Don't know how active this community is though.

Probably the most active in the world! Welcome

So nl10 is still funny... People seem to have just learned that they should 3bet bluff and do it in weird situations. And the regs are strange too, they play quite straightforward and then suddenly they just become steaming fish!

I'm trying to get in a 1 hour session in the morning before uni and then a session in the evening. I used to play zoom but I think it's better for me at the moment to grind only a few regular tables and focus on taking notes and improving my game rather than autopiloting. As much as I'm tempted to zoom...

Welcome to Run it Once, home of the Champions!!
Hope you crush all your goals
DK

I definitely somewhat fit the degen category, and if I don't stop spewing I will also fit the category of bustoer. So then all I need to do is go around these forums spamming like you and you will be right gay!

Ok here is a first update. I'm not updating much because I've just started my PhD and my motivation is mainly focused on that. Whenever I do play poker I just feel like playing rather than really studying or posting in here (I hope that changes!).

I've been playing mornings for 1 hour (solid volume...) and it was going quite shitty. Could be just because I haven't played in a long time but there was some spew too. It's interesting because at first I was grinding only a few regular tables and we can all clearly see the point when I said "fuck it" and started 4 tabling zoom... I wonder whether it's something psychological about keeping busy, not being bored, and having action etc, or whether my game has developed to be more suited to zoom. Could be both.

Here is my graph just because it is so swongy and I'm proud of my comeback like a results fish!

Now I can go and do real life things.

Just gonna bring this back from the dead, took a bit of a break for university stuff but I've been playing quite a bit recently and posting a lot so I might as well continue with this!

My bankroll went down and down for a while and I had to drop to nl10, but I have been rebuilding and shooting nl25 again now.

Whenever I do play poker I just feel like playing rather than really studying or posting in here (I hope that changes!).

At least that changed! ^

Can anybody tell me what the policies are for uploading videos here? I'm thinking about uploading a few session recordings into this thread. Links will be to youtube.

Here's my first video in case anybody fancies watching fish!:
NL25 Zoom Video 1

UPDATE

Still treading water at nl25 for now! I've always noticed a different style of play the moment I step up to nl25, and after shooting nl50 in the past it feels pretty much the same. It is a lot more aggressive and people fight back on flops fairly often which puts me into some tough spots. It does make me quite anxious but it's just something to work on and get used to.

Leaks to work on:
- BB ranges (playing too wide, losing > 30bb/100 over decent sample)
- Cbetting OOP from CO and from SB

I played quite a few hands yesterday but had mixed results. I was up and down stacks very quickly but overall quite happy how I played later on in the day. Unfortunately I didn't get to record the super fun session but here is one of my sessions from yesterday:

NL25 Zoom Video 2

This time recorded with my voice so you can hear my thought process / justifications for spewing :D Tried my best to blur out identifying information but it's hard to do it completely. There were some situations here where I was really uncertain, so I'll have to go back over it and try and figure out what it is that made me unsure.

On a side-note, anybody on here program? Python? I recently started learning, trying to think of projects to do in my spare time so any suggestions welcome. Preferably poker-related :p

Loosing 30bb/100 from BB doesn't look like a leak to me, at least far from a big one.

UPDATE
Haven't had a chance to put in too much volume over the last 10 days because I've had to make some progress on an experiment I'll be running at the uni. Got a bit more time now so I will be putting in volume, but my last few sessions have been really bad so I will move to nl16 for a bit. It seems nl25 is a constant struggle for me and always has been.

I think I'm a bit lost as to how to approach off-table work. I've always thought that watching videos, making notes/re-reading them, and reviewing hands will be ok, but I think I should find a better way of studying the game because I don't think I'm really improving. Any ideas would be really appreciated.

Leaks to work on:
- same as before, but also should start paying attention more to my perceived range.

There is no video this week, but I will make one before the end of the week.

Hi.

Regarding your off-table work I would suggest reading through Nick Howard`s feed. He also has a student who is following his "Coaching for Profits" program and the insights there are quite valuable. Hope it helps.

