Hello boys and girls, I finally decided to make my own RIO blog. Had quite a few on another well known forum, and although I was very lucky that most of my followers were very nice people, many even with nice blogs, RIO has a much more professional atmosphere and I think this suits me better.

My name is João and I´m a brazilian part time (but still very serious) poker player. I´m playing this game for a very, veeeeeeery long time, and even though I´m an overall winner at the main stakes I play, it took too many hands, too many years, too much effort, too much tears and quite some $ invested in poker related stuff (including this training site ofc).

100% of this is Pokerstars.com

I found poker a long time ago, by watching High Stakes Poker on TV, and began playing with play money right away. Took a few years to get brave enough to make my first real money deposit. Lost most of the (thankfully small) deposits, until I decided to start from the smallest stake - 2nl, focus on No Limit Hold'em and look for a way to be a winner on this game. At 2+2 found some very good posts which helped me a lot, and also got my hands on Blackrain's CTM book, and this is where the graph above begins.

Moving up from 2nl to 5nl, I did manage to win from the beginning, but my winrate dropped so much that I began to develop some bad mental habits. Anyway, bankroll was still growing, with more hiccups than I would like but growing nonetheless. Moving up to 10nl was like hitting a concrete wall. Believe it or not, took me almost 5 years of thinking, studying, playing, countless shots followed by frustration and having to move down to regrind, to begin winning. And it's supposed to still be one of the "easy" limits lol.

Used a lot of resources along the way, and all have their fair share of participation on my turnaround: 1) PokerSnowie; 2) Many subscriptions of RIO Essential; 3) The Grinder's Manual; 4) FTGU; 5) Finding a select few very nice players to talk about the game; 6) Putting my hands on GTO+; 7) Hand2note; 8) Nick Howard, his blog (including his brother's one), his Elite videos and especially the countless hours of valuable free content on youtube.

I still have lots of leaks on my game, obviously (if not, I'd be playing higher stakes by now, and winning way more at 10nl), but since August last year everything more or less clicked and this year I´m already winning at about 8 evbb/100 over a (lolsample) of 50k hands. Since the best players (better said, biggest winners) at my stake and format are achieving 10 bb/100+, and I'd already studied their games and it's not really rocket science, it's not perfect game 100% GTO approved, but more like a very exploitative (and exploitable) game. I'm very confident that if I keep the effort, keep good habits, keep improving, and don't run atrociously bad, I'll get the elusive 10 evbb/100 winrate at 10nl. Suffered from the mental block of not believing I'm good enough to be among the best for too long, but now I´m rid of this, saw the light in the end of the tunnel and just learned how important confidence is and we must aim bigger to get bigger.

I'd like to get 50k hands until April, 30. With this volume, the chests, leaderboards and challenges, I'll probably end up well rolled for shot taking 25nl (by my nitty standards, btw I´m also the biggest BR nit alive as well). I´ll do my best effort to not look at results til my "deadline", but will still try to post here as much as possible to keep my motivation high.

If any of you fellow runitoncers are still here after the wall of text above, thank you very much for reading this, hopefully this blog will deliver.

Cheers