficult to process, especially because so much of that is just due to taking unsuccessful shots at live MTTs. I could have just not done that and I'd be in much better shape, but dwelling on that isn't going to be helpful, so...

I don't know. I just wish this whole thing was going even slightly better after all of these months, and seeing as I've been downswinging since the beginning of November (after hitting an all-time high with my bankroll)... it's just really hard. I'm just not making any progress (quite the opposite) over the past six weeks, and it doesn't feel good.

But I don't have much choice but to keep at it, at least for now.

I'm going to move up to NL100 tomorrow, just a little earlier than planned. Other than that aforementioned overtired (and therefore ill-advised) session I played, I've really been doing well at NLHE cash tables and—without being quite in "chasing losses" territory—I think that I should stop playing cash games where I buy in for less than I often buy in for MTTs. It's just exaggerating MTTs' effects on my bankroll.

And it's not just the encouraging results I've had at NLHE cash making me confident: I've been studying NLHE diligently and I feel really good about my game, especially against the Ignition player pool (which I don't suspect becomes twice as tough going from NL50 to NL100). So I think I need to just not waste any more time playing a level that I'm severely overrolled for: it's just too big of an opportunity cost.

I really hope I can turn December around results-wise. We'll see what happens.

Finally, a proper bink!

A relatively modest one in an Ignition 178-player $55 semiturbo, but it's quite welcome!

I've been having some long cashless streaks and horrible luck all-in near final tables lately (even just earlier in the day), so it's nice to have one of these bigger spikes that are so vital to a winning MTT trendline.

But even heads-up in this thing, I got super unlucky with my opponent on the ropes! A4s < A3o AIPF as chip leader. (A3 on the flop, natch.)

Luckily, this player was super underdefending their big blind and almost definitely not VPIPing, shoving, or 3betting wide enough, so I was able to just kind of hammer on them preflop until I got all in with top and third pair versus top pair (with a live kicker and a gutshot) and held up.

It's always nice to get heads-up in a tournament (of whatever size) against a player who is just really not tough enough in that scenario. Because I'm really not a HU NLHE expert, and when the pay jump between 2nd and 1st feels so achievable just through so-so heads-up play... it makes for some confidently +$EV poker!

And at risk of totally jinxing it... I'm officially in the black for December now! And, even taking some time off for Christmas, I've got plenty of time to run it up even more! Here's hoping!

Just had an astonishingly bad NL100 session. Ow. Just ow.

Nevermind being in the black. With about a week and a half left in the month, getting out of the red isn't impossible but it's not looking super likely.

Just a miserable session full of strong second-best hands and big bluffs that may generally work but not in these instances. (Bluffing AJ high into a set, for example.)

I know that a winning poker graph is very jagged, with peaks and valleys and breakeven stretches, but I'm getting really tired of how I've been getting jerked around results-wise over the past couple of months.

Setbacks are part of poker. But, just, like.... come on, can I just have a run where I FEEL like I'm making progress for some significant amount of time? It's just been hell on my self-confidence and my certainty that I'm not wasting my time.

Either especially due to or in spite of my recent bink (I'm not sure), I'm kind of feeling like focusing pretty exclusively on NL100 for a while and not exposing myself to MTT variance.

This wouldn't necessarily be for long, but maybe for like 3-4 weeks I just try to put together a winning run of cash play that's neither bolstered nor sabotaged by MTT results.

Psychologically, as I've mentioned, I really just want to feel like I'm heading in the right direction financially. And in that regard it's almost impossible to see the forest for the trees in MTTs.

Cash has its swings too, but if I can play +bb/100 poker it will actually be positive regarding my bankroll... unlike MTTs where playing +bb/100 poker either does or does not result in profits; that's not the only determinant.

And just considering the year I've had plus how I've mentioned that I really don't have infinite patience for this... I think this is a good move for a little while.

In terms of volume, regarding CG hands, as well as tournaments played, whats your roughly daily amount?

Came back to playing NL100 after a short holiday break to be greeted by running almost 5 BIs under EV in under 600 hands. (I typically don't play such a short session, but I knew I was upset.)

However, this masks the fact that I couldn't put my obviously severely recreational opponent on 82 when I went broke on AA postflop as an underdog to their 8s & 2s on the turn.

I also don't know that DriveHUD is correctly calculating the EV of this beauty:

NL Holdem $1(BB)
HJ ($169.04)
CO ($30)
BTN ($21.35)
HERO ($100)
BB ($104.26)
UTG ($133.58)

Dealt to Hero: Kd Kh

UTG Raises To $3.50, HJ Folds, CO Calls $2.50, BTN Folds, HERO Raises To $16, BB Folds, UTG Calls $12.50, CO Calls $12.50

Flop ($49.0): 7h 5s 2c
HERO Bets $24 (Rem. Stack: 60.0), UTG Calls $24 (Rem. Stack: 93.58), CO Calls $14 (allin)

Turn ($111.0): 7h 5s 2c 7c
HERO Bets $60 (allin), UTG Calls $60 (Rem. Stack: 33.58)

River ($231.0): 7h 5s 2c 7c 6s

CO shows: 7d 6d
UTG shows: 8c 9c

CO wins: $89.42
UTG wins: $137.58

Every hand is independent. The long run is very long. You'll run worse than you ever thought possible and then run even worse than that. Don't be results-oriented.

I get it.

But I'm so tired of this. Overall, I've just been sliding downhill financially since the beginning of November and it's so frustrating. Every time I feel like I've turned a corner, I splat against a wall.

Most sessions just feel like such an extraordinarily uphill battle. I know this is my stupid human storyline-oriented brain fooling me in the face of statistical chaos, but I just feel like I've been too unlucky to succeed at this and I don't feel like it's going to turn around.

I've played a lot of poker before this year. It's never been this frustrating for this long.

I feel I'm constantly improving and constantly losing money, and that's an infuriating feedback loop.

I'm pretty seriously considering changing my approach to poker and freeing up a lot of the time I'm spending on it.

I don't know. It's easy to feel this way after a blamelessly horrible session. I tend to bounce back from feelings like this in less than a day, but... blech.

I'd meant to look back on my year and post the highlights here, especially re: MTTs. No better time to do that than now, probably.

My entire re-connection with poker started with deciding to finally play a bracelet event at the WSOP. I entered the $1500 HORSE, because 1) I love mixed games and 2) I really didn't want the possibility of facing an all-in decision in level 1 of my most expensive tournament ever.

I didn't even make it to the second break. It was brutal: I lost with three of a kind to a better three of a kind in both hold 'em and stud, and then I busted after getting all in on 5th in stud8 with a four-card 6 and a 4-flush. Off-suit Q, off-suit Q for 6th and 7th.

The trip got better, though. I came in 8th/380 in a $550 NLHE at the Wynn, losing AKo < QQ AIPF versus a WSOP ME final tablist (not that I knew that at the time, due to being out of the poker loop for a while).

I also got 7th/115 in Aria's $470 HORSE event, which was satisfying after WSOP HORSE went so poorly.

For some online final table highlights:

Despite my overall poker misfortunes and MTTs' big negative effect on my bankroll, I won or nearly won kind of a lot of MTTs in 2018. This isn't every final table I hit, but I found these noteworthy looking through my records.

June 22, binked 113-player $16.50 PLO tourney.
July 24, 3rd/67 $11 FLO8.
July 24, binked 308-player $22 NLHE.
September 9, binked $82 PLO for more than $1400 (I didn't record how many players; I usually do).
September 23, 5th/779 $55 NLHE.
September 30, 4th/118 $22 PLO8.
September 30, binked 722-player $55 NLHE (same tournament I got 5th in the previous Sunday).
October 28, 2nd/183 $215 PLO.
November 18, 4th/134 in $22 PLO8.
November 26, $1700 WSOPc Cherokee Main Event seat for $250.
December 6, binked $82 Thousandaire Maker on Ignition.
December 12th, 4th/128 in a $33 PLO8.
December 17th, binked $55 178-player NLHE.

(Lots of 4th places in PLO8 tournaments. Weird.)

I don't have my precise ROI due to having some of my best MTT results on my second computer as well as MTTs being glitchy for tracking software (even once I started plugging in results; some of my biggest scores just don't show up and I don't know why), but online MTTs were basically the sole bright spot on an otherwise frustrating poker year. My live final tables were obviously bright spots, but all of the profit from those were wiped away by having zero non-satellite cashes in ring and bracelet events.

And cash just went horribly online. Live, in a small sample, I did make some money at cash games. But online... I don't know. I really feel like I ran bad at every single variant I dipped my toe into online: PLO, NLHE, Stud8, FLO8, FLHE (in order of volume, though I'm going by memory for the fixed limit games).

For each of these games, I didn't put in so much volume that luck couldn't have made me a loser. (It certainly felt like it was luck most of the time, but who wouldn't say that?)

Online cash games were just really expensive for me this year, and I had a hard time finding answers. When I got PLO coaching, I both learned and gained confidence. I studied just about every poker variant pretty intensely.

But the results didn't come, for whatever reason.

My "new year's resolutions" with poker:

First and foremost, I'm dropping down significantly in stakes. The truth is that the dollar amount of the downswing I've experienced since the beginning of November has gotten to me mentally (though I'm honestly generally pleased with how I've handled it; it's just borderline impossible for the past two months I've had to not affect someone), and if I'm going to lose any more money on poker (which is always a possibility regardless of skill level), I psychologically absolutely need it to be for less than it has been. Or else I can't convince myself to keep playing.

And I'm going to keep trying to play full-time for the foreseeable future. Right now, my bankroll and BRM scheme have me playing NL50, PLO25, MTTs with a $24 ABI, and FL games with a big bet up to $8.