I've recently started following his content and it is amazing :)

UPDATE
Dropped back to nl10. I'm working on my time management and gonna try to hit 10k hands per week. It sounds like nothing but it's a lot for me. I think part of the problem with my game is that I'm spending not enough time actually playing and gaining experience. There's a lot to be said for recognising patterns through continued practice, and since I have sporadic volume I am likely missing out on a ton of information that would help my game.

I advertised for a skypegroup in a different forum and managed to find a bunch of players. Really looking forward to working with some new people now but it would also be nice to have some people in there who are playing higher stakes than I am. The problem is that there is little incentive for a better player to join a group like that so it might be futile :D There are some inactive members too, so might have to purge. In which case I will probably make a post somewhere in RIO to see if we can get some nl25+ players for the group.

I also made a post recently asking for opinions on off-table work when the answer was just slapping me in the face: do session reviews. My fear was that I wouldn't be able to recognise problems in my game off-table because I couldn't recognise them in-game, but this is not so true for 2 reasons. (1) reviewing allows for the time to actually THINK about spots rather than being forced to think quickly under pressure where we are so susceptible to faulty logic; (2) reviewing is completely detached. You don't have residual emotion or gameflow thoughts looming in the back of your mind - it is just pure objectivity. Even if I'm not that good a player, I'm sure I'm a much better player when reviewing hands. I expect that the more I review, the better I will think in-game.

So in a review I will either go over my biggest losing hands to spot any obvious leaks, or look at tough hands that I get stuck on and mark in-game. Depending on how I feel I will either just go through quite a few of them quickly and superficially, or I will look at 5 hands in more detail and keep some detailed notes. It's going really well so far.

Leaks to work on:
- Not re-evaluating my plan based on board textures.
- Not considering my perceived range when villain is showing aggression.

Update
I’ve started to treat my sessions as 2-hour blocks with a short break between the two. This seems to be working out ok for me lately and allows me to get between 1500 and 2000 hands in if I 4 table zoom. I’m not so comfortable 4-tabling but for the sake of volume it is bearable and not making me spew yet.

The session reviews have taken a bit of a back seat because I have identified some leaks that I am currently working on. For example, I’m often levelling myself into “close” calls that turn out to be not even close. Nowadays I’m much happier sticking to my gut feeling in these situations with the following logic: I am too stationy (that’s the leak). Overfolding would probably be less of a problem for me than calling too often. Of course I may get bluffed in some spots but it’s ok because the majority of the time I will be losing, and if I’m unable to differentiate the bluffs from the nuts then I can’t go too wrong by folding. So that’s something I’m working on. The cue for me is when I face this unsettling feeling in my gut, and I just need to ask myself (1) if villain has any bluffs, and (2) if villain plays dominated hands that way. Generally the conclusions lead me to make the fold after a painful tank. Reading this paragraph back makes me sound like such a station…

The volume this week has also taken a hit because I’ve been busy. I had to take part in a sleep experiment at the university where my brain activity was recorded during the night. It was incredibly uncomfortable with the equipment that I had to wear, and I was in a small chamber with a camera on me all night! This screwed my plans for volume for that night and the following night because I was so sleep deprived, but now I’m back to the plan. I hope to get 2k hands per day on average for the rest of this week and hopefully all of next week.

In terms of how I’m feeling about my results... it is a bit so-so. I know not to be results oriented, but since overturning my game and really trying to clean it up I feel like I have been playing much closer to my A-game. Nevertheless, the results at the end of the day are always just a couple of BB up or a couple of stacks lost from coolers. It is quite disappointing that when I feel like I play my best I am still ~breakeven. My graph for this year is looking pretty sad:

I’m sure that the red line losses are mainly coming from my blinds. My opinion is that I should 3bet a little more from the SB and from BU vs CO, and look for more spots to checkraise from the blinds. But nothing in my stats stand out tooo much to me.

Things to work on:
- 3Betting from blinds
- Checkraising spots postflop OOP
- Continue being a nit to aggression on later streets
----- Stop getting attached to absolute hand strength!
- Keep up the volume.

I’m having this problem in my game and I’m going to write it out here in one long ass wall of text. I’m sure it is a common issue but it feels like it is incredibly hard for me to fix. But I’m working on it!

