FINISHED - Growing Bankroll: Let's make 1k

I played two sessions (today and yesterday) and at first the sessions started pretty good, yesterday I lost a few dollars and after reviewing the session I noticed that I really need to call more cbets, that was my biggest mistake, my redline just crashed yesterday, -30BB/100.

So I adjusted that today and I really found that the population tendecy of NL5 is barreling flop and turn with a whole broad selection and don't barrel the river cause then they got scared, so that improved my winrate, however I have a new spot which in general should be one of the most profitable situations in poker but I seem to lose money in these spots last 2 weeks (sample size 31 hands), the spot is flopping a set...

First the winning hands:

Then you have situations like these, which makes the micros super profitable:

So the problem with winning hands is winning quite small pots (only 6% over 100 BB pot).

The losing hands:

Here I also have 2 examples:

And the last situation (more occuring than previous one):

The problem is that all these small pocket pairs only hit their set 12% of the time, so every time I don't hit I have a small loss as well (except when the PFR is passive), so with those 88% ~3BB losses and then 12% not even winning that much, I don't know if I can still profitably call all those pocket pairs or if I should scrap out some of them, for example if I go 66+ then situations like that first losing hand will occur less frequently, however if you look at the second winning hand I do think that they can be called profitably as people overvalue TPGK hands a lot.

Nice blog! I just started grinding NL2 myself! You're graphs show you're playing super well ♦ GLGL

It feels like most of my showdown winnings come from sets as well.

Thanks for the comment!

Week 12
This week was not so good resultwise again... I don't feel like I played terribly although I know about 5 hands were I made clear mistakes, 3 times calling way to light and twice betting without a reason, the worst example below:

Also found the first Tilt call:

Graph:

Which explains enough, I think that especially the first 2k hands I played really bad, after that I was getting unlucky at showdown a lot, my blue line was even below 0 at one point.

The biggest difference I find right now and when I was crushing is that people aren't calling me at the same rate any more when I have something big, maybe because I am playing like 1pm mostly nowadays instead of 9pm...

Hands: 4392
Starting bankroll: $62
Bankroll last week: $192
Current bankroll: $175
Profit/loss this week: $17
Profit/loss total: $113

I have just withdrawn my entire BR, will be transferring it to 888 I think, stars was fun while it lasted but it is time to test other rooms now!
Probably no volume this week. As it may take some time for the money to arrive (my starting money already arrived but all my winnings are 'pending').

I am also gonna add an aditional 45 euros to my starting bankroll as the soccer season has ended and I have no sports bets to make anymore, those 45 euros are what is left of my HeadsUp winnings after I did some sports bets, if I don't use it, it will just be in my skrill account, without any use, so I think this is the best option. Ofcourse I will add an aditional 45 euros (or 50 dollars) to my goal as well.

I am quite happy to leave pokerstars as the game has been quite tough lately at NL5, really weird how people get that much more aggressive! Hope it's better at 888!

Bankroll right now: €191 (or $213) (made a loss again this week).

I feel like this change is neccesairy as I have been losing for more than a month now, I abandoned the last 15$ of my bonus and I am left with about 650 starcoins at stars, so when I come back I will get some early rakeback (or I might play some MTT with starcoins as buyin).

Ready to start fresh! With better play, less mistakes and I will see if I can start winning again.

Week 13

Low volume week!

Hardest hand:

Resultwise it went okay, lost a bit of money on the tables at 888 but all the new depositor promotion stuff results in a $5 win over the week. Also I think I played really well this week even though it were only 1k hands, I have the feeling that I get to exploit the population a lot better lately!

So far I have played about 500 hands regular tables at 888 and 500 hands of snap, I am winning at the regular tables and losing at the snap tables but I think it is just a sample size thing as so far the field looks really soft at the snap tables, I think snap is more profitable then regular at 888. But I have only played in the weekend this week.

