Hey guys,

I'm a 26 year old pokerpro, I've been pro for 6 years and I started playing poker a few weeks after my 18th birthday. The first years of my poker journey were really cool, I loved it. I was extremly passionate about it and I would put in mass numbers of hours at the tables as well as off the tables. Eventually, I got somewhat decent at this game.

Right now I do not like to share my personal information (mainly embarrassment), but I used to shot high-stakes, was even sponsored and traveled the world. I had some massive MTT binks and also ran tons of dollars over expecation. Life was fucking easy. I stopped learning, stopped growing, leaned back and did nothing. Essentially I became a fkn rockstar, going out drinking multipe times a week, dating, fucking, spending money like it was monopoly money and chilling out.

The last 7-8 months were really though and I finally need to do something about it. I hate playing poker. I hate every aspect of it. I do not like learning and to me sometimes it just seems like that I hate to think at all. I hate to put in any effort. It has been like this for a while now and really the more I think of it, the more I realize that probably in the last three years I never really enjoyed the process of playing poker and learning. And now I feel stuck with this game. It's not like I simply quit playing poker and get a day job. I simply cannot let go of my dreams and aspirations. How would I possibly buy a house or appartment in a few years if not by playing poker? And god all those idiots who would ask me every single year if you still play poker for a living hoping that you had quit, I simply cannot grant them this satisfaction of me "failing".

Obviously these thoughts are not new and the desire to change was always here, I simply never did change. Now I want to try a new approach, hence the journal. I started posting here today and I want to be an active part of the community. I used to be a active 2+2 poster a few years back but stopped somehow at sometime. I really like the format here at RIO so I am going to give this a shot.

Over the years I continiously moved down in stakes because I simply would not beat the games anymore and other people got better. The highest limit I played regulary was NL1k and semi-regulary NL2k. Played around 300-400k hands at these stakes and I was breakeven. Convinced myself to move down, because if I grinded for the rakeback then I might as well do it at lower stakes where I do not swing like crazy. Then it turned out that lower limits where actually not much easier then the higher ones (what is obviously in hindsight, I never did anything for my game and I played rarely) so I struggled to beat them too. Actually I play NL100 and I am not even beating that anymore. Now I not just simply hate what I do, I even lose money while hating what I do haha. 

To sum this post up, in essence I am a fkn moran who ran good and now really is committed to change. I fully believe that I actually can change, I loved this game in the past, why shouldn't I be able to love it again? I also think that my A-Game is good enough to beat NL100 (and probably NL200 as well), me losing this year has a few reasons (other than not being really good at poker haha). First of all, I do not tableselect on NL100. I also played some massive 12 hour sessions what certainly cannot yield a high EV (and pretty sure that I even dropped EV to the point of being -EV). It sounds sort of dumb to write down, but I rarely was on my A-Game and it did not really bother me much. I just wanted to get it over with, so I sat down, auto-piloted my x numbers of hands or hours and that's it.

So far I have been really nonspecific about my goals, I will go into more depth these days. I will also come up with a few ideas about how to get better and improve my game/mindset. In the meantime, take care and all the best!