sippin_criss

so sick, GL

Nice points here. MatoStar you didn't tag me but to put it plainly the number one thing is a willingness to persist through the constant pain and suffering. Guys will lose 10 buyins and question the strategy that is clearly working well for dozens of guys. They explore nonsense on YouTube trying to find the holy grail when it's already in front of them. Their study habits are way too complicated and not basic and foundational. They take breaks every time they have a bad day and it cuts their volume in half.

It is actually so straightforward and simple and laid out for them, I think an incredible amount of dick punching has to occur for someone not to make it to 500 within say 2 years, as a winning 50NL reg.

RunItTw1ce If this question could be answered with a forum post poker would be over.

This player is grinding known pools so wouldn't have an expectation of a WR that hits the anon ceiling of 10~ anyways. He also has a nearly FT job after fairly recently grinding 50nl so it's just a bizarre question

As for the redline dip, it can always mean any number of things. It happened to me as I moved to 1k but my overall aggression frequencies stayed in line while my winrate went up from where it was at 200 and 500. My general assumption is the higher you go in stakes the fewer good opportunities you have to win pots. Guys are just battling more so it makes sense you will see a redline dip but I can't know. It's just a guess.

RunItTw1ce

This endeavour could cost Patrick half a million dollars proving to everyone something they should already believe in if they're in the stable.

I just had a look and counted 10~ guys who started the group playing low stakes and have at the very least taken a shot at 500. I also know there are guys playing 200 knocking on the door of that 500 threshold. I wouldn't be surprised if the group has 15 $1k+ regs by the spring.

Having the roll to go it alone at the end of the contract means different things to different guys. That's geared towards money management, volume, cost of living, etc. Just because a player can comfortably beat 500 doesn't mean he has the liquidity or appetite to go it alone. I can all but guarantee someone will be a winner at 500 at the end of their contract with Nachos but I can't necessarily guarantee what will be in their bank account because that's up to them.

Any of the folks that are truly struggling to escape low stakes while in a CFP are doing one or more of the following: not putting in volume, not studying, not following the strategy, or dealing with other life issues. I am seeing literally 0 guys who log 30k+ hands a month, post a bunch in the discord, show up to the group sessions and also struggle to escape low stakes.

There are also guys grinding 50-100NL and doing the steady day in-day out procedural work and it's obvious to anyone with half a brain that their success at 500+ is inevitable.

I think everything about CFP's has been said and then some in the convo you guys had with Saulo, but for me it's the best poker decisions I have ever made.

My results for the year have been amazing, besides my criminal volume. I mean it when I say criminal, I should be thrown in jail for how weak my volume has been. I'm working on it though.

Some of these poker platitudes lose their meaning for me and I need to take some work alone to dig deeper into what's really going on.

I have done plenty of pokerdope sims and am well aware of the pain that's going to eventually be brought upon me. Knowing it's going to happen doesn't take the sting of it away when it does. I have been incredibly fortunate that in all of my play at 500+ I haven't yet experienced so much as a 10 bi EV downswing, so that helps with my confidence.

The main component here is that I play for a living and need money for expenses, so I can't afford to lose or breakeven for an indefinite period of time and that's the main reason I give a shit when things aren't going great. If I was a millionaire I wouldn't give a flying fuck how many buyins I lost over a given period. I also wouldn't play poker anymore either so there's that lol.

Structural tension (goals, process, motivation + drive)

When things aren't going great for me in poker it gives me a perverse pleasure. There is a wrong and it needs to be righted. There is an itch and it needs to be scratched. I put my head down and figure the fuck out how to right these wrongs and scratch that itch. I don't care too much about my energy, I just get it done regardless. I make the sacrifices I know I need to make and I figure it the fuck out. I know this because I have done it hundreds of times in my poker career.

I also know that whenever I climb out of what is currently the largest $ downswing I can recall in my poker career, I am going to win a few buyins more than that previous peak point, and I am going to relax and chill the fuck out. I won't realize it but I'll take some extra hours off. I'll get sloppy with my study habits and my money. Four days prior to this relaxing phase I was telling myself "never again" and here I am with my feet up sipping a pina colada. Fuck man.

So what must be done?

I need to be less emotionally invested in my results, but that emotion needs to be replaced with something. I need to give MORE of a shit about how I am operating my day to day than the number that I see at the end of the day. I've tried indifference, I've tried using logic, but there are just always going to be heavy emotions associated with results regardless of the common sense reasons we can give ourselves.

I'm not easy on myself. I don't give myself the pats on the back I deserve. I need to lay out my process clear as day and follow it to the letter. I will set it up in a way that the only possible outcome is success. When I take stock of my days, how much I won or lost is allowed to be on the list of things I care about, but it needs to be a lot lower than it currently is. All the things on that list that come before results need to be celebrated when they are achieved and become a deeper part of my identity. If I do this for eternity I think I'll be just fine.