I’ve played poker on and off for almost 5 years now and I am deeply interested in the game. I have covered quite a lot of strategy content from lots of different sources, but I guess I struggle to fully absorb it. We could say I’m a slow (and stubborn) learner. Two different coaches have stated that they think my main issue is not getting in enough volume, and I never fully took that on board. I would always grind a bit and study a bit more with the assumption that the more I study the better I would get. If things went bad, I tended to retreat into a couple of days’ study to avoid the possibility of losing more money by continuing the grind. It was sort of like my ‘safe place’ that I would use to protect myself.

However, I think this has had a really bad impact on my game. By taking this approach I may have protected my emotions but this is immature and does not strike to the root cause of the issue, which is that I was (and am) insecure about my game. My intentions were fine – to learn more and to work hard – but I was just applying myself in the wrong places. The answer was always obvious: I need more practical experience at the tables. The more hands I cram in over a consecutive period of time, the more I will begin to recognise patterns that would otherwise go completely unnoticed due to their links decaying over time spent not grinding. I guess it was something that Nick mentioned in one of his streams that was exactly the same idea that the other coaches have said to me but maybe it was the way he said it that gave me a mini ‘aha’ moment.

I mentioned in a previous post that I’m a station. Generally when I’m playing things are quite straightforward and the decisions are ok, but then I find myself on the river in a big pot with a nutted hand. My opponent decides to show aggression and I’m struggling to sort through the information. It sucks because I get one gut feeling to fold (based on my experience), one gut feeling to call (based on my emotion), and then some conclusion that I come to shortly after that justifies one or the other gut feeling using what I believe to be a logical thought process but it is obviously heavily biased. If I make that call it pretty much always confirms my fears. If I make the tough fold I feel ok for a while, until I post the hand on a forum and get told that I have to call and stop thinking too much.

I need to accept that I can’t be right all the time. I’m currently making too many calls, which is pretty costly. If I were to make more hero folds in these spots I of course allow my opponents to exploit me (which they are not anyway, on average). I believe that for someone like me (station) to overfold these spots it would be more beneficial than to continue my usual behaviour. The thing is, it is actually a very simple fix – I need to listen to my gut more. He has seen quite a few poker hands and he recognises these ugly situations in a second. I think my real mental game problem comes from a discomfort in never knowing whether I made a good decision after I fold. If I listen to the gut and fold I never get to see if I was right or not, and this bothers me. But I recognise that this is erroneous thinking because the specific hand doesn’t matter. If I make 10 incorrect folds for every 90 correct folds, it is better than making 10 correct calls and 90 incorrect calls. The only benefit I gain by making those 90 incorrect calls is that I get confirmation that I was right, and somehow this seems to be bringing me some sort of twisted relief. Maybe I’m trying to accumulate more and more evidence for this before I finally implement it but I am also never satisfied with the current evidence. I need to just see one more time to make sure I’m right. This is self deception at its finest, and it is a total embarrassment.

I’m not sure if this is clear to read so I apologise if it’s not, but it feels clear to me. I just don’t trust myself that my simple gut feeling could possibly be right this often. In this lack of trust I create a paradox where I’m completely hopping over the straight pathway to beating my stakes by not believing things can be so straightforward.

It’s a fishy mindset, but I’m sure there are other people out there who can at least understand it, if not relate to it directly. I’m really trying to make these tough folds, but today I slipped up and ignored my gut. I got punished and then went on to repeat the mistake 3 more times before I finally quit my session. It should have stopped at 1 because I truly believe that this is the biggest thing holding back my game at the moment, and I should focus most of my efforts at making this a much easier process.

Big grind today - I think this is almost a record day for me given that I barely get more than 1k hands. Shame about the number of shitty spots I was in but I didn't have any long tilts going on so I feel like I played relatively well.

Might spend tomorrow's poker time just reviewing hands from today - I had quite a few crappy situations that I'd like to investigate. Maybe I will link them here. One thing I'm curious about is raising turns. For example, OOP when we call pre, xc flop, xr turn:

...and IP when we call pre, c flop, and r turn:

These look like some pretty sweet spots to start expanding in, but I need to look a bit closer before I start spazzing out. But they look like they could be some autoprofit situations where people are overfolding either the turn, river, or both.