Graph

Previous BR: 200$
Current BR: 205$
Hands: 121

They took some money off me with wrong exchange rates, clever but okay... So I started with 200$ instead of 210$ :(. My goal has changed from $1000 to $1050 to take care of the extra 40$ in my BR.

Think folding should be okay with that hand. Like you said everything gets there and I think he's going to be very Kx, sets and one pair heavy and I think most one pair hands are going to check back river most of the time. So I agree that he's probably going to have you beat here most of the time when he bets. Question is then of course if he's bad enough to call with something like 98s if you were to bet river. You probably don't have this information on him after 11 hands so I'd say your play is safest.

Nice progress so far sir, will be following

How is combining uni and poker treating you so far? Asking because I'm in the same boat, would be interesting to hear how you deal with it

Originally posted by TJtheTJ
Think folding should be okay with that hand. Like you said everything gets there and I think he's going to be very Kx, sets and one pair heavy and I think most one pair hands are going to check back river most of the time. So I agree that he's probably going to have you beat here most of the time when he bets. Question is then of course if he's bad enough to call with something like 98s if you were to bet river. You probably don't have this information on him after 11 hands so I'd say your play is safest.

Nice progress so far sir, will be following

How is combining uni and poker treating you so far? Asking because I'm in the same boat, would be interesting to hear how you deal with it

Thanks! Combining is hard ofcourse, because university takes a lot of time... But so far I think I can put about 10-15h/week in poker, and that divides half study half playing, so not much volume most weeks, but I do have the feeling that I am getting better (even though the results tell me otherwise, but I think I was just on a heater when I just started first 10k hands).

The hard thing is that making lots of progress is difficult, because your short on time, but the good thing is that there is no pressure. The only goal is to run it up, I don't need to pay anything from my poker money etc. so I am free to play and therefore losing isn't a disaster. I saw in your blog that you are from the netherlands as well, so it must be very similar to you!

WEEK 14 Return of the green

This week was my biggest winning week ever, like the entire month may where I lost some money is all made up for in 1 week.

I felt very confident on my cash games, happy folding, happy bluffing and happy value betting, had very little tough spots etc. was a very relaxing pokerweek for me for sure! The only bad thing was the start, I got boat over boat, then I lost an all-in to a nine outer and then I had one tilt all-in because I had trips on a wet board against the player that just boat over boated me. After that tilt all-in call I decided to quit for the day and that was a very good desicion.

Results:

After that I ran very well and made all the right calls and raises! Pretty nice feeling to be back on the winning track.

BUT I also played lots of those promotional pyramid free rolls and I got a very +EV blast promotion. So I could play about 20 blast tournaments for the price of 8, very +EV even after you consider the 10% rake. I cashed in a lot of them, like above average often, I final tabled one of the $500 pharaoh for $10, I got deep in the Ramses $10k for $5 and got lots of 1 dollar cashes which add up eventually.

I will include a graph, but the actual results are even better because the graph doesn't understand that almost all of the blast tickets were free:

I didn't include any additional stats because I don't understand them.

Because I was doing so good in all the freerolls I also decided to play one $1 tournament, I didn't cash in it but I got a feeling of the player field and it felt sooo much softer than people in the cash games. I will include an example hand:

888 Poker - 200/400 Ante 50 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

CO: 13.23 BB (VPIP: 19.44, PFR: 9.38, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 36)
BTN: 23.68 BB (VPIP: 31.82, PFR: 18.75, 3Bet Preflop: 9.52, Hands: 67)
SB: 9.05 BB (VPIP: 20.90, PFR: 9.23, 3Bet Preflop: 5.00, Hands: 67)
Hero (BB): 20.66 BB
UTG: 30.38 BB (VPIP: 29.55, PFR: 25.58, 3Bet Preflop: 13.33, Hands: 44)
MP: 15.5 BB (VPIP: 14.71, PFR: 9.68, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 34)

6 players post ante of 0.13 BB, SB posts SB 0.5 BB, Hero posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.25 BB) Hero has 8♦ 9♥

fold, fold, fold, fold, SB calls 0.5 BB, Hero checks

Flop: (2.75 BB, 2 players) 7♦ T♣ T♠
SB bets 1 BB, Hero calls 1 BB

Turn: (4.75 BB, 2 players) 5♣
SB bets 2 BB, Hero raises to 18.54 BB and is all-in, SB calls 4.93 BB and is all-in

River: (18.61 BB, 2 players) 3♦

Ofcourse it is a bad line by me, but I wouldn't expect a call with that, I also remember one person raising for 80% of his stack then folding to a shove preflop.... I might consider playing some more tournaments if people are really like this!

