NL100 or I quit poker

Originally posted by Incog
First of all, nice Blog u have here. Your commitment looks strong and I wish u the best. Keep up the good work.
Second ... I am just a fish in a pond, so keep that in mind :-P

Some Questions:

Do we really keep the betsizes preflop the same, if we play with antes (3x standard ... 2,5x in LP)?
OTF: You are IP and I think ur cbet-rate should be almost 95% here, no?
OTR: I see myself only calling here. U are deep and your Raise looks strong, but with his shove it is an easy laydown, no?

Hey,

Thanks for the nice comments

About the sizings, I would say that no one really knows. I don't think it's what would make one a winning or a losing player, I think it's a detail, but here's my take on this:

I actually I do 2.5x EP-CO and 2.7x BT (well, 2.75 if I can, but that's not possible at NL10).

2.5x because:
A lot of regs have a 3bet or fold approach, opening to 3x vs. them is bad. Playing pots OOP is bad, so I'd like to keep the pot smaller. I've seen NL500 regs doing 2x EP-CO and 2.5x BT, so making 2.5x is already an adjustment from my part.

2.7x BT because:
I will always be IP, and I want to play bigger pots IP. Vs 2.5x and antes, people call a lot as well, maybe more than they should, and because of the rake I am actually happy to take the pot PF uncontested. I find that 2.5x vs EP-CO is more respected than a 2.5x vs BT (even when you take into consideration the raising range).

Fell free to dismiss all that I am saying, I have never seen a GTO chart for the microstakes in ante games, it's just what I think is the right thing to do.

OTF: Yeah well I could cbet but I didn't think villain would have hands like K5s (which I think is quite a loose defend and contradicts what I said earlier), so before seeing the SD, I assumed that his range would connect decently well on a 98x board, and as a consequence I thought I should cbet polarized here. OTR: Yes, I agree with all that you said, it's just that in-game I managed to do 2 mistakes OTR ♦

Originally posted by Swish29

Originally posted by Incog
First of all, nice Blog u have here. Your commitment looks strong and I wish u the best. Keep up the good work.
Second ... I am just a fish in a pond, so keep that in mind :-P

Some Questions:

Do we really keep the betsizes preflop the same, if we play with antes (3x standard ... 2,5x in LP)?
OTF: You are IP and I think ur cbet-rate should be almost 95% here, no?
OTR: I see myself only calling here. U are deep and your Raise looks strong, but with his shove it is an easy laydown, no?

Hey,

Thanks for the nice comments

About the sizings, I would say that no one really knows. I don't think it's what would make one a winning or a losing player, I think it's a detail, but here's my take on this:

I actually I do 2.5x EP-CO and 2.7x BT (well, 2.75 if I can, but that's not possible at NL10).

2.5x because:
A lot of regs have a 3bet or fold approach, opening to 3x vs. them is bad. Playing pots OOP is bad, so I'd like to keep the pot smaller. I've seen NL500 regs doing 2x EP-CO and 2.5x BT, so making 2.5x is already an adjustment from my part.

2.7x BT because:
I will always be IP, and I want to play bigger pots IP. Vs 2.5x and antes, people call a lot as well, maybe more than they should, and because of the rake I am actually happy to take the pot PF uncontested. I find that 2.5x vs EP-CO is more respected than a 2.5x vs BT (even when you take into consideration the raising range).

Fell free to dismiss all that I am saying, I have never seen a GTO chart for the microstakes in ante games, it's just what I think is the right thing to do.

OTF: Yeah well I could cbet but I didn't think villain would have hands like K5s (which I think is quite a loose defend and contradicts what I said earlier), so before seeing the SD, I assumed that his range would connect decently well on a 98x board, and as a consequence I thought I should cbet polarized here. OTR: Yes, I agree with all that you said, it's just that in-game I managed to do 2 mistakes OTR ♦

ty for the detailed list for RFi. NL10 is gonn happen next year for me so I try to keep ur thoughts, which seems reasonable, in mind.

@OTR: We've all been there! :f_drink:. Spotting errors or tilt is the first step.
little side note: Since u close the action for sure on this hand, I really give myself the time on the river and think it through. ... This helped me alot in those situations ... (15 seconds later u start to feel that u are infact holding the "second best", and ur mood goes up as u push the fold button vs. his shove.