I haven't decided yet on what my weekly schedule will look like (it may very well include PLO again), but I think I'd like to get back into MTTs, at least on Sundays. And I think I'd like to play half NLHE and half PLO for my cash volume. I know the risks of being a generalist, but I really want to be a well-rounded player.

And speaking of my poker goals: many of them are unfortunately far further from my grasp than I'd like. A summer Vegas trip is looking pretty unlikely, and I'm probably going to have to stay home from live MTTs (even the next Cherokee stop) between now and then, too. It's disappointing, but I don't have much choice unless my bankroll grows at an extraordinary rate.

And, in the immediate term, it's just going to be hard for me to make a compelling hourly wage at poker given the stakes I'm going to be playing and the volume I'll be putting in. At least for now, I'm going to drop from 6 tables to 4 (at least for cash play), while planning on putting in a similar number of hours per week.

But at this point, making $x/hour or building my bankroll to $y are presumptuous goals. Because my 2018 did not prove to me that I'm a winning poker player who should be setting goals that depend on being a winning poker player.

But 2019 is going to have to really bash my head in for me to give up on full-time poker. I'm going to try to rebuild over the next few months (or however long it takes).

Because I honestly just have a very hard time accepting that my 2018 results were appropriate for my skill and effort. Maybe I truly can't hack it as a full-time pro, but I think I need to keep trying before I decide that's true.

I know it's so easy to blame losses on luck, but it's just been an eerily uphill battle for so much of my time at the tables.

I'm hundreds and hundreds of big blinds below EV in tournaments, and even despite that I've turned a profit in them.

In online cash games, it's honestly felt like nobody could have booked a winning year with my run of cards (even if I'm also 100% confident that a better player could have lost less; I'm not blameless).

I didn't put in so much volume that luck cannot be discounted as a major factor, and we all know that all-in EV doesn't tell the whole story. (My greenline and EV line have effectively converged at this point, FWIW.)

And while I know that losing players think that running normally is running bad, but I think I can tell the difference between running good, running normally, and running bad. (But of course I'd say that.)

Like, I've run good at times this year! Really, I have. At those moments, it just feels impossible to make a mistake. It's nice! But it's atypical.

But when it feels like the opposite is happening—when it feels like nobody could make a profit given the situations you've been dealt—I think I am experienced and perceptive enough to know the difference between that and routinely misplaying a "normal" run of luck.

But I could be wrong.

However, the only way to really find out is to keep at it.

I just might not be good enough to win, and I may not even have the potential to be good enough.

But I think I've invested too much time in improving my previously-winning poker game (between starting to play again last June and today) to give up after a really mixed and confusing half-year of results.

Whether I can hack this or not, letting a strange year of results determine my poker future seems easily regrettable. I would never know what was possible if I decided to quit playing, but if there's any significant chance that I could be successful at this (and I have just enough reasons to think there's some chance), I think I should continue to pursue it. Worst case scenario is that I waste a significant amount of time and—compared to other businesses' startup costs—a tolerable amount of money.

Fingers crossed for a better year in 2019.

I've only been putting in light volume as December comes to an end. I've already put in a decent number of hours this month and the holidays are as good a time as any to take it easy, plus I cut down on tables and I'm really just not 100% happy with poker lately, for obvious reasons... so the motivation to play—while not absent—is somewhat dull.

That's not to say that I'm not enjoying playing at all. Most of my stubbornness with poker stems from enjoying the hand-by-hand decision-making (and the analysis thereof), and those decisions are a constant that I can rely on (online, at least; sometimes when playing live I get annoyed at how few opportunities per hour I have to make real poker decisions).

Results are quite different, though. As readers likely know, results have been worse than unreliable for me.

I mean, it's borderline "reliably bad" at this point.

The garbage run continues, I have to say. Just before starting to write this post, I ran second set into top set with no straight or better possible, with villain's range not being composed exclusively of top set (imo).

It's been 3 for 3 losing sessions since my last post. 3 sessions is obviously nothing, but when I'm just stringing together so many losses I'd really appreciate any winning (honestly, even breakeven) stretch.

Even just one winning session (especially at cash) just always feels like such a cool, refreshing glass of water, with how badly cash has gone for me this year.

But, thankfully, at this point the actual value of the losses isn't getting to me as much. This is in no small part due to moving down in stakes, and basically resolving to just play this bankroll (moving up and down appropriately) until: A) it's obscenely depleted (maybe not to quite $0) or B) until I have a real, professional bankroll. Within my fairly conservative BRM, either possibility should take quite a while unless I go on an absurd MTT run, and—having abandoned any strict professional ambition to grind Vegas MTTs this summer (I may still go if I can scrap together the "fun money" to treat it more recreationally, totally apart from my "responsible" and more sustainable bankroll)—there just aren't any major, lifetime poker goals that I'm tantalizingly close to at this point.

That is obviously a little bit sad, but it's also much easier to just take the results as they come (even if I'm still sick of losing; I'd be tired of losing even if I was just playing some random videogame online for no money).

To be slightly more concrete and specific about it: at this point my entire (now voluntarily reduced) bankroll is less than the amount that I lost last month. Right now, I frankly just have the perspective that—unless I win a lot first—nothing can happen to me financially that would be worse than November 2018 in absolute dollar value... and I more than survived the disappointment of that already.

And right now it will be extremely difficult for me to lose more in a day than what I pay in rent per month, which—while not a comparison that is often at the fore of my mind—is a financial point of reference that can make some results feel much more impactful than others.

I'm still just so annoyed by the general losing trend, though. It's extremely frustrating, because—outside of some mistakes I can recognize that shouldn't completely dictate whether I can win overall—I just feel like I'm continually improving my game and largely making very good decisions.

But I'm just not reaping ANY rewards in online cash games, at the end of the day. And even though we're guaranteed absolutely nothing at the poker table, I just can't shake the feeling that I "deserve" better than what I've been experiencing lately, which—while a somewhat egotistical notion that needs to be dealt with carefully in terms of mental game and entitlement tilt—is a useful motivator to put in volume.

Because it's really only time at the tables (playing my best and always trying to improve; not autopiloting too many tables for some foolhardy sake of volume) that will prove me right or wrong. If I'm a winning player (or have the potential to be), this stuff is kind of supposed to converge to a positive winrate sooner or later.

In short, I'm still irritated at my recent results, but I've got a much more patient outlook right now due to adjusting both my bankroll and my expectations.

Oh, I forgot to mention amidst all the mental game/bankroll kind of stuff:

It's been really interesting coming back to cash PLO after studying NLHE so much.

From reading Janda's NLHE4AP (as well as working with GTO+, which will be illustrating similar ideas), there are three concepts from Janda that have been really instructive for me lately.

First and second, that we're aggressive in poker to 1) deny equity and/or 2) to build the pot for if/when we win it. The argument itself isn't necessarily too surprising, but phrasing our objectives this way is really useful, I think.

Previously, I think I was way too anxious about #1 in PLO without realizing: the more equity my opponent has (making equity denial more of a victory), the less likely I am to win the pot I'm building. I was really not appreciating the implications of #2 when I was closer to the bottom of my range than the top (more on this later).

But it's kind of obvious, right? In retrospect, it is. But I was too often just super anxious to buy out players' equity on the flop, or protect marginal (but often best!) made hands when tons of runouts would make my life difficult. This is all especially important when out-of-position and when playing in the soft, loose-passive games that have been common for me to find online.

This isn't to say that I think GTO NLHE concepts apply directly to PLO. For PLO, I actually think that the above ideas (and any subsequent applications) will often run CONTRARY to how these arguably general poker concepts would apply to NLHE.

In NLHE, visibility is generally much worse due to how much weaker the average made hand will be. This makes folks' preflop ranges way more important, and it's way easier to be a really significant favorite or underdog on the flop and not know it.

For example, let's say I have 6s5s and I open from the cutoff. Button and SB fold. Big blind calls with 7h7c. The flop comes KcTd8h. Big blind checks.

It's really hard for even a tough player to do anything but check/fold in big blind's shoes. And if I make my c-bet and BB indeed folds, I just denied an utter mountain of equity (more than 95%!). Huge win for me!

PLO has very few analogous situations. Visibility is generally much higher due to the importance of the board and the changing nuts, and it's just really hard for someone to be making the same "face-up equity realization mistakes" in response to flop aggression as our BB villain with 77 did.

In other words, it's just much less likely for PLO players to be forfeiting a ton of equity on the flop without realizing it, and the pot-limit structure of PLO also makes it hard to force players to make these kinds of mistakes before or on the flop.

Third (from Janda), I've really been keen on utilizing the lens of how we strengthen our opponent's range with our aggression. Again, it's fairly intuitive, but having it put so concisely has been helpful for me. Truthfully, it's been vital for me to understand how to play better in NLHE (especially OOP), and I think it's going to pay some unique dividends in PLO, too.

Before, if I was just really dogging it equity-wise on a flop in PLO and my opponent checked, I might take a stab to just take a shot at denying equity. But now, when I'm in bad shape equity-wise on the flop and my opponent checks to me, I'm going to be checking a lot more often than before.

First of all, I'm not bloating a pot that I'm unlikely to win at showdown.

But in terms of non-showdown outcomes, I keep my opponent's turn range weak by checking back the flop. Then, if my opponent checks again and the turn doesn't figure to help them very often, I can make an extremely profitable bluff. Because while the pot-limit structure of PLO makes it harder for players to make big "face-up" mistakes on the flop, that's less true on the turn with just one more card to come, especially if our opponent's range is not especially strong so far and they shouldn't have many tantalizing draws.

I mean, this is just a delayed c-bet. Nothing radical, and it's roughly analogous to overbetting a blank turn in NLHE. But arriving at the tactic via the above concepts really helps me understand why I might use it. As long as I start applying it in a balanced way, it should really help a lot, I think.

ah ok thx. Flop Strategy from Leszek Badurowicz covers this concept also very nicely.

