Blog: mjez Start from scratch

BR Challenge Update

Week: 20

Hands played: 3657
Profit: $-36.02
BR: $78.89

I'm still on the variance downswing. Plus, I still do a ton of mistakes.
This is really serious now, so I have to follow my BRM strictly again. I move back to NL2. No more excuses.
The great thing is I love poker even more than a year ago.
I'm going to focus on studying and grinding.

See you next week.

Did you ever consider switching to SNG? It's how I built my bankroll back up from nothing. It also helps to get away from cash sometimes and play a different format of NLHE.

I switched from SNG to cash.

I've been watching this Charlie Carrel's Talk at the University

He talked about a thought process in hand and how to simplify it. I like this approach so I share it here.

He said you should ask yourself two questions:

#1 What is your opponent's range - sometimes it's very difficult to know
#2 What are you going to do about it - how does your hand play in this process

He suggests not thinking about blockers or frequencies, it's too much info.

Wow! Two Hours and 20 minutes!
I've set it to watch later — perhaps when I'm grinding my 300 leaderboard hands.

For anyone who (like me) wondered who on earth Charlie Carrel might be, this will help...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Carrel

Thanks for posting that mjez1

Originally posted by mjez1
I've been watching this Charlie Carrel's Talk at the University

He talked about a thought process in hand and how to simplify it. I like this approach so I share it here.

He said you should ask yourself two questions:

#1 What is your opponent's range - sometimes it's very difficult to know
#2 What are you going to do about it - how does your hand play in this process

He suggests not thinking about blockers or frequencies, it's too much info.

He said a lot of stuff that is worth hearing — thanks for letting us know about him...
I finally made it through the whole thing — took me three days.

In return, I offer this Liv Boeree's lecture — also at Oxford Union

He said a lot of stuff that is worth hearing — thanks for letting us know about him...

Even though there is quite a lot of stuff I don't share the same opinion as Charlie does but I think we can get inspired and learn new things from anybody.
I'm glad you've found it worth it. True, it's a pretty long video.

In return, I offer this Liv Boeree's lecture — also at Oxford Union

Thank you for sharing

BR Challenge Update

Week: 21

Hands played: 4439
Profit: $+9.80
BR: $88.69

I've finally stopped losing. I didn't grind much in terms of hours last week due to the Christmas holidays.
I was playing only NL2 zoom so in a number of hands, it's similar to previous weeks.
I try to be more aggressive on the flop, it seems it works well.
Let's keep grinding and studying see you next week

Have a happy, amazing, and successful New Year!

Last week I realized how complex game poker is.
A lot of work ahead of me. I'm pumped

Originally posted by mjez1
Last week I realized how complex game poker is.
A lot of work ahead of me. I'm pumped
In many ways it is like chess — it is so easy to learn the basics of how to play, but much, much more difficult to get good

Originally posted by VorpalF2F
In many ways it is like chess — it is so easy to learn the basics of how to play, but much, much more difficult to get good

True. I knew that as a learned knowledge that poker is complex, but just recently I realized it fully with my own brain. I started to see it and feel it by myself.
It's like opening a brand new door and getting to know what's behind them. Exciting

IMO if you want to build your bankroll to move up a good option are the 1.50$, 3.50$ 9max Turbo and hyper sngs on stars.

They are really soft compared to zoom cash game, i tryed that out didnt play tournaments or sngs for 10 years, also i came back to poker like 1-2 years ago,
well its more like a tip, generating EV in those 9max turbo hyper sngs on 1.50 buy in or 3.50 is more easy than NL Foldem zoom cashgame i ended up playing 50 of those just trying it out noticing the player pool is fairly soft and weak. I ended up 40 $ +ev icm adjusted and 36 $ + for like 3-5 hours playing. And i didnt run that good or anything, its just the playerpool makes tons of mistakes.

And they are quite fun. Ofcourse you have to know what you are doing etc.... and variance might be quite high, but if i would build bankroll with 60-100 $ i would just spamm 1.50 sngs then move up to 3.50 sngs the hypers and turbo ones.

Thank you for your suggestion, but I did play sngs and it didn't work for me. I think I was break-even, though. I didn't study much at that time.
I played rather for fun, actually.
Now I have a good resource for studying cash games and it works better for my current situation. Sometimes I need to unexpectedly end my session, for that reason cash works for me better.

Now, I don't even have a roll for $1.50, I think a safe bankroll for sngs is like 100 buy-ins.

For those who have a good BR at their stakes, I can recommend hiding your balance and checking it once a week.

It's liberating

The recent plateau on the all-time graph.

:f_grin::f_love::f_wink::f_cool::f_biggrin::f_drink::f_thumbsup:

Pokerstrategy Equilab has an Equity Trainer. Put there your and villain's range and see how good you are in estimating equities.
I currently train HJ vs UTG.
Have fun as I have

Then you can see your final results and try to be better next time.

Podcast recommendation:
I enjoyed these two very much.

David Reichelt - mobile game creator who generated over $75 million in revenue

MMAsherdog on the best poker players and how to improve at poker
I'm going to even re-listen this one.

I've reached BR $100 so I am going to take a bit more aggressive BRM and take a shot at NL5. If I lose 2 buy-ins I move down.

I'm going to write a more informative post soon.

Happy grinding all