Just tap it in, the ball wants to go home. Tap tap taparoo.

Go home ball. Go home. You want to go home...




Citzenwinds lesson rings true. He says to let a lot of aggressive moves go by villains with tptk/2 pair, non set type hands.
For the all times when you let the villain bluff you, you dodge more bullets.

I let some super premium hands go. Protected my heater.

Still, I know the above is a space heater from soviet china fueled by overplayed memes. Feels lovely though.

I'm getting better.
Nice heater day slash marathon session.

Poker is easy.




I really try and it hurts to fail. It's inevitable that I'm going to have a big downswing at some point, I just hope to keep playing good and soldier on when it comes.

If I can continue to win long term, then maybe my life wont be so hopeless. No money in jobs. No jobs for 23 year old dropouts. Ship it.

I am a consistent loser in every stake I play ...or so it would seem.

There's 2 stakes I have won well over a weak sample (10k hands) and that's 25nl Rush and 10nl Rush.

I play significantly different when I have a 25nl rush table loaded where most of my STABILITY comes from preflop stealing with some occasional cbet flops. I tend not to play past the flop at 25nl without a majorly strong hand.

When I do play past the flop, stacks tend not to go balls deep and I usually win.
The only "common" big losses are when I get KK+ in preflop.


When I play normal stakes, when I played a ton of 10nl/5nl/2nl hands and lose ...my vpip is LESS yet I play LOOSER. I think this is bang on where I lose. I am a major nit at normal games and have around 12/10 with 1.5 3bet 45% fold to 3bet (also a downfall).

I play so tightly that leakbuster has no positional awareness registered for me.
In 25nl on the button, I'll play 30-40% of my hands but practically none EP and only AQ+ in MP.

It's a looser range than my normal games but in normal games I'll play AJs+ in EP which is looser in EP.

Guys, I think I can win now.

The amount of improvement this last 6 weeks I have made could be likened to an entire rebuilding of my postflop play.

I can now understand which flops are great or shit to cbet. A new skill!
I now play thinking of what situations IN GENERAL are good to play in what ways.
I think less of what the villain has exactly post flop and think more about what kind of hands would get them to the current point in the hand by their actions. ie; I'm thinking of all streets play rather than the last and current and using processes of elimination. If I deem myself ahead in general, I will bet them in places I used to fold and turn up correct fairly often.


On verneers recommendation, I have fired up a variance calculation of 25nl type play for me using my ev bb/100 and standard deviation (ev bb/100 = 7.33, SD = 48.22)

I play 2 styles as discussed but the standard deviation is very diferent for both.
The 20k hands of 25nl and 10nl rush stealing have SD of 48, both identical.

All my other limits are between 90-190. Does SD indicate how much your play changes?
I would love to know because it seems key.

Here is my best/worst variance giraffe of 25nl:

Just opened 4 tables and had a ton of fish open shoving garbage. Went up 3 buyins and closed the tables in less than 100 hands.







I played these on my laptop, all 200 is today, the last 100 is just some late night session.
My actual hand volume for 2nl is a few thousand hands now and br up to $40 from $20.

I play both on a laptop and desktop and using two seperate hand databases is quite annoying, my graphs never trult represent my game.

I'm actually scared by the play there, there was a 15/10 player today over 300 hands who min 4bet with 72o. wtf

There's a guy on 2+2 who can't win, he's been playing two years or so and can't beat 2NL.

I'm not going to be like him. Time to suck it up and put in the solid bank roll play. I had $21 or something after losing a bajillion buy ins at 10nl then 5nl.

I'm at $31 now after 2k hands. I'm just going to play for playings sake. Not going to consider the prospect of moving up. The musing of objectives beyond my means.

Maybe when I'm at $100, I'll take 1 of my 4 tables to 5nl but I can guarantee one thing:
I know enough to win 2nl. I know more about poker than every player currently sitting at FTP 2nl tables.

Not much of a brag lol but I can do it!

Time to play more.

Oh yeah, one day I'll be in the high stakes forum, that's a heads up.
Ba dum tsh

The Above graph is of the last 2 nights play. 2-3 tables 5NL FR. I've played only a few hours due to work obligations but I'd like to explain the graph above for onlookers and why it's a bad graph.

You can see I won around 2 buy ins but my actual expected value winrate is only 1bb/100 and my flop all in ev is around 60%. Turn all in ev is around 70%.

The big winning hand around 185 was a lucky 3way all in preflop with QQ. Both villains were loose and spewy. One called in with garbage like K2o or something and the other with AA.
I lucked out with trips on the turn.

The hand around 800 was the one I posted in the forum where I failed to fold AK with hitting A on the flop to an extremely wet board where a passive villain hit a straight flush.
Up until hand 800, I was not paying enough attention to the villains aggressive turn actions. the rest of the graph is much nicer with no cliffs.

A big issue I have to work on is ranging villains on flops and being more accurate to their positions. Recognising patterns in their postflop play.
With this improvement, perhaps I could improve my EV and win 4bb/100 optimistically.

After this work I should try and learn more about extracting value from villains. The hand at 1500 exactly has no noticable place on the graph but the situation should have been massively profitable.

A 22/11 style villain 3bet pre from the middle position and I held AA on the button. I raised 3x. Not a bad play but not great either.
Perhaps calling and then trying to extract more would have been possible.

I'll learn more.

Since the last blog entry I have done a few different things.
Played a few very short sessions before/after work, less than 1k hands total.

Made one costly clear mistake and posted the hand in the forums.

Got some great advice and it's still hard to believe that massively experienced players at decent limits are giving me help with 5nl.


Watched only 1 video and did it whilst away from the tables. It's verneer's going robusto part 1, it's the best video I've seen so far because it's very basic and at low limits. There's actual clear framework guidelines given on playing hands and the way verneer was discussing what the villain had was vastly different to how I placed the villain.

He places some guys correctly on draws and second pairs etc and explained why he could determine it.
I personally placed the villains with much better holecards than they held. Some guys played trash yet had semi-decent preflop stats.

My next entry should be a better evaluation of the differences of his play in the series versus mine.
Then I'll try and work out how to CHANGE my actions in-game to align better to what was taught.

I think that having a learning routine might be the key to improving solidly.

Right now I just read a ton of posts here and on 2+2, watch a bunch of videos and lay down as many hands as I can per day. It's not working out too well.

All this complex information hitting me in such a condense time frame doesn't allow my brain to adapt correctly. In fact it probably influences my play negatively by trying to change so much quickly.

Now I have a plan of structured learning in which my brain should have some breathing space and more reliable experience to see how changes to my playing interact with different situations.


I plan to:

Play less hands, play less tables, play no rush poker to let me think.

Play and learn new things from videos seperately.

Play a focused 2 table session to improve and work hard in the day time and watch one video at night, taking notes on how my play relates to the video.


Hopefully these adjustments to take things slower will be a great decision.

So, I'm a losing player. That sucks.

Grinding really is grinding. Thousands of hands played close to perfect and one tiny slipup and you have to go back 6 hours and start again.