I'm having some motivation problems that are frankly pretty tightly coupled to results, unfortunately. I know this is a mental game leak, but after months and months of working really hard at this... I'm just not getting rewarded overall and it's very discouraging. And confusing.

Right now I'm just running really bad, especially all-in. It wasn't really getting to me until a frustrating return to MTT play yesterday, whose lowlight was losing an 80+bb pot all-in on the flop as more than a 96% favorite. (That's a lot of big blinds in a tournament, especially when I was significantly above both the starting and average stack sizes.)

Then, tonight I lost a 320bb PLO pot all-in on the flop as a huge favorite against a ridiculous holding, and I had to cut my session very, very short because I knew I was too frustrated by it. It came on the heels of running TT into QQ on a wet QTxx board at a NLHE table minutes earlier.

It got me to the point of questioning the integrity of Ignition, as I've just been brutalized by their RNG since last summer. I've never had those kinds of lolrigged-type thoughts before, not even close.

But after so many setups and diverging EV/winnings lines, one's brain wants answers, even if it needs to imagine some.

I also frankly made some mildly expensive mistakes to kick off tonight's session. (Not quite stack-punting, but not subtle mess-ups either.) So I guess I'll just leave tonight's session at less than one sixth of its scheduled length, and try to pick things back up tomorrow afternoon.... probably.

It's just very hard to know when/whether to give up on all of this. I don't like feeling like I may be wasting my time, and my overall results from last summer through today are very hard to make sense of.

I'm very, very close to cutting my poker hours significantly.

It's all hard to make decisions about without knowing how any of it would go.

Have you had any Coachings, yet. This could give you some confident. As I know you playing over bankrolled, this could be a good investment

So, just to document it here:

As of now, I've more-or-less given up on the full-time poker thing.

I'm still probably going to play about 20 hours a week and take it very seriously (and maybe I'll have enough positive results over time that returning to full-time play will make sense), but I'm slightly burned out from the really confusing/discouraging run I've had since June 2018.

And last summer, something I would say to myself and those close to me is "I don't want poker to be the only thing that I do". And that's never changed, but I thought it would be best to dive into it fully at first to build a bankroll, and then take my foot off the gas pedal a bit once I'd gotten myself into comfortable territory in that regard.

I think I'm also going to focus more on tournaments moving forward, as it's the only form of poker that I actually succeeded at last year. Plus, while I really like playing deeper-stacked poker (you know, with more than 1-2 streets of decision-making), MTT success is sort of the ultimate goal for me, as evidenced by the anxious shots at the WSOPc and my preoccupation with a summer Vegas trip.

I just thought it would be prudent to build a bankroll at the cash tables, but the opposite has happened: I've squandered some really significant MTT profits by trying to eke out a decent hourly at cash.

I'm just feeling exhausted.

I just finished what I expected to be my nightly MTT session, and I'm just so tired of all of this.

I'm tired of running my sets into higher sets and my premium pairs into higher pairs.

I'm tired of losing more than my share of important flips and far more than my share of 60/40-or-better races.

I'm tired of mostly posting losing sessions.

I'm tired of feeling like poker is an expensive hobby rather than an opportunity.

And even when the above isn't the source of my exhaustion, other things happen like they did tonight: my internet (usually EXTREMELY dependable and fast) suddenly goes out while I'm at critical stages of my remaining tournaments for the night (approaching two money bubbles, managing a push/fold or close-to-it stack elsewhere).

I'm calling it: I was either too permanently limited in my abilities or too unlucky (including internet outages) to have succeeded at poker over the past 800+ hours that I've played since June 2018.

Because I've worked really, really hard, and if I'm unable to post a winning month at this point... then I have a hard time imagining getting there via whatever my potential may be.

I've spent so much time studying in various ways, and I've really been good about not succumbing to tilt despite some immense hits to my bankroll and uselessly horrible runs of cards. I haven't always played perfectly, but I think it was exceedingly rare for me to slip into my C-game or lower. (I think my worst mental game leaks are overwhelmingly manifested away from the table: publicly in this thread and probably in this particular post... confidence and motivation issues, mainly... that is, despite being pretty disciplined about putting volume in.)

I've just been having a really hard time deciding on how best to fit poker into my life.

For a long time (after playing semi-professionally pre-Black Friday,) it was hardly in my life at all before deciding to visit the WSOP for the second time last summer, and after some success there and a rekindling of my passion for the game itself... I decided to really immerse myself in it as intensely as possible and pursue full-time professional play.

That relationship with poker has failed. It's really disappointing, for a variety of reasons. The main reason may be that I've really had a lot of confidence at various points that I could pull this off. I've been really optimistic here and there.

It's just really hard to know what to do now. If I'm a winning player, it stands to reason that I should play enough (and at a high enough level) that I can make an amount of money that is actually useful in real life.

But, like, I tried that. And I've tried changing gears (re: variants I focus on) and cutting back and so on, but nothing seems effective or satisfying.

Except actually playing and thinking hard about poker strategy: that's honestly still satisfying to me. I truly love playing and studying. I'm just utterly disenchanted with my results over the past ~10 weeks, and I'm feeling like poker is not a productive use of my time or money. And that presents some difficult questions when juxtaposed with my passion for the game itself.

Which is why I don't know what to do. If nothing else, I can't afford for poker to be just an expensive hobby. Not anytime soon, at least: that doesn't fit into my financial/professional reality.

And if I'm not a winning player, it is by definition an expensive hobby unless I hit the winning side of variance, which I could also do with less skill-based gambling (which I'm largely not interested in, mostly due to being a fairly frugal guy in many regards).

And if I'm not a losing player but I cannot succeed at playing full-time or even semi-professionally and part-time (which was my most recent resolution), it's just extremely awkward for me in terms of goal-setting/mindset/etc. How do I manage my bankroll in that situation? How often do I play? How do I give myself the best chance to take a trip to Las Vegas every summer to enjoy the poker festivities at and around the WSOP?

Professional-level bankroll goals are just always in the back of my head if I do not accept that I am a losing player overall, and if I'm a losing player overall then I honestly feel a bit silly playing at all. (And I either cannot responsibly afford to play or do not have much access to the poker variants I would enjoy most as a recreational player: mixed games and live MTTs, for example.)

And by the way: at this point, I have no perspective on whether or not I'm a losing player (or whether my A-game is winning but my B-game isn't, etc). I can tell you that my pattern of results over the past ~10 weeks or so is very discouraging. I can tell you that I feel like I "deserve" much better than what I've received in this entire run of 800+ hours of play.

Anyway, this post is already quite long and I'm pretty tired.

I legitimately would deeply appreciate advice on what to do next.

Thankfully, I was always going to be taking a break from now until at least Sunday, so there's at least going to be the benefit of that.

But before I wrap up, I just want to add an almost-but-not-totally separate set of thoughts:

Sometimes I'll read a thread online (usually on 2p2) about a guy who decided to try to play professionally. They're excited, reportedly disciplined, and they have some amount of money and experience backing their confidence.

These threads typically fizzle out.

And I think I'm adding to that library here, but I want to do it "consciously", so to speak.

For whatever reason (call it a postmortem, maybe), I really want to be clear about some differences I strongly believe exist between my trajectory and many ambitious threads that I've seen:

1) I'm not a gambling addict. A few years ago, I worried that I may have been due to my propensity to really spend a lot of time on poker when I'm engaged with it at all.

But I don't do things that gambling addicts do: I don't chase losses, I'm pursuing EV rather than "action", I don't play with money that I can't afford to lose, I don't lie about my activities/results/etc, my non-poker gambling temptations are extremely mild (I'm not above throwing ~$20 into a deuces wild video poker machine before I go home from a poker trip, but that's pretty much all)... I just don't match textbook definitions or case studies of folks who are plainly gambling addicts.

It's sad how often you see someone make an aspiring pro thread and they're just really obviously not equipped to gamble responsibly. Thankfully, I'm very confident that I'm not a problem gambler.

2) While I have a lot of passion for it, I'm not an obsessive fan of poker and everything surrounding it, nor am I someone who just wants to fill his life with as much poker as humanly possible. Poker is one of many interests of mine, and—in theory—it happens to be a pastime that can not only sustain itself but also pay bills too.

It's a subtle distinction, but I feel like I've seen a lot of people writing online who try to be pros because they want to play poker instead of doing something more "normal" professionally, whereas I was frankly pursuing full-time poker because it seemed uniquely viable due to a) various unusual circumstances in my life, b) my past (sustained) successes, and c) what I believed was an aptitude for growing into a pretty competitive player.

I'm definitely emotional and irrational about aspects of poker, though! I have an indescribable fondness for just being at a poker table and playing the game (down to the minutiae of handling cards and chips), but I do not an inexhaustible appetite for poker. I'm not thrilled by poker; rather, I'm fascinated by poker. Throughout this full-time journey, I've often reflected that—while playing in an aspirationally professional manner is usually not "fun"—it IS "interesting". (It's frankly also pretty boring sometimes, even if I can't relate to live players who are more interested in their iPads than they are in their opponents.)

I also have a nostalgic draw towards the WSOP: it was on TV when I was growing up and exposed me to the weird world of poker.

So I'm not some EV-seeking robot or anything.

But I think some poker players want to become professional poker players because they want to play so many hours of poker that a "real" job would just get in the way of that. That's not me.

3) I really don't have a burning desire to be rich, per se. Both this point and point 2 actually feed into gambling addiction, but I don't play poker out of a lust for money. My general financial goals are very modest, and my poker goals were really not extreme or too awfully fanciful.

That's part of why I'm so disappointed in my failure: I think I was pretty realistic about what was achievable in any given timeframe, and success in poker was not going to be defined by seven figures of winnings on my Hendon Mob profile.