But for now the focus will be on cash games.

Total results:
Hands: 2474
Bankroll: $271
Bankroll last week: $205

I will move up to NL10 for 5 buy ins, I expect that I will be able to go positive there, but we shall see. Will move down again below 220$

Last thing, I got an additional starting offer from Pokerstrategy so I know also play at Ladbrokes and I ran my stack up to 23 euro's so far! I will be playing some NL4 and NL5 there. I won't include any winnings from that site to my results yet, but when I reach 50€ I consider it a 'real part of my bankroll' and I will include it in my challenge. For now it is too volatile to consider it part of my bankroll as it is gone in 4 bad beats/coolers/bad bluffs/stupid calls.

So far at NL10

So I've been playing exactly 1k hands at the new limit so far and so far I am down 40 big blinds... But EV is down 220 BB, so am running good.

The start of the week was hard, as I was not comfortable with the money yet, looking back I didn't 3bet at spots I would normally 3bet etc, I had a flopraise cbet stat of 1 percent after the first 300 hands, which made me way to passive, but since yesterday I feel like i am getting comfortable with the money. (As a comparison, with my other Jobs my hourly is slightly more then $10 so from here on out the money really starts to mean something to me), today I launched my first 4bet bluff so I think I am finally ready to go and show my skills to those NL10 regs.

However it is really weird, I made lots of mistakes that have (almost) nothing to do with my gameplan and I already lost 15$ to it... Twice I clicked my half pot standard open raise size blindly, missing that the pot was already 3bet... So I put 2 dollar in the pot just to fold to a shove...

The one that costed me the most was a really stupid mistake, I open KQs from the smallblind and I flop a nut-gutshot on a wet board, there are 47 cents in the pot and I look to the BB, seeing that he only has 36 cents left, no way I am folding this, so let's take maximum folding equity, shove all-in. He calls, has Aces up and I lose. After the session I see that I lost way more than I expected, thought I was about 8 dollars up in the session, but I actually was 3 dollars down, so I go through pokertracker to see where I lost the money... And I see that I lost 11 dollars in this hand, because the guy didn't have 36 cents, he had 36 dollars... Really bad mistake on my part and I am happy for that guy to get such an gift while having aces up.

Anyway I lost a bit this week but still I am very happy with the progress I made, I think I can become a NL10 reg this shot and otherwise next shot, still have plenty to play with this shot however.

Week 15

After last post wasn't able to play much, only played 300 hands more, was away the entire weekend for sports tournaments etc.

Hands: 1308
Bankroll: $265
Bankroll last week: $271

Still got lots of room to take this shot and I am really confident that I will make it, the only thing that might keep me back is the rake, it is huge!!!
I raked 11.83$ in 1308 hands which amounts to 9 bb/100, but then again the rake won't get much better untill about NL50.

Right now I am raking exactly 5% (which is better than at NL5), but the cap is 4$ (aka 40BB)

So at 888poker I only reach the cap when the pot is 800BB. This will get lots better because the cap and the percentages won't change untill NL200, so for example at NL50 the cap is still 4$ but then it is only 8BB, so the cap is reached when the pot is only 160BB, much more reasonable.

So basically right now untill NL50 I am playing effectively with uncapped rake.

Let's hope the graph will go up, or at least I won't lose my 45$ to this shot.

Week 16

Again not much volume on the tables this week.