So I had a look this morning at those spots... I wish I had a bigger database to look at! The sample was 666282 hands which is most of my "lifetime" (lol). HM2 filters are a little strange and not exactly perfect. Sometimes I run a filter (and I make sure I'm not overlooking things) and still the numbers don't fully add up. I think it is because the filters don't completely include all possibilities. Nevertheless the numbers are pretty close and here are my findings:

Call preflop, call flop, raise vs turn barrel
This situation occurred 313 times.
- Win with the raise 54% (FE)
- Raise got called 38%
- Raise got reraised 8%

When we got called
- Faced a river donkbet 30% (actually losing a lot here when I call)
- Faced a river check 70%
- I barreled river 36% of the time
- Villain xf river 49%
- Villain xc river 51%
- no xr river.

Coldcall preflop, check-call flop, checkraise vs turn barrel
- This occurred 240 times
- Win with the checkraise 38% (FE)
- Checkraise got called 48%
- Checkraise got reraised 14%

When we got called...
- Barreled river 47%
- Villain folded to barrel 43%
- Villain called barrel 57%
- No raise vs river barrel.

Conclusion
IP raising:
Against 2/3 pot cbet on flop and turn, a raise needs ~55% FE to autoprofit. Seems that villains are pretty close to that, so it isn't an autoprofit spot in a vacuum. This doesn't mean we can't print money though, because (1) villains are reraising us <10% of the time, (2) we can choose hands with equity, and (3) we can fire rivers.

When we fire river, we need about 39.5% FE and according to my filters I'm getting around 49% FE. I still wouldn't want to say it is an autoprofit spot, but it would be nice to have SOME reasonable bluffs. Villain needs 28% equity to make a call. I'm not a GTO boss so maybe it's wrong, but I guess this means we can bluff ~28% and value shove ~72%. BDFD+BDSD that floats flop and turns equity seems to fit nicely into this frequency.

OOP checkraising:
Against a 2/3 pot cbet and then a second barrel of the same size, a checkraise should work 58% to autoprofit. According ot my filter, villains are folding only 38%. This suggests that they might be overdefending vs turn checkraises (not really surprising). This means their range should be too weak to defend enough (~40%) on the river to a 2/3 barrel. Villains fold 43%, which is too close given their weak range and should mean that they are calling turn and river with too weak a range.

tl:dr
- Assumptions seem to have been wrong:

• neither IP (CC, c, r) or OOP (CC, xc, xr) spots seem to be autoprofit points. We should have some solid equity to do this.

• we get reraised very infrequently (IP<10%, OOP<15%). This means we could potentially favour higher equity draws (FDs, OESDs) because (1) villains are overdefending, so we should prefer higher equity, and (2) villain is more likely to call than raise and spoil our implied odds with such hands.

Still trying to get as much volume in as I can. My results are not improving though and I can't seem to stop losing :D but I will keep playing. Bankroll hasn't been this low for years.

2017 doomswitch

There's a lot of runbad but also I would be naive to suggest there is no mindset shit going on. Something I've noticed in game is that no matter how hard I work on my mindset off the tables, I seem to fall into a black hole whenever I face a tough situation. Nothing I study and reflect upon away from the tables seems to help - I'm just totally blind until the hand finishes. Not really sure how to overcome this. I would say that I will do my best to try to be more confident in my decisions, but I'm not sure if that makes much sense given how my results are!

In terms of technical aspects of my game, it turns out I'm sure that I miss good squeeze spots and I'm also struggling OOP in 3bet pots as the caller. I'm going to be working on this today and hopefully try to come up with some simple gameplan.

Re. the skypegroup, I'm happy now that we have quite a few active members and looking forward to having some sessions.

I feel like my game is improving a lot lately. I sat down and tried to organise a schedule where I can play poker and study for uni. So far it is going really well - here it is:

My goal is to study/play at least 20 hours per week and no more than 30 hours. The rest of my time should be allocated to uni work, gym, and whatever else. I'm quite loose about what constitutes "study" but I'm not letting myself off easy with it. It involves at least 1 or 2 deep session reviews per week, and some working through spots in crEV. I'm allowing video watching to also be a part of study because I don't often watch videos and generally don't watch passively when I do. This is basically my answer to the "Studying Poker" thread I made, and I'm happy enough with this.

