I think it was probably a wise move not to move up stakes in the same week you started playing for 'rent money'. Like snazzy hat said a few posts back, I'm confident you'll adapt and go on to bigger things.
I think it was probably a wise move not to move up stakes in the same week you started playing for 'rent money'. Like snazzy hat said a few posts back, I'm confident you'll adapt and go on to bigger things.
Thanks Pete. I'm actually adding the higher games this week so far. Winning in the higher stuff and losing it back at micros is the story of this week at the moment fml!
Hi mate, I'm sure you are probably already aware and may not even be in a position to want to apply, but I came across a news article today saying that professional musicians who are out of work due to the pandemic can apply for a one off £500 payment.
Anyway, I saw this and thought of you so thought I would mention it just in case.
Hi mate, I'm sure you are probably already aware and may not even be in a position to want to apply, but I came across a news article today saying that professional musicians who are out of work due to the pandemic can apply for a one off £500 payment.
Anyway, I saw this and thought of you so thought I would mention it just in case.
Thanks a lot for posting this mate, much appreciated Had a look and I don't fit their criteria due to poker bankroll and other savings being over their savings threshold. When I think of it like that there are definitely many many many musicians who need the help far more than me!
Signed up to the NHS volunteer system today. Not mentioning that to say "oh look at me, aren't I a good" but to encourage anyone who can to do the same Not started yet as they need to verify account but it was really easy to sign up and my understanding is you get an app and then on the app you can switch your status to available when you can help and it comes up with a list of tasks currently needing doing in your area so once you've signed up you can do as little or as much as you can. Will edit that if that's not the case once I'm verified, but I think that's how it works.
Enjoyed this week's routine a lot more than last week. Last week felt a bit burned out from trying to suddenly massively up my volume at micros. This week been playing a bit higher but on fewer days - quality over quantity and all that. Had more time to do study and other stuff which has been nice. Finished my playing for this week today and had another profitable week. Lost a bit on Sky but did quite well on the other site and cashed 6 out of 6 of the 20s I played lol. Best finish was 3rd though so still a lot of work to be done. Am playing 'as a job' in the week but still having a session for fun on the weekend to make sure my hobby hasn't just turned into a chore. Will most probably play Saturday night and just play all of the fun stuff around £5 buy-in, of which there is a lot on a Saturday!
Realised I hit a personal milestone yesterday in hitting 20k on my lifetime graph across all sites. Drop in the ocean by the big guys' standards but feels good nonetheless
Just to clarify, this is lifetime haha, I haven't suddenly completed the challenge overnight Looking back seems pretty overly ambitious to have set myself a target to make more this year than I had previously ever made in all years combined lol! Still, it's a long year and a lot can happen/change in a year as current events are showing.
Hi mate, I'm sure you are probably already aware and may not even be in a position to want to apply, but I came across a news article today saying that professional musicians who are out of work due to the pandemic can apply for a one off £500 payment.
Anyway, I saw this and thought of you so thought I would mention it just in case.
Thanks a lot for posting this mate, much appreciated Had a look and I don't fit their criteria due to poker bankroll and other savings being over their savings threshold. When I think of it like that there are definitely many many many musicians who need the help far more than me!
Signed up to the NHS volunteer system today. Not mentioning that to say "oh look at me, aren't I a good" but to encourage anyone who can to do the same Not started yet as they need to verify account but it was really easy to sign up and my understanding is you get an app and then on the app you can switch your status to available when you can help and it comes up with a list of tasks currently needing doing in your area so once you've signed up you can do as little or as much as you can. Will edit that if that's not the case once I'm verified, but I think that's how it works.
Enjoyed this week's routine a lot more than last week. Last week felt a bit burned out from trying to suddenly massively up my volume at micros. This week been playing a bit higher but on fewer days - quality over quantity and all that. Had more time to do study and other stuff which has been nice. Finished my playing for this week today and had another profitable week. Lost a bit on Sky but did quite well on the other site and cashed 6 out of 6 of the 20s I played lol. Best finish was 3rd though so still a lot of work to be done. Am playing 'as a job' in the week but still having a session for fun on the weekend to make sure my hobby hasn't just turned into a chore. Will most probably play Saturday night and just play all of the fun stuff around £5 buy-in, of which there is a lot on a Saturday!