Results
Hands: 1690
Bankroll: $271
Bankroll last week: $265

I'm back where I started, I was up a whole lot mid-week. But after the 800 hand mark I just kept missing all the flops. My red-line was up 100 for the first 800 hands, but 800 hands later it is 100 down instead.

This week I played one big tournament again, and right now I'm really in doubt between two things:

Option A:
Keep grinding, make bucks, complete the challenge.

Option B:
Start playing more formats, MTT and cash, make bucks, complete the challenge.

I know that option A is probably the quickest way to succes, but option B has some merit to it as well, people at MTT's are just so much worse than people at cash games, so I feel like I can get a real big edge on those players if I just study tournament poker a bit, I even feel like I have a big edge on them now. As you can see in my volume, I am not getting in the hands I want to, not because I don't have time, this week I had all the time of the world, but just because I can't play long session at cash games, my longest session ever (in those entire 16 weeks) has been just over one hour, I am not a grinder.

So what I decided now are two things:

1 - Play 3 1$ dollar tournament this week
I wanna see if those bad players where just 'variance' or something that just happens in MTT's on a regular basis, I chose to play 3 one dollar tournaments because those three dollars are insignificant to my BR, so it won't matter when I don't cash in any of them (which will most probably happen).

2 - Play 2 sessions this week that are 1.5 - 2 hours
If I will ever be a regular grinding I got to learn to grind for longer periods of time. Right now what stops me most has been breaking tables, which happens too much, I might just play ZOOM (snap) poker to not have to worry about that problem anymore.

Finally my learning goals:
- Finish the Redline series this week (2 video's left)
- Attend lemon's live coaching (as usual)
- Watch one tournament related video

After I finished the redline series I will check what I want to improve the most, and find videos about that topic.

It's almost summer which will give me a lot more time to study poker related things, so I might as well find out these weeks what I want to progress in.

I was really trying to get a good and long session in but sometimes you just hit your stop loss...

I am so much down this week already, now the mental game will become a problem, because to regrind this amount of money will take such a long time with a winrate of about 5BB/100.

The worst part is, I played very solid, only problem is I never won at showdown, and I don't think I made a single overplay or bad call... This downswing comes at a very bad timing because I was really hoping to become a NL10 regular, just to see my hopes get smaller and smaller...

Summary of the hands:

Brutal start of the week, it sucks that I will likely have to move down...

Week 17

To come back at the monday message:

I felt really bad after the session, right after posting the message about the brutal session I had to leave the house to follow a course in teaching sports, while cycling there I really had to calm myself, it helped that I wrote about it already so my frustrations where on paper, but after the course I was completely zen again. I decided to go down to NL5 again and regrind my stack up to 260$. I was really proud at my mental game!

The results came for themselves (monday is included in this graph):

The funny thing about the graph is that all the parts that go down are on NL10 and all the parts that go up are on NL5.

So about the goals I set myself... I played one 1$ tournament and redeemed my gold tokens for 2 3$ tickets (for 5$ worth of gold tokens). I cashed in one of them for 6$, however I found out that if I really want to be profitable at tournaments I do actually need to learn more about it. So far I've busted early game everytime, but early game is like the part the cash game players are supposed to be profitable in, so that might be why it felt easy. However in the tournament I cashed I played really well early game, got 3x starting stack and was in 30th place (56 cash) but then the bubble came, my chances of winning the tournament went down every hand with the bubble because I really didn't know how to play there, lots of improvement to be had there.

I played one 90 minutes session. But couldn't get a second one in. But I just find it hard to find time for long sessions, there are almost no days in the week I can take 2 hours straight off to play some games and when I do find time I am usually tired from one of the following: 'sports/teaching sports/university/learning'.

I did however reach all my learning goals (although I was late in the coaching).

