Hello everyone,

I want to start this off by sharing my background with poker and life (short story) in general. A quick rundown is that I have played mostly 6max online a majority of my poker career. I played a lot pre black friday and grinded from 5nl to 100nl right before it all went down. I have ALWAYS loved heads up and would have always preferred it. I am a strict and disciplined player so I never fully switched to HU because of how many buyins was always preferred and to start at minimum 100nl because of rake. 3 years ago I took time away from my job to play poker full time again. I grinded from 10nl-200nl (a lot tougher than it was when I first started playing online haha) within 4 months playing 70+ hours a week. At that point I made a decision to go to AC Sun-Thurs since it was way easier to make a living off of the live tables compared to 200nl on ACR. I realized after a few months of being away from my wife that it was a lot of stress on the relationship and that it would be almost impossible to continue this for when we wanted to start a family. LONG story short, I did the "right" thing and went back to my job which I had for 7 years. 1.5 years later they let me go 2 months after my baby was born.

Literally the most stressful time in my life, felt like a failure. No clue what to do. Was taking any side jobs I could get. My wife runs her own salon so I was ending up watching the baby now most of the time since she had to go back to work. I started playing poker again and decided I'm going to play heads up no matter what. I always wanted to be the best (cliche). I am incredibly hard on myself.

It was at this time that I started watching RIO HU videos and came across someone named Nuno Alvarez. The way he taught in his videos was perfect for the way I learn. I decided to message him and find out his coaching rate because I knew I needed to learn from him if I was going to get anywhere in the HU world. Learning an incredible amount of knowledge every single session and further speaking with him, he decided to stake me. I could not tell you how much this meant to me. Putting in at least 1 hour of study everyday and meeting with him once a week has been an eye opening experience to how much more there is to poker. He is a great guy and an amazing teacher.

Heads up has been quite different. Getting used to the differences in hand strength took me a little longer than expected. Spending 4-5 hours a day waiting at the tables is something I did not think was going to happen at 100nl HU tables. It's a shame that I don't have better options for sites to play on. It took me almost a month to put money on because I had to go through bitcoin (yeah...I lost quite a bit while waiting for it to clear =[ ) Tomorrow I will be putting up hands/graphs/goals. At the moment just finished a session and pretty tired. I will be updating once a week. Good luck to everyone!

Poker Goals -
2 hours minimum study a day. I want to fully understand both IP and OOP ranges for one board with many run outs per day.

Change my sleep schedule to fit for when there is more action on WPN HU. I noticed that between 2am-6am EST is when I get the most action.

Since a lot of the action I get is heavily reg based I want to study their individual games and be the best one there at 100nl (and higher when I get there )

I need to stop a tilt that I have with making mistakes. Being so hard on myself during a session when playing a hand incorrectly stops me from playing my "A" game. (ex: knowing that I should be using a small bet size on certain boards and auto pilot back to my old strategy with 3/4 pot from long ago). The difference in EV is nothing too crazy but just knowing I made a mistake on things that I studied for so long makes me incredibly mad at myself.

I know putting a goal on a limit/monetary amount is never a good thing but I want to put one anyway. My wife and I are planning on moving by the end of this year. I want to be studied / experienced enough to beat the $400nl HU tables or higher by the end of the year and hopefully be able to support my family with this knowledge and continue to grow.

Weekly Goals -

20 minutes daily meditation. I slacked for the past few weeks.

Continue with 4 days per week at the gym. Helps both with feeling great on and off the tables.

Spend more time with my wife and daughter. Now that I think I have the best schedule for getting the most action at the tables I will be able to spend the other hours with my family.

Update this blog every week with new goals and challenges.