Yeah I thought that might be the case but thought I'd mention just in case or if you had any colleagues that might benefit.
Well done on hitting the lifetime 20k and best of luck going forward.
Realised I've not updated yet in this calendar week so better do a quick post to avoid the fine!
Had another winning week, which was nice though by the end was starting to feel pretty frustrated. Had a couple of days off and feeling really excited to play again when I jump into some UKOPS stuff later
Games have been completely crazy - just ridiculous 4 way all-ins going down all the time, which tilted me slightly having being spending time delving deeper into PIO turn spots, most of my decisions are quite often having to be binary 'fold' or 'call all-in' preflop decisions
Been working on mental game with some interesting resources which has been eye-opening. I may be being completely naïve with this thinking but I sometimes get the feeling that the skill gap between me and some of the players who are more profitable than me isn't astronomically huge, but their mental game, focus, work rate when putting in volume and -more importantly with me- ability to handle the natural swings of the game are just on a different planet of skill compared to me. Like I say, maybe I'm way off the mark with that and this time next week I'll regret saying it Tbf the more I look at certain solutions and frequencies, the more I feel like a massive button-clicker! Got so much to learn.
Music production going really well and really getting stuck into that which is super fun to have as a hobby outside of poker whilst I can't go out to do my usual music
Playing maybe ABI 10 tonight for UKOPS and will increase or decrease this depending on how things are going. Final Sunday could be playing the Main or the 55p Micro
Just looking through some stats on sharkscope as feel I've been losing a lot of HU's recently
Looked up my lifetime final table results and was a little bit shocked at the finish position distributions. Genuinely no idea what a 4 handed MTT is by the way but apparently I've played a few of them and made some FTs lol!
Decided to filter from the point where I think I started to get a bit better at the game to see if that changed the results:
Not sure how many games would be needed to be considered a sample in HU but this is showing a definite trend towards 2nd place rather than 1st. I also hoped there would be a bit more of a trend towards top 3 spots, which I suppose there is somewhat but maybe I'm still not being aggressive enough on FTs when I thought I was. Tbf recently I've noticed myself playing really aggro on bubbles and FT bubbles but then concentrating more on not **** up when we actually get to the FT and there are people punting off left, right and centre. Maybe this a huge leak, especially in bounty hunters where all the money is up top. Will have to go through some FT hands
Only played 2 days of UKOPS so far as I get burned out really quickly playing too many late nights at a time where you don't sleep properly. Lost about 100 first day, won about 120 second day but am yet to cash or take a single bounty in a UKOPS event Will be back for more Friday and Sunday
Had a pretty frustrating night tbh. Didn't lose much but just lost every important all-in. All standard stuff but I think what I found frustrating about it is being used to small field daytime games, quite often you can end up with a stack in these big runner things nowhere near the money that would equate to a decent final table stack in the daytime games. It's a lot of flips and holds to get through to actually go deep in these things!
Just played some 20nl and had a good session. Was really good fun to actually make use of some of the PIO work. Not applying it literally of course, but thinking about what strategy/sizing should be used in x spot, how villain is deviating and how/why we should deviate.
Thinking about playing a bit more cash but keeping separate rolls for cash/MTTs. Don't want to be that guy who wins in tournaments only to go and donk it off on cash
Reckon keeping two rolls simultaneously would work?
What do cash guys reckon the minimum starting roll to play 20nl on Sky would be? Hear some huge numbers thrown around these days that sound more like MTT BRM! How big can the swings get at 20nl?
Turned pro for five minutes and already looking to abandon donkaments
I can relate to the feeling of frustration with the bigger field evening games. It takes some getting used to. I'd rather more frequent small wins than less frequent big wins (assuming they amount to roughly the same ROI).
A couple of times PIO has crept into your posts lately, have you bought it?