I didn't expect to become a poker superstar soon or ever; I just wanted to make money at it, move up in stakes a bit (not even that high!), and use my profits to fund some poker travel and some other aspects of my life.

I just really thought I was going to do better than I have.

I do have the same dreams, haven't work that hard for it though. But there are more important things in my life, where I do have to focus at. Like family health job. But as I do have a quite a lot of time I do want to spent ist for Poker, too. But must importantly, everything should be making fun. So if you do not feel like playing, than play less. And if you play, than play less tables. Not for building your br, just for learning the game more deeply. go down in some stakes. Or try to play some life, there you could have a more easy way to make money. And continue to lay 2-3 tables of Omaha online. Just some ideas which could help. Most successful people enjoy what they are doing. So loosing money which matters do not satisfy. So playing lower could compensate this. Also playing to much can be annoying.

I feel really sorry for hearing this, as I can of course relate to most of these problems.
Just in the first days of 2019 I am currently running about 30 stacks below EV in PLO CG and it can really take you down.
Can't even imagine how losing for so long, despite most likely being a winning player, feels like.
It is always very hard, or impossible, to evaluate someones situation from afar, but my wild guess would be that your A-game is crushing, but your B- and C-game are probably slightly winning/slightly losing and the long downswing is just clouding your mind.
If you don't already do, I would stop playing different formats, focus on one of them and I wouldn't choose MTT's just because your results were the best in this. Pick whats fun and interesting for you.
For a while, try to execute a proper life schedule, go to sleep at a reasonable time, get GOOD sleep, no phone, TV etc. and exercise twice a week or so. Don't focus on grinding for a few days, just try to live a "balanced" lifestyle" and then integrate playing poker into it.

In the end none of us can really evaluate if you are actually a good winning player or not.
I would take the biggest losing pots and let them get reviewed by someone really good, there are for sure also good MTT regs you can find in forums or on discord servers that would do that for free or a small fee.

You probably thought of all of this yourself and if it doesn't really help you, then take them as kind words. Poker can be cruel, but if you really want it, I am sure you can succeed.

I hope poker still works out for you in the future, best greetings.

gl at the tables

menofold and Voodoo32, thanks for the feedback.

I'm considering some moves that aren't totally incompatible with what you two are suggesting.

I'm considering some blend of the following two things:

A) Cutting my bankroll down to, like, $500 and seeing what I can do with it within responsible (if relatively aggressive) BRM and casual hours at the tables online. Maybe I keep another $500 in reserve for if this first $500 evaporates.

B) Having a cathartic poker trip where I throw sustainable BRM to the wind and play what I want, to Make Poker Fun Again (tm).

The WSOPc in Thunder Valley will be running a HORSE event and a FLO8 event.

Vegas tends to have various poker games, I've heard.

Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood is running a festival with kind of a lot of mixed games at low (for live standards) buy-ins.

After this trip, I'd either 1) not play very much anymore, 2) have increased my bankroll and confidence, or 3) play under some scenario mentioned above (under "A").

As I write this post, I'm in the process of planning B, so it's very likely to actually happen to some degree.

I'll update here as things solidify.

I priced out different trips and got dissuaded from going anywhere, due to the high cost of travel. In pretty much every scenario, I'd be spending almost as much on travel as I would be on buy-ins, which just made the whole idea feel costly in a pretty unsatisfying way.

Also, upon further reflection, I'm realizing that I've gotten to the point that my mental game is frankly a bit shattered. I feel like I'm currently irrationally conditioned to expect to lose, to the point of real, visceral anxiety. Something's not right when I wouldn't voluntarily take a +EV all-in race due to my sincerely dread-filled pessimism over it.

I don't think that this current feeling had affected any of my at-the-table decisions, oddly enough. The onset seems a bit delayed: I wasn't feeling this deeply unsettled by the above until today, but it also seems consonant with my experience over the past ten weeks or so.

Right this second, I don't expect to play another hand of real-money poker ever again, but I also wouldn't be shocked if this anxiety passes.

Especially if I step away for a bit. Like, really really step away. Not just scale back or drop down or take my usual 36-48 hour weekend break.

I'm looking back at my records, and I'm actually a little surprised at how incessant my poker schedule has been. I'm not someone who plays online for many, many hours at a time unless tournament success demands it (i.e. going deep), but I'm seeing very few gaps more than one calendar day long in the dates I've played.

And regardless of the cause (lack of skill or lack of cards), my results over this period would have discouraged pretty much anybody. It's just felt so impossible to succeed, and that's an emotionally exhausting situation to be in.

And knowing how many times I've been temporarily fed up throughout this journey (they're well documented in previous posts here), I won't be too surprised if I bounce back eager to play part-time or full-time again. (Though I think the latter is less likely, at least until I feel successful with a more limited approach.)

But I don't think I'll find that motivation (or, frankly, tolerance for losing) without taking at least a week or two off. For me to succeed at poker, I think I'm going to need a really significant mental reset button to compartmentalize my disappointment over the 800+ hours I've put in since June.

There are some small, specific, achievable (non-poker) projects that I can work on in the meantime to feel productive, but I honestly don't know that I can say I gave myself a real, restful holiday break... so maybe practicing some self-care will pay dividends, too.

So... we'll see what happens after I take a breather from cards, chips, and the many emotions that accompany them.

So, just checking in:

I haven't played any real-money poker since last week.

I binked a 40-player PLO tournament on PokerStars.net the other day, though! Hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk for me, if you please, Banker! :P

I mentioned in the very first post of this thread that I legitimately enjoy playing on PSnet due to their mixed game traffic (something I desperately wish SWCPoker could even palely imitate so I could get some meaningful Badeucy/etc on), and I would also generally recommend play money poker to folks struggling with results: you risk nothing, you keep your poker muscles in shape (however modestly against a very unusual population), and you can feel the swings of winning and losing without it affecting your real bankroll.

But that sick brag is not actually why I'm posting.

As readers will know, I've been struggling a bit with how to define my relationship with poker due to a disappointing and confusing run at playing full-time.

I think I'm arriving at an answer.

So, I have a lot of experience with teaching and I've formally studied education (though not to the extent that I have a degree in it; just a certificate alongside other education).

It's always been in the back of my head that I would eventually be involved with poker education/training in some way, but I figured it would be as some kind of instructor or coach (which is a pretty common path for winning players who want to supplement their income with something that doesn't depend on a deck of cards per se).

Trouble is, I really don't have the credibility required to be an instructor or coach.

But I do think I have an idea for a project that will be valuable for poker players of various levels as they learn the game.

It's going to take me a couple of months (at least) for it to be presentable, but I think that working on it part-time while playing part-time (after the break I'm currently on) while pursing some non-poker projects as well could be a really good balance for me.

I'm excited about it, because this poker education project is pretty low-risk and it keeps me engaged with poker without forcing me to put in winning full-time volume, which I'm obviously skeptical of my ability to do successfully after months of trying.

It also allows me to leverage some of my strengths in unexpected ways... so keep an eye out for this project's debut! I think most players will find it helpful, or at least interesting.

Got back on the proverbial horse (no mixed game pun intended) for a mildly succesful PLO25 session. Won less than a BI, but that's better than losing.

PSA, always be on the right side of this freeroll:

PL Omaha $0.25(BB)
BB ($46.11)
HERO ($57.86)
BTN ($25.45)
SB ($38.15)

Dealt to Hero: Qs Ah 8s 8h

HERO Raises To $0.85, BTN Calls $0.85, SB Calls $0.75, BB Folds

Flop ($2.80): Kh 5s Jh
SB Checks, HERO Checks, BTN Checks

Turn ($2.80): Kh 5s Jh Ts
SB Checks, HERO Bets $1.40 (Rem. Stack: 55.61), BTN Raises To $7 (Rem. Stack: 17.60), SB Folds, HERO Raises To $23.80 (Rem. Stack: 33.21), BTN Raises To $24.60 (allin), HERO Calls $0.80 (Rem. Stack: 32.41)

River ($52.00): Kh 5s Jh Ts 9h

BTN shows: Ad Qc 4d 7h

HERO wins: $51

I'm still not keen on getting back to a full-time poker-playing schedule. I've been working on the aforementioned poker education project, which is exciting and time-consuming. I've also been working on non-poker stuff, and I'm pleased with how all of these things are blending into a seemingly productive day.

And by basically only playing when I'm looking forward to playing (with the possible exception of Sundays just due to how much value there is in Sunday MTTs, regardless of my motivation), I think I'll be at a mental game advantage that had been lacking for some months.

And now that my professional ambitions (even just my poker ambitions) are less exclusively dependent on my poker results, any disappointing results will be far less gutting.

Finally (for this post), it's getting to the point that planning for summertime in Vegas isn't absurdly premature... hmm. I'm also considering a quick trip to the WSOPc stop in Vegas in February, but I'm not sure. One advantage to visiting that WSOPc stop is that there's plenty of non-WSOPc stuff to do if I arrive and start feeling uneasy about my bankroll. That was far less true for Cherokee or especially Hammond. (Sorry, Cherokee and especially Hammond.) Also, now that I'm just putting in less volume at poker, my risk of ruin is a much less practical anxiety. Playing a $400 ring event without 50+ buy-ins (itself an aggressive BRM scheme) isn't going to hurt me as much now that my goals and expectations for poker have shifted.

Super unusual PLO session to talk about.

I'm typically super careful about not playing tired or too long.

But at these Ignition PLO25 tables (when I was almost certain I was playing the same 90+ VPIP player on two tables and they were re-raising really goofy stuff preflop), I stayed up way too late and it ultimately paid off.

Below are the "climactic" hands on either table, but I'd really been scratching and clawing (and losing flips) against this player to get to this stack depth.

Almost 400 hands to finally get some big pots off this presumably one player, with a lot of heads up play on the bottom table.

