My poker journey...the next step (Nl400 and beyond) ***update 5 years later

Sorry about your downswing, I lost 14BI last 2 days myself. Sucks! Keep on grinding though;)

@Sasa- Thanks for the solid advice I definitely agree with playing less tables, right now I'm limiting myself to 6 (if I go under that I get really bored, so it's not a good idea).

@Snodreliss- Thanks, I'm sure we'll both bounce back in no time, swings are part normal for winning players anyways!

I just got back from a weekends spend skiing/snow-shoeing with my girlfriend and a couple of other friends. It had been planned for months, and it really ended up being at a good time for me in terms of poker. I feel completely remotivated and excited about playing again after taking a little break and relaxing.

Before leaving on my vacation I played another hour and dropped 1-2BI I think. Today I played my first session back and made about 1.5BI. I feel like I thought about all my decisions well and played to the best of my abilities. I did play a little tight and didn't make any big moves since it was my first day back. Tomorrow I plan on attacking the tables a little more!

BR- $19 760

Since my last update I'm up a couple BI SH. I also played a session of heads-up, which went well, up about 1.5BI from a reg who I found very tight/predictable. I think I’ll be playing HU from time to time from now on. It’s a nice change of pace when I’m tired of SH and it should definitely help my game overall. I’ve also been watching a ton of video’s and thinking a lot about my game this month. I’m definitely still making technical errors while I play, which I’m working on.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about my mentality, specifically during larger swings (up and down). What I’ve realized is that I was/am according too much importance to results on the short term. When I win or lose 5k+ I have a bit of trouble not changing my mindset. Because of this I get way too frustrated every time I start loosing and way too excited when I start winning. Both of these extremes cause me to think less rationally while playing and therefore decrease my expected earnings on the longterm. I’m working on this and I think that I’ve really improved my outlook now that I’ve realized the problem. I’m sure this is something that I’ll continue to think about/improve on.

For the rest of the month I’m going to play only when I feel like it (I’ll probably feel like it a lot ) and make sure poker isn't affecting my mood. After all, I should keep poker in perspective…I started playing because it's a fun challenge, and I should never loose sight of that!

Cheers,
Georg

BR- $22 045

I played another session of SH yesterday up a little over 4BI. I ran very well and thing I played alright, although still tighter than I'd like preflop.

Today I didn't feel like grinding SH so I decided to play a couple of HU sessions up about 800$ (not sure for BI because I played some 0.5/1, 1/2 and 2/4). Right now I'm playing max 2 tables at a time and really concentrating on my game. Unfortunately there are very few HU tables that run at Lads, so I'll need to change sites if I ever decide to play more of this format. For now I'm just going to play it from time to time when I'm not feeling SH, but who knows in the future.

1 other annoying thing is that a lot of players know that I'm a reg at Nl400 SH and therefore won't play me HU. I find this kind of funny because at this moment I'm sure I don't have an edge on a Nl400 HU reg...I mean I have played like 3 sessions in my life so far I personally don't mind playing other regs because that's how you improve...if I want to eventually venture to higher limits, then I need to have an edge on the average reg at the limit I'm currently at first. Not that I'll pass up an easy money game with a fish either obv. ♦

I'm finding it really fun thinking through all the different situations HU puts you in. It really is great to work on your ability to adapt to your opponent which is obviously the single most important skill in poker!

BR- $24 965

Really nice blog!
I have read both of it and it is really inspiring. Because of that i switched back to play more cash since i was more of a MTT player.
I guess i need to start a blog myself. I am playing NL50SH in FT now and I am thinking to make a deposit in Lads. I am not sure if a make 1K deposit whether i can make the points to clear it. Do you think it is ok if i start there NL50SH with 20BI bankroll? How are the players?
GL and keep it up!

@bah- Thanks! I'd assume the level of play is really low at Nl50, although I started at Nl100 on Lads so I've never played that limit. I'd say a 20BI bankroll isn't nearly enough though. I've been using a 40BI rule for moving up ever since Nl50. The reason is that it's so easy to hit a 10-15BI downswing especially when you move up limits and are probably making mistakes.