Yeah definitely agree with you about more consistent smaller wins. Conventional wisdom always says higher ROI in bigger fields but more variance. In bounty hunters where most of your ROI comes from first place finishes it's going to take even longer than usual to realise your EV
I have the free PIO and went through a load of tutorials so I could learn how to use it. May sound silly but so much training content is PIO-based these days sometimes it just felt like information overload with the bombardment of numbers to look at even with someone talking through it. Now I've sort of learned how to use it and how everything works, all of the content from people cleverer than me talking about it makes a lot more sense.
Quite a lot of PIO actually tends to follow similar patterns in different situations. So I've found a lot of value in finding sims of board textures/situations that are similar to a hand I've played that I'm interested in. Same ideas will apply without having to actually run sims yourself.
I think number one most important thing is always to ask 'why' we're doing something. 'Because PIO says' is such a flawed way of thinking IMO - need to look into why it takes certain lines and whether they're even applicable to games we're playing in (mostly not).
For example, a solution might say that we should bet a particular river really super thin for value into villain's range. If you look at what villain is 'supposed' to be calling on this river it might well have a whole load of Ace high and even King high calls at a high frequency that are never happening in real life. So your +EV value bet with some hands actually becomes -EV in reality.
One of the things that I have found applicable to lower stakes (against regs) is some of the postflop spots where some hands become raises where I wouldn't even have considered having a raising range at all before. Kind of opened my eyes to a lot of things I was doing on autopilot without even realising there might be another option. In MTTs it's usually not going to be a bad thing to find more spots to be aggressive in
Well that quick reply turned out longer than I expected! What has happened to your diary btw sir?
Sky cash games are rather annoying when it comes to keeping an accurate record of results given that they don't provide downloadable hand histories, so I can't give you any exact figures for here. However, I do have a sample of almost 400k hands I played at 20nl on another site saved in PokerTracker, which might be a useful reference point - over those 400k hands I averaged a 6bb/100 win rate and my largest downswing was around $400 (20 buy-ins).
In your position (as mainly an MTT player thus far) I like the idea of keeping some sort of separate roll for cash on Sky as it'll make keeping track of how you're doing a little clearer. As for a starting roll, I'd say it depends on your risk tolerance and whether you're prepared to reload the cash game roll. Given that it would likely only be a small proportion of your overall poker bankroll, combined with being a proven winner in MTT's, I think £200 would be enough to jump into 20nl with. Starting with 10 buy-ins is not really exercising any proper BRM in the conventional sense, but it's fine as a bit for a punt/experiment and a decent winning player would have a greater than 50% chance of not going broke starting with 10 BI's imo. If you'd rather be conservative and and make busting your cash roll unlikely then 25-30 BI's should suffice, along with making disciplined drops in stakes as required.
Yeah definitely agree with you about more consistent smaller wins. Conventional wisdom always says higher ROI in bigger fields but more variance. In bounty hunters where most of your ROI comes from first place finishes it's going to take even longer than usual to realise your EV
I have the free PIO and went through a load of tutorials so I could learn how to use it. May sound silly but so much training content is PIO-based these days sometimes it just felt like information overload with the bombardment of numbers to look at even with someone talking through it. Now I've sort of learned how to use it and how everything works, all of the content from people cleverer than me talking about it makes a lot more sense.
Quite a lot of PIO actually tends to follow similar patterns in different situations. So I've found a lot of value in finding sims of board textures/situations that are similar to a hand I've played that I'm interested in. Same ideas will apply without having to actually run sims yourself.
I think number one most important thing is always to ask 'why' we're doing something. 'Because PIO says' is such a flawed way of thinking IMO - need to look into why it takes certain lines and whether they're even applicable to games we're playing in (mostly not).
For example, a solution might say that we should bet a particular river really super thin for value into villain's range. If you look at what villain is 'supposed' to be calling on this river it might well have a whole load of Ace high and even King high calls at a high frequency that are never happening in real life. So your +EV value bet with some hands actually becomes -EV in reality.
One of the things that I have found applicable to lower stakes (against regs) is some of the postflop spots where some hands become raises where I wouldn't even have considered having a raising range at all before. Kind of opened my eyes to a lot of things I was doing on autopilot without even realising there might be another option. In MTTs it's usually not going to be a bad thing to find more spots to be aggressive in
Well that quick reply turned out longer than I expected! What has happened to your diary btw sir?
