I’ve been wanting to write a blog type post for a while now and have just never got around to doing it. The reasons for doing such can be mostly distilled in one point ‘to keep me disciplined’. But outside of just that I think it’s good to share experiences with others and it’s nice for me also to see what I write today in 12 months time and reflect on where I was and am now. I’d like to start doing monthly posts focused on my goals/achievements in relation to playing and studying. I have a couple of other things I might add in future but let’s start the bar low! I’ll give a summary as to where I started and where I am now in terms of poker. Going forward, it’ll be more focused on what I have accomplished in the 30 days prior and what I want to accomplish in the next 30 days. I may start doing the posts on an external website as I will be posting this in a few places but we shall see.
March 2020
I started playing online poker mostly at the start of the pandemic. I played a little prior to this but largely I started playing a lot during this time period. Watched a lot of streams, started joining communities and learning about the game. Despite best efforts my results were awful – pretty much a nose dive downward from $0 to -$1500. I was just donating $$$ to the micro pool, it was clear I had no understanding of fundamentals, at all.
September 2021
I had a mental reset and decided to play micro SNG MTT games, I had mostly been playing large field micro MTT games until this point. I came across a few good sources suggesting that SNG MTT games can be a good source of experience with really low variance so I decided to go that route. In addition to change in game selection, I joined BBZ, purchased a couple of bundles and charts, studied, learned the basics and it was pretty night and day as you can see:
You can pretty much pinpoint the day I switched mind set and games (the graph above misses some early volume before 2021 due to a name change on my PS account).
January 2022
I joined Mammoth Seminars which provided 5 seminars per week on theory/ICM/Multi-way/PKO. I continued to attend these while mostly grinding 18 Mans on Stars. Shortly after joining I got a GTO Wizard and HRC membership and that quickly became, alongside the seminars, the majority of my source of study.
July 2022
I was looking for 1-on-1 coaching and stumbled across a staking group, I spoke with the head coach there, applied and started to be staked. I continued to get coaching in the SnG MTT format until September 2022.
You can see that period of time was pretty lack luster in terms of results (lol sample) although it was nice to not be just donating to the pool.
September 2022
I started playing MTTs mainly due to the availability of higher ROIs in these games and also the SnG format quickly got stale and repetitive for me. I started at games up to $22, generally focusing on the $5-$11 range with the bb22/big22 sprinkled in. On average my buy in hovered around the $11 between September and December. I soon after added the $33 games and more recently now play the $44 and $55 buy ins too. Although, I tend to stick to playing the softest 44/55 at the moment.
This graph shows results from September 2022 (date I started playing MTT under stake) until now. We have made some progress, but hopefully just the start!
Future
I want to continue to study and play, improving and climbing the stakes. I will continue with my 1-on-1 coaching and group sessions with my stable and use GTO Wizard/HRC/GTO+ for studying on my own. I also have a study partner too. I recently had a very comprehensive database review (150+ pages of info to sort) which gives me some focus in terms of improvement. Once I have read, re-read and re-re-read the document, I am going to sort out a study plan to close these gaps in my game, some of which are very very basic but things easily missed. This will likely set me up for a 6 month+ study