What's up!

I'm the fish. I'm the guy who 4-6 tables microstakes cash, assumes he is pretty good because he used to read poker books back in the early 2000s. Reading Super System II and Harrington on Hold 'em as a teenager means I'm ready to grind heavy volume at NL50+, right?

Luckily I'm not that stupid. Instead I made the brilliant move of starting to grind out some volume at NL2 and a lil NL5, just to see how it goes.

So yeah I'm a smart guy, dedicated to working hard, motivated by the prospect of a profitable hobby/side-income down the line. This won't be hard at all-

GRAPH

(Spoilers: -7BB/100 over first 18k hands)

Back to the drawing board!!

Right now I'm splitting my time about 25/75 between study and play. I'll watch 1-2 RIO videos while taking notes and paying close attention, do maybe 30-60 minutes of hand review and equity calculator work, and then the rest of my time is at the tables. Right now I'm spending a ton of time on it, I imagine this will wax and wane since I tend to go all-in on one project for a few weeks at a time.

GOALS FOR THIS JOURNAL / ME AS A POKER PLAYER IN 2020:
(1) Engage with at least one high quality piece of educational poker content every day that I play poker.
(2) Do 80+% of what is within my power to have an A+ mental game: Exercise, meditation, diet, sleep. This is the real +EV of playing poker for me at these stakes: I might only win enough money in a month to buy dinner, but the mental gains are incredible.
(3) Put in real volume. When in "poker mode" (i.e. during the weeks that I make poker my focus) get at least 15k hands per week.
(4) Never more than 6 tables at a time. Aim for an average of about 4 tables at a time, or ~300 hands per hour at 6max.
(5) Participate in the RIO forums, at least one post per day that I play poker.

If I achieve goals 1-4, it should be inevitable that I achieve the "main goal" - Establish a winrate at NL2 or NL5 over a 50k+ hand sample. After doing that, the longer term goal is to aim to win at NL10 and beyond in 2021. I don't dream of the highest stakes, but long long term it would be incredible if this path leads me towards establishing at a winrate at NL50 or even NL100-200 -- that would be real income to improve my life with. But hey, that's off in the distance for now :-)

In the process, I will try to distill and share the major lessons that I'm learning -- the "AHA" moments that take me from a massively losing player to a decent winning reg over the next 6 months.

Hoping to post in here once every 1-2 days and make friends with some of the other hard workers around here. Who knows, maybe we can form some kind of study group and work our way beyond microstakes together as the RIO crew? Time will tell. SEE YA!