Blimey, I was looking for a yes or no
I'm not sure I could assign a range for the typical opponents we play for analysis in PIO It is a program I will be interested in more when I eventually move up in stakes. I've actually been looking at ranges in HRC recently in anticipation of that; this game gets a lot more difficult the more you learn.
I updated the diary at the end of March. It was just a week by week rundown of how results went.
Ran pretty well for most of March but so far April has been the opposite haha. Mostly load up a session and within 10mins I'm down to 1 table having bust with Aces all in pre on all of the other tables. Maybe it's actually running well to get dealt Aces so many times at the start of a session and manage to find people willing to get all in pre
Played some cash with quite nice results but as has been the case on previous occasions playing cash, I just can't find the enthusiasm for it. I really want to enjoy cash, but I just don't! So I'm sticking to exclusively MTTs again for now A lot of people talk about flexibility being one of the benefits of playing cash. I think I prefer the opposite; sitting down and committing x hours to a tournament grind. Because the option of playing cash is always there, it keeps popping up in my mind when I would be better off putting more time into producing or study or something like that.
Away from poker, producing is going really well; feel like I'm actually starting to like the sound of my own stuff!
Gf has got us doing a 30 day yoga video series from youtube. Having worked out minimum 3 times per week for the past 15 years or so I thought it would be easy, but we're only on day 2 and it's already a killer! Anything arm and shoulder strength I think most people will find pretty easy but some of the stretches are using muscles I don't think I've used since I was crawling on the floor as a baby! Quite interesting actually which muscles don't get used/stretched enough in day to day life. Would recommend
This month at the tables has been pretty brutal so far - basically just losing every all-in over and over again - it happens!
Lolsample of course, but really really pleased with my mindset this month and how I'm approaching the game despite getting smacked in the face. I genuinely believe with the same run of variance a year ago I would be down quite a bit of money this month, but atm am dealing with things much better which I'm really happy about. Have moved up to ABI 10 during the week then playing much lower ABI at the weekend for a bit of fun so overall ABI on scope will be lower than my regular midweek games.
So many of these sessions I've basically ended up 1 tabling my lowest buy-in at the end of the session. Read somewehere on the forum the other day that some regs just punt off in that situation, but I've been really sweating and focussing on that last table even though I know getting 1st would still mean a losing session, and I think that is contributing a lot to breaking even rather than losing.
Really enjoying producing some music and having the time to do it
Will be playing some low stakes Sky MTTs tonight with some beers - say hi if we share a table!
Had a couple of breakeven-ish sessions since last post so current breakeven stretch is about 220 games or something like that. Huuuuuuuuuuge sample Not sure why, but it feels like it's going on for ever despite only being one month long and not very many games. Have played with enough variance calculators to know it's just a drop in the ocean and some players probably play 220 games in a week lol. Nontheless I looked at my all time results and pulled out a few wayyy longer breakeven stretches to make myself feel better and to give a bit of context. Probably the dullest thing ever if it's somebody else's results but I found them quite fun to look at
Knew about all of these before looking them out, but the one that surprised me was the next one.
As I mentioned earlier in this thread (if anyone has made it all the way from the start haha!) in 2018 I basically had a heater for the entire year. Worked hard on my game pretty much every week and just won every single session...
...is how I always remember it. Actually there looks to have been a 300 game BE session in the middle there that I don't even remember. Just shows how your mind can play tricks on you, especially during a rough patch and you can convince yourself that you're having the worst luck ever, you can't even remember what winning feels like, and that nobody in the world runs as bad as you etc etc
Comments
I think it was probably a wise move not to move up stakes in the same week you started playing for 'rent money'. Like snazzy hat said a few posts back, I'm confident you'll adapt and go on to bigger things.
Must be time for an update from you soon?
Anyway, I saw this and thought of you so thought I would mention it just in case.