Well it's actually thinking about that caused the problem ♦ I wanted to raise/fold in-game (still a mistake), when villain 3bet all-in I started to think and talked myself into a call

Since last Monday, (day of my adjustments PF), I paid 105.42$ of rake in 8,936 hands, before that date, I paid 140.57$ in 12,415 hands (only NL10 antes), so now I paid 11.84bb/100 of rake vs. 11.33bb/100 before, absolutely not what I was expecting. One of the reasons I heard that 3bet or fold was good was because of the high rake, but maybe that's true at NL100 with a 5% rake and a cap at 2.5bb, but at NL10 it's 4.5% capped at 15bb, meaning it's better to play small pots at NL10 and bigger pots at NL100.

At NL10, cap is reached when the pot is 333.33BB, at NL100 when the pot is 50bb. Anyway it's not like a 3bet or fold strat will make it so that it's not possible to get out of the micros, and if it's better at NL100 then I am fine learning this approach asap.

I honestly don't know how to play/study enough poker to be competitive. I feel like I did poker related stuff close to the most I could this month, and I average 2h daily (and that's with 6h30 today - I have Mondays off until the end of the year, I had too much PTO left because of the Covid).

168h in a week, 45h for work + breaks, let's say 56h of sleep (8*7=56), that means I have 67h for everything else. That includes seeing friends/someone new in my life that I care about, reading, learning new interesting things (watch documentaries/listen to podcasts), do a workout 3x/week, watch videos about stuff I like, the time between waking up and getting read to work, eating, hygiene, meditation (now it's 1h weekly, but soon I want to make it 2) etc. I also really like to play video games and that's just not possible with poker.

It's not like I am a video game character that I manage, I cannot split the 67h I have in a week after work/sleep and perfectly allocate 20 for poker, x hours for friends (that's never consistent anyway), y hours for new person etc. Moreover, if I have a strict schedule like that it gets ruin the moment I have something exceptional to do. 20h weekly already seems pretty low for someone that wants to be competitive, and that would not even be 100% playing, I would have to study the game as well. Maybe there is something about managing time that I don't know? For instance, I am OK with unexpected expenses because I learned to manage my money, maybe I need to learn how to manage my time? Or perhaps, it is not needed to play 20h+ weekly at this game in order to be playing NL50+?

Edit: Also the work I have is challenging for me at least, and sometimes I wonder if it is healthy to work and play poker so much without either leisure.

Edit 2: Maybe I could try to do 50h monthly for a while and see how that goes.

Originally posted by Swish29
Goals for December:

a) Do poker stuff (play or study) for 100h, +/- 25h. Basically 75h if I am busy/have meaningful other things to do and 125h otherwise.
b) Track non-playing time properly
c) Read this post before every session
d) Say nothing rude in chat
e) Meditate every day
f) Stay at NL10 until I have all of my "To do" items in Done/Cancelled in my poker Kanban board* (basically a bunch of stuff/possible leaks I want to look at, and I should give it all a serious look. I may still be folding too much vs river cbets for instance, but that would be after I have proved to myself that it's an exploit vs the field, otherwise I should do aim to be GTO-ish). Even if I have the bankroll, I should stay at NL10 if there are still crucial items not done
g) No MTT, only CG Zoom
h) Continue with the videos on RIO
i) Every Monday, check the situation with my goals and see what needs adjustments

a) 15h, 6h of playing, 9h of studying. I ran ban/played bad/played too loose while being tired. I should not have played in the first place.
b) OK
c) Still not consistent with this, I think I need to have some sort of checklist before I start to play, which would include being honest about how I feel (cf. a)). The danger is that I may tell myself that I feel worse than I actually do and end up not playing. I am kind of fine with this; after all I don't play for a living so I should not beat up myself with that, at least I don't think it's a concern for now.
d) OK
e) OK - I started unguided meditation. Before that I was using the 9 mins guided meditation of Sam Harris on Youtube.

Now I'm doing unguided 10 mins of meditation, I will add 1 min per week until I reach 20 mins, so that should happen in late February.
f) OK
g) OK
h) OK - I watched a lot of videos this week so that's good. Membership is finished, I will work on PF raise/continue ranges for every position, 3bet/fold ranges for every position, BB defense vs 2.5x open vs every position. Of course, nothing that would be exactly GTO, it's mostly that I need to have solid PF ranges because if I don't pay attention to that, I will go back to playing 32/23 and that's not good, at least not at NL16 and it certainly would get worse the higher I play.
i) OK (well, Sunday after I'm done with poker is fine too)

I also decided that I will hide winnings in my report and look at results once a month. Even if one has a theoretical winrate that's very high, one will still lose 40% of the time or so over 1,000 hands, so for my sanity I really think I should not check results.