Thanks dude, an honour from a legend.

If you haven't read through the mobius or freenachos blogs on here, please be sure to do so. Both of those Patrick's words have helped guide me in the following post:

I'd like to talk a bit about the way we punch ourselves in the dick and prevent a higher level of performance and moving up to stakes we know we can perform at, or wish we could play at.

1. Managing your energy. This is boring basic shit but people by and large are pure trash at it. Getting the sleep you know you need, drinking some water, getting some fresh air. Having that difficult conversation with your spouse so it's not hanging over your head for a week while you grind. Getting out for a quick coffee with a good friend you have been ignoring for months. Allowing yourself an hour or two in a day just to do nothing and wind down.

When your energy isn't effectively managed your attitude while you play will be fragile, your focus will be trash, you'll be lucky to ever play your B- game and you will somehow think you all of a sudden hate poker when all you needed was a nap and some fresh air for the first time in 5 days.

1. Honest feedback on your leaks You don't need a coach or a group of buds in a discord to get constant feedback from, although it helps. You will want a standard to hold yourself to and you'll want to make sure you're regularly reviewing your hands and following that standard. Pay attention to your most common leaks, save them in an upgrade document and make sure the most commonly leaking part of your game is where you commit most of your tactical energy too. Please avoid the rabbit hole of constructing your turn XR strategy in 4 bet pots when you are still making basic preflop blunders.

2. Paranoia The regs at the stake you're nervously taking a shot at right now don't actually know exactly what you're doing. If you're finding fish, with the lower rake that occurs as you move up your winrate should actually stay stable and your hourly should double. Eventually when you're playing 2k and beyond on sites like Stars you're dealing with world beaters, but I can assure you a random 100NL reg cannot see into your soul. Do not go gentle into that good night!

3. Quitting regularly and taking time off. This one is particularly bad if you already know you're a long term winner with a solid strategy. If you're not a long term winner, there are a lot of resources out there to assist you. Even the best of us have losing days almost half the time. If we are emotional puppets to our results, then at least 1/4 of our time spent as poker players is complete misery. It's important that we are able to either accept it and sit in our misery diapers, or better yet be grown ups and move past it.

You have to find a way to stop always cutting your sessions short when you lose a flip, stop taking a few days off to refresh. This shit is not a cure, it's a bandaid to a bigger issue and you have to figure out the root of what's causing such emotional responses. If this sounds like you I promise you you're going to have a bad time getting to where you need to go. I want to be clear there is a difference between taking time off because poker is hurting your tummy, and taking time off for the purpose of balance and energy management. Be honest with yourself and recognize the difference.

I made a 3 point checklist for myself for those times when things are rough:

1. Is my energy good?
2. Are the games good?
3. If yes to 1 & 2, am I so emotionally crippled in this moment that I have to stop playing? (hopefully not, then let's go!)

Last I checked anywhere the SNG offerings everywhere were trash.

I actually played a lot of SNG's on Global starting 2018ish and could get a solid hourly doing it. Unfortunately right now at 6:45PM PST there are 2 games running on Global above $20.

As for MTTs I'm kind of of 2 minds. If I had to pay the bills I'd just play a bunch of the softest $15-$50 buyin games I could find and play as many of them as I could. Once you get to an ABI of $80+ it seems to get extremely difficult and elite players have horrible extended stretches and nasty downswings. Going forward for me with MTTs I'll probably just flick in the odd Sunday Million and try to satellite into $3k+ buyin live events and try to fluke bink enough to buy a house.

Who do you know of who plays 2knl who drops to 200? On Global it's kind of a thing I suppose but 1k+ hardly ever runs there. 1k runs on Bodog plenty even though the games have been dry all year long. I have dropped down to 500 at times due to not finding good games but haven't had to resort to 200.

Cheers man. Yeah it becomes plainly clear where I started grinding hypers chasing SNE but with RB that was the highest hourly I ever had playing SNG's!

I did coach for Stoxpoker, that went belly up and then Cardrunners got me on board shortly after.

<3 <3 <3

Thanks bro! You are right too lol.

June:

Volume crazy low of course. Figuring out a schedule or sites to add is always a bit tricky. Playing low stakes for most of my time in the game was so simple because I could always just show up and rarely needed to consider selecting games where now it's one of the most important aspects of my grind.

Bodog was ACTING UP a week or two ago, several people on 2p2 were posting about getting disconnected and having other brutal issues. I have no interest in losing half a stack at any given moment due to software so I just choose not to play in those stretches.