Signed up to the NHS volunteer system today. Not mentioning that to say "oh look at me, aren't I a good" but to encourage anyone who can to do the same
Enjoyed this week's routine a lot more than last week. Last week felt a bit burned out from trying to suddenly massively up my volume at micros. This week been playing a bit higher but on fewer days - quality over quantity and all that. Had more time to do study and other stuff which has been nice. Finished my playing for this week today and had another profitable week. Lost a bit on Sky but did quite well on the other site and cashed 6 out of 6 of the 20s I played lol. Best finish was 3rd though so still a lot of work to be done. Am playing 'as a job' in the week but still having a session for fun on the weekend to make sure my hobby hasn't just turned into a chore. Will most probably play Saturday night and just play all of the fun stuff around £5 buy-in, of which there is a lot on a Saturday!
Just to clarify, this is lifetime haha, I haven't suddenly completed the challenge overnight
Current BR: £2538
Well done on hitting the lifetime 20k and best of luck going forward.
In all seriousness, well done on the landmark. That's a really impressive ROI over a proper sample size too
Had another winning week, which was nice though by the end was starting to feel pretty frustrated. Had a couple of days off and feeling really excited to play again when I jump into some UKOPS stuff later
Games have been completely crazy - just ridiculous 4 way all-ins going down all the time, which tilted me slightly having being spending time delving deeper into PIO turn spots, most of my decisions are quite often having to be binary 'fold' or 'call all-in' preflop decisions
Been working on mental game with some interesting resources which has been eye-opening. I may be being completely naïve with this thinking but I sometimes get the feeling that the skill gap between me and some of the players who are more profitable than me isn't astronomically huge, but their mental game, focus, work rate when putting in volume and -more importantly with me- ability to handle the natural swings of the game are just on a different planet of skill compared to me. Like I say, maybe I'm way off the mark with that and this time next week I'll regret saying it
Music production going really well and really getting stuck into that which is super fun to have as a hobby outside of poker whilst I can't go out to do my usual music
Playing maybe ABI 10 tonight for UKOPS and will increase or decrease this depending on how things are going. Final Sunday could be playing the Main or the 55p Micro
Glgl to everyone playing!
Looked up my lifetime final table results and was a little bit shocked at the finish position distributions. Genuinely no idea what a 4 handed MTT is by the way but apparently I've played a few of them and made some FTs lol!
Decided to filter from the point where I think I started to get a bit better at the game to see if that changed the results:
Not sure how many games would be needed to be considered a sample in HU but this is showing a definite trend towards 2nd place rather than 1st. I also hoped there would be a bit more of a trend towards top 3 spots, which I suppose there is somewhat but maybe I'm still not being aggressive enough on FTs when I thought I was. Tbf recently I've noticed myself playing really aggro on bubbles and FT bubbles but then concentrating more on not **** up when we actually get to the FT and there are people punting off left, right and centre. Maybe this a huge leak, especially in bounty hunters where all the money is up top. Will have to go through some FT hands
Only played 2 days of UKOPS so far as I get burned out really quickly playing too many late nights at a time where you don't sleep properly. Lost about 100 first day, won about 120 second day but am yet to cash or take a single bounty in a UKOPS event
Just played some 20nl and had a good session. Was really good fun to actually make use of some of the PIO work. Not applying it literally of course, but thinking about what strategy/sizing should be used in x spot, how villain is deviating and how/why we should deviate.
Thinking about playing a bit more cash but keeping separate rolls for cash/MTTs. Don't want to be that guy who wins in tournaments only to go and donk it off on cash
Reckon keeping two rolls simultaneously would work?
What do cash guys reckon the minimum starting roll to play 20nl on Sky would be? Hear some huge numbers thrown around these days that sound more like MTT BRM! How big can the swings get at 20nl?
I can relate to the feeling of frustration with the bigger field evening games. It takes some getting used to. I'd rather more frequent small wins than less frequent big wins (assuming they amount to roughly the same ROI).
A couple of times PIO has crept into your posts lately, have you bought it?
I have the free PIO and went through a load of tutorials so I could learn how to use it. May sound silly but so much training content is PIO-based these days sometimes it just felt like information overload with the bombardment of numbers to look at even with someone talking through it. Now I've sort of learned how to use it and how everything works, all of the content from people cleverer than me talking about it makes a lot more sense.
Quite a lot of PIO actually tends to follow similar patterns in different situations. So I've found a lot of value in finding sims of board textures/situations that are similar to a hand I've played that I'm interested in. Same ideas will apply without having to actually run sims yourself.