I haven't been playing much lately, and I won't been playing much either for the next 2-3 weeks due to other commitments. I'll play from time to time but no grinding so I'll probably just update this blog 1-2 a week. I must admit that I'm ready for a little break as well, so it's nice that I'm busy with other things anyways.

I'll be back grinding after for sure though, refreshed and ready to dominate the tables ♦

Cheers!

Why you still have a full-time job :)?

I know my question is a bit offtopic, but since u play on Lads i figured you can help me out. How do I get HEM to import the hands, cuz i can't find the folder where the client saves em.
Oh, and on topic, keep up the good work. Cheers.

update?

gggeorgio! I've been following your blog, it's really interesting, and i see that you have lots of dedication to be where you're right now, which makes me wanna ask you some questions.

#1: how much time have you dedicated to study? A roughly estimate is enough :). Do you have a particular method to study the strategies?. Buy books? or just with the PS material has been enough for you.

#2: How do you deal with having a girlfriend, and other obligations.. this question i ask, specifically because i'm in your same situation and i would like to hear some advice regarding how to organize my time to be able to study Poker to get to a higher level.

I don't play No Limit so i can't get any advice there ( I would love to ask you some technical questions about your play, but right now it would be useless). I wanted to build first a solid foundation with Fixed Limit and then try to move to No Limit, but this is not the time yet for me to move

Thanks a lot man.

I come from the spanish community by the way, so i excuse myself if i made some mistakes while writing this post

hey soulandbone. I'll try to answer a couple of your questions.

1) I think I study something like 1/3-1/4 of the total time I spend on poker, but I'm not really sure because I don't count it out. By far my favorite kind of study is video's because you can learn so much from someone explaining their own thought processes.

Studying is definitely important, but I believe that what you're thinking about while you're playing is just as important (and quite underrated). You can easily play hours and hours of poker just coasting along making the same decisions over and over again without improving at all. On the other hand you could be thinking about why you make each decision and evaluating if it was the correct one. In this sense you end up 'studying' at the while you're playing.

2) My answer is pretty simple for this. I try to only play poker in my free time. So that means I only play/study when I don't have plan with my girlfriend and don't have 'real work' obligations.

Hope that answered your questions.

I haven't updated lately because I've literally played 0 poker in the last 2-3weeks. I went on a work trip for 2 weeks and didn't even have regular access to the internet. Right now I'm looking at changing to pokerstars and am almost 100% sure that I'm going to do it... the only downside is that my account isn't tracked to pokerstrategy. My plan is to cash out everything over 16k (about 7k right now) so that I feel a little safer knowing that I can't loose all my hard work if my account was hacked or something like that. I'll then transfer the rest to pokerstars and start there with 40BI at Nl400.

If everything works out I should be ready to grind it out for the start of April. The main reason I'm changing is because of the amount of traffic. The other reason is that I didn't think I could get much rakeback through the pokerstars bonus system, but when I looked closer at it, it actually is pretty good once you get to supernova.

I'm not sure when I'll update again, but until then, GL at the tables everyone!

update pweease

Hi everyone,

It's been about 6 months since I updated this blog and I'd like to get things rolling again! I'm not too sure why I decided to stop updating... but it probably had something to do with the fact that I focused a lot on other aspects of my life in the past months and have therefore played less poker. I never really stopped though and played a good amount of SH Nl200/400 on pokerstars as well as a lot of MTT's between 50-200$ BI. The MTT's went great and I made something like 14k during a month and a bit. SH was basically the opposite...I played like shit for about a month not really thinking about how to improve and it showed as about 7k down. The two together though still made for some decent money and I can now say that I made 30k starting from 50$ in one year. (all my progress can be seen in my first blog 'My poker journey...maybe this time I can get it right')

Right now I have an 18.5k roll on PS and plan on really focusing on my Nl400 SH game. I think I've improved myself a lot over the past few weeks and my style has really changed since I started playing this limit back at Ladbrokes. I also feel that the games are a bit tougher than they were half a year ago...but luckily so am I

I'm going to try and make monthly goals like I did before to help me stay relatively focused but my main goal is a little personal challenge that I'd like to try and achieve by the end of the year. My goal is to play 200k hands 6-8tabling at Nl400 with the best possible win rate. Obviously it's quite a bit of volume (65k/month or about 30hours a week) considering I have a normal job, but I don't think it's too much because I've really never seen poker as work...it's way too much fun! The reason I'm making this goal is because I feel like profitable poker might not be around forever (and my lifestyle might not always have time for it) so it would suck to waste a great opportunity to do something that's fun and make a bunch of money at the same time.