Further a friend of mine who knows I am into poker recommended a sports betting program that indentifies value bets and I decided to risk max 100$ of my bankroll and all the money I got at ladbrokes to do a one week trial. It went really well, my 'closing EV' was +4% and I was running a bit hot with a total ROI of +8% on a total turnover of 250$ (in 200 bets). However the trial ended and the program is quite expensive so it was fun while it lasted and it helped me recover my bankroll a bit! It would be nice to show my graph and ev graph here however as soon as the trial ended I couldn't get it anymore...

Results Week 17
Hands 1767
Bankroll last week $271
Bankroll this week $276

For the cash games:

I will stay at NL5 for three more days due to finals (exams) at my university, after that I will take another NL10 shot, more confident and less scared than last time!

Week 19

NL10 still not treating me well.

Hands: 1408
Bankroll: 241
Bankroll last week: 271

I played NL5 for the first 200 hands, the main difference I see between NL5 and NL10 is the postflop aggresivity. My bad results are a product of both losing some pots you are supposed to win (lost a 3 way all in with 70 percent equity, which really hurts the EV - reality difference), but the main factor seems to be the marginal spots I don't encounter as often on lower limits.

Examples:
- With medium pocket pairs TT, JJ etc. I have the biggest difference in winrate, the main reason for this seems to be that when I get 3bet with those hands I seem to don't know what to do (I mostly call and then screw up postflop as they are hard as hell to play postflop in a 3-way pot).
- When I open a non-premium high card hand like AJ and get called, then squeezed by a reg, this happens about 3 times as often so far on NL10 and I know that they are doing it light, just haven't found the appropiate reaction yet (call seems bad, so need to find out if folding or 4bet-folding is better, the second option is what I've been doing so far, but that doesn't work out yet)

I decided that I am gonna quit the challenge playing cash games...

It was fun while it lasted but I find myself not just wanting to play enough. Each week I have a 'reason' why I have under 2k hands, but last two weeks I am completely free and still didn't play a healthy volume.

I am still gonna play some cash games but I think I will slowly switch to tournaments as I really do enjoy them more and I know that players in tournaments are so much worse than CG players (plus I am kind of a gambler, but I like to gamble with an edge and in cash games you just lose too much when getting it in with anything else than AA preflop).

I think that it is a big step for me to really change what I play, because when I started I just started playing cash games, I had no big reason I just thought that I would like that the most, but slowly I found myself more interested in tournament videos etc. and I think that allthough I will have lots to learn on the formats, it will be better long-term as having fun (or liking what you're playing) should be a top priority.

It was a succesfull journey I think!

Summary
In the beginning I started with 15 euro's on unibet, I played some poker and did some sportsbet and grinded it up to about 55 euro's, after a lot of playing poker and some more sports betting (with an edge ofcourse) it now is 240 dollars (plus 30 euros on ladbrokes right now).
So I turned 15 euros into 240 dollars and I am really proud of it.

Let's see if I can be as succesfull in tournaments. Starting this week!
(I will sometimes leave an update in this blog ofcourse!)

I now have a total of exactly 235 dollars and 30 euros, so I think I will start playing 1 euro's with the occasional 3 euro tournament.

As promised I would occasionally give an update:

In the summer I've tried to play tournaments for 2 days a week, as they can get quite long 2 days seemed enough to me, however I realized that everytime I felt like I just wanted to bust because it wasn't worth my time anymore, I really couldn't play 4 hours to win or lose 1$... So after 2 or 3 weeks I quitted having only played about 30 tourneys with biggest win 12$ in a 45-man (I think it was 2nd or 3rd), overall I lost about 10$ those weeks.

After that I decided to take a break, it didn't seem like I enjoyed myself any more. But than I realized that I've had some bad luck with the eur/dollar. When I first started I deposited 45$ at a rate of 1.08 eur/usd, I cashed out 185$ at the rate of 1.18eur/usd which means that I lost like 10% due to forex, bummer.

But when college started again I felt like I could play for 1 hour a day (in the summer I just went to beaches etc. a lot, so I was either not home or too tired, when college starts it's supposed to take a lot of time, but I'm quite a quick learner so I have some spare time mostly between 12.00pm and 15.00pm).

