Hey everyone,

A short bit about me first. I'm Owen Shiels, one of the essential MTT coaches on RIO. I'm a low/mid stakes MTT pro and have been since 2010. I'm married and I've got 2 young daughters. One is 3 and the other is 15 months. Juggling parenthood and being an MTT pro can be difficult at times. I thought I'd start a blog to help focus myself on a goal I'd like to achieve and also to try and interact more with the RIO community. I'm pretty busy a lot of the time so can find it hard to interact with the poker community often. Hopefully this blog will help!

I've wanted to start a blog for a while but didn't know what to base it on. I want to structure it around some sort of goal and hadn't really come up with one until now. Money goals aren't the greatest to set for MTTs and volume goals are pretty difficult for me to maintain with 2 young kids to look after. So I'm going to go for a BB/100 MTT goal. So far this year over 220,000 hands I'm at 7.46/100 and my aim over the rest of this year is to reach 10/100. Here's my year so far:

I also want to use this blog as a place to learn from my mistakes focusing mainly on ICM which is an area I've definitely struggled with this year. I've often found myself making pretty aggro moves which are costing me a lot of $$$s. So I wanted to use this blog as a way of improving myself, documenting how much it's really costing me and to hopefully help others at the same time. So here's the first one:

So this guy was pretty aggro playing 28/22/10 over 229 hands. However he'd lost quite a few chips recently so I think his 3b range here is more value weighted than it would've been when he had 3m+ chips. I gave him a pretty generous R/C range of 88+, AQo+, AJs+ and then gave him a 50/50 bluff ratio. So he's calling 50% of the time when I jam. The tournament is a $22 with $1500ish up top. 10 left and next out gets $119. WIth these ranges here's what I'm allowed to jam:

The way HRC works out the numbers is by giving a +/- of the entire prizepool so my 77 is losing 1.34% of the entire prizepool by jamming here. This comes out to being -$74.91 in this spot which is a pretty big loss for a $22 buy in. Clearly clearly a fold even with a generous bluffing frequency here. Just as an FYI villains bluff/value ratio here has to be over 60/40 before 77 can even consider jamming. That's saying that when you jam you need villain to fold over 60% of the time to be able to make 77 profitable here.

OK well there's post 1. I'm going to keep a few of the next posts for running updates and my first few days of posting. I'll be trying to update this blog at least a few times a week. Thanks for reading everyone.