I wasn't in, like, revenge tilt territory, but I I was really motivated (and focused!) because I knew just how eminently beatable this player was and how good it would be to get in some super profitable spots. It took a long time, but thank goodness this player stuck around long enough for me to find these spots:

PL Omaha $0.25(BB)
CO ($13.25)
BTN ($82.28) [VPIP: 96.5% | PFR: 68.8% | AGG: 35.3% | 3-Bet: 56.8% | Hands: 143]
HERO ($140.45)
BB ($45.19)
HJ ($59.04)

Dealt to Hero: 4s 5d As Ad

HJ Folds, CO Raises To $0.85, BTN Raises To $2.90, HERO Raises To $9.80, BB Folds, CO Raises To $13.25 (allin), BTN Calls $10.35, HERO Calls $3.45

Flop ($40.00): 4d 7d Qc
HERO Bets $40 (Rem. Stack: 87.20), BTN Raises To $69.03 (allin), HERO Calls $29.03 (Rem. Stack: 58.17)

Turn ($178.06): 4d 7d Qc Qs

River ($178.06): 4d 7d Qc Qs 9h

CO shows: Jd Td Jc Ts
BTN shows: 9c 6c 6h 5c

HERO wins: $176.06

PL Omaha $0.25(BB)
BTN ($15.79)
SB ($136.13) [VPIP: 91.4% | PFR: 73.4% | AGG: 39.6% | 3-Bet: 37.5% | Hands: 243]
HERO ($54.9)
HJ ($10)
CO ($26.4)

Dealt to Hero: Qd Kc Td 9s

HJ Checks, CO Folds, BTN Raises To $1.10, SB Raises To $3.80, HERO Calls $3.55, HJ Folds, BTN Calls $2.70

Flop ($11.65): 4h 8s Jc
SB Bets $11.65 (Rem. Stack: 120.68), HERO Raises To $46.60 (Rem. Stack: 4.50), BTN Calls $11.99 (allin), SB Raises To $81.55 (Rem. Stack: 50.78), HERO Calls $4.50 (allin)

Turn ($156.29): 4h 8s Jc 5c

River ($156.29): 4h 8s Jc 5c 7c

BTN shows: Ah Ts 9d 6h
SB shows: 6s 7d 5s 9c

BTN wins: $23.43
HERO wins: $100.41

Y'AAALLLL how 'bout this month at PLO25 and NL50 tho

[ ] volume
[ ] sunrunning all-in
[x] them EV bigskis
[x] profit

Even running under EV, I'm sure I'm on variance's good side right now in important ways. Still, I'm feeling sooooo good about my game. And it's unfortunate that I seem to not be able to play my A game for enough hours in a month to play full-time, but crushing the bottom end of meaningful stakes over 6000+ hands still feels great.

I'm not sure when I should try to move up to NL100 and PLO50. By a lot of BRM schemes, I could/should.

But mentally, I'm honestly just extremely comfortable sitting with $25 and $50 at PLO and NLH respectively.

And considering I'm trying to keep my mental game in peak condition and play my A game pretty exclusively, that comfort level is super important to me right now.

I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the psychology of the stack rolling into triple digits, either in the direct buy-in for NL100 or a 200bb stack at PLO50. Even after enduring the swings of PLO100 and mid-stakes MTTs a few months ago, right now I'm feeling like $100 is a lot of money to put on an all-in race.

Oh, just for contrast and because I forgot to post it, here's a frustrating hand from this past Sunday at the final two tables of a PLO8 tournament (versus a player I noted as being SUPER spewy, as you can see here):

PL Omaha HiLo $1000(BB)
BTN ($11550)
SB ($14400)
HERO ($24230)
UTG ($24113)
MP ($9969)
HJ ($3490)
CO ($45067) [VPIP: 42.9% | PFR: 23.8% | AGG: 21.7% | 3-Bet: 5.9% | Hands: 88]

Dealt to Hero: 2d 9s Ac Tc

UTG Folds, MP Folds, HJ Raises To $3490 (allin), CO Calls $3490, BTN Folds, SB Folds, HERO Calls $2490

Flop ($10970): 9c Jc Kc
HERO Checks, CO Bets $10970 (Rem. Stack: 30607), HERO Raises To $20740 (allin), CO Calls $9770 (Rem. Stack: 20837)

Turn ($52450): 9c Jc Kc 9d

River ($52450): 9c Jc Kc 9d Jd

HJ shows: 2h 7h 3d 5d
CO shows: 5c 3c Jh Kh

CO wins: $52450

(PLO8 tournaments are SOOOOOO EASY, y'all! I mean, when you don't get murdered by the deck like I was above.)

Nice job!

I've gotten more bold with my bankroll, in no small part due to increased confidence and a healthy winrate this month.

It's also due to feeling that there's probably a pretty hard limit on the hours I can play per month while playing my best. Playing full-time didn't work, but I do feel like I can make significant money at poker if I game-select well and keep at the game (in both study and some modicum of volume).

But I can only make significant money if I'm playing for significant stakes. And being able to travel to live MTTs once in a while (including summer Vegas trips) is important to me, so I need to be able to play stakes that can actually build up some funds to spend on both travel and entries.

So I'm going to be a little less risk-averse with my bankroll. Nothing too aggressive on the bankroll management side in terms of guidelines for number of buy-ins, but I'm going to put more trust in the number of buy-ins I'd decided on and make sure I'm optimizing my hourly in a specific way:

Before today, my BRM scheme dictated that I play $72 PLO 6max games.

I don't know anywhere that spreads 0.36/0.72 PLO, so I would previously just read that as "PLO50".

But I've decided to do something a little more aggressive with my bankroll than only playing 4 tables of PLO50.

Before, I'd wait until I was close to my bankroll calling for $90+ PLO games to take shots at PLO100.

I think that was a really significant opportunity cost for moving up in stakes. I use pretty conservative guidelines regarding number of buyins (it's more than 100 for me to feel comfortable), and that means if I'm only playing one stake or another exclusively I'd spend a lot of time gradually trying to build a serious bankroll.

So, now—inspired somewhat by how MTT grinders (and myself in my part-time MTT play) leverage their AVERAGE buy-in amount to play a variety of stakes—I'm going to take a similar approach to 4-tabling PLO cash.

I'd previously been averse to this because I thought that playing two different stakes would be kind of a weird distraction mentally. But I went through a stretch playing NL50 and PLO25 simultaneously and I felt fine about it, so seeing different blind sizes obviously wasn't as big a problem as I thought.

So, this afternoon (in lieu of what is usually an MTT session; I wanted to be free this evening for personal reasons, though), I decided to go for an average stake of "PLO72" (as my BRM suggests playing "$72" games). 100+50+50+50 divided by 4 is $62.50 and 100+100+50+50 divided by 4 is $75, so I decided to play three tables of PLO50 and one of PLO100 feeling very confident that I was in the realm of responsible BRM.

And uhmmmmm it went super good.

This month has just been amazing at the cash tables, and I'm actually in the black overall for January despite an MTT downswing:

It's super good timing because I could use some profits for cushion, as I decided a little bit ago that I'd take a trip to Vegas for the WSOP Circuit stop at the Rio. They're spreading a HORSE ring event (kind of uncommon), and traveling to Vegas is very affordable compared to other poker destinations, so I decided to spend a little less than a week out there in February.

I'm thinking about trying to sell action on 2p2 so I can more comfortably play a full week of ring events, but if not I'm definitely playing the HORSE one and then trying to satellite into the others and playing whatever looks good around town if I don't win seats. (The $400 event satellites for $75 are pretty poorly structured with high rake, but the fields are so weak that I think it's probably still +EV to play them, especially if $400 is a significant chunk of one's bankroll for a tournament.)

Anyway, some highlights from this afternoon's session...

This one was just a freaking gift. Like, wow.

PL Omaha $1(BB)
SB ($99)
BB ($104.05)
UTG ($138.09)
HERO ($178.83)
CO ($105.7)
BTN ($170.5)

Dealt to Hero: 6c 6h Ad Td

UTG Folds, HERO Raises To $3.50, CO Folds, BTN Calls $3.50, SB Folds, BB Folds

Hero SPR on Flop:
Flop ($8.5): 9c 6d 6s
HERO Bets $3 (Rem. Stack: 172.33), BTN Raises To $17.50 (Rem. Stack: 149.5), HERO Calls $14.50 (Rem. Stack: 157.83)

Turn ($43.5): 9c 6d 6s 5c
HERO Bets $20 (Rem. Stack: 137.83), BTN Raises To $103.50 (Rem. Stack: 46.0), HERO Raises To $157.83 (allin), BTN Calls $46 (allin)

River ($350.83): 9c 6d 6s 5c 2h

BTN shows: 8h 8s Qh 9d

HERO wins: $338.50

Ditto.

PL Omaha $1(BB)
CO ($200.8)
BTN ($134.71)
HERO ($99)
BB ($78.33)

Dealt to Hero: 4d Ad Tc Kc

CO Folds, BTN Folds, HERO Raises To $3, BB Calls $2

Flop ($6.0): As 4h 4c
HERO Checks, BB Bets $6 (Rem. Stack: 69.33), HERO Calls $6 (Rem. Stack: 90.0)

Turn ($18.0): As 4h 4c Qh
HERO Checks, BB Bets $18 (Rem. Stack: 51.33), HERO Calls $18 (Rem. Stack: 72.0)

River ($54.0): As 4h 4c Qh 8d
HERO Checks, BB Bets $51.33 (allin), HERO Calls $51.33 (Rem. Stack: 20.67)

BB shows: 3s Jd Qs 8s

HERO wins: $153.66

[ ] Poker is dead.
[x] Game selection is important.

Oh, and another thing I did today was look over the Sunday MTT offerings on the sites I play and put together a concrete Sunday schedule based on a few different factors (even though I'm not doing my MTT grind this Sunday; again: wanted to keep my evening free this week).