Originally posted by Swish29
Goals for December:

a) Do poker stuff (play or study) for 100h, +/- 25h. Basically 75h if I am busy/have meaningful other things to do and 125h otherwise.
b) Track non-playing time properly
c) Read this post before every session
d) Say nothing rude in chat
e) Meditate every day
f) Stay at NL10 until I have all of my "To do" items in Done/Cancelled in my poker Kanban board* (basically a bunch of stuff/possible leaks I want to look at, and I should give it all a serious look. I may still be folding too much vs river cbets for instance, but that would be after I have proved to myself that it's an exploit vs the field, otherwise I should do aim to be GTO-ish). Even if I have the bankroll, I should stay at NL10 if there are still crucial items not done
g) No MTT, only CG Zoom
h) Continue with the videos on RIO
i) Every Monday, check the situation with my goals and see what needs adjustments

a) Studied 10h, did quite tedious work, but I have solid PF ranges for about every frequent spot now. Started to comment on monteCarlol's session
b) OK
c) n/a - But follow-up of last week: I wrote a checklist of things to do before starting a session, and I hope to get furniture tomorrow so I declutter my desk and have a clean set up.
d) n/a (did not play, but I feel cured :))
e) Done (I meditated every day for a month today and I'm currently doing 11 mins of un-guided meditation)
f) Done
g) Done, I might burn 109$ in the 5M GTD on the 27th though, I don't want to look at results in January so I'll play NL10 for the whole month anyway.
h) n/a (done with membership)
i) Done

No more studying this month besides monteCarlol's video and the occasional HHs/Youtubers I like. I also plan to do close to no studying in January. I hid my results in my PT4 report and I am actually looking forward to play without checking my results

Best wishes for a very Merry Christmas,
VS

I did nothing this week, because I can't log in on PS for 10 days, this is quite a joke. No answer from support.

I am playing poker because I would like to make meaningful amounts of money (say at least 50% of what my salary is), but I think it's smarter to study things in order to get a job that pays 50% more (I got my first job as a software engineer in test last year, so I can definitely study at home and get better), so that will be my main focus in 2021, not sure if I will continue poker. I am thinking that playing 5h a week is not enough to stay competitive, and I after working 40h, and studying 10-20h, do I really want to play poker? Don't I want to read more books/spend more time with friends or girlfriend/play video games? Probably yes.

Obviously I would rather make 1.5x my salary now just by working, and not 1x my salary + 0.5x of my salary through poker while spending 20h on it weekly.

Originally posted by Swish29
I did nothing this week, because I can't log in on PS for 10 days, this is quite a joke. No answer from support.

Hey Swish29,
Check this thread:
https://forums.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?postid=3204944#post3204944

The instructions in there will help if you have a corrupted user.ini file.
Otherwise they won't help.

I also have a log-in problem (but only on mobile) and also no answer from support.

I suspect they are short-staffed

...wishing you the very best for a peaceful, prosperous 2021,
VS

Originally posted by Swish29
I did nothing this week, because I can't log in on PS for 10 days, this is quite a joke. No answer from support.

I am playing poker because I would like to make meaningful amounts of money (say at least 50% of what my salary is), but I think it's smarter to study things in order to get a job that pays 50% more (I got my first job as a software engineer in test last year, so I can definitely study at home and get better), so that will be my main focus in 2021, not sure if I will continue poker. I am thinking that playing 5h a week is not enough to stay competitive, and I after working 40h, and studying 10-20h, do I really want to play poker? Don't I want to read more books/spend more time with friends or girlfriend/play video games? Probably yes.

Obviously I would rather make 1.5x my salary now just by working, and not 1x my salary + 0.5x of my salary through poker while spending 20h on it weekly.

Very wierd of PS, to not even contact u.

@salary: I get your general drive to make enough money of poker to boost ur lifesryle, but I would
a) either not take it so seriously. Just keep grinding the hours u have and study aside. I think your mindset is to affected if u always think about money and needing to win.

or.

b) take it more seriously, and take really 2-3 Month of of work. And take your shot. This is better for ur mindset because u have only one thing to concentrate at.

just my 2 cents.

Keep up the good grind. good luck and happy new year, Swiss!