I've been watching and rewatching Tyler Forrester's videos, and watching Ben Sulsky's Toy Game series, over the last two months. I'd say most of the money I've spent on RIO has to go to the Tyler Forrester revenue category. I play almost exclusively live, with the occasional 2 table cash session from 25nl to 100nl, or a random tournament. I work nights a few days per week, and my game options are limited to tough games with harder working people (be it bot implementers or true professionals) or nothing at all. So live is my stuff. I play in a weekly 25/50cent game that starts off $100 deep, usually ending the evening playing $300-$500 deep and rebuys occurring. I also have access to a variety of raked homegames at the 1/2 level. I don't have anything to write about hand history wise, as I'll save that for another thread. But I'm writing this as I'm still excited over the scenario I found myself in last night.

I am required by my position to be awake in the middle of the night. This Thursday, I took the opportunity the slow night gave and drove the 35 minutes to the law firm to join in the raked 1/2 game, fully planning on eating as much as possible to offset the high costs. I walked in the door and there are 4 drunk business owners with 1k in front of them, straddling and blind raising (in the sb vs a btn straddle) upwards to $30. I didn't realize this game played so big, but wasn't about to drive home. I've studied shortstack math in icmizer and excel pretty much to death, and figured I'll just take all the easy spots they're offering. The biggest whale has nearly 2,000 dollars in hundreds of chips just smashed together in a pile. I bought in for $300 and ran it to $1800 doing nothing but putting the majority of my money in preflop as a 70% favorite vs his range, and stacking off. I got $600 in preflop with QQ vs 47o. I didn't even know this was possible. I saw it, almost refused to believe it wasn't a show to angle someone, and then decided to outline my adjustments. I've never played 5/10 before, and this game was regularly a $10 straddle, and I quickly doubled. I decided to just go linear as hell and fold everything that didn't fit the 70% plan. I also ate 4 bowls of chicken teriyaki and the guy's venmo wouldn't let him send anymore. It felt weird, but he's loaded and fine, so I feel great.