This is related to being more selectively aggressive with my bankroll, as I'm giving myself one bullet per week for WPN's $215 PLO tournament (which I always want to play because I think it's extremely high value for me; I've already gotten second place in it once in only playing like 3 or 4 times).

The $215 PLO is way above the ABI dictated by my BRM (which isn't super aggressive overall), but I've balanced it all out by making sure my Sunday ABI actually meets my BRM ABI, as well as making sure that I'm ultimately not risking more than my hard daily stop loss dictates (which I'd also just set as a percentage of my bankroll a long time ago; this is the same effective stack I'd leave a cash table with weeks ago before I decided to make this schedule). I'm doing this by planning my Sunday bullets hour by hour rather than just looking at the lobby when I feel good adding another table and figuring "okay, that's like 125% of my BRM ABI so I can probably play it" or "this tournament is only 75% of my BRM ABI so I can fire another bullet at it no problem".

So yeah. Overall I'm just trying to be more effective in optimizing my hourly and potential winnings. And even though I'm no longer trying to play full-time, if I'm going to play at all, I don't think these are unhelpful goals to keep in mind.

Put in a couple more hours of PLO50 and PLO100 tonight, and finished the session having run above EV due to one somewhat lucky river. However, my EV bb/100 was still positive, but just modestly so due to a tough situation I found myself in after check-raising way ahead on the flop but then having a rough turn come off. I knew I wasn't drawing dead but I wasn't sure how often that card hit villain's range. Turns out, it hit them very well but I shoved into them just to add max fold equity to whatever pot equity I had in reality (which was never 0%). Didn't get lucky there.

I'm unlikely to play much more than 10k hands of cash per month at the rate I'm going these days, but I feel like I'm playing at least twice as well as I did when I was playing twice as much. So it all evens out or better, even if variance will be on my back for more days/weeks/etc when the cards are just not cooperating at all. Obviously, I'm much more prone to breakeven months and even years, but given how poker is a less exclusively dominant aspect of my life, that will be less stressful.

Anyway, point is: if I can have even half the winrate I've been enjoying this month and put in similar volume every month, I'll be making significant money while keeping myself sharp due to lack of burnout and giving myself a lot of temporal freedom to actually take advantage of the freedom that (semi-)professional poker theoretically affords you.

Hopefully there's not too much positive tilt intoxicating me right now, but I gotta say that I feel great about my current relationship to poker. (Hard not to feel that way when the results have been so rewarding, but still. I'm seeing good signs.)

So, after trying its free trial many months ago, I decided to buy a year's subscription to PokerSnowie.

I just feel like it's going to be really helpful to have a way to put in quasi-volume when I don't feel like I'll be playing my best (either due to being tired or whatever), and maybe this will just be the main way I keep my NLHE game sharp enough to stay competitive in NLHE MTTs (and, like, live NLHE cash when I need to waste time and a game I'd prefer more isn't available).

Also, getting the feedback from Snowie in real-time will be good too. (And I have other plans for it, but more on that much much later.)

Last night I played 5 10-player freezeouts and won two of them, which is kind of gratifying. Twice I busted getting all-in way ahead. Stupid snowdonk. ;p

I think putting time in just training freezeouts and cash games with Snowie is going to keep my NLHE game roughly where I want it: competitive but not necessarily killer. I'd prefer to primarily focus on being the best PLO player I can be, while staying well-rounded as best I can.

Quick check-in: a nice Sunday for me yesterday. High ITM% and some solid runs:

17th/421 in an Ignition $33 for $101.04
14th/173 in the WPN $215 PLO for $595
3rd/419 in the Chico $22 mini-main for $991.37

I've actually had very little time to play lately, just due to a variety of factors. Sometimes real life sneaks up on you!

I've only played once since my last post: a

What a miserable 83 minutes of PLO I just played.

Reminded me really acutely of how I felt not that long ago: just felt impossible to win. Ran well below EV and had a miserable W$SD%, especially early in the session.

Blech. Need to put it behind me.

It sapped about a third of what I'd made so far this year, though. Stinks, especially heading into my Vegas trip. I'd really prefer to go into it feeling like I have a nice cushion.

Ungh. I just hate PLO runs like this. Multiple BIs below EV but it doesn't even matter because I'm running into extremely goofy combos from extremely high VPIP players, and my worst beats are happening when I'm a huge favorite on the flop/turn and then folding river isn't a reasonable option but I've lost.

My absolute least favorite thing is being an 85%+ favorite on the turn without being all in and then losing at showdown. And it just seems to happen to me in such streaky fashion; it's miserable.

And I lost to a set of 5s like 3-4 times in just over two hours of four-tabling! Absurd! And I got two-outered twice and just ugh ugh ugh.

My W$SD this week is 38.8% and it's just no fun at all. I'm losing most of my all-ins, and I'm getting AI ahead a vast majority of the time. It doesn't take that many whiffed 60/40s to make for a sustained downswing, and that's where I'm at.

All the cushion I had from two Sundays ago is wiped out now, and it's just so frustrating. I really wanted to go into my Circuit trip feeling like I had profit to burn if it all went poorly.

I'm actually far less emotional about it than all of this sounds, but it's definitely frustrating!

I'm glad to have a place to vent about it, honestly. And I'd be more frustrated if I didn't feel like I was constantly improving, or if my ego was more bound up in my results.

It's just that now that I'm not pursuing full-time professional play, I'd like the game to be a little more fun for me... and PLO runs like this are such the opposite. It's, like, exclusively painful!

And these past two sessions were ones where I almost didn't play, so there's that stupid part of me going "agh, if I'd just not played...!" Or, at least, tonight I almost played some NLH instead, which tends to be a less excruciating experience when losing.

Man that sucks, been there, will be there. You still seem to have a good mind set though. It will change into many sweet times too. 'Suddenly it happens!'. GLGL

Overdue update. Going to be brief.

Went to Vegas. Got sick. Ran like garbage and still haven't cashed a single WSOPc ring event, which has been extremely expensive for me in both buy-ins and expenses (despite trying to be quite frugal).

Exhaustingly disappointing results combined with illness have me feeling very down lately, honestly.

As much as I feel like this blog's narrative has already been the slow strangling of optimism and ambition under the weight of disappointing results, I need to admit a modicum of defeat beyond what I've already accepted in previous posts.

Since becoming involved with poker once again last June, it's been an emotional roller coaster. I started way up by final-tabling two small-stakes tournaments in Vegas during the WSOP; I dipped as I lost buy-in after buy-in trying to learn the ropes of PLO cash; I went back up as I binked my biggest online MTT ever; I was really put through the wringer in the following weeks as I seemed utterly unable to win (including expensive trips to the WSOP Circuit), and my early optimism for 2019 was crushed by winning-yet-under-EV cash results and yet another expensive 0-for trip to the WSOP Circuit.

The truth is, both before and especially after expenses, I've lost money over this period of time. A ton of it is attributable to the PLO cash learning curve and then excruciatingly unsuccessful shots at live MTTs, but even with my healthy online ROI I've also run very far below expectation in online MTT big blinds during this time, which—as you can imagine—has limited my potential success quite a bit.

It all has me feeling extremely snake-bitten, and I honestly don't have the stomach for any more of it right now.

Consequently, I'm going to take an indefinite break from playing poker. I have some things keeping me tied to the game in productive ways, but I honestly couldn't stomach losing another coinflip right now (except maybe against Snowie, but even then...).

It's too painful and I'm not so proud to act like my mental game is strong enough to push through it all, when it isn't.

I'm also getting very close to the point that I arguably can't afford to lose any more money on poker, and if I can't afford to lose then I can't afford to play responsibly.

My limited 2019 volume suggests that I'm a winning cash player at this point and my online MTT record shows a healthy ROI, but I don't feel like a winner in my gut and I have about nine months' worth of overall (if modest) losses that have me feeling pretty discouraged.

Right now I just have too many viscerally negative associations with playing the game, so I'm stepping away with no real plans to return to playing.

I'd already booked my summer WSOP trip and I'm not canceling it just yet... if nothing else, I'd hate to change my mind and then lose the primo hotel rate I got.

But right now poker is just bound up in too much frustration for me.

Some resentment too, if I'm honest. There just seemed to be a lack of correlation between the effort I put into the game and the results I got out of it, and whatever my shortcomings as a player are, I really feel like I deserved somewhat better than I got.

But it just goes to show that nothing is guaranteed in poker. Failing (or just "not succeeding", however you want to spin it) is always distinctly possible, even if you're a careful student of the game.

Obviously, I wish more than anybody that things had gone even slightly better for me (and I certainly had my sparks of rungood from time to time), but I just can't bring myself to take on another 60/40 without being a nervous wreck... and I'm just so emotionally exhausted by losing at this point that I need a break from the swings, and I've already taken what I think is my longest break from playing since last June. I'm just not bouncing back mentally like I often have.

Hopefully it's just a refreshing and temporary break, because deep down I think I love the game and I know how much I've invested in it. I still want poker success for myself, and I still believe it's possible for me in the abstract (that is, bankroll and mental game permitting).

But, in a variety of ways, I just can't currently accept the risks that are necessary for that success. I'm too beaten down by disappointment for right now.

So... talk to you later?

Popping back in with some additional reflections.

A lot of my disappointment and disenchantment at the moment has to do with my poker goals.

My poker goals were very vulnerable to unsustainability, and I don't know that I ever spent enough time thinking critically about that.

One dimension of this is ego.

The relationship between my ego and my poker is funny, because in some ways I'm egomaniacal about poker and in some ways I'm completely not.

For example, my ego is not excited by the prospect of playing nosebleed cash online or live high roller tournaments. If my bankroll allowed (or rather, dictated) it and I felt I had an edge, I would play these games just as a matter of course. Moving up in stakes and playing tougher games really only ever felt like a means to an end to me, and I'd frankly rather play the most profitable games I can beat than play the toughest games I can beat. I don't feel a need to beat good players; I'm totally content beating worse players.

