Pinowww

Hi everyone! My name is Remco.

13 years ago I won the sunday warm-up on pokerstars. Half a year later i would come in 2nd place in the sunday million.

My biggest accomplishment would come within another year. I would win 36k$ in a month of playing 2/4$ PLO (90 stacks) and be the biggest winner on pokertableratings for that month on pokerstars.

I would name the last one my greatest accomplishment, since I knew through holdemmanager it took me 80.000 hands and about 150 hours. I was winning 11,25bb/100 hands AND my EV winrate was about 5bb/100 hands, so I was running hot as hell and it felt like it too. But 5bb/100 over a 80k hand sample gave me more insight. Because this was the first moment I could take poker serious as a career. It showed I could be consistent over longer hand samples. I would eventually play over a million hands that year and Supernova elite would follow (OG IN THA HOUSE).

I had some fun years playing poker, played in a couple of poker houses. Made some friends, made some memories. Sadly at some point I got scammed on a pokersite. This had nothing to do with the pokersite and had everything to do with a scumbag who we trusted and who installed a bad piece of software on our PC’s. He could see our hole cards, sit at our tables and ultimately got banned in the process on the websites. On the tables it had costed me about 20k$ directly to certain players (he worked with a group). For over a month I would be analyzing and trying to figure out the weird statistics of a bunch of players on the PLO 6-max tables who could see my cards, but I thought they were just playing really good.
Something changed with inside me during and after that month. It changed the way I saw and thought about the game. During and after that month, my winrates started to vanish. I was making more mistakes and analysed and thought about the pokerhands less and less.

I wasn't actively thinking about the game and hands anymore and became what could best be called a rakebackpro. Now, by no means was I a terrible player. But I definitely was not the best player. Breaking even in an online PLO 2/4$ 6max game for over years, you are probably in the top 10% of players. But it is like being in the top 8 million of 80 million tennis players. You shouldn’t be calling it a job. Having said that, I only had to get my first job at 28! From when I was 19 years old untill I was 28 years old poker payed the bills, rent, college tuition travel and life. The game became less exciting, my friends bought houses, started families, build careers all the while I became less inticed with my own future in the pokerworld and had to find another path.

I got a masters degree in mathematics and became a mathematics professor at a nearby high school. I got a girlfriend, we live together and we are going to start a family. Great life. I learned the values of having a consistent schedule, budgeting, communication of emotions, relationships, maintaining a home, yardwork, being a handyman, working, cooking and cleaning. Allthough I didn't know, these were the basics to make me truly happy on a daily basis. Teaching mathematics to 12-18 year olds and preparing and serving diner in the evenings so my girlfriend comes home to a warm meal (which makes her happy) are the best things I can wish for.

Money was never a problem and money is still not a problem. I went broke, but never in debt. I can buy all the things I need with a simple salary. Allthough I understood poker gave me money, at some point it did not give me much else anymore. A job in education gave me much much more.

I am currently teaching combinatorics in high school. I can only describe this as the underlaying mathematics of solvers. Somehow I came across Phil Galfond using Vision which I find absolutely fascinating. The game has changed, but is still far from GTO in every hand.

But more importantly, I saw him have a family and a business. I saw him as a positive role model in the community. He showed me that a healthy relationship with poker is possible.

So this is the start of my new hobby: poker.

I’ve come back and been playing again since may/june. I’ve made about a 4000$ profit playing 10$ to 50$ buy-ins. I found the game has changed a lot, so I’ve been diving into some solvers analysing hands, which has taught me so much since starting again.

Playing tournaments is just not realistic for me though with a job and a relationship. I would rather have a 1 hour session every other day, then 1 seven hour session every two weeks or something like that. This has caused me to go back trying PLO 6max cashgames and I am currently playing 10c/20c 6 max PLO. I am trying to discover the game again, analyse hands truly indepth, play as perfect as I can.

Seeing Phil play versus jungleman headsup PLO has brought me so much understanding about the current meta. It has taught me so much about the game, that I feel I am ready to come back…. as a casual player, whose only motivation is getting the highest winrate possible in any game. Starting with 20$ a table, lets see where this ends.

Thank you Phil Galfond