The biggest challenge I face these days is managing my patience and persistence when the games aren't great. Trying to cycle through 6 reg games for hours isn't good for my bottom line and I'd probably make a similar hourly picking up cans. I probably need to accept starting my grind later in the evening and be willing to go past midnight when the opportunity presents itself. If I go an hour without finding a fish it's hard to build up the momentum to keep going, but if I have even 1-2 solid fish around I'll basically grind all night. The problem I think I have is that I have been starting a bit too early before the games get great and cost myself my momentum. Starting later can give me some more family time, probably a better hourly, and more overall interest in the grind.

I've also had a tough time being willing to grind 500 when the 1k games are trash but I've gotten over that hangup and use playing 500 as a recharge but also still an opportunity for a nice hourly.

Summer is finally arriving here and I am going to be pained with the gift and curse of using beer, so at the very least I am going to try to be a good boy during the week. For the last couple years my family has rented a house on a lakefront property next door to some of our closest friends and it's been a bit of a party hub. We are moving shortly which will be sad but will help my bottom line and my liver. Always a give and take!

ZeroEQR I guess you have to copy paste the links in the original post to see the graphs, my bad!

Hey guys. Wanted to talk a bit more about my day to day process that helped me get up to playing 1k and what I'm doing now.

Patrick Gerritsen, NachosPoker head coach had some coaching with HS crusher Matt Marinelli some years back and when asked what he should be working on, Matt told him "Just do what you like doing."

I did a good job most of my poker career doing what I liked with study, but I got off base when I started doing what I thought I should be doing (trying to memorize grids and pio ranges) and I just ended up bored and miserable.

I finally got into a rhythm of a daily review of all of my 10-15+bb pots I played the previous day and it worked like a dream. I have a much easier time connecting and diving deeper to a hand I actually played rather than pulling up a random board and digging into it in a solver. Any misplayed hands I found I took note of the error, noted the upgrade, and saved it in an upgrade/mistake document that I regularly review.

Since the games at 1k haven't been great as of late and my volume has been weaker this rhythm has slowed considerably, so I have begun diving deep on every common formation in the small sample I've played at 1k. (Single raised pot in position preflop raiser, single raised pot in position preflop caller, etc). So far for the single raised pots each formation produces 700~ hands that I just comb through and each mistake I notice I mark the hand and mark the nature of the mistake to spot the trends. Usually when I get through the entire formation 1-2 common errors pop up for more often than the others and now I have something I can easily attack when I play.

With my volume being lower than I'd like it makes it harder for me to maintain a good study rhythm, but I am staying engaged and on my feet coaching all the new players that come into the CFP. Lucky for me they're passionate, curious, and smart so it's a real pleasure for me and helps me stay sharp.

Hopefully I can get some solid games this weekend and provide a good monthly update.

Ty man!

Cheers buddy!

Congrats dude and thanks for the steady updates.

That 500z WR :o:o:o:o

Love your resilience man I think that is one of the main keys to pushing through to the highest level!

Where are you putting in most of your volume? Feel free to answer vaguely lol.

Moved from a bigger city to a small town 2 years ago and it has been amazing for me, my family, social life, and general connections with people around me. You go from being another face in the crowd to becoming buddies with the dude who works at the hardware store. If I go for a walk or drive my kids to school I'll end up waving at half a dozen different buddies.

Demondoink I think consistency is definitely key! People love the regular updates. Seems appropriate not to post screen names in hands, simple enough to give a basic description or whatever.

Power rankings for sure who doesn't love that!

Do you mind sharing what your hourly rate is?

Cheers man

Nice video Krzysztof! The way this video was structured would be a great study process for most of us.

RunItTw1ce yup that's me!

Great video format. Love the videos that provide a framework for an immediate practical application!

Hey Brock. Tariq Haji put out a recent video for dealing with donk bets at 100NL on Ignition and I suspect his detailed findings will be similar across the board on most weak fields whether it's cash games or tournaments.

Hey Daniel, loved this video. I think your live play videos are among the best videos out there and recommend your stuff to anyone who will listen. What I loved about this video was a concrete way to boost winrate today as well as providing clear and detailed methods for us to work through on our own. 10/10 perfect video couldn't ask for anything more.

Tattooing this on my forehead:

"If I never pay attention to showdowns though, I'll also surely lose. If the player pool consistently deviates from GTO in some way, I need to take advantage of this arbitrage opportunity. The only way to find the opportunities is to think deeply about the implications of different range structures in different situations.

In fact the skill is more important than any other, because GTO strategies are really just models of potential play from our opponents. No one's preflop ranges or betsizings exactly match the solver, much less their postflop distributions after the flop. To quote George Box: "All models are wrong. Some are useful."

Thanks again for the content Tyler, broken record here but you're just the absolute best of the best.

Love your content Tariq and found your donk chart incredibly valuable. Cheers.

Re: x/f Ax otr in Q8 iso hand vs the loose passive fish, I agree there is an argument to x/f AJ there vs that player type but I would also assume that if Tariq has a hand as strong as AJ he's going to just be betting it himself a lot.