Hello everyone!

This blog is a continuation of my previous one: "I am done with being a life nit" (https://www.runitonce.com/chatter/i-am-done-with-being-a-life-nit/). I'll be journaling about my new goal to climb to high stakes in tougher pools and approach poker more competitively.

At the end of my previous blog, I had quit my job, become a digital nomad, and started playing poker for a living, shooting for NL1K on some untracked sites. Sounds like smooth sailing, right? Well, it honestly didn't go very well. Below is my graph for the past 175k hands.

A few things you'll notice:

1. The volume is really bad—this was for a year. The untracked sites play slow, and I'm quite slow with decisions, but I should be able to play 300k hands here.
2. The redline really started to fall off a cliff.
3. I'm break even.

I wouldn't be concerned about point #3, as these stretches happen, if #2 wasn't so bad. However, the volume aspect is the real issue. I've had a lot of anxiety around playing. Even when I was winning, I was scared to play. It wasn't because I was lazy—I would just study instead of playing.

I got into this vicious circle of "low confidence" → "run bad" → "feel like I shouldn't be playing" → even lower confidence. So what went wrong?

A few things could have been the problem:

1. I drastically misunderstood variance and likely jumped to the professional level too fast for myself.
2. I was using an approach mostly based around MDA, and when the meta shifted in some pools, I really struggled to adjust. Without having the theoretical foundation, my strategy was too coarse. I could sense it but didn't quite have the tools to teach myself.

Thanks to my time in Tech, I've saved some money, so I'm not in a financially tough place. My plan now is to address each of these issues. My goal is to play NL5000 on tougher, named sites. To get there, I need to do significant work with mental and technical coaching.

For the mental side, I joined Adam Carmichael's "Poker Athlete" program, which has given me tools to keep working on myself. I have weekly group calls that I find super helpful.

For the technical side, I've done two things:

1. I bought Mechanics of Poker last year, and it's fantastic. The drive to understand "why" has started me on the right path.
2. I hired a new high-stakes coach who plays in the games I eventually want to climb into. His approach feels exactly like what I was missing and is very different from what I'm used to. IT's very focused on fundamentals.

It's an exciting time with all these changes and moving in a new direction, but managing expectations will be important. I feel like I'm learning to walk again with poker, so I expect results to be slow-going for a while, but this is what's supposed to happen.

From my old blog, people messaged me saying they appreciated my vulnerability and rawness, so I'll try to maintain that in this new blog.

I believe my anxiety will calm down as I give myself permission to make mistakes while playing. I'm looking forward to just playing good poker and trying to crush people. I'll mostly be playing NL100-NL400 on ACR, but will mix in some GG 100-200 for a while. I've had a bit of a mental reset with all the changes.

In future posts, I'll elaborate more on what has really changed, but for now, I'm excited to chart my journey here.