My plan for next week will mostly be some sort of player pool analysis and working on my ranges for certain lines. This nitty approach I've started taking might be ok but I'm obviously gonna have to start opening up in the right situations, so I think it's time to start looking for those.

A big leak I'm going to try to work on is when I play poker. I've always had issues when it comes to getting volume because if I run bad, I play for extended periods and get tons of hands in. If I run good, I cut my sessions short to protect myself. This is a terrible approach because essentially it is maximising volume under unfavourable circumstances and minimising it when I'm doing well. You can see from the table there are some >3hr playing days - these are for sure big losing sessions. It is pretty much just a mindset leak and I have to deal with that.

Stoploss is a really good idea. Do you have it whether or not the losses are from coolers? Maybe I'll do a stoploss of 2 or 3. The problem is that would interfere with my daily volume goals :D Which at the moment is just to play at least 2 hours. These days I'm preferring to not go for handcount but rather time spent playing.

This week has been quite interesting. I started doing some "mass" database analysis and got quite into it. So far I have been condensing the useful information into excel so that I can analyse it properly later. As for my schedule, I have barely played poker this week:

I'm fine with this. I feel like the week has been very productive, and I've also begun properly trying to make use of CREV to model common situations so that I have a proper plan. It is a short sacrifice that will be better in the longrun.

In Nick Howard's last stream he gave some ideas for filters to run so I tried them out with my last 200k hands, and here are the results :

won/lost between 1.5bb and 4bb (+17.2bb/100)
won/lost between 4bb and 8bb (+101bb/100)
won/lost between 8bb and 12bb (-37.89bb/100)
won/lost between 12bb and 16bb (-30.31bb/100)
won/lost between 16bb and 20bb (-107.95bb/100)
won/lost between 20bb and 40bb (-270.92bb/100)
won/lost between 40bb and 99bb (+1735bb/100)

After seeing the other posts in Nick's blog and after seeing the graphs from the guys in my skypegroup it is pretty obvious I have some big issues in medium sized pots. It is petty fucking horrendous... So that needs work.

I feel like I have so much I want to work on with my game it's hard to find time for everything, but I want to
1. Do as much playerpool analysis as possible
2. Dig much deeper into these mid-large sized pots and spot some patterns in my game
3. Continue using CREV to model common spots
4. PLAY A BIT MORE?!

At least I have some direction to go in nowadays.

I updated my OP - before I didn't say a lot because I wasn't sure I would update very often or if I would continue playing poker regularly.

Quick update - volume is still low, things are pretty busy at the university but I'm still getting off-table work done.

Regarding these medium won/lost 8-20bb pots, about half are when I'm the PFA, ~35% are when I 3bet, and ~25% are when I coldcall. I guess I will focus on these spots. Doesn't really narrow it down too much :p

Last week didn't go so well - only managed about 25 hours for poker because I was quite busy. I also started losing a bit of motivation because it seems like the more I work on my game the worse my results get. I've spent some money on coaches in the past and although I feel like it improved my knowledge, for some reason that hasn't resulted in a better winrate. If I could afford it I would consider getting some coach to look over some sessions I've played and give me some things to work on.

IRL I've had a bit of energy in the last couple afternoons and decided to go to the gym more. I already go 3 times per week with a friend but the routine doesn't really include enough strength training because it is higher rep-ranges. So I decided to try an extra 2 days per week and work on deadlifts, squats, bench, and overhead press with lower reps/higher weight. Haven't deadlifted properly for a while now but somehow got a PB yesterday with 120kg x 3 reps so pretty happy with that! Will try to increase this over the near future because it is not quite 1.5x bodyweight (I'm 82kg). Would love to deadlift >2x bodyweight.

it seems like the more I work on my game the worse my results get

I think this is something most of us have experienced at some point. My theory behind why is that we start with an overall game plan that we've designed based on previous study and intuition, then we notice one thing we do in the plan is really bad so we change that one thing, but it leaves the rest unchanged and it creates a weird imbalance. Think there can be a similar thing that happens with short term coaching relationships. Best advice I could give to that would be to focus on one area of your game at a time and go hard on it, otherwise you end up with a patchy game. Which is why for me exclusively studying with things like play and explains may actually do more harm than good