I think number one most important thing is always to ask 'why' we're doing something. 'Because PIO says' is such a flawed way of thinking IMO - need to look into why it takes certain lines and whether they're even applicable to games we're playing in (mostly not).
For example, a solution might say that we should bet a particular river really super thin for value into villain's range. If you look at what villain is 'supposed' to be calling on this river it might well have a whole load of Ace high and even King high calls at a high frequency that are never happening in real life. So your +EV value bet with some hands actually becomes -EV in reality.
One of the things that I have found applicable to lower stakes (against regs) is some of the postflop spots where some hands become raises where I wouldn't even have considered having a raising range at all before. Kind of opened my eyes to a lot of things I was doing on autopilot without even realising there might be another option. In MTTs it's usually not going to be a bad thing to find more spots to be aggressive in
Well that quick reply turned out longer than I expected! What has happened to your diary btw sir?
In your position (as mainly an MTT player thus far) I like the idea of keeping some sort of separate roll for cash on Sky as it'll make keeping track of how you're doing a little clearer. As for a starting roll, I'd say it depends on your risk tolerance and whether you're prepared to reload the cash game roll. Given that it would likely only be a small proportion of your overall poker bankroll, combined with being a proven winner in MTT's, I think £200 would be enough to jump into 20nl with. Starting with 10 buy-ins is not really exercising any proper BRM in the conventional sense, but it's fine as a bit for a punt/experiment and a decent winning player would have a greater than 50% chance of not going broke starting with 10 BI's imo. If you'd rather be conservative and and make busting your cash roll unlikely then 25-30 BI's should suffice, along with making disciplined drops in stakes as required.
Good luck!
P.S. Fancy some heads up games?
Haha knowing you I'd have thought you'd recommend minimum £1k starting BR for 20nl
However, I don't recall ever losing an MTT HU to you
Can play HU on your stream some time if you want to mix it up?
I'm not sure I could assign a range for the typical opponents we play for analysis in PIO
I updated the diary at the end of March. It was just a week by week rundown of how results went.
Ran pretty well for most of March but so far April has been the opposite haha. Mostly load up a session and within 10mins I'm down to 1 table having bust with Aces all in pre on all of the other tables. Maybe it's actually running well to get dealt Aces so many times at the start of a session and manage to find people willing to get all in pre
Played some cash with quite nice results but as has been the case on previous occasions playing cash, I just can't find the enthusiasm for it. I really want to enjoy cash, but I just don't! So I'm sticking to exclusively MTTs again for now
Away from poker, producing is going really well; feel like I'm actually starting to like the sound of my own stuff!
Gf has got us doing a 30 day yoga video series from youtube. Having worked out minimum 3 times per week for the past 15 years or so I thought it would be easy, but we're only on day 2 and it's already a killer!
Lolsample of course, but really really pleased with my mindset this month and how I'm approaching the game despite getting smacked in the face. I genuinely believe with the same run of variance a year ago I would be down quite a bit of money this month, but atm am dealing with things much better which I'm really happy about. Have moved up to ABI 10 during the week then playing much lower ABI at the weekend for a bit of fun so overall ABI on scope will be lower than my regular midweek games.
So many of these sessions I've basically ended up 1 tabling my lowest buy-in at the end of the session. Read somewehere on the forum the other day that some regs just punt off in that situation, but I've been really sweating and focussing on that last table even though I know getting 1st would still mean a losing session, and I think that is contributing a lot to breaking even rather than losing.
Really enjoying producing some music and having the time to do it
Will be playing some low stakes Sky MTTs tonight with some beers - say hi if we share a table!
As I mentioned earlier in this thread (if anyone has made it all the way from the start haha!) in 2018 I basically had a heater for the entire year. Worked hard on my game pretty much every week and just won every single session...
...is how I always remember it. Actually there looks to have been a 300 game BE session in the middle there that I don't even remember. Just shows how your mind can play tricks on you, especially during a rough patch and you can convince yourself that you're having the worst luck ever, you can't even remember what winning feels like, and that nobody in the world runs as bad as you etc etc