This means that I'm really not as competitive about poker as I could be. I think that it's a potentially healthy direction to err in as one will be less prone to certain forms of tilt, but it also removes a motivating fire that a more competitive player would have.

Where my ego does get in the way, however, is a more vague sense of self and achievement. Going back to my introduction to it as a teenager, I've always kind of romanticized poker as this strange, somewhat "nostalgic" hybrid of semi-sophisticated intellectual sport and vulgar gambling. Being good at it—and consequently being able to make money at it—has just always been appealing to me as a validation of some kind of intellect.

In short, I've always felt like it would feel good to be good at poker.

And while money is obviously a primary measure of being good at poker, I have to admit that I'm a sucker for other markers of poker success.

I really wanted some kind of poker trophy. A bracelet, a ring, a little statue of the Wynn, whatever.

Building my bankroll online honestly was only ever a means to being able to play live MTTs and collect trophies. I mean, sure: making a compelling hourly online to justify spending so much time on poker is its own reward as well, and being able to sincerely identify as a professional poker player would have been its own ego stroke and it would have paid the bills.

But what I really wanted was to build a WSOP-ready bankroll.

And, sadly, I'm very far from that goal now. It's stupidly results-oriented and it's bound up in an irrational lust for recognition, but the fact is that I'm really not closer to this goal today than I was this time last year. I'm actually further from it.

And this is a big part of why I'm so demotivated and disappointed. I think I sincerely worked very hard towards my various poker goals, but whatever insufficient mix of skill and luck I brought to the tables has led me to where I am today. And my ego is frankly pretty bruised over it. I thought I could do better than this, and I didn't.

And I'm not currently finding the patience or passion to keep at it, due to having already spent so many months dedicated to it without finding anything resembling the rewards I sought.

I feel myself slowly recovering from my snakebit feelings, though I'm not feeling enormously motivated to play.

I think I'll keep a NL50/PLO25 bankroll on Ignition but cash out everything else.

Hey so I hope that folks won't find this in poor taste, but I legitimately think that anybody reading this could be interested:

I'm now streaming videogames and poker over on Twitch. (Pretty much just for fun; I have virtually zero expectations for it.)

On the poker side, this afternoon was my first foray into it and I just played PokerStars.net 8-game, but I think it produced some interesting hands! This is one of my favorite clips from the session.

Here's a link to the collection of poker highlights. My channel is https://www.twitch.tv/devwil

I'm planning on streaming Snowie and probably real money eventually, as well as doing some surprising things that I think will be fun.

Oh, and I play a lot of Hitman 2016 during the week. 11:30p-1a EST Sunday through Thursday, I'm going through and playing the "escalation" missions on every map. I just finished Sapienza the other day, though I hadn't done Paris yet so that's what I'm up to now.

And just for some quick, additional links if folks want to follow along outside of Twitch: I put select highlights on YouTube... I also put clips on Facebook and Twitter, where I give heads-up announcements like ~10 minutes before I go live. I also have an Instagram for all of this, but I don't expect to be QUITE as active over there.

I just played my first real-money poker session in weeks. (Mostly been playing vs Snowie for my stream, which has been kind of frustrating in its own way, though edifying and no-risk.)

The result was really not encouraging at all, after weeks of just feeling down on the potential downside of any given session (given my extremely disappointing results over the past months).

Today I played just under 1000 hands of PLO and NLHE (total), I ran more than two buy-ins under EV, and I lost way more buy-ins than is easily shrugged off for 1000 hands.

Variance has straight-up bullied me into having an extremely pessimistic view of poker overall, and it's virtually kept me away from real money play for the past six weeks.

In this amount of time (before today), I played about 3 hours of real money poker total.

My mental game is just a mess, quite frankly.

I feel like I have a strong understanding of strategy (an understanding which has only increased over the past year though experience, study, and coaching), but in any given game I have such counterproductive negative feelings about the future result. I don't mean "oh, I'm not +EV in this lineup". I mean that regardless of abstract mathematical expectation, I just emotionally expect the worst at this point.

It's just so hard to feel good about playing for real money when I keep making +EV plays that don't get rewarded. (Not that I never make mistakes.)

Conversely, for months and months I feel like I've seen poor play get rewarded, especially in PLO.

The games are just not tough at all but I've had the worst time turning EV into money.

Between that and my miserable, improbable (but entirely possible) bad run in live MTTs, poker has just been feeling expensive rather than profitable.

The long run is extremely long, but when it's just so hard to viscerally expect a +EV play to result in positive value, I'm just extremely unmotivated to play for real money.

I really like poker, honestly. I'm just getting really tired of the gambling part of it and its negative effect on my finances.

There's plenty of time to spend on poker outside of real-money play and I'm still enthusiastic about that, but it just feels weird to engage with real-money play so little.

But I haven't been enjoying it lately, and it has absolutely not been paying dividends in the past few months.

The next two months will be interesting. There's a ton of live poker happening in Cherokee this month, but I'm leaning towards sitting out of all of it. In June, I have a Vegas trip booked for the World Series and adjacent festivals, and I keep going back and forth on whether I want to go.

Because I like to think about and play poker, but I'm just very, very tired of losing money on it. I'm not excited by the risk of it, and the potential rewards just feel so unlikely to me at this point.

Thankfully, the newly-released schedule at The Orleans for June aligns with my travel plans in a potentially enjoyable way, and the buy-ins there are pretty modest.

So I'm now leaning towards indeed hitting Vegas in June; I just need to be clear with myself on being okay with being disappointed yet again with an MTT trip.

For me, the mental game of poker is a constant grappling contest between results and expectations.

I'm sure every poker player feels this tension in some form or another, but I feel like—even after my pretty significant experience playing the game—I still hit pretty significant highs and lows of optimism and pessimism.

The optimism wouldn't be so bad if it hadn't resulted in unsuccessful and expensive live MTT shots. The pessimism wouldn't be so bad if it didn't cloud my judgement and sap my enthusiasm, making me forget my poker successes and keeping me from real-money tables for weeks at a time.

This is all to say (circuitously) that I got back on the proverbial horse today, after a weeks-long struggle with my poker goals.

I put in a proper Sunday MTT session this evening. Definitely some unwelcoming frustrations in terms of luck and I almost had a dreaded 0-for session, but my one cash was a final table in my highest buy-in tournament of the day: 8th place (though I was 4th in chips starting my final hand; made a +cEV play versus my opponent's actual hand and lost, oh well... haven't run the math on $EV or cEV vs range, but it was PLO8 and I had AA on a pretty dry SPR < 1 flop... not much to do but GII... everyone at the FT was quite short, even for a reasonably-paced tournament).

I had some emotional valleys during the session, but for the most part it was kind of nice to get back into playing a bunch of tables and listening to music/podcasts.

And my god do low stakes MTT players play horribly, even given all of the barriers to entry that exist for online poker these days (plus increased access to strategy material). I legitimately forgot about just how soft these games are, due to being away from this routine for a while and mostly only playing versus PokerSnowie (who is quite tough!).

But I digress somewhat.

The real point I'm thinking a lot about tonight is that I think that one key to poker sustainability for me is playing in games that feel meaningful to win but are not frustrating to lose.

This is largely related to stakes, but not only. Playing against Snowie is no-stakes, but it's edifying, interesting, and enjoyable. Playing PokerStars.NET 8-game is fun, too. Neither of these games are especially frustrating to lose at, but there's some modicum of reward for me on the upside. That's meaningful.

Conversely, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to stomach swings of a certain size, in absolute dollar amounts, and—similarly—I'm honestly just not super motivated by money. I had some financial goals that I thought poker could help me with, but I've rethought those and I really should not depend on poker for those goals even if I hadn't rethought them. That's just fundamentally results-oriented, and—as I think I've discussed previously—when my results are disappointing, I get pretty discouraged. So I need to be pretty modest about what I'm expecting from poker overall.

Anyway, point is: I don't know if I ever want to put myself in a position to be able to lose four figures online on any given Sunday again. Extreme inflation aside, the real-world value of that money is always going to get to me, I think.

So, as I said, it's just a matter of finding games that don't stress me out to lose, but feel worth my time.

I think that the sweet spot for me in that regard is something like NL100, PLO50, and MTTs in the low-to-mid double digits. Maybe slightly lower, even.

But beyond bankroll management and game selection, I need to keep reminding myself to focus on the process rather than the outcome. I know that I like poker enough to play it without real money at stake, at least in some circumstances. So I know that I intrinsically enjoy playing.

To put it another way: I'm currently trying to focus on keeping real-money poker fun while also putting myself in a position to potentially profit from it. Thankfully, these two things should be one and the same for me: what's fun for me is making +EV decisions. I like to play poker because I enjoy the process of trying to play well.

But, as I mentioned, I can most certainly get caught up in setting unhealthy expectations for myself.

So yeah: I'm just going to try to do a better job of managing any expectations that arise, keeping myself at the real-money tables for at least like ~10 hours a week or so, and hoping (but not quite expecting) that I end 2019 four figures in the black from poker. I don't think it's an unrealistic hope, even with a modest winrate in the already modest games I mentioned.

I just need to keep thinking of it as a serious and potentially profitable hobby (whereas most hobbies are expenses). My hourly rate at the tables is therefore not meant to compete with the federal minimum wage or anything like that, but instead my rate (plus my enjoyment) should be compared to other "non-career" activities I care about like making music and playing non-poker games.

Framing everything like that is going to be pretty effective for me moving forward, I think. Not only will it frame my play healthily, but it will also frame my non-play healthily!

Let's say I can make like $5/hour at the tables. I'm not making any claims to winrate, but rather picking a number that's neither peanuts nor higher than the federal minimum wage.