I did some calculations and if I could play 200k hands at 1 ptb/100hands at Nl400 = 16k as well as something like 6k bonuses (my only rakeback is the pokerstars VIP system). In total this would be 22k in 3months. 1ptb is a pretty bad winrate, so if for instance I was able to average 1.5 ptb/100hands at Nl400 = 24k + 6k (bonus) = 30k total.

I'm going to make my goal 20k total profit from now until the end of the year because I know that the calculation make it look so easy to make money, but in reality there are very few players that can average high winrates over large hand volume. I think the key to having a goal like this is knowing that the emphasis needs to always be on always IMPROVING your game and not just on playing tons... because I'm sure I'd have no trouble playing 200k hands break-even, but then what would that get me.

Anyways, I think I've rambled enough for one post. I'll probably post short updates after most days that I play (so most days ♦), and I'll post some smaller goals at the start of each month as well.

GL everyone!
Georg

Nice to see an update... was wondering what happened... GL and look forward to seeing your progress!

bookmarked GL and I hope you can show us a bit of your play in the future. By the way what's your screen name on stars ?

Nice insights and goals.

Goodluck.

Day 1: Sunday Sept 28
Played 3.8k hands and lost 6.5 BI. Obviously I'm not thrilled to start with a loss, but I'm actually pretty happy with the way I played and I was able to put in quite a bit of volume (I've very rarerly grinded more than 4k hands in a day). I'm confident that I never tilted and played the best I could throughout.

The only thing that I'm not sure about is if the quality of my play when downhill a bit near the end of the day due to fatigue. I'll have to monitor this pretty closely considering I've never put in as much volume as I plan on doing in the next 3 months. I think the obvious solutions are to take relatively frequent breaks on big days and to only play 6 tables when I'm feeling fatigued or slightly frustrated.

I'm working my normal job all day today, so I won't get a chance to put in more play time until tommorow.

@justkyle88,roswellx,nickparkes: GL to you guys as well! My screen name is gggeorgio on stars as well.

Oh u'r back again
I'm glad that u haven't retired yet, your blog was one of the best.
gl at the tables ♦

Day 2: Monday Sept 29
Played 1.7k hands today just under break even. I think I played relatively well. I had a little trouble staying possitive a couple of times in the session as I started off droping 2 buy-ins then later ran AK into AA and KK for full stacks each time pretty close together in spots where I would never fold preflop. That being said, I definitely didn't tilt at all while playing and managed to make my money back in other spots.

I think I played a little tighter and made a few less moves than I'd have liked, maybe due to losing yesterday. I felt like I hand read well and didn't spew much, which can be a problem for me. I did spew one spot however in a 250bb pot where I called down a winning regular's shove over my bet on the river ... I totally leveled myself into thinking that he know, that I knew that he knew... )

Since I can still play pretty well while losing, I guess that means that once I start winning I'll be playing gggggrrrrreat ...I do have a lot of leaks to plug for sure though!

total challenge: 5.5k hands, -2.7k $

edit* GL you to sasa.

hey sir!

gl with your challenge.

i reently joined pokerstars and also played some k hands 400sh vs u. i think your preflop game is perfectly fine and most of the time i leave the table/seat when u have direct pos on me. i think you have some postflop "leaks" (but well, everybody has leaks, so no big deal) and i dont mind playing you if i have pos

ofc i cant tell u what i think u can do better, cuz we might play a lot vs each other now that i 12 table 400sh stars (2.5ptbb atm, not sure whats achievable)

since my hourly 12 tabling is higher than 4-6 tabling 1k, i will stay here some more time

cya @ the tables