So I have been playing for between 0.75 and 1.25 hours a day last two weeks and I really start to enjoy it again. I play on a site that is exactly what I look for in poker, Unibet, I like it because HUDs are not allowed and seating is random, I think I am better whithout looking at stats, but then again I feel like I have to use a HUD on pokerstars etc. because everybody is using one, the random seating is perfect because I don't have time to search for the most profitable table and because on Unibet nobody is allowed to do that I don't feel like I'm on a disadvantage for that reason anymore. I think that those two are really the difference for me that I finally do enjoy poker again, I like the game, I just don't like the fish-hunting and stat-exploiting. If you are at a poker table and you have a fish on your table you are gonna notice anyway with or without hud.

Only disadvantage is that I can't track my progress accurately, I try to with a excel sheet, but I can't export my hand history.

So far I am doing very well. Deposited 45€ again and started playing 4NL (untill I have 260€ for BR-management) and I have been winning with 30BB/100 for the first 2700 hand (again the hands and the winrate are a guess, the only fact is the total profit which is €36.86, the amount of hands is calculated by multiplying time played with the amount of tables played and a guess of the hands per hour per table).

I am not gonna keep a blog again, as I can't share hands or graphs (except for my excel graph but that doesn't show much), but I will blog when I hit milestones like the €100 etc.

Blog Job

Because of the blog job I will start updating again.

I will be posting mostly general results (I will post my excel sheet where I summarize each session, and the resulting graph), also I will be trying to get my hands on the october Unibet €3000,- freeroll, so I will be trying to complete the missions at the same time. (So I will be playing all sorts of formats, but mostly cash games).

GOALS:
- Play 2500 hands/week
- Complete all october missions for the freeroll
- Maintain a winrate > 15BB/100 hands

So the overall goal is to win at least 60€ at NL4 playing 4-6 tables for 2500hands/week.

I will be starting at 1 october, so that's when I will anounce my starting balance.

Good luck to all readers.
Greetings,
Tim

START - OCTOBER WEEK 1 - start

September has been the most profitable month for me ever, everything seems to be going well for me since the restart.
Here are my september stats:

Which are amazing!

The graph looking like this:

[Note: x-axis is not lineair, don't know how to fix it in excel :()

I also won the two tickets to the freerolls this month so I will be playing those tonight, it was very +EV to get those tickets, (the first one, the €1000 freeroll plays like an €1.50 tourney, the €3000 one almost like an €10,- buy-in), the missions I had to complete didn't really mean I had to give up EV, the only negative was that it was very high variance (banzai is all-in everyhand you play, tourneys are higher variance than cash games).

Starting BR = 103€, So will be aiming to hit the €160, by the end of the month.

BLOG JOB - WEEK 1 UPDATE 1

Yesterday I first played a Sit and Go (for step 1 mission) and lost it, -€1

Then at 20.30 the first freeroll started, I decided to play 5 CashGame tables on the side of it. The freeroll started very well, within 30 minutes I tripled my stack to 15k, but later around the hour mark, I lost it all when calling a random open 60bb shove from an opponent holding QQ, he had A5 (no suit) and hit his Ace, bummer. +€0,-

At this time I was getting more tired and decided to close all the cash game tables. I won €6.34 on them.

The second freeroll (the big one) then started. The story started the same. People called my shoves when I had nut flushes etc. So after about 15 minutes again I had a stack of about 15k. I survived with it, it didn't shrink but I didn't pick up to many playable hands as well, but then when the blinds were 120/240, a shortstack (about 4k) shoved on me while I was holding AQs. I called, he had AKo. I was down to 11k. Few hands later I had the button with two shortstacks in the blinds so I shoved my pocket 3s, big blind called A4s, I lost again down to 6k, another late position shove (I think Q9 suited) marked the end of my adventure. (+€0)

Freerolls where fun but I still am not good at the 20-40bb range, always feel like I don't know which option is best around those regions.

End day 1: +€5.34, 425 hands.