For that amount, poker probably doesn't deserve 40 hours per week of my time. And it also isn't so lucrative that I need to force myself to play when I just don't feel like it.

That isn't to say I'm not going to expect myself to play during certain times in the week, but that's a healthy expectation that I have control over (compared to dollar results). And it's an expectation that can be flexible if I'm just looking at the equation and saying to myself, "you know, whatever money I may have made today from poker, it's just not feeling worth it... it's worth $5.01+ per hour to me to do something else".

Sorry for the ramble... haha. Just having a somewhat fatigued stream of consciousness coming off of my first serious MTT session in quite some time... and I'm feeling/hoping that I've made progress on my mental game.

Kind of a weird boast, but I'm weirdly proud of it:

I just got to 10 iterations/node for a preflop sim I decided to run to help me play better in the extremely loose-passive, high-rake microstakes PLO games on Ignition.

In a 4max 40bb game, I forced CO's preflop frequencies to match the "Whale" population profile that DriveHUD has produced from my database.

Preflop, I feel like I'm often acting after a player who open limps most hands, and I just haven't felt confident about what to do.

Looking forward to combing through these ranges with Monker and hopefully applying them for some fat EV bbs online. (Obviously, this could help a bit with loose-passive live games, too.)

Just checking in briefly.

Poker is still feeling like a struggle. I final-tabled a PLO8 tournament last Sunday for a winning day, but my MTT bb/100 continues to ride far, far below my EV bb/100 and I'm just so tired of losing after going 0-for in MTTs today.

I have so many reasons to believe I can succeed at poker, but it sustained success continues to feel so evasive. And then that feeling makes it hard to put in volume (just due to negative reinforcement), which just puts me at greater exposure to the short term results of the deck.

I think I've reflected before in this journal about how I cannot afford for poker to be an expensive hobby. But it really has felt like one for the most part, despite my best efforts.

And as a hobby, it's not fulfilling enough if I can't succeed more often. There are activities that I enjoy more regardless of result that are less expensive. Poker needs to make me money (or at least lose less than it has) for me to keep it in my life.

It's nice to do well and I still do care about poker strategy, but the short-term swings just have me feeling exhausted and losing makes me feel stupid (and wasteful of money) even when—for one example from today's MTT session—I get all in with 93% equity and lose.

I know I did everything right. I know I expect to profit in that and similar situations.

But I just haven't been profiting and poker is feeling expensive. And I don't really know what to do about it.

There are really only three options: keep at it, quit playing (for real money), or stay engaged with poker in a much less financially risky way (like, creating strategy/analysis content or whatever).

I don't know which one makes the most sense, and it's not like the third can't coexist with the first or second, but there's only so much time in the day and I don't want poker to consume my entire life.

So I just feel tired and confused.

I just finished a very short cash session on the site where I play the least frequently.

I busted my "bankroll" on that site (which was pretty minimal; I don't care about that a ton in isolation) and I think I'm done playing poker for real money for a very, very long time.

Two months ago, I made a similar post about quitting indefinitely. And I honestly took about a month away from the tables (which, in online poker time, is a pretty long time).

Financially, I can't really afford to lose money at poker anymore except at stakes where winning would feel insignificant.

Psychologically, real-money poker is just ruined for me. I can't take losing anymore. I can't lose another hand and feel fine about it. It feels like such a waste of time and money for me at this point, despite having a lot of intellectual reasons to believe I'm a winning player.

Viscerally, I just can't convince myself to play with my own money at risk anymore.

It's just been an extremely discouraging feedback loop for months and months, and I don't have the financial or psychological tolerance for it any longer.

And I'm furious about it, because I loved and—in ways—continue to love this game.

I worked really, really hard on my game, too. And I know I improved a ton, and I feel like my poker knowledge is actually pretty advanced. I still believe that.

But over and over I just feel like I've been a "jobber" to players of all skill levels, to borrow a pro wrestling term: I just feel like I've been predestined to lose no matter what. I get bailed out from mistakes/etc so rarely, and my +EV plays just aren't paying dividends often enough. I just feel foolish continuing to play, and I feel like I'm getting set up to fail at this point.

I'm not saying I "deserve" to have been able to make a living or even significant side income at this game. But I do know that I've "deserved" better than what I've gotten: if nothing else, objectively, the gulf between my bb/100 and EV bb/100 in MTTs is enough to make me feel sick when I look at the graph in my database.

It just feels so unfair (not that I was ever guaranteed anything).

It's also extremely confusing. I don't know how poker thrives if this drawn-out losing experience is normal. Who would sign up for such an unsatisfying game?!

And—if this experience is not anywhere near normal—I don't know how I ended up so dreadfully mired in the least rewarding stretch of poker imaginable. As I've ruminated previously in this journal (I'm quoting directly from four months ago): "I was either too permanently limited in my abilities or too unlucky [...] to have succeeded at poker".

That is a miserable conclusion to have arrived at, not just once (four months ago) but again (today).

Regardless of my precise poker skill, I have historically been an excellent learner. And I know I spent a lot of time studying poker. And to have been so gutted by my experience at the tables over the past year despite my efforts to learn an approach that should have afforded me far better results... it's frankly disappointing on an existential level.

(Just to clarify one point to assuage some potentially dramatic imaginations: I am thoroughly and extremely saddened by my failures at poker, but my financial losses from poker have not, like, mortally destroyed me financially. I'm not going to be starving or homeless due to failing at poker, but I will definitely say that I expected to have a lot more money today as a result of playing and studying poker.)

Anyway.

As I said, for the second time in 2019 I've reached a point that I'm just so fundamentally disgusted with my poker failures (whether they be luck-based or skill-based; it maybe doesn't even matter) that I loathe the idea of playing for real money.

I think I'm still going to stay engaged with the game in some other ways, but I just feel so mentally and financially exhausted by the gambling part (which is, unfortunately for me, the most profitable part given sufficient skill).

Again: the financial exhaustion is relative. I still have what is, by many measures, a workable bankroll. But I just almost feel nauseous at the thought of risking a single buy-in/big blind/ante more from it, regardless of EV. I've just been conditioned so horribly by poker that I can't do it anymore, and if I can't play at stakes that feel like they're worth my time (in an expected hourly wage sense), I just don't feel like the potential downside (say, a year of disappointing and unrewarding results) is worth the risk: I might as well just play on Stars.NET or versus AI.

I've simply been made too pessimistic by the "one step forward; two steps back" pattern I've experienced over the life of this journal, and—even if I intellectually believe I should have an edge in a lot of different games—poker now feels expensive to me. And I'm just not willing to have real-money poker in my life if it feels like an expense: I don't have enough of a gambling compulsion for that.

So... I don't know; I guess I'm probably canceling the June WSOP trip I booked. I still have a few weeks to decide. And I'd hate to regret not going.

But I'd really, really hate to regret going and coming home having lost a lot on expenses and entries. So I may need to cut it out of my summer plans.

After taking some time to 1) be completely emotionally divorced from real-money poker for a bit and 2) re-assess my financial situation, I have to admit that I'm looking forward to playing for money again.

I should know better at this point that I can't actually stay mad at poker forever, and—moving forward—I'll be playing stakes that I can better shrug off losses at. These stakes won't be especially meaningful in themselves, but it will keep me in the game give me a chance to slowly (VERY slowly) grind up a bankroll.

Real-money poker is going to be a pretty small part of my life, though. I think I'll register tournaments on Sunday for like two hours tops (accumulating no more than ~4 tables at once) and play a few hundred hands of cash every month.

Because of this low volume, it's going to be a while before I'm back to stakes where a compelling hourly is possible. For example, I'm back down to PLO25, where I don't even buy in for a full 100bb. As I've mentioned elsewhere in the forums, I've been using a 40bb strategy to 1) best exploit my opponents' tendencies to make their biggest mistakes on early streets and 2) keep myself from being in frustrating/confusing spots on later streets versus extremely idiosyncratic ranges found in the populations I play against.

I've also canceled my Vegas plans for June. It's really sad and disappointing, but the truth is that I've already had the privilege of traveling the country to play the WSOPc, visiting Hammond, Cherokee, and Las Vegas stops.

These excursions went improbably terribly, but—as much as these aggressive risks literally ruined my poker career for the short term due to their extremely unfortunate impact on my bankroll—I really am grateful for the experience. Not everybody has the resources or confidence (I hesitate to say "skill") to simply pursue that kind of thing, so I do count myself lucky for that, regardless of how unlucky I was at the tables.

Hopefully in a year or two I'll be closer to where I want to be in my poker career (which I don't anticipate ever being a full-time pursuit now having attempted that during the life of this journal).

I'm sure I'll be updating sometimes in this journal along the way.

Like when, today, I won at a rate of 82 EV bb/100 in ~50 minutes of 4-tabling PLO cash. And, more importantly for my mindset lately: my EV bbs actually translated into a big, positive result.

That feels good.

Psychologically, I really don't need to win all the time. I play a lot of games and I'm not generally an especially sore loser, I don't think. (I do have my less flattering moments, to be sure. And sometimes I discover that a particular game makes me feel too bad when I lose and not good enough when I win: Scrabble and Street Fighter can be that way, for me. But poker losses really only get to me when they are sustained and oppressive-feeling, while winning at poker still feels good—especially if it's the result of +EV play.)

But when poker has been so stingy with the financial rewards for my objectively +EV plays... it's been very discouraging overall, as I've written repeatedly in this journal.

So to finally win some flips and such today was a small but important psychological win.

I have a new thread for the new "poker season", by my personal poker calendar.

Not only is June to June how I tend to mark the poker year (sup preliminary WSOP events), but there are some big changes in my life that suggest to me that a new chapter is afoot.

Plus, this thread is pretty long and unwieldy at